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All articles

- Alex Pretti’s Killer May Be Part of His Union: 2026 Jan 26

- After the Rain: 2026 Jan 22

- Reclaiming the Ladino Left: 2026 Jan 21

- Kansionario Sosialista: 2026 Jan 21

- Can a Liberal Zionist Recreate Mamdani’s Coalition?: 2026 Jan 16

- The Eyes of Silwan: 2025 Dec 23

- How Should We Engage in Communal Rebuke?: 2025 Dec 23

- Trump’s New Travel Ban Targets Palestinians: 2025 Dec 22

- Crying Is Not Surrender: 2025 Dec 22

- The Genocides The New York Times Forgot: 2025 Dec 19

- Zohran Mamdani Vs. the Real Estate State: 2025 Dec 17

- Scenes from a Columbia Writing Workshop: 2025 Dec 16

- The ADL Tried to Appease MAGA. The FBI Cut Ties with Them Anyway.: 2025 Dec 10

- How Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Enabling Another Israeli Land Grab: 2025 Dec 8

- An Educational Crusade in East Jerusalem: 2025 Dec 8

- Miért fogadják tárt karokkal a magyar zsidó intézmények Orbánt és Netanjahut?: 2025 Dec 2

- Why Hungarian Jewish Institutions Are Embracing Orbán and Netanyahu: 2025 Dec 2

- The Zionist Right Has a MAGA Problem: 2025 Nov 26

- Israel’s Collective Amnesia: 2025 Nov 24

- The Life and Legacy of Sion Assidon: 2025 Nov 21

- Cryptocurrency Comes to Gaza: 2025 Nov 19

- In California, Jewish Groups’ Win Is Students’ Loss: 2025 Nov 14

- Alphabets on the Sand: 2025 Nov 12

- Mamdani Created a Left-Liberal Coalition on Israel/Palestine: 2025 Nov 5

- The Olive Harvest Deportations: 2025 Nov 3

- Degrees of Separation: 2025 Nov 2

- Portrait of a Campus in Crisis: 2025 Oct 31

- The View from Evin: 2025 Oct 31

REPORT | 26 JAN 2026, 10:39 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 27 JAN 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

Alex Pretti’s Killer May Be Part of His Union

Border Patrol agents belong to the same federal workers union as VA nurses, a situation some of Pretti’s colleagues are determined to change.

Sarah Lazare

A photo of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by a US Border Patrol officer, is displayed at the shooting scene in Minneapolis, January 26th, 2026.

Adam Gray/AP

On January 24th, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Veterans Affairs ICU nurse and ICE observer Alex Pretti in Minneapolis—firing at least 10 shots within five seconds while Pretti was pinned to the ground. About six hours later, Pretti’s labor union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), released a statement about his murder. “We have received confirmation that a member of AFGE Local 3669, Alex J. Pretti, was the man killed during the incident,” it read. But while referring to Pretti’s killing as a “tragedy,” the statement fell short of condemning the federal immigration agents behind the shooting. “Until we have verified facts,” the union wrote, “it is important that we refrain from speculation or drawing conclusions.” A separate statement by AFGE President Everett Kelley blamed the Trump administration for Pretti’s killing, but also made no mention of Border Patrol or ICE as the parties responsible. (In contrast, many unions have released statements clearly denouncing the perpetrators, with the National Nurses United writing on January 24th that “nurses demand the immediate abolition of ICE.”)

This hesitation to denounce Border Patrol came from a union that represents not just government employees like Environmental Protection Agency workers, park rangers, and VA nurses, but also federal law enforcement officers—including approximately 18,000 Border Patrol personnel unionized under the AFGE-affiliated National Border Patrol Council. The identity of the Border Patrol agent who shot and killed Pretti has not been confirmed, but it is possible that he, too, belongs to this union. The AFGE acknowledged this in its statement, writing: “We just recently discovered that the officer involved was a Border Patrol officer and we are still not certain if he is a member of AFGE.” “These officers shouldn’t be killing anybody,” Lisa Dadabo, an AFGE member and VA social worker from Chicago told me. “But for a union member to kill another is a fundamental betrayal of what a union is supposed to be.”

Border Patrol’s killing of Pretti came as part of a weekslong federal occupation of Minnesota. Since December 2025, thousands of federal immigration agents have carried out unprecedented violence on Minnesota, conducting home raids without signed judicial warrants, detaining a preschooler, tear gassing high school students, and killing 37-year-old mother and poet Renee Good. Many union members have been targeted by this onslaught. Approximately 16 members of UNITE HERE Local 17, a union of hospitality workers, have been abducted from the Twin Cities metro area since late December 2025. SEIU Local 26, which presents janitors, building maintenance, and other low-wage workers, has had at least 20 members abducted.

Unions have subsequently become a core part of the resistance in Minnesota. On January 23rd, a day before Pretti’s killing, unions joined faith groups and community organizations in leading a mass mobilization calling for an immediate end to ICE and Border Patrol presence in the state. An estimated 50,000 (possibly as high as 100,000) people marched through Minneapolis in subzero temperatures that day, risking frostbite; workers and community leaders picketed and staged acts of civil disobedience. Hundreds of businesses closed in protest, and many workers stayed home or called in sick, part of an economic shutdown that underscored the urgency of getting federal immigration agents to leave.

Workers say it’s a fundamental contradiction to be in a union with the very federal agents their movement is opposing. “We can’t have it both ways,” says Aimee Potter, a Chicago-based VA social worker who works in addiction treatment and is an AFGE steward in her shop. “We can’t advocate for our communities and for ‘ICE Out’ and at the same time be connected to an organization that is terrorizing our members and our communities.” Dadabo agreed, noting that this discrepancy was clearer than ever after Border Patrol’s killing of Pretti. “When I found out [the person they killed] was a VA nurse who had been trying to help people, I can’t even really describe it. It was just seething rage,” she says. “[Pretti’s killing] is just a real breaking point . . . the last straw.” (Potter and Dadabo are not sharing the names of their hospitals for fear of retaliation, and they asked me to make it clear they are not speaking on behalf of their unions or the federal government.)

Potter and Dadabo have now become part of an emerging rank-and-file effort to remove the Border Patrol union from AFGE. Potter says she is in a Signal chat with “dozens” of VA workers from across the country who do not want to be in the same union as Border Patrol agents. On Monday morning, these workers released a public letter demanding that the leadership of AFGE and the AFL-CIO (the largest labor federation of the country) “immediately condemn [Pretti’s] killing, move to stop representing Customs and Border Patrol, and support a Department of Justice investigation of the officers involved.” “We ask you to show some courage,” the letter read. “We ask you to uphold the most fundamental principle of unionism—that an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Asked to comment on these demands, the AFL-CIO directed me to a January 24th statement made by its president Liz Shuler that calls for ICE to leave Minnesota but does not address the demand to remove Border Patrol from AFGE and the AFL-CIO. AFGE did not immediately respond to my requests for comment. The Border Patrol union, for its part, wrote in a January 24th statement that “the fake and dishonest media and the shameless politicians should be held accountable for willfully misleading the public and enticing these protesters and agitators. We have full confidence that when more facts are revealed, our agents and officers will be shown to have utilized justifiable force in eliminating the threat.”

In the summer of 2022, the ICE officers’ union—thus far a part of the AFGE and the AFL-CIO—began a formal split from these bodies. “They only care about their far-left agendas and politics,” the leader of the ICE officers’ union said of AFGE and AFL-CIO at the time. In addition to “holding [Border Patrol] accountable” for what Dadabo called “a human rights crisis,” AFGE organizers like Potter and Dadabo would now like to see a separation from the Border Patrol union. “I don’t want to sink AFGE,” said Dadabo, who has remained an active union member and steward even after her union’s collective bargaining agreements were dissolved by the Trump administration. “This is not about that. The purpose of a federal union is to protect the public good. If we’re not doing that, then we’re failing.”

Update: About three hours after this article was published, AFGE released a statement calling for the "resignation or termination of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller for smearing slain AFGE member Alex Pretti as 'domestic terrorist.'" In the statement, AFGE demanded "a full and transparent investigation into Alex’s killing led by an independent third party," as well as "bipartisan congressional oversight to uncover the truth, ensure accountability, and begin repairing the damage to public trust." The statement does not mention Border Patrol, or include a response to members' demand to remove the Border Patrol union from AFGE.

This article is a joint publication of Jewish Currents and Workday Magazine.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

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Sarah Lazare is the editor of Workday Magazine and former web editor for In These Times. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The American Prospect, The Intercept, and other outlets.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/alex-prettis-killer-may-be-part-of-his-union at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

MEMOIR | 22 JAN 2026, 2:45 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 22 JAN 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

After the Rain

In Gaza, rain once meant renewal. Now it is only a reminder of the slow violence we are living under.

Abdullah Hany Daher

Displaced Palestinians walk in front of their destroyed homes in Gaza, January 2026.

Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP

Once we waited eagerly for rain—and when it came, we opened our windows without fear. Rain meant land, growth. It promised renewal. We spoke of it as something generous.

Now, when we hear that rain is coming, we do not even look up. We look at the ground, at the tent, at the night, which is preparing itself to be long.

My father listens to the forecast, and we begin calculating who will sleep, who will stay awake. Whether the tent will hold against the wind. Whether the stakes will loosen. We arrange our worries as if order might give us control, but when the rain arrives, it is indifferent to our preparations.

Once it starts, the water rises quickly—subtly at first, then spectacularly. We stand still. It reaches our knees. What should I do? I ask myself. Laugh? Cry? Sit down? The rain overtakes sense. The body freezes before the mind has time to decide.

Around you: A family huddled together, seeking shelter inside a space too small for fear. Someone trying to save blankets. Someone lifting a child from the ground. A child who cannot sleep. A child in wet clothes. A child who does not understand why this sound, once calming, now signals danger.

Gentle rain—a story we used to tell. I think of the child who never heard it.

I tell myself that this will pass. That it is one night. That morning will come. But another voice inside me asks whether it really will. Once, the two voices argued. Now they are too tired for that. They press me from each side, and I am suspended between the commitment to endurance stoked by the promise of a better tomorrow and the resigned feeling of doubt. I try, and fail, to understand what we are facing. Understanding requires energy we no longer have.

On rainy nights, I watch my father. His silence feels heavier than the rain. I wonder how many times he reminds himself to remain steady, how often he contends quietly with failure, then, just as quietly, begins again.

After a harsh storm some time ago, I called my aunt to ask how things were. She laughed before I could finish the question. Her husband and son had spent the night holding down the tent stakes so their paltry protection would not fly away. She tried to make it sound light, almost absurd, something we could laugh about. But the joke abruptly yielded to memory’s true texture. Then she cried.

The storm winds carry questions with no answers. Houses that survived months of bombing, walls that withstood nights of explosions, fall without warning. The destruction the bombs failed to cause, the long aftermath often completes. People die because the wind decides a house is no longer a shelter. In Gaza, danger is no longer an event but a condition.

When, for a moment, things calm, we feel uneasy. As if it is temporary by nature. As if calm is undeserved. Silence feels suspicious. Dry earth feels borrowed. We feel something like guilt. We do not ask for much: a night that passes, ground that holds, morning that does not begin with counting losses.

Morning always comes. It offers not relief, but continuation. After the rain, we dry what we can. We check on each other without asking questions that might break us open. We stand up. We gather what remains.

Abdullah Hany Daher is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. He documents the human stories of war, aiming to preserve voices that the rubble cannot silence.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/after-the-rain at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

HISTORY | 21 JAN 2026, 6:20 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 22 JAN 2026, 12:47 AM UTC

Reclaiming the Ladino Left

The early 20th century saw a flurry of left activism by Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in the US. Recovering their legacy can enrich the Jewish left of today.

Devin E. Naar

Masthead for the New York-based Ladino newspaper La Vara, 1922.

On a summer day in 1924, Alberto Moise set up camp by the corner of Madison Avenue and East 115th Street in East Harlem to advocate for the slate of communists on the ballot that fall. New York’s main Ladino newspaper, La Vara, captured the event vividly:

It was quite a scene to see our friend Alberto Moise up on the soapbox, sweating buckets, in the middle of the street, speaking about the putrid and deceitful old parties of Republicans and Democrats and the need for every Sephardic worker, pushcart peddler, and shopkeeper to vote for the Workers Party.

Alberto Moise, who is already known as an orator whose words are as sweet as honey, made everyone’s jaws drop, and even the Yiddishim were amazed, since it was for the first time in the history of the Sepharadim in America that, in the lead-up to elections, a Sepharadi could be seen in the middle of the street speaking in the Judeo-Spanish language.

The newspaper’s pride at seeing this Jewish vernacular, Ladino (also known as Judeo-Spanish or Judezmo), deployed as a language of politics—and radical politics at that—is palpable. The editors take care to note the attention of “los Yiddishim”—Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, often depicted as aloof or even condescending, who dominated the Jewish political scene at the time, and whose culture and lifeways have long been considered synonymous with the American Jewish experience. Yet here was the nascent Jewish social and political movement I call the “Ladino Left” coming into its own in the public sphere, embodied by Moise and the recently formed Sephardic Branch of the Workers Party (the legal organization through which the Communist movement operated from 1921 to 1929).

If Sepharadim have largely been invisibilized in American Jewish culture, Sephardic left-wing activism has been buried even deeper, hidden entirely from view. The last century has scrubbed the Ladino Left from scholarly and popular consciousness, such that from today’s vantage point, it’s almost impossible to imagine its existence. This apparent obscurity is a result not only of the shame and fear mainstream Jewish communities have felt about Jewish leftist organizing within their ranks, but also of Yiddish history’s monopoly on the story told about early 20th-century American Jewish life—and Jewish left-wing politics in particular. It also stems from the contemporary association of Sepharadim and Mizrahim globally with the right.

Indeed, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews themselves, like Jews in general, often police the ideological boundaries of their communities. In recent years, as the left has turned to Sephardic and especially Mizrahi history as a political resource—advancing sometimes idealized narratives from centuries of coexistence and cultural exchange between Arabs and Jews—communal gatekeepers have responded by deriding leftist and anti-Zionist Sepharadim and Mizrahim as “tokens,” and claiming that left-wing politics are alien to modern Sephardic and Mizrahi culture. These arguments sometimes promote Islamophobic renderings of Jewish history in Muslim societies, emphasizing the discrimination and violence Jews faced in the period surrounding the formation of the State of Israel and arguing that antisemitism is a permanent feature of Muslim societies. At the same time, they often downplay the profound prejudice Jews from Muslim societies encountered when most fled to Israel. In a 2022 Jewish News Syndicate article attempting to undermine anti-Zionist voices, two employees of the Sephardic and Mizrahi advocacy group JIMENA admitted that “in its early days of independence, Israel sometimes failed the Mizrahim” and that “some of these issues persist today,” but insisted that “those failures pale in comparison to how Israel has helped us.” JIMENA’s 2025 National Demographic Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the US asserts that “community members are generally socially and politically conservative,” and locates such conservatism both in domestic issues as well as “their strongly-held connections to Israel and Zionism, and their vigorous sense of belonging to the Jewish people.” (Their report notably leaves out the study of Sephardic communities of Ladino-speaking background, who largely arrived a few generations earlier than American Mizrahi communities and may skew more liberal, mirroring American Jews in general.)

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To insist that Sephardic and Mizrahi histories should be understood as reflecting any single worldview or ideology is to flatten once-dynamic Jewish communities animated by a range of political perspectives, including vibrant left-wing movements.

To insist that Sephardic and Mizrahi life should be understood as reflecting any single worldview or ideology is to flatten once-dynamic Jewish societies across North Africa and the Middle East, the Balkans, and the broader Mediterranean region—communities animated by a range of political perspectives, including vibrant left-wing movements. Left politics were particularly prominent in two of the largest Jewish communities of the former Ottoman Empire: In Baghdad, where over a third of the residents were Arabic-speaking Jews, more among them affiliated with the Communist Party than the Zionist movement prior to World War II. Similarly, in Salonica, home to the largest population of Ladino-speaking Jews anywhere in the world before the Holocaust, 39% of Jews voted for the Communist Party in the 1926 Greek parliamentary elections. In the US, too, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, the country’s largest Sephardic mutual aid and membership organization—which, although not overtly political, today embraces mainstream institutional Jewish perspectives, including on Israel—was itself an outgrowth of a Salonican organization co-founded in 1915 by the socialist Maurice Nessim. Seven of its first ten presidents were socialists—a fact conveniently overlooked in the organization’s official history. In other words, left-wing politics is hardly inherently anathema to Sephardic and Mizrahi communities, and these groups’ embrace of more conservative politics today must not be understood as inevitable.

By delving into the history of the Ladino Left, we find that only a few generations ago left-wing politics played an outsize—and perhaps even mainstream—role in the communal life of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in the US. It is high time the story of this group be recognized as one of the two Jewish leftist movements operative in the US in the early 20th century, along with the much larger and better remembered Yiddish left. As the first effort to narrate this history, this essay should be considered a prolegomenon, intended to provoke further research, discussion, and debate. What lessons does this occluded world offer an American Jewish left engaged in shaping a communal vision for a future characterized by safety, solidarity, and justice? The shroud of oblivion must be removed so that the Sephardic Jewish leftist—and the Jewish left as a whole—may be reimagined anew.

The Ladino Left emerged in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century. As a major industrial port city, Salonica (today’s Thessaloniki, Greece) became a center of labor activism and, beginning in 1909, home to the Federasion Sosialista Lavoradera, or Socialist Workers Federation, the largest workers’ movement in the eastern Mediterranean region. Although half the city’s residents—and workers—were Jews, the Federasion worked across communities in the spirit of internationalism, connecting Ladino-speaking Jews with Turkish-speaking Muslims and Greek- and Bulgarian-speaking Orthodox Christians. Under the leadership of Jewish union organizer Avraham Benaroya, the Federasion organized major strikes in the tobacco industry involving around 10,000 workers, while also contributing to cultural-political life through cafés, theaters, and newspapers. Rather than boycott the organized Jewish community, Benaroya urged socialists to run in Jewish communal elections. He also defended Ladino as the language of the Jewish worker in a moment when it was under attack by Zionists, who promoted Hebrew, and by assimilationists, who championed the state language (first Turkish and then Greek) or French.

Tobacco workers in Salonica, circa early 20th century.

Photo courtesy of Beth Hatefutsoth.

The shift from Ottoman to Greek rule in 1912 and 1913 injected two previously unknown currents into the political life of Salonica’s Jews: state-sponsored antisemitism and the subsequent increase in Zionist activism. In one of the few documented moments of contact between the major Ladino and Yiddish left-wing organizations at the time, the Federasion wrote in 1913 to the secular Yiddish socialist party in the Russian Empire, the Bund, asking in French for advice on how to respond to the intensifying “daily struggle between Zionists and internationalists” among Salonica’s Jews “unleashed” by the Greek conquest. When World War I engulfed Salonica, opposition to Greece entering the conflict provoked some of the Federasion’s members to flee, with the US—neutral until 1917—emerging as a primary destination.

In New York, Salonican Jews interacted with the other roughly 50,000 Sepharadim from the Ottoman Empire, whose compressed period of immigration stretched from about 1908 to 1924. These new immigrants initially eked out a living in menial jobs, while contending with widespread racism, including from established Jewish communities. An infamous report commissioned by the Jewish Federation of New York in 1926 claimed that Jews from the Ottoman Empire were “almost as alien to their [Ashkenazi] kinsmen as are the negroes to the average white Southerner.” In its coverage of the report, The Jewish Daily Forward described the newcomers as a “considerably inferior” group with “no cultural life of their own worth speaking of,” whose “habits and ways of life” more closely resembled those of “the average Turk or Syrian” than “‘normal’ Jews.” Already in 1913, the longest-running English-language Jewish newspaper in the US, The American Israelite, warned that the arrival of Ladino-speaking Jews provoked “a race problem within a race problem,” as Jews as a whole grappled with their ambiguous position vis-à-vis the American color line. Aware of broader racial tensions and disparities, La Amerika, the first major Ladino newspaper in New York, decried the “white pogromists” who subjected Black people to mass violence. Anti-Black violence also prompted La Bos del Pueblo (The Voice of the People)—a New York Ladino newspaper founded by Federasion militant Maurice Nessim—to declare that “America is not a democracy either,” obliquely comparing its “massacres” to the Armenian genocide undertaken by the Ottoman Empire. Ruing the racial and class oppression that suffused American life, Federasion veteran and prominent journalist Albert Levy infamously punned in his satirical Ladino newspaper El Kirbach Amerikano (The American Whip) that the country should not be called the United States of America (“Estados Unidos”) but rather the Rotten States of America (“Estados Pudridos”).

Sarah Aldorati on an East Harlem tenement rooftop, circa 1920s.

Photo courtesy of Stephanie Fins.

Many Ottoman Jewish immigrants worked in factories that produced cigarettes, light bulbs, batteries, and ice cream cones. (The first American Ladino novella, Amerika! Amerika!, written in 1917 by Simon Nessim, dramatized a strike orchestrated by 400 Sephardic Jews in battery factories the previous year.) Both men and women also toiled in poor conditions and for low wages in the garment industry’s kimono, bathrobe, and skirt sweatshops. Their plight became a national story in 1913, when former President Teddy Roosevelt paid women workers a visit during a strike. The New York Times identified the first woman to speak to him, 17-year-old Sarah Aldorati, as a “beautiful Spanish girl.” Roosevelt soon learned that Aldorati and about 100 other women on strike were “Turkish Jewesses” and their “Spanish” was Judeo-Spanish. He concluded that because they could speak neither English nor Yiddish they remained “peculiarly helpless under our conditions here” and “the lowest and poorest paid workers” in the industry.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) initially sought to recruit these “Spanish and Turkish” girls, as The Ladies Garment Worker described them in 1913 (notably, the heavily Yiddishist union did not readily identify them as “Jewish”) before deeming them too difficult to organize. But Ladino-speaking workers soon began organizing in their own language. During World War I, Maurice Nessim’s La Bos del Pueblo galvanized the emergent Ladino Left in New York. Moise Gadol, the older editor of the more moderate, Zionist La Amerika, the first Ladino newspaper in New York, denounced the new competition as “la bos del guerko” (the voice of the devil) for opposing Jewish nationalism and criticizing the government. In letters to the Post Office Department in Washington, DC, which determined which newspapers were suitable to be mailed and which were “subversive” enough to be censored, Gadol pled that this “dirty paper,” which aimed to “demoralize the loyalety [sic] of the good people of Spanish Jewish origin,” be shut down. Despite these denunciations, Nessim’s newspaper gained subscribers across the country, from New York to Chicago to Seattle, not only by advocating for unionization and women’s rights and opposing capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism, but also by defending the interests and public image of Sephardic Jews. When a sensational 1918 exposé in the American Weekly Jewish News defamed Sephardic Jews for not “looking” like Jews, for exhibiting “aimlessless” and “sluggishness” in their demeanor, and for being “docile and submissive because of the stagnating influence of Turkey,” Nessim repudiated these claims in a bold letter to the editor and began publishing articles focused on communal self-defense strategies in his own newspaper.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union initially sought to recruit these “Spanish and Turkish” girls before deeming them too difficult to organize. But Ladino-speaking workers soon began organizing in their own language.

An announcement in the Ladino newspaper La Luz for Alberto Moise’s lecture on “The position of the proletariat in relation to religion,” to be delivered on Yom Kippur Day, hosted by Spanish Branch of Workers Party in East Harlem, October 1922.

Unlike the Yiddish left, often defined by strictly secular trends, the Ladino Left did not reject religious observance. In addition to extolling the promise of socialism at cafés on the Lower East Side, Albert Matarasso, a Talmudic scholar and secretary of the Sephardic Brotherhood, officiated weddings according to rabbinic law while pragmatically advocating for travel on Shabbat if a synagogue was beyond walking distance. Fellow Federasion militant Raphael Hasson, who organized with Greek radicals in Chicago and later in New York, regularly attended synagogue. But a secular strand was also alive within the Ladino Left, as embodied by Moise, who held political meetings on Yom Kippur.

During World War I, the Ladino Left entered the American mainstream. Nessim and his circle convened at cafés, formed a socialist literary club, participated in May Day parades, hosted costume balls, and supported popular Ladino theater productions by playwrights like Elie Mushabac that promoted class consciousness and anti-war sentiment. In 1915, Nessim convened a meeting that led to the establishment of the Salonician Brotherhood of America, the organization that later evolved into today’s Sephardic Brotherhood. During the Russian Revolution, the Sephardic Social Club—founded on the Lower East Side by Jews from Castoria, Greece—transformed itself into the Sephardic Branch of the Socialist Party of America in 1918. Moise began issuing El Proletario as the Party’s official Ladino organ, which later published a Ladino socialist songbook, excerpted in this pamphlet.

The Bureau of Investigation—which would soon become the FBI—surveilled this “extremely radical” newspaper and eventually shut it down. But the real blow came during the Palmer Raids in 1919, during the First Red Scare, when the government arrested thousands of suspected socialists and anarchists—mostly immigrants, with many Jews among them. By then, Nessim and Moise had abandoned the more moderate Socialist Party and established the Sephardic Branch of the Communist Party of America (sometimes identified as the Spanish-Jewish Branch, or even just the Spanish Branch, depending on the context). Nessim was arrested for distributing revolutionary flyers. While out on bond and awaiting deportation proceedings, he fled to France; with his departure, La Bos del Pueblo closed.

Maurice Nessim at the office of La Bos del Pueblo on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1919.

Photo courtesy of Sharon Nessim.

Alberto Moise/Moreau with a communist student, December 1936.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection.

But within a few years, Nessim’s comrades, including fellow Salonicans Albert Torres, Albert Levy, and Moise Soulam, launched several new Ladino publications—most significantly, La Vara. Established in 1922, La Vara featured news and political commentary, alongside literature and satire. Its circulation soon reached 16,800, an impressive showing considering the relatively small population of Ladino speakers; this made it the most widely read newspaper in the history of Ladino publishing. Its name, which means “the staff,” alluded to the one wielded by the prophet Moses, which the editors figuratively brandished to beat the hypocrisy out of so-called leaders—especially those of the Sephardic community, whom the periodical regularly denounced as “ish bitiridjis” (self-aggrandizing “go-getters”) capable of nothing but “kornazlikes” (cunning tricks).

La Vara helped to foment radical action in Sephardic life. It advertised meetings of the new Sephardic Branch of the Workers Party—the cover for the Communist Party (CP)—and launched a major campaign, led by Louis Mizrahi from Izmir, to unionize hundreds of Sephardic laborers in the garment industry in 1923. When Shabetay Djaen, chief rabbi of Monastir in present-day Macedonia, visited New York in 1925, the publication reported sympathetically on the talk he delivered to the 300 mostly Monastir-born members of the Sephardic Progressive Club, in which he insisted that Jewish “national” culture and socialism are linked: “Marx, Engels and Lasalle and other socialists agree with the social order proposed by Moses,” Djaen said, according to the paper.

The 1920s marked a high point for the Ladino Left, simultaneous to what historian Tony Michels has called a “golden age” for Yiddish-speaking Communists. La Vara’s editors endorsed the Workers Party in 1924, writing that if Alberto Moise’s aspirations were realized, “very soon the Republican and Democratic parties will be completely eviscerated, and the poor of this nation will finally be saved.” (In the lead-up to the elections, and on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, editors Moise Soulam and Albert Levy published a new year’s wish, modeled after Avinu Malkeinu: “Avinu malkeinu, destroy the capitalists / Avinu malkeinu, may the fascists disappear / Avinu malkeinu, bring an end to the KKK / Avinu malkeinu, which is against our nation.”) Announcements for the activities of the Sephardic Branch of the Workers Party, which held regular open-air meetings on the streets of the Lower East Side and East Harlem, appeared in both La Vara and The Daily Worker, the CP’s English-language organ. In 1928, Alberto Moise, now known as Alberto Moreau, ran for New York State Assembly on the CP ticket, the first time in US history a Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew ran for elected office. La Vara endorsed his (unsuccessful) candidacy, and left-wing Sepharadim rallied behind him—although, significantly, much of his support came from Puerto Ricans. Much as German socialists had helped initiate Yiddish activists into American radicalism through the mutual intelligibility of their mother tongues, Sephardic radicals forged strong bonds of solidarity with Puerto Rican workers through language.

Much as German socialists had helped initiate Yiddish activists into American radicalism through the mutual intelligibility of their mother tongues, Sephardic radicals forged strong bonds of solidarity with Puerto Rican workers through language.

Much had changed by the time of the Great Depression. By the 1930s, a middle-class lifestyle had gradually become attainable for some Sephardic Jews, as they began to own their own businesses or even attend university, leaving behind factory work and the crammed living conditions of the Lower East Side and Harlem for Brooklyn and the Bronx. Around this time, the Ladino Left splintered into roughly three groups. A more upwardly mobile segment—including figures like Levy, Torres, and Matarasso—increasingly moderated their politics, moving with the rest of the Jewish community toward the Democratic Party, especially during FDR’s New Deal, which appeared to realize their desire for a social safety net. In a bid to appear more “American,” the Sephardic Club of the Democratic Party, which had chapters on the Lower East Side, in Brooklyn, and in the Bronx, distinguished themselves from the radical Sephardic organizations by conducting meetings in English rather than Ladino.

Women workers picketing with the ILGWU at the Sephardic-owned Nachman Bros. shop and others in the cotton goods industry, 1937.

Photo courtesy of the Kheel Center at Cornell University.

Those who remained engaged with left-wing politics split into two additional camps, following the broader rift within the CP between its more moderate and radical factions, leading some among the former to join splinter groups and other parties. For Sephardic leftists, which side of the debate they found themselves on was a matter not only of ideology but also of language and identity. Some in the moderate group ultimately tied their fate to the broader Jewish community through anti-Communist organizations like the ILGWU, where they used English—or sometimes had to learn Yiddish—to work with the union’s significant Ashkenazi membership. (While the labor movement generally served as a path of Americanization for Jews, for Sephardic Jews it also offered an on-ramp into the organized Ashkenazi-dominant Jewish community, and to whiteness more broadly.) In 1937, for instance, 3,000 Sephardic Jews in the cotton goods industry, organized by ILGWU Local 91 and its new Sephardic leaders, went on strike against their Sephardic bosses.

Another more radical group cast their lot with other Spanish-speaking working people, confirming their solidarity and identification with nonwhite people from Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreau and another Salonican Jew named Saby Nehama, both founders of the Sephardic Branch of the Workers Party, played leading roles in establishing the Centro Obrero de Habla Español, the Spanish Speakers’ Workers Club, a central Communist community center that catered to the growing contingent of Latine workers in Harlem, especially Puerto Ricans. When the CP split in 1929 amid factional disputes, Moreau expelled Nehama from the Centro, prompting Nehama to leave the CP for the ILGWU. The ILGWU’s Ashkenazi leadership appointed Nehama as their Spanish liaison to the increasing number of Puerto Rican women entering the needle trades in the 1930s, weaponizing his ability to speak “Spanish” to block Puerto Ricans from ascending the ranks of the organization. Soon, however, Nehama endorsed the demands of Puerto Ricans to serve in leadership positions themselves.

Meanwhile, the Comintern in Moscow appointed Moreau to organize a New York Spanish Bureau of the party in 1929, which supplanted the Sephardic Branch of the Workers Party. Following the model of the Centro Obrero de Habla Español, Moreau brought together all Spanish-speaking workers—Sephardic, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Venezuelan, and others—within the new bureau; according to historian Jocelyn Olcott, he became “the indispensable intermediary between Spanish-speakers and the CPUSA.” That same year, Moreau co-authored the influential Marxist pamphlet Los Latino-Americanos en los Estados Unidos, the first study of the plight of Latine workers in the US. In his longtime role as secretary of the Anti-Imperialist League, he advocated for Puerto Rican independence and for the extraction of the US from the affairs of Latin American and Caribbean countries, and he also helped draft the Communist Party charter in Venezuela. In addition to allying with Spanish speakers, Moreau organized with Afro-Caribbean radicals like Richard B. Moore and Cyril Briggs. While he never denied being a Jew from Salonica, Moreau’s peers increasingly saw him as “Latin American,” as The Daily Worker noted in 1930.

Moreau was joined in the core leadership of the American CP by fellow Salonican David Amariglio, who began serving as the New York State CP treasurer in the 1930s. Following Moreau, Amariglio became the second Sephardic Jew to run for elected office when he ran (also unsuccessfully) for New York State Senate in 1932 on the CP ticket—touting a platform “against hunger, lynching, and war”—and again in 1935 for New York Supreme Court Justice. As with Moreau, La Vara praised Amariglio’s candidacy. In 1938, he negotiated the repatriation of members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of Americans—mostly Communists and anarchists, some of them from the Ladino Left—who volunteered to fight facism in Spain in the 1930s. As a founder and managing editor for the CP Spanish-language organ, La Vida Obrera, he became so close to Latine radicals that the US military classified him as Mexican in 1943. Yet unlike Moreau, who broke with organized Sephardic life, Amariglio remained a lifelong member of the Sephardic Brotherhood and is buried in its cemetery.

David Amariglio (center left) accompanying an American who was wounded after volunteering to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War to speak to Consul General Robert Murphy (right) in December 1938. Amariglio assisted the veterans in reclaiming their American citizenship after fighting in Spain.

John Phillips/The LIFE Picture Collection

In short, in the 1930s, the Ladino Left largely ceased to function as an organized movement with its own institutions and publications. Sepharadim who continued to engage in leftist politics generally did so as part of larger groups. Whether they opted for the more moderate ILGWU or the more militant CP, their identities as Sepharadim from the Ottoman Empire tended to be subsumed by broader categories—whether Jewish or Latine—that rendered them invisible, even as the Ladino Left planted some of the seeds that ultimately bloomed into a movement of Spanish-speaking leftists. Over the following decades, where leftist attitudes remained part of Sephardic life, it was mostly among individuals—particularly within a cohort of US-born children of Ottoman Jews coming of age in the 1940s. Historian Victor Silverman has recounted how his Brooklyn-born mother Rachel Benjoya and her sisters joined the CP as an expression of their internationalist Americanism, speculating that Party membership may have enabled them to overcome the stigma of being outsiders: as women, Jews, Sepharadim, and children of immigrants who had learned English only at school. Sometimes radicalism persisted within families, even under duress: Rae Sevy, the US-born niece of La Vara editor Moise Soulam, served as the switchboard operator at CP headquarters and spent much of her adult life being surveilled by the FBI.

But as long as La Vara remained in print—which it did until 1948—the Ladino-speaking masses were exposed to leftist perspectives in their own language, equipping them to understand political developments of the 1930s and ’40s through that lens. As fascist movements gained strength in Europe, one contributor advocated a popular-front approach to fighting it, arguing that workers should join forces with the middle class. He emphasized that fascist movements were undergirded by capitalism and imperialism, two forces that had to be uprooted. During the Harlem riots of 1943, another writer vociferously defended his Black neighbors, recognizing that the violence was the result of deeply entrenched racism and that Jewish safety was linked to the well-being of fellow minorities. When La Vara shuttered after more than two decades of publication—reflecting an American-born generation increasingly abandoning Ladino—Ladino leftists lost their last crucial, communal platform.

As long as La Vara remained in print—which it did until 1948—the Ladino-speaking masses were exposed to leftist perspectives in their own language.

Throughout this period, Zionism was a point of contention within the Ladino Left, and debates about it shaped the trajectories of the organized Sephardic community more generally. The question came to the fore in 1917 as New York’s Sephardic organizations were deciding whether to support the American Jewish Congress’s call for the creation of a “Jewish commonwealth” in Palestine under the auspices of the British. Significantly, the largest Sephardic umbrella organization, New York’s Federation of Oriental Jews, representing over 20 institutions, boycotted the congress. Even Sephardic Zionists, who had already formed their own association in New York, expressed skepticism about the idea of establishing an exclusive Jewish state.

Such reservations among Sepharadim did not stem from a sense of distance from Palestine, but rather from their proximity. After all, as an Ottoman province, Palestine was already part of their country; it was a place where some had relatives or had visited. Ladino was a major Jewish language there into modern times: Visitors to the region noted that it was the main Jewish language in Hebron in the 1820s and was necessary to communicate with much of Jerusalem Jewry in the 1840s, and it continued to be widely spoken in the Old City into the 20th century, including by some Palestinian Muslims. Sephardic Jews viewed efforts to extract Palestine from the Ottoman Empire as treason against the state that had protected their community since the 1492 expulsion from Spain. The chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, Haim Nahum, and the main Ladino newspapers in Salonica and Istanbul all opposed political Zionism (though at least in part because of pressure from Ottoman authorities). Thus, New York’s Federation of Oriental Jews argued in its 1917 statement on the issue that the American Jewish Congress’s proposal threatened the well-being of their Jewish brothers and sisters in Palestine and throughout the Ottoman Empire. “The blood that will be spilled by our loved ones will be the result of [Zionists’] flawed efforts,” the statement declared, “and only they will be held responsible for having played with the lives of our siblings in the Ottoman Empire who will suffer due to the sins of others.” That same year, debates over Zionism nearly fissured the new Salonician Brotherhood of America. When the organization tried to remain neutral on both Zionism and socialism, its co-founder, Maurice Nessim—who opposed the former and supported the latter—resigned in protest.

Once the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the wake of World War I, some of the reservations American Sephardic Jews had expressed about Zionism became moot. The ideology became ascendant among those Sepharadim who embraced the Democratic Party; Sephardic Democratic Club meetings included the singing of both the American national anthem and “Hatikva.” But even as Sephardic Jews warmed up to Zionism, American Ladino newspapers continued to express doubts about its progression through the 1930s, worrying that rampant discrimination meant they had no place in the movement. The Zionist newspaper La Amerika published the complaints of a group of Salonican Jews who concluded after a 1925 visit that “Palestine is not the homeland of the Jews, in general, it is the homeland of the Ashkenazi Jews alone.” In 1937, writing in La Vara, Nessim Mehoudar, an Ottoman-born Palestinian Jew who settled in New York, blamed the instigation of conflict between Arabs and Jews principally on the Jewish Agency’s predominantly Ashkenazi representatives in Palestine, who he said acquired land through “intrigue.”

Even these reservations began to fade in the 1940s, as prominent communists like Leon Trotsky came out in favor of a Jewish homeland, and as the devastation of the Holocaust became known. Just as those who participated in the Ladino Left experienced a process of Americanization and accommodation to Ashkenazi norms by joining organizations like the ILGWU, the Zionist movement (which the ILGWU increasingly supported in the 1930s) became an on-ramp into the organized Jewish community. The Sephardic Brotherhood of America renamed itself the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America in 1947, precisely as the organization’s leaders nominally adopted Zionism, as a way of insisting on their inclusion in a newfound conception of Jewish peoplehood. In 1945, for the first time, Sephardic Jews in the US served as delegates to the World Jewish Congress to promote the creation of a Jewish state. Ironically, the article describing this event in La Vara used the very orientalist rhetoric that the newspaper had once so fervently rejected: “The Sepharadim have finally awoken from the profound slumber imposed by the soporific flower of the Orient.”

Virtually no trace of the Ladino Left has been transmitted to us today. Part of the erasure stems from the broader surveillance and repression of the American left by the government throughout the early- to mid-20th century, culminating in McCarthyism in the 1950s. Many of the aforementioned figures adopted aliases to protect themselves and their families from being targeted by the federal government. After escaping to France, Maurice Nessim returned to the US under an assumed name, Maurice Lacoste; Alberto Moise became known as Alberto Moreau and also wrote under the pen name John Bell; David Amariglio became David Leeds. Several of these men appeared in the proceedings of McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities. Anxieties around the key roles that radicals played in the founding and development of the Sephardic Brotherhood resulted in the organization scrubbing Nessim from its official narrative.

Meanwhile, leaders of early to mid-century left-wing Jewish movements fused Jewish identity with the Yiddish language, fueling the marginalization and erasure of Ladino. Indeed, Jewish branches of the Socialist and later Communist parties were so-defined by language: They were Jewish because their members spoke “Jewish,” the meaning of the term “Yiddish.” The equivalence of Jewish and Yiddish alienated Sephardic Jews from the organized Jewish community in general, and from the Jewish labor movement and Jewish radical politics in particular. The elevation of Yiddish as the Jewish language par excellence was an ideological imperative among some leaders. For Jewish socialists like Chaim Zhitlovsky, the concept of the “pintele yid,” an essential—even racially constituted—Jewishness was expressed through Yiddish, such that “even a convert to Christianity could still be viewed as Jewish as long as he spoke Yiddish,” as historian David Weinberg explains. Zhitlovsky was well aware of Ladino but demeaned it as part of his defense of Yiddish; in a 1912 article, he argued that only the latter could serve as “the language of the Jewish nation.” Discussions of Ladino in Yiddish publications often replicated the very critiques foisted upon Yiddish by the dominant Eurocentric, orientalist attitudes of the era. In a 1913 piece in Zhitlovsky’s New York monthly Dos Naye Leben, contributor M.A. Herbert denigrated “Shpanyolish” as a mere “dialect” lacking “its own literature” and “its own characteristics,” rather than a legitimate “language.”

While robust scholarship on Jewish radicalism has emerged in recent decades, not a single study acknowledges the presence or participation of Ottoman Jews as a group in the labor movement or in radical politics in the US.

The suppression of leftist narratives by the state and within the general Jewish community, alongside ignorance and marginalization of Sepharadim within the Jewish left, have been replicated in Jewish collective memory and scholarship across the generations. While robust scholarship on Jewish radicalism has emerged in recent decades, correcting for the erasure resulting from repression, not a single study acknowledges the presence or participation of Ottoman Jews as a group in the labor movement or in radical politics in the US, neither in the Socialist or Communist Parties nor in institutions like the ILGWU. The reticence partially reflects the weaknesses of the field of Jewish studies, which scholars of Sephardic history like Sarah Abrevaya Stein have accused of “laziness” and a “profound resistance to reconceptualize.” A couple of studies on Jewish labor mention ILGWU leader Saby Nehama in discussions of Jewish–Puerto Rican relations, but misidentify him as being from Spain, rather than Ottoman Salonican. Similarly, Alberto Moise/Moreau has received attention not in Jewish studies, but in Latine studies. In an article in American Communist History, scholar Kenneth Burt describes him as the “first radical Latino voice in the electoral arena in the Northeast,” identifying him as an Argentine. Benjamin Balthaser’s 2025 study Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left does include Moreau—and is the first book to highlight his anti-Zionism—but otherwise neglects the Ladino Left.

The primary exceptions to this near-total erasure are Joseph Papo’s 1987 communal history, Sephardim in Twentieth Century America, in which he acknowledges Ottoman Jewish participation in the Socialist Party and labor movement, as well as activist and writer Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s 2007 book The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, in which she observes that “radicals abound among those who emigrated to the US and edited the Ladino press” and refers to editors Maurice Nessim and Moise Soulam by name. For Kaye/Kantrowitz, preserving this history was a part of an essential “de-Ashkenization” of Jewish cultural and political expression, embodied in projects like the 1989 feminist anthology she co-edited, The Tribe of Dina, which included a significant representation of Jewish women’s voices of Ladino- and Arabic-speaking background. In The Colors of Jews, she is both adamant about this aspiration and candid about the imperfection of her own attempts to realize it. She describes a 1993 teach-in led by her then-nascent organization Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ): Though it featured a talk by Edward Alcosser—the chairman of the board of New York’s American Sephardi Federation, whose father had served on the executive board of the ILGWU—entitled “Outside Yidishkayt: Sephardic Progressive Thought,” the teach-in bore only a Yiddish name: “In Gerangl,” meaning “In Struggle.” For the next teach-in, JFREJ tried but failed to find an adequate Ladino equivalent, reinforcing the sense of non-Ashkenazim as outside the normative Jewish left. (The organization has since made significant headway, founding a Mizrahi and Sephardi Caucus in 2014.)

As Kaye/Kantrowitz understood, suppressed non-Ashkenazi lineages—like the history of New York’s Ladino Left—ought to compel us to rethink not only the Jewish left’s past, but also its future. A first step is to begin to reckon with the factors that have contributed to the erasure, including the deeply rooted intra-Jewish prejudice at play, itself partly a symptom of living under white supremacy, and to begin to redress the issue by reconsidering the very terms used to describe the movement. Jewish Currents offers a valuable case study. According to its mission, it is “committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture on the Jewish left,” but it has never served as a voice of the Jewish left in all its breadth, largely permitting the Yiddish and Yiddish-descended left from which it emerged to stand in for the Jewish left as a whole.

From its early days, while Jewish Currents readily commented on the plight of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in the new State of Israel, it failed even to acknowledge the presence of Sepharadim and Mizrahim within the American Jewish community, let alone the Jewish left. Already in 1956, Jewish Currents published a letter from a disgruntled reader who complained about the magazine’s centering of Yiddish in progressive Jewish education: “The Ladino of the Sephardic Jew is disregarded completely.” (Other Jewish languages like Judeo-Arabic or Persian were not even considered.) Not until 1972 did Jewish Currents publish an article on Ladino-speaking Jews, focusing on the innocuous theme of Ladino music but grappling for the first time with the very forms of exclusion the magazine practiced. Reviewing an album of Ladino folksongs, Sonya Schappes, spouse of Jewish Currents editor Morris, asked why “progressive Jewish folk singers persistently overlooked the wealth of Jewish folk music” beyond the shtetl while non-Jewish musicologists and performers took great interest in Ladino songs, concluding that the only explanation was a “narrow-minded approach” to Jewish self-conception. In response, Salonican union organizer Sabetay “Edward” Ayash—who served as the founding treasurer of SEIU 1199 in the 1930s and worked as a pharmacist in Harlem, where Schappes was one of his clients—wrote a letter to the editor in which he, too, wondered why “we don’t sing the songs of this minority of the minorities,” and also why fascist Spain dedicated more resources to promoting Sephardic culture than did “our Ashkenazi communities in the USA.” (Perhaps not wanting to be too strident, he surmised that this phenomenon was “unexplainable.”) He suggested that Sephardic culture had been so ignored by dominant American Ashkenazi Jewish society that even Sepharadim themselves internalized the irrelevance or nonexistence of their own culture.

Sabetay “Edward” Ayash with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1960s.

Photo courtesy of Irving Ayash.

Ayash appears to have been the only figure active in the Ladino Left to contribute to Jewish Currents. When he died in 1973, a group of fellow union leaders eulogized him in the magazine as “a life-long champion of democratic trade unionism, social justice, equality and peace.” But the publication did not implement any structural changes to expand its purview and embrace the experiences, traditions, and insights of Sephardic Jews in the US. If the Jewish left of today, as expressed in organizations like Jewish Currents and others, is to warrant that title, then it must make more space for multiple Jewish cultures, without which the Jewish left will remain stunted by internalized Eurocentrism and white supremacy.

For readers of Jewish Currents, the Ladino Left also offers an additional path into the question of a just future in Israel/Palestine. Lately, the Jewish left has sought to reclaim Arab Jewish identity as a way of refusing Zionism’s dichotomy between Arab and Jew. The project can be enhanced by similarly attending to the Ladino-speaking Jew—and indeed by reconnecting this figure with the Arab Jew—in order to recuperate a lost map of the former Ottoman Jewish world wherein deep Jewish religious and cultural links to Palestine need not translate into a project of exclusivist nationalism or settler colonialism. This work can similarly facilitate coalition-building in the fight for Palestinian liberation, helping Jews connect with Muslim communities through shared culture. For instance, groups like the Egalitarian Sephardi Mizrahi Kehilla of NYC employ the shared Middle Eastern, North African, and Ottoman musical modes known as makam as part of their services, providing for an expanded sense of political imagination.

The recuperation of the figure of the Ladino-speaking Jew also offers an additional possibility of bridge-building in the American context, particularly to Spanish-speaking immigrant communities currently under attack by the federal government. Spanish is the second-most spoken language in the US, and “Hispanics” constitute nearly 20% of the population. (These include about 300,000 Latine Jews, representing a variety of ancestries.) While Ladino functions today almost exclusively as a post-vernacular, deployed to consciously symbolize an identity rather than to communicate, the language—its idioms or its socialist anthems—could be deployed in the service of solidarity. Yiddish is often deployed this way by today’s Jewish left, but Ladino has the benefit of being largely intelligible to communities actively facing immigration exclusion, the militarization of the border, and the deportation state.

We can look to the profound hybridity of Ladino—long met with suspicion or confusion—as a generative resource for articulating a Jewish horizon beyond political Zionism.

We can also look to the profound hybridity of Ladino—long met with suspicion or confusion—as a generative resource for articulating a Jewish horizon beyond political Zionism. In his History of the Jews, famed Russian Jewish diaspora nationalist Simon Dubnow criticized Jews from Istanbul and Salonica for suffering from a “superficial cosmopolitanism of the Levantine type” because they failed to become either Turks or Europeans, while also supposedly failing to adopt a Jewish national consciousness (his claim notably rhymes with Joseph Stalin’s antisemitic canard that Jews in general were “rootless cosmopolitans”). But some thought about their Levantine condition quite differently. Richard Kostelanetz, a New York-born anarchist critic with roots in Izmir, views the Ladino-speaking experience as a “declassé” and “alternative Jewish heritage” ripe with cultural and political potential.

Similarly, the philosopher, resistance fighter, and former communist Edgar Morin (né Nahoum), born to Salonican Jews in Paris in 1921, considers his family’s multiple affiliations across the generations—as Salonican, Sephardic, Jewish, Turkish, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Mediterranean—not as a sign of irrevocable alienation, but rather as a promise of “multi-rootedness” (in French, “poly-enracinement”). For Morin, this multi-rootedness manifests as a transdisciplinary worldview that embraces relationality, complexity, anti-essentialism, and contradiction as the foundations of human knowledge. This paradigm offers a complementary approach to the Bundist, Yiddish concept of “doikayt” (“hereness”), which has become a rallying cry of the Jewish left: Whereas doikayt risks reinforcing the very centrality of Israel/Palestine it means to disrupt by situating the “here” of diaspora in relation to the “there” of Eretz Yisrael, Morin’s framework helps us to embrace a multiplicity of different “homelands” with no hierarchy whatsoever. This powerful concept finds concrete expression in a grand mosaic map that appeared in Brooklyn’s Sephardic Home for the Aged—which stood from 1951 until 2014 as the most visible communal landmark of American Ladino heritage—showing the eastern Mediterranean geography of the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt, with the line: “In These Lands Our People Dwelled for 500 Years.” This declaration, though intended as a description of historical reality rather than an expression of radical politics, can nevertheless serve a vision of Jewish flourishing across borders.

To incorporate this expansive principle of multi-rootedness into our politics, we must not only acknowledge and raise up the history of the Ladino Left, but also integrate it into the contemporary culture of the Jewish left, undoing the oppressive power dynamics that have excluded it until now. There is enough space for Chaim Zhitlovsky and Maurice Nessim; for Clara Lemlich and Sarah Aldorati; for “doikayt” and “poly-enracinement”; for protest songs in all of our Jewish languages. Already in 2007, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz emphasized that Jewish histories invisibilized by a “hegemonic Ashkenazi community are often best equipped to help the Jewish world reckon with our multiculturality, and to know that this multiculturality is an enormous asset when it comes to combating racism and antisemitism and to building social justice coalitions.” Though the Ladino Left must be reclaimed for its own sake, si kere el Dio, if it can also help strengthen the Jewish left, zay gezunt. There are other radical Jewish American histories waiting to be reclaimed, too—whether of early 20th-century Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews from Ioannina or Arabic-speaking Syrian Jews who joined the ILGWU or the CP. A wider range of Jews must see their heritages reflected, and activated, in our liberation movements to make it clear that they, too, are poised to play an essential role in them.

Devin E. Naar is an associate professor of Jewish studies, Sephardic studies, history, and international studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/reclaiming-the-ladino-left at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

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UPDATED 21 JAN 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

Kansionario Sosialista

Selections from a 1919 Ladino Socialist songbook

Introduced by Devin E. Naar With music by Lu Coy, Daniel Elias, and Simone Salmon

The Sephardic Branch of the Socialist Party of America was established in 1918 on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, with about 150 initial members. The group soon began to produce publications in Ladino—first its newspaper, El Proletario, and then, starting in 1919, a series of pamphlets under the title “Communist Library.” The inaugural release is also the only surviving text: Kansionario Sosialista (Socialist Songbook). This booklet features the lyrics of more than a dozen radical songs translated into Ladino, including the classic anthem “The Internationale”—written in 1871 after a major international leftist congress and later adopted by movements across the world—as well as others that praise workers and socialism or condemn war and capitalism. The source languages for these renderings are unknown; perhaps they were translated from Spanish, French, Italian, Yiddish, Greek, or any of the other tongues familiar to the Ladino-speaking community. (According to the Bureau of Investigation, El Proletario’s co-editor, Abraham Cohen, knew ten languages.)

A foreword to the volume explains that while the Communist Library’s main aim was to provide Judeo-Spanish readers with “class education,” the series began with the kansionario out of popular demand. Presumably the Sephardic Branch’s sympathizers had requested Ladino versions of socialist songs to chant during marches or on the picket line, to make their voices heard in their own language. The editorial choices tell us something about how the Ladino Left understood itself. The inclusion of some words in Castilian Spanish (written in Hebrew characters and sometimes glossed in Ladino) is likely a sign of the community’s efforts to connect to other Spanish-speaking workers in New York City. And while the only existing copy of the booklet is missing the last page, the table of contents indicates that the collection ends with a Greek version of “The Internationale,” which suggests that these radicals also saw themselves as linked to their Greek counterparts.

Though unknown to most of us now, at one time some of these Ladino renditions appear to have been popular enough that their reach extended beyond the immediate circle of Ladino leftists. In the 1970s, when historian Louis Menashe asked his Salonican-born mother Bertha—who had never joined a radical organization—to write down the lyrics of Ladino songs she remembered, she included “Kante Sosialista” (“Socialist Song”), with only tiny variations in wording from the version published in the Kansionario Sosialista more than a half-century before. Indeed, despite their radical politics, certain leftist songs seamlessly entered the canon of Ladino popular music. When Albert Levy—who had advocated for the abolition of private property in El Proletario and served as the editor of La Vara before joining the Democratic Party and becoming director of Sephardic Talmud Torah, a Seattle religious school—transcribed the lyrics of a range of popular Ladino songs in a personal notebook long after his politics moderated, he included “Kante Sosialista” as well as “Marsh Ovradera” (“Workers’ March”), both of which are included in this excerpt.

Here you’ll find a selection of six songs from this volume—“La Internasional” (“The Internationale”), “El Imno Sosialista” (“The Socialist Hymn”), “La Marseyeza de la Pas” (“The Marseillaise of Peace”), “Marsh Ovradera” (“Workers’ March”), “Kante Sosialista” (“Socialist Song”), and “La Revolusion” (“The Revolution”). They are being published alongside English translations by Oya Aktaş, Joana Bürger, and Büşra Demirkol, with Devin E. Naar and Nesi Altaras. We’re also pleased to present new recordings of “La Internasional” and “El Imno Sosialista.” The former was performed and recorded in Brooklyn by a group led by Daniel Elias of the Elias Ladino Ensemble and Simone Salmon, an ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist specializing in Jewish and Turkish music. The latter was performed and recorded in Los Angeles by multimedia artist, activist, and musician Lu Coy, who draws on their Ashkenazi Jewish and Mexican heritage to sing in both Ladino and Yiddish. Because this song, like many of those included in the Kansionario Sosialista, has no known tune, Coy also wrote an original melody and accompaniment with Michel Van Loh.

— Devin E. Naar

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Cover of the Kansionario Sosialista, or Socialist Songbook, the first volume in the Communist Library series put out by the Propaganda Commission of the Sephardic Branch of the Socialist Party in New York, 1919.

La Internasional

“La Internasional” was recorded by Andrew Sheron at Conveyor in Brooklyn, New York. Singers: Arielle Angel, Rachel Angel, Daniel Elias, Aleeza Howitt, Yoni L., Akee S., Simone Salmon, and Zack Youcha. Piano: Andrew Sheron. Mixed by Darren Blackensee at Electric Garden in Brooklyn.

Ariva los proves del mundo

De pie los esklavos sin pan

i gritemos todos unidos

Biva la internasional

Renovamas todas las traves

ke empiden el triunfo del bien

Kambiyemos el mundo de vase[1]

Undiendo el imperio burgez

Agrupemos nos todos

Por el plyeto final

I se alsen los pueblos

Kon valor por la internasional

El dia ke el triunfo alkansemos

Ni esklavos ni duenyos avra

Los odios ke el mundo enveninan

Del mundo lansados seran

El ombre del ombre es ermano

Deritos todos egual ternan

La tiera es el paradizo

La patria de la umanidad

Agrupemos nos todos

Por el plyeto final

I se alsen los pueblos

Kon valor por la internasional

The International

Rise up poor of the world

On your feet slaves without bread

and may we cry out all together

Long live the international!

Let’s reimagine the rules

That impede the triumph of the good

Let’s change the empty world

Drowning the bourgeois empire

May we come together

For the final struggle

And may the peoples arise

With valor for the international

The day we achieve triumph

There will be neither slaves nor owners

The hatreds that poison the world

Will be cast off from the world

Every man is brother to the other

Everyone will have equal rights

The Earth is paradise

The homeland of humanity

May we come together

For the final struggle

And may the peoples arise

With valor for the international

El Imno Sosialista[2]

“El Imno Sosialista” was reimagined by Lu Coy with Michel Van Loh, and recorded in Los Angeles, California. Guitar and saz: Michel Van Loh. Vocals and flute: Lu Coy. Percussion: Kayhan Azadi. Engineered and mixed by Kayhan Azadi in Los Angeles. Mastered at Electric Garden in Brooklyn.

Estos burgezes, traditores, ke nos atropeyan

Basho el yugo de la eksploatasion,

Seran barridos mal i de mala manera

I presegidos sin kompasion.

Desperta obrero i mira[3]

La luz de la verdad

I veras alos sosialistas

Komo luchan kon ardor i kon pasion

La union, la union sera nuestra salvasion

Non mas sufrir esta opresion

Esklavos del progreso

La libertad emos de proklamar,

Si non viene un muevo de retroseso

Un muevo sol, al mundo luminara:

Non mas sufrir!

Esklavos del progreso

La libertad emos de proklamar,

Si non viene un muevo de retroseso

Un muevo sol, al mundo luminara:

La libertad!

The Socialist Hymn

These bourgeois, traitors, who trample us

Under the yolk of exploitation,

They will be swept away and badly so

And persecuted without compassion.

Wake up worker and look at

The light of truth

And you will see the socialists

How they fight with fervor and passion

The union, the union will be our salvation

No more suffering this oppression

Slaves of progress

Liberty we must proclaim,

If not a new regression comes

A new sun will illuminate the world:

No more suffering!

Slaves of progress

Liberty we must proclaim,

If not a new regression comes

A new sun will illuminate the world:

Liberty!

La Marseyeza de la Pas[4]

Kontra el grito de gera,

Ke resumando siempre esta,

De la pas la ermoza bandiera

Los ovreros devemos alsar. (2x)

I a traverso las frontieras

Prontos los tiranos oyiran

A los puevlos, todos gritaran;

Non mas geras, somos ermanos!

Al ruido del kanon,

Obreros protestad!

Union, union, asta obtener

Al triumfo de la pas.

Non mas kanones, ni fuziles.

Abasho el arte destruktor!

Non mas kantes ni gritos de gera

Ke despertan el adyo feros!

Fraternedad santa i kerida

Ven i muestra giya seras

Tu en el mundo deves reynar

Por los pueblos somos ermanos.

Al ruido del kanon,

Obreros protestad!

Union, union, asta obtener

Al triumfo de la pas.

The Marseillaise of Peace

Against the cry of war

Which is always resounding,

The beautiful flag of peace

We the workers should raise. (2x)

And across the borders

Soon the tyrants will hear

The peoples, all screaming;

No more wars, we are brothers!

Upon the noise of the cannon,

Workers protest!

Union, union, until we get

The triumph of peace.

No more cannons, nor bombs

Down with the art of destruction!

No more songs or cries of war

That provoke the wrath of God!

Sacred and beloved brotherhood

Come and you will be our guide

You must reign over the world

Because the peoples are brothers

Upon the noise of the cannon,

Workers protest!

Union, union, until we get

The triumph of peace.

Marsh Ovradera

Avanti ermanos ovradores!

Trupa de gera se siente.

La ora sona produktores

Por el grandioza kombate

Enemistad non kieremos

Ke venga al mundo ermandad.

Na el eskopo, ke presegimos

En el kombate grandiozo

Avanti! Avanti! Grupemos nos

Milarias somos, venseremos

Milarias somos, venseremos

Somos milarias en el plieto,

En toda sivdad i kazal;

Dientro de nos esta despierto

Grande i sublim ideal.

Parte igual nos kieremos

De lo ke el lavoro da.

Na el eskopo, ke presegimos

En el kombate grandiozo

Avanti! Avanti! Grupemos nos

Milarias somos, venseremos

Milarias somos, venseremos

Armas, kanones i espadas

Deve deshar toda nasion.

Armas nuevas i bien armadas

Son libertad i instruksion.

Esklavaje non kieremos

Ke venga vida libertad.

Na el eskopo, ke presegimos

En el kombate grandiozo

Avanti! Avanti! Grupemos nos

Milarias somos, venseremos

Milarias somos, venseremos

Workers March

Onward fellow workers!

The troops of war are heard.

The time of the producers has come

For the grand battle

Enmity we do not want

May brotherhood come to the world.

Thus our goal, which we pursue

In the grand struggle

Onward! Onward! Let’s organize

We are thousands, we will triumph

We are thousands, we will triumph

We are thousands in the struggle,

In every city and countryside.

Within us has awoken

The grand and sublime ideal.

We want an equal part

Of what our labor gives.

Thus our goal, which we pursue

In the grand struggle

Onward! Onward! Let’s organize

We are thousands, we will triumph

We are thousands, we will triumph

Weapons, cannons and swords

Every nation must leave them behind.

New weapons, very powerful ones

Are liberty and education.

Servitude we do not want

May life and liberty arrive.

Thus our goal, which we pursue

In the grand struggle

Onward! Onward! Let’s organize

We are thousands, we will triumph

We are thousands, we will triumph

Kante Sosialista

Ijos del pueblo ke oprimen kadenas

Sus indjustisias non pueden sufrir

Sus egzistensia es un mundo de penas

Ansi ke esklavos, preferan muerir

Estos burgezes son bien egoistas

Ke ansi despresian la umanidad

Seran baridos por los sosialistas

Al fuerto grito de libertad

Roho pendon, non mas sufrir

La eksploatasion a de sukomber

Levantate pueblo leal

Al grito de revolusion sosial

Vindikasion ay ke pedir

Nuestra union lo puede ke seer

Nuestro pueder lo rompera

Torpes burgezes

atras, atras!

Socialist Song

Children of the people oppressed by chains

They cannot bear the injustices

Their existence is a world of pain

Thus the slaves prefer to die

The bourgeois are selfish

And thus debase humanity

They will be erased by the socialists

Upon the fierce cry of liberty

Red flag, no more suffering

Exploitation is about to succumb

Rise up loyal people

Upon the cry of social revolution

Vindication must be demanded

Our union can manifest it

Our power will break it

Back, back

you bumbling bourgeoisie!

La Revolusion

Obreros! Obreros! Del martirio idela siera.

Depies! Esklavos de la tiera.

Vos produktores de la rikeza;

Mostrar vuestras frentes kon fiereza.

Vuestra proklamasion obreros!

Obreros! Obreros!

Sera por pueblos,

Por toda la umanidad el sinyo giador.

El nuevo rejim salvador

Mezo vos, vuestra unidad,

Orden sera ekuidad.

Ley, sera libertad.

La relijion, sera verdad.

El dover tendra ke ser: amar.

El ombre, el kriado

Deverna vero umano.

I esto o nasion!

Sera echo por la revolusion.

The Revolution

Workers! Workers! With the hammer and the sickle.

On your feet! Wretched of the earth.

You, the producers of plenty;

Show your brows with pride.

Your proclamation, workers!

Workers! Workers!

You will be for the peoples,

For all humanity, the guiding light.

The new regime of redemption

Through you, your unity,

Order will be Equality.

Law will be Liberty.

Religion will be the Truth.

Duty will be to Love.

Each person, each child

Will become truly human.

And this, o nation!

Will be accomplished by the revolution.

Footnotes

1

The meaning of the term “vase” is unclear. It may be from French, “vase,” meaning mud, filth, sludge, or ooze, translating to something like, “Let’s change this putrid world.” It may also have been a typo, intended to be “base” or “foundation.” We have opted for the latter interpretation.

2

The song’s lyrics resonate with German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg’s famous quote, “we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.” “Progress” here might be read ironically, a reference to the proletariat’s alienation from industrialization, but we did not put it in quotes to maintain fidelity to the original.

3

Lu Coy's new rendition of this song picks up at the second verse.

4

Sung to the tune of “La Marseillaise.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Devin E. Naar is an associate professor of Jewish studies, Sephardic studies, history, and international studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece.

Lu Coy (they/them) is a Los Angeles-based queer multimedia artist, activist, and musician. Their work spans electroacoustic composition, song, theater, installation, and ceremony, drawing on the texts and traditions of their Ashkenazi Jewish and Mexican heritage. Coy has become a widely recognized emerging voice in the Yiddish and Ladino revival movements across the US and Europe.

Daniel Elias is a founding member of the Elias Ladino Ensemble. The grandson of Rabbi David Elias Cassorla, who served the Sephardic Congregation of Coney Island, and the son of Joe Elias, an early collector and performer of Ladino music, he has been performing Ladino music since the age of 15.

Simone Salmon is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at UCLA, working at the intersection of Jewish music, diaspora, and state power. Her work focuses on Jewish musical life in Turkey and its diasporas, situated within broader Sepharadi and Mizrahi musical worlds, and examines how authoritarian governance, minority silencing, and cultural resistance shape musical expression.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/ladinoleftsongs at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

REPORT | 16 JAN 2026, 6:38 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 16 JAN 2026, 8:18 PM UTC

Can a Liberal Zionist Recreate Mamdani’s Coalition?

Brad Lander’s primary challenge to Rep. Dan Goldman will test whether the progressive alliance that came together in 2025 can win again.

Alex Kane

Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander campaigning in Brooklyn on August 5, 2025

Kyle Mazza/dpa

On the morning of December 18th, a group of community advocates and city and state legislators gathered in front of downtown Brooklyn’s municipal building to endorse City Comptroller Brad Lander’s primary challege to two-term Congressman Dan Goldman, a staunchly pro-Israel Democrat and heir to a fortune from the Levi Strauss clothing company. The gathering was a warning sign for Goldman: All eight politicians who took turns speaking were either current or former representatives of parts of Goldman’s Tenth Congressional District, which runs from lower Manhattan to west and south Brooklyn. Normally, elected officials support an incumbent from their own party, but here, they were denouncing Goldman as someone who, in the words of Assemblyman Bobby Carroll, “turned a cold shoulder” to constituents concerned with the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. Carroll contrasted this with the attitude of Lander, a progressive who “co-endorsed” Zohran Mamdani last summer while running for mayor himself, and whose support was ultimately instrumental in building the left-liberal coalition that helped elect the democratic socialist in November.

The presence of one elected official was especially noteworthy: City Council member Alexa Avilés. Avilés had weighed her own run against Goldman, and had picked up the endorsement of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) in October. With the group’s field operation having powered Mamdani’s winning campaign, its endorsement was expected to carry more weight than ever in 2026. But things got complicated for Avilés when Lander, who’d been expected to take a spot in Mamdani’s administration, decided to jump into the NY-10 race. Thanks to his long-time advocacy for tenants, immigrants, and labor—and the big boost he’d given Mamdani—Lander would have substantial support on the left, especially in a district he’d partly represented on the city council for 12 years. Still, Lander, whose days of active DSA membership were long over, wasn’t going to win the NYC-DSA’s nod, not least because he’s a liberal Zionist—a strong critic of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, but nonetheless a believer in Israel as a Jewish state and an opponent of the DSA-backed Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

With Lander in the fray, progressives began to fear a repeat of the 2022 election—when the left split the vote in a Democratic primary and Goldman ended up with a narrow victory. Consequently, some of DSA’s elected officials began coming out for Lander—none more important than Avilés herself. In a December 10th statement announcing she would not run, Avilés wrote that a “split field” runs the risk of allowing Goldman another “damaging term” in Congress. In a subsequent statement endorsing Lander on December 18th, she wrote that her district needed “a fighter in Congress who will put the needs of working-class people above the interests of corporations and AIPAC.” (The pro-Israel lobby is a supporter of Goldman, while Lander’s first campaign video featured a swipe at the organization.) Lander, Avilés wrote, “will fight for New Yorkers in a way that our current representative does not.” “I believe that I’m the candidate best suited to bring that coalition together and defeat Dan Goldman,” Lander told Jewish Currents in an interview the following day. The political moment, he said, calls for “a popular front if we are going to defeat Trump and build something better here, and make progress defending the human rights, dignity and self-determination of Palestinians.” With NYC-DSA’s candidate bowing out, Lander’s candidacy will be a test of whether the progressive alliance that came together in 2025 can do it again.

Challenging Goldman, who this month received backing from Governor Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, has become an increasingly urgent priority for New York progressives. The former assistant US attorney rose to prominence as a cable-news commentator and lead counsel for the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019. He ran for Congress in the progressive district in 2022, barely defeating state assembly member Yuh-Line Niou, who split the vote with other contenders on Goldman’s left. Progressive discontent with the congressman grew as Goldman vocally backed US support for Israel’s onslaught on Gaza following October 7th, 2023; pro-Palestine protests became a fixture outside his congressional office in Brooklyn. “Goldman has always been an ardent defender of the Israeli government,” said Grace Mausser, the co-chair of NYC-DSA. “He maintained his stance even as more and more Americans recognized the situation in Palestine for what it is: a genocide.”

In Avilés, the socialist group saw a credible threat to Goldman, and a chance to have another DSA leader join the small group of democratic socialists in Congress that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. “We believe a socialist with a strong history in movement politics and who has consistently taken a brave stance on Palestine is the best candidate for this district,” Mausser told Jewish Currents after NYC-DSA officially endorsed Avilés on October 25th. NYC-DSA had a steady base of 2,000 members in the Tenth district, its second-largest contingent in the city; it could also mobilize a citywide membership of over 13,000 behind its candidate. And these volunteers had a potent message to use against Goldman: He had refused to endorse Mamdani for mayor, despite the democratic socialist winning the district handily in the primary.

Multiple progressive challengers, however, could dilute that message. Avilés had been in conversation with NYC-DSA leaders about the race since the summer; during that time, according to reports in Gothamist and The New York Times, Lander had indicated that he wanted to be Mamdani’s deputy mayor. (Lander allies, however, told the Times he had never assumed he would get the job, and had been thinking about a potential congressional run since last spring). But according to the Times, Mamdani had informed Lander in late October that he would not be getting the deputy mayor job; instead, the mayor-elect wanted to support Lander in a run against Goldman. About six weeks later, on December 10th, Lander officially entered the race with a Mamdani endorsement—along with endorsements from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. This changed Avilés’s and DSA’s calculations. “DSA didn’t want to play spoiler when there’s clearly a much stronger candidate in Brad Lander, given he’s been in office for so long in Brooklyn,” said Ross Barkan, a writer who covers New York City politics for New York Magazine and the Times. “In the district’s vote-rich neighborhoods, he’s just much better known.”

Mausser told Jewish Currents that NYC-DSA left the ultimate decision up to Avilés, though the group’s leaders “talked and thought about strategy” with her after Lander indicated he was going to join the race. “Alexa was not hell-bent on running for Congress,” Mausser said. “She only wanted to do it if it made sense for the left, for her, and the political ecosystem that she operates in. In this case, she, like us, didn’t want to divide the left vote.” The Mamdani endorsement was another compelling reason for staying out. “The mayor was the agent of consolidation behind who he deemed to be the stronger candidate who is more connected to the district,” said Michael Lange, a NYC-DSA member, political strategist and author of “The Narrative Wars,” a Substack about New York City politics. “There was not a path for anybody else.”

Following Mamdani’s historic victory in November, the DSA was making strategic choices to spend its resources on winnable races in 2026—a mission that will determine whether the new mayor’s affordability agenda has enough allies in Albany and Washington, DC. In this vein, NYC-DSA has so far endorsed six state assembly and senate candidates, and is likely to endorse two congressional candidates—all of them in districts that Mamdani carried in the Democratic primary. “The New York City DSA branch has always been a pragmatic organization,” said Barkan. “If you’re taking volunteers to one part of the city, that’s less people for other parts. DSA is just not large enough to be a presence in more than a few congressional primaries while also backing a full state legislative slate.”

Besides, Barkan says, Lander was not someone democratic socialists had a compelling reason to run against. “He’s not a cadre DSA member and he’s not anti-Zionist, but he’s aligned on a majority of issues,” said Barkan. It is true that Lander’s positions on Israel are at odds with many of NYC-DSA’s members. “His perspective on Israel is something that many in the organization have trouble with,” said Michael Thomas Carter, a NYC-DSA member and former spokesperson for State Senator Julia Salazar, another NYC-DSA elected official. “Lander describes himself as a progressive Zionist, but there’s a lot of people within New York City DSA who believe that Zionism has an inherent ethnic-supremacy component that cannot be progressive.” These differences surfaced the day after the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel, when NYC-DSA tweeted an encouragement for people to attend a pro-Palestinian rally that ended up featuring a speaker who referred to Israelis kidnapped by Hamas from the Nova festival as “hipsters” who were “doing very fine.” Lander criticized the rally as “abominable,” although he told Jewish Currents he understands in hindsight that NYC-DSA did not organize or sponsor the demonstration. But despite this history, democratic socialists were applauding Lander this past June, when he cross-endorsed Mamdani. The decision paved the way for liberal supporters of Lander to get behind the democratic socialist in the ranked-choice primary, and it ultimately helped fend off former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s independent bid in the general election. “Lander was a very valuable surrogate for Mamdani,” Lange said. “He earnestly combated the Islamophobic vitriol that attempted to paint Mamdani as an antisemite.”

It may also help, some progressive leaders say, that Lander’s views on Israel and Palestine tend to diverge sharply from Goldman’s. Joe Dinkin, the national deputy director of the Working Families Party (WFP)—Lander’s longtime political home, which has endorsed him in the race—called Lander “a clear voice against genocide and occupation,” adding: “That’s a stark difference from Dan Goldman, and is the kind of progressive Jewish leadership we deserve in Congress.” Along these lines, Lander told Jewish Currents that he would co-sponsor the Block the Bombs Act, which would halt the sale to Israel of tank ammunition and certain large bombs. “I support a block on offensive weapons as long as they’re conducting so many human rights violations over and over again,” Lander said.

Goldman has not joined the 61 sponsors of that House legislation, which was introduced last May, and his campaign did not respond when Jewish Currents asked whether he would support the measure if it came up for a vote. His voting record after October 7th has been supportive of arms for Israel. In April 2024, as Israel perpetrated what experts were calling a genocide in Gaza, Goldman voted to give the country an additional $14.5 billion in military assistance. The same month, Goldman voted to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib over her use of the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a decision he recently told The New York Times he would likely not make again. Maddy Rosen, a spokesperson for Goldman, described him in an email statement as “an unwavering supporter of Israel’s right to exist securely and safely as a Jewish state and safe haven for the Jewish people.” But that support, she said, “does not extend to this Israeli government or Prime Minister Netanyahu, of whom he has been sharply critical for years.” But in January 2024, Goldman nevertheless voted with 205 Republicans and 42 Democrats to sanction the International Criminal Court after it issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Many voters in the Tenth District, especially those on the left, will be sifting through these positions on Israel, and Lange is among the political observers who think most will break for Lander, even without a formal DSA ground game to help persuade them. “It’s not like the socialist voters in the district are going to sit it out,” Lange said. “The socialists in this district are still going to vote for Brad and probably give him money and volunteer.”

Lander has reasons to be positive about his chances. Three months before he declared his candidacy, a September poll of district voters found that Lander would beat Goldman handily in a hypothetical match-up. He’s especially popular and well-known in the district’s upper-middle class, voter-rich Brooklyn neighborhoods. Further, Lander has shown a talent for raising the kind of money needed to compete with an incumbent like Goldman—even in last year’s losing bid for mayor, where he reached New York City’s fundraising limit four weeks prior to the primary. And while he won’t have the DSA’s official nod, he will be backed by other progressive organizations that can supplement Lander’s own field operation, including the WFP and the United Auto Workers’ northeast chapter. “With WFP and other organizations Brad has been part of building, he’ll have plenty of willing and eager canvassers,” Dinkin said. Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, which boasts a membership of 6,300 people—1,000 of them in the Tenth District—is widely expected to get behind Lander as well; in the past, it has endorsed him both for mayor and for comptroller. Audrey Sasson, executive director, said the group is looking for a “candidate who’s ready to fight for Zohran’s vision, who sees the Jewish left as an asset rather than a liability, who will speak out on genocide and won’t be beholden to AIPAC.”

If these factors translate into a Lander victory in June, progressive leaders like Dinkin say it will be a positive sign for the future durability of a broad progressive coalition in New York. “We lost this seat in 2022 because of a fractured field,” he said, and learned a lesson from it. “Brad’s race shows there are a lot of people who are taking seriously the project of building a big-enough coalition to win and govern in the age of Zohran Mamdani.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

alexbkane

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/can-a-liberal-zionist-recreate-mamdanis-coalition at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

PHOTO ESSAY | 23 DEC 2025, 9:33 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 30 DEC 2025, 12:14 AM UTC

The Eyes of Silwan

As settlers evict families from their homes in an East Jerusalem neighborhood, a community art project called I Witness Silwan ensures that they are always being watched.

Introduced by Charlotte Ritz-Jack

The eyes of Ghassan Kanafani, painted by Palestinian American artist Chris Gazaleh and installed in the hills of Batan al-Hawa in Jerusalem.

Afif Amerah

On the afternoon of December 14th, some 20 Israeli police and army officers arrived in the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem to tell Umm Nasser Rajabi that she and her family of 18 had a few hours to pack and permanently leave their four-story home. Although Rajabi had been issued an eviction notice for early December, and had seen her next-door neighbors forced out the previous month, it still came as a shock when the police showed up. Umm Nasser and her relatives began frantically emptying the home as Israeli settlers, who had been scoping out and photographing the property for months, gathered to watch and celebrate. “This is my house,” Umm Nasser said between tears. “I spent 50 years in this house, raising all my kids here.” After the sun had set and the family’s belongings had been cleared out, nearly a dozen people helped Palestinian Red Crescent staff carry Awad, Umm Nasser’s grandson, out of the house on a hospital bed; since suffering a stroke five years ago, Awad has required full-time care, hospital-grade equipment, and intravenous food, all of which Umm Nasser had specially fitted the first story of her home to provide. As the family drove five miles across Jerusalem to a hastily-rented unit in Beit Hanina that they can’t afford long-term, nearly three dozen settlers seized the house under the protection of police and private security forces.

Along with the police, soldiers, and settlers, other silent witnesses were looking on as the Rajabi family was forced out. Painted on the front of the house in colorful hues are the eyes of Milad Ayyash, a 17-year-old Silwan resident who was shot and killed by settler security in 2011, while etched in bright blue on a balcony is the eye of a younger Umm Nasser, looking protectively over the neighborhood where she grew up and raised her 11 children. These painted eyes are among dozens adorning the stacked houses of the dense Batan al-Hawa section of Silwan, where more than 85 families—some 700 people—are facing expulsion to make way for ever-expanding Israeli settlements. The product of “I Witness Silwan: Who Is Watching Whom?,” a public art project established in 2015, the murals invert a reality in which Silwan’s residents live under constant surveillance by the regime seizing Palestinian property, turning the gaze—and the accountability that comes with being watched—back outward.

Ateret Cohanim, a settler organization working to Judaize areas of East Jerusalem, began filing dozens of eviction suits against Silwan residents in 2001, claiming legal rights to the land after taking control of a Jewish trust that had operated in the neighborhood in the late 19th century to aid the poor. Under Israel’s 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law, Jews are permitted to reclaim property in East Jerusalem that was lost during the 1948 war, despite the fact that most have already been compensated for lost property—and that those taking over land tend to have no historical connection to the particular property they claim. (Palestinians, who were not compensated for land lost in 1948, are denied the same right.) The Rajabis and the other targeted families waged years-long legal battles in response, but many of their cases ended in June, when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ateret Cohanim. At least 30 families in Batan al-Hawa, which sits close to the Old City walls, have already been evicted, with more to follow until, ultimately, the section is in the hands of settlers.

As the evictions ramp up, the eyes, bright and unblinking, stare at the settlers. To date, the I Witness project has painted nearly 100 murals on the facades of homes that have been issued eviction and demolition orders. Some murals are painted directly onto Silwan’s concrete walls; others are applied as large vinyl stickers of printed photographs. Often, they are accompanied by touchstones of Palestinian identity—olive trees, lines from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, or portraits of figures like Edward Said. While they mostly depict the eyes of current or former residents struggling against displacement, a few famous intellectuals and revolutionaries peer out as well: Che Guevara, Sigmund Freud, the Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani. On one house, the eyes of George Floyd, the Black American killed by Minneapolis police in 2020, appear next to those of Iyad al-Hallaq, a young Palestinian man with autism killed by Israeli police in East Jerusalem five days after Floyd was murdered.

Another set of eyes, featured on one of the neighborhood’s largest murals, belongs to Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist murdered by the Israeli military in 2022. Her eyes grace the exterior walls of the home of Zuheir Rajabi, Umm Nasser’s nephew and a community leader who co-directs I Witness Silwan. Zuheir wakes up each day knowing that the Supreme Court could issue a final ruling to greenlight his eviction, too. For him, Abu Akleh’s eyes—and the murals across the neighborhood—are part of a struggle for survival. The art “sends a message that people exist and want to continue to live in Silwan,” he said. “Even if we are pushed from our homes, our eyes will remain, always watching.”

Ahed Izhiman

I Witness Silwan murals on the hillside of Batan al-Hawa, which include the eyes of Silwan community members, living and martyred; Palestinian luminaries like Ghassan Kanafani and Shireen Abu Akleh; and international figures like Malcolm X.

Umm Nasser paints her home.

I Witness Silwan

Eye of Umm Nasser painted on the backside of Umm Nasser’s home.

Kobi Wolf

Over a five-year period, I Witness Silwan worked with Umm Nasser to paint the entire facade of her home. Facing the main street of Batn al Hawa, the building was painted with flowers, eyes, and a four-story-tall image of a woman in prayer. Umm Nasser and her extended family were forcibly expelled from their home on December 14th, 2025, after a ten-year struggle, which was then handed over to Israeli soldiers. The settler organization Ateret Cohanim, fully backed by the state, has based its ownership claims on the fact that Yemeni Jews lived in this part of Silwan more than 100 years ago.

Eyes of John Berger, an art critic, painter, and writer whose work has shaped how people see, analyze, and understand their world, and who was a staunch advocate for Palestine.

Kobi Wolf

Eyes of Bai Bibiyaon Ligkayan Bigkay (left), designed by CeCe Carpio and a Silwan community member.

Kobi Wolf

Bai Bibiyaon Ligkayan Bigkay is a Lumad leader and Talaingod woman-chieftain in the Philippines, leading her tribe in the indigenous defense of ancestral lands. Her eyes in Silwan make visible connections between the Palestinian liberation struggle and global indigenous struggles against colonization.

Eyes of Eyad al-Halak, a young man with autism who was murdered in the Old City by border police on May 30th, 2020.

Afif Amira

Eyes of George Floyd, who was murdered by police in Minneapolis on May 25th, 2020.

Afif Amira

Zuheir Rajabi of Silwan said, “George Floyd was killed because of racism and state violence. George Floyd’s story parallels what is happening to us in Palestine.”

Charlotte Ritz-Jack is an editorial fellow at +972 Magazine living and writing in Jerusalem.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-eyes-of-silwan at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

CHEVRUTA | 23 DEC 2025, 2:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 23 DEC 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

How Should We Engage in Communal Rebuke?

An investigation through Jewish text on moving fellow Jews

Aron Wander in conversation with Nathan Goldman

Chevruta is a column that aims to address the ethical and spiritual problems confronting the left. For each installment of the column—named for the traditional method of Jewish study, in which a pair of students analyzes a religious text together—Jewish Currents will match leftist thinkers and organizers with a rabbi or Torah scholar. The activists will bring an urgent question that arises in their own work; the Torah scholar will lead them in exploring their question through Jewish text. By routing contemporary political questions through traditional religious sources, we hope to discover new and unexpected avenues for inquiry into today’s most pressing problems. You can find a stand-alone source sheet for group study here.

Throughout the genocide in Gaza, the Jewish left has regularly drawn on the religious framework of tochecha—the commandment to rebuke—in order to articulate our sense of complicity in Israel’s violence. At protests against the genocide, it isn’t uncommon to see Talmudic quotations about tochecha, like the oft-cited statement that “whoever can protest against the sins” of their community and does not “is held responsible” for those sins. Our use of tochecha expresses some basic moral intuitions about our responsibility for the actions of our fellow Jews. It draws on the long rabbinic tradition of seeing ourselves as liable for other Jews’ actions, and it also functions as a recognition of the fact that many of us are connected to communities that are intellectually, affectively, and materially tied to Zionism. Moreover, it serves as a rejoinder to the mainstream Jewish institutions that have claimed to speak on behalf of all American Jews when they express their support for the genocide.

Still, I have some reservations about the way we deploy this framework or are implicitly guided by it: What is the line between seeing ourselves as responsible for other Jews’ actions and reifying the nationalist notion that Israel reflects Jews’ collective will? Are we shifting our focus away from questions of power and strategy and toward our own moral status? How responsible are we for actions we don’t have the ability to stop? I think a deeper dive into some of the sources on tochecha can help us work through these and other pressing political and ethical questions, including those that arise in our attempts to challenge and critique our local Jewish communities: What is the appropriate context for rebuke, and what are the risks of engaging in it? How should we relate to those in our community with whom we profoundly disagree and whose minds we hope to change?

In this conversation, Jewish Currents senior editor Nathan Goldman and I briefly review some of the rabbinic literature on tochecha before discussing two sources: a despair-ridden essay by Rabbi Aaron Tamares z”l, a 20th-century anarcho-pacifist rabbi, arguing that the obligation of tochecha only further enmeshes us in collective wrongdoing, and a winding responsum by Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg z”l, a leading 20th-century Haredi halachic authority, exploring which of our fellow Jews we’re obliged to rebuke, and how we should relate to them affectively. My hope is that even if these sources cannot definitively answer the questions at hand, they can offer language and political frameworks through which to address them rigorously and honestly.

— Aron Wander

Aron Wander: Nathan, what’s bringing you to this conversation?

Nathan Goldman: I’ve been interested in questions about how to relate to the Jewish community around Zionism for a long time. These questions first really surfaced for me almost a decade ago, when I started organizing with IfNotNow, whose theory of change is about moving Jews. But I’ve confronted them in a new way since October 7th and the beginning of the genocide, when I first got involved in conversations around Israel/Palestine at my synagogue. As the constituency there that’s confused or conflicted about Zionism has grown—and as others have clung to liberal Zionism—it has seemed important to me to show up as an anti-Zionist voice and try to pull the community to the left.

I’ve felt really ambivalent about this work. On the one hand, I feel a responsibility to create the kind of community I want, in this place where my wife and I are building our Jewish life, where we take our kids to services and where they will go to religious school. And in a more brass tacks political sense, it feels like this is the way I can make the most of my positionality, pushing people within my particular community—especially because it’s a progressive Jewish space that’s very unusually welcoming of my perspective, so it feels like there’s a real possibility of reaching people. On the other hand, I often find the work very challenging and draining. And I find myself wondering whether it’s effective. Am I actually changing anyone’s mind? Are the rhetorical compromises that I end up having to make corrosive to my own politics? What impact does doing this work have on the synagogue being a spiritual home for me? I also struggle with what posture I should have toward those I’m working to move, and wonder how my orientation and affect shape what’s politically possible.

Aron: For me, too, this question feels urgent both personally and politically. I graduated from rabbinical school in May. I trained for five years to be a rabbi, and felt really called to and excited about that work. And I also felt really clear I didn’t want to be in a context in which I felt like I was going to have to lie about Israel/Palestine. I had to be able to speak with moral clarity about occupation, apartheid, genocide. Even if I didn’t use those particular terms at every moment, I had to be able to be honest about what’s happening on the ground and my opposition to nationalism and domination. At the same time, I was trying to figure out whether I was concerned with the purity of my own politics over the efficacy of the political project of advancing justice in Israel/Palestine.

Both of the sources we’re looking at today deal with the obligation of “tochecha,” or “rebuke.” This mitzvah comes from Vayikra, where the Torah says, “Do not hate your sibling in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your fellow and do not bear sin on their account.”[1] The way in which these three elements—not hating your sibling, rebuking your fellow, and not bearing sin on their account—relate to each other is itself complicated, and there are rabbinic traditions of both constraining the mitzvah and expanding it. There’s a rabbinic text that focuses on the word “fellow” and says that this means that your obligation is only to rebuke your fellow Jew who is bought into the rabbinic system.[2] Similarly, there’s a rabbinic text that says that just as it’s a mitzvah to say that which will be heard—meaning that you have an obligation to rebuke if it’ll work—so too, it is a mitzvah not to say that which will not be heard, meaning that if you think your rebuke will go unheard, it’s actually forbidden to state it.[3] On the other hand, one rabbinic tradition says you’re obligated to rebuke someone until the point at which they physically strike you.[4] Perhaps even more well known is a text that says that if you don’t protest against something for which you are able to protest, you’re responsible for it. This same text suggests that because we can never know whether or not our protest will work, we are always responsible for the attempt.[5] So there’s a vast tradition on this mitzvah.

With that in mind, we’ll turn to the first source by Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamares. He was a Lithuanian anarchist, pacifist, and Orthodox rabbi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He’s actually come slightly into vogue in the last few years, particularly because of his very trenchant critique of Zionism, on anti-nationalist and pacifist principles.

Nathan reads.

The rod of rebuke has two sides: If the rebuker is able to sway the collective toward an upright path—the one the rebuker supposedly yearns for—all is well. But if not, they will be drawn after the collective’s depraved ways. For those people whose moral sense has not been fully developed, rebuke actually expresses their own doubts and misgivings about the worthwhileness of just and upright ways. It is like a person who must walk a path and is afraid to walk alone because of bandits and therefore invites others to join them. A rebuker is essentially saying to their listeners, “If you walk with me on the path I am proposing, then I too will walk, but if you do not, then neither will I.”

Aron: If you were to translate this into your own terms, what’s Rabbi Tamares saying?

Nathan: He’s saying that to rebuke is a gesture of relationship with a particular community that creates or shores up the connection. And so the very grounds on which I’m able to sway the collective in the way that I’d like to is also a way for me to be carried along with them, meaning there’s a kind of riskiness in rebuke. There’s an opportunity where you can move people, but the same thing that allows for that opportunity creates a risk that you will be carried along with their wickedness.

Aron: I’m curious if that resonates. It reminded me of what you were sharing about your moral calculus around organizing your synagogue: on the one hand, the importance of that work, and on the other hand, the fear or danger of some sort of corrosiveness of being engaged in those politics.

Nathan: In one sense, it does not resonate, because when I engage with liberal Zionists whom I hope to move toward my politics, I just never worry that I’m going to come out of a conversation having become a liberal Zionist. But in another sense it does resonate. In order to be in community and have these kinds of conversations, I do contort myself in particular strategic ways. I speak in a very different register about Israel/Palestine and Zionism with the staff at Jewish Currents, or with other people who I know share a certain baseline, than I do with people at my synagogue who don’t, or who I’m not sure about. I’m sometimes more pragmatic about how I deploy words like “genocide” or “apartheid.” I’ve definitely had many instances of choosing to censor myself. And to some degree, I don’t find that inherently problematic—that’s just part of doing political work. But I also worry about it: Does the habit of speaking in this way somehow change my politics, or my relation to the world, or my solidarities?

Aron: With some of those questions in mind, let’s turn to the last part of his essay.

Nathan reads.

Therefore, rebuke is only appropriate for those of extreme spiritual prowess, like the early prophets, whose inner freedom was total and whose moral differentiation from the collective was ensured. Whether or not the collective repented, they would never join the collective . . . But for one who has not achieved the vigor of the prophets and merely desires to do so, the proper advice . . . is to hand a bill of divorce to the community regarding all spiritual matters. Therefore, all those of clear mind must say, “I am communal only in material matters—in planting, harvesting, building railways . . . and such, all of those things that an individual can only create by joining in labor with others . . . If the collective has corrupted its path, all that is incumbent upon me is to struggle against being dragged along by it.”

Nathan: I am kind of repelled by the focus on one’s own moral purity. Because “the spiritual prowess of the early prophets” seems like a really high bar—an actually unreachable standard—it sounds like his broad prescription is to withdraw. That doesn’t sit well with me because it’s so focused on one’s own righteousness, rather than the well-being of others, or the political effect in the world, which I think is much more important than whether I’m corrupting myself. At the same time, I think that the idea of “a bill of divorce regarding spiritual matters” is very interesting, though I don’t know what he means practically.

Aron: I think in this context, when he says “spiritual,” he means “ethical.”

Nathan: In that sense, I guess I already feel spiritually divorced from my synagogue community. When it comes to Israel/Palestine, at least, it’s not where I turn for ethical guidance. And yet I do worry there’s something untenable in that for my own context, which is quite different from the one Tamares is talking about, because I go to synagogue to fill needs that are fundamentally spiritual rather than practical—nothing is about planting, harvesting, or building railways.

Aron: I also don’t find this so appealing politically. Tamares is saying, “If I can’t have a guarantee that rebuke will work, then I’m not going to do it.” Out of an inability to deal with or accept that fundamental unknowability about politics, he ends up with a deep fatalism, where the only thing he can do is withdraw. I also think the distinction he draws between material connection to a community and ethical implication doesn’t make much sense. I can’t say: “I materially live in capitalism, but ethically I have nothing to do with it.” Our material implications carry ethical consequences. But what speaks to me is the deep degree of despair. He’s writing after World War I, which, in some ways, feels really resonant with our moment. After the horrors of the war, Tamares believes that surely everyone will have learned the lesson that nationalism is bad, war is bad. But instead, the lesson people drew from World War I is that everybody should have a nation-state. And if everybody is going to continue this horrific thing, what hope is there? All he can do is withdraw. And he turns out to be right in a certain sense, that World War II follows on its heels, and we don’t seem to have learned much from the horrific evils of nationalism and militarism.

Nathan: When he says, “All that is incumbent upon me is to struggle against being dragged along by the collective”—I read that at first as giving up. But I think there’s a way of reading it instead as a real challenge and responsibility: It is incumbent on me to struggle against being dragged along. Ultimately, what feels like the biggest question here is: Do you have to put yourself on the line ethically in order to rebuke or sway or organize? One premise of some of the work I have found myself doing is that it is possible to move people around an issue on which I myself have no intention of moving. But Tamares proposes that that depends upon “an extreme spiritual prowess,” where no matter what people around you are doing, you’re going to do the right thing. I certainly don’t think of my steadfastness as reliant on my own wisdom or skill. I think it relies on having relationships with people and other political communities, with friends and loved ones and comrades whom I learn from, with whom I disagree, and who might rebuke me and whose rebuke I take seriously. I see that as the ground of being able to hold fast to my ethical commitments, which strengthens my ability to enter into spaces where there’s much more disagreement. That feels like a real possibility for me that wasn’t true for him, or that he didn’t see. Still, I do worry about having an alienated, instrumental relationship to my own spiritual community. That’s small potatoes in the context of the violence we’re talking about. But there is a possible loss, I think, in treating that space as a terrain of struggle.

Aron: So much of what you raise is really about the question of relationship. It’s not a particularly compelling rebuke to say, “I actually am totally independent of you guys. I have no ethical relationship to you, but you’re doing the wrong thing.” Strategically, it’s not going to work, both because the person being rebuked won’t actually feel any stakes, and also because it comes off as condescending and obnoxious. But I think the fundamental question Tamares doesn’t really deal with is whether I should act even if I don’t have a guarantee of the effectiveness of rebuke. This question gets picked up in the next source, which is by Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, a Jerusalemite rabbi and a major halachic authority who died in 2006. He has a 21-volume set of responsa called the Tzitz Eliezer, and he’s wrestling in this responsum with the question of rebuke.

Nathan reads.

One must consider the words of Maharam Schick,[6] who writes that regarding apostates who desecrate Shabbat in public or commit idolatry or violate commandments in order to offend the community, all of whom are considered as non-Jews, the commandment to rebuke does not apply, and we are only obligated to rebuke them by virtue of our collective responsibility (“areivut”) to the degree that we can protest and punish them appropriately. Therefore, with those who throw off the law—desecrate Shabbat in public, etc.—if our protests will not be effective and we have no ability to punish them, then we are absolved of responsibility to rebuke them, and we are no longer within the realm of collective responsibility . . . And all that is incumbent upon us is to be careful “to withdraw from the tents of those wicked people,” as the Torah states about the sinful band who rebelled against Moses,[7] as much as we can.

Aron: The obligation to rebuke someone outside of the system who is still Jewish is, for him, contingent upon the degree of coercive power the community has over them. If we can punish them in a way that would stop them from doing what they’re doing, we’re responsible. But if they are outside of our power such that there’s not actually anything we can do about them, then we do not have that obligation.

Nathan: In one sense, he seems more optimistic about rebuke. But he lands by saying, “If these clear things don’t apply, then you shouldn’t try.” There is something nicely pragmatic about it: Do you have the ability to hold people accountable? Then you have a responsibility. If you don’t have the ability to do that, then what are we doing here?

Aron: In some ways, it offers us a challenge on the Jewish left: Am I really responsible for Jews whose behavior I can’t change, for communities I have no connection to? The separatism he advocates for at the end strikes me as different from Tamares, because it’s actually taken from a clear sense of recognizing when you don’t have any kind of political path, as opposed to a preservation of purity.

Nathan: That’s helpful, and, if you take a step back from the question of punishment, it speaks to some of the ways I think about my calculation in terms of synagogue organizing.

Aron: Right. And I think here, “punishment” is a stand-in for: Do I have power?

Nathan: In my case, I think I do have at least some power, because I participate in the community, and so I’m taken seriously as someone who’s part of it.

Aron: Let’s move along. In the next part of this responsum, Waldenberg is going to turn to the question of our affective relationship to those we’re rebuking. He will first quote a statement by the Beit Yosef, Rabbi Joseph Caro, a 16th-century rabbi who lived in Spain and the Land of Israel, that says that you shouldn’t quarrel with people who mock religious Jews. Then he’ll cite a later critique of that statement by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan[8]—who we’ll refer to by the name of one of his works, the Biur Halachah—which complicates this injunction.

Nathan reads.

As regards the Beit Yosef’s statement that “one should not quarrel with people who mock religious Jews,” the Biur Halachah says, “this is only when one is performing a commandment privately, but if one is standing in a place with heretics rebelling against the Torah, who want to enact certain municipal statutes through which they will cause the collective to stray from God’s path, and one initiated one’s rebuke peacefully, and it was not heard, such a case is not what the Beit Yosef was referring to at all. And in such a case, it is a commandment to hate them and quarrel with them and undermine their efforts as much as possible.”

Nathan: So in a literal sense, he’s saying: “There is this idea to not fight with people who are mocking observant Jews. But if this is happening in public, and it’s going to have a wider effect, then you should escalate. In fact, you should hate them, and you should fight as hard as you can against them.” That latter posture feels distinct from rebuke to me, because it’s an appeal to undermine their efforts. It seems like these are not people we’re trying to get on the right path. But I think it’s really interesting that he thinks you should also hate them, because intuitively that seems outside the realm of the practical. The rest of the concern seems so pragmatic, which makes me wonder whether he understands the hatred as also being pragmatic.

Aron: It might be helpful to read further in the Tzitz Eliezer. He’s again quoting the Biur Halachah, and pointing out that, in other places, its author, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, actually seems to note the dangers of this kind of affective response. And so he’s asking: How could the same person have said these two things?

Nathan reads.

But regarding the Biur Halachah’s statement that “it is a commandment to hate them,” one must point out that in his other book, Ahavat Chesed, he himself quoted the words of Rabbi Yehonatan of Lubcz[9]: “ . . . One must work toward the good of one’s fellow and seek peace and be careful to avoid violating the commandment not to hate them. According to the Maharam of Lublin, it is even forbidden to hate the fully wicked until one has rebuked them. But as the Talmud states, ‘there is no one in our generation who can rebuke properly such that it would be accepted.’” But perhaps the Biur Halachah was distinguishing between one who is individually wicked as opposed to one who causes others to join their wickedness, and that it is a commandment to hate the latter, even today.

Nathan: So the back-and-forth is that the same person has said, in one context, you should hate these people, but elsewhere, has quoted the Talmud, which says that you shouldn’t hate the wicked until you’ve sufficiently rebuked them. But there is an uncertainty about whether you can ever sufficiently rebuke them, which means you shouldn’t hate them. And so how do we square “it’s good to hate” and “you shouldn’t hate”? The resolution proposes that you should not hate people who are just themselves wicked, but you should hate people who are trying to get other people on board. There can be a kind of jouissance in hating random individuals with bad politics, but there’s no political use to that, except me feeling superior. But for people who are having a broader effect in the world, maybe there is a possible political utility: It could support my organizing against them, if that work involves getting others to view them unfavorably—to join me in hatred—as a way of curbing their influence.

Aron: With that in mind, let’s move toward the end of this long responsum. The text quotes a rabbinic principle called “moridin”—causing someone to descend or putting someone down—which is the idea that for certain kinds of sinners, you can literally, but in this case also figuratively, lower them into a pit, causing conditions that lead to their physical harm. Even if you yourself are not permitted to cause them physical harm, you can set up scenarios that would harm them.

Nathan reads.

But we are still left with a great issue: how to measure and express this hate in terms of quantity and quality. See the Tosafot,[10] for instance, who said that there is a limit to how much one is permitted to hate, beyond which it becomes total hatred, against which one must restrain oneself. Who is such a sage that they know how to measure and limit such hatred? Until what point is it permissible? And at what point does it become total hatred, which is forbidden, such that we would need to restrain ourselves?

One should also consider the words of the Netziv,[11] who castigates the baseless hatred that leads to unlawful bloodshed in which each judges their fellow to be among those whom it is permitted to cause to die, and they thereby increase bloodshed, all while mistakenly thinking they are doing something permitted for the sake of a commandment, and the entire nation is destroyed, God forbid. It is worth quoting the words of the Hazon Ish,[12] and these are his measured words: “It would seem that the law permitting one to create conditions causing heretics to die only applies at a time when God’s providence is revealed, when there were miracles and God’s voice was heard. But in a time of hiddenness, when the nation’s faith has been severed, then causing others to die does not defend the breach, or rather widens it, and it is incumbent upon us to return them to the faith by cords of love and to place them in the light as much as we can.” And his words are salves for the eyes and show us a path that offers understanding and contemplation for these great statutes.

Nathan: This is helpful as a framework for thinking about the risks of becoming attached to a certain feeling and to letting it get out of our hands in a way that is counterproductive to our goals. It speaks to a tension between negative affect and the political discipline that’s necessary for strategic work. It’s important to be careful with feelings, or to be aware of the degree to which you can’t modulate them and they can have unintended consequences.

Aron: I’ll speak for myself that even if I think I shouldn’t indulge in that hatred of my enemies, there’s such deep anger and frustration. With someone like Jonathan Greenblatt, or whoever it may be, I kind of like seeing how bad he is. There is something about his badness that reminds me of my own goodness, which I think can also become politically complicated. Something Sigmund Freud and the German political theorist Carl Schmitt both get at is the unconscious, or semi-conscious, pleasure in this hatred, which offers me a source of identity in recognizing this other person’s badness and helps me distinguish myself from it.

If I have a psychic investment in someone being bad and I hate them and that makes me feel good, I may be tempted to act politically in certain ways that actually reaffirm both of our subject positions, rather than challenging them. Because if they were to change their politics, there’s a possibility that it would be really disruptive to my identity. Who am I now if I don’t have this person I’m opposed to? And I’m then foreclosing the possibility of political transformation.

Nathan: I do think there’s a different reading of the text in terms of our conversation, in which it’s a caution against too much intra-communal strife. I can imagine someone cautioning me against pushing too hard within my synagogue community, who might say: “You want to push, but don’t push so hard that the whole container explodes.” To which I’d respond: Maybe sometimes the “nation” does need to be destroyed—not in terms of death, of course, but in terms of the rupture of the institution. But then again, if it does, you’ve lost one basis of doing the kind of work you were trying to do, which gets at the question of whether anti-Zionists need to completely divest and retreat to our own communities, or whether we need to work within more politically pluralistic spaces. I think many of us end up doing some of each, but how do you strike the right balance? Where do you actually need to shatter and rupture and withdraw, and where do you need to keep things in place such that you still have vehicles of reaching new people and shifting existing institutions, and you’re not abandoning important avenues for political change?

Aron: Those are key questions, but I don’t read the Tzitz Eliezer’s responsum as cautioning against rebuking excessively because of the risk of rupture. I think it’s really about the proper orientation toward those we’re rebuking. The Hazon Ish’s idea of “cords of love” seems crucial. The way I would translate that for our context is: Am I relating to those I’m rebuking in a way that allows them to be transformed? That’s not only a matter of affect, of course—it’s also about political vision. Am I offering those I’m rebuking some sort of political horizon that includes them?

Nathan: That brings me back to the ways I contort myself to be heard in my synagogue work. I’ve often tried to come into a room and announce my anti-Zionism in the least scary way possible, to over-emphasize that I imagine a future in which Jews are safe in Israel/Palestine. I do think that emphasis is strategic and makes me more likely to reach people than if I were just berating them, or not addressing their fears. At the same time, I find it incredibly frustrating, even maddening, to continually center Jews’ anxieties about the future while in the present Israel continues to kill and dominate Palestinians daily. But ultimately, my feelings about it aren’t nearly as important as whether it might, even in some minuscule way, contribute to Palestinian liberation. Maybe what I need to ask myself is: When is there political content to my frustration—because it’s a result of things getting stuck and reflects some strategic failure—and when is it just a reflection of my own affective experience?

Aron: And I wouldn’t advocate for a no-holds-barred instrumentality. But I think the questions about where the political and ethical diverge, where they come together, and where they are in tension are some of the most central questions to reckon with for organizing within our communities today.

Footnotes

1

Vayikra 19:17

2

Tanna DeBei Eliyahu 18

3

Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 65b

4

Babylonian Talmud, Arakhin 16b-17b

5

Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 54b-55a

6

Rabbi Moshe Schick, 1807–1879, a Hungarian rabbi and halachic authority

7

Bamidbar 16:26

8

An influential Lithuanian rabbi, halachic authority, and ethicist; 1838–1933

9

A 19th-century rabbi from Belarus also known as Rabbi Yehonatan of Volynia; Rabbi Kagan printed Rabbi Yehonatan’s moral treatise, Marganita Tava (Precious Jewel), at the end of his own ethical work, Ahavat Chesed (The Love of Lovingkindness).

10

A collection of medieval commentators on the Talmud

11

An acronym referring to Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (1816–1893), a Lithuanian rabbi and commentator and head of the famed Volozhin Yeshiva

12

Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (1878–1924), a Haredi leader and scholar

Aron Wander is a rabbi, organizer, and writer. His writing can be found at his blog, Hitnodedut.

Nathan Goldman is a senior editor at Jewish Currents.

nathangoldman

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/how-should-we-engage-in-communal-rebuke at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

CONVERSATION | 22 DEC 2025, 7:35 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 22 DEC 2025, 7:35 PM UTC

Trump’s New Travel Ban Targets Palestinians

Immigration law expert Samah Sisay says the new restrictions are about politics, not security.

Alex Kane

Mykhailo Polenok/ Alamy

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that bans people from Syria, South Sudan, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Palestinians with Palestinian Authority-issued passports, from entering the United States. The order also implemented partial restrictions on the entry of people from 15 other countries, most of them African nations. The administration has framed the new ban as part of its response to the killings of two National Guard troops by an Afghan man who came to the US after fighting in a CIA-backed “death squad” unit, but it is the second time this term that Trump has issued restrictions on who can come to the US. In June, Trump banned travelers from 19 other Middle Eastern and African countries. Immigrant rights groups have criticized the policies as rooted in racism and xenophobia. They also say the initiative will lead to family separation in situations where people outside of the US wish to travel here to reunite with their families.

While Trump issued similar bans during his first administration, the latest travel ban is the first to target Palestinians. Trump justified the ban on Palestinians by pointing to the presence of armed Palestinian groups that “operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.” He also said that recent “war in these areas” has compromised the ability of the Palestinian Authority to vet and screen applicants for travel. The recent ban builds on a prior decision by the State Department issued in August that paused approvals of visitor visas for people from Gaza, some of which were issued to Gazans injured by Israeli bombardment seeking medical care in the US.

To learn more about this iteration of Trump’s travel ban, the implications for Palestinians, and what the new restrictions say about Trump’s broader immigration agenda, Jewish Currents spoke to Samah Sisay, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which filed multiple challenges to travel bans Trump issued during his first term.

Alex Kane: Why do you think Palestinians were included in this travel ban, and what is its practical impact?

Samah Sisay: What we’re seeing now is the expansion of the June travel ban. This ban included 19 countries, and stated that there would be a review done, based on security and other admission issues, to see if other nationals of specific countries would be added. This is the administration testing their Muslim ban and seeing how much they can expand it. The justification for including a lot of the countries is that there are many people overstaying their visas. But the numbers of people who are Palestinian or hold Palestinian Authority passports who are coming to the US is not comparable to a lot of other countries, and yet they are still being targeted.

Before the ban, I’ve worked with a few clients who applied for their family members to try and get them out of Gaza or other parts of Palestine. The application process takes a long time. There are delays. They’re often just denied. So it’s always been really difficult for people to enter through what the administration calls “legal means.” In reality, most people were [already] not receiving visas to come to the United States from Palestine. In the past some Palestinians have gotten temporary status to enter for a conference or a specific educational purpose, but now all of that has been halted.

The addition of individuals who hold passports from the Palestinian Authority highlights the political nature of the ban. It highlights that this administration is utilizing its broad powers around immigration and entry to make political statements. Because immigration is a space where the executive is afforded so much discretion and power, the administration figured out that this is a space that they can utilize to punish Palestinians and exclude them from the fabric of the US system. The exclusion of Palestinians started after the mass student movement in support of Palestine on college campuses. We saw the administration trying to reject student visas for students engaged in Palestinian activism. The majority of the students impacted were Palestinian themselves, such as Mahmoud Khalil, who was targeted for detention.

AK: Does this ban impact Palestinians in the US who are not citizens?

SS: It depends. The most direct impact is on individuals who are outside of the US trying to come in. But technically, if you’re a Palestinian student on a temporary visa, you oftentimes have to leave the country to renew or to extend your stay. Obviously, if there’s currently a ban, leaving means you can’t come back. It puts people in a situation where they have to find other means of stabilizing their status, or they will have to do what the administration calls “self deport”—leaving with the understanding that you will probably not be able to return.

AK: Does this mean a bar on injured Palestinians traveling to the US for medical treatment?

SS: Yes, unfortunately. There is something called “humanitarian parole,” which is a completely different process that, for instance, Afghans and other people utilize in emergency situations, allowing temporary entry for people with urgent humanitarian needs. The executive has discretion here, so it’s possible someone could be paroled, but I doubt that would happen.

AK: How do you understand the ban in the context of the administration’s broader war on immigrants?

SS: The story that’s often told to Americans is that we need to worry about people who are entering the US through “illegal means,” without visas. Yet this administration is actually making it difficult for anyone to come here even with visas. At the end of the day, it just highlights that this has never been about process. It’s always been about exclusion and racism. The office of the executive—which, unfortunately, courts have strengthened a lot in recent years—has the power to exclude certain people based on what they’re claiming are security measures. But all of that is rooted in racism and our relationships with certain countries.

AK: Is the Trump administration also making it difficult for Palestinians to claim asylum?

SS: Because of the closure of these systems that allow people to travel through regular channels, we’re seeing a lot more Palestinians who are fleeing various difficult circumstances entering the US through the Mexico–US border and claiming asylum. The Trump administration is essentially trying to get rid of asylum for everyone, even though asylum is a process that is enshrined in both international law and US law. There is a clear bias against Palestinians within the asylum process, including prolonged detention of Palestinians who have been granted release by immigration courts.

Currently, CCR is representing Mohammed Abushanab, a 27-year-old Palestinian man from the West Bank who fled after facing detention and abuse by Israeli soldiers. He entered the US through California and was immediately detained by immigration officials. He was denied asylum, but only because of the way he entered. Asylum law is very stringent: If you do not enter at a “port of entry” designated as a place where people can claim asylum, you can no longer qualify for asylum status under US law, and that’s what happened with Mohammed. But we have these other protections called “withholding of removal” and protection under the Convention Against Torture, and he was granted both of those protections by an immigration judge. He has been in detention in Texas over almost 18 months, and the administration has refused to release him despite him being granted these forms of relief. They’re saying that they have the right to deport him to a third country—a country that is not Palestine—because the relief he was granted is just against deportation to Palestine. We brought a habeas corpus case, saying that he needs to be released, and that they’re just keeping him detained because he is Palestinian. We’re seeing more and more that ICE is just keeping people in detention who were granted a protection from removal instead of releasing them.

AK: What do you think the stated justification for the travel ban—that there are armed Palestinian groups that operate actively in the West Bank and Gaza—tells us about how the war on terrorism has become linked with the war on immigration?

SS: The creation of agencies like ICE to do this type of enforcement all happened post-9/11. The modern immigration system that we have in the US, where we’re seeing mass detention and these immigration enforcement catchers running around everywhere, is tied to post-9/11 fears and extreme Islamophobia. If you look at the countries that are on this list, many are countries that are majority-Muslim. The few that are not are countries that the US has fraught relationships with.

AK: Is there any hope that a lawsuit could reverse the travel ban?

SS: While the President and the executive branch do have broad discretion over immigration and entry, they’re not allowed to engage in arbitrary decisions or racial animus. Unfortunately, we have a Supreme Court that upheld the first Muslim ban. Still, there are many people who are working to craft arguments to show how this current attempt to exclude people based on race and national origin is truly arbitrary, based in racism and in Islamophobia, etc. The fight continues. I obviously can’t say we will win, but we need to keep pushing and not allow this to become something that’s just accepted.

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

alexbkane

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/trumps-new-travel-ban-targets-palestinians at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

MEMOIR | 22 DEC 2025, 4:13 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 22 DEC 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

Crying Is Not Surrender

In wartime, expressions of sorrow are pushed away. But our grief is sacred. It demands to be felt.

Abdullah Hany Daher

People mourn during a funeral at Al-Shifa Hospital for victims of Israeli attacks on Gaza City, September 3rd, 2025.

Xinhua/Alamy

I’d gone to Al-Shifa Hospital to see my friend Imad, who had been shot in the leg while trying to collect humanitarian aid. It was not his wound, however, but a quieter image that stayed with me: In a chaotic hallway, I noticed a woman sitting on the floor, cradling her daughter in her arms. The girl, no more than 10, was wailing over her father’s body. Her mother did not speak. Her face was frozen. She did not cry. I kept wondering if she was strong, or if something inside her had perished.

War revises emotion. Sorrow is stifled. Sadness is stunted.

In Gaza, children are informed that their parents are martyrs, not victims. Women are applauded for remaining quiet during funerals, for sitting silently amid the veiled bodies of their children. Fathers stand at burial sites, shaking hands and accepting condolences. Their eyes are vacant, fixed on the spaces where the no-longer-living used to be.

People say, “I’m fine.” They smile in photographs. When memory overcomes them, they change the subject.

Slogans of tenacity and steadfastness—“Don’t cry. They want to see you broken.”—are repeated like commands, overtaking the wails of those mourning their loved ones. Endurance is a public duty. Tears risk admitting collapse—and collapse might be contagious. It might undermine the struggle. It’s a peculiar battle: surviving war on the outside while concealing everything within.

How many parents have buried their children without crying in public? How many people keep their screams inside, afraid of being perceived as weak or ungrateful or a distraction from the cause? People become monuments to suffering—unmoving, unspoken, unfinished.

Children learn from their surroundings. If a child does not see anyone cry, they may come to believe that articulations of sorrow are forbidden, that strength entails suppression, that the full expression of love must be buried with the deceased. One unacknowledged anguish fuels another. Grief burrows under the earth. It piles up softly.

In the moments of quiet disrupting the onslaught, grief returns in new forms. Sleeplessness that does not belong to the present night. Each tranquil moment, tormented by the past. The whole body speaks what the mouth cannot. Shaking hands. Sudden panic. Breathlessness.

You stand in front of loss and feel nothing—then, guilt for feeling nothing. Later this becomes a wound.

One day, I traveled to my grandfather’s house in Beit Lahia. When the call for noon prayer came, I walked to the mosque that his neighbors had built. Afterwards, I noticed a group of people lingering, preparing to pray again, this time over a small body. I joined them. The child, I learned, had been pierced by a stray bullet while playing outside.

His mother fell beside the body, crying quietly and shaking. She gripped the shroud as if attempting to keep him warm. His father stood by the door, receiving condolences and saying, “Alhamdulillah for everything” over and over, as if the phrase could keep the world together.

I stood there perplexed. Who was truly holding on, and who was simply not allowed to crumble?

But why is hopelessness unwelcome? Why must strength be audible and unshakeable? Why isn’t quiet collapse considered sacred?

Sometimes I feel guilty for wanting to cry. As if my grief needed to be evaluated, justified, and compared. Other people have lost more, I think. Do I even have the right to feel such sadness? Soon, my emotions feel like trespassing on the devastation of others.

But pain does not compete. It does not ask for permission. It simply demands to be felt.

This is the truth: War breaks things—bodies, homes, hearts. Sometimes, all that’s left to do is weep.

Crying is not surrender. It is a testimony. It means that, even in a place where death comes daily, the heart is still alive.

Abdullah Hany Daher is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. He documents the human stories of war, aiming to preserve voices that the rubble cannot silence.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/crying-is-not-surrender at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 19 DEC 2025, 6:55 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 7 JAN 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

The Genocides The New York Times Forgot

The paper’s Gaza coverage continues its pattern of downplaying US-backed atrocities in Bangladesh, East Timor, and Guatemala.

Zachary Jablow

Police barricade The New York Times building during a protest calling for a Gaza ceasefire, New York, February 4th, 2024.

Cristina Matuozzi/Sipa via AP

In the winter of 1981, six years into Indonesia’s occupation of the island nation East Timor, The New York Times Magazine published a report about the island that may as well have been written about Gaza any time since October 7th, 2023. Referring to the relatively small groups in the United States protesting their government’s role in the occupation, correspondent Henry Kamm wrote, “There is substance to these protests, even if, at their most extreme, they degenerate into hyperbole—accusations of ‘genocide’ rather than mass deaths from cruel warfare and the starvation that accompanied it on this historically food-short island, of American complicity rather than acquiescence.”

By the end of the occupation in 1999, about a quarter of the population of East Timor had died. A generation of scholars has since concluded that Indonesia’s systematic campaign of murder, starvation, and displacement indeed amounted to genocide. And the US was undeniably complicit, providing weapons and diplomatic support to the Suharto regime while publicly denying Indonesia’s atrocities. (In the Times article, Kamm acknowledged that the US had “furnished most of the weapons that Indonesia used for its invasion” but assured the reader that “the United States intended that these weapons be used only for Indonesia’s self-defense.”)

Likewise, this September the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded that, using more than $20 billion in US military aid, Israel committed genocide in its Gaza war, now nominally ended under a tenuous US-brokered “peace” deal. A small chorus of US politicians have since adopted the label, albeit reluctantly. But as with its coverage of Timor, the New York Times has equivocated on the cause of famine in Gaza and frequently downplayed the appropriateness of the genocide designation. In April 2024, The Intercept reported that an internal Times memo had cautioned staff to “set a high bar” for allowing sources to use the term genocide “as an accusation” in its Gaza coverage, even in quotations—even as the paper encouraged the routine use of the term “terrorism,” without quotes, to describe the October 7th attacks on Israel.

The Times’ obfuscation of these two US-backed genocides is part of a broader pattern. In newly published research, my co-author Tianhong Yin and I delved into the paper’s archive to look at how it covered post-World War II atrocities that are now understood by experts as genocides. We compared the Times’ treatment of genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia—cases in which the US was either not directly involved, or, as in Bosnia, ostensibly engaged in “genocide prevention”—to genocides that, like Gaza, featured active American assistance to the aggressors. Specifically, we looked at the number of Times articles that referenced each country from the start of the genocide period up to 2020, as well as the number that included contested language like “genocide,” “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “atrocity.”

Our results were clear: The historical events that the New York Times has most clearly remembered as genocides, as crimes that demand outrage and accountability, are those where American complicity was not part of the story. But in cases where the US facilitated mass violence, the Times is much more apt to omit the genocide label or avoid mentioning the situation entirely. Such is the case with East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The US oversaw the transfer of weaponry to its ally West Pakistan, which in 1971 conducted a campaign of mass murder and rape against the largely Bengali inhabitants of East Pakistan. So too in Guatemala, where throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the US installed, armed, and trained a string of military dictatorships that prosecuted a brutal, decades-long counterinsurgency, including the mass rape and murder of the indigenous Maya in what is now known as a “silent holocaust.” Each of these wars claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, but in the pages of the Times they have quickly receded into obscurity.

Ultimately, these omissions are part of an American “culture of impunity,” one that cannot be laid at the feet of any single media organization. But as the “paper of record” self-consciously publishing what is often referred to as the “first draft of history,” the Times nevertheless holds a particularly powerful position in representing—as well as influencing—the liberal mainstream. As such, it can be argued that the Times’ silences have helped sustain what genocide studies scholar Jeff Bachman calls the US’s “near-continuous stream of violence and atrocities” well into the present. After all, an American public steeped in the responsibility it bears for the atrocities of Timor, Bangladesh, and Guatemala, among others, would have been more likely to recognize how history was repeating itself in Gaza. By failing to foster such an awareness, the Times has contributed to a collective amnesia that has stymied accountability, most recently for US participation in Israel’s genocide.

Bangladesh was the most widely reported of the genocides we studied in which the US can be said to bear some direct responsibility. At first, in 1971, war in what was then called East Pakistan was considered worthy of some attention by the Times. This corresponded with a time when there was controversy in the State Department regarding American support for West Pakistan, and when some diplomats were recognizing the genocidal potential of US complicity. But after that internal dissent failed to change US policy, one would have to squint to find any reference to the fact that a genocide was committed in the world’s eighth most populous country, let alone that the US provided much of the weaponry for it. From the December 1971 conclusion of the war to 2020—a span of about 48 years, or well over 17,000 daily editions of the New York Times—just 176 articles included the term “genocide” when mentioning Bangladesh. For comparison, by 2020 Cambodia—which itself was the least mentioned of the three genocides we studied that were not US-backed—had been mentioned along with “genocide” in 808 articles in the 41 years since the ouster of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

East Timor is another illustrative case, especially because it demonstrates how US grand strategy shapes the way mass violence is understood by the country’s ostensibly independent domestic media. At the start of the Indonesian occupation in 1975, the US had an interest in maintaining close ties with Indonesia and keeping it outside of the USSR’s sphere of influence. But this posture shifted after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the accompanying change in the geopolitical landscape. By 1999, the US had distanced itself from Suharto’s Indonesia and held Timorese independence as a foreign policy goal. Not coincidentally, it was around this time, long after the worst phase of the genocide had ended, that the Times finally deemed Timor a minor but newsworthy story, reporting on the Timorese independence referendum and the subsequent Indonesian repression. The change was noticeable: From 1975 to 1991, the term “genocide” had accompanied mentions of Timor in only 1.5% of Times articles. Then, from the end of the Cold War in 1991 to Timorese independence in 1999, when Timorese victimhood became less of an impediment to US foreign policy, far more reporting was published on the conflict and more than 5% of articles included the term “genocide.” Overall, Timor remained a marginal story and has all but vanished from the news over the decades, but the paper’s sudden openness to covering it after the reversal in US policy is nevertheless revealing.

The Guatemalan genocide has been similarly marginalized. Despite the country’s proximity to the US and extensive American interference in its politics, decades of mass violence amounted to no more than a minor Times story. The paper published just over one mention of Guatemala per day during the 1981–1983 period known as the “silent holocaust.” Compare this with the more than three articles per day published about Rwanda during that country’s genocide, in which the US had no active role. Fewer than 2% of articles mentioning Guatemala from 1981 to 2020 include the term “genocide.” This stands in contrast to inclusion of “genocide” in articles mentioning Rwanda (32%), Bosnia (8%), and Cambodia (6%).

The US role in these genocides is generally shrouded in obscurity even when they are discussed in the Times today. An August 2025 New York Times Magazine piece that offered one of the all-too-rare accounts of the Guatemalan genocide serves as a case in point. In this moving photographic portrait of Mayan survivors of sexual violence who have recently taken their assailants to trial, only one sentence provided the Times’ American readers any sense of their government’s responsibility for this horror. It stated that the crimes took place when “then-dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, ordered his US-supported military to eradicate guerilla opposition” The line is perfectly accurate, but it is also a characteristically vague understatement. The US “supported” the Guatemalan dictatorship the same way Germany “supported” Vichy France: In 1954, the CIA, in part at the behest of the United Fruit Company, overthrew Guatemala’s elected government and set up a military dictatorship, trained and reorganized its army, and set it loose on the civilian population to protect American business interests and keep the land in the hands of friendly oligarchs.

This is not to say that American culpability has been entirely written out of the Times. When a Guatemalan tribunal found Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013, the issue of US responsibility was treated as a legitimate controversy in the paper. The opinion section featured a debate (“What Guilt Does the US Bear in Guatemala?”), and a news article on Montt’s trial centered around the glaring omission of US culpability from the proceedings. Likewise, a search through the paper’s archives will unearth the occasional op-ed calling for accountability for atrocities in Timor. Still, these US-sponsored genocides remain on the margins of popular discourse, in a remote corner of American collective memory as recorded by the Times.

Meanwhile, one does not need to diligently comb through the Times’ archives to find coverage of those cases of genocide where the US is not implicated. Cambodia and Rwanda, for instance, are often mentioned in those terms. When US officials sought to represent their mid-1990s military intervention against Serbia as a humanitarian mission to protect Bosnian Muslims, the Times frequently included language like “genocide,” “atrocity,” and “slaughter” in its coverage of Serb aggression. And unlike Timor, Bangladesh, and Guatemala, these cases have been given sustained attention over time, their legacies inscribed into the institutional memory of the paper. Hundreds of articles referenced the occurrence of genocide in the years after the conclusion of mass violence in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia.

The result of such lopsided coverage is that American complicity in some of the worst atrocities since the Holocaust has, in effect, been written off as an unfortunate byproduct of well-intentioned Cold War campaigns. Such narratives reinforce a dominant interpretation of American foreign policy as benevolent and motivated by humanitarian principles, with mass violence and war crimes considered the exceptions rather than the rule. This has left the American public ill-equipped to understand the logic of its government’s contemporary brutalities, most notably US participation in the destruction of Gaza. It has also hampered our ability to understand the proper context for the naked—but far from novel—lawlessness of the Trump administration’s military policy. When, for example, Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger considered the upheaval at Trump’s Pentagon, he wrote that “what has made the American military notable in the past 75 years is abiding by international law, its refusal to kill civilians.” “This didn’t always work perfectly,” he added for good measure, “but at least it was a core belief.” (The Times editorial board has also continued to lament the dissolution of the old foreign policy consensus that wrought the aforementioned carnage.)

This mythology appears to have informed the Times’ credulous reporting on Gaza. It is not that the Times has altogether ignored the bloodshed in Gaza; rather, the paper has framed it in a way that tends to suggest Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign is not fundamentally criminal. Israeli actions are usually depicted as possibly heavy-handed or controversial but essentially legitimate operations to “root out” Hamas. When Israel bombs a Gazan refugee camp, the Times duly provides the Israeli justification and informs its audience that “Israel is trying to eliminate Hamas, which led the attack [of October 7th].” Human rights organizations and independent news outlets have long since concluded that Israel systematically and intentionally targets civilians and civilian infrastructure “as a goal in itself.” But this has done little to change the ubiquitous Times story that Israel has carried out a (possibly reckless) “search-and-destroy” mission against Hamas.

In keeping with the paper’s prior coverage, this telling ultimately serves to sanitize not only Israel but, crucially, the US, which is cast in the role of bystander and mediator rather than participant and accomplice. American officials repeatedly appear in Times stories as apparently motivated by humanitarian concern for the Palestinians but (at least during the Biden years) unable to restrain their Israeli counterparts and blundering in their efforts to aid Palestinians. As Israel starved the population of Gaza with indispensable US backing, Nicholas Kristof, among the Times’ most liberal regular columnists, emphasized in an illustrative piece that Biden was “upset over the humanitarian toll” in Gaza but that he “blew it” by, in this case, defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in a “misguided effort to impose accountability.” All this belies the basic fact that in Gaza, as in Timor, Bangladesh, and Guatemala, the US was no bumbling humanitarian but a hegemon ready to pursue its interests through brutality, and willing to support its clients’ and allies’ mass killings until doing so becomes impolitic. To avoid yet another US-backed genocide will require a reckoning with this reality—from both the government that underwrote the wars and the media that forgot them.

Zachary Jablow is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Illinois and a visiting lecturer at Bryn Mawr College.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-genocides-the-new-york-times-forgot at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 17 DEC 2025, 5:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 23 DEC 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

Zohran Mamdani Vs. the Real Estate State

Can the mayor-elect overcome the snares being set for his affordable housing agenda?

Samuel Stein

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference announcing transition committees to advance his affordability agenda in New York City, November 24th, 2025.

Lev Radin/Sipa USA

As Zohran Mamdani prepares to take office on January 1st, the enemies of New York’s mayor-elect are already maneuvering to thwart his historically ambitious agenda. Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams is leading the charge, taking last-minute action aimed at “Mamdani-proofing” city government and preventing or forestalling the sweeping housing reforms that helped propel the young socialist to victory.

In his final weeks in office, Adams and his first deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, are on a mission to stack the city’s Rent Guidelines Board with appointees who will refuse to freeze rents for millions of tenants in rent-controlled apartments—one of Mamdani’s most popular campaign pledges. While this is a perfectly legal function of mayoral power, Adams waited until after Mamdani’s victory to replace seven members whose terms had long expired, laying bare his motivations. If this comes to pass, the promised rent freeze will be delayed for at least one year, leaving millions of tenants—not to mention Mamdani voters—feeling betrayed.

Adams isn’t stopping there. Mamdani vowed to deliver new, affordable housing early in his term by completing a long-planned development for low-income seniors on a government-owned lot that is currently used as a sculpture garden in gentrified downtown Manhattan and is beloved by a very vocal group of preservationists and celebrities. But on November 3rd, the day before Mamdani’s runaway victory, Adams’s appointees in the Department of Citywide Administrative Services converted the site to state parkland. Mamdani and the project’s developers may sue, or the state legislature may undo the city’s action, but either course would take time and political capital that are both in short supply. For now, the project is dead. If Mamdani manages to resurrect it, he will also revive the controversy surrounding it and incur the ire of its opponents.

If Adams succeeds in thwarting two major planks of Mamdani’s housing platform, it could derail the new mayor’s considerable momentum as he begins to govern. Expectations for his mayoralty are high by design. Mamdani ran a campaign that promised far deeper reforms than New York City mayors have delivered—or even deigned to support—in generations. Although most of these reforms promote “affordability” in one way or another, including universal childcare and fast and free buses, housing affordability galvanized his campaign and mobilized thousands of campaign volunteers. His call for a four-year rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants was something no serious candidate had ever promised, let alone attempted; Mamdani also pledged that under his leadership, the city would set a course to build 200,000 affordable homes.

Mamdani’s victory demonstrated that housing can be a winning campaign issue—and not just in New York. The United States has constructed a housing system that is as complex as it is limited, and as expensive as it is stingy—truly the worst of all worlds. While it imposes all sorts of means testing and regulatory hurdles on both tenants and builders, the system delivers remarkably little housing that’s actually affordable.

This is no accident. It is, instead, the logical result of a system that’s primarily designed to raise property values, with affordability only a secondary or tertiary goal. As the sociologist Melinda Cooper argues in her latest book, Counterrevolution, the idea is to produce wealth without raising wages, creating a basis for prosperity without challenging American businesses’ bottom lines. Declining property values and home prices are understood as a sign of impending doom, rather than a cause for celebration, and so the system aims to keep prices on an upward slope.

This has conditioned elected officials to lower their housing horizons, and it has conditioned residents to expect disappointment. The easiest housing reforms for American politicians to achieve tend to be those that benefit landlords and developers alongside tenants and homebuyers, such as rezonings (which allow developers to build more housing) and vouchers (which pay landlords the portion of the rent their tenant cannot afford). Programs to build social housing and expand rent regulation get sidelined because they attack the private real estate system directly and challenge the logic of ever-rising rents.

Soon, however, New York will have a mayoral administration that aims to turn that logic on its head, continuing the important work of zoning reform and rental assistance while prioritizing rent control and social housing. Doing so will not be easy, and Adams is hardly the only powerful foe working to block reform. Indeed, Mamdani’s entry into the halls of power calls to mind the words of Spanish political scientist Juan Carlos Monedero, whose New Left Review essay “Snipers in the Kitchen”—published one year after Pedro Sanchez and a socialist coalition government took power in Spain—speaks directly to New York’s current moment. “Even when popular parties with redistributive agendas have won electoral majorities and gained, in principle, access to the governmental levers of power . . . they do not enter into full possession of the state, as if it were a new home,” he writes. “The rooms may be booby-trapped, the stairs barricaded; there may be snipers in the kitchen—shooters who are unseen because they are taken for granted, and all the more effective because unseen.” The obstructionists have crucial advantages, Monedero writes: “money, property, superior education, knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of rule, norms of organization, close connections with higher officialdom, and so forth.” And the obstacles they sow take many forms: “scandals whipped up out of trifles, judicial harassment, dirty tricks or political maneuvers—and this even before market pressures are taken into account.” He concludes, “If we are not to become trapped in a permanent state of melancholy, we need a careful analysis of the state’s enormous capacity for reaction in defense of capital’s interests.”

Already, the first set of traps is being laid by Adams in broad daylight. How else is New York’s City Hall booby-trapped to prevent progress on housing? What forces barricade the staircase, and what snipers lie in wait for a mayor who dares challenge the real estate state?

In order to navigate the hostile territory of city government, Mamdani will first have to construct an administration of his own. As Mamdani’s transition team works to fill various posts, they are likely facing a common contradiction: Most people with the experience to understand exactly how the housing system works today either outright oppose, or simply cannot fathom, radical changes to it, and most people who support a radical rehauling are too inexperienced to craft a practical path forward. The Mamdani team has already identified several appointees who straddle both camps, but they are by nature few and far between. Instead, Mamdani’s ideological apparatus will have to either inculcate seasoned insiders to new ways of thinking or quickly train a like-minded but untested cohort. Both are easier said than done, which may result in high-level housing appointees who refuse to go much farther than previous mayors have, or in radical housing leaders who are easily stymied by recalcitrant veterans of previous administrations.

A socialist housing program in a capitalist political economy quickly runs up against one of the most stubborn structural fortifications of all: the tax base.

Even with all the right people in place, a socialist housing program in a capitalist political economy quickly runs up against one of the most stubborn structural fortifications of all: the tax base. In New York, as in most American cities, by far the largest contributor to the city’s operating budget is the property tax, and the bulk of property tax revenue comes from residential real estate. A strong socialist housing program—one that includes converting for-profit housing into public, tenant, and community-controlled social housing; constructing new models of social housing from the ground up; regulating rents; empowering tenants; and enforcing codes—tends to bring down housing’s exchange value, since it limits the amount of profit landlords can extract from housing. When buildings are worth less on the market, their owners owe less in taxes. Compounding the problem, socialist administrations that decommodify a meaningful amount of a city’s housing stock will produce a growing class of housing that is exempt from taxes but, in most cases, requires ongoing subsidies to remain affordable, leading to lower revenues and higher expenses. In both scenarios, there will be less money coming in to pay for the basics of city governance: schools, hospitals, transportation, and more. The more successful the socialist housing program is, the deeper the tax problem becomes.

To offset the property tax trap, the administration can seek to raise wealth and income taxes. Though popular, this would be a steep challenge—not only because it arouses political opposition from those with the most money to spend on opposition campaigns, but because New York City does not control its own income and corporate taxes. Those systems are controlled at the state level, and the governor, centrist Democrat Kathy Hochul, has the greatest power over the budget. She may not be game to alter them for a socialist’s sake, particularly in a year when she’s running for reelection.

This fact should draw our gaze toward the upper floors of the booby-trapped house of power, the higher orders of government that can make or break a city administration. After property taxes, state and federal funds make the second-largest contribution to the city’s operating budget—including federal funds that pass through the state before arriving in the city’s coffers. Gov. Hochul ultimately endorsed Mamdani in the general election when his victory was all but assured, but made clear that she opposes tax hikes and only supports Mamdani’s affordability agenda in the vaguest terms. Under her leadership, the state government will likely find ways to make some of Mamdani’s campaign promises pencil out, but they are unlikely to be a strong enabling force.

The federal government, meanwhile, will be a formidable foe. Despite their bizarrely cordial first meeting, the President of the United States is a predatory landlord who has already declared his intention to wage a multilevel war against New York City under Mayor Mamdani. While we might expect incursions into New York City with immigration police or the National Guard, the Trump administration will likely also find new and creative ways to screw the city fiscally. They have already cut funding for crucial transit infrastructure projects like the New York-New Jersey Gateway Tunnel and the Second Avenue Subway expansion, but that is likely just the beginning of a punitive federal austerity regime.

In addition to targeted cuts aimed at New York, the Trump administration may also impose new national rules that make life hell for the very New Yorkers who might otherwise benefit most from Mamdani’s affordability initiatives. The administration has stated its intention to evict families with mixed immigration statuses from public and subsidized housing, to remove all working-age and “able-bodied” residents from public and subsidized housing after two years, and to slash funds for housing formerly homeless households, conditioning all future funding on involuntary treatment programs and work requirements. If any of this comes to pass, it will not only limit the amount of money the city has to spend on existing programs—let alone expanded ones—but will also create new crises the mayor will have to contend with, and may well be blamed for.

In the face of federal cuts, the Mamdani administration may increasingly turn toward the bond market to fund a greater share of its capital projects, including its promise to build hundreds of thousands of new affordable homes. This is not a new practice—US infrastructure has long been funded by floating bonds, which bring in capital quickly and are repaid with interest over time using either specific project revenues (like tolls or rents) or the city’s tax dollars. But it is an approach that carries inherent risks.

First, there are the risks of incurring significant debt and owing interest. Bondholders must be repaid according to a schedule, no matter what other priorities the city might otherwise aim to fund. And city revenue must first go toward paying interest and debt before it can be used for anything else. The more debt the city takes on, the more of its annual budget goes toward interest payments to unaccountable bondholders.

Second, there are the credit rating agencies. Three New York-based global firms—Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch—monitor just about every government in the US and around the world, and issue a rating based on their perceived credit-worthiness. These agencies do not tend to look favorably upon municipal socialists or their policy priorities, and could decide that Mamdani’s New York is less of a safe bet than Adams’s. If they downgrade the city’s credit rating even slightly, not only will fewer investors be interested in buying our debt, but those who buy will be entitled to even higher payments. From the city’s perspective, this means that a growing share of its revenue would go toward interest instead of flowing into programs for New Yorkers and salaries for civil servants—an outcome that would feel a lot like the very austerity Mamdani ran against.

Adding to the challenges, Mamdani has also promised to pay workers on city-sponsored projects at union-scale. His social housing plan calls for three elements to work in tandem: high levels of construction, low rents, and high wages. But the system cannot accomplish all three at once without much higher levels of subsidy than its budget currently offers.

Given the city’s fiscal constraints, these larger subsidies would ideally come from the state government, or, better yet, the federal government. To the extent that there is historical precedent for high levels of high-wage, low-rent housing, this is how it has worked. Much of what is attributed to the legendary reformer of the 1930s and ’40s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, for example, was possible because he had willing allies in the governor and president’s seats. Mamdani has no comparable partners. Skimping on any one of the three goals—low rents, high wages, large quantities of housing—threatens not only to derail one of Mamdani’s central policy promises, but also to sow divisions within his base, with either workers or tenants feeling betrayed by any final compromise.

Such divisions will likely be played up by the mayor’s enemies, including not only rival politicians but landlord lobbyists enraged by the mayor’s plan to freeze rents, increase housing code enforcement, and put the worst landlords out of business. Landlord associations will formally work with any administration, since they refuse to cede the terrain of city government to their rivals. But they will also work tirelessly against the Mamdani administration. Their lobbyists will soon be roaming the halls of the state legislature, pitching various means to water down tenant protections and allow for bigger rent hikes, while their lawyers will be pursuing a similar strategy through the courts. This inside-outside game of legislative and judicial lobbying, coupled with press and social media campaigns spotlighting sympathetic landlords and scheming tenants, can create an echo chamber of “common sense” that becomes hard to pierce.

The traps Mamdani will encounter are not unique to housing; they are laid in every stubborn corner of municipal politics: traffic and transit, hospitals and healthcare, schools and education, safety and policing. Housing, however, holds a particularly central place in city life. The price of housing is, for many, the single largest ongoing cost of living, and it ranks highest on many polls of New Yorkers’ top concerns—which is why Mamdani made it a centerpiece of his campaign. In order to make it a centerpiece of his government, and to avoid becoming trapped in the “permanent state of melancholy” Monedero warned about, he will need to systematically sidestep these traps, blockades, and snipers, each and every day he holds this office.

To set about this difficult task, Mamdani and his administration must harness the mayor-elect’s unique advantages, ensuring that the skills that won him office also help him govern. His gift for clear and cutting communication will be essential in explaining these challenges to the public—not to make excuses for why he cannot achieve what is expected of him, but rather to call out the people and institutions actively working against his agenda.

Door-knocking doesn’t negate structural barriers to socialist policy, but it can put pressure on some of the snipers in the kitchen to lay down their arms.

More than a civics primer, this would serve as a call to action for the thousands of supporters and dozens of membership organizations who mobilized to knock on doors during the campaign, turning Mamdani’s prospects from long-shot to frontrunner in a matter of months. As Mamdani and many others have noted, the key to his enduring success beyond the ballot box will be maintaining the level of popular mobilization that swept him into office. For example, one response to Adams’s subterfuge on the Rent Guidelines Board would be for tenant groups to pressure appointees to refuse the nomination or, perhaps better yet, to accept the honor and resign the day Mamdani is sworn into office—an effort that is indeed already underway. Campaign veterans have spun off an organization to spearhead this kind of mobilization called Our Time for an Affordable NYC, which hopes to harness the campaign energy into a permanent campaign for the mayor-elect’s core promises. Door-knocking doesn’t negate structural barriers to socialist policy, but it can put pressure on some of the snipers in the kitchen to lay down their arms, or else provoke the ire of a loud and active electorate.

Mamdani can similarly direct his agencies to intervene in some of the most portentous housing fights currently raging, including the pending foreclosure of over 5,000 rent-stabilized apartments owned by the notorious private equity-backed real estate firm Pinnacle Group. Tenants are calling for the new administration to stop their housing from being auctioned off to the highest bidder, instead asking them to intervene to convert it into social housing under some blend of tenant, public, and community control. This is a big ask, but if Mamdani can meaningfully move city policy in this direction early in his mayoralty, he would not only improve the prospects of thousands of tenants, but also signal that his campaign rhetoric about shutting down the city’s worst landlords was not a ploy but a promise.

He will, however, have to pay for these purchases, which again raises the specter of taxes, debts, and municipal finance. With relentless organizing, however, tenants and other working-class constituencies can convince the governor and the legislature that taxing the rich is less politically dangerous than failing to do so. Already, Gov. Hochul is signaling that she may be open to raising the corporate tax rate, a significant switch from her previous stance on the subject. Mamdani could also begin moving toward a city less reliant on the rich to fund essential services. In addition to progressive taxation, the Mamdani administration could, as historian Daniel Wortel-London has argued, return New York to an older model of equitable economic development in which the city owns and operates a series of municipal enterprises, from a public bank to Mamdani’s promised public grocery stores, using the city’s purchasing power to support worker-owned cooperatives and tenant-controlled housing.

None of this will blast through the barricades or disengage all the traps. All Mamdani’s socialist bonafides cannot change the fact that he will be governing from within a capitalist system—or more specifically, that he will be the mayor of the financial command center of the global capitalist economy. But Mamdani’s opponents are not the only ones who can harness structural power, be it through new organizations like Our Time or legacy ones like the Met Council on Housing, New York’s longest-standing citywide tenants union. Though Mamdani’s opponents might have booby-trapped the rooms, that does not preclude his supporters from building their own barricades across the city.

New York City in 2026 may not be the ideal time and place to advance socialist housing policy, but this is how history proceeds. The keys to the house of government will soon belong to Mamdani and all the organizers who brought him to this point. If they are to succeed, they must enter with their eyes wide open to the traps laid before them.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

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Samuel Stein is the author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State and the forthcoming A Right to Housing?

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/zohran-mamdani-vs-the-real-estate-state at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

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UPDATED 16 DEC 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

Scenes from a Columbia Writing Workshop

In my classrooms, students continued to move toward the political analysis that two successive university—and presidential—administrations seemed determined to suppress.

Ade Khan

Graduating students pose for photos near the main gates of Columbia, May 21st.

Heather Khalifa/AP

The Monday after two plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers unlawfully detained Mahmoud Khalil at his Columbia University residence, I walked into my classroom in Kent 511, unsure who, if anyone, would show up. The night before, I had offered a hybrid Zoom option to undergraduates who felt uneasy about attending in person, given rumors that ICE was targeting international students across campus. I braced for an empty room. To my surprise, students filed into the damp classroom one after another. No one stayed home.

That evening, I opened class with an acknowledgment of the campus atmosphere—its heightened militancy and restlessness. Some students took this as an invitation to vent, while others reflected quietly. Most just laughed at the absurdity of their educational setting. I live two minutes away, but have to get to campus 15 minutes early to wait in the security line, one said. Sometimes, when I know I’m running late, I blame security, another confessed.[1]

Minutes later, we plunged into the day’s task: reading criticism. Shifting seamlessly from the temporal to the textual, students began discussing Tolstoy’s What Is Art? and Hanif Abdurraqib’s ode to Prince. Some contested Tolstoy’s claim that art could be defined as the transmission of emotion—the act of conveying feeling to an audience and inviting them to feel in kind. Others agreed with him. The discussion led students to the topic of persuasion. Is what moves us in art also what moves us in political rhetoric? they wondered. Indeed, is it the same thing that moves people to care for one another in the first place?

Certainly, care for each other’s perspectives had enabled the participants of this creative writing classroom to withstand the tumult of their college. Through Columbia’s many crises, inquisitiveness about one another had kept my students engaged, even across ideological fault lines. Every session, they came prepared to help their classmates’ writing improve, critiquing it to more fully transmit the intentions of its creator.

Outside our classroom, violent spectres had begun haunting campus. The grounds were dotted with vigilant officers and bulbous cameras that watched students’ every move and utterance for evidence of subversion. Many of my students were wary of the school’s server and avoided email or Zoom, fearing surveillance by right-wing media or punitive administrators. Some, especially those writing about protest activity or Palestine, asked the workshop to delete their papers after discussion, worried (with good reason) that people might leak their work to conservative news outlets. And still, in my classrooms students continued to move, whether defiantly or unwittingly, toward the very things two successive university—and presidential—administrations seemed determined to suppress: political deduction and the exchange of ideas.

During the 2024-2025 academic year, I taught four writing courses at Columbia University as part of my one-year postgraduate fellowship. Each semester, I led one nonfiction workshop and a seminar on the traditions of nonfiction.

My first time teaching undergraduates coincided with many of them regularly making global headlines. The year before, as a graduate student at Columbia, I watched the United States Congress grill the university’s then-president, Minouche Shafik, about the charge of rampant antisemitism on campus. Representatives inquired about specific professors by name, marshaling their social media posts and their pedagogy as evidence of antisemitism. It was clear that the country’s leaders placed a significant share of the blame for student activism on teachers. Shafik reassured them that she was “personally committed” to making sure that faculty did not “cross the line.” In the subsequent months, the institution unleashed a repressive juggernaut against supporters of Palestine on campus, resulting in hundreds of student arrests and in the loss of revered faculty.

At the beginning of September 2024, I completed the university’s new Title VI training, revised in response to the events of the prior year and the subsequent recommendations from the Anti-Semitism Task Force. The module instructed faculty on the handling of specific scenarios in and around the classroom. In one hypothetical, a professor holds a class about climate change near a protest. The protesters have signs suggesting people of Country Theta are “evil murderers,” causing a student from Theta to feel too uncomfortable to attend class. The training was fuzzy on the specifics of how such a situation could come to be. Was the class often held outside? Did the protest happen spontaneously, or was the professor aware it was about to happen? How is the class’s content relevant to the concerns of the protest? I did not know. Still, the training pronounced that the professor was limiting educational opportunities for the Thetan student, and told us that holding class near protests “crossed the line between criticizing a country’s policies and denigrating the people from that country.” “Academic freedom is not unlimited,” it concluded.

As an early-career educator, new Title VI guidance led me to deduce that it was essential to maintain a dry objectivism in the classroom.

As an early-career educator, this guidance led me to deduce that it was essential to maintain a dry objectivism in the classroom. In those early weeks, I overplanned lessons to avoid non-pertinent political discussions. I considered replacing an essay on my syllabus by Sarah Aziza on witnessing the Gaza genocide, and rehearsed my rationale should I be questioned on keeping it in. I gamed out how I might mediate if one student insisted on using “conflict” to describe the genocide and another student called it out. I stumbled when students brought up the brutalities enacted by Israel or mentioned the Gaza solidarity encampment. Often, I just nodded and quickly pivoted to the “germane.”

This approach worked for a time. As the circus raged outside, with its hawkish cameras and nosy ventriloquists, some students arrived in class eager to escape it all. They sought to dwell instead in the education they had come here for—to learn beyond the present moment, discuss something of the past, and perhaps even a hopeful something of the future. And so, in that first month, as the weather soured, they read and dissected Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” then wandered Manhattan looking for a compelling subject to profile themselves. For a few weeks, we managed to remain in a cocoon of craft. But it would not last.

The problem arose toward the middle of the semester, when students’ writing assignments came due and they began submitting some of the most urgent writing in America right now. Faced with essay prompts that encouraged them to engage deliberately with their environment, they wrote about reconciling what is and what could be. They wrote the benign brutally and the brutal delicately. They wrote about furtive sexual desires and quintessential fights with parents. They wrote about their fear of bugs and heartbreak and the encroaching police, about generational nihilism in a changing climate. And, time and time again, they wrote about the genocide of Palestinians: from a psychological perspective or through a feminist lens, in lyric essays and with ethnographic tools.

Why, despite my desultory efforts, had the politics of the present perforated the classroom? I sensed the answer had to do with the nature of what I was teaching, and the lives of the people I was teaching it to. Creative nonfiction charges us to extrapolate from our surroundings, using them as points of departure into more universal inquiries. My students instinctively reached for this horizon, writing not only about their experiences but also about how their lives were shaped by and linked to broader histories. Much had preceded my time as an instructor at this school: a pandemic that left students in bewildering isolation, the quashing of student unions, a steady consolidation of executive power, and the militarization of campus in service of curtailing anti-genocide protest, to name a few. These events pushed students away from the institution and into one another’s arms. Many began organizing, disagreeing, fracturing, and re-organizing—experiments in collectivity that organically found their way onto the page. Some confronted these topics experientially, as in essays about peers who were expelled, kicked out of university housing overnight, and left to seek shelter amongst friends. Others tried to make sense of their mediascape, dissecting and critiquing television shows and viral moments in popular culture. Reading their work, I began to understand that political engagement was not confined to a small, outspoken faction of undergraduates, as the media regularly insisted. It was, instead, a contagious sensibility that had taken hold in the tight quarters students were forced into.

In her 1975 essay “Notes of a Barnard Drop-Out,” the poet June Jordan wrote, “Barnard College did not teach me necessity, nor prime my awareness as to urgencies of needs around the world, nor galvanize my heart around the critical nature of conflicts between the powerful and the powerless.” I believe the same went for many of my students, who had been galvanized in large part by influences beyond Columbia’s iron gates—most pressingly, Gaza. A generation raised on mobile devices could scarcely ignore a livestreamed genocide. This is a fact pro-Palestine students’ detractors have delighted in pointing out, conjuring a generation of screen-addled minions in thrall to TikTok’s ahistorical propaganda. As recently as November, former Obama aide Sarah Hurwitz argued that young people in the US are shaped by the “post-literate media” of the internet, and are thus misinterpreting the carnage in Gaza as comparable to the Holocaust or the history of racism in America. But inference based on history and a critical understanding of power—the things that Hurwitz ironically deems “post-literate”—are in fact profoundly literate impulses, central to the work of higher education.

In my classrooms, students repeatedly demonstrated such instincts. They did not engage with Gaza merely as passive algorithmic consumption or performative online outrage. Instead, they often independently researched and synthesized what they saw on social media, conferred in clubs and common rooms to informally process the images, and then entered the classroom to engage in dialogue. For instance, when we read Teju Cole’s “When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism and When It Still Is,” students connected Cole’s argument about a camera’s gaze being inherently political to the storm surge coming out of Gaza. They talked about the video of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy carrying the remains of his baby brother, Ahmed, in a blue backpack, or the footage of Ahed Bseiso being amputated by a kitchen knife with no anesthesia.

To sidestep the unrelenting genocide in Gaza, which animated so much of how people processed and grieved the world around them, would have been to retreat into the exact didactic teaching I was trained to avoid.

Such moments of extrospection were not tangents, I began to understand. They were the substance of how students were digesting their learning. To sidestep the unrelenting genocide in Gaza, which animated so much of how people processed and grieved the world around them, would have been to retreat into the exact didactic teaching I was also trained by the Title VI office to avoid. So I relaxed. I started letting students lead discussions, acting less as an instructor and more as an interlocutor. I opened myself up to the unruliness of a writing classroom that held, rather than excised, its students’ politics.

I had known from the start that the students in my classes were not all politically aligned. Some were adamantly socialist. Others had inherited an unquestioning centrism from their parents. Most had not yet decided on a political ethos but were moving through college looking for it.

In the workshop environment, there is nowhere to hide from such differences. Unlike seminars or lectures, workshops have no definitive syllabus outlining what students will gain in the course. Their peers provide the education. As the author and educator bell hooks writes, “There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources.” The workshop, then, by definition, fosters sustained exposure to other perspectives. Students have their writing read only twice or thrice a semester, yet spend the remaining eight to ten weeks emphatically debating how best to express another’s ideas—ideas with which they might bitterly disagree.

After I ceded some control over the classroom conversation, I braced for arguments and fracture, preparing (as the Title VI training forewarned) for Zionist students to file reports of discomfort caused by pro-Palestine writing, or activist students to drop out at the slightest hint of Zionism in their peers’ work. But something altogether different unfolded. Over the course of the semester, students who fundamentally disagreed on whether university deans were essential educators or overpaid middle managers collaborated on essays about just that, pointing out gaps in one another’s argumentation. Students from different class backgrounds read one another’s essays, then embarked on meaningful discussions about their divergent upbringings.

I watched these developments with hesitant optimism, cautious of what might still erupt. I feared that certain disagreements might trigger administrative meddling; I also worried that parents might be perturbed by the politically charged topics students were investigating in their art. Sometimes I recommended that students proactively seek input from their loved ones before presenting their writing to the class. But to my surprise, students preferred consulting with their peers—even those with whom they knew they clashed.

On multiple occasions, Jewish students submitted work or verbally grappled with how to continue supporting a Jewish nation-state, or how to express nascent critiques of Zionist commitments within their families. I could see that these students offered their experiences with trepidation, knowing that their sympathies might not be shared but seeking peers’ responses nonetheless. In turn, their critics—frequently first-generation college students, Black and brown women, anti-Zionist Jews, and queer individuals—responded with principled, constructive feedback, identifying logical fallacies or historical omissions in defenses of Zionism. The writers occasionally offered rebuttals shaped by their own communal considerations; at other times, they simply took notes. In the next session, they might flip positions, with anti-Zionist students submitting writing, and others in a position to critique. As in any workshop, such interactions sometimes led to heated exchanges: People quietly walked out of the room, or were on the edge of tears, myself included. Still, the following week, we all returned to the same muggy room, and students reentered the process of criticism all over again.

In her essay “Art Song,” Maggie Nelson recounts an episode in which photographer Catherine Opie is teaching an art criticism class. During the class, a student critiques another’s work, claiming it “signifies the backbone of colonialism,” leaving the artist visibly dejected as he mutters, “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” In response, Opie urges the artist to engage rather than retreat. “Stand up for your work!” she entreats him, “Open it up! Don’t shut it down, man.” Nelson uses this scene to illustrate her claim that “the pedagogical task at hand was not to discipline people for their failures, but to help them make more interesting art, discover how to talk about it together, and allow that shared fortitude and support to become a basis for motley community.”

I saw Nelson’s insights translate to the context of my nonfiction workshops, where the singular, often messy, goal was to make one another’s art sturdier so it could withstand the world’s scrutiny. Some sessions would begin with sentences like, “As you know, I don’t agree with what your narrator is saying, but I want to help you write it.” While I am unsure if anyone’s political position shifted, the sustained exposure to one another, and the trust accrued between them, encouraged students to consider perspectives they had not yet encountered or may not otherwise have engaged with so thoroughly. I cannot say what went on between these same students outside the classroom—they might well have never interacted, or have been active political adversaries. But each week in the classroom, they burrowed into one another’s viewpoint, at least for a short while. In the motley community of my classroom, we sought shelter from the institution’s fugue state. Amid a widening chasm of campus paranoia, we built a wobbly bridge of open exchange.

Amid a widening chasm of campus paranoia, we built a wobbly bridge of open exchange.

Like most liberal exercises, the workshop has its limitations. Not all topics merit generous feedback, nor are all tales of personal woe created equal. Dialogic interaction may improve our writing, but it’s certainly not a cure-all for solving our most urgent and dangerous political quandaries. Still, by demanding vulnerability, the space of the workshop offered an antidote to the stifling antagonism on campus. Here, if only for a brief moment, students could stand on somewhat equal ground and look one another in the eye; share incipient ideas, and open themselves up to robust inspection.

It is ironic that this kind of organic communion—so often upheld as an ideal within liberal university frameworks—has been effectively foreclosed by the very policies those institutions have pursued in the last two years. In that time, too many “adults” have seesawed between infantilizing students as confused conduits of a misinformed agenda, or demonizing them as fringe, even hateful, agitators destabilizing an otherwise apolitical campus majority. Such bad faith allegations have occluded the simple fact that college students are not brainwashed provocateurs, only young people straddling the precarious threshold of adulthood who, however imperfectly, are trying to forge an ethic toward life—and are doing so while bearing witness to the most persistent slaughter and starvation of our lifetimes. What has moved these students to dissent is ultimately obvious: It is the persevering disquietude caused by others’ circumstances—beyond the classroom, across an ocean, under the rubble. Gazans have screamed into the cavernous echo of the internet, and one of the only apt responses has emerged on university campuses. Amid a higher education system that is rightfully criticized for its insularity, these porous reactions to real tragedies ought to be encouraged. Instead, every effort has been made to suppress them.

And yet, during my year of teaching writing workshops at Columbia, I learned that there are limits to this suppression. By the end of my final term, I had realized that I was not the one engineering the alchemy of my classrooms. Instead, that space, as the university itself, was shaped by the students who inhabited it, undergraduates who were all politically occupied, regardless of the depth and direction of their commitments. These students came to class seeking dialogue with one another, and so long as that remained the primary mode of learning, I saw that no apparatus of surveillance could really blunt its transformative potential. A classroom, no matter how closely patrolled, has a stubborn way of remaining a place devoted to inquiry. So do the crevices of campus life—libraries, class breaks, even house parties—where students converse with someone who does not look like them, persuade and argue, and begin to organize. As long as such spaces survive, so will the conditions for interaction, for questioning, and, perhaps, for revolt.

Footnotes

1

The nonfiction writing classroom is governed by an ethic of discretion. To honor that shared understanding, all interactions with students have been anonymized and broadly paraphrased. No student work or direct quotations appear in this article.

Ade Khan is a writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She lives in New York City.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/scenes-from-a-columbia-writing-workshop at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

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UPDATED 11 DEC 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

The ADL Tried to Appease MAGA. The FBI Cut Ties with Them Anyway.

The Jewish defense group—whose partnership with federal law enforcement goes back decades—has never been more isolated.

Mari Cohen and Alex Kane

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks in Washington, DC, August 26th, 2023.

Andrew Harnik/AP

In the weeks after a gunman killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk, influential right-wing figures searched for culprits to blame. Many of those upset about the murder of the Turning Point USA founder zeroed in on one target in particular: the Anti-Defamation League. Critics, including high-profile conservative accounts like Libs of TikTok, highlighted the ADL’s inclusion of Turning Point in its Glossary of Extremism and Hate, containing more than 1,000 terms, groups, and individuals the ADL considers extremist. The short glossary page on Turning Point mentioned connections between the group and “known extremists,” as well as past scandals with employees making “racist or bigoted” remarks. “Even after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the ADL still lists Turning Point USA as a hate group. They have blood on their hands,” wrote an X user named Pericles Abbasi on September 27th, in a post viewed by 6.5 million. In response, Elon Musk wrote that “the ADL needs to change this now.” The billionaire and X owner would go on to tweet at least nine times about the organization over the following four days, calling the ADL a “far left hate propaganda machine” that “hates Christians.” Musk claimed the FBI had been “taking their ‘hate group’ definitions from ADL,” which had led the bureau to investigate “Charlie Kirk & Turning Point, instead of his murderers.”

A former staff member at the ADL Center on Extremism (COE), who requested anonymity because they signed a non-disclosure agreement upon leaving the organization, called the glossary “one of the best assets and resources” offered by the ADL—a public resource to help people “understand extremist activity in their community,” and a tool for extremism researchers and law enforcement as well. When it launched in 2022, the ADL had boasted of a “first-of-its-kind” database that joined “a body of online research tools at the cutting edge of exposing hate.” But on September 30th, Jewish Insider reported that the organization had decided to take down the entire glossary from its website. To justify the move, the ADL told the news outlet that “an increasing number of entries in the Glossary were outdated” and that “a number of entries” had been “intentionally misrepresented and misused,” though the former employee said COE staffers had been “tasked with keeping it updated and added to it regularly.”

The ADL also made several tweaks to a separate, longer “backgrounder” page on Turning Point—removing language about Kirk creating a “platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists,” for instance, and adding that he had publicly condemned some “extremists”—before deleting that page, too, on October 1st. (Other backgrounder pages, on groups ranging from the Palestine solidarity group Jewish Voice for Peace to the white supremacist Goyim Defense League, remain on the website.)

FBI Director James Comey speaks to the ADL National Leadership Summit in Washington, DC, May 8th, 2017.

Susan Walsh/AP Photo

These hasty efforts to mollify MAGA were too little, too late. The same day that Turning Point’s backgrounder came down, FBI Director Kash Patel announced, first on Fox News, and then on X, that the bureau would cut ties with the ADL, which had been a longtime partner. Patel framed the decision as a rebuke of former FBI Director James Comey, who became a target of the MAGA movement thanks to his bureau’s investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia, and who has long maintained close ties to the ADL. In a statement shared with Fox News, Patel described the ADL as “an extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization,” running “spying” operations on Americans. “That era is finished,” Patel declared. “This FBI formally rejects Comey’s policies and any partnership with the ADL.” (Two days later, the bureau announced it would also cut ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing hate groups.)

The practical impact of Patel’s announcement remains unclear. Neither the FBI nor the ADL responded to questions about which programs the bureau would no longer participate in. (The ADL also declined to respond to other questions for this story.) “I think any threat information that the ADL provides will still be treated appropriately as a tip as it would from any American citizen,” said Kenneth Gray, a former FBI agent who spent 24 years at the bureau. “I think what it does break is the access that ADL previously had by providing things like training to the FBI. That is now dead.”

No matter how the specifics play out, it’s clear that the ADL’s efforts to appease Trump and MAGA have backfired—failing to pacify the right, while further alienating liberals. Longtime critics on the left have mixed feelings about the FBI’s jilting of the ADL: “To get to a place where the FBI would say, ‘this is a non-governmental organization that we cannot rely on in this way,’ is a positive development,” said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute. “But the idea that it would be done by a government that has white supremacists and antisemites actually within the government is deeply problematic and equally harmful.” Yet, despite such concerns, few liberal or progressive groups rallied to the organization’s defense after Patel’s announcement. (A notable exception was the Jewish group J Street, which said that despite its “differences” with the ADL, it was “deeply concerned” by the FBI’s decision.) Former ADL employees—some of whom requested anonymity to protect their professional standings—said the organization had distanced itself from liberal allies so much that few are eager to stick up for it, even against an administration they oppose. “The retreat from the broader civil rights work that the ADL has done for generations diluted coalitional strength and has seemingly isolated the organization,” said Robert Sills, the ADL’s former national director for state and local government affairs.

“The retreat from the broader civil rights work that the ADL has done for generations diluted coalitional strength and has seemingly isolated the organization.”

Indeed, six former ADL staffers told Jewish Currents that under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s ten years of leadership, the organization’s attention has shifted to focus primarily on the alleged threat that Palestinian solidarity activists pose to the Jewish community—an evolution that accelerated after the October 7th attacks. Greenblatt has praised Trump’s crackdown on campus Palestine activism, including the attempted deportation of Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, while applauding the withholding of funds to universities accused of failing to crack down on antisemitism. “No one should have been surprised that this FBI would sever ties with the ADL, and that the vocal elements of the MAGA base that vilify the ADL and harbor and foment antisemitism would demand that,” said Sills. “But the organization wasn’t well-insulated against that kind of threat because post-October 7th, senior leadership, for a variety of reasons, moved rapidly away from continuing the civil rights work that previously made it integral to the broader social justice movement and anti-extremism movement.”

The relationship between the ADL and the FBI began decades before Comey professed his “love” for the antisemitism watchdog on the stage of its 2014 leadership summit. The organizations’ ties date back to both of their early days, when the fledgling Jewish organization began investigating Nazi-sympathizer groups popping up across the United States in the ’30s. Throughout the decade and into World War II, the group cultivated working connections with FBI officials, frequently forwarding pamphlets and information it had collected on Nazi and America First groups. FBI staffers replied to the ADL’s letters and took meetings with its leaders, though the bureau’s priorities did not always align with those of the Jewish minority; in the early ’40s, for instance, the ADL pushed to free German Jewish refugees from the constrictive status of “enemy aliens,” while the FBI sought to maintain national security restrictions on them.

Beginning in the mid-’40s, the ADL expanded beyond investigating white supremacists and started keeping tabs on Arab and anti-Zionist groups. One 1946 edition of “The Facts,” a research newsletter that the group sent to the FBI, included a report on the activities and personnel of the Arab League’s “Arab Office,” the Institute of Arab-American Affairs, and the League for Peace with Justice in Palestine. These groups “are not immediately recognized as our enemies, because they avoid invective and the brazen lie,” the report said. “Their ulterior motives are not readily detected because of their subtlety. Thus, their propaganda, apparently plausible and reasonable, is the more effective and consequently the more dangerous.”

Throughout this period, the ADL worked to smooth over disagreements and pacify FBI officials. During the debate over refugee status, for example, the FBI told the ADL it had caught wind that one of its co-founders was criticizing the bureau’s anti-refugee position. The ADL’s Washington director wrote to the critical colleague, defending the FBI and reminding him that “the director of the FBI, as well as the Bureau, have given us the friendliest cooperation.” Such efforts paid off over time. By the late ’60s, the scholar Emmaia Gelman writes in a forthcoming book titled The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, the FBI’s mutual appreciation for the ADL had been solidified: In a 1968 memo, director J. Edgar Hoover instructed all the bureau’s field offices to connect with the ADL divisions in their regions, noting “the Anti-Defamation League receives considerable information of interest to this Bureau.” The following year, the ADL sent the FBI information from its undercover investigation of the Organization of Arab Students.

Around this same time, according to historian John Drabble, the far right became particularly fixated on the ADL, which they framed as a subversive Jewish influence controlling the government. When files on the FBI’s Cointelpro—a covert operation that targeted activists and groups deemed “subversive”—were made public in 1977, they showed that the ADL and FBI were indeed collaborating to disrupt “white hate” groups, intensifying the suspicions of the far right.

The ADL maintained its close relationship with the FBI through the rest of the century, even during moments of tension—as in 1993, when the FBI’s search for a stolen FBI file in the Jewish organization’s possession eventually led to a San Francisco Police Department raid on ADL offices. Police wound up discovering an ADL surveillance operation targeting a host of leftist organizations—including Arab, Black, Jewish left, and anti-apartheid groups—and the FBI briefly investigated the matter before closing its inquiry in 1994. By 2000, the ADL and FBI were regularly hosting joint training sessions for law enforcement. In his 2014 speech, Comey noted that FBI personnel had participated in more than 105 ADL-sponsored training sessions since 2010. “We would always have law enforcement come by and visit the office—the FBI was there quite often,” said Vegas Tenold, who worked at the COE from 2018 to 2020.

This arrangement became a selling point for the ADL, a way to boast of crucial contributions to preventing antisemitic attacks and other bias-motivated violence; its website touts the ADL’s “unrivalled experience in equipping agencies and officers with resources and professional development.” In 2019, Cosmopolitan profiled an ADL researcher who spent her time undercover in online extremist communities, developing an apparent knack for predicting when trolls would actually become violent. In one anecdote, the researcher’s information helped the FBI prevent a man from blowing up a federal office building in Springfield, Illinois; in another, her information led law enforcement to seize guns from an alt-right man who posted about plans to kill Jews. “They sent me that article when they wanted to hire me,” said Tenold. “They send that article to everyone as far as I know.” (The story has now been adapted into an Apple TV miniseries with actor Jessica Chastain, though its release was put on hold after Kirk’s death.)

But outside of a few instances like those captured in the article, Tenold said that the ADL has been less indispensable to the FBI than the organization wants its donors and political contacts to believe. “The sense I got from the FBI is they never really listened to the ADL anyway,” he said. “You would give them a presentation, but the presentations were mostly stuff that you could just find on Wikipedia. If you spent a day researching any given group, you could probably get the kind of information the ADL had.”

Others have seen the ADL’s role as more consequential. A former regional staffer said that he believed the group’s contributions to FBI intelligence had “probably saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.” The staffer said that after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in 2017, the ADL was able to name at least 85% of the participants to the FBI. Daryl Johnson, a former senior domestic terrorism analyst for the Department of Homeland Security, said the ADL has been broadly useful to the bureau because of its internet research, an area that’s “touchy for law enforcement and the intelligence community. We cannot go out there and just monitor the internet at a whim. You’ve got to have a criminal nexus, probable cause, things like that.” The ADL, without such constitutional constraints on its evidence-gathering, is freer to infiltrate online communities and pass along actionable intel to the FBI.

This kind of “usefulness” to the bureau, as well as other law enforcement agencies, has fueled criticism of the ADL from civil libertarians and the left alike. It has also stirred debate within the organization. According to a former ADL staffer who advised senior leadership on law enforcement issues in the mid-2010s, staffers were split between two general views: One side saw the partnerships as an important way to protect Jews from antisemitic violence, while the other worried that aligning with agencies that have harmed other minority communities would drive a wedge between Jews and others. The internal friction became more urgent after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 sparked a national uprising against police brutality. “After the murder of George Floyd, I got increasingly uncomfortable with doing any kind of thing with law enforcement,” said Tenold. He and some colleagues wrote a letter to Greenblatt and other top leaders, advising them to end the collaborations. Tenold said he got “almost everyone” at the Center of Extremism—where staffers were considered more liberal than others at the ADL—to sign. But management responded to the letter, he said, by arguing that “the ADL needed to leverage their relationship with law enforcement to effect change.” On a call with an ADL vice president, Tenold noted that the letter’s signatories “were saying that we should speak out [about police violence] as a civil rights organization,” and the VP responded that “in times like these, there’s wisdom in such a thing as strategic silence.” That was the last straw for Tenold: “I remember hearing that and thinking, I gotta get out of here.”

The Floyd protests did briefly prompt ADL leaders to reflect on whether some of its law-enforcement programs should continue. In June 2020, Jewish Currents and The Guardian reported that senior ADL employees had recommended that the group end its practice of sending police and federal law enforcement, including FBI agents, on delegations to Israel—a program that had long been protested by pro-Palestine groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. In a memo sent to Greenblatt, the senior employees wrote that “in light of the very real police brutality at the hands of militarized police forces in the US, we must ask ourselves difficult questions, like whether we are contributing to the problem.”

But soon after this moment of reflection, the ADL became only more defensive against its left critics. At the organization’s annual summit in 2022, Greenblatt delivered an address in which he unequivocally defined all anti-Zionism as antisemitism and cast critics of Israel, particularly the groups Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Council on American Islamic Relations, as dangerous threats on par with the right. It was a marked shift in tone for an organization that had, under the first Trump administration, consistently blamed the far right for most extremist attacks on Jews. Going forward, Greenblatt said, the organization would devote “more concentrated energy” to research, political advocacy, and litigation aimed at countering anti-Zionist groups on the left.

The address caused another uproar inside the organization. Greenblatt’s claim that the left and the right were equivalent threats—the “photo inverse” of one another, he said—was especially controversial among COE employees. “This was something that within the COE we flatly said was inaccurate, but leadership did not take our expertise into consideration,” said the former COE staffer. Another former ADL staffer told New York magazine that Greenblatt’s new approach could place more activists under surveillance and lead law enforcement to treat students advocating for Palestinian rights as if they’re on par with neo-Nazis.

The October 7th attacks, and Israel’s destruction of Gaza in their aftermath, made such a prospect suddenly real. As the civilian death toll mounted, Palestinian rights activism surged on college campuses. That same month, the ADL teamed up with the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a pro-Israel legal advocacy organization, to send a letter urging university presidents to investigate their campus’s SJP chapters for potentially violating laws against “material support” for terrorism. The following spring, Greenblatt called for the National Guard to break up Columbia University students’ Gaza solidarity encampment.

“My entire portfolio was focused on white supremacists and violent extremists. After October 7th, it was exclusively pro-Palestine.”

During this time, the ADL was moving away from its work combating bias in all forms. Before October 7th, Sills, the former national director for state and local government affairs, said, “my entire portfolio was focused on white supremacists and violent extremists. After October 7th, it was exclusively pro-Palestine, though I think it’s evident that the other threats have remained if not strengthened.” The pivot in his role was not unique. “We were told the organization was not going to respond to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s demonization of immigrants. We were told we were backing away from LGBTQ issues,” Sills said. “Jonathan and senior leadership made clear that they felt that we had spread ourselves out into policy spaces that were not material to the mission, despite the ADL mission statement continuing to read ‘to secure justice and fair treatment for all.’”

Sills said that after Congress began to hold hearings into alleged antisemitism on college campuses in December 2023—sessions that fueled a right-wing attack on universities around the country and led to the resignations of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University presidents—senior leadership at the ADL wanted to “pursue these types of hearings at every state-level higher education committee in the country.” That effort, he said, would have “empowered right wingers who don’t believe in public higher education but would gladly use antisemitism as a pretextual cudgel toward their own ends that have nothing to do with protecting the Jewish people.” Sills ultimately resigned in 2024 after the ADL began to push for anti-masking statutes—intended in part to target pro-Palestine protesters who hid their faces—that he feared would violate the First Amendment and harm marginalized communities.

A similar dynamic played out in the ADL’s education work, as Jewish Currents reported earlier this year. In December 2023, the ADL eliminated A World of Difference, its flagship anti-bias program in schools; staffers were told to pivot to antisemitism education. Meanwhile, the ADL cozied up to luminaries in the Trump orbit, honoring Jared Kushner for his work on the Abraham Accords in March 2024, and, after Trump’s election in November 2024, hiring a lobbying firm with close ties to Trumpworld. After Elon Musk gave what looked like a Nazi salute during an inauguration-day speech, the ADL came to his defense, saying that Musk “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

The group also hailed the detention and attempted deportation of Khalil as “bold.” After the decision to strip billions of dollars from Harvard over its response to pro-Palestine protests, Greenblatt celebrated the decision, saying he was “really glad that the Trump administration is leaning in,” although he had previously raised concerns about “the extent and scope” of the approach Trump had taken toward Harvard.

At the same time, the ADL refrained from commenting on other Trump administration moves on issues it had previously spoken out about—the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, for instance, along with its crackdown on immigrants and new restrictions on refugee entry. The organization “made a decision that by severing its focal energies from larger social issues and narrowly focusing on antisemitism, and on Israel, it could maintain an impactful voice and a place at the table,” said one former ADL regional staffer. “Many of us inside tried to raise the warning flag as often and as loudly as we could, to say that antisemitism was clearly being used to give a veneer of credibility to the sledgehammer attack on civil liberties and constitutional protections. But that was not heard and was discarded by leadership.”

Despite its efforts to curry favor with the Trump administration and its right-wing supporters, the ADL has been unable to get past its reputation as a foe of the far right. The organization’s reputation among Trump officials remains “thoroughly left wing,” New York magazine reported in August. “The ADL, they’re very quick to condemn conservatives for some stupid shit,” said one administration official.

The group has, at times, called out the administration: In mid-November, the ADL criticized Trump for refusing to condemn antisemitic white nationalist leader Nick Fuentes after Tucker Carlson hosted Fuentes on his podcast. It has also said that Trump administration official Paul Ingrassia—a Republican recently appointed to a position within the General Services Administration who’s acknowledged that he has a “Nazi streak”—has “no place in government.” Such denunciations provide fuel for continued right-wing attacks on the ADL. “Despite its sharp rightward bent, the ADL does come from a legacy of liberal advocacy, and they had been a major voice in combating radical right-wing movements,” said Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates who focuses on white nationalism and antisemitism. “The MAGA movement sees this kind of work as an attack on white Christian America.”

The ADL’s break up with the FBI came as a blow to an organization that has long touted its access to public officials. “The ADL’s relationship with the FBI gave them considerable cachet and prestige,” said the former regional staffer. “Not only was the FBI’s decision to sever its relationship a predictable political outcome—this administration takes a grievance-based approach and holds any past criticism as means for disqualification—but it was embarrassing for ADL.”

By the end of October, the ADL had entirely removed a “Protect Civil Rights” section from the “What We Do” page of its website.

The ADL’s response has been notably muted. The organization’s brief public statement responding to Patel, released on October 1st, acknowledged only that the ADL had “seen” the FBI director’s statement, and said that the organization maintains “deep respect” for the FBI and law enforcement. JTA reported that the ADL asked other Jewish organizations not to speak up publicly on its behalf after Patel’s announcement. Instead, it made more concessions to its detractors on the right: By the end of October, the ADL had entirely removed a “Protect Civil Rights” section from the “What We Do” page of its website.

The organization reacted with greater zeal when Zohran Mamdani, an Israel critic and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions supporter, won the New York City mayoral election on November 4th. The day after the election, the ADL announced that it was launching a “Mamdani Monitor” initiative, which would involve a “citywide antisemitism tipline,” research on Mamdani’s appointees for evidence of antisemitism, and a public-facing tracker synthesizing and displaying the ADL’s research on the mayor-elect. The initiative spurred backlash even from centrists who had previously supported the organization, including MSNBC host and frequent Greenblatt interlocutor Joe Scarborough, who accused the ADL CEO of ignoring Mamdani’s outreach to New York Jewish groups. A coalition of progressive Jewish groups, including IfNotNow, Bend the Arc, and J Street NYC, called the program “Islamophobic and racist.” “The fact that no such monitor exits for a Trump regime full of people who regularly fuel and use antisemitism is all the proof we need that the ADL has abandoned marginalized communities in order to join in with the right in the name of defending Israel for anything, and at any cost,” said Jamie Beran, the head of the progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc.

For some, like Maya Berry, the ADL’s differing responses to Patel and Mamdani exemplify its pro-right drift. “They shut down the Glossary of Extremism the moment that it got dinged by white supremacists and far right groups,” she said, but they didn’t respond to the backlash that resulted when they listed Arab American individuals or Muslim groups, or when they named other Jewish organizations whose politics they didn’t agree with. “It’s quite telling that this is when it went too far,” she said. The ADL’s decisions to abandon its former civil rights commitments and tie itself to the right will likely have far-reaching consequences, according to the former regional staffer. “Even if the ADL wanted to course correct,” they said, “at this point it likely cannot do so.”

Mari Cohen is the associate editor of Jewish Currents.

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Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-adl-tried-to-appease-maga-the-fbi-cut-ties-with-them-anyway at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 8 DEC 2025, 5:23 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 DEC 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

How Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Enabling Another Israeli Land Grab

By codifying Israel’s demands, the new “peace process” guarantees that Palestinian territory will keep shrinking.

Anne Irfan

Israel drops leaflets warning Palestinians to stay away from the “yellow line” in Khan Younis, October 20th.

Jehad Alshrafi/AP

On November 18th, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 2803, formally endorsing President Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza’s future. First released as the basis for the ceasefire deal of October, the plan establishes a handful of core structures: first, a “yellow line” which demarcates the parts of Gaza where the Israeli army will retain an on-the-ground presence; second, an International Stabilization Force (ISF) that will serve as a “long-term internal security solution,” overseen by a “Board of Peace” headed by Trump himself; third, “a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” staffed by Palestinian and international experts tasked with managing Gaza’s “transitional governance”; and finally, a “Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza.”

Extending the hyperbole of his claims to have ended “3,000 years” of war in the Middle East, Trump welcomed the UNSC approval of his plan as “a moment of true historic proportion” that will “lead to further Peace all over the World.” Despite the rhetoric, however, Resolution 2803 doesn’t signal a break with the past. On the contrary, it represents continuity with decades of supposedly international—in practice, Western and Israeli—plans for Palestine. These plans, exemplified by the League of Nations mandate, the UN Partition Plan, and the Oslo Accords, have reworked political geography, governance, and aid structures to shrink Palestinian territory. They have done so by introducing new, moveable “borders” like the yellow line as a way to progressively reduce how much land is allocated to the Palestinian people and their would-be state. They have created bodies like Trump’s ISF and his “apolitical Palestinian committee” to contain Palestinian nationalism and resistance while enabling further Israeli impunity. And they have carried out these moves not with any input from the Palestinian people, but rather by entrenching neo-colonial dynamics (as evident in the involvement of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a key member of Trump’s Board of Peace).

Ultimately, such plans have enabled Israel to grab progressively more Palestinian land while entrenching obstacles to Palestinian sovereignty. The consequences of the Trump plan are likely to fall along the same lines—resulting in anything from a full ghettoization of the Palestinians in portions of the Strip to the total liquidation of the Palestinian presence in Gaza.

Western-led proposals have enabled Zionist land grabs in Palestine for nearly a century. Before 1948, Palestine was governed by a British regime that took its mandate from the League of Nations—a body then dominated by Britain and France. Then, in 1947, the UN put forward its infamous Partition Plan, recommending that 55% of Palestine be allocated to a Jewish state at a time when Jews made up around a third of the country’s population. The plan was rejected by Palestinians but accepted by the Jewish Agency (the main Zionist leadership and parastate operation in Mandatory Palestine), which recognized it as a good deal and a basis for possible later expansion.

In the end, the Partition Plan never came to pass; only Zionist expansion did. Zionist militias, and then the newly formed Israeli national army, used military means to establish their new state on 78% of Palestine—significantly more than the 55% allocated under the UN Plan. To do so, they carried out the Nakba, the deliberate expulsion and displacement of at least 750,000 Palestinians into neighboring Arab states and the two parts of Palestine not claimed by Israel in 1948: the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As a result, Palestine was de facto partitioned, but with no independent Palestinian state established. After Israel began its lasting occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it implemented a one-state reality whereby the Israeli state controlled the entirety of historic Palestine and imposed a hierarchy of different regimes for Palestinians and Israelis.

The Gaza Strip as we know it today has been formed by this history of shrinkage. Under the British Mandate, Palestine’s Southern District—sometimes known informally as the “Gaza District,” after its biggest city— was the largest administrative area in territorial terms. But during the Nakba, Zionist militias and the Israeli army seized most of it, reducing the region to an area of 214 square miles. The 1949 Egyptian–Israeli agreement demarcated this newly-formed Gaza “Strip” by establishing an armistice line around it that became known as the Green Line. The following year, a weakened Egyptian government agreed to an addendum that shrank the newly formed Gaza Strip by a further 20%, leaving it as a tiny territory of 141 square miles—less than 1.5% of historic Palestine. Israel proceeded to police the Green Line as an international border despite its formal status as a temporary armistice boundary.

It didn’t stop there. After Israel began its long-term occupation of Gaza in 1967, it reduced the territory accessible to Palestinians even more—first by establishing illegal settlements and military installations, and then by imposing “buffer zones” and “security perimeters.” The Oslo process shrank the Strip even further, as Israel established a “security perimeter” stretching over half a mile into Gaza, with the military enforcing “special security measures” to prevent Palestinians from entering.

Israel’s encroachment into Palestinian territory has continued into the 21st century. Upon completing its unilateral evacuation of 8,500 settlers from Gaza in 2005, Israel enacted a restricted “buffer zone” reaching almost a mile into the Strip. Any Palestinian found in it could be shot on sight. And after imposing a full blockade on Gaza in 2007, supported by its Egyptian allies, Israel periodically expanded its buffer zone, confining Palestinians to an ever-smaller stretch of land. The deadly logic of the “buffer zone” culminated in the mass fatalities of the 2018 Great March of Return, when Israeli forces killed at least 234 Palestinians and wounded more than 33,000 who had moved “too close” to the fence enclosing the Strip. Those decades of land grabs may now reach their apogee with the newest plan for Gaza, which continues to implement what many Palestinians call the deliberate process of ongoing Nakba.

Considering the Trump plan within this historical trajectory, we can identify four prongs to the strategy of dispossession. The yellow line itself is the first. Under the terms of the ceasefire, Israeli forces were required to “withdraw to the agreed upon line,” a directive that quietly allowed the Israeli army to retain direct control of at least 58% of Gaza. The fortification, in other words, shrinks the Palestinian portion of Gaza to less than half of the Strip—no more than 64 square miles, or one-fifth of New York City. This is history echoing once more: During the 1948 Nakba, more than 200,000 Palestinian refugees fled southwest, ending up confined to the Gaza Strip. During the genocide of 2023-25, Israeli forces have carried out the same process within the Gaza Strip itself, violently displacing nearly two million Palestinians and enclosing them on the western side of the yellow line.

And that’s not likely to be the end of yellow-line fueled dispossession. After Palestinians pointed out that the yellow line’s location was unclear, Israel announced on October 20th that it had started laying down yellow concrete blocks on the ground to “create tactical clarity.” But far from removing ambiguity, the physical blocks have only increased it, as Israel has kept moving them further inside Gaza. There have also been repeated news accounts of Israeli forces launching ground invasions to carry out attacks across the yellow line, breaching the ceasefire condition that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza.”

Just as when Israel repeatedly violated the terms of Oslo in the 1990s—delaying its military evacuation from Gaza City, for example, and later invading supposedly PA-controlled territory—it has faced no consequences for its ongoing breaches. In fact, far from demanding that Israel comply with the agreement, evidence is mounting that the White House is quietly colluding with behind-the-scenes plans for Israel’s permanent occupation and even annexation of Gaza. The same week that the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2803, the US pushed forward with proposals to permanently partition the Gaza Strip—turning the yellow line from a temporary military buffer into a possible future border. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians and right-wing activists continue to advocate for the permanent expulsion of Gaza’s Palestinians, with overwhelming support from the Jewish Israeli public—82% in one recent poll.

The ISF forms the second prong of Trump land grabs, one that also harks back to the Oslo Accords. Touted in the ’90s as a peaceful resolution to decades of violence, and publicly framed in the discourse of a “two-state solution,” Oslo—like the Trump plan today—centered mainly on the Israelis’ primary concern: their own national security. After the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established in 1994 under the auspices of Oslo, almost half of its employees were hired to perform a security function. They were tasked not with protecting the security of the Palestinian people, but rather with suppressing any activity deemed a threat to Israeli interests—including nonviolent civil resistance to the occupation. As a result, the PA quickly gained a reputation among Palestinians as a pawn of the Israeli military.

Today, similar dynamics are once again at play with the ISF. While the ISF’s membership is unconfirmed as yet, it will reportedly include troops from various Arab and Muslim countries, among them Azerbaijan, Egypt, Indonesia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—though none of them has formally corroborated their participation. According to the White House, the ISF will help train a new Palestinian police force in Gaza and manage internal security affairs, while also playing a lead role in “demilitarizing” Gaza and “securing the borders.” The latter are both elastic Israeli demands with a range of possible meanings—not least because the “borders” in question are unspecified, opening them up to further land grabs. It’s a set-up that virtually guarantees that Palestinian territory will just keep shrinking. Indeed, several Arab and Muslim critics have expressed concerns that their governments’ participation could make them “a stooge of the Israeli state.”

The arrangements for Palestinian governance, which form the third prong of the dispossession strategy under the Trump plan, again recall Oslo. Proponents of the ’90s agreement touted the PA as a precursor to Palestinian independence. But there was one rather big hitch: Israel never agreed to the creation of a fully sovereign Palestinian state, even when it was run by supposedly “peacenik” prime ministers like Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. During the Oslo process, Israel agreed to give the PA only limited autonomy (not sovereignty) over just 18% of the West Bank and three-quarters of the Gaza Strip; it also insisted on keeping the illegal settlement blocs that have taken up yet more Palestinian land. As a result, the Oslo process tightly constrained the PA’s powers—allowing it no national army, no sovereign control of borders, and no economic independence. Further, Palestinian self-determination was deferred until “final status negotiations” that never came, while the core issues of the Palestinian struggle—the right of return and the status of Jerusalem—went ignored.

In the 2020s, the current Israeli prime minister has repeatedly made clear his unconditional opposition to a Palestinian state of any size, even as most European governments continue to publicly back the two-state formula as the only possible way forward. As a result, the Trump plan provides for even less Palestinian autonomy than was granted under Oslo. There is no equivalent to the PA in the plan; only a transitional committee overseen by Trump’s Board of Peace. Tellingly, the plan speaks of Palestinian statehood and self-determination as an “aspiration”—not a right—and merely suggests that after development and reform, “conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway” to it.

The fourth and perhaps most overt land-grabbing tool involves neo-colonial forms of reconstruction. Under these plans, the Israeli-controlled “green zone” (east Gaza) would be reconstructed with support from US-backed actors, many of whom see Gaza as little more than a profit-making opportunity. At the end of November, the US State Department confirmed a scheme to establish “alternative safe communities” (ASCs) that would house Palestinians in the green zone. Yet with virtually the entire Palestinian population of Gaza currently confined to the western side of the yellow line—the designated “red zone”—it is unclear how they would be moved to the ASCs, or what this would mean for the red zone’s future. The ASC proposal also shows some alarming continuities with plans floated by the Israeli government in July to establish a “humanitarian city” to intern all Gaza’s Palestinians, which even some internal critics compared to a concentration camp. As they “reconstruct” Gaza on their own terms, the US and Israel look set to continue with such plans, extending the decades-long displacement and confinement of the Palestinian people.

The consequences of the Trump plan have already been deadly. Since the Gaza ceasefire ostensibly came into effect on October 10th, Israel has reportedly violated its terms more than 500 times. It has also openly ignored certain clauses, such as the requirement to open Gaza’s Rafah crossing with Egypt; Prime Minister Netanyahu recently indicated that his government may eventually open it, but only for Palestinians leaving Gaza. This is a direct breach of the agreement, which specifies that Rafah should be opened “in both directions” and that Palestinians outside the Strip should be “free to return.”

Most disturbingly, during the so-called “ceasefire” of recent weeks, Israeli forces have continued to open fire on Palestinians in Gaza, killing at least 360 people, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly. Many were killed for the “crime” of crossing the yellow line into Israeli-held Gazan territory while seeking to return to the homes and neighborhoods from which Israeli forces displaced them over two years of genocide. Despite its professed commitment to the ceasefire, the Trump administration has failed to condemn, let alone prevent, these repeated violations.

As with previous “international” plans for Palestine—from Oslo to Jared Kushner’s “Deal of the Century”—the Trump plan presents Israeli gains as concessions and Palestinian losses as rewards. The West’s continuing preoccupation with Israeli conceptions of security, combined with outsiders’ shameless pursuit of their own political and financial interests, steadily keeps the focus away from human rights, let alone reparative justice. As Israel uses the cover of yet another “international” agreement to seize more land and establish new facts on the ground, it is all coming—once again—at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Anne Irfan is the author of A Short History of the Gaza Strip.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/how-trumps-gaza-plan-is-enabling-another-israeli-land-grab at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

REPORT | 8 DEC 2025, 5:21 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

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An Educational Crusade in East Jerusalem

Under the pretext of “national security,” Israel is ramping up its longstanding attacks on Palestinian education in the city.

Jonathan Shamir

Students walk past an UNRWA school in East Jerusalem, February 18th.

Saeed Qaq/NurPhoto via AP

In the middle of the school day on May 7th, Israeli forces stormed three United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools in the East Jerusalem refugee camp of Shuafat. Accompanied by education ministry officials, heavily armed police officers evacuated the schools’ 550 students, who ranged in age from six to 15. “Many of the kids were preparing for their final exams and went home in tears,” Roland Friedrich, the head of UNRWA in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, told Jewish Currents. “It was a very traumatizing experience for the children, and in clear violation of international law and their right to education.”

Ever since the Oslo Accords granted the Palestinian Authority (PA) autonomy over educational policy, students at most of East Jerusalem’s schools—including those run by UNRWA—have been taught a curriculum grounded in Palestinian history and culture. In response, right-wing Israeli groups and politicians have led a sustained campaign against these institutions—accusing them of promoting terrorism and trying to force them to move to an Israeli curriculum. Given Israel’s longstanding interest in shutting down UNRWA, the agency’s East Jerusalem schools have become a particular target—especially after October 7th. Emboldened by leaders from across the spectrum accusing the agency of collaborating with Hamas, in May 2024 Israeli protesters threatened UNRWA staff with guns and set fire to the perimeter of the organization’s compound. In October of the same year, the Knesset passed new legislation to expel UNRWA from East Jerusalem and criminalize any official contact with the agency; the raid in Shuafat represented the enforcement of this law.

The shuttering of UNRWA schools, which educate less than one percent of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem, is only one step in an escalating Israeli campaign to place the city’s Palestinian education system under a security lens. In November 2024, the Israeli government passed a law permitting the education ministry to withhold funding from schools where “expressions of sympathy with terrorist acts are occurring or being permitted.” The law also empowered the education ministry to dismiss teachers suspected of holding such sympathies. Another bill, this one preventing all schools in Israel from hiring graduates of Palestinian universities in the future, is in the final stages of approval and is likely to become law. (Sixty percent of teachers in East Jerusalem schools are alumni of Palestinian institutions.)

According to critics, Israel’s ultimate goal with such moves is to suppress Palestinian identity. In a recent report, Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO that works to promote a more equitable Jerusalem, described the new policies as “a direct attack on the right of children in East Jerusalem to learn according to their identity, heritage, and culture.” The political scientist Nathan J. Brown, who has researched the development and content of the PA curriculum, concurred. Israel’s attacks on education are “part of a broader project that looks to liquidate all the structures and institutions of Palestinian national life,” he told Jewish Currents, “so that you are left with Palestinians without Palestine.”

Soon after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, it attempted to replace the Jordanian education system with an Israeli alternative. “Since the very beginning, Israel wanted to change the curriculum as a means to assert its sovereignty over Jerusalem,” Gaal Yanovski, a researcher at Ir Amim, told Jewish Currents. Only a general strike from the Palestinian population forced Israel to retreat from such efforts, and the Jordanian curriculum remained in place for several decades—reviewed and censored by the Israeli authorities, but not altogether in their control.

“Since the very beginning, Israel wanted to change the curriculum as a means to assert its sovereignty over Jerusalem.”

After the signing of the Oslo Accords, the East Jerusalem education system moved into the hands of the newly established PA, which developed a curriculum with a greater emphasis on Palestinian history and identity. Israel’s security establishment was initially disinterested in challenging this curriculum; so long as the PA was abiding by its security commitments, Brown told Jewish Currents, Israel was content to let the issue of Palestinian education be. “It is only when Netanyahu was first elected [in 1996] on a platform of rejecting the Oslo Accords that he desperately looked for a new excuse to avoid fulfilling Israel’s end of the bargain,” he said. “And he found it by seizing on ‘incitement’ in education . . . and framing it as a primary driver of conflict.”

Even so, the status quo was slow to change, and only did so amid the security crises of the 2010s. It was in this period that officials began turning to the Palestinian education system as an explanation for outbursts of violence, resulting in a reality where “education and terror are closely linked in the Israeli psyche,” as per Tess Miller, a staff member at Ir Amim. The shift became especially pronounced following the “knife intifada” of 2015 and 2016, when Palestinian youth carried out a wave of stabbing attacks across Israel. Subsequently, education officials formulated what the historian Amnon Ramon describes as “the first plan to encourage schools in East Jerusalem to transition to an Israeli curriculum through a special supplementary budget.” The plan offered extra resources to schools that taught the Israeli curriculum, with then-education minister Naftali Bennett explicitly stating that he wanted to prioritize “every school that chooses the Israeli curriculum” in order to “aid the Israelization process.”

In 2018, this logic would come to be institutionalized in Resolution 3790, Israel’s first five-year plan for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. While the resolution was presented as a broad investment program, nearly half of its 445 million NIS ($133 million) education budget was reserved specifically for schools that adopted the Israeli curriculum. “The plan had dozens of chapters and goals, but its real centerpiece was transferring Palestinians to the Israeli syllabus,” Ir Amim’s Yanovski explained. He noted that “there was still an element of choice to the policy” because the Israeli curriculum was being promoted rather than imposed: “The thinking was that with the right incentives, [Palestinian] parents would eventually see it as better for them.” But the real purpose of these moves, and the veiled threat beneath them, was always clear. As then-mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barakat clarified in 2018 while proposing an earlier version of a law to expel UNRWA from the city, Israeli leaders’ true goal in the city was “putting an end to the lie of the ‘Palestinian refugee problem’ and the attempts at creating a false [Palestinian] sovereignty within [Israeli] sovereignty.”

In recent years, Israel has continued to build on this strategy of leveraging investments to force Palestinians to change their curriculum. For 2024-28, the government allocated an expanded budget of $860 million to East Jerusalem, with $215 million reserved for education. Schools had to adopt the Israeli curriculum to receive much of this funding. In fact, this budget set explicit targets for increasing the share of students studying the Israeli curriculum in Jerusalem municipality‑run schools, from 24% in 2022-23 to at least 45% by 2027-28. (According to municipal data obtained by Ir Amim, the figure stood at 27% as of this August.)

Since October 7th, the push to remake the Palestinian education system has accelerated, with the far-right repeatedly alleging that Palestinian education constitutes “incitement” to violence. At the center of this drive is Avichai Boaron, a settler activist and Likud lawmaker who took over as chair of the Knesset subcommittee on East Jerusalem’s education system in 2024, and who treats Palestinian schooling as a national security emergency. In this role, Boaron has said that “every classroom where there is incitement to terrorism is a classroom with 30 potential terrorists.” Following this logic, he suggested that Israel should fund the retraining of Palestinian teachers to address such “incitement” and, in a heated speech in the Knesset, warned Jerusalem Affairs Minister Meir Porush that “October 7th, 2030 will be on your hands” after the latter refused to adopt Boaron’s 100 million NIS ($30 million) proposal for retraining teachers.

Thanks to the advocacy of Boaron and his ilk, the educational part of the East Jerusalem five-year plan has remained fully budgeted despite the sweeping spending cuts Israel has undertaken to finance its many wars. And as before, such funding is overtly conditioned on Israelization. Boaron has said as much in meetings of his subcommittee, baldly stating that “we have to inculcate one Israeli curriculum in all the schools, and whoever doesn’t want to cooperate won’t get money.”

Before, the children were learning about Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Nakba, and the Naksa; now, they are taught about the Wailing Wall, Israeli Independence Day, and the Six-Day War.

For East Jerusalem’s already disadvantaged Palestinians, this campaign poses a quandary. Around 70% of Palestinian youth in the city live below the poverty line, and structural discrimination has meant that tens of thousands are attending overcrowded and otherwise substandard schools. In 2023, the Israeli Supreme Court deemed that these conditions amounted to “differential treatment” and ordered the city’s authorities to submit a plan to address them; however, city officials have repeatedly ignored the court’s orders. This has left East Jerusalem’s Palestinians desperate for quality education, a fact that the Israeli right is relying on as it pushes unpopular curricular changes onto parents. “Israel has created a vacuum through a lack of basic services, and then exploited the situation so that the only choice for parents is to accept a school where they have to put their Palestinian identity aside,” Ir Amim’s Miller explained.

The recent ban on UNRWA schools has tightened this bind. Shaher Alkam, the chair of the parents’ committee of UNRWA schools in Shuafat, told Jewish Currents that for months, many of the students from the three forcibly closed schools in Shuafat remained out of school altogether. In this context, most parents were left with no choice but to send their children to Arabic-language schools that teach the Israeli syllabus. “It is agony for the parents who have to send their children through a checkpoint, which can take more than two hours each way, into a part of the city that their children do not know, to study a curriculum that goes against their identity,” Alkam said. Before, their children were learning about Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Nakba, and the Naksa; now, they are taught about the Wailing Wall, Israeli Independence Day, and the Six-Day War. Most significantly for those who live in Shuafat refugee camp, all references to Palestinian refugees and the right of return are erased from their children’s new program of study, even as they navigate the militarized checkpoints and systemic discrimination that continue to define their plight as refugees.

Despite its role in animating these sweeping changes, the idea that the Palestinian education system is a driver of violence is contradicted by Israel’s own evidence. At one of Boaron’s subcommittee meetings in 2024, security officials presented him with data on the correlation between being educated in the Palestinian system and committing crimes with nationalist motives. In the end, the statistics that Boaron had long demanded demonstrated the opposite of his expectations: It was the Israeli education system, and not its Palestinian counterpart, that was more likely to push Palestinians toward violence. Even more significantly, the data showed that youth who were either not registered or had dropped out of school were far more likely to carry out violent attacks—exactly the conditions that Israel created for the students in Shuafat and across Jerusalem.

Boaron, however, remained undeterred by evidence, and is determined to achieve even greater securitization. His subcommittee already includes several officials from police and intelligence services, and has recently started focusing on topics such as dismantling barriers to data-sharing between schools and surveillance agencies. Suhad Bishara, a Palestinian lawyer who is representing the petitioners for an interim injunction against the UNRWA ban, told Jewish Currents that this lack of concern for evidence was unsurprising, as the East Jerusalem campaign has never truly been about security. “It is clear that there is no justification for securitizing education in this way. Instead, all of this is a pretext to erase the national identity of Palestinians.”

A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that the Israeli bill preventing schools from hiring graduates of Palestinian universities could, if passed, "lead to the firing of up to 60% of the current teaching staff in East Jerusalem." In fact, the law would not be applied retroactively but only affect future hires. The article has been updated to reflect this.

Jonathan Shamir is contributing writer at Jewish Currents and the former deputy editor of Haaretz.com.

jonathan_shamir

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/an-educational-crusade-in-east-jerusalem at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

REPORT | 2 DEC 2025, 6:33 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

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Miért fogadják tárt karokkal a magyar zsidó intézmények Orbánt és Netanjahut?

Október 7. óta a magyar zsidó szövetség visszavonult a jobboldali miniszterelnök kritizálásától, ami egyre hangosabb cionizmusellenes visszhangot váltott ki zsidó részről.

Larkin Cleland Fordította: Nagy Balázs

Orbán Viktor magyar miniszterelnök Budapesten fogadja Benjamin Netanjahu izraeli miniszterelnököt április 3-án.

Denes Erdos/AP

To read this article in English, click here.

A magyar rendőrség kontingense nem azért vonult ki a Four Seasons Hotel luxusszálloda elé, ahol Benjamin Netanjahu megszállt Budapesten idén áprilisban, hogy letartóztatást foganatosítsanak. Annak ellenére, hogy érvényes letartóztatási parancsot adott ki a Nemzetközi Büntetőbíróság (ICC) az izraeli miniszterelnök ellen, a rendőrök inkább azzal foglalkoztak, hogy a turistákat távol tartsák a szálloda előtti gyepről. Orbán Viktor magyar miniszterelnök döntésének köszönhetően Magyarország napokkal Netanjahu érkezése előtt megkezdte teljes kilépését a Nemzetközi Büntetőbíróságból, a rengeteg budapesti útlezárás nem azt a célt szolgálta, hogy megállítsa a letartóztatás elől menekülő izraeli vezetőt, hanem azt, hogy a fekete autókból álló konvoja akadálytalanul haladhasson a repülőtérről a zsidónegyed mellett a Duna-parti szállodába.

Nagy volt a felhajtás Netanjahu körül, aki 2017. óta először látogatott Magyarországra, méghozzá a fogadó ország kormánya és zsidó közössége közötti kapcsolatok szempontjából kényes pillanatban. A legutóbbi találkozót az Orbán-kormány plakátkampánya előzte meg, amelynek során Budapestet bevándorlásellenes üzenetekkel szórták tele, mellette Soros György magyar-amerikai filantróp mosolygó arcával. Sok plakátot szinte azonnal „koszos zsidó” és ehhez hasonló antiszemita graffitik borítottak el. Netanjahu látogatása alatt a Mazsihisz, a magyarországi zsidóság többségét tömörítő szervezet Orbán politikáját és antiszemitizmusra uszító retorikáját kritizálta, Netanjahut pedig azért, mert a két ország kapcsolatait a magyar zsidók érdekei elé helyezte. A kritika, amellyel együtt egy kérést is megfogalmaztak: „Netanjahu miniszterelnök úr, tisztelettel én arra kérem, segítse elő a diaszpóra nagyobb megbecsülését” – a rákövetkező napokban dominálta a világsajtó látogatásról szóló főcímeit.

Idén áprilisban viszont a szövetség egyik vezetőről sem fogalmazott meg nyilvános kritikát. Négy napon keresztül a Mazsihisz az Orbán-kormánnyal együtt lelkesen üdvözölte Netanjahut. A két miniszterelnök közös sajtótájékoztatója után a magyar zsidó közösségek vezetői kerekasztal-beszélgetést folytattak Netanjahuval, és mindkettőt elkísérték, amikor azok látogatást tettek a Duna-parti holokauszt-emlékműnél. A Mazsihisz weboldalán olvasható közlemény kiemelte a jó kapcsolatot Netanjahuval, és azt, hogy a szövetség kiemelkedő alakjai részt vettek a kerekasztal-beszélgetésen.

Büchler András, a Mazsihisz vezetőségének tagja szerint a szövetség új állásfoglalása tükrözi a közösség nagy részének politikai jobbra tolódását annak Izrael-politikája kapcsán. A változást a magyar zsidó identitás összetettségével és „azon identitás legerősebb pillérével”, a holokauszttal hozta összefüggésbe. Ugyanabban a városban, ahol a legtöbb magyarországi zsidó felmenői átélték a vészkorszakot, Büchler szerint a 2023. október 7-i Hamász-támadások újabb árnyalatot adtak a trauma emlékezetének. Most „bár a legtöbb zsidó hagyományosan baloldali és gyakran kritikus Orbánnal szemben, úgy látják, hogy ő az egyetlen, aki kiáll Izrael mellett”.

Bár a magyarországi zsidóság intézményei békülékenyen fordultak Netanjahu és Orbán felé, ez az álláspont nem általános. Netanjahu áprilisi látogatását kisebb tüntetések zavarták meg, egy csoport cionista zsidó tüntető izraeli zászlókat lengetett, azért gyűltek össze a zsidónegyedben, hogy elítéljék a látogatást tevő miniszterelnök gázai invázióval kapcsolatos szemléletét. Legutóbb idén augusztusban a magyar zsidó közösség közel 300 meghatározó alakja írt alá egy petíciót, amely szerint az izraeli kormány és a magyarországi zsidó szervezetek „nem képviselik a véleményünket”, és ellenállásukat fejezték ki a tűzszünettel kapcsolatos tüntetések magyarországi tilalma és Orbán nemzetközi büntetőbíróságból való kilépése ellen.

Netanjahu idei látogatása felhívta a figyelmet a zsidó intézmények és a zsidóság közötti liberális konszenzusban kialakult repedésekre, amelyek korábban mind a belföldi problémákat és a konzervatív kormánnyal szembeni ellenállást helyezték előtérbe az Izraellel kapcsolatos kérdésekkel szemben. Most a zsidó intézmények az október 7. utáni félelmekre úgy reagáltak, hogy közelebb igazodtak Orbánhoz, aki azt állítja, hogy csak ő tudja garantálni a zsidók biztonságát belföldön és Izraelt támogatni nemzetközi szinten – és aki ezt az érvet igyekezett megerősíteni azzal, hogy befektetett a város zsidónegyedébe irányuló turizmusba, amely projekt jövedelmezőnek bizonyult a Mazsihisz számára. Ugyanakkor a cionizmusellenesség erősödik a zsidóság bizonyos rétegei körében, akik egyre inkább elidegenednek a hagyományos zsidó szervezetek kormányzati narratívájától.

„Közösségünkben mindig is voltak Izrael-kritikus hangok, de elnémították őket, vagy öncenzúrába kezdtek” – mondta a Haaretznek Surányi Ráchel, a budapesti Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem szociológusa, aki a magyar zsidó közösséget kutatja. Az általa aláírt kritikus petíció „azt mutatja, hogy a dolgok változnak”.

Izraeli és magyar zászlók díszítik a budapesti Széchenyi Lánchidat Netanjahu látogatása előtt.

Larkin Cleland

2017-ben, amikor Heisler András, a Mazsihisz (Magyarországi Zsidó Hitközségek Szövetsége) akkori elnöke és a magyarországi zsidó közösség de facto vezetője kamerák előtt szemrehányást tett Orbánnak, szervezete már feszült kapcsolatban állt a miniszterelnök jobboldali kormányával. Ez a szakadás 2014-ben kezdődött, amikor az Orbán-kormány pénzforrásokat osztott szét a helyi önkormányzatok és civil társadalmi szervezetek között a holokauszt 70. évfordulójára rendezett megemlékezések megszervezésére, ebből 1 millió dollárral egyenértékű összeget közvetlenül a Mazsihisz számára. De a zsidó közösség „anomáliákat” kezdett észrevenni – ahogy Heisler egy interjúban fogalmazott – a kormány emlékezetpolitikájában, amelynek legszembetűnőbb szimbóluma egy budapesti központi téren felállított, a német megszállás áldozatainak emlékműve volt, amely a zsidó és baloldali csoportok haragját váltotta ki azzal, hogy tagadta a nácik szövetségeseként működő magyar kormány szerepét a holokausztban. A Mazsihisz úgy döntött, hogy visszaadja az 1 millió dollár értékű összeget a kormánynak – ezt a döntést Orbán kormánya „arculcsapásnak” tekintett Heisler szerint –, és sok közösségi tag nem vett részt a kormány által finanszírozott eseményeket az egész emlékév során.

Bár ezután egyfajta béke köttetett, Heisler szerint a közösség hozzáállása a kormányhoz továbbra is gyanakvó maradt, amikor 2017-ben híre ment, hogy Netanjahu Magyarországra látogat. Az év során közel 2000 magyar zsidó megkérdezésével készült felmérésből kiderült, hogy csupán elhanyagolható 1 %-uk támogatta Orbán Viktor kormányzó Fidesz pártját, annak ellenére, hogy a párt országos szinten közel 49%-ot kapott a szavazatokból, és a következő évi parlamenti választásokon kétharmados többséget szerzett. Hasonlóképpen ez a reprezentatív zsidó minta következetesen progresszívebb véleményeket fogalmazott meg, mint a képzett magyarok összehasonlító mintája – például a zsidók csak 14 %-a támogatta a menekültek befogadásának korlátozását, míg az egyetemi végzettséggel rendelkező magyarok 66 %-a támogatta ezt.

Heisler szerint a magyar zsidók eleinte izgatottan várták az első izraeli államfő látogatását, mióta Magyarország 1989-ben helyreállította diplomáciai kapcsolatait Izraellel, de az izraeli miniszterelnök hamarosan belekeveredett a közösség és szövetségese, Orbán közötti feszültségekbe. Először is Netanjahu eredeti útiterve nem tartalmazott találkozót a magyar zsidó közösséggel. Aztán miután megjelentek a Sorosról szóló óriásplakátok, az izraeli külügyminisztérium egy nyilatkozatban védelmébe vette azokat, és Sorost legitim célpontnak nevezte. Amikor végül nyilvános rendezvényt szerveztek Heisler, Netanjahu és Orbán számára, a Mazsihisz vezetője meglátta a lehetőséget, hogy felszólaljon: „A szándék az volt, hogy egy nagyon udvarias, nagyon kimért beszédet mondjak, de jelezzem ebben azokat a konfliktuszónákat, amik léteznek, és amikben kérem az ő segítségüket” – mondta.

Ma azonban a Mazsihisz vezetése, élén a korábban a magyar honvédségnél orvosként dolgozó és 2023-ban Heisler posztját megöröklő Grósz Andorral, más hozzáállást tanúsít Orbánnal szemben. A szövetség ma már nyíltan bírálja Heisler kritikáját. A Jewish Currents kérdéseire adott írásbeli válaszában Mester Tamás, a Mazsihisz alelnöke és a helyi BZSH (Budapesti Zsidó Hitközség) elnöke „diplomáciai hibának” nevezte a volt vezető Netanjahu és Orbán felé tett kijelentését. Mester szerint elképzelhetetlen, hogy egy magyar zsidó vezető nyilvánosan bírálja az izraeli kormányt a zsidó érdekekkel ellentétes politikája miatt, de „ilyen magatartást a Netanjahu-kormányzat nem folytat, nem folytatott”.

Orbánnal kapcsolatban Mester dicsérte a miniszterelnök Izrael iránti támogatását az ENSZ-ben és az Európai Unióban, valamint a hazai zsidó ügyekhez való hozzáállását: „A kormányzat következetesen kiáll a magyar zsidó közösség mellett. Nem kell szembesülnünk a nyugat-európai – nem egyszer halálos áldozatokat, súlyos sebesülteket követelő – új típusú, szélsőséges iszlamista vagy ultrabalos szellemiségű antiszemitizmussal.” Megismételte a kormány üzenetét, miszerint Magyarországon a zsidók biztonságban élhetnek, és elmondta, hogy bár egyes megfigyelők szerint „a belpolitikai kommunikáció bizonyos elemei – például a migrációellenes vagy »Soros György«-ellenes kampányok – olyan szimbólumokat és narratívákat használnak, amelyek egyesek szerint érzékenyen érinthetik a történelmi antiszemita toposzokat”, „a kormány ezeket a vádakat következetesen visszautasítja, hangsúlyozva, hogy politikáját nem etnikai vagy vallási, hanem nemzetbiztonsági és szuverenitási szempontok vezérlik”.

Heisler ezt a változást részben Grósz elnök hosszú ideig tartó, hierarchiában eltöltött szolgálatának tulajdonította, amely azt a meggyőződést keltette benne, hogy „a kormánnyal jó kapcsolatban kell lenni, és békés kapcsolatban kell lenni”. A Mazsihisz új álláspontja azonban összhangban lehet a magyar zsidók körében általánosan tapasztalható attitűdváltozással. A szociológus Surányi szerint a magyar zsidók Magyarországhoz és Izraelhez való viszonyát történelmileg az jellemzi, amit ő és kollégája, Gerő Márton „következetlen liberalizmusnak” neveznek. A Jewish Currentsnek adott interjújában így magyarázta: „Sok magyar zsidó azt állítja, hogy Magyarországot illetően baloldali liberálisok, de Izrael esetében a politikai oldalaknak más jelentésük van, nem bal- és jobboldalról van szó.” Valóban, miközben a belpolitikában progresszív álláspontot képviselnek, a 2017-es tanulmány azt is kimutatta, hogy a magyar zsidók többsége általában egyetért a Netanjahu-kormány által képviselt izraeli politikával. A Netanjahu két magyarországi látogatása közötti években a közösség belpolitikája valószínűleg elkezdett közelebb kerülni az izraeli konzervatív politika támogatásához.

A budapesti zsidónegyedben, a Dohány utcai zsinagóga előtt található teret, amelyet hivatalosan Herzl Tivadar térnek neveznek, nem hivatalosan „Október 7. térnek” nevezték át.

Larkin Cleland

Ma, bár a 2017-es tanulmány óta nem készült újabb reprezentatív felmérés, Surányi szerint a zsidó közösségben legalább néhányan „azt mondják, hogy Orbánra szavaznának csak azért, mert támogatja Netanjahut és Izraelt”, ami 2017-ben még gyakorlatilag ismeretlen álláspont volt. Szerinte a változás okai összetettek, a magyar társadalomban jelen lévő idegengyűlöletből és iszlamofóbiából fakadnak, és egy olyan évtizedet követnek, amelynek során „Orbán folyamatosan nyomta ezt a morális pánikgombot” a migránsokkal szemben. „Azt hiszem, ez beleivódott a zsidók gondolkodásába” – mondta Surányi. A Magyarországon gyorsan növekvő, konzervatív és gyakran a Fideszhez közel álló Chabad mozgalom újkeletű felemelkedése is szerepet játszott ebben. Végeredményben, tekintettel az Orbán és Netanjahu között az első látogatás után kialakult személyes barátságra, egyes zsidók elkezdhették összekapcsolni a magyar vezető támogatását Izrael támogatásával. Október 7. csak szorosabbra fűzte ezeket a kötelékeket: Surányi – akinek saját kutatása részben a magyar zsidó médiában Izraelről folyó, nagyon kiegyensúlyozatlan diskurzusra összpontosít – a közösség általános hozzáállását így jellemezte: „Hogyan lehet Izraelt kritizálni, miután megtámadták?”

A látszólagos jobboldalra tolódás ellenére sok magyarországi zsidó nem ért egyet sem azzal, hogy a közösség támogatja Izraelt, sem azzal, hogy a Mazsihisz békejobbot nyújt a magyar kormánynak. Az augusztusi petícióban az aláírók – köztük Jámbor András parlamenti képviselő, Karsai László holokauszt-történész és Máté Gábor kanadai-magyar orvos – kifejezték szolidaritásukat mind „az október 7-i támadások zsidó áldozataival, mind a gázai ártatlan palesztin áldozatokkal”, és bírálatukban a magyar zsidó intézményeket és a kormányt is megemlítették, amiért elnyomják az Izraellel kapcsolatos nyílt vitát. „Alig van olyan platform vagy intézmény, amely merne részt venni ezekben a vitákban és árnyalt beszélgetésekben” – írták. „Sőt, az elmúlt hónapokban aktívan visszavonták a meghívásokat azoktól a zsidó képviselőktől, akik nem a radikális izraeli kormány álláspontját hangoztatják.”

Margit Anna, egy berlini aktivista, aki Budapest zsidónegyedének szívében nőtt fel, és az elmúlt hónapokban gyakran visszatért a városba, hogy anticionista zsidó rendezvényeket szervezzen, elmondta, hogy egyre növekvő anticionista hangulatot észlel a zsidó közösségen belül, különösen a fiatalok körében. De ezek közül az anticionisták közül kevesen érzik úgy, hogy a Mazsihiszhez hasonló zsidó intézmények őket képviselik – mondta Margit. Magyarországon, mondta, „úgy tűnik, hogy a cionizmus az egyetlen világ a zsidók számára, az egyetlen bolygó. Ha az emberek kilépnek a cionizmusból, az olyan, mintha eltűnnének a föld színéről”. A petíció közzétételét követő napokban a Szombat, Magyarország legnagyobb zsidó lapjának szerkesztője cikket tett közzé, amelyben elítélte az aláírókat önreflexió hiányáért, és azzal vádolta őket, hogy „nem törik meg a csendet, hanem csatlakoznak egy szüntelenül és egyre agresszívebben üvöltő kórushoz”.

Strukturális okai is vannak annak, hogy a zsidó intézmények nem szívesen szakítanak a kormánnyal. Novák Attila, a magyarországi és közép-kelet-európai holokausztot és cionista mozgalmakat kutató történész szerint míg más országok zsidó gyülekezetei, amelyek adományokból vagy tagdíjakból tartják fenn magukat, a magyarországi zsinagógák finanszírozásuk nagy részét a Mazsihiszen keresztül kapják, amely viszont állami támogatást kap a zsidó kórházak, iskolák és idősek otthonainak hálózatának fenntartására, valamint arra, hogy a kommunista rezsim által illegálisan elkobzott vallási ingatlanokért kormányzati kártérítést nyújtson. Emellett a zsidó látványosságokhoz kapcsolódó turizmusból is szerez bevételt. A Mazsihisz költségvetésének szinte teljes egészét ez a három forrás biztosítja, nagyjából egyenlő arányban, ami a kormányzattal való kapcsolatot rendkívül fontossá teszi. „Ha az állam nem ad pénzt, akkor nincs pénz” – mondta Novák. „Akkor nem tudnak fizetni rabbikat, nem tudják takarítani a zsinagógákat.” Míg a kormány szociális szolgáltatásokra szánt forrásai és a történelmi ingatlanokért járó kártérítés elvileg évről évre garantált – ez az egyik oka annak, hogy Heisler volt elnök úgy látja, a szövetség nem függött különösebben a kormánytól –, az új projektekhez és a sürgősen szükséges felújításokhoz szükséges további pénzek az állammal való jó kapcsolatoktól függenek.

A gyülekezetek szintjén a rabbik azt mondják, hogy a Mazsihisz nyomást gyakorol rájuk, hogy kerüljenek el minden olyan vitát, amely veszélyeztetheti ezt a finanszírozást. Egy rabbit 2020-ban rövid időre kizártak a szövetségből és elbocsátottak, mert Facebook-bejegyzéseiben kritizálta Izraelt. Egy másik rabbi, aki névtelenséget kért, hogy elkerülje a következményeket saját maga és zsinagógája számára, elmondta, hogy a Mazsihisz finanszírozása a gyülekezet költségvetésének több mint felét teszi ki, amely Budapest egyik leghaladóbb gyülekezete, és megosztott az Izrael és a cionizmus támogatása kérdésében. „Van függőség, és nem is kicsi függőség, a Mazsihisztől, és rajtuk keresztül a kormányzattól is” – mondta.

Még a Mazsihisz költségvetésének legfüggetlenebb harmada, a turizmusból származó bevételek is egyre szorosabban összefonódtak az állammal, mivel a magyar kormány a nemzetközi látogatókra koncentrált, hogy fellendítse a gyengélkedő gazdaságot. Budapest zsidónegyede, ahol három felújított zsinagóga található, kiemelt látványosság, amelyet a kormány turisztikai anyagokban is erőteljesen népszerűsít. A budapesti gettóegykori helyszíne évtizedekig hanyatlott, majd a 2000-es években vált híressé a lerobbant lakóházakba épített „romkocsmák” miatt. Az Airbnb és a fapados légitársaságok megjelenésével ma már évente több millióan látogatják a negyedet, és jelentősen hozzájárulnak a turisztikai bevételekhez, amelyek Magyarország GDP-jének több mint 13 %-át teszik ki. A helyi lakosok életminőségét érintő problémákra reagálva a helyi önkormányzat tervet dolgozott ki a buliturizmusról a kulturális turizmusra való átállásra, ezen belül pedig a zsidó témájú kulturális turizmusra, amely anyagi és szimbolikus szempontból is hasznos a kormány számára. Orbán ezt a láthatóan zsidó negyedet használja arra, hogy alátámassza azt az állítását, hogy „Magyarország a zsidó közösség számára a legbiztonságosabb ország”, köszönhetően a „radikális iszlám” befolyását megakadályozó bevándorlásellenes politikájának. Eközben a zsidónegyed több étterme és szállodája Orbán támogatói hálózatának, a NER csoportnak tagjai tulajdonában van.

A zsidó szervezetek is profitálnak ebből. Mester, a Mazsihisz alelnöke kifejezetten megemlítette a Jewish Currentsnek, hogy nagyra értékeli az Orbán-kormány intézkedéseit, „ennek keretében több program és kezdeményezés indult a zsidó kulturális örökség megőrzésére és a közösségi élet támogatására”, beleértve a zsinagógák és emlékművek felújítását is. A három híres imahely egyikét, a Rumbach utcai zsinagógát a Mazsihisz nemrégiben felújította a kormánytól kapott 3,2 milliárd forint (akkori értéken több mint 11 millió dollár) támogatásból. A Mazsihisz kezeli a Dohány utcai zsinagógát is, amely Európa legnagyobb zsinagógája, és amely a Mazsihisz turisztikai iroda igazgatója szerint évente több mint félmillió nemzetközi látogatót vonz, akik hajlandóak megfizetni a borsos belépőjegyárat. A beruházások azonban alig forgatnak vissza valamit a negyed szoros kötelékű magyar zsidó közösségébe, amelynek többsége a turisztikai fellendüléssel együtt távozott. Büchler, a Mazsihisz igazgatótanácsának tagja, egyben egy kis kézműves zsidó ajándékbolt társtulajdonosa is a környéken. Míg a tulajdonosok remélik, hogy újjáéleszthetik az egykor itt virágzó magyar zsidó élet és anyagi kultúra egy részét, elismerte, hogy a vásárlók 95 %-a turista, és a környék helyzetét „egyfajta holokauszt-Disneylandhez” hasonlította.

Magyarország zsidó közösségének, amely szomszédai között egyedülálló abban, hogy sok képzett városi zsidó túlélte a holokausztot Budapesten, hosszú történelmi tapasztalata van abban, hogy hogyan alkalmazkodjon és éljen túl az illiberális és elnyomó kormányok alatt. Ebben a fényben talán a jelenlegi politikai változás inkább visszatérés a normához, mint új fejlemény. Novák szerint Heisler mandátumát és néhány, az antiszemitizmussal kapcsolatos összetűzést leszámítva a posztszocialista 90-es évek káoszában, a Mazsihisz soha nem volt olyan szervezet, amely erőteljesen bírálta volna a kormányt. Egyesek számára túl nagy a kockázat, hogy Orbán rossz oldalára kerüljenek, mint kisebbségi közösség.

Egy másik rabbi, aki a Mazsihiszhez tartozó gyülekezetet vezet, és szintén kérte, hogy nevét ne hozzák nyilvánosságra, pragmatikus szempontból foglalta össze a zsidó intézmény előtt álló választási lehetőségeket. „Ha zsidó vagyok, és még száz évig itt akarok maradni Magyarországon, és nem akarok elmenni, és a magyar nép négy egymást követő ciklusban sem tudja leváltani a Fidesz-kormányt, akkor nekem kell ellenzéki szerepet játszani a magyar nép helyett?” – fogalmazott. „Miért játszanánk ezt a szerepet? A mi feladatunk a közösségeink fenntartása.” Ennek eredményeként a magyar zsidóknak, akik intézményes vallási keretek nélkül szerveződnek, maradt a feladat, hogy ellenzékbe álljanak Orbán kormányzásával és a cionizmussal szemben. Ez a helyzet arra késztette Margitot, a berlini aktivistát, hogy rájöjjön: hangjára szükség van a hazai zsidó közösségben: „Meg kell próbálnom tenni valamit Magyarországon. Mert szerintem sokan vannak, akik cionizmusellenes zsidók, de nem mernek semmit sem mondani, mert azt hiszik, hogy egyedül vannak.”

Larkin Cleland is a journalist and urban geographer. He recently completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Hungary, focusing on the history and politics of the development of Budapest’s Jewish Quarter.

Nagy Balázs fordító és nyelvtanár. Angol–magyar fordításokkal és nemzetközi témákkal foglalkozik.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/why-hungarian-jewish-institutions-are-embracing-orban-and-netanyahu-translation at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

REPORT | 2 DEC 2025, 6:33 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 22 JAN 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

Why Hungarian Jewish Institutions Are Embracing Orbán and Netanyahu

Since October 7th, Hungary’s Jewish federation has backed away from criticism of its right-wing prime minister, prompting an increasingly vocal anti-Zionist Jewish response.

Larkin Cleland

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Budapest on April 3rd.

Denes Erdos/AP

A cikk magyar nyelvű változata itt olvasható.

The contingent of Hungarian police in front of the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel where Benjamin Netanyahu stayed in Budapest this April were not there to make an arrest. Despite the active warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the Israeli prime minister, the officers concerned themselves mostly with keeping tourists off the grassy lawn. Thanks to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s decision to begin the process of withdrawing from the ICC just days before Netanyahu’s arrival, the slew of road closures across Budapest were aimed not at stopping the fugitive Israeli leader, but rather at speeding his convoy of black vans from the airport, past the Jewish Quarter, and toward the hotel on the banks of the Danube.

The fanfare marked Netanyahu’s first visit to Hungary since 2017, when he arrived at a thorny moment for the relationship between his host country’s government and its Jewish community. That previous junket came on the heels of an Orbán government billboard campaign that plastered Budapest with anti-immigration messages alongside the smiling face of Hungarian American philanthropist George Soros; many billboards were promptly graffitied with antisemitic phrases like “dirty Jew.” During Netanyahu’s visit, the president of MAZSIHISZ, the federation representing the majority of Hungary’s Jewish population, reproached Orbán for policies and rhetoric that stoked antisemitism and Netanyahu for privileging bilateral relations between the two countries over the concerns of Hungarian Jews. This criticism, which included the plea, “Prime Minister Netanyahu, I ask you respectfully to promote higher respect for the diaspora,” dominated global headlines about the visit in the following days.

But this April, there was no public critique of either leader from the federation. Across four days, MAZSIHISZ participated enthusiastically alongside the Orbán government in welcoming Netanyahu. After a joint press conference by the two prime ministers, leaders of Hungary’s Jewish communities held a roundtable with Netanyahu and accompanied both on a visit to the Holocaust memorial on the banks of the river. The statement released afterward on the MAZSIHISZ website emphasized the warm relationship with Netanyahu and the attendance of the federation’s major figures at the roundtable.

According to András Büchler, a MAZSIHISZ board member, the federation’s new approach reflects the broader community’s recent move toward the political right in its Israel politics. He framed the shift as connected to the complexities of Hungarian Jewish identity and to “the strongest pillar of that identity,” the Holocaust. In the same city where the ancestors of most Hungarian Jews survived the ghetto, he said the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, have added a new “layer” to the memory of that trauma. Now, “even though traditionally most Jews are left-wing, often critical of Orbán, they feel like he is the one and only who would stand by Israel.”

Yet while the institutions of Hungarian Judaism have taken a conciliatory turn toward Netanyahu and Orbán, this view is not universal. Small protests did challenge Netanyahu’s April visit, including one group of Zionist Jewish protesters waving Israeli flags who gathered in the Jewish Quarter to denounce the visiting prime minister’s approach to the invasion of Gaza. More recently, in August, nearly 300 prominent Hungarian Jewish figures signed a petition stating that the Israeli government and Hungarian Jewish organizations “do not represent our opinion” and expressing opposition to a ban on ceasefire demonstrations in Hungary and to Orbán’s withdrawal from the ICC.

Netanyahu’s visit this year laid bare the cracks forming in the liberal consensus between Jewish institutions and the Jewish population, both of which had previously placed domestic concerns and opposition to the conservative government ahead of considerations about Israel. Now, Jewish institutions have reacted to post-October 7th fears by pulling closer to Orbán, who argues only he can guarantee Jewish safety at home and support Israel internationally—and who has sought to reinforce that argument by investing in tourism to the city’s Jewish Quarter, a project that has proved lucrative for MAZSIHISZ. At the same time, anti-Zionism is growing among certain segments of the Jewish population, who have become increasingly alienated by the traditional Jewish bodies’ embrace of the government’s narrative. “There were always critics of Israel in our community, but their voices were muted or they censored themselves,” Ráchel Surányi, a sociologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest who researches the Hungarian Jewish community, told Haaretz. The critical petition, which she signed, “shows that things are changing.”

Israeli and Hungarian flags decorate Budapest’s Széchenyi Chain Bridge in advance of Netanyahu’s visit.

Larkin Cleland

In 2017, when András Heisler, then-president of MAZSIHISZ (an acronym for the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, pronounced “maw-zhee-hees”) and the de facto leader of Hungary’s Jewish community, reproached Orbán in front of the cameras, his organization already had a strained relationship with the prime minister’s right-wing government. That rift began in 2014, when the Orbán government distributed funds for local municipalities and civil society organizations to hold remembrance events for the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust, including $1 million directly to MAZSIHISZ. But the Jewish community began to notice “anomalies,” as Heisler put it in an interview, in the government’s politics of remembrance, symbolized most prominently by the installation of the Monument for Victims of the German Occupation in a central square in Budapest, which angered Jewish and left-wing groups by denying the role of Hungarians and the Nazi-allied Hungarian government in the Holocaust. MAZSIHISZ decided to return the $1 million to the government—a decision that Orbán’s administration viewed as “a slap in the face,” according to Heisler—and many community members avoided government-funded events throughout the year of commemoration.

Though a peace of sorts was made afterward, according to Heisler, communal attitudes toward the government remained suspicious when in 2017 news arrived that Netanyahu would visit Hungary. A survey of nearly 2,000 Hungarian Jews in that year found that only a negligible 1% supported Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz Party, even as that party took nearly 49% of votes nationally and went on to secure a supermajority in the following year’s parliamentary elections. Likewise, this representative sample of Jews consistently expressed more progressive opinions than a comparative sample of educated Hungarians—for example, only 14% of Jews supported cracking down on the acceptance of refugees, whereas 66% of college-educated Hungarians did.

While Hungarian Jews, Heisler said, were initially excited about the first visit by an Israeli head of state since Hungary restored diplomatic ties with Israel in 1989, the Israeli prime minister soon also became implicated in the community’s tensions with his ally Orbán. First, Netanyahu’s initial itinerary didn’t include any meetings with the Hungarian Jewish community. Then, after the Soros billboards appeared, the Israeli foreign ministry defended them in a statement, calling Soros a legitimate target. When a public event was eventually arranged for Heisler, Netanyahu, and Orbán, the MAZSIHISZ leader saw his chance to speak out: “The intention was to give a very polite and very proper speech, but to point out the points of conflict that existed, and for which I was requesting their help,” he said.

Today, though, MAZSIHISZ leadership, under Andor Grósz, a former doctor in the Hungarian armed forces who succeeded Heisler in 2023, has taken a different approach to Orbán. The federation is now openly critical of Heisler’s rebuke. In a written response to questions from Jewish Currents, Tamás Mester, vice president of MAZSIHISZ and president of the locally affiliated BZSH (Budapest Jewish Community), termed the former leader’s statement to Netanyahu and Orbán a “diplomatic error.” According to Mester, a Hungarian Jewish leader could conceivably criticize the Israeli government publicly for politics that work against Jewish interests, but “the Netanyahu government does not and has never carried on such conduct.”

With respect to Orbán, Mester praised the prime minister’s support for Israel at the United Nations and European Union, as well as his approach to domestic Jewish concerns: “The government consistently stands with the Hungarian Jewish community. We do not have to face western European radical Islamist or far-left antisemitism.” He reiterated the government’s message that in Hungary Jews can live in safety, and said that while some observers may see “sensitive historical antisemitic tropes” in the government’s messaging, “the government consistently rejects those accusations, emphasizing that its politics are guided by national security and sovereignty, not ethnic or religious considerations.”

Heisler attributed this change in part to president Grósz’s long history serving in a hierarchy having instilled in him the belief “that there must be a peaceful relationship with the government.” But MAZSIHISZ’s new stance may correspond with changing attitudes among Hungarian Jews more broadly. According to Surányi, the sociologist, Hungarian Jews’ approach to Hungary and Israel has historically been characterized by what she and her colleague Márton Gerő call “inconsistent liberalism.” In an interview with Jewish Currents, she explained, “Many Hungarian Jews argue that they are leftist liberal when it comes to Hungary, but when it comes to Israel the political sides have different meanings, it’s not right and left.” Indeed, while displaying their progressivism on domestic policy, the 2017 study also showed that the majority of Hungarian Jews agreed generally with Israeli policy as represented by the Netanyahu government. In the years between Netanyahu’s two visits to Hungary, the community’s domestic politics may have begun to shift toward a closer alignment with their support for conservative politics in Israel.

The square in Budapest’s Jewish Quarter outside the Dohány Street Synagogue, usually called Theodore Herzl Square, has been unofficially renamed “October 7th Square.

Larkin Cleland

Today, although there has not been another representative survey since the 2017 study, Surányi said at least some people in the Jewish community “say that they would vote for Orbán just because he is supporting Netanyahu and Israel,” a position that was essentially unheard of in 2017. She said the origins of the shift are complex, stemming from the xenophobia and Islamophobia present across Hungarian society and coming after a decade during which “Orbán has been pressing this moral panic button” against migrants. “I think it got to the Jewish head,” she said. The new prominence of the conservative and often Fidesz-aligned Chabad movement, which has grown rapidly in Hungary, has also played a part. Ultimately, in light of the personal friendship that blossomed between Orbán and Netanyahu after the first visit, some Jews may have begun to associate support for the Hungarian leader with support for Israel. October 7th has only exacerbated such attachments: Surányi—whose own research focuses in part on the severely unbalanced discourse around Israel in Hungarian Jewish media—characterized the mainstream communal attitude as “How can you criticize Israel after it was attacked?”

Despite this apparent rightward shift, many Hungarian Jews still disagree with both the community’s support for Israel and MAZSIHISZ’s conciliatory turn toward the Hungarian government. In the August petition, signatories—including parliament member András Jámbor, Holocaust historian László Karsai, and Canadian Hungarian doctor Gábor Máté—expressed their solidarity with both “the Jewish victims of the attacks of October 7th and the innocent Palestinian victims in Gaza,” and criticized Hungarian Jewish institutions and the government for suppressing open discourse around Israel. “There is barely any platform or institution which would dare to take on these debates and nuanced conversations,” they wrote. “In fact, in recent months they have actively cancelled invitations to Jewish representatives who do not represent the point of view of the radical Israeli government.”

Anna Margit, a Berlin-based activist who grew up in the heart of Budapest’s Jewish Quarter and has returned frequently to the city in recent months to host Jewish anti-Zionist events, said she has noticed a growing anti-Zionist sentiment within the Jewish community, especially among young people. But few of these anti-Zionists, Margit said, feel represented by Jewish institutions like MAZSIHISZ. In Hungary, she said, “It feels like Zionism is the only world for Jews, the only planet. If people exit Zionism, it feels like walking off the face of the earth.” Days after the petition was released, the editor of Szombat, the largest Jewish publication in Hungary, published an article decrying the signatories for lacking self-reflection and accusing them of “not breaking the silence, but rather joining a ceaselessly and ever more aggressively howling chorus.”

There are also structural reasons why Jewish institutions may be disinclined to break with the government. Attila Novák, a historian who studies the Holocaust and Zionist movements in Hungary and East-Central Europe, explained that unlike Jewish congregations in other countries which rely on contributions or membership dues, Hungarian synagogues get most of their funding through MAZSIHISZ, which in turn receives general state funding to maintain its network of Jewish hospitals, schools, and nursing homes, as well as government compensation for religious properties illegally confiscated by the communist regime. It also makes its own income from tourism to Jewish sites. Together, nearly the entire MAZSIHISZ budget comes from those three sources, in roughly equal proportion, rendering the relationship with the government critically important. “If the state doesn’t give money, then there’s no money,” said Novák. “They can’t pay the rabbis and they can’t clean the synagogues.” While government social service funds and historical property compensation are theoretically guaranteed year over year—one reason why former president Heisler says that he didn’t see the federation as particularly dependent on the government—additional money for new projects and much-needed renovations relies on a good relationship with the state.

At the congregation level, rabbis say they face pressure from MAZSIHISZ to avoid any controversy that could endanger this funding. One rabbi was briefly expelled from the federation and fired in 2020 for Facebook posts critical of Israel. Another, who asked that his name be withheld to avoid consequences for him or his synagogue, said that funding from MAZSIHISZ makes up more than half of the budget of his congregation, which is one of Budapest’s most progressive and is split on the issue of support for Israel and Zionism. “There is dependency, and not just a small amount of dependency, on MAZSIHISZ and through them on the government too,” he said.

Even the most independent third of the MAZSIHISZ budget, tourism money, has become ever more intertwined with the state as the Hungarian government has zeroed in on international visitors to prop up a struggling economy. Budapest’s Jewish Quarter, home to a triangle of restored synagogues, is a prime attraction, one heavily promoted in government tourism materials. Once the site of the Budapest Ghetto, the neighborhood experienced decades of decay before becoming famous in the 2000s for its “ruin bars” built into run-down apartment buildings. With the emergence of Airbnb and budget airlines, millions now visit the neighborhood yearly and contribute heavily to the tourism revenues, which represent more than 13% of Hungary’s GDP. In response to the ensuing quality-of-life issues for local residents, the local government has laid out a plan to shift from party tourism to cultural tourism, especially Jewish-themed cultural tourism, which is useful both materially and symbolically to the government. Orbán uses this visibly Jewish neighborhood to bolster his claim that “Hungary is the safest country for the Jewish community,” thanks to his anti-migration policies that prevent the influence of “radical Islam.” Meanwhile, several of the restaurants and hotels in the Jewish Quarter are owned by members of Orbán’s patronage network, the NER group.

Jewish organizations stand to benefit, too. MAZSIHISZ vice president Mester specifically mentioned to Jewish Currents his appreciation for the Orbán government’s “programs and initiatives to preserve Jewish cultural heritage and support community life,” including renovations of synagogues and memorials. One of the three famous temples, the Rumbach Street Synagogue, was recently renovated by MAZSIHISZ using a grant of 3.2 billion forints (then equivalent to more than $11 million) from the government. MAZSIHISZ also manages the synagogue on Dohány Street, the largest in Europe, which, according to the director of the MAZSIHISZ tourism office, draws more than half a million international visitors a year willing to pay its steep ticket prices. Still, the investments have done little to bring back the quarter’s tight-knit Hungarian Jewish community, which mostly fled with the tourism boom. Büchler, the MAZSIHISZ governing board member, is also part-owner of a small artisan Judaica shop in the neighborhood. While the owners hope to revive some of the Hungarian Jewish life and material culture that once flourished here, he admitted that 95% of the customers are tourists and compared the situation in the neighborhood to “living in a kind of Shoah Disneyland.”

Hungary’s Jewish community, unique among its neighbors in that many educated urban Jews survived the Holocaust in Budapest, has a long history of adaptation and survival under illiberal and repressive governments. In this light, perhaps the current political shift is more a return to the norm than a new development. According to Novák, apart from Heisler’s tenure and a few clashes over antisemitism in the chaos of the post-socialist ’90s, MAZSIHISZ has never been a body that strongly criticized the government. For some, the risk of getting on Orbán’s bad side as a tiny minority community remains too great.

Another rabbi, who leads a MAZSIHISZ-affiliated congregation and also requested that his name be withheld, summed up the choices facing the Jewish institution in terms of pragmatism. “If I am Jewish, and I want to be here in Hungary for another hundred years and not leave, and the Hungarian people cannot vote out the Fidesz government for four consecutive terms, do I have to play the role of opposition instead of the Hungarian people?” he said. “Why would we play this role? Our job is to maintain our communities.” As a result, it’s been left to Hungarian Jews organizing outside institutional religious frameworks to mount an opposition both to Orbán’s rule and to Zionism. That context led Margit, the Berlin-based activist, to realize her voice was needed in the Jewish community back home: “I should be trying to do something in Hungary. Because I think there are a lot of people who are anti-Zionist Jews, but who don’t dare to say anything because they all think they are alone.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

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Larkin Cleland is a journalist and urban geographer. He recently completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Hungary, focusing on the history and politics of the development of Budapest’s Jewish Quarter.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/why-hungarian-jewish-institutions-are-embracing-orban-and-netanyahu at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

DISPATCH | 26 NOV 2025, 6:48 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 1 DEC 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

The Zionist Right Has a MAGA Problem

A conference aiming to confront antisemitism on the right offers a portrait of an old guard left twisting in the wind.

Ben Lorber and Jess Schwalb

From left: Luke Moon, Mario Bramnick, Randy Fine, Leo Terrell, and Ellie Cohanim at the “Exposing and Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Political Right” conference in Washington, DC, November 18th, 2025.

Leo Terrell on X

MAGA’s crusaders against right-wing antisemitism couldn’t seem to agree on the problem they had gathered to solve. Huddled in a basement conference room last Tuesday, attendees of “Exposing and Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Political Right” had been called to Washington, DC, by the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, authors of Project Esther, the Trump administration’s blueprint for attacking the left via its commitments on Palestine. The Task Force was in disarray. Just a few days earlier, it had split from the Heritage Foundation after the powerful conservative think tank defended Tucker Carlson when Carlson gave a friendly interview to Nazi apologist Nick Fuentes. The group was ostensibly gathered to counter the mainstreaming of nakedly antisemitic figures like Fuentes within the MAGA movement and to chart a path forward. But hours into the half-day event, speakers ping-ponged between trivializing the online antics of “stupid 20-year-olds in their grandma’s basement,” in the words of Task Force co-chair Ellie Cohanim, and warning against an “explosion” of antisemitism on the right whose “dimensions are enormous and incomprehensible,” per fellow co-chair Mario Bramnick. While some, like Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), expressed fear that “mindless, vicious hatred, is becoming mainstream,” others tried to downplay the impact of Fuentes, Carlson, and their followers: “They want us to get angry and offended, and there’s really no reason to. I mean, these are a bunch of freaks,” said Gen Z MAGA Jewish influencer Justine Brooke Murray.

The conference came after several weeks of right-wing meltdown. Incited by Fuentes’s October 27th appearance on Carlson’s show, the controversy engulfed the right when Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended the organization’s “close friend” Carlson and railed against the “globalist class” and “venomous coalition” attacking him. The Task Force—which had been housed at Heritage from its inception and had collaborated with the think tank to author Project Esther—soon had a serious problem. At least nine member organizations and individuals publicly announced their withdrawal from the Task Force following Roberts’s statement, and its credibility was sinking by the day. At the conference, Luke Moon, Task Force co-chair and executive director of the Christian Zionist Philos Project, described spending countless hours on the phone trying to mend the fraying coalition. But eventually he and some of the other co-chairs felt they had no choice but to sever ties with Heritage, “at least for a season,” to stave off an exodus of the remaining members.

Pulling together the conference in DC was like “herding cats while building an airplane in the sky,” Moon told the audience of 50 or so, composed mostly of End Times Christian Zionists, anti-LGBT ideologues, and Jewish MAGA influencers. Joined by an anti-DEI activist with a Tikvah Fund luggage tag and a German Shepherd bomb-sniffer-in-training wearing a vest with an Israeli flag patch, this motley crew had urgent business to discuss: The Carlson-Fuentes-Heritage episode was only the latest evidence that right-wing support for Israel was eroding. Polls indicate that younger conservatives increasingly view Israel in a negative light. Even leading MAGA figures—not just Carlson, but influencers like Candace Owens and politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie—have criticized Israel’s crimes in Gaza and called US support into question under the banner of “America First.” The challenges ahead were clear enough: How could the Task Force, along with the broader pro-Israeli right, counter this growing dissent? And how best to respond to the rise of overt MAGA antisemitism?

When he and three others started the Task Force in November 2023, Moon explained to the room, they made a conscious decision to target opponents on the left. “We did see in the corner of our eye the rise of antisemitism on the right,” he acknowledged, but they chose to stay focused on Palestine solidarity movements because, in their view, “it was 100 pro-Hamas people to one [right-wing] antisemite in his mom’s basement eating Hot Pockets.” As Bramnick, a prominent Christian nationalist and pastor, said, the sentiment was that “our real problem is the Islamists and the progressive leftists that have already sold out our nation.” Trump’s presidential victory in 2024, said Bramnick, was seen by the MAGA coalition as “a mandate to combat woke socialism, globalism, [and the] anti-Christian, antisemitic, and anti-Israel agenda.”

In recent months, however, as right-wing skepticism of US support for Israel has moved toward the mainstream, even figures like freshman Florida Rep. Randy Fine, who has built his brand from vitriolic attacks against Israel critics on the left, were now telling the conference that “Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous antisemite in America.” And while charges of antisemitism lobbed at left-wing critics of Israel are frequently spurious, on the right they often carry more substance: For open white nationalists like Fuentes, the problem with Israel is not imperialism or apartheid but an all-powerful global cabal of subversive, disloyal Jewish interlopers who are assailing Christianity and undermining America from within.

Confronting their fellow right-wingers also presents a particularly tricky problem, because after years of heated crusades against DEI and “wokeness,” much of the MAGA movement is in no mood to launch any kind of sustained inquiry into accusations of bias within its ranks. Doing so would mean mimicking “BLM, MeToo, left wing moral panic behavior,” tweeted Rachel Bovard, vice president at the Conservative Partnership Institute, an institution that the New York Times called a “nerve center for the right wing.” Responding to criticism of Roberts, Carlson, and others, Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, a non-interventionist journal, posted on X that “the Israel First censoriousness mirrors the late 2010s-early 2020s woke left speech crackdown.”

Trump has long seemed a reliable ally for the pro-Israel right, from his move of the US embassy to Jerusalem during his first term to his staunch backing of Netanyahu’s genocide and crackdown against protesters more recently. But the White House now seems hesitant to take a stand against Carlson, the most influential pundit in the MAGA-verse. The weekend before the conference, the president told a reporter “you can’t tell [Tucker Carlson] who to interview . . . If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out.” Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile, castigated pro-Israel activist Sloan Rachmuth on X for speculating that Carlson’s son, Buckley, who serves as Vance’s deputy press secretary, may be a “vile bigot” like his father, since “racism and antisemitism is a family trait.” “Sloan describes herself as a defender of ‘Judeo-Christian Values.’” Vance tweeted. “Is it a ‘Judeo-Christian value’ to lie about someone you don’t know? Not in any church I ever spent time in!” The day after Vance’s tweets, Rachmuth appeared at the Task Force conference.

In the face of this right-wing infighting—some of it intergenerational—the mostly older Task Force members and supporters gathered in DC to reaffirm their commitment to fighting what Bramnick called a “spiritual war” against antisemitism. But that, as it turned out, was about all they could agree on. From divides over how, and whether, to publicly criticize Trump for his countenancing of Carlson and Fuentes, or Carlson and Fuentes themselves, to the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes antisemitism in the first place, the conference ultimately clarified only one thing: The pro-Israel MAGA coalition is twisting in the wind.

Throughout the half-day conference, speakers struggled to understand the root causes of antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment among their own. “What happened?” thundered the ZOA’s Klein, wearing his signature “Never Again” lapel pin in the shape of a yellow star. “Why this transformation? . . . Some people say it’s Qatar money. I don’t know, but there’s something strange going on.” Former Trump appointee Cohanim similarly claimed that “foreign operators” and “foreign adversaries . . . want to divide us and pave the way for [MAGA] electoral loss.”

As speakers debated the source of antisemitism on the right, some veered into antisemitic tropes. Ralph Reed, founder of the evangelical Faith and Freedom Coalition, claimed that antisemitism is rooted in “collectivist ideologies” like communism and fascism. Anyone who resents capitalism and its merit-based free-market system “will come to hate the Jew,” said Reed, because “wherever Jews have gone, if they were not persecuted or denied a right to be full participants of society, they have risen to the highest level in that economic system.” Reed’s analysis conveniently obscured the fact that most MAGA conspiracy theories target left-wing specters like philanthropist George Soros or “cultural Marxism,” and affirmed the antisemitic notion that Jews are inordinately powerful. Murray, the Gen Z influencer, put it more bluntly: “[Antisemites] always tweet about how ‘we’re noticing how the Jews are in every high position’ . . . Yeah, it’s because we’re successful! We have mothers who foster success, who drum it into our heads . . . It’s a form of jealousy.” The crowd chuckled approvingly.

Comments like these were more feature than bug of the gathering. Klein suggested that Soros, a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracies, belongs to a nefarious group of left-wing funders “promoting hatred toward Israel.” Yaakov Menken, rabbi and founder of the right-wing Orthodox advocacy group Coalition for Jewish Values, contrasted the “educated Jews”—yeshivish rabbis of the Haredi enclave of Lakewood, New Jersey, who voted for Trump en masse —with the “nonsense” from “left wing Jewish clergy,” a broad category which for him included “Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Jewish Renewal and mail order [rabbis] in the entire country.” The crowd met his delegitimization of most of the American Jewish rabbinate with applause. During the post-conference shmooze and cocktail hour, a Daily Signal journalist covering the event dipped further into the well of conspiracy, excitedly plugging his Substack and recent book, both titled The Woketopus, which detail the “left-wing, dark money” “cabal” funding everything from “anti-Israel protests” to “unions, transgender orthodoxy” and more. (His book cover is a dead ringer for the classic antisemitic Nazi cartoon from the early 1940s.)

When it came to tactics for addressing right-wing antisemitism, the path seemed no less muddled. Several speakers implored the group to maintain “robust coalitions” and expand their base. But they were light on details about what any of that meant—who could be added to the base, for instance, and how? As co-authors of Project Esther, the Task Force was accustomed to advocating for the use of state and legal power to address perceived antisemitism on the left. The founding statement of their coalition, which Moon read aloud in his opening address to the conference, endorsed the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been used in disciplinary and legal proceedings in governments, universities, and civil society. But, perhaps reflecting the influence of the many conservative leaders who have come out against the use of legislative speech codes to combat antisemitism in the past year, the Task Force disagreed about whether they would call for such tactics to now be used against opponents on the right.

Even Leo Terrell, who currently heads Trump’s federal Task Force to Fight Antisemitism at the Department of Justice, didn’t seem convinced that a legal approach was the path forward. Terrell—a former Fox News talking head who woke up the sleepy room with a lively monologue about how antisemites “aren’t after Jews, they’re after Western civilization!”—has championed high-profile efforts to arrest and deport activists like Mahmoud Khalil and to defund universities like Columbia. But aside from a passing comment affirming the DOJ’s commitment to prosecuting hate crimes, Terrell didn’t seem enthusiastic about using the tools of the federal government in the fight against right-wing antisemitism. “Some people have Jewish fatigue,” he said. “You got the president who is 100% committed. You got an attorney general who’s 100% committed. But people in between . . . I hear stuff like ‘we got enough.’” Rather than rely on legal remedies, he told attendees, it was up to them to post on social media more frequently. “We’re losing the public relations war,” he said, and “we need to be just as loud, just as vocal as the other side, because they have groups helping them. I don’t want to mention their names because I don’t want to embarrass these people.” (He then mentioned CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times.)

Murray seemed more aware than her elders that attempting to enforce speech codes on the right would backfire. “There’s some people, even on our side, who talk about hate speech. Never use that phrase,” she said to the group of mostly Boomer evangelicals. “There’s no such thing as hate speech.” (She thanked the one person who applauded.) Echoing Terrell, she instead implored conservatives to counter Fuentes and Carlson with “more speech.” “We know what’s hateful,” she said, “but instead of showing that we’re angry or that we’re offended, we need to hold up a mirror to them.” Murray praised Chaya Raichik, founder of the MAGA doxxing account Libs of TikTok (“a proud Jew!”) for modeling a path forward with her posts ridiculing “blue hair nut jobs” who “don’t know what gender they are.”

To address right-wing antisemitism, several speakers acknowledged, would require calling out members of their own camp. Bramnick was all for this: “We need to hold proper accountability, which is what the left did not do and now their party is now being run by Mandani [sic], AOC, and Bernie Sanders,” he said. “This is not going to happen to the MAGA movement, not under our watch.” Rep. Fine admitted, however, that while “it’s easy to call it out on the other side—I like to do it, it’s fun—it’s a lot harder to do it on our own.” This proved especially contentious when it came to Trump. When Klein told the attendees he’d been “disappointed” by the president’s comments defending Carlson, he apparently rattled Cohanim, who earlier had praised Trump as “the greatest friend and supporter of the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel in all of history.” She took the mic after Klein to announce that “sentiments that are shared by the speakers today do not necessarily represent the views of the Task Force.”

Later in the afternoon, after a standing ovation for Terrell and before a lecture titled “Is Christian Zionism a Brain Virus?”—the title a retort to Tucker Carlson’s viral claim—the conference attendees struggled to make a minyan. Between speakers, Rabbi Menken popped his head back into the conference room to plead for a few more adult Jewish men. “It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been inside a synagogue since Yom Kippur!” he said. But the crowd, made up primarily of evangelical advocates and leaders, mostly stayed seated.

That interlude perfectly illustrated another challenge the Task Force faces as it tries to regroup. When Project Esther was released in October 2024, the authors received much criticism for involving relatively few Jewish organizations in their efforts. Since leaving Heritage, they have not moved to blunt that criticism: The Task Force is now affiliated with the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel (CCPI), a new umbrella coalition of evangelical leaders modeled after the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. CCPI coordinates pro-Israel advocacy at the federal level and has flanked the hardline Israeli right; its influence at the conference was evident. Most speakers followed a familiar formula for the pro-Israel Christian right: pound the Bible, invoke national security, reference the Founding Fathers, repeat. Bramnick summed it up neatly, saying that “antisemitism is not just an anti-Jewish problem. It is anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-Western.”

As Bramnick, who has supported End Times prophecy and proselytizing to Jews, put it, “God’s covenantal promises to Israel and the Jewish people is [sic] unconditional, and God will defend Israel. He will and is defending the Jewish people.” Other speakers insinuated that Trump himself, as well as appointees like Terrell and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee (who made a brief appearance from Jerusalem via recorded video), were chosen by God for a divine task. For them, it is self-evident, as Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Reed lilted in his Georgia twang, that “being a good Christian means defending Jews. That is in the DNA of the American church.” He pointed to polling showing that large majorities of evangelicals (70% of white evangelicals, according to one 2022 poll) believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people. “That’s about twice, by the way, the level of American Jews,” he remarked. “What that says about the Jewish community? I don’t know. I’ll leave that to others to say.”

But Reed’s style of Bible-thumping is losing sway with young Christians. A September 2025 survey showed that only 29% of evangelicals under 35 believe that Jews are God’s chosen people—a core belief of Christian Zionist theology—and concluded that “while support [for Israel] exists, it is not universally deep nor comprehensive across the evangelical spectrum.” Nor is this a recent trend: A 2021 survey showed that support for Israel stood at only 33.6% for evangelicals ages 18-29, a notable drop from a 2018 survey showing 69% support in the same category.

For all their talk of “Judeo-Christian” values, last week’s attendees and speakers may well be spitting into the wind of a Christian nationalist movement that is increasingly dropping the hyphen and leaving the “Judeo” behind. When a college student pressed Vance last month to justify US support of Israel—while, in the student’s view, the Jewish religion supports the persecution of Christians—the vice president responded not by defending “Judeo-Christian values,” but by affirming theological differences between Jews and Christians. Similarly, in his defense of Carlson, Heritage president Roberts emphasized that “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” proclaiming that “my loyalty as a Christian and an American is to Christ first, and to America always.” For Christian Zionist members of the Task Force, that view is tantamount to a heresy.

At the conference, such biblical invocations were supported by old neoconservative lines exhorting a partnership with Israel rooted in shared military aims. The 64-year-old Reed emphasized that evangelical support for the Israeli government “is not some false and patronizing philosemitism,” but “love for the Jewish people that we view through the prism of US national security interests.” Accordingly, Reed argued that Israel must be backed because of its crucial function as “a land-based aircraft carrier” for the US in the Middle East—tellingly lifting a phrase popularized in the Reagan era. But many MAGA adherents no longer accept this paradigm as self-evident, any more than they agree with other speakers who asserted that Israel has a God-given right to annex the West Bank, or that its 2005 disengagement from Gaza was an affront to God’s will. “MAGA has been co-opted by neocons that are more concerned with protecting Israel, Ukraine, Indian and Chinese H-1B visa workers, and foreign students than American workers, American taxpayers, and American students,” tweeted one leader of College Republicans of America a week before the conference, epitomizing a schism over the future of the conservative movement that touches not just Middle East policy but also issues of immigration, economic populism, and national identity.

It was left to the few young people who addressed the conference to acknowledge that institutional leaders like Reed misunderstand the younger MAGA mood. The Philos Project’s Isaac Woodward, a millennial, encouraged conservative groups to go beyond theology and engage young right-wingers on the merits of their political concerns—preferably offline, where face-to-face interactions could more effectively change hearts and minds. As an example, Woodward praised as a “blessing” the hundreds of trips to Israel that Philos has led for young Christians, saying “those are the things that move the needle.” During a post-conference interview, Dimas Guaico, the head of Philos’s youth project Gen Zion, said that he also felt like the elders in the room were out of touch and needed a more grassroots approach to organizing. Sporting a silver necklace in the shape of the undivided Land of Israel— which, he explained, contained “a piece of the Iron Dome”—Guaico said he had been criss-crossing the country to recruit 20 pro-Israel student representatives to join him at the upcoming TPUSA conference, where he expects to encounter some opposition. “We have to do social media, yeah, but we have to do real life,” he said. “This generation wants action.”

But even the youth at the conference did not seem particularly attuned to the populist trends currently convulsing the right. While Murray advised conservative leaders to be more sensitive to the concerns of MAGA youth, for example, she was scornful when discussing the dismal economic outlook fueling the populist appeal of leaders like Fuentes. “Maybe actually get a job,” she lectured her peers. “Maybe try to improve your life, maybe study a little bit harder . . . [instead of saying] no, it’s somebody else’s fault that you are in the condition that you are currently in.”

Ultimately, while conference speakers projected bravado—with Rep. Fine calling on the audience to “punch [antisemitism] right in the face”—attendees left with few solutions for the problem of antisemites in the MAGA ranks and little clarity on the transformation taking place before their eyes. Perhaps that is unsurprising, given that the right’s decades-long campaign to smear progressive critics of Israel as antisemites has shown little nuanced understanding of antisemitism, nor of why so many are critical of Israel in the first place. Now, faced with the rise of a more unequivocally antisemitic form of anti-Zionism on their own side, the Christian and Jewish right find themselves similarly ill-equipped to meet the moment.

“In every major scientific revolution, the elites . . . refused to acknowledge the evidence that was right in front of their eyes,” pontificated Christian Zionist scholar Gerald McDermott at the conference, comparing those who dismissed the theories of Galileo and Newton to the critics who dismiss Christian Zionism today. “Their brains were so wired to the old paradigm that they could not see it . . . Or some actually did see it, but they had so much invested professionally in the old paradigm that they chose not to see it.” Perhaps McDermott, and the others on stage, imagined they were speaking truth to the likes of Carlson and Fuentes; in truth, they were talking only to themselves.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Ben Lorber works as senior research analyst at the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, researching antisemitism and white nationalism. He is the co-author of Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.

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Jess Schwalb is a former Jewish Currents fellow and currently works at Diaspora Alliance. She lives in Chicago.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-zionist-right-has-a-maga-problem at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 24 NOV 2025, 5:24 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 24 NOV 2025, 5:46 PM UTC

Israel’s Collective Amnesia

Even as Israel continues killing Gazans, its liberals are ready to forget the genocide.

Lee Mordechai

Palestinians walk amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in Gaza City, November 5th, 2025.

Majdi Fathi/AP

On October 13th, three days after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, the current head of the Israeli opposition, centrist liberal Yair Lapid, gave a speech in which he declared that “all those who demonstrated against Israel these past two years . . . were deceived.” Before his fellow Knesset members and visiting US President Donald Trump, he announced: “There was no genocide, no intentional starvation.” The well-documented facts—that Israel pursued a relentless policy of starvation, including entirely blocking aid from entering Gaza for 11 weeks straight—were thus rewritten on live TV. This revision of reality laid the groundwork for what was soon to come: a quiet, collective act of forgetting, which aims to make the decimation of Palestinian life in Gaza simply disappear from Israeli memory.

Even as Israel continues killing Gazans, this willful amnesia has begun taking shape in a variety of ways across liberal Israeli society, the very spheres from which one would hope to see an honest reckoning. Proponents of brutality have been uncritically embraced. Yair Golan, rising star of the Zionist left, invited retired general Giora Eiland—who conceived the notorious Generals’ Plan, which proposed starving Gazans who would not leave their homes, and advocated for the utility of epidemics in killing Palestinians—to speak at his party’s event honoring Yitzhak Rabin. Meanwhile, institutions and public figures have moved to assert the boundaries of acceptable memory by rendering certain narratives about the past two years unspeakable. Haaretz, Israel’s leading left-leaning newspaper, published an op-ed by a psychiatrist who works in the public health services system dismissing accusations of genocide from Jews in Israel and elsewhere as a deluded “fantasy of morality,” a pathological form of self-harm that amounted to “moral masochism.” This logic of denial has also found expression in the routines of public life, under the pretext of a return to normalcy. As the Israeli academic year commenced, the country’s two leading universities put out joyful messages, noting with relief the return of the Israeli captives and reiterating their support for students who have been serving as reservists in the military, but saying nothing about the losses of Palestinian students with families in Gaza.

This consolidation of forgetting builds upon widespread Israeli indifference to Palestinian suffering over the past two years. Many Israeli liberals have spent this time trying to look anywhere other than at the devastating consequences of Israel’s actions: A June 2025 poll found that two thirds of Israelis—including 44% of opposition voters—thought that Israeli media did not need to cover the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. (The poll also found that some two thirds of Israelis, including 67% of self-identified centrists and 30% of leftists, believed there were no innocents in Gaza, in essence legitimizing their targeting in the war; other polls have shown that 47% of Jewish Israelis support the widespread, intentional killing of civilians in Gaza and 82% favor the ethnic cleansing of Gazans, with 56% backing the same fate for Palestinian citizens of Israel.) Indeed, Israeli media never paid much attention to the destruction of Gaza, which served as background noise while other stories—the many retellings of October 7th, the hostage crisis, global antisemitism—took precedence.

Ultimately, the liberal Israeli attempt to forget what Israel has wrought on the Palestinians of Gaza is a bid to return to the status quo that reigned from the moment Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 until October 7th. For the vast majority of that period, Gaza and its people remained conveniently invisible to Israelis—periodically erupting into the news cycle in the context of brief but increasingly horrifying spasms of violence, only to vanish from Israeli consciousness once again. In this sense, collective forgetting when it comes to Gaza is hardly new; it’s been an ongoing process for nearly two decades. The past two years of continuous violence made Gaza impossible to ignore, requiring more active modes of forgetting—and now a concerted effort to solidify a whitewashed national narrative that exonerates Israel of wrongdoing. But that passive, normalized neglect of Gazans’ rights, and even their existence, is precisely what led to the tragedy of October 7th and the violence that followed. In their eagerness to forget, Israelis are sowing the seeds of the next catastrophe, allowing them to germinate in plain sight but out of mind.

Over the course of the war, state and media institutions honed an effective strategy for facilitating collective amnesia about Israeli atrocities in real time. Whenever a case of Israeli brutality stirred public controversy, the same basic pattern of events followed: The news breaks; the state waits for it to disappear; if it doesn’t, the state performs some symbolic and utterly insufficient accountability process that at most targets a few grunts; the media fails to follow up, or does so only after Israelis have moved on, and finally, the story dies.

For instance, in early 2025, the Israeli military submitted to international pressure and began investigating six cases of the “mosquito procedure,” in which Israeli troops treated Palestinians as human shields, sending them unarmed, sometimes wearing IDF uniforms, into tunnels and buildings in the Gaza Strip. This practice was used regularly enough that a senior combat officer described it in an anonymous letter as creating a literal slave class. A handful of soldiers were interrogated by military police, the results of the investigations were never published, and the story—and the practice—receded from public attention. In March 2025, Israeli soldiers killed 15 paramedics and first responders in Rafah; the military first denied being involved, then attempted to cover up their crimes with a series of falsehoods that were debunked in the following weeks and months. Israeli media refrained from seriously investigating the incident, leaving international media to uncover key aspects of what happened. No one faced meaningful consequences: Eventually a commander was reprimanded, and a single reservist was discharged from military service—more for his lies in an internal military investigation than for the killings themselves.

Similar dynamics have played out in the notorious case of Sde Teiman, where detainees were abused physically and sexually and where the local infirmary had patients constantly blindfolded, in diapers, and chained to their beds. Although abuse was widespread, only a handful of soldiers were questioned about just one of the many instances of mistreatment at the military base—sexual abuse caught on camera and leaked to the media last summer. Even this limited response was so anathema to Israeli norms that right-wing mobs, which included Knesset members, overran the two military bases where the interrogations occurred. The investigation for breaking into the bases, in which people who were identified by the police were not interrogated for months, is advancing at glacial pace, with no trial in sight. And almost a year and a half after the initial revelations, only five soldiers have stood trial for the actual abuse, in a case that is still ongoing. (A recent poll reveals that over 60% of Jewish Israelis oppose the investigation of Israeli soldiers accused of abusing Palestinian detainees or prisoners.) The whole matter was generally forgotten in Israel until it was revealed in late October that the military advocate general was the one who leaked the incriminating video. Even as the story has returned to national headlines, public attention has focused on that official’s misdeeds and her dramatic fall from power, with some publications portraying the soldiers as victims of her actions.

These instances of insufficient accountability and evanescent attention are the exception; far more commonly, Israeli perpetrators of violence against Palestinians have faced no accountability process at all, their crimes never entering the public consciousness. I’ve seen this clearly in my own efforts to synthesize the evidence for Israeli war crimes since October 7th—confronting countless incidents of violence that most Israelis never heard about—and through the work of professionals who have catalogued this violence systematically. Last August, the leading Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, put out an extensive report detailing abuses against Palestinians in the Israeli incarceration system entitled “Welcome to Hell”; a year later, the group concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and released another comprehensive report. None of this received significant coverage in Israeli media. Even in Haaretz, these findings quickly vanished from the front page, allowing liberal readers to treat such reports as passing media events rather than assimilate them as enduring revelations about Israel and its conduct. The result is a pervasive cultural ethos of permissiveness and impunity, in which Palestinian suffering goes almost entirely unacknowledged.

That ethos has been fostered even by the Supreme Court—the very institution Israeli liberals took to the streets to defend, as one of the last bastions of Israeli democracy, in the months before October 7th. The court refrained from looking into the mounting allegations of widespread abuse of detained Palestinians and from examining the possibility of widespread harm to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, avoided enforcing investigations into the thousands of cases where such harm was recorded, and allowed the state to continue its campaign of starvation. This lack of scrutiny from the very institution charged with serving as a check on power helped keep this violence out of the public eye as it unfolded, paving the way for the public forgetting of this moment.

Domestic mechanisms of amnesia are now being aided and abetted by international ones. Despite immediate and continued Israeli violations, the ceasefire has been enough to convince too many bodies and states to move on. Almost immediately after the truce was announced, the European Broadcasting Union postponed a vote about Israel’s participation in the Eurovision song competition, a symbol of Israeli connection to and acceptance within European culture. Germany, which had declared that it would stop selling Israel offensive weapons in August, signaled that it would lift its embargo only a couple of days after the ceasefire went into effect, and recently followed through. (A week after the ceasefire it had already signed a two billion Euro deal to acquire Israeli Spike missiles.) And French President Emmanuel Macron went back on his commitment to exclude Israeli companies from a major arms expo. If such efforts to hold Israel accountable continue to collapse, Israelis will understand that the horrors of the past two years can safely be forgotten—an understanding cemented by the Israeli media, which has emphasized these reversals while downplaying the overall effects of weapons bans, thus reassuring the public that the world has moved on and any lasting impact will be insignificant.

Together these forces are helping Israel’s refusal to face the reality of what it has done, and thus to maintain the core national myths that the past two years have clearly disproven, like Israel’s military, economic, and diplomatic independence, or the idea of the IDF as “the most moral army in the world.” With this violence firmly forgotten, Israelis will be free to return to a more comfortable, passive mode of neglect of Palestinian life. For both domestic and international critics, disrupting this amnesia will be extremely challenging. After all, Israel allowed the pre-October 7th status quo with Gaza to persist because it secured many benefits and cost little. And of course, the Israeli tradition of forgetting is deeply rooted, extending all the way back to Israel’s origins: Since 1948, both state and society have rigorously strived to forget the founding violence of the Nakba through means ranging from enacting legislation to physical destruction. Winning justice for Palestinians—and the enduring security that Jewish Israelis claim to want—will require reckoning with this entrenched national ethos of denial. Until we are finally willing to remember the horrors we’ve already wrought, there will surely be more to come.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Lee Mordechai is founder of the Bearing Witness project and a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the Hebrew University.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/israels-collective-amnesia at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

ROUNDTABLE | 21 NOV 2025, 3:02 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 21 NOV 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

The Life and Legacy of Sion Assidon

For the Moroccan Jewish leftist, the decolonization of his homeland and the liberation of Palestine were inextricably entwined.

Driss Ksikes, Khalid Lyamlahy, Arthur Asseraf, and Michèle Sibony with translation from the French by Omar Berrada

Sion Assidon at a Palestine solidarity demonstration

social media

Sion Assidon died at age 77 on Friday, November 7th, 2025, after three months in a coma. Official, though vigorously disputed, reports describe the cause as a fall while gardening at his home in Mohammedia. Below, four writers reflect on the enduring meaning of the Moroccan Jewish activist’s life.

On November 9th, in Casablanca’s Jewish cemetery, hundreds of Moroccans—Jews and Muslims, family members, friends, activists, and acquaintances—attended the funeral of Sion Assidon, a former communist and a steadfast anti-Zionist. All around, Palestinian flags flew: a final act of resistance. Resistance to what? To his country normalizing relations with Israel for “security reasons.” To the widespread complicit silence in the face of a genocide that Israel’s neocolonialist leaders have been perpetrating in Gaza after two decades of siege.

Assidon’s was the struggle of a generation. Along with Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Levy, and Raymond Benhaïm (the only one still living), he was among a handful of Moroccans, politically left-wing and culturally Jewish, who experienced the orchestrated displacement of their co-religionists through a mythicized aliyah from the late 1950s—and understood this displacement as Zionism’s other crime and as a first act of normalization by the Moroccan authorities. From a secular and internationalist perspective, Assidon saw how the propaganda that lured the Sephardic Jews of the Arab Amazigh world to a promised land impoverished his society, stripping it of a pluralism that had spanned millennia.

Assidon stood at one extreme of this generation. Like the Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, whom he admired, he did not compromise; he resisted. Assidon believed that, at its core, the Palestinian cause is a matter of human justice, that its rationale is one of righting wrongs—and, as such, does not allow for half measures. This radical ethic is linked not only to his rejection, like other anti-Zionist Jews, of the nationalization of Jewishness, which ethnicizes and therefore racializes it, but also, more fundamentally, to an unyielding ethic of transparency and truth, and therefore a rejection of double standards. This stems from his long-waged fight against corruption in Morocco and his feeling that normalization with Israel, regardless of the rationale behind it, constitutes an act of moral bankruptcy.

Assidon believed that, at its core, the Palestinian cause is a matter of human justice, that its rationale is one of righting wrongs—and, as such, does not allow for half measures.

For Assidon, semantics was key. Words must be clarified and situations renamed in order to ensure precise meaning. The final time I saw him was in a bookstore in Casablanca last June, during a meeting about “other narratives” in relation to Palestine. He specified that, for him, the Zionist occupation was not just a matter of “settlement” (“istīṭān”) but, even worse, of “replacement” (“iḥlāl”). In a recent interview with the Turkish publication Nouvelle Aube, he systematically avoided naming Israel, referring to it only as “the occupying state”; and he similarly distanced himself from the idea of “the Jewish people,” speaking instead of “diverse Jewish communities.” In this respect, Assidon echoed the approach of historian Shlomo Sand, who, in The Invention of the Jewish People, refutes the fallacious Zionist myth of diasporic return, pointing out that what is gathered under the banner of “the Jewish people” is really various peoples of multiple origins. Hence, Assidon was outraged at the increasingly common conflation of Moroccan Jews, with their diverse beliefs and sensibilities, and Israelis of Moroccan origin, some of whom have been complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Assidon’s anti-Zionist struggle was not a discursive act; it was an activist’s concrete commitment. Since its inception in 2010, Assidon has been the standard-bearer of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Morocco—and since October 7th, 2023, as the movement experienced a surge of interest, he was eager to facilitate the mobilization of young activists in academic, artistic, and cultural circles where, in his view, the insidious infiltration of Zionism warranted constant vigilance. He was also vocal about the long-complicit agricultural and military sectors, which he felt have not been scrutinized enough. Assidon was always keen to point out the unspeakable and denounce the unnamable. He did it so calmly, with a firm and discreet smile that made clear how fully and serenely he rejected injustice, the concealment of major facts, and the manipulation of historical truths.

—Driss Ksikes, translated from the French by Omar Berrada

Last year, Sion Assidon explained in an interview with The Voice of Morocco that the meaning of his Amazigh family name bears relation to “link,” adding with an amused smile that his work may be nothing more than “bringing people together.” Indeed, through his identity and political trajectory, Assidon embodied connections that contest authoritarian and imperial orders—between Jews and Muslims, Amazighs and Arabs, Morocco and Palestine, local campaigns and global struggles, political rebellion and transnational solidarity—even when the steadfastness of his commitments paradoxically led to his own isolation.

Born in 1948 in Agadir to Amazigh Jewish parents, Assidon was formatively influenced by early exposure to a series of significant political events. As a child, he witnessed the fervent struggle that led to the country’s independence in 1956. Four years later, after a devastating earthquake leveled his hometown, Assidon relocated to Casablanca, where he attended French high school and participated in Jewish youth scouting groups; in this context, he observed the state-facilitated migration of Moroccan Jews to Israel amid the siren calls of Zionism. In March 1965, 17-year-old Assidon tried to join the student protests against a controversial educational reform, and although his family prevented him from participating, the uprisings, which ended in bloody repression, remained vivid in his memory. The following year, he moved to Paris to study mathematics, and the shockwaves from the Vietnam War and the Six-Day War—two spectacular assertions of colonial destruction—that were reverberating across Europe fortified the principle that would guide the rest of Assidon’s life: a deep sense of solidarity with the oppressed and a firm commitment to justice.

Through his identity and political trajectory, Assidon embodied connections that contest authoritarian and imperial orders.

When Assidon returned to Morocco in 1968, he found his homeland in a period of mounting political repression. Dubbed the “Years of Lead,” the era was characterized by the suppression of those who dared to criticize the authoritarian regime of King Hassan II. Assidon swiftly took on important roles in several organizations critical to the swelling leftist opposition, including as a co-founder of 23 Mars, a Marxist–Leninist group committed to revolutionary transformation and—after tensions about strategy fractured that group—as a member of the Maoist collective Let’s Serve the People. In 1972, he was arrested and tortured in Rabat’s infamous secret detention center Dar El Mokri before standing trial the next year. For the crime of “violating state security,” Assidon was sentenced to 15 years in prison. It was only after a robust international campaign that he was finally pardoned in 1984 (though his passport and right to travel were not restored for another eight years). Following his release, Assidon continued to work toward the realization of his resolutely anti-Zionist and humanist ideals, especially as a founding member of both Transparency Maroc, an NGO dedicated to the fight against systemic corruption, and the Moroccan branch of the Palestinian-led BDS movement—regularly leading boycott campaigns and participating in pro-Palestinian protests.

In losing Assidon, we have doubtless lost a crucial link in the chain of political struggles that shaped the country’s postcolonial history. His passing marks the fading of a vibrant generation of anti-Zionist Moroccan Jewish activists who insisted that Judaism remains a constitutive element of the Moroccan landscape, firmly anchored in a national identity shared across religious and linguistic traditions. Still, his legacy remains alive in the values that he championed with astonishing energy. In Morocco, Assidon’s close friends affectionately called him the traditional name “El Maâti”—probably first bestowed during his years in the underground militancy —which holds in its roots the ideas of giving and generosity, virtues for which Assidon will always be remembered, and that we might hope to see carried forward.

— Khalid Lyamlahy

When it comes to politics, Moroccan Jews are rarely treated as individuals. Particularly on the subject of Palestine, the entire community is seen as a bloc. Our ranks have included both committed anti-imperialists who refused to leave their countries of birth, and others who have been at the forefront of the global right and settler colonialism. But depending on who you ask, you will be told that all of us are either on the left or on the right. One popular version of the story goes like this: Moroccan Jews are victims of Zionism. Bad, racist Ashkenazis erased our histories and forced us to do wicked things. If only we were permitted to access our own pasts, we would remember how our grandmothers baked cakes with their Muslim neighbors, and our true fundamental opposition to the occupation of Palestine would shine through. Another common narrative is not much better: Moroccan Jews—along with others called “Mizrahi” by Israelis—are the ones who poisoned the Israeli project. Zionism in 1948, they say, was a happy, progressive movement led by socialist secular Europeans who lived in peace with the Arabs, until backwards fanatical Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa came in and turned the whole thing conservative, religious, and violent. The sad part is that it’s not just external observers who foist these narratives upon us; often, we are the ones who tell these stories about ourselves.

The blazing activism that defined Sion Assidon’s life helps us move beyond these clichés. For him, to be on the left as a Moroccan Jew was not a given; it was a commitment. He expressed no inherent affinity with other members of the community. Instead, his lifelong struggle against oppression in all its forms could include criticizing those Moroccan Jews who had become colonizers. For example, when Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020, Assidon issued a scathing critique against “our Moroccan brothers (who occupy Palestine!).” He dismantled the dominant rationale that formalizing cooperative ties between the two states would allow Morocco to resume relations with Jews from Morocco who now lived in Israel: “It’s a neat little double magic trick, which makes the settlers—‘our Moroccan brothers’—innocent of their contribution to war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people, and it also tries to whitewash the Moroccan regime’s original double crime of transforming Moroccan citizens into colonial mercenaries.” By “double crime,” Assidon was referring to the Moroccan king Hassan II’s collusion with Zionist migration agencies in the 1960s, when the king facilitated the mass departure of Moroccan Jews in exchange for financial compensation, effectively selling off his subjects. At the time, Assidon was already lucid about the connections between colonialism in Palestine and authoritarianism at home. To him, Arab regimes like Hassan II’s bore some responsibility for the success of Zionism in Palestine, and one could not fall without the other.

The world was cleaved in two, not between Muslims and Jews or Israelis and Palestinians; but between those who, like him, resisted imperialism in all its forms, and those who did not.

This dissident position was never an easy one. Like other anti-Zionist Moroccan leftists, such as Abraham Serfaty, Assidon was tortured and incarcerated under Hassan II. “I have used an image to try and communicate what prison is like: We are like Palestinian refugees in their camps,” Assidon wrote from jail in a 1980 letter published by his supporters: “Every moment has the taste of exile. It does not mean that there are no moments of joy, of laughter, of song. But prison remains present in every gesture.” To Assidon, kinship with the Palestinian struggle had nothing to do with where one was born. It came out of a shared experience of dispossession and a common political vision. The world was cleaved in two, not between Muslims and Jews or Israelis and Palestinians; but between those who, like him, resisted imperialism in all its forms, and those who did not. This, too, is the legacy he leaves us with: a resonant reminder that all of us, whatever community we belong to, have the same duty to fight colonialism wherever we encounter it.

— Arthur Asseraf

Some lives look like destiny. This seemed, perhaps, the case for our friend Sion Assidon—from the Agadir earthquake that marked his childhood (“Huddled in the back of a car at night, I remember wishing that the sun wouldn’t rise over the chaos. But the sun did rise and I was brutally thrust out of childhood, in a small town wiped off the map,” he recalled) to his young adulthood and his home crushed by “the Years of Lead” he spent in prison (age 24 to 36!) to the excruciating losses of and separations from so many loved ones . . . But, despite everything, one must choose—to live, overcome obstacles, continue to fight, to laugh, to love.

One could not take a stroll with Sion anywhere in Morocco without someone coming up to shake his hand. “A former prisoner,” he would say each time. A true brotherhood—smiles and weighted glances, news of mutual friends and their families, cordial pats on the shoulder. One must live after all, but one never forgets. “There is a place where I always feel best: alone in my little cell, inside my head,” he would say, another aftereffect of incarceration that was shared by many of his companions.

Sion’s funeral was a rare and magnificent event. The full courage, the popular struggle, the quiet force of Morocco was there.

And still, on this sad day, as Sion’s life slips away and assumes a final form that eludes and grips us at once, his friends numerously gather in Morocco and across the world, and his smile once again fills our screens. We feel the presence of his joviality, his singing, which he sometimes flaunted in the streets, very loudly and without a hint of embarrassment. “I sing,” he would say, “I practice Qigong. I take care of myself. You have to stay on your feet after all.” His appetite for life extended to all the fruits of Morocco’s soil—plants he would fondly caress as he smelled them, honeys from the Atlas Mountains, oils, citrons . . . His cherishing of food was a true act of love. Morocco was his mother and father, through all the setbacks, in every struggle.

Sion’s funeral was a rare and magnificent event. The full courage, the popular struggle, the quiet force of Morocco was there. They all came: formerly incarcerated comrades; human rights activists; compatriots from various movements and organizations—Attac Maroc, the Maghreb Social Forum, Transparency Morocco, Moroccan Labor Union, BDS Morocco; members of left-wing parties—the Party of Progress and Socialism, the Democratic Way, the Unified Socialist Party; and many more. And Palestine was omnipresent because everyone there shared with Sion a commitment to the struggle against imperialism and other destructive orders wherever they are found, including the recolonization of Morocco, the extraction of its wealth and its forces in the service of the worst.

The tranquil entrance of this crowd into the cemetery, and the immense respect and affection these men and women showed constituted a veritable consolation and a true message of peace. A friend who was there told me that Sion’s coffin was carried under the supervision of a rabbi, by, among others, a conservative Muslim human rights activist, a communist, a Maoist, and BDS activists. This popular tribute to their comrade and kinsman showed the world that a Moroccan people exists, bound by a thirst for justice. May this model of humanity be replicated everywhere. The world needs it. And may the earth of his homeland rest lightly upon its son.

— Michèle Sibony, translated from the French by Omar Berrada

Special thanks to Omar Berrada for his curatorial work on this roundtable.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

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Driss Ksikes is a Moroccan fiction and nonfiction writer, playwright, and scholar. His work is engaged with critical approaches to culture and decolonization of epistemologies and imaginaries. He is associate dean of research and academic innovation at Institut des Hautes Études de Management in Rabat.

Khalid Lyamlahy is assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Chicago where he teaches francophone North African literature. He is the author of Nostalgic Rebels: Politics, Aesthetics, and Selfhood in Postcolonial Morocco (Liverpool University Press, 2025).

Arthur Asseraf is an associate professor of history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of several books in French and English on the history of colonialism, North Africa, and media.

Michèle Sibony is an anti-colonial activist. Since 2001 she has been a member of Union juive française pour la paix, an anti-Zionist and anti-racist collective, which she led for many years. She is the author of several publications, including A contre chœur with Michel Warshawski (Textuel 2002) and Antisionisme, une histoire juive with Béatrice Ores et Sonia Fayman (Syllepse, 2023).

Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and editor of several books, including, with Sarah Riggs, Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (2024). Born and raised in Casablanca, he currently lives in New York.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-life-and-legacy-of-sion-assidon at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

REPORT | 19 NOV 2025, 4:49 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 19 NOV 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

Cryptocurrency Comes to Gaza

With formal banking infrastructure in ruins, Palestinians in Gaza are forced to rely on unregulated digital currencies for survival.

Hani Qarmoot

A destroyed branch of the Bank of Palestine in Gaza City, July 9th, 2025.

Jehad Alshrafi/AP

Yousef al-Ashqar, 22, moves quietly through the aisles of the Hyper Mall supermarket in central Gaza’s Nuseirat. His shopping list is ordinary—rice, canned food, detergent—but his method of payment is anything but. When he gets to the cashier, al-Ashqar doesn’t pull out cash or a credit card. Instead, he unlocks his phone and opens a digital wallet containing USDT, a stable cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar that is widely used in Gaza. A small QR code appears on the screen, which the cashier scans, and the transaction is completed within seconds. “I haven’t used real cash in months,” al-Ashqar says as he places his groceries in a plastic bag. “It’s either broken, fake, or simply gone. But with crypto, I can buy anything I need, including clothes, food, and electronics.”

Al-Ashqar earns a living through online sports betting platforms, and his winnings arrive in USDT, which he stores in a digital wallet. From there, he sends and receives local payments in crypto, avoiding Gaza’s defunct banking system. “Sometimes I exchange a little bit through local brokers,” he says, referring to the informal network of cryptocurrency exchangers that has sprouted up in the Strip. “But most of the time, I simply pay with my phone.” He notes that many shops now accept crypto, especially in large shopping complexes like Nuseirat’s Abu Dalal Mall and Hyper Mall. “Everyone is aware that cash is unreliable,” he says. In this context, he adds, “crypto is freedom.”

Al-Ashqar’s story is just one example of a larger financial transformation taking place across Gaza. Two years of Israeli bombardment and siege have left the enclave in a severe economic crisis. Lacking jobs or savings, families find it difficult to pay for essentials, and those lucky enough to still have work—mostly government staff, United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) employees, or freelancers earning from clients overseas—often struggle to get paid. As I have reported elsewhere, this economic disaster is accompanied by a quieter, but no less important, liquidity crisis. Banks have long stopped operating in Gaza, and without reliable access to electricity and the internet, it has been difficult for residents to access or use online banking.

The cash situation is even worse. Shattered ATMs sit like abandoned relics, their screens cracked, cash slots blocked, and buttons missing. Using currency in Gaza now requires hiring brokers, who often charge commissions ranging from 1% to 50% to exchange digital transfers for scarce physical cash. And even if you are able to get bank notes, this doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to use them. In the absence of freshly minted money, Gaza’s currency has deteriorated more quickly than it can be replaced, and the few remaining bills feel like fragile scraps of cloth, with faded ink and torn edges from repeated handling. Shopkeepers examine such bills in low light, weighing the value of each before deciding whether to accept it. The condition of the notes is so bad that streetside stalls have appeared to repair them, offering taping and pressing services to render the bills “good enough” to circulate again. But despite such efforts, currency is disappearing. The ten-shekel note, which was once common, is now so rare as to be almost unusable. Larger notes are not better. Paying with a 100-shekel note for an 80-shekel purchase frequently frustrates both buyer and seller: The shopkeeper has no change, and the customer is forced to buy unnecessary items just to use the bill. In all cases, transactions that used to take seconds now take much longer or are altogether impossible.

As physical currency goes extinct, Palestinians in Gaza have turned to a variety of survival strategies, ranging from trust-based options like barter and informal credit lines between neighbors to, increasingly, alternative systems of exchange like cryptocurrency. “With banknotes damaged, banks gone, and no way to get dollars in or out, I can only do commerce and import necessities using cryptocurrencies,” said Rafat Naim, a food merchant in Gaza who now uses Bitcoin to pay foreign suppliers and get items into the Strip through the Israel-controlled Kerem Abu Salem and, occasionally, Rafah crossings. Naim is not alone. In recent months, dealers of essential food items such as sugar and cooking oil have started integrating cryptocurrencies, especially USDT, into their domestic and international transactions. A young, up-and-coming businessman named Ali Ramadan told Jewish Currents that he uses USDT to buy reduced-cost products from vendors who take cryptocurrency, then resells them in nearby marketplaces for cash. “Making money isn’t the only goal,” Ramadan said. “It’s about making the most of what we have and sustaining the market when money is nearly worthless.”

In addition to larger businesses, street vendors and smaller service providers have also adopted cryptocurrencies as a way to transact without using delicate banknotes or rare coins. Amir al-Derawi, the owner of a small food kiosk in Nuseirat Camp, says accepting USDT has simplified his life. “Before, I sometimes waited hours for change or had to refuse torn banknotes,” he said. But now, his e-SIM allows to access mobile data, which he shares with customers through a hotspot. “Customers just scan a QR code, and the payment is done instantly.” The benefits are also apparent to buyers, so much so that Maher Daher, who works for UNRWA in Gaza, expressed his desire for cryptocurrencies rather than US dollars to be used to pay his wage. “The dollar has fallen here,” he said, referring to the fact that the official exchange rate between the US dollar and the Israeli shekel is around 3.31, but has fallen precipitously to 2.28 within Gaza due to the liquidity crisis. “Our income would be protected and daily life would be stabilized if UNRWA paid us in USDT through a secure wallet.”

Additionally, cryptocurrency has become vital for aid organizations seeking to get around Israel’s restrictions—which include Israeli banks’ regular freezing or delaying of transfers into Gaza, and their strict withdrawal limit of 500 shekels ($152) a day. International services such as Western Union and PayPal have also suspended most transfers into Gaza, while approved transfers can be frozen or delayed for weeks, leaving aid distributors without access to essential cash. As a result, local coordinators with four youth-led community initiatives in Gaza—all of whom wished to remain anonymous for protection—told Jewish Currents that many donations for food, water, and medical assistance into Gaza now come in USDT. Donors, who are often relatives and well-wishers abroad, send the crypto to local middlemen in the Strip, who then distribute the money to families in need through secure wallets like Binance, or use crypto to buy and disburse aid supplies directly. “Donations simply couldn’t reach Gaza without cryptocurrencies,” said one independent aid organizer. Another volunteer with an initiative in Nuseirat agreed, adding that crypto has become the easiest way to collect and move donations under siege. “Without USDT, we wouldn’t be able to buy even a single water tank,” they said.

But even as cryptocurrencies have offered a taste of economic freedom to Palestinians living amid a destroyed financial system and a blockaded economy, they also come with significant risks. Many locals lack the smartphones and technical knowledge necessary to operate digital wallets, forcing them to rely on informal brokers to exchange cryptocurrency for local items, sometimes at exorbitant costs. Sometimes, such brokers keep the client’s money and never send the crypto. Ghassan Shaker, for instance, received a transfer of 357 USDT from his sister in Kuwait through a local broker. “I trusted the broker to deposit the crypto into my wallet, but he never did. I gave him the full amount, and it just vanished,” Shaker explained. His story highlights the risks many face when relying on unofficial intermediaries in Gaza’s fragile digital economy. Even those who possess their own digital wallets are vulnerable to fraud in the form of phishing scams as well as fake cryptocurrency websites, which trick victims into entering their details on the pretext of setting up their wallets and then steal their money.

More broadly, these issues point to the ways that unregulated cryptocurrencies, although useful in facilitating immediate survival for some, ultimately cannot take the place of a properly operational banking system. “Even as aid flows through these channels, people who lack digital literacy or dependable internet access run the risk of being left behind,” said Mahmoud Deeb, a Turkish financial expert of Palestinian descent. Further, he noted that cryptocurrencies cannot solve broader problems like unemployment and lack of access to financial services, which can ultimately only be addressed by a reconstruction of Gaza’s economy and the restoration of its banking system. As Deeb stressed, “reliance on cryptocurrencies is only a temporary solution.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Hani Qarmoot is a journalist and storyteller from Gaza, focusing on resilience, dignity, and life under siege.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/cryptocurrency-comes-to-gaza at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 14 NOV 2025, 4:46 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 19 NOV 2025, 3:36 PM UTC

In California, Jewish Groups’ Win Is Students’ Loss

A new “antisemitism prevention” law erodes possibilities for robust public education on both Palestine and Jewish identity.

Gabi Kirk

Students stage a walkout for a ceasefire in Gaza in Alameda, CA in January 2024.

Alamy Live News via AP

It was on the weighty date of October 7th this year when California Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed the controversial education bill AB 715 into law. The product of months of political haggling, the bill establishes a new state office of civil rights and, within it, a governor-appointed “antisemitism prevention coordinator,” the first in the United States for K–12 education. The legislation instructs this new coordinator to “develop, consult, and provide antisemitism education to school personnel” in order “to identify and proactively prevent antisemitism,” and “requires districts to investigate and take corrective action” when “discriminatory content” is used in schools. The bill prescribes that any offending “instructional materials” be “immediately and permanently . . . omitted” from the classroom. Districts found to be engaging in discrimination may see a portion of state funding withheld. AB 715 also expands what is considered discriminatory in classrooms, establishing that “discriminatory bias . . . does not require a showing of direct harm to members of a protected group” nor does it require “members of a protected group to be present while the discriminatory bias is occurring.”

Jewish groups in the state are heralding AB 715 as a win for Jewish students, protecting them from what they describe as a precipitous rise in antisemitism in schools since October 7th, 2023. According to the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California (JPAC), organizational support for AB 715 amounted to “the largest Jewish coalition ever assembled for a California bill.” Endorsers included every Jewish federation in California; the West Coast affiliates of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); several Hillel chapters; 12 individual synagogues; the state Democratic Party-affiliated California Jewish Democrats; and Zionist groups like StandWithUs and Zioness. In turn, they faced opposition from every sector of the progressive movement, including Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim community groups; Asian American and Black community organizations; anti-Zionist and progressive Jews; education workers; and free speech legal experts. Many opponents warned that rather than protect students, the bill could give the state license to curb political content in classrooms under the guise of fighting antisemitism, a pattern already familiar from Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education in California, as well as from similar legislation in other states. Most notably, the California Teachers Association came out in opposition in July, expressing concerns that the bill “does not address any other forms of hate or discrimination” aside from antisemitism. They noted that because “we are already seeing ‘anti-discrimination’ frameworks weaponized to limit academic freedom” at the federal level, the state should “avoid a framework that punishes teachers for teaching students.” But not even the power of the largest teachers’ union in the state, which has over 310,000 members, could stop AB 715 from passing unanimously in the Assembly and Senate and receiving Newsom’s signature. (In response, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has filed a lawsuit to challenge the statute’s constitutionality.)

AB 715 is best understood as a continuation of the five-year assault on ethnic studies curricula in California’s public schools, which has become a state graduation requirement in recent years. Emerging from radical student organizing in the 1960s and ’70s, ethnic studies is an academic discipline which centers the experiences of communities of color. While it is often erroneously understood simply as “multiracial education,” the discipline has always centered a radical critique of structures of injustice like colonialism and capitalism. Though AB 715 does not explicitly mention ethnic studies, a previous iteration of the bill, introduced in 2024 and defeated earlier this year, would have required school districts to submit ethnic studies curriculum to the California Department of Education for review, in order to root out alleged “bias”—chiefly antisemitism. That bill struggled to gain traction among legislators after constituents voiced fears that singling out ethnic studies for policing would mean students of color would have their communities’ stories suppressed. But the contention that ethnic studies contains antisemitic content dates back to the backlash to a state model curriculum for ethnic studies created after California passed the graduation requirement in 2021. The original Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum contained lessons on Arab American and Palestine studies, which were eventually excised from the final draft—along with other material, like explicit criticisms of capitalism—after an all-out campaign by Jewish and conservative groups. In the years since, the authors of the original curriculum and other ethnic studies educators developed the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, offering individual school districts the chance to return to the intentions of the original curriculum, before the more critical content was removed from the statewide version. When school districts across California have adopted this version, Jewish and Zionist groups have claimed that the curriculum contains and fosters antisemitism.

As they once managed to do in opposing ethnic studies, the backers of AB 715 pulled together an arguably diverse coalition against antisemitism in K–12 schools. The bill’s legislative co-sponsors included leadership of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, Asian American and Pacific Islander Caucus, Latino Caucus, and Black Caucus. JPAC, too, paid lip service to California’s diverse communities in their official statements: “We know other vulnerable communities have also been subject to increases in discrimination in recent years. This surge in targeted hate incidents demands a firm and urgent legislative response.” According to them, AB 715 “reaffirms California’s commitment to creating safe, inclusive learning environments for all students—including Jewish students.” Indeed, on the same day AB 715 was signed, Governor Newsom signed SB 48 into law, creating four new discrimination prevention coordinators which broadly “focus . . . on religious, racial, ethnic, gender, and LGBTQ discrimination” for K-12 education, and which per the law, would only come into being if AB 715 was also enacted.

Yet SB 48 was originally meant to prohibit immigration officers from entering schools without a warrant and to restrict school law enforcement from cooperating with federal officials. It was amended in July to its current version. As a result, the pro-AB 715 coalition’s claim to support inclusivity appears suspect: It is unclear how a statewide antisemitism coordinator supports “safe, inclusive learning environments” for non-Jewish students; why the appointment of statewide discrimination prevention coordinators relied on the creation of an antisemitism prevention coordinator first; and why “discrimination prevention” took precedence over protecting students from ICE at a moment when officers are conducting warrantless raids across the country.

Ironically, the ethnic studies approach could help us better understand this series of events, from the competing claims of what constitutes “anti-discrimination” to the role of the California Jewish community as both a minority group and an effective wielder of political power. Yet rather than offering an opportunity to develop sharper analyses of antisemitism and racism, those that support AB 715—from mainstream Jewish institutions for whom Zionism trumps all else, to anti-DEI groups who wish to move into the mainstream of California political life—offer a static, tired understanding of antisemitism, one that conflates it with criticism of Israel and support for Palestine, and which suggests all Jews in America are in a static, immutable state of perpetual victimhood. Like previous efforts from mainstream Jewish Zionist institutions, AB 715 is not interested in combatting antisemitism so much as in suppressing Palestinian stories in the classroom and adding surveillance to teachers already under scrutiny. Even as these advocates work in the name of protecting children, those who stand to lose from AB 715 are California’s students—including its Jewish youth, an increasingly racially diverse group with diverse opinions on Palestine-Israel who would benefit from a robust curriculum that teaches us how both antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism are connected to broader structures of empire and colonialism.

The show of force in passing AB 715 comes after parent groups, typically working in collaboration with established Zionist lawfare groups, have sought to thwart ethnic studies implementation across the state by filing suits against school districts and boards. In February 2025, a suit brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center successfully stopped ethnic studies instruction in the Santa Ana Unified School District in Orange County until further notice. The Deborah Project has sued both the Mountain View–Los Altos High School District and the Hayward Unified School District for release of “records” related to ethnic studies instruction; both districts settled and agreed to pay the group’s legal fees. (Another suit filed against the Los Angeles Unified School District by the Deborah Project alongside a Jewish parents’ group was finally dismissed after two and a half years in December 2024.) Both the Brandeis Center and The Deborah Project are notable pro-Israel “lawfare” firms that have filed numerous Title VI complaints alleging antisemitism on both college campuses and in K-12 schools. In addition to these legal efforts, parent groups have used grassroots tactics to try to persuade districts to rethink ethnic studies—particularly in the South Bay area, which boasts a large Israeli American population. There, in Palo Alto and Menlo-Atherton, parents organized a letter and petition, respectively, complaining about ethnic studies content. In the latter town, the teacher whose ethnic studies lesson on “narratives and counter-narratives” in Palestine-Israel prompted the petition has sued the school district, accusing them of anti-Black discrimination in failing to protect her from rampant harassment by anti-ethnic-studies groups. This fall in the same district, an anonymous group of parents had begun messaging families encouraging them to “opt” their children out of ethnic studies classes.

Many such campaigns combine allegations of antisemitism in ethnic studies with broader attacks framing the curricula as subversive and anti-American. Outside of Sacramento, for example, the Coalition for Empowered Education brings together the conservative North American Values Institute (formerly known as the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values); the “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,” which claims that “Marxist socialism is the deadliest ideology in history”; and a multiracial variety of right-wing groups, including the Hindu American Foundation and Free Black Thought. In one publication, the Coalition argues that frameworks within ethnic studies “can damage the United States internally by instilling hostile and inaccurate views of American democracy into school kids, erroneously portraying the American democratic system as fundamentally racist, violent, and oppressive.”

The undisguised language of the right is absent in AB 715, which instead makes gestures to liberal multiculturalism. The final text of the bill proclaims that “antisemitism threatens not only the Jewish community, but all Americans. People who peddle these antisemitic conspiracy theories . . . also target other communities—including Black and brown Americans; Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders; LGBTQI+ individuals; Muslim Americans; women and girls; and so many others.” Yet AB 715’s external backers have contributed little to educational efforts about how antisemitism is linked to other forms of bigotry. Conservatives today demonize critical race and ethnic studies by claiming it teaches a version of US history where white people are monolithic oppressors and people of color are abstract victims. Aligning themselves with this critique, Zionist groups have claimed that such approaches offer no space for understanding American Jews, claiming at once that Jews are part of a Judeo-Christian civilization and that they are the ultimate victims of it. As I have written, a more accurate narrative of American Jewish racial position in the US today is one of mixed and complex relationships to power and privilege—especially when considering the racial diversity within the Jewish community. But too often, per historian of American Jewish identity Caroline Light, “Jewish coherence . . . depends upon shared appeals to the past that obfuscate alternative, ambivalent narratives” and “depend upon silences in the process of history itself.”

Critical race and ethnic studies, by contrast, pushes for a multifaceted analysis of American Jewish identity that does not rely on a universal victim narrative to “cohere.” Understanding antisemitism as a form of racism in the US requires reckoning with how some Jews became white. This reckoning can be aided by complex theories of racialization and white supremacy in the US, wherein some groups have found themselves in multiple conflicting positions of access to and exclusion from structures of power. Indeed, such theories can help us understand how California’s Jewish Caucus was reportedly able to spend “years and years of political capital” to get AB 715 passed over the objection of key stakeholders. Some criticisms of the Jewish Legislative Caucus or JPAC’s role in fights over AB 715 or the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum suggest that Jewish Zionist groups have undue influence and power in Sacramento. On its face, such an assertion is an antisemitic canard, but the reality—in which such groups frequently have more legislative success than their progressive opponents—can be complex to grapple with. The truth is not that Jews qua Jews hold outsized political power or pull strings, but that Zionism and anti-Palestinian racism have become such deeply held American bipartisan values that organizations aligning with those values will see fewer barriers to their agenda.

We can come to terms with Jewish power alongside Jewish vulnerability if we take seriously the lessons from ethnic studies that describe how racial identities are not innate, but rather change shape through time and space in relation to structures of power. This suggests that what we need now is not only an assertion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism; we need a new definition of antisemitism that understands that the racial position of American Jewry has shifted. We need scholars of antisemitism to critically analyze what antisemitic tropes or ideologies look like in the 21st century, and we need a framework for discussing how Israel’s actions can, in fact, foment antisemitism by claiming to be acting on behalf of all Jews when carrying out acts of genocide.

California could be a powerful place to develop such curricula. The state now has the second-highest Jewish population in the US. It is home to two of the largest metropolitan Jewish communities in the country: Los Angeles and the Bay Area. And the diversity within California’s Jewish communities is unique. Nationally, 89% of Jews are white, according to the American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis, but a 2021 study of the Bay Area Jewish community indicated that 25% of Jewish households polled include “a respondent or spouse who is Hispanic, Asian-American, African-American, or of mixed or other ethnic or racial background (other than white).” Among respondents aged 35–49, this rises to 28% and for ages 18-34, the number is 38%. In other words, Jewish families with school aged children in California are increasingly not white or Ashkenazi. Instead of isolating the Jewish experience and putting it in a zero-sum relationship to the stories of other groups, the California curriculum could offer an analysis of antisemitism and racism together that could help us better understand the experience of the many Jews of color in the community, as well as their non-Jewish neighbors. For instance, one might find a link between Jewish and Arab American histories by studying the history of Sephardi Jews from the Ottoman empire who were racialized as Arab upon immigration to the US, rather than taking the white, Ashkenazi history as the assumed starting point. Instead of teaching “Black–Jewish relations” that supposes a monolithic white Jewish community, schools could teach the history of Black Jewry in the US and abroad, offering insights about the relationship between anti-Blackness and antisemitism, rather than supposing that they are always separate and hierarchized.

At one point, I felt hopeful that some bridges could be built between ethnic studies and those whose stated goal was quality education about Jews and antisemitism. But as long as Jewish Zionist groups intervene every time that curricula veers even slightly toward acknowledging Palestinian human rights, the possibility for a robust cross-analysis of antisemitism within ethnic studies recedes farther from sight. This is especially true as previous campaigns to “include Jews in ethnic studies” have actually been Trojan horses for including pro-Israel content in ethnic studies. Ethnic studies educators spend so much time dealing with Zionist backlash to the potential inclusion of Palestinian stories that little energy is left over to devote to robust education on antisemitism. In doubling down on the same tired conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, AB 715 has contributed to making the possibility of such education more remote by clarifying the intentions of groups like JPAC. Ethnic studies educators who are earnest about bringing in better Jewish education know they cannot win with these critics unless they plan to erase Palestinian stories and silence criticism of Israel.

Against this backdrop, the students of California are left to find their own way forward. After all, even where Palestine is successfully barred from the classroom, kids are hearing about Palestine anyway—from TikTok and Instagram; from Palestinian flags in their neighbors’ windows; from older siblings and cousins navigating campus activism; and from other students in California’s multiracial classrooms. Rather than assure that their loyalties stay with Israel, campaigns against ethnic studies have only deprived these students of a classroom setting in which to better understand what they are taking in from their environment. The groups behind AB 715 have cast the “liberated ethnic studies” curriculum in the role of an “outside agitator” infiltrating schools. But watching students speak at school board hearings and organize protests at middle and high schools, it is clear how homegrown support for Palestine is among students in California, even at young ages. And it’s clear that these supporters include many Jewish students and parents, who have recently begun joining pro-ethnic studies and anti-AB 715 coalitions in greater numbers than ever before—including many who weren’t already part of Jewish anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. In fact, I’ve heard from many of these students and parents that they believe ethnic studies frameworks have helped them better understand their own identities as Jews, even where such connections aren’t made explicit in the curricula.

When Jewish Zionist groups prohibit students from engaging in this critical learning in the classroom, and as teachers are punished for teaching Palestine or shy away from it for fear of reprisal, California’s youth figure out ways to teach themselves. In March 2024, Berkeley Unified School District held a public comment session on whether to renew a contract to develop curriculum with the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Consortium. The content of the hearing—one of several over the 2023-2024 school year—expanded beyond just ethnic studies into how Palestine-Israel is, or is not, allowed to be discussed in Berkeley’s schools. A Jewish senior at Berkeley High School pushed for the importance of teaching about Palestine in ethnic studies. “I think school is the place we need to be hearing about this from . . . Not teaching students about Israel-Palestine isn’t going to stop them from hearing about it.” And an eighth grader spoke about the “Watermelon Club” she co-founded at her middle school, which had been accused of perpetrating antisemitism through its organization of a student walkout. “Many students and parents may think that the club or the members of the club are anti-Jewish or antisemitic,” she said at the hearing. “But any student is welcome to the club. We as the club leaders will make sure it’s a safe environment where everyone’s opinions are heard.”

Selections in this essay, particularly the passage that begins "But too often..." and ends on "structures of power," were originally published in “Avoiding a Zero-Sum Game: Lessons for Jewish Studies from California’s Struggle over the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Reprinted with permission of Shofar and Purdue University Press.

Dr. Gabi Kirk is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Analysis at Cal Poly Humboldt, in Arcata, California.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/in-california-jewish-groups-win-is-students-loss at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

MEMOIR | 12 NOV 2025, 2:57 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 14 NOV 2025, 6:27 PM UTC

Alphabets on the Sand

In Gaza, language is insufficient to describe the magnitude of our loss, but I write anyway.

Abdullah Hany Daher

Palestinian children attend a lesson in Gaza City, February 26th, 2025.

Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP

In Gaza, books were not simply burned; they vanished. Libraries turned to dust. Schools became piles of concrete. Notebooks disintegrated in the mud, letters dissolving into the rain. Children drew alphabets on the sand, and watched as the wind erased them. They drew alphabets on the walls of their tents, then watched as dust concealed them. Children no longer read stories; they became the story.

When the war began, formal education was suspended across Gaza. Schools closed, then reopened as shelters; later, they were converted into cemeteries. Children lost their desks, their homework, their songs. Teachers no longer asked, “Did you study?” but “Did you survive?” Walls burned. Playgrounds became burial sites. The child who once memorized poems now repeats the names of the missing. Where devastation is the classroom, it often feels as though knowledge itself has become a form of mourning.

In June 2024, I was walking through Jabalia Camp when I saw an improvised graveyard beside a school. No marble headstones. Only cardboard boxes previously used by UNRWA to deliver flour, now carrying the names of the dead. The cardboard that once held supplies for survival had become markers for those who didn’t survive. I stopped in my tracks, unable to move. I wanted to copy the name of one of the martyrs into my phone, but I felt like a traitor. How can I carry a name of someone whose eye color and joys I don’t know, whose voice I’ve never heard? Will all this life evaporate like dust from an explosion—heavy, and then gone?

This past February, I went to the Shadia Abu Ghazala School in Al-Saftawi to see a friend who was staying there. The buildings that had once been brimming with chattering children were reduced to rubble, chairs that had once held eager students strewn broken throughout. In the courtyard, a man sat on a stone, holding a Quran. Ten children surrounded him, listening. No pens. No paper. No board. He was not a teacher, but a father. When teachers fell, he replaced them. When classrooms disappeared, he built one with his voice. As I stood there, ashamed of my silence, I, too, became his student, learning anew how to name loss without surrendering to it.

Now I am a high school senior. In Gaza, this final year of secondary education determines everything—our future studies, our careers, the paths of the rest of our lives. But only a few schools have reopened. From where I live in Khan Younis, it takes more than three hours to reach the nearest functioning school. On the broken roads, there are no buses, no taxis. I travel by foot. Sometimes I walk past craters deeper than I am tall. The internet comes and goes. Every day, the occupation cuts or jams the signal. When the internet returns, it crawls at 100 kilobytes per second. We wait hours to open one page, download one file, glimpse one line of a lesson we may never finish.

And still, many in Gaza refuse to stop learning. In the mornings, children walk through the ruins with plastic bags instead of backpacks. Some classes meet under trees, others in half-collapsed mosques. A child sits in the corner of a tent, reading from a half-burned notebook. A girl explains to her sister a grammatical rule she once heard. A boy searches through rubble for a torn page to keep. Education becomes resistance—not an institution, but an instinct. To learn in Gaza is to say, “I am still here.” We read not because we hope, but because each sentence feels like defiance of the ruin that surrounds us.

The ceasefire came, but the bombing never really stopped. In each moment of silence people still count the dead. In each interval of calm, I feel time slowing down—as if the world outside Gaza moves forward while we remain stuck inside the same unfinished sentence trapped between survival and meaning.

When I write, I don’t feel proud. I feel late. Words cannot keep up with what happens here. Language always follows loss. Still, I write, because forgetting is another kind of death. Writing does not save anyone; it only makes absence visible. It says, “We existed.” It says, “We tried.” And in Gaza, we have no more space to bury names.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Abdullah Hany Daher is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. He documents the human stories of war, aiming to preserve voices that the rubble cannot silence.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/alphabets-on-the-sand at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 5 NOV 2025, 2:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 7 NOV 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

Mamdani Created a Left-Liberal Coalition on Israel/Palestine

The surprising story of the New York mayoral campaign is not liberal Zionist opposition to Mamdani’s campaign, but their support.

Peter Beinart

Zohran Mamdani speaks during a victory speech at a mayoral election night watch party, November 4th, 2025.

Yuki Iwamura/AP

In the weeks before election day, supporters of Israel stepped up their attacks on Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York City mayoral contest on Tuesday night. In late October, over 1,100 rabbis across the country signed a letter denouncing “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization throughout our nation.” As Alex Kane reported in these pages, the signatories included not just conservatives and centrists, but also liberal Zionists: At least 65 rabbis and cantors affiliated with the liberal Zionist lobbying group J Street signed on. On October 31st, Angela Buchdahl, arguably New York’s most prominent Reform rabbi, accused Mamdani of promoting “the age-old antisemitic trope that Jews across the world are the root cause of our problem here.”

This was predictable: Liberal Zionists have long opposed anti-Zionism’s “political normalization” and regularly oppose candidates who challenge the Jewish state. The more surprising story of the 2025 New York mayoral campaign is not liberal Zionist opposition to Mamdani’s campaign, but liberal Zionist support. Even before the Democratic mayoral primary, Mamdani received the cross-endorsement of his primary rival, Comptroller Brad Lander, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the city. After the primary, Mamdani won the backing of Representative Jerrold Nadler, the longest-serving Jewish member of Congress, as well as State Assemblyman Micah Lasher, the frontrunner to succeed Nadler when he retires next year. In the campaign’s final weeks, Lander, Nadler, and Lasher were joined by other prominent liberal Zionists, figures who oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, yet support its existence as a Jewish state. Victor Kovner, one of the founders of J Street, Sharon Kleinbaum, rabbi emerita at the LGBT synagogue Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, and State Senator Liz Krueger all endorsed Mamdani’s campaign. Each has said that they disagree with Mamdani about Israel, but support him all the same. “I differ with some of Mamdani’s views about the future for Israelis and Palestinians,” wrote Kovner in The Forward, “including his failure to vocally support a two-state solution. But one doesn’t have to agree with all of his views about the Middle East to conclude that he is the best candidate for mayor.”

This is a new political phenomenon. Since at least 1967, the organized American Jewish community, and virtually all US politicians, have treated Israel’s system of Jewish legal supremacy as nonnegotiable. Anti-Zionism has been beyond the pale. Mamdani’s victory suggests that we are witnessing a historic change. The increasingly right-wing character of both Israel’s government and the pro-Israel establishment in the US is not only leading more Americans to question Zionism, it’s also leading some Zionists to cease making Zionism a political litmus test. By bringing together anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists, Mamdani has forged a coalition that allows Americans who disagree in their ultimate vision for Palestine and Israel to work together to end unconditional US support for Israel. In the coming years, that coalition could change the Democratic Party, and American politics, as a whole.

In recent decades, barely any anti-Zionists have competed seriously for high political office. But when they have, liberal Zionists have shunned them. In 2018, when then-candidate for Congress Rashida Tlaib suggested she might prefer a single democratic state in Israel-Palestine, J Street withdrew its endorsement. The lobbying group, whose Political Action Committee says endorsees must “commit to supporting US security assistance to Israel as outlined in the 10-year Memorandum of Understanding negotiated by President Obama,” has not even endorsed progressives who are less explicitly anti-Zionist than Mamdani, like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush. As The Forward has noted, J Street endorsed 48 candidates in 2022 who were also endorsed by AIPAC, which supports the Israeli government unconditionally, but only one who was also endorsed by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). And it’s not just J Street that won’t ally with anti-Zionists. Last year, Kamala Harris’s campaign refused to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the Democratic National Convention. This summer, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party revoked its endorsement of mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, a JVP-endorsed candidate who supports boycotting Israel.

Mamdani’s success shows that this firewall is starting to erode. As I noted after Mamdani’s primary win, he presents his positions on Israel-Palestine—which are radical in the context of American politics—in liberal and universalist terms, framing his opposition to Jewish statehood in the language of equality under the law. In an October debate, he said he “would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion. And part of that is because I’m an American who believes in the importance of equal rights being enshrined in every single country.” Rather than exceptionalize Israel, he’s said that he opposes not only Jewish supremacy in Israel but Hindu supremacy in India and Islamic supremacy in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

These arguments may appeal to some liberal Zionists, who are increasingly alienated from the actions of the Jewish state. On its website, New York Jewish Agenda declares that “we are proud to call ourselves liberal Zionists.” But in a Guardian report last month, its executive director Phylisa Wisdom acknowledged that its members’ views are in flux: “There are a lot of people who couldn’t ever imagine voting for an anti-Zionist mayor and who also could never have imagined their own feelings about Israel and the Israeli government that they are having right now,” she said. Many liberal Zionists, she suggested, think Mamdani is correct “that Benjamin Netanyahu should be behind bars.”

J Street’s views are evolving as well. In January 2024, the group withdrew its endorsement of New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman, in part because he accused Israel of committing genocide. But this August, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami declared that he had “been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.” J Street does not endorse in local elections, but after Mamdani won the primary, Ben-Ami said that “political figures like [him] may well have an important role to play if we’re going to succeed” in achieving J Street’s goal of “Jewish safety” and “Palestinian freedom.” J Street still supports a Jewish state. But by suggesting that Mamdani, who opposes one, has an important role to play in achieving J Street’s vision, Ben-Ami implies that liberal Zionists and anti-Zionists need not be political adversaries. As he said in his statement after the mayoral primary, their shared commitment to “democratic principle” requires that they work together “to beat the threat we all face from the authoritarian right.”

If some liberal Zionists have warmed to Mamdani because they’re more alienated from Israel, they’ve also warmed to him because they are more alienated from many of Israel’s defenders in the US. Lander, arguably New York’s most prominent Jewish liberal Zionist elected official, has accused Israel of “war crimes,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “forced starvation” in Gaza. Yet Mamdani’s chief rival, Andrew Cuomo, in his effort to woo New York’s pro-Israel establishment, joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team at the International Criminal Court. Cuomo has also engaged in blatant anti-Muslim bigotry, calling Mamdani a “terrorist sympathizer” and laughing when a talk show host said Mamdani would have cheered 9/11, which drew reprimands from J Street and Rep. Nadler. In 2022, the Canadian political scientist Mira Sucharov asked American Jews whether they supported Zionism according to different definitions of the term. When she defined Zionism as “a belief in a Jewish and democratic state,” 72% agreed. But when she defined it as “the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” the figure dropped to only 13%. By embracing Netanyahu and Islamophobia, Cuomo defined Zionism in a way that makes some liberal Zionists uncomfortable. Despite identifying as Zionists, figures like Lander and Nadler may find Mamdani’s emphasis on equality in Palestine-Israel more appealing than Cuomo’s.

Mamdani’s coalition between anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists will be tested in the years to come. Despite Mamdani’s success, liberal Zionists in other states may refuse to follow Lander and Nadler’s lead when faced with anti-Zionist insurgents. If they instead help AIPAC-friendly centrists triumph, they will alienate the party’s young, progressive base. Lander will likely enjoy the backing of Mamdani and many of his supporters if he challenges AIPAC-aligned Congressman Dan Goldman next fall, as some expect. But if no major candidate with Mamdani’s views enters the 2028 Democratic presidential primary—and there are none on the horizon—will the activists who powered his campaign mobilize for a candidate like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, or Chris Murphy, who oppose unconditional support for Israel but stop short of challenging Jewish supremacy itself?

At this moment, both anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists are far from achieving their goals. Neither one decolonized state between the river and the sea nor partition into separate Jewish and Palestinian states is plausible in the near term. But the fact that their ultimate visions remain distant might make it easier to unite around shorter-term goals: In particular, halting—or at least seriously curtailing—US military aid to Israel, and fighting Donald Trump’s authoritarianism at home. Mamdani’s victory offers a glimpse of a left-liberal coalition for Palestinian freedom and American democracy, which echoes the great American progressive coalitions of the past. Between 1935 and 1939, the Communist Party of the United States supported the New Deal. In 1967, the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society joined protests led by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an umbrella group that included more moderate anti-war activists. In those cases, leftists supported liberals. And given how rare anti-Zionism remains among American politicians, leftists may sometimes make the same calculation in the years to come, as the struggle for Palestinian rights wins influence inside the Democratic Party.

But given the generational and ideological trends that Mamdani’s campaign represents, it may be that over time the power dynamics nationally shift leftward, and liberal Zionists play the supporting role. If this coalition becomes a politically viable alternative to both white Christian supremacy in the United States and unconditional support for Jewish supremacy in Israel, historians may look back at the 2025 New York mayoral race as the moment where it began.

Peter Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents.

PeterBeinart

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The Olive Harvest Deportations

Alarmed by efforts to publicize its violence against Palestinians, Israel is moving to expel international solidarity activists from the occupied West Bank.

Maya Rosen

Israeli soldiers stand by as settlers destroy olive trees in Abu Falah, a village to the east of Ramallah, October 24th.

Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Activestills

On October 16th, a group of 32 international volunteers was interrupted while helping Palestinian farmers pick olives outside the village of Burin in the occupied West Bank. “The Israeli army arrived in a white van, and the farmers said we must leave,” one of the activists, who requested to remain anonymous, told Jewish Currents. The activists quickly moved into a farmer’s home. But according to Ghassan Najjar—a Burin resident who helps coordinate the annual olive harvest—the military, along with armed settlement officials from nearby Yitzhar, followed them inside and raided the house. At the insistence of settlement forces, the military called the police, who claimed that the area had been designated a closed military zone and proceeded to arrest all 32 activists. The volunteers, who came from across the United States and Europe and ranged in age from twenties to eighties, were taken to the police station in the settlement of Ariel. Over the next five days, they were transported to prison and then deported.

Najjar said this mass deportation of international activists, the largest ever apart from the expulsions of those aboard the recent Gaza solidarity flotillas, shows the extent of coordination between settler bodies and Israeli government officials. According to the Religious Zionist news site Srugim, it was settlement forces that initially noticed the activists. Settlers reached out to the head of their local governing body, the Samaria Regional Council; the head of the Council then contacted top military personnel as well as the Minister of the Interior, demanding deportations. Soon after the deportation decision was made, settlers loudly celebrated it as a win. On October 18th, Member of Knesset Tzvi Sukkot, a settler who has been arrested numerous times for violence against Palestinians, posted on Facebook that “this mass expulsion will, God willing, send a clear and unmistakable message to anyone thinking of coming here into the area to smear Israel through planned, violent provocations.” In an interview with Jewish Currents, Sukkot reiterated this sentiment. “These are people who come to bait, to provoke, to create a distorted picture of reality,” he said, adding that he was “certainly proud of” the campaign to deport them. That effort has only grown in the past days, with Israeli police arresting an additional 11 activists in Burin on October 29th and moving to deport the two in the group who were on tourist visas.

The arrest of international activists is a small part of Israel’s sprawling war on the Palestinian olive harvest. For decades, and especially in the past few years, Israeli settlers, soldiers, and government leaders have all targeted the harvest due to its economic and cultural importance across Palestine. In Gaza, Israel has destroyed an estimated one million olive trees in its bombardment, an assault leading experts have called a genocide. Meanwhile, less than two weeks into this year’s West Bank harvest, Israeli settlers have carried out over 150 increasingly violent attacks against harvesters. Settlers have stolen olives and damaged equipment; cut down and burned olive trees, destroying whole groves; and regularly teamed up with soldiers to prevent farmers from reaching their trees. “It has become a long-standing tradition during the olive-picking season for settlers to do everything they can to prevent Palestinians from enjoying their agricultural produce,” said Lea Tsemel, a human rights lawyer who represented the arrested activists.

In response, the harvest has become a time of particularly intensive protective presence, a practice wherein outside activists join Palestinian hosts in the hopes that their presence will decrease violence, or that they will at least be able to document attacks. Multiple Palestinian, Jewish, international, and Israeli groups have launched such initiatives in coordination with local communities, helping to produce media and human rights reports about settler and state attacks, bringing international diplomats to the field, and otherwise attempting to put Israel’s abuses in the spotlight. Coming amidst growing criticism of Israeli violence, these efforts have incensed Israeli settlers and leaders. “Israelis now feel isolated from the world because people have started to know the truth; they’ve started to know exactly what the settlers are doing here,” Najjar told me. This concern has given rise to an escalating Israeli campaign to hinder activists’ participation in the harvest, as well as the harvest itself, by smearing both as “terrorist” activities and calling for arrests and deportations. In light of this mobilization, human rights experts say that the recent wave of deportations may be only the beginning of a bid to radically curtail the role of activists in the area. In Tsemel’s words, “it’s an attempt to prevent the presence of anyone who could be a witness.”

Israel’s alarm over international activists in the West Bank started growing in the aftermath of October 7th, as skyrocketing settler violence began drawing global scrutiny. In March 2024, Sukkot launched a series of Knesset hearings on activists in the West Bank as part of the Subcommittee on Judea and Samaria, which he heads. Attended by military, police, and government top brass, as well as right-wing NGOs, the five such hearings to date focused on the ways that, in Sukkot’s words, foreign activists were “do[ing] everything in their power to obstruct our just war.” Much of this panic concerned activists’ efforts to bring attention to settler violence: At one of the hearings, a representative of Im Tirzu accused activists of “releasing false reports to the International Criminal Court” and of bringing diplomats to the West Bank, while at another, far-right Jewish Power Member of Knesset Limor Son Har-Melech complained that activists “blacken Israel’s name around the world.” “Ultimately, the campaigns against Israel and the sanctions come from them,” Sukkot said in September 2024. Therefore, Israel must work on “weeding them out one by one.”

Such calls to “weed out” activists have been accompanied by the creation of concrete enforcement structures. In early April 2024, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir set up a special unit within the police to handle foreign activists arrested in the West Bank. The unit—which was established soon after the Biden administration began implementing sanctions against violent settlers and settler organizations, and was reported to be in direct response to this move—carries out its work in cooperation with the Population and Immigration Authority (PIA) because of the organization’s low threshold for revoking visas. As a result, the unit has been able to swiftly enact deportations: According to data provided by the Human Rights Defenders Fund, 16 international activists were expelled from the country in the months following the start of Sukkot’s hearings and Ben-Gvir’s special unit. Similar trends have held when it comes to Israel denying people entry into the country: The Religious Zionist publication Arutz Sheva reported that only 30 left-wing activists were refused entry to Israel between 2017 and early 2024, whereas the first five months of 2025 alone saw over 100 refusals. “Many discussions in which we worked to connect the relevant bodies and actors finally bore fruit,” Sukkot said of the increase. “The special staff set up by Ben-Gvir . . . together with cooperation that we led between the PIA, the Ministry of the Diaspora, and the Central Command, led to a rise of thousands of percent [sic] in the refusal of entry of these hostile actors into Israel.” “Our message is clear,” Sukkot concluded. “The State of Israel will not be a playground for de-legitimization activists.”

These policies often lead to certain areas being arbitrarily marked as off-limits to both Palestinians and those accompanying them. “Across the West Bank, there are many places that are simply closed—huge swathes of land where access just isn’t permitted,” said Qamar Mashriqi, a human rights lawyer who works to protect Palestinian land rights in Masafer Yatta. Such practices are in direct violation of a 2006 Israeli Supreme Court ruling stating that the military cannot prevent Palestinians from accessing and working their land, as well as the Israeli military’s own stated commitment to following the court’s ruling. Documents obtained by Jewish Currents show that in a May 2024 response to the court, the military acknowledged that “the fact of arriving with activist accompaniment cannot be considered a provocation or a reason for declaring a closed [military] zone.” This position was reaffirmed in a September 2025 Civil Administration document released ahead of the olive harvest, also obtained by Jewish Currents. But Avi Dabush, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights—which organizes daily protective presence during the olive harvest—has told +972 Magazine that activists with his group have nevertheless been prevented from accessing olive groves almost every day this season. As Yonatan Pollak, a veteran Israeli activist who helps to coordinate protective presence during the harvest, noted to Jewish Currents, “this is a clear case of how reality and stated policy are two completely different things.”

Since this year’s harvest began, that reality has become more and more violent. In a particularly horrific incident on October 19th, the first day of the local olive harvest, over 100 settlers attacked farmers in Turmus Ayya, beating international activists with clubs and leaving a Palestinian woman with a brain bleed and 18 stitches in her head. The event was captured on video by the American journalist Jasper Nathaniel and received millions of views. Two days later, a settler on an ATV drove among the olive harvesters, asking people for their names and photographing them, and a few hours later, the military announced that only people from Turmus Ayya were allowed to stay in the fields. “They were looking for the activists. They wanted the activists to leave the area so they wouldn’t witness any intimidation or attacks from settlers,” Yaser Alkam, a landowner in Turmus Ayya who serves as the head of the foreign relations department in the local municipality, told Jewish Currents. Both Nathaniel and Alkam believe the attempt to root out the activists was due to the attention the video of the attack two days earlier had received. “All the soldiers and police officers seemed very upset about all this publicity they’re getting,” Nathaniel said. “It’s clear that they understand the bad optics, and they are trying to clean it up.” The same pattern unfolded the next day, when Alkam went to harvest his olives along with Dutch journalists. The same settler came through on his ATV to intimidate people and, Alkam said, “saw the cameras, the journalists taking videos of him.” Soon after, the military came and declared a closed military zone, forcing both the journalists and Alkam to leave.

Palestinians in nearby areas report a similar situation. Najjar, of Burin, said that there had been many cases this season of the military declaring closed military zones and forcing internationals to leave. “Many times over the last two months, the Shin Bet [the internal Israeli security police] have called me and threatened me and told me not to bring internationals,” Najjar said, noting that this is the first year that he has received threats concerning activists. In Masafer Yatta, too, where the majority of olive trees are now under closed military zone orders for the entirety of the olive harvest season, there is concern that Israel will restrict activists. In a recent message, the settler-led South Hebron Hills Regional Council has told residents that “only land owners who can prove their ownership will be permitted to take part in the olive harvest. The entrance of outside actors or anarchists will not be permitted.” The message went further, clarifying precisely what was concerning the settlers. “On entry to the olive harvest,” it noted, “there will be a security check and mobile phones must be deposited.” Such directives show that “they do not want the word to spread,” said Najjar. “They do not want anything that goes on in those areas to be documented.”

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.

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Degrees of Separation

Israel’s new international college programs offer American students an escape from campus activism while training them as state cheerleaders.

Maya Rosen

Graduation day at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, June 2025.

Reichman University Facebook page

On a sunny afternoon in April, I filed into an auditorium at Reichman University in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv, with some hundred prospective students and their families. Outside the auditorium, staff handed out brochures, pens, and tote bags emblazoned with the motto of Reichman’s international school: “Live in Israel, study in English.” We watched a short promotional video for the school, featuring smiling students and grassy quads. Afterward, Jonathan Davis, the head of the international school and the university’s vice president for external relations, took the stage. His presentation was largely like any other college information session: We heard about the school’s majors, dorms, sports teams, and an alumni network he boasted was comparable to those at Ivy League universities. But there was one important difference between those schools and Reichman, Davis explained: “We’re a university where you won’t find any woke or cancel culture or antisemitism.” The crowd cheered.

At a time when university campuses around the world regularly erupt in protests against Israel, Reichman University offers a markedly different option. “We’re not embarrassed to call ourselves Zionist,” Davis told the prospective students. “You’re going to find yourself in a very comfortable situation on this campus.” On the other hand, he noted, “if you’re an avowed anti-Zionist and you support BDS, I don’t think you’ll feel comfortable here.” Davis went on to describe the “tremendous amount of unity” on campus in support of the Israeli military, boasting that 55% of Reichman students had served in reserve duty since October 7th. The school encourages former combat soldiers to enroll by offering them reduced admissions requirements and has even adapted aspects of Israeli military hierarchy into its own social structure: Each new student is assigned to an older student counselor, most of whom, Davis explained, are former military officers.

Reichman, Israel’s only private university, has an enrollment of some 8,500 students, about a third of whom came to the school from outside the country. This international student body is growing, including since October 7th: For the 2024–25 academic year, it increased by 6%. Among the influx were several dozen students who transferred to Reichman from US universities in the middle of the school year. Applications were up for this year, too, and Davis believes the school’s unabashed Zionism is “a big selling point. People don’t want anti-Israel, antisemitic demonstrations,” he told me. “They don’t necessarily want Palestinian flags in their face. And they don’t want to be made to feel bad.”

Reichman has operated its English-language international school since 2001, making it something of an outlier among Israeli universities. Most of its peers have run study abroad programs for decades, and in some cases have offered undergraduate degrees to a small number of international students in particular fields—but full-scale undergraduate BA programs for foreign students were by and large not part of their educational model. Now, though, these schools are following Reichman’s lead; in fact, nearly every research university in the country—including Hebrew University, the Technion, and Tel Aviv University—has opened or significantly expanded English-language BA programs since October 7th or plans to soon. The trend is also spreading to smaller colleges like Kiryat Ono and Western Galilee, which are opening English-language BA programs for the first time in the 2025–26 academic year.

Nearly every research university in Israel has opened or significantly expanded English-language BA programs since October 7th.

Overall numbers of international students in Israel remain small, but they are growing quickly. According to a report by the Kohelet Forum, an influential conservative Israeli think tank, some 1,500 international undergraduates were enrolled in BA programs in Israel in the 2021–22 academic year, a number that doubled to around 3,000 in 2023–24. A spokesperson for Ariel University, which is located in the occupied West Bank, told me the school had seen a 50% increase in enrollment in its English-language program since October 7th; a promotional video for Bar-Ilan University, posted by Jamie Geller, an online influencer who has worked with the school to promote international recruitment, claimed that applications to its international school were up by 40% in the same period. Many of these students’ home communities report the same trend: “It’s night and day in terms of how many students are considering college in Israel, more than ever before,” Esther Genuth, a college-guidance counselor at the Modern Orthodox Frisch School in New Jersey, told me. A few years ago, she said, “there’d be a handful of students looking into Israeli colleges.” Now, “the numbers are really astounding.”

They are increasing in the context of a post-October 7th Israeli immigration boom: Between October 2023 and September 2024, Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration reported a 62% increase in American Jews opening immigration files—a total of more than 6,000 applications—compared with the same period the previous year. (“Aliyah” is a term used to describe Jews moving to Israel; it literally means “ascension.” Anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent is eligible for citizenship in Israel under the country’s Law of Return.) Increases in applicants from other countries during that period were striking as well: France’s pool of would-be immigrants to Israel topped 5,550, an increase of 355% from the previous year, and Canada’s files numbered over 800, an increase of 87%. The Israeli military is seeing the same trend: During this past March–April recruitment period, for example, enlistment of new immigrants arriving to join the army increased about 40% compared with the same period in 2023. Many of these immigrants are “October 8th Jews,” a term coined by the right-wing American commentator Bret Stephens—and now broadly popular among conservatives—to describe Jews whose commitments to Jewish identity and Israel intensified after October 7th. When I spoke with Geller, the Bar-Ilan-associated influencer, she referenced the “October 8th” concept and explained that “there’s a pipeline” from increased Jewish engagement to studying in Israel to, eventually, aliyah—“the ultimate realization,” she explained, of a “Great Jewish Awakening” that followed October 7th.

Some on the right have been trying to direct diaspora Jews into this pipeline for years, focusing especially on university students. In a 2019 article for right-wing Tablet magazine, the writer Liel Liebovitz called for American Jews “to radically rethink their choices when it comes to higher education” in response to the alleged phenomenon of campus antisemitism and promoted the “crazy idea” of college in Israel as a way forward. When campus pro-Palestine organizing accelerated two years ago in response to Israel’s military campaign against Gaza, the same pundits seized the moment to normalize this “crazy idea” and render it urgent. “Jews need to get out of academia, and they need to get out now,” Liebovitz urged in November 2023 in Makor Rishon, a newspaper associated with Israel’s Religious Zionist movement. “They must understand that there is nothing left for American Jews in the world of academia.” A few months later in the Jerusalem Post, conservative historian Gil Troy proposed “encouraging America’s best students” to attend college in Israel as a way of “draining the academic swamps” in the United States.

Far from empty rhetoric, this sort of hyperbole advertises a political project with increasing formal backing by the State of Israel. Since October 7th, and especially following the rise of encampments on US campuses in the spring of 2024, Israeli university administrators, politicians, and organizations have been urging their government to do more to absorb Jewish students from abroad. Last April, Peretz Lavie, the former president of the Technion—a highly ranked university in Haifa that specializes in science and engineering—published an op-ed in the business newspaper TheMarker comparing the situation of Jewish students at Ivy League schools today to that of German Jewish students in the 1930s. “Now is the time to open wide the doors of Israeli academia to Jewish students,” he wrote, calling on lawmakers to make this project “a national operation.” Days later, Israel’s Association of University Heads released a statement offering to assist Jewish students and faculty “who wish to join Israeli universities and find a welcoming academic and personal home.” In January 2025, the Kohelet Forum published a policy report proposing a plan for doing just that. Like other iterations of this idea, the report argues that at Israeli universities, these students would find “a much more supportive and welcoming environment than at elite institutions” abroad. Projecting this vision into the longer term, it goes on to argue that, over time, “parents and children will change their views on continuing education in American universities. The idea of pursuing a degree in Israel will begin to permeate.” Perhaps most notably, the report positions young diaspora Jews as an “important human capital reserve” for the State of Israel, imagining international students as “strategic assets” who would go on to serve an ambassadorial role on the country’s behalf. In the future, the report concluded, this “Zionist reserve” might play a pivotal role in “enhancing the global reputation of Israeli universities” and “creating a foundation for the advancement of Israel’s academia and economy.” The report’s authors told me that the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism adopted this plan and has begun implementing it this year.

The calculating language of the Kohelet report underscores the fact that the push to expand Israeli international schools is not just ideological but strategic. As the scholar Maya Wind, whose book Towers of Ivory and Steel maps out Israeli universities’ role in Palestinian dispossession, noted in an interview, foreign students function as a tool of soft power in the practice of Israeli statecraft: These students, and the esteem and connections they bring with them, have the potential to burnish Israel’s image on the world stage. “It’s a question of prestige, a question of funding, a question of political legitimacy,” Wind explained. Similar to the Kohelet report, multiple advocates I spoke to explicitly framed the presence of international students in Israel as a matter of national interest—even if they don’t ultimately complete the pipeline and move to Israel. “A certain percentage will want to tie their fate to Israel. That helps the state. On the other hand, those who return to the US will be ambassadors of goodwill,” Lavie told me. This comes in the context of Israeli officials’ concern that “what’s happening on US campuses is a strategic threat” to the State of Israel, as Knesset member Oded Forer declared during a parliamentary hearing last May. “The American president, in another 15, 20, 30 years, is a student today . . . on one of these campuses.” For the recruiters of American students, this same threat can also be recast as an opportunity. Yuval Sinai, the co-author of the Kohelet report, was blunt about his plans: He and his colleagues hoped, he told me, to “take advantage of the crisis of antisemitism and the difficulties that students are experiencing” as “an opportunity that would bring diaspora Jews closer to the State of Israel.”

Israel is developing this new soft power strategy as an older one breaks down. Since the 1990s, the Israeli government and Zionist organizations in and outside the country have tried to shore up attachment to Israel among diaspora Jewish youth through tourism and exchange programs that promote an image of Israel as a liberal democracy and support for it as apolitical. As that image becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, these programs have struggled. Their flagship initiative, Birthright Israel, which has brought a total of close to a million diaspora Jews on free trips to Israel since 1999, is now a bellwether of this decline: Participation in the program had already significantly dropped by the summer of 2023. This shift also marks the broader collapse of a multigenerational liberal base receptive to Zionist messaging, particularly in the United States. “There’s a bifurcation going on,” said Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist and scholar of Middle East studies at Columbia University, referring to the emergence of two opposing poles: a left-wing student movement galvanized by the genocide and a countermovement of young Jews who have embraced a stridently right-wing pro-Israel identity.

The push to expand Israel’s international student body might be understood as an attempt by pro-Israel institutions to cultivate a smaller, more committed base that can substitute for the broad liberal constituency that has been lost. Multiple sources for this piece described Israel’s growing international school network as an intensified heir to Birthright; as the Kohelet report puts it, the older program was like “a good first date; now it’s time for the relationship between Jews abroad and Israelis to take the logical next step” of integration into Israeli society. In framing this narrowing as a “logical next step,” rather than as evidence of contraction, Zionist organizations appear to be attempting to rebrand retreat as progress—and to transform the loss of wider appeal into a show of vitality. In the process, they are drawing on a long-established international tradition of using foreign study programs to serve political goals. Internationalizing its campuses is a “very important legitimizing mechanism” for the state, according to Wind, even if the strategy “has mostly succeeded in attracting Zionist Ashkenazi Jews.” Furthermore, she added, “escalating this strategy over the past two years and in the wake of the student encampments is intended to reinforce the Zionist narrative that American campuses are dangerous for Jewish students and that Israel”—a country that has committed itself to perpetual war—“is the safer choice.”

The push to expand Israel’s international student body represents an attempt to cultivate a smaller, more committed base that can substitute for the broad liberal constituency that has been lost.

Promotional material from Thrive Study Abroad’s Instagram page

The campaign to recruit international students to Israeli universities has involved the combined efforts of the Israeli government, American Jewish foundations and communal institutions, and the universities themselves. Israel has supported the project largely through its Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which has grown significantly in the past few years (its annual budget increased from 93 million NIS to 230 million NIS—or $27.8 million to $68.8 million— between 2022 and 2024, including subsidies for settler and other right-wing propaganda initiatives). According to Sinai, the Kohelet report author, the ministry has started funding scholarships for eligible foreign students beginning in the 2025–26 academic year. It has also advertised money for Israeli academic institutions that want to establish additional English language programs and market them to Jewish students abroad, prioritizing those from “hotbeds of antisemitism.” The call specifies that programs must be “Zionist and pro-Israel in nature” to receive funding and that they must require students to participate in a Zionist ideological program developed by the ministry called “Right to Identity.” Other Israeli state funding has been provided by the country’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, which recently launched a slew of “academic integration programs” geared toward students coming from abroad who plan to stay in Israel. Last year, 15 tracks opened at 11 institutions, and at least seven more tracks are opening in the 2025–26 academic year, according to Avital Feldman, the head of the English language desk at the Israeli government’s Student Authority, a department within the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration that offers potential immigrants guidance on college admissions. Participating students receive a year of English language courses alongside intensive Hebrew language study, then transition into courses taught in Hebrew.

Much of the private funding for the creation of these academic integration programs in Israel has come from an American venture capitalist named David Magerman via his foundation, Tzemach David. Formerly a major donor to the University of Pennsylvania, Magerman cut ties with his alma mater shortly after October 7th. “There is no place for self-respecting Jewish people at an institution that supports evil,” he wrote in an open letter castigating the university’s president and chairman for failing to explicitly condemn Hamas. “My only remaining hope is that all self-respecting Jews, and all moral citizens of the world, dissociate themselves from Penn.” Magerman told me he now believes that American Jewish parents are engaging in “a form of child abuse” if they send their kids to a top university with a pro-Palestine presence. “The golden age of Jews in America is over,” he added, echoing the title and argument of former New Republic editor Franklin Foer’s popular 2024 piece in The Atlantic. “I view myself as post-America.” Magerman’s pessimism has prompted him to take on a new role in the university fundraising landscape: “diverting money, students, and other resources from American colleges to convince people to support and attend Israeli colleges.” Last summer, he began by redirecting a $5 million gift of his own: Originally earmarked for Penn, the money went to five Israeli institutions of higher education in order to implement the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration’s academic integration program for Hebrew language learners.

One of Magerman’s guiding conceits is that families are more likely to take the idea of college in Israel seriously if it is presented early and often in kids’ secondary education. “Ultimately,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy last June, “we need to get middle school parents to start thinking about Israeli college.” For now, he hopes to make the idea ubiquitous at Jewish high schools in the US and has enlisted college-guidance counselors, mostly from Modern Orthodox schools, to serve, in his words, as its “cheerleaders.” To that end, last summer, Tzemach David—together with Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a Religious Zionist organization called World Mizrachi, and an Orthodox Union program called the Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus—flew ten guidance counselors to Israel, where they toured nine college campuses in four days. Several participating counselors I spoke with afterward seemed to embrace their mission. Rafael Blumenthal, the director of college guidance at the Modern Orthodox Ramaz School in New York City, told me Ramaz has started sharing information about college in Israel with its freshmen and sophomores because “there’s a better chance that they will be intrigued and [the idea will] catch hold earlier on.” Tzemach David ran a second trip to Israel for a new cohort of counselors this summer, and more are planned. The foundation has other initiatives in the works: Early next year, it will debut a new program that will send American Jewish high school sophomores to school in the West Bank settlement cluster of Gush Etzion for a semester, in the hope that they will later attend college in Israel and ultimately settle there.

Israeli universities have also increased their direct recruitment in the US. Last year, Israeli consulates launched college fairs in cities including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Washington, DC. Multiple guidance counselors I spoke to credited these fairs with their students’ rising interest in college in Israel. “We’re planning to make these annual events,” said Gal Braun, the director of academic affairs at the Israeli consulate in New York. “Jewish high schools are asking us to do them even more often.” Israeli university representatives have likewise ramped up visits to high schools—mostly Jewish ones, but sometimes public schools with large Jewish populations—as has the Israel Student Authority.

Israeli universities can advertise some concrete advantages to American students facing soaring tuition costs at home. Public universities in Israel cost around $4,000 annually (and are free for students who decide to officially immigrate), and even private Reichman, the country’s most expensive school, tops out at $16,900 a year—a fraction of the cost of most US private colleges. Most bachelor’s degrees in Israel take three years to complete rather than four, and professional degrees in fields like law or social work can be attained in the course of undergraduate study. “It’s kind of a no-brainer,” said Orit Coty, the marketing director for Tel Aviv University’s international school, for American students to accept a steep discount on “the level of education equal to a very, very highly ranked university in the States.” Still, it may not be easy to sell many American Jewish families on abandoning the elite American universities that serve as core status symbols in certain milieus. Magerman admitted that one obstacle to his project is that he sees parents “burying their heads in the sand and hiding from reality because they so desperately want their kids to get a diploma with a famous college name on it.” As a result, he said, he anticipates that getting enough American students on board will be a more significant challenge than building Israeli capacity to absorb them.

Promotional materials from Thrive Study Abroad and Rimon Jerusalem’s Instagram page.

In the last few decades, universities around the world have undergone a process scholars call internationalization, pouring resources into programs that foster academic cooperation across borders: study-abroad programs and faculty exchanges, joint research projects, foreign-language degree tracks, and grant partnerships. These projects often have clear economic benefits: NAFSA, a nonprofit that supports international education, estimates that foreign students contributed $43.8 billion to the US economy in the 2023–24 school year and that decreases in international student enrollment for 2025 due to new US immigration practices could cost the country some $7 billion. Universities also get a prestige boost from the presence of international students, with higher-education rankings using this data as a factor in their metrics—a fact that the authors of the Kohelet report pointed out to me numerous times. But foreign student programs have also served a more directly political function since they were popularized during the Cold War. In the mid-1940s, for instance, the US government started the Fulbright Program—one of the first large-scale academic and cultural exchanges of its kind—as part of an attempt at “establishing a democratic empire,” the education scholar Ravinder Kaur Sidhu writes in his book Universities and Globalization; the program’s goal, Sidhu argues, was to “persuad[e] elites from other nations to regard the United States as a friendly authority with whom they shared common interests as members of a ‘free world.’” (The Soviet Union maintained its own international student programs, including Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, founded in the early 1960s to educate elites from newly decolonized countries tuition free.) Today, the US may be retreating from such tactics because of Trump’s preference for hard power over soft—in addition to suspending student visa opportunities, the president has proposed slashing Fulbright funding—but the approach remains alive and well around the globe: In the words of a 2018 Chinese government document, foreign students were meant to “tell China’s story and spread China’s voice” upon returning home, while British government documents from the aughts and 2010s refer to their international students as “unofficial ambassadors” and “long-term advocates.”

Israel has participated enthusiastically in this global trend. In 2017, the country’s Council for Higher Education (CHE), the body that oversees higher education policy and allocates university funding, launched a national five-year plan, with a budget of 435 million NIS ($130 million), to centralize and accelerate the internationalization process. The council’s Study in Israel initiative, which began in 2019, aimed to more than double the number of international students in the country by 2022. The CHE has been explicit about the fact that international partnerships are important not simply for research or profit, but also as a means of securing legitimacy for institutions facing international scrutiny: After a government committee convened in May 2024 allocated 90 million NIS ($26.9 million) to fighting academic boycotts against Israel, of which 32.6 million NIS ($9.8 million) was allocated to the CHE, the Chair of the CHE and Minister of Education Yoav Kisch said that he would work “to incentivize international collaborations in research, and to enable the brightest Israeli and Jewish minds who wish to do so, to complete their research in Israel through unprecedented research grants.” Historically, this tactic has been evident at Ariel University, the only Israeli university located in the occupied West Bank. Ariel has long been excluded from prestigious international research collaborations and funds and has responded by boasting of its international partnerships, which number at least eight with universities in the US, including a 2019 agreement with Florida Atlantic University and most recently with the University of Utah. International collaborations thus become evidence of normalcy; global recognition from certain quarters becomes a defense against boycott from others.

Today, Israeli universities within the country’s 1948 borders are being treated as pariahs in ways once more typical of Ariel, in part because of increased attention to their violation of Palestinians’ rights and their role in supporting the military—the latter of which includes 57 current programs at Israeli universities for active soldiers and those set to be conscripted. The push to boycott Israeli academic institutions, as called for by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, continues to gain steam. Many student encampments in the spring of 2024 explicitly called on their universities to cancel exchange programs and research collaborations with Israeli universities, as with a campaign at Columbia University to close the university’s Tel Aviv Global Center and end its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University. In February 2025, the Association of University Heads in Israel released a report warning of a dramatic increase in boycott activity, documenting a 66% rise in “incidents”—including suspended partnerships, canceled conferences, rescinded invitations, grant refusals, and journal editors declining to publish Israeli scholarship—between October 2024 and February 2025 compared with the previous year, with US cases doubling.

The CHE’s five-year plan was in part an attempt to get ahead of this shift: It established internationalization offices at every Israeli university and tasked them not only with academic collaboration but also with responding to the growing pressure of boycotts. Over the past several years, these offices have gone on to establish programs like Ben-Gurion University’s Desert Academic Research Experience, or DARE, which brings scientists from abroad to the university for a funded summer sabbatical. Ben-Gurion’s vice president for global engagement, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, told me that the program aimed to humanize Israelis in the eyes of visitors: “They’d meet us, they’d know who we are, and it would be much harder afterwards to imagine us as monsters who eat Palestinians for breakfast.” The name, she noted, was meant to challenge them: “We dare you to come.” She hoped that exposure to Israeli academia would cultivate a more “balanced” perspective less likely to lead to support for BDS. Other initiatives have taken a more overtly political approach to shaping international perceptions. This October, for instance, Ariel University opened an English master’s degree track in “communication, public advocacy, and combating antisemitism” aimed to help students “be ready to legally and rhetorically resist antisemitism in a campus environment.” In another case, an organization called Thrive offers international undergraduates at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and Reichman University a “boot camp” experience to simulate Israeli military training. The program, explained marketing director Rena Zoldan, was designed to counteract media narratives around the Israeli military by giving students “a first-hand understanding” of life within it: “They spend 24 hours under fake fire learning how to shoot and crawl,” followed by a weekend with soldiers. “If you’re just at Tel Aviv University going to the beach every day, maybe you’ll meet soldiers,” Zoldan said, “but you’re not going to get to these conversations and these nuanced views of Israeli life.”

Students in the Thrive Study Abroad program participate in a 24-hour “training” experience with the Israeli military.

Still via Thrive Study Abroad’s YouTube channel

This dynamic—at once embattled and opportunistic—has helped shape the state’s approach to encouraging foreign students to come to Israel, especially for full-degree programs. Emmanuel Nahshon, a former Israeli diplomat who works to combat academic boycotts for the Association of Israeli Universities, said he has been in talks with the country’s Foreign Ministry to promote Israel as a destination for international students. His office proposed a 20 million NIS ($6 million) annual initiative to fund tuition and scholarship aimed at “turning Israel into a safe haven for Jewish students from around the world,” though Nahshon stressed the program would also recruit non-Jews. “The idea is to open the doors of the Israeli universities as much as possible,” he told me. “Those who are looking to destroy Israel know that our universities need to interact with the broader academic world,” he explained, “and they see this as a weak point. We must make sure they don’t succeed.”

Israel’s academic community is now confronting a situation reminiscent of South Africa’s in the 1980s, scholar of Middle Eastern studies Seth Anziska said in an interview. The African National Congress first called for an academic boycott in the late 1950s; in December 1980, the United Nations passed a resolution calling for the academic boycott of South Africa, initiating an era of heightened debate and polarization in the international community about how to relate to collaborations, conferences, exchanges, and other work with South African institutions and scholars. As Anziska noted, the South African boycott’s power ultimately lay in “creating an atmosphere of unacceptability,” marking apartheid as beyond the bounds of legitimate engagement. Even if the boycott’s material impact remains a subject of debate among scholars, it helped designate South Africa as an international pariah—an outcome that resonates in Israel today, where boycotts are producing the very sense of isolation that many American Jewish students imagine they are escaping when they choose to study there.

There’s “a fragility about dealing with the reality of Palestine, a fragility in thinking about Israel as a perpetrator of obscene violence,” Anziska said. In Israel, by contrast, these students feel like “lords of the land.”

Even beyond the reach of the boycott movement as such, it is unclear whether the project of internationalizing the Israeli university remains viable in the face of perpetual war. In the past two years, US State Department travel warnings have complicated exchange programs between American and Israeli universities, and many American universities have called off and suspended their programs. Flight cancellations, inflated ticket prices, and limited airline options have further hindered mobility. Israel’s own international student programs are not immune to these logistical challenges: While every program administrator and government official I spoke to had their sights set on expansion, several also reported serious barriers to increasing international enrollment since October 7th.

Still, for the students who will choose Israeli universities, such material barriers, and even dangers, may not outweigh the emotional comforts on offer. When I spoke with Anziska, he emphasized that what Israeli campuses really offer their potential applicants—who feel increasingly alienated in the diaspora yet are insulated from the material realities of Israel’s war in Gaza—is psychological refuge. “It’s a fragility about their identity in America,” he said. “A fragility about dealing with the reality of Palestine. A fragility in thinking about Israel as a perpetrator of obscene violence.” In Israel, by contrast, these students feel like “lords of the land.” The Israeli international schools have made this a clear selling point. A video advertising Hebrew University’s new English-language bachelor’s program opens with footage of Palestine solidarity encampments and the sound of explosions. “Stop. You’re Jewish, yet you’re considering attending universities that you know don’t support your heritage and facing dangerous groups that you know want your people erased?” its narrator asks. “Don’t do this to yourself. Come to Israel . . . Israel is your home. Choose pride. Choose your people.” Now that that program is in its second year, it can also use current students to deliver this message themselves. “The biggest thing for me is that I can proudly assert my Jewish identity on campus,” Shira Litvack, a student in the program, told prospective applicants at an open house. Litvack said that she had started her degree in Canada but had dropped out because of antisemitism. At Hebrew University, she said, “I don’t feel like I have to hide.” The cost, according to Anziska, is that students will accede to “a suspension of reality. They’re in a silo of anxieties, fears, and messaging,” he said.

At the same time, history suggests that there is no guarantee that study abroad programs will achieve their desired political goals. Scholarship shows that students often arrive in a host country on the basis of preexisting sympathies and maintain them—but as the education researcher Sylvie Lomer notes, international study can also lead students to “reach their own, potentially critical, conclusions and act accordingly.” While Israel has made a bet on recruiting passionately Zionist students who are unlikely to change their views, it could still be hard to keep all of them in the fold under the pressure of Israel’s never-ending, and increasingly escalating, aggression. Although the organized Jewish community wants to use the turmoil on US campuses to their benefit, “without resolving the political crisis at the heart of it, it’s just window dressing,” Anziska said. “There’s mass killing 40 kilometers away. It’s dissonance—an illusion.”

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October 31, 2025

Portrait of a Campus in Crisis

UCLA capitulated to its own hardline pro-Israel activists long before President Trump came calling. As a result, its students have repeatedly become targets of vigilante and police violence.

Will Alden

Adali Schell

The encampment at UCLA, spring 2024.

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Around 8 pm on the last evening in April, some 200 people gathered in Bruin Plaza on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus for a screening of the documentary The Encampments. As the sky darkened and lampposts clicked on, members of the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) stretched a white sheet of fabric between two metal poles, while their comrades in flannels, puffer jackets, and loose-fitting jeans, most faces obscured by medical masks or keffiyehs, settled on blankets near the Bruin bear statue. The Encampments chronicles the Palestine solidarity movement at Columbia University, but it includes a brief portrayal, nearly 30 minutes in, of the UCLA students’ own encampment on Royce Quad, not far from this evening’s screening—the site where, exactly one year earlier, an off-campus mob wielding wooden boards, metal rods, fireworks, and chemical spray had staged a ferocious overnight attack while police looked on. Victims of that mob attack were among the crowd marking the grim anniversary, yet they never got to see their protest represented on screen. About 25 minutes into the film, a column of 30 University of California Police Department (UCPD) officers in riot gear emerged from behind a concrete stage at the northeastern edge of the plaza, marching two abreast, visors down, batons and pepper-ball guns in hand.

This aggressive interruption of the students’ movie night marked a new phase of the sprawling police operation that had dominated a section of campus for the previous week: UCPD officers from up and down the state—including the Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco departments, in addition to UCLA’s own—had spent the days leading up to the anniversary of the attack patrolling Royce Quad and sitting in police SUVs prominently parked near the grassy expanse. The SJP students had originally planned to screen the documentary on the quad, but on the afternoon of the event, university security personnel sealed off the area with steel barricades, and a long caravan of California Highway Patrol SUVs pulled into a campus parking lot nearby. This expensive show of force, while unusual in its size, exemplified post-encampment UCLA, described by a group of faculty members in a May essay in The Nation as “a fortress” that was “nearly unrecognizable as a university.” In the wake of the 2024 mob attack—and the subsequent mass arrest of the student protesters who had been attacked—the university went to work “ensuring that the Royce Quad encampment and related incidents could never happen again,” including by redrawing its emergency-response plan so that police officials “no longer need[ed]” to consult senior administrators before curbing campus protests, according to a sworn declaration that summer by Rick Braziel, then head of the newly formed Office of Campus Safety. In the fall, under a preliminary federal injunction premised on the idea that the encampment had been a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” UCLA announced an interim update to its “time, place, and manner” rules, effectively limiting protests to certain “areas for public expression” and forbidding “tents, campsites or other temporary housing or other structures” anywhere on campus unless specifically approved by the Events Office.

Police attempt to break up a screening of The Encampments on

the UCLA campus, April 30th, 2025.

Edward Ho/Daily Bruin

The revision to these free-expression policies was widely viewed as unfairly targeting the Palestine solidarity movement, gathered under the banner of the UC Divest Coalition at UCLA. Campus authorities invoked the new rules in October, as they dismantled Jewish students’ solidarity sukkah, and again in November, when they arrested four people connected to a protest on Bruin Walk. When, on the evening of the Encampments event, the SJP activists arrived in their backup location—Wilson Plaza, down the steps from Royce Quad—with an inflatable screen, a Student Affairs official informed them that, “the second that thing goes up,” facilities workers and police would confiscate it: Apparently, the backyard movie rig qualified as an unauthorized structure. Rather than argue, the students packed up their equipment and directed the group to Bruin Plaza, one of the few designated “areas for public expression,” where amplified sound was allowed until midnight. Ditching the inflatable screen, they opted for a more DIY approach. “We thought, ‘Hey, we have this white bedsheet; let’s just have two people hold it,’” one of the screening’s organizers, a computer science graduate student named Dylan Kupsh, told me later. “It’s not a temporary structure because it’s not attached to anything.”

The audience in Bruin Plaza—including experienced SJP members like Kupsh who’d been keeping tabs on the police while the film played—were on their feet before the UCPD officers reached them. “We’re going to move together,” a student in a black “University of California Intifada” t-shirt and a keffiyeh worn as a hood said into the megaphone. “Together we keep each other safe, right? We keep us safe!” Their number dwindling, the students walked west until they reached De Neve Plaza, a courtyard surrounded by dorms. There, having lost the police, they encountered another familiar antagonist: Eli Tsives, a curly-haired sophomore, perched on a low wall and holding out an Israeli flag. A frequent counterprotester who had amassed a major Instagram following on the back of his post-October 7th advocacy—most prominently with an April 2024 viral video in which he portrayed encampment activists as “promoting hate” because they were blocking his preferred path to class—the 20-year-old Tsives had a proven ability to attract attention and push the administration to take a heavier hand with the student movement. In previous confrontations, the activists had been careful not to take the bait: Tsives’s own videos typically show them responding calmly to his finger-jabbing and bellowed accusations. But this time, just seconds after Tsives brought out the flag, someone snatched it and ran.

Tsives, in his muscle-hugging t-shirt and white Nikes decorated with Israeli flags, sprinted after, into the tide of arriving students, where I lost sight of him. “This person does not deserve our attention!” said a woman with a keffiyeh around her hair, urging others away. Soon, I watched Tsives shove his way out of the crowd. “Only Jewish kids getting assaulted right now,” he shouted, as if narrating for an audience. In the caption of the video he posted later, Tsives said the protesters were “violent” and suggested that they tried “to beat me up,” but the video itself doesn’t support this. Though the action is obscured, Tsives is shown roughly grabbing someone in a black hoodie and demanding his flag, while others in keffiyehs try to intercede. When I approached him afterward, he told me he’d been put in a headlock. Watching with arms crossed as the students set up their film equipment in De Neve, Tsives said, “I feel better than ever, because the police are going to come and get rid of them.”

The group of activists had just gotten the film playing again when the riot police appeared—breaking into a run as they entered the courtyard. The students stopped their chants of “Shame!” and fled. There were isolated screams as the officers, batons drawn, chased them up the steps outside the Dogwood dormitory, and as two motorcycle cops roared in from the opposite side of the courtyard, misery lights flashing. The police arrested the two people who had been holding the poles of the makeshift screen—one a student and the other an alumnus—and barred them from campus for two weeks, citing a Vietnam War-era law that the university unearthed last year and now regularly deploys against pro-Palestine student activists. The alumnus was sent to the emergency room that night with minor injuries to his hip, shoulder, and wrist that he sustained when the arresting officers pinned him against the concrete steps.

Tsives’s all-but-inscrutable Instagram video, promoted by pro-Israel accounts like Jew Hate Database and JewBelong, quickly became the latest flash point in a concerted campaign to paint UCLA as a hotbed of Israel-related antisemitism. The hardline Jewish Faculty Resilience Group at UCLA declared in a statement the next day that the film screening had “resulted in the violent assault of a Jewish student who had expressed support for Israel.” On Fox News @ Night, the anchor Trace Gallagher played Tsives’s video and pronounced him “the victim of an antisemitic attack.” The UCLA administration, in a statement, rushed in to apologize to the student (they did not identify Tsives by name) who had been “physically assaulted” on the night of the screening: “We are sorry for what this student experienced, and we have already been in touch with him to offer support.”

This kind of distortion was nothing new, Catherine Hamilton, a former editor at the Daily Bruin student newspaper, told me. But something about the anniversary of the mob attack added insult to injury. A year earlier, Hamilton herself was hurt while reporting; assailants sprayed a chemical into her eyes and hit her in the chest, causing pain in her sternum “so intense that she could not stand up,” according to a lawsuit filed in March against university officials, police agencies, and known attackers. Though the violence at the screening was smaller in scale, Hamilton seemed pained by the familiar pattern—the Zionist provocateur spoiling for a fight, the police gunning for pro-Palestine students, a protester taken to the ER, and the university adopting wholesale the narrative spun by pro-Israel actors. “It is, in many ways, just sickening,” she said.

Hamilton seemed pained by the familiar pattern—the Zionist provocateur spoiling for a fight, the police gunning for pro-Palestine students, a protester taken to the ER, and the university adopting wholesale the narrative spun by pro-Israel actors.

An “Exceptional Failure” to Protect Students

This is a story about UCLA in the long aftermath of October 7th, but its outlines could apply to any number of American universities embroiled in struggles over political speech that are rapidly remaking our democracy as we know it. The dominant narrative advanced on cable news and in every major American newspaper over the last two years is one of a crisis of campus antisemitism. In The New York Times or on CNN, the student movement has been represented not so much by its core demand—that universities divest from companies complicit in the grinding annihilation of Gaza—as by the emotional experience of Jewish students who feel upset by it. Students at Columbia created a buddy system “so that no Jew would have to walk across campus alone if they felt unsafe,” wrote Franklin Foer in an April 2024 cover story in The Atlantic; Jewish students’ account of “the fear that consumed them when they heard protesters call for the annihilation of Israel” led Foer to conclude that the university was “a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews.” This image of the Jewish student in peril was even projected internationally: “Every place you go around the world, you hear from Jews, and they’re worried about coming here to the United States, particularly to college campuses,” CNN host Jake Tapper said on air in December 2023.

This narrative—which tends to shift public attention to American fora and away from the abundantly documented atrocities in Gaza—has cast the most outspoken Zionists on campus as representative of Jewish students. There was the student at Yale who alleged that a passing protester “stabbed” her in the eye with a small Palestinian flag “because I am a Jew” (on Fox News the next day, her eye appeared unharmed); the Florida State University student in an Israel Defense Forces t-shirt who told police he’d been “hate-crimed” in the gym by a graduate student who said, “Fuck Israel, free Palestine,” before she allegedly grazed his shoulder while making a grab for his smoothie. Such stories, often accompanied by inconclusive video, catch fire online among those predisposed to read them as examples of antisemitism, even in spite of “scant details,” Arno Rosenfeld wrote recently in The Forward. They evince “a kind of spiritual truth rather than a detailed set of facts.”

The students on this social media dais have become savvy ambassadors for a worldview, endemic to organized American Jewish life, that conflates Jewishness and Zionism. In his senior year of high school, for example, Tsives did an internship with the Zionist group StandWithUs, where, he told me, instructors taught him “not just Israel 101 but also everything that you need to know about how to hold an argument” with pro-Palestine activists in college. Even those young American Jews who do not attend such programs are often raised within institutions that instill in them a powerful identification with the Jewish state. “They’re taught that threats to unqualified support for Israel are threats to Jewish safety, and they take it to heart,” said Marjorie Feld, a professor at Babson College and the author of The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism.

Long before President Trump adopted the allegation of antisemitism as the central tool in his crusade against higher education, university administrators—under pressure from their donors and trustees and from activist members of Congress—have elevated even the flimsiest reports of harm to Jewish students as justification to tamp down on pro-Palestine activism. Despite video of the alleged eye stab depicting something far more ambiguous, Yale opened an inquiry into the claim and enlisted the help of the FBI in tracking down the flag-waving student; at FSU, the graduate-student worker who’d said “fuck Israel” on video was fired, suspended, barred from campus, and charged with misdemeanor battery. Universities have suspended clubs, fired teachers, and punished their own star students for speaking out against Israel. Their official task forces to study campus antisemitism, convened in the months after October 7th, were sometimes chaired by professors of dentistry, epidemiology, and real estate finance—nonexperts who happened to be Jewish and who produced credulous reports that relied on outside pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for their analysis. Yet even kowtowing, in televised grillings on Capitol Hill, to the notion that strident protest of Israel amounted to anti-Jewish hatred did not spare the presidents of Columbia, Penn, Harvard, and other universities their jobs.

What it did, instead, was help pave the way for President Trump to attack the nation’s leading sites of critical inquiry under the cover of what movement strategist Sharon Rose Goldtzvik has called “smokescreen antisemitism.” In March, the same month that The Atlantic’s Foer released a follow-up article taking aim at Columbia’s “anti-Semitism problem,” the Trump administration canceled $400 million in funding for the university and, apparently acting on information provided by Zionist doxing group Canary Mission, sent ICE agents to detain Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil. In April, the same month that The New York Times was amplifying the “scathing” report by Harvard’s task force on antisemitism, the Trump administration withdrew $2.2 billion in grants over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and alleged antisemitism at the university. Unlike Columbia, Harvard took the feds to court—drawing praise from liberal commentators—yet the university had already fulfilled parts of their demand list, dismissing the faculty leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and suspending the research partnership between its school of public health and Birzeit University in the West Bank.

Indeed, the Trump administration’s wide-ranging assault on universities has been built upon the successful efforts of campus pro-Israel advocates, along with donors and outside groups, in lobbying for the illiberal and violent repression of pro-Palestine speech. Though Foer contended in his March article that the Trump administration was “exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism,” its demands of Columbia substantially echoed a previous list of demands by the university’s own Zionist faculty activists. Similarly, Harvard’s CMES and its partnership with Birzeit had both come under attack by an influential Jewish alumni group in a distortion-filled May 2024 report.

The crisis at California’s largest public university, while attracting less national attention than its Ivy League equivalents, has exemplified these dynamics. I spent the spring quarter visiting UCLA and interviewing more than 40 people—students, faculty, staff, and outside advocates on all sides of this drama—in an attempt to understand how these national political trends were playing out at a single university. The picture that emerges is one of a campus besieged from without and within, caught between the crusaders in the White House and those walking its own halls. Contrary to the ubiquitous narrative of Jewish victimhood, a sober look at the nation’s No. 2-ranked public university in this moment of fracture reveals that the power on campus overwhelmingly accrues to the most right-wing Zionist students and faculty in their efforts to stifle opposition to what United Nations experts call a genocide in Gaza. Theirs is a faction supported by well-resourced communal organizations and Trump-aligned law firms, and defended by police and the federal government. Successfully pushing their message to a sympathetic media and stoking the outrage of powerful allies, the pro-Israel advocates on campus appear more as agent than object, more doer than done to. Their concerted pressure campaigns targeting administrators have gotten results in the form of new, strictly enforced policies; disciplinary proceedings against protesters; interventions into academic curriculum; and the repeated use of police and other security forces to quell the student movement.

Contrary to the ubiquitous narrative of Jewish  victimhood, a sober look at the nation’s No. 2-ranked public university in this moment of fracture reveals that the power on campus overwhelmingly accrues to the most right-wing Zionist students and faculty.

Pro-Israel demonstrators at a rally for the Israeli hostages on the UCLA campus, November 7th, 2023.

Raquel Frohlich/Alamy

This activist infrastructure long predates October 7th, gaining steam over the last decade in response to boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) resolutions on campuses. A “complex landscape of many different campus groups” and donors, in the words of Josh Nathan-Kazis, the journalist who documented these efforts in a series of articles in The Forward in 2018, has collectively poured cash into “very aggressive, and very hard-nosed” strategies to counter campus activism. Nathan-Kazis pointed out in a 2019 interview that “this whole wave of hardline tactics and entities” did not come from Jewish students themselves, but rather “from ideas developed by think tanks in Israel, and leaders of the American-Jewish community.” This dynamic persists: When students in the UC Divest Coalition at UCLA established their encampment in April 2024, the Miriam Adelson-backed Israeli-American Council, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, and other groups quickly organized a rally on campus with the university’s permission, where Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, draped in a combined American-Israeli flag, pointed to the nearby encampment and said, to cheers, “Their evil and their fascism will not win.” The backdrop to the rally stage was a “Jumbotron” TV screen erected by an off-campus group calling itself the Bear Jews of Truth and paid for by a list of prominent donors, including Jessica Seinfeld, a cookbook author and the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld; Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund billionaire who has gone to war with Harvard over its student protests; and a host of local machers in real estate and law. The intention for the screen, according to archived versions of the GoFundMe page, was to create a “legendary counter move” to the encampment, drowning out student chants by playing “nonstop clips” of “the screams and cries of October 7th.” In the wake of the mob attack two days later, Jewish student leaders at the campus Hillel—who self-identify as Zionists—wrote in a pointed statement, “We can not [sic] have a clearer ask for the off-campus Jewish community: stay off our campus. Do not fund any actions on campus. Do not protest on campus. Your actions are harming Jewish students.” Of the Jumbotron, they wrote, “We can’t learn over the constant noise of Jews being slaughtered.” Yet even if the Zionist activists, like Tsives, represent only a fraction of Jewish students, they style themselves as the embattled avatars of UCLA Jews in general and are often adept at flexing the power arrayed around them. In our first interview, in April, Tsives described the network of organizations operating on campus as a “Jewish powerhouse,” adding that the new chancellor, Julio Frenk, who was “brave enough” to suspend SJP in his second month on the job, had provided “that final cherry on top.”

Pro-Israel demonstrators play a video called “This is Hamas”

across from the UCLA encampment, April 29th, 2024.

Qian Weizhong/VCG via AP

At UCLA, fearmongering by outside groups and their allies on campus eventually led to violence. Out-of-context audio and video clips like Tsives’s—promoted by members of the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group, by then-Chancellor Gene Block in a widely circulated statement, and by outside groups including the Maccabee Task Force and the Israel on Campus Coalition—spread through local group chats including Persian Jews of LA, Israelis of LA, and Beverly Hills neighborhood groups. In the ensuing hours-long attack on April 30th, at least 25 activists from the encampment were rushed to the ER with blunt-force head traumas, fractures, lacerations, and chemical-induced injuries, while more than 150 required on-site treatment for pepper spray and bear spray, according to a report by volunteer medics. “I thought I was going to die. I thought I’d never see my family again,” one student, who was hit in the head twice and received stitches and staples in the hospital, told Hamilton in her Daily Bruin report. Thrust into an international spotlight, UCLA administrators answered this assault on their own students by directing the California Highway Patrol, armed with riot guns, to clear the encampment the following night, resulting in additional injuries and 209 arrests. In allowing “people who violently disagreed with the political message of the encampment to dictate the terms of the protest,” the university submitted to a “heckler’s veto,” as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) contended in a lawsuit, and “trampled” on students’ right to free expression. In the weeks following, and into the next academic year, the university adopted a muscular new approach to enforcement, with the police continuing to arrest student protesters, send them to the emergency room, and temporarily ban them from campus. In the last two years, roughly 130 students have faced disciplinary charges related to pro-Palestine activism, with some of them charged multiple times, according to faculty and staff supporting their defense.

Now, like other schools, UCLA has responded to the Trump administration’s opportunistic quest by aligning itself more fully with the most radical pro-Israel activists in its midst. Frenk, who took office as chancellor in January, said in a May interview with Jewish Insider that the prospect of losing federal funds “occupies me at night.” His administration has rapidly expanded the crackdown that began under Block, suspending at least 11 students over Palestine solidarity activism, placing SJP on interim suspension, and launching an “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism,” led by real estate finance professor Stuart Gabriel, to “implement” the recommendations of the university’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which Gabriel chaired. Dov Waxman, a UCLA professor of Israel studies, told me that the task force report was a “problematic” document that “presented people’s perceptions or experiences of what they considered to be antisemitism as antisemitism.” He resigned from the task force rather than put his name to the draft. Another resignee, Shalom Staub, UCLA’s assistant vice provost for community engagement, told Gabriel in a September 2024 email, obtained through a public-records request, that the draft report repeatedly “conflate[d] political speech, albeit objectionable and repugnant speech, with antisemitism,” while adopting an “ahistorical, non-contextual approach” that “minimiz[ed] the context of the severe Israeli military action in Gaza post October 7.”

Yet Frenk’s maneuvers failed to keep the Trump administration at bay. Over the summer, UCLA became the first public university penalized in the government’s anti-antisemitism gambit, facing a $1.2 billion fine and a slew of other demands reflecting right-wing anti-DEI and anti-trans objectives. Negotiations between the two sides were ongoing as of press time, even after a federal judge restored virtually all of the $584 million in research funds that the Trump administration had suspended as part of its efforts. Those cuts, UC President James B. Milliken said in an August statement, did “nothing to address antisemitism”; Milliken further complained that “the extensive work that UCLA [has] taken to combat antisemitism has apparently been ignored.” But it hadn’t been ignored. On the contrary, at least one product of that “extensive work,” the antisemitism task force report, was repeatedly cited by the Department of Justice in the letter outlining its findings. Two federal grant-making agencies, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, likewise justified their suspension of funds by citing “UCLA’s own” report.

Again and again, the university’s validation of Zionist critics, far from protecting it from censure, has provided an opening for further punishment. After UCLA law student Yitzy Frankel and other plaintiffs claimed in a June 2024 lawsuit that encampment activists had made a section of campus into a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” the Trump-appointed judge in that case noted that the university “[did] not dispute this” version of events. University officials ultimately settled the case for $6.45 million. One UCLA administrator, quoted anonymously in the Los Angeles Times, conceded that the Frankel settlement—announced just hours before the Trump administration accused UCLA of civil rights violations, heralding the funding freeze—had “backfired,” inviting the federal government to pounce on the apparent admission of failure. “If you placate the bully, the bully comes back,” said legal scholar Katherine Franke, who was forced to retire from Columbia in January after being targeted with harassment and threats over her pro-Palestine advocacy.

In response to a list of detailed questions about these events, a spokesperson for UCLA said in an emailed statement that “there is no room for violence, hate or intimidation” at the university. “The events in the spring of 2024 tested the bonds that unite UCLA as a learning community and created mistrust in some corners of our campus,” the statement went on. “UCLA continues to take meaningful steps to ensure we can both maintain our commitment to free expression and make our campus a place where all Bruins feel safe, supported and able to thrive.” (The spokesperson had previously declined to make Frenk available for an interview.)

The attack of April 30th, 2024, remains an untreated wound, with the university thus far avoiding any official reckoning with its role in the most extreme night of vigilante violence endured by any Palestine solidarity encampment nationwide. The story of that night and what came after is particular to UCLA. Yet the experience of the students, treated as expendable by their own university, is vividly illustrative of the forceful opposition arrayed against the student movement as a whole. And it shows how advocates for Israel set the terms of the campus battle. “The only way UCLA really has been exceptional,” Waxman told me, “is in its exceptional failure to protect the students in its encampment from violence.”

“The only way UCLA really has been exceptional is in its exceptional failure to protect the students in its encampment from violence.”

Pro-Israel demonstrators attack students at the UCLA

encampment in the early morning hours of May 1st, 2024.

Ethan Swope/AP

An injured person is carried away amid

an attack on students at the UCLA encampment,

April 30th, 2024.

Ethan Swope/AP

The Fire In the Med School

Not long after October 7th, 2023, Kira Stein, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, started a “support group” for Jewish faculty who felt “isolated, fearful, or demoralized” by what was occurring on campus, as she later put it in an email. Stein, who is 55 and wears a blonde bob and cat-eye glasses, was affiliated with the university on a volunteer basis, seeing patients and supervising residents in a campus clinic that her mother, psychiatry professor Vivien Burt, had founded. But while Stein did not draw a salary from UCLA, she possessed an employee ID number and a university email address—and would soon make herself into a force on campus.

In the first month after the Hamas attack—with scholars and activists already warning of an unfolding genocide in Gaza as Israel laid siege to the territory, killing more than 10,000 by early November—students at UCLA’s Westwood campus were joining their peers around the country in holding rallies, walkouts, and teach-ins to advocate for divestment. A November open letter that was signed by Stein, Burt, and more than 350 other professors and affiliates decried “explicit calls for violence” at pro-Palestine rallies, citing chants featuring the word “intifada”—a term that has been associated with periods of acute resistance in Palestinian history, both violent and nonviolent—and “event advertisements featuring images of weapons/violence.” “A number of faculty members were clearly very upset” and “traumatized” by the protests, Burt, now 81 and a professor emeritus, told me recently. According to Stein, “what started as emotional support quickly evolved.”

By January, Stein’s new group, the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFRG), had collected hundreds of signatures on a letter to administrators with a list of demands, including that UCLA formally adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—which classifies broad swaths of anti-Zionist speech (including calling Israel “a racist endeavor”) as antisemitism—and that it mobilize campus police to “respond promptly to instances of violence and hate.” The group established an antisemitism tip line, organized faculty to speak at UC regents meetings, filmed student testimonials to send to congressional investigators in Washington, and put up a billboard near campus asking the public to “REPORT Anti-Jew Hate at UCLA.” Yet its aspirations went beyond local activism: In a speech at a May 2024 fundraising event at the Museum of Tolerance, Stein described her vision for a “grassroots rapid-response team and command center on every single campus.” For this, JFRG would need to “immediately” raise $1 million to counter the “terrorist organizations and foreign governments” that she claimed were financing her adversaries, like SJP, which she described as “pro-Hamas, neo-Marxist, and anarchistic.”

Like Stein and Burt, many of JFRG’s most active members are affiliated with the medical school, which, through its teaching hospitals and government research grants, generates an outsize share of revenue for the university. In the 2023 fiscal year, the most recent period for which information is available, the UCLA Medical Center accounted for about half of the university’s total $11.2 billion in revenue, an analysis of the financial data shows, far surpassing the $983 million garnered from student tuition and fees. This makes the medical school a particularly sensitive target—and gives the members of JFRG a powerful perch from which to lobby administrators. Elsewhere, too, medical faculty have been outspoken in their pro-Israel advocacy, with doctors organizing at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Yet in many ways, JFRG, which registered last year as a nonprofit and recently posted a job listing for an executive assistant to Stein, stands apart. As one UCLA medical school insider said, insisting on anonymity for fear of retaliation, “If you’re looking for the source of the fire, in terms of UCLA, it’s in the med school.”

“If you’re looking for the source of the fire, in terms of UCLA, it’s in the med school.”

Kira Stein addressing antisemitism at UCLA, May 20th, 2024.

Still: JFrgatUCLA on YouTube

Compared with faculty in the humanities, medical faculty are often highly paid, and even those who engage deeply in teaching or research rarely, if ever, interact with undergraduates. American medical education has traditionally “imagined itself as removed from social issues and social pressures,” said Lara Jirmanus, a family physician and clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. But amid mainstream recognition of mounting data showing social factors like class and race to be leading health determinants, conservative-leaning doctors have sought to cast such research as “a politicized interpretation of the world that is somehow discriminatory against white people,” Jirmanus told me. In academic contexts, this view has translated into a suspicion of DEI initiatives, including on the grounds that they harm Jews. At JFRG’s Museum of Tolerance fundraiser, Burt responded to a question about “combatting antisemitism” by declaring, to applause, “We need to end DEI,” which she said casts Jews as “oppressors,” “even more so than just your average white person.”

In early April 2024, psychiatry residents Afaf Moustafa and Ragda Izar delivered a lunchtime Zoom lecture entitled “Depathologizing Resistance” to members of the medical school community. The talk took Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in protest of Israel as a provocative entry point for a broader analysis of the ways that the field of psychiatry has “pathologized actions that counter our power structures of colonization, homophobia, and white supremacy.” To Stein, a supervisor in the same department, the talk amounted to “anti-Israel and antisemitic libel” that echoed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as she put it in an email that evening to Chancellor Block and other senior administrators. She lambasted the administrators for their “lack of intervention after we had alerted you to the concerning nature” of the talk, even as she and her JFRG colleagues were already launching an intervention of their own. Within hours, JFRG posted a video recording of the lecture, which Stein made with a screen-recording tool, to its website, alongside screenshots of Stein’s emails to administrators, listing Moustafa and Izar’s names. The same day, Physicians Against Antisemitism—an Instagram account run anonymously by psychiatrist Katherine Hulbert that says it works “behind the scenes” with pro-Israel doxing outfits including Canary Mission, StopAntisemitism, and Jew Hate Database—published slides from the lecture, also including the two residents’ names.

This package of internal medical school material quickly found its way to right-wing media. Even after JFRG removed the video from its website—under pressure from medical school colleagues who insisted in a faculty meeting that the recording had been made illegally—an audio-only version of it, alongside the names and headshots of the residents, appeared in the Washington Free Beacon, followed by the Daily Mail. Moustafa, who is Palestinian, immediately began receiving death threats. “I was having trouble sleeping. I was having nightmares,” she told me. “I was really worried someone was going to come to my office at work, which is public information. And I got extra security at home.” More than 70 of Moustafa and Izar’s medical school peers signed a letter to Block and other administrators accusing Stein of “actively trying to silence and dox, and thereby endanger the physical and psychological safety of the only two female, Arab psychiatry resident trainees in the program.”

The department quietly suspended Stein from teaching, pending an investigation, though she remains on the volunteer faculty, Burt told me. Yet while Stein distanced herself from any doxing—“If doxing has occurred, it will be stopped,” she said during a heated exchange at the faculty meeting, a transcript of which I reviewed—the incident with the psychiatry residents was one entry in a pattern of “organized repression” of voices critical of Israel by “a small number of students and faculty” in partnership with “non-university actors,” according to the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism in a January report on the medical school. The task force, co-chaired by two experts on race and racial violence and convened at the same time as the task force on antisemitism, described multiple instances of discriminatory abuse directed against Palestinians and their supporters of color. (In the month following the report, a Black UCLA medical student was doxed by Jew Hate Database; the post included details about her scholarship known only to a small circle at the medical school.)

Even with Stein under fire, JFRG continued to establish itself as a player in campus politics. Eight days after the “Depathologizing Resistance” lecture, it organized a group of around 25 faculty members to attend a UC Board of Regents meeting, marching from the medical center with yellow hostage ribbons pinned to their chests. They were joined by an influential outsider, Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, which is a major funder of the UCLA Hillel. “I want to say on behalf of the Jewish community that you, UCLA, are embedded in a larger city, the largest Jewish community on the West Coast . . . and we are watching you,” Farkas said when it was his turn at the microphone. “We will organize against you.”

As Trump has intensified his assault on higher education, JFRG leaders have capitalized on the opportunity, giving media interviews on “the crisis Jewish students and faculty are facing” and promoting their far-reaching demands as “the path forward.” In April of this year, two UC regents—influential Hollywood superagent Jonathan “Jay” Sures and consulting firm CEO Richard Leib—met with leaders of JFRG in a private conference room on UCLA’s campus, Burt told me. The regents, who had requested the meeting, were “obviously moved by the many things we had told them” in public-comment forums, said Burt; they saw the federal government withholding funds from Columbia and wanted to prevent something similar from occurring at UCLA. In response, JFRG created “a comprehensive, faculty-driven road map for addressing antisemitism (including anti-Zionism)” that it shared with the entire board of regents, Chancellor Frenk, and Gabriel, the antisemitism task force chair. The document recommends that the UC system adopt the IHRA definition, implement mandatory trainings “taught by vetted third-party experts aligned with the IHRA definition,” and “immediately remove antisemitic content in the medical curriculum,” among other points. “The folks affiliated with JFRG have the administration’s ear instantly,” Hannah Appel, an anthropology professor and associate faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, told me, noting that Frenk “routinely” repeats JFRG talking points.

“The folks affiliated with JFRG have the administration’s ear instantly.”

On campus, JFRG’s reactionary Zionist movement continues to get results: In the spring, administrators moved to end the medical school’s Structural Racism and Health Equity (SRHE) course, which required first-year medical students to grapple with how social inequities affect patient health—and which had been a favorite target for JFRG members and their right-wing allies off campus, including pundit Ben Shapiro and Do No Harm, an anti-DEI medical advocacy group that sued the UCLA medical school in May, alleging “illegal racial discrimination” that harmed white and Asian applicants. After pausing the SRHE course for a curriculum review, the school laid off the course’s tutors at the end of June, citing the “current curtailment of federal grants and funding,” according to an email sent on June 13th, weeks before any federal funding to UCLA had actually been suspended. When I asked Burt, in our September interview, about JFRG’s policing of academic material, she insisted that limits had to be placed on “political indoctrination” in classroom settings. She was pleased with the winding down of SRHE. “Whatever is being done to lessen antisemitism, we’re in favor of.”

The “Don’t Fuck With Us” Jew

On a Monday in late April 2024, Eli Tsives approached the southernmost entrance of the Royce Quad encampment. Now in its fifth day—having drawn hundreds to its discussions and teach-ins, and to the collective act of disruption it represented—the encampment had swelled beyond the quad to a nearby paved walkway. Tsives, then in the spring of his freshman year, was known to the activists as the student provocateur who’d shown up on the encampment’s very first day wearing an Israel Defense Forces t-shirt and holding an Israeli flag, and who’d gone on to post a video to his Instagram page of a confrontation with student safety marshals (“Let’s get a nice look at their faces. You can kiss your jobs goodbye,” he’d told them). Now, a friend filmed Tsives, a large Star of David dangling from his neck, as he demanded entry. The students at the steel barricades, in medical masks and keffiyehs, moved to form a wall with their bodies. By this point, experienced activists in the encampment had created a list of Zionist agitators from on and off campus who, for safety reasons, were not allowed in, according to a student organizer, Ethan, who asked that I not use his last name. These included “the undergrads who aren’t much of a threat—they’re just annoying—and the adults, who are there to get violent,” he said. Tsives was in the former category. “Everybody, look at this, look at this,” Tsives called out to onlookers off camera, giving the impression of a crowd. “I’m a UCLA student. I deserve to go here. We pay tuition. This is our school. And they’re not letting me walk in. My class is over there. I want to use that entrance,” he said, pointing past the activists toward Kaplan Hall. “We’re not engaging with agitators,” one of the students replied.

The son of two Soviet Jews who emigrated to the US in their youth, Tsives grew up south of San Francisco, playing water polo and acting in school plays. His family wasn’t particularly religious, but Tsives’s mother, now a tech executive, often spoke about Israel as an insurance policy. “She always told us: ‘If bad things happen, we’re going to Israel,’ ” Tsives said. When he was 13 and the family was living in Shanghai for his mother’s work, a science teacher at Tsives’s international school “said something along the lines of ‘The current state of Israel should not exist because of what they do.’ And I was very confused,” he told me. “My mother sat me down and grilled me on Israel education. That was pretty much the spark that lit the fire in me becoming an activist.” He arrived at UCLA just weeks before October 7th, fresh from his StandWithUs internship. When pro-Palestine protests broke out that fall—which Tsives viewed as “blatant antisemitism happening on my campus, right in front of me”—he felt galvanized. “Not a lot of things were being done about it,” he recalled. “I said, ‘If no one’s gonna do it, I’m gonna do it.’” He identifies specifically as a Russian Jew, not just an American one—a “chutzpah-driven, loud, don’t-fuck-with-us Jew.” Tsives told me, “When people hate my people, my natural instinct is to be louder and prouder of who I am.”

Eli Tsives in Washington, DC, in October 2025.

KT Kanazawich

A theater major at the time of the encampment, Tsives said that the class he was trying to get to on that Monday in late April was Introduction to Lighting Design, which met in Kaplan Hall (he has since switched his major to political science, in part because of the “absurd amount of antisemitism and anti-Zionism happening in the School of Theater, Film and Television,” he told me). But Kaplan Hall has six main entrances; the encampment was blocking only two, on the building’s western side. The closest unobstructed entrance was roughly a 45-second walk south from the spot where Tsives starred in his one-minute video. Waxman, the Israel studies professor—who was a critic of the encampment at the time, posting on X the week it appeared that “groups like SJP” were “exploiting the sympathy that many students rightly feel for the suffering of Palestinians”—told me that students “could simply walk around the encampment.” Though it was “in a central part of our campus,” he said, “it didn’t block any building. The idea that Jewish students couldn’t enter UCLA, or couldn’t go to class, is just misrepresentation.” When I asked Tsives why it was important to him to use that particular entrance with other entrances nearby, he said, “There’s no reason why masked protesters who are harassing Jewish students should tell me to walk around the school just because I’m a Jew.”

Though the encampment was “in a central part of our campus,” Waxman said, “it didn’t block any building. The idea that Jewish students couldn’t enter UCLA, or couldn’t go to class, is just misrepresentation.”

Eli Tsives in the April 2024 video in which he claimed he was being blocked from getting to class.

Tsives’s performance, with his insistence that the activists were promoting “aggression” and “hate,” entered the cultural bloodstream. Promoted by influential right-wing accounts, the video spread like wildfire through Jewish networks and family group chats, racking up millions of views across Instagram and X, and was soon featured on Fox & Friends. But its influence extended beyond the Jewish echo chamber and the culture-warring right, making its way to CNN’s Inside Politics, where a stone-faced Dana Bash followed the clip with sensationalized commentary: “What you just saw is 2024 in Los Angeles, hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe. And I do not say that lightly.”

The university swiftly endorsed Tsives’s narrative. Flooded with complaints from parents, alumni, and politicians, Chancellor Block, in his first university-wide email about the encampment since its creation, declared that “students on their way to class have been physically blocked from accessing parts of the campus,” putting Jewish students “in a state of anxiety and fear.” By that point, journalists and other observers had documented numerous instances of harassment directed at students in the encampment, including physical shoving and shouted threats of violence, by a loose confederation of Persian Jews, Israeli Americans, and other off-campus locals. “It was rare to have a moment where at least one random middle-aged Zionist wasn’t trying to get in,” Ethan told me. But Block’s official email, which condemned “instances of violence completely at odds with our values as an institution,” declined to say who was committing the violence. Graeme Blair, a political science professor who serves as one of the spokespeople for the campus chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, told me that he believes Block’s equivocating statement, which validated and amplified incendiary claims, was “one of the key factors that led to the escalation of violence” in the April 30th mob attack. “They’re stopping students from going to their classes,” one of the attackers told local news channel Fox 11 that night. “We’re here to stop them from doing what they’re doing.”

There are a number of Eli Tsiveses nationwide—Zionist students like Shabbos Kestenbaum at Harvard, Bella Ingber at New York University, and Lishi Baker and Eden Yadegar at Columbia—who, in one way or another, have successfully bent their schools toward their version of reality. Many of these students have been the faces, and beneficiaries, of lawsuits against their universities. Kestenbaum sued Harvard over “rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment” on campus; his co-plaintiffs settled in January, winning concessions including undisclosed “monetary terms” and a pledge that Harvard would adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, while Kestenbaum held out for a separate settlement in May. Ingber also received an undisclosed settlement from NYU over assault claims that, though challenged by security footage, separately resulted in another student being charged with a hate crime (a grand jury could not be persuaded to indict the student, and the charges were dropped). At schools across the country, “the students who have actually caused harm are the ones winning thousands of dollars in university settlements,” Noura Erakat, the prominent Palestinian American human rights attorney and Rutgers professor, told me. “Their grievance aligns with power’s aspiration for expansion.”

Beyond the financial rewards, these students’ political activism has launched them into the world of influence. The path they’re on was charted by the famed pundit Bari Weiss, who first rose to prominence as a campus crusader at Columbia in the early 2000s and whose staunchly Zionist outlet, The Free Press, was recently acquired by CBS. Few among the latter-day Weisses can rival Tsives’s following on social media, which numbers more than 50,000 on Instagram, but Kestenbaum provides another study in mainstream sway. He broke through on the stage of the 2024 Republican National Convention, where, in his kippah and hostage dog tag, he sold himself as a former Bernie Sanders supporter disgusted with the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the fight against antisemitism. In May, he was the subject of a sympathetic New York Times profile, “The Jewish Student Who Took On Harvard,” which portrayed him as the glad-handing David to Harvard’s Goliath. Tsives first met Kestenbaum, whom he described as a “good friend,” on his first trip to Israel, at 16, through the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, where Kestenbaum, who is six years older, was an assistant bus director. “He’s been part of my journey,” Tsives said of Kestenbaum, “I’ve been part of his.” This year, the two were promoted as “visionaries and advocates” on a slate of candidates, which also included Ingber, in the World Zionist Congress elections. But they have their sights on American politics: Kestenbaum told Jewish Insider that, at the encouragement of “New Yorkers from a broad ideological spectrum,” he was considering a run for retiring Democratic representative Jerry Nadler’s House seat. When Tsives met the Israeli celebrity and activist Noa Tishby at a May 2024 event, she anointed him the future “first Jewish president” of the US. “I will be,” Tsives told me. “That is the end goal.”

Bean-Bag Rounds and Flash-bang Grenades

It was just before midnight on April 30th, 2024, when UCLA police chief John Thomas arrived on campus. By that time, attackers had begun tearing down the encampment’s steel barricades and shooting fireworks at the activists inside. One of Thomas’s lieutenants had requested help from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to quell the escalating violence; the university would soon call in the California Highway Patrol (CHP) as well. But the 19 officers assembled there upon Thomas’s arrival were hanging back. An LAPD lieutenant informed him that the force was too small and that they had to wait, Thomas told the Los Angeles Times. (He was later reassigned and left the UCLA police department in December.) “No one from UCLA PD took command of the scene,” according to a UC-commissioned report completed in November 2024 by the consulting firm 21st Century Policing Solutions; officials from outside police agencies got the impression that “no one was in charge.” That week, administrators had engaged in a “chaotic” decision-making process “without clarity on who maintained final decision-making authority,” according to the report. This resulted in “institutional paralysis” and “an inability to effectively respond and protect students from violence.” On the night of the attack, with students being bloodied, the police did nothing. In one instance, past 2 am, when assailants rushed the encampment and slammed a plank of wood into someone’s head, police officers some 200 feet away stood still, according to an analysis of video by The Washington Post.

When assailants slammed a plank of wood into someone’s head, police officers some 200 feet away stood still.

Pro-Israel protesters shoot fireworks at the UCLA encampment, May 1st, 2024.

Shay Horse/NurPhoto via AP

The attackers viewed the student activists as “outsiders” who had “violated” the firmly rooted Persian Jewish community—as Sean Tabibian, a real estate developer on the scene that night, told me—and they assumed that the police would take their side. Tsives, who was there to observe at the behest of a Fox & Friends booker, said on the show that the attackers told him that “the main reason they were doing this was to attract police [to] finally go inside the encampment and start making arrests.”

University officials have claimed in court documents that they were already planning to remove the encampment when it was attacked. Those plans quickly translated into action as the sun rose on May 1st. In a meeting that afternoon attended by Chancellor Block, UC President Michael V. Drake, and LA Mayor Karen Bass, the UCPD and outside police agencies sketched out a plan for ending the encampment: The CHP—which has authority over state property, including university campuses—would dismantle the barricades and arrest protesters, the LAPD would protect the CHP, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department would bus arrestees downtown for booking, according to an after-action report by the LAPD. (Such “mutual aid” requests by campus police that spring, along with private security, ultimately cost UCLA $10 million, the most of any UC campus.)

As sheriff’s deputies pulled up to Wilson Plaza, rumors of a police sweep spread across campus. The student activists—exhausted from the attack the night before—reinforced the encampment perimeter with wooden pallets and collected hard hats, goggles, umbrellas, and other protective gear. Starting just before 6 pm, a dispersal order played over loudspeakers declaring the encampment “an unlawful assembly” and telling the students to leave or risk arrest. Many people did leave over the ensuing hours, but hundreds remained, keeping up their call-and-response chants as police and news helicopters thundered overhead, and as large formations of officers marched outside the encampment walls. (Nearly 600 officers from the LAPD alone responded to the UCLA protests between April 30th and May 3rd, according to the city controller.) “That was the day that it hit: UCLA has changed forever,” Dylan Kupsh, the SJP activist, told me. “It marked a turning point in the militarization of campus.”

The raid began in the predawn hours, when armored CHP officers fired 12-gauge shotguns loaded with bean-bag rounds, as well as grenade launchers with sponge rounds designed for “pain compliance,” at the students, discharging a total of 57 projectiles, according to the CHP’s use of force report. An investigation by the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters found at least 25 instances in which the officers “appeared to aim their weapons at the eye level of protesters or fired them into crowds,” in apparent violation of training guidelines and state law. (The CHP, in its one-page report, said that the officers were defending themselves against frozen water bottles and other thrown items and that they did not fire “indiscriminately in the crowd of protesters.”) One student, Kira Layton, was shot in her right hand. She needed surgery to install screws in her metacarpal bones and intensive physical therapy. “It stopped my life completely,” she said, her voice unsteady under the weight of the memory, at a press conference on campus this May to announce a lawsuit, alongside other plaintiffs, against the city of Los Angeles and the state of California. A reddish mark from the injury was still visible, 12 months later, on the hand clutching the microphone. “I couldn’t work. I couldn’t go to school. I had to move out of the apartment I was living in to stay with my mom. I couldn’t sleep.” Returning to campus in the fall, she experienced panic attacks and started failing her classes “for the first time in my life.” In the course of arresting 209 people the night of the sweep, the police dealt emergency-level injuries to at least 15, including head trauma from fired projectiles and burns from flash-bang grenades. The encampment was reduced to a heap of smashed and overturned tents on the matted lawn.

“That was the day that it hit: UCLA has changed forever. It marked a turning point in the militarization of campus.”

Police enter and clear the UCLA encampment, May 2nd, 2024.

Jae C. Hong/AP

Ethan Swope/AP

In an administrative shake-up three days later, Block shifted command of the campus police to a new Office of Campus Safety, whose inaugural head, Rick Braziel, a former Sacramento police chief still living in the state capital, reported directly to him (while earning $52,000 a month for the short-term role). Faculty activists privately referred to this new office as UCLA’s version of the Department of Homeland Security. The university had consolidated power in the hands of the police, and the effects were immediately apparent: On June 10th, 2024, after a long afternoon of protests that included attempts to read the names of Palestinian dead in different places on campus, UCPD officers kettled students in a narrow passage between two hedges outside the law school, forcing them back, videos show, into a line of LAPD officers. Jakob Johnson, a history major then in the final days of his senior year—and now a plaintiff in the omnibus lawsuit against university officials—saw a UCPD officer aim a grenade launcher at his chest from less than ten feet away. The sponge-tipped bullet “completely knocked the air out of my lungs,” Johnson told me. At the emergency room, after coughing up blood, he was treated for contusions on his lungs and heart. Johnson is a dedicated runner; for months afterward, the injury significantly limited his aerobic capacity. “It just felt like my lungs would stop functioning” beyond a certain point, he said. The recovery also included a period of severe depression. Having planned to matriculate to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Johnson withdrew two weeks before the start of classes that fall. “For my own university, where I’ve come into myself in so many ways, and which has given me the education that put me out there in the first place—for that university to shoot me just shattered so much,” Johnson said, when we met on UCLA’s campus in May. “Any faith I had in the institution was lost.”

“Parents are sending their kids to schools with the assumption that the school won’t make intentional choices to harm them,” said Ricci Sergienko, a civil rights lawyer representing Layton and other plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the state and city governments. “When you call in the police, you’re ensuring violence against young people.” The increased reliance on militarized police to suppress student protests is itself an alarming sign of UCLA’s priorities, his co-counsel Colleen Flynn told me; the administration is “willing to sacrifice the safety and physical well-being of their students to keep the money flowing in.”

Lawfare Finds “UCLA in Full Retreat”

At 12:13 am the night of the mob attack, as the violence raged, JFRG posted on X that it “unequivocally condemns the clashes and riots on our campus.” Mainstream Jewish groups likewise moved quickly to express their disapproval of “the abhorrent actions of a few counterprotesters,” as LA’s Jewish Federation put it. Yet even then, a counternarrative was already forming—virtually from one paragraph to the next, in the Federation’s statement—that shifted the focus to the “illegal encampment” and the question of “Jewish safety.” In her speech at the Museum of Tolerance event weeks later, JFRG’s Stein asked the audience to imagine “if you [had] to show a wristband . . . to be allowed free access to public property.”

The wristbands had become a symbol, among campus Zionists, of perceived anti-Jewish discrimination. It was true that activists had used a wristband system to speed re-entry to the encampment. The requirement for getting one, organizers told me, was to agree to a set of community guidelines, including “I will not use cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol,” “I will respect everyone’s preferred names, gender pronouns, and expressed identities,” and “I will not wield a weapon or act violently.” The guidelines make no reference to Israel or Zionism. At the same time, in at least one case caught on video, an activist asked someone seeking entry if they were a Zionist—which, for the activists, served to gauge hostility toward their project. “It was never ‘encampment policy’ to ask people if they were Zionist or not,” one Jewish Voice for Peace organizer told me, while acknowledging that, in part because of “constantly shifting circumstances,” with activists “cycling in and out of roles,” the question was sometimes asked.

“It was never ‘encampment policy’ to ask people if  they  were  Zionist or not,” one    JVP organizer told me, while acknowledging that, in part because of “constantly shifting circumstances,” with activists “cycling in and out of roles,” the question was sometimes asked.

Protesters block a photographer from entering the UCLA encampment, April 26th, 2024.

Ringo Chiu/AP

In June, Yitzy Frankel, then a UCLA law student, filed a lawsuit alongside other plaintiffs accusing UCLA and UC officials of failing to protect Jewish students and faculty, and specifically claiming that pro-Palestine activists in the encampment were excluding Jews. It was not that protesters had physically blocked Frankel from activities on campus; instead, he claimed that the “knowledge that he could not go through the encampment without violating his faith by disavowing Israel” forced him to change his routine. Describing the encampment as a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” the complaint pointed to the wristband system, which, it said, involved swearing fealty “to the activists’ views.”

Representing Frankel were two firms known for their conservative activism: the Washington, DC, firm Becket Fund for Religious Liberty—which represented the craft store Hobby Lobby in its successful Supreme Court effort to deny birth-control coverage to its employees—and Clement & Murphy, led by Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general under George W. Bush. The lawyers pursued a careful legal strategy: As an Orthodox Jew, the complaint read, Frankel “believes, as a matter of his religious faith, that he must support Israel.” Legally, Frankel’s argument was “a little bit narrower than ‘to be a Jew is to be a Zionist,’ ” said Noah Zatz, a UCLA law school professor. “It’s ‘For me, to be a Jew is to be a Zionist,’ in a religious sense. It actually lowers the burden, because they don’t have to get into an argument about the intrinsic nature of Judaism.”

In its legal defense, the university did not dispute the idea that the encampment excluded Jews; rather, it argued that the activists’ “antisemitic conduct” was “not perpetrated by UCLA.” The result was that the “Jew Exclusion Zone” narrative “risk[ed] becoming the official record of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment,” wrote Thomas Harvey, a lawyer representing Jewish pro-Palestine activists and others, in an unsuccessful motion to intervene in the case. On August 13th, 2024, two months after the lawsuit was filed, Judge Mark C. Scarsi issued a preliminary injunction that prohibited UCLA officials from “offering any ordinarily available programs, activities, or campus areas” that “are not fully and equally accessible to Jewish students,” and specified the protection of Jewish students’ “religious beliefs concerning the Jewish state of Israel.” (Harvey, in his motion, warned that this conflation of “political perspective” and “protected religious belief” would “infringe on the free speech rights and religious freedom of anti-Zionist Jews or anyone else who criticized Zionism as a political project.”) UCLA appealed the injunction, stating through a spokesperson that the ruling “would improperly hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground.” An injunction, the university had argued in a filing, would effectively allow “the Court to take the reins and manage UCLA’s response to protest activity on campus, down to ordering when and where law enforcement should be deployed.” Yet the appeal immediately drew a howl of protest from JFRG. “REALLY, UCLA?” the group said in an X post, plastering the words in red lettering on an image of a court document. “Why is UCLA appealing a ruling that bars anti-Jewish exclusion on campus!?” Eight days later, the university backed down, withdrawing the appeal and accepting the injunction. Mark Rienzi, the president and CEO of the Becket Fund, said in a statement, “We’re glad to see UCLA in full retreat.”

Universities across the country have similarly retreated in the face of “nuisance suits” that “have no legal basis,” according to Franke, the retired Columbia law professor. These legal efforts typically rely on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects students from discrimination based on “race, color, or national origin”—and whose use in antisemitism cases dates to a novel interpretation of the law promoted by Kenneth Marcus, who led the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in the post-9/11 era. Since October 7th, 2023, pro-Israel advocates across the country have filed 26 lawsuits, including the Frankel case, against colleges and universities alleging antisemitism under Title VI, compared with just two such cases in the years prior, according to data compiled by the Middle East Studies Association’s Academic Freedom Initiative. (This tally does not include the roughly 100 Title VI antisemitism investigations opened by the federal government in the last two years.) Of the 28 total suits, nine have had their Title VI claims dismissed at an early stage of the proceeding, with judges sometimes ruling that the alleged antisemitism actually counted as political speech protected by the First Amendment. One reason judges have not dismissed more of these claims, according to Radhika Sainath, a senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal, is that universities, under political pressure, are generally “not making all the arguments they should.” Nine cases have resulted in settlements. Franke called it “appalling” that universities “are settling the suits and paying out large sums of money.” She said, “The law is being used in a range of ways to extract funds from our institutions through private litigation that parallels what the government is doing in pulling public funds.”

“We’re glad to see UCLA in full retreat.”

The University of California settled the Frankel lawsuit in July. In addition to making Judge Scarsi’s injunction “permanent” for 15 years or more, the deal required UC to contribute $320,000 to UCLA’s new Initiative to Combat Antisemitism—charged with implementing the task force recommendations—and $2.3 million to a list of Jewish and Zionist organizations including the ADL. UC also agreed to pay $3.6 million to the lawyers who brought the case and $50,000 apiece to Frankel and the three other plaintiffs. (In response, Shabbos Kestenbaum tweeted a now-deleted message of congratulations “to my friend Yitzy and the other plaintiffs at UCLA for this historic win,” adding, “I encourage ALL Americans: hold your universities accountable! DM me if I can be of help.”)

At UCLA, legal challenges to the pro-Palestine movement have played out on an individual scale, too. In late May, Dylan Kupsh found himself in a downtown LA courtroom, looking the part of a slightly bewildered computer science grad student in a rumpled white dress shirt and black slacks. At the table to his left were lawyers for United Talent Agency vice chairman Jay Sures, who, as a UC regent, helped oversee university investments, and who had been a vocal opponent of the student movement. Sures was seeking a restraining order against the 26-year-old Kupsh, whom he had described in a sworn declaration, citing information from the UCPD, as “the ring leader” of “a pro-Palestinian mob”—a reference to the group of students who had protested outside Sures’s home in a leafy Brentwood cul-de-sac on a February morning, leaving handprints in red paint on his garage. (Kupsh told me that SJP does not have an individual leader; he believes he was targeted because, as a frequent police liaison at protests, he was known to the UCPD.)

In court, Sures’s lawyers claimed that their client, who is Jewish, was a victim of antisemitism, even postulating that the pigs depicted on a banner held by the students were wearing yarmulkes. Judge Kimberly Repecka wasn’t buying it; the pigs’ hats were clearly police hats. “They look very much like the cartoon images from the ’60s and ’70s of law enforcement officers that are specifically meant to mock them as pigs,” she said. She granted Kupsh an anti-SLAPP motion under the California law that protects individuals targeted for exercising their free-speech rights on a public issue. Running through a list of the evidence, the judge repeatedly found that particular allegations made by Sures, including that he was targeted as “a prominent member of the Jewish community,” reflected not what had actually occurred, but rather “Mr. Sures’s state of mind.”

Yet only a week after Sures’s case fell flat, UCLA informed Kupsh that he had been placed on interim suspension and immediately barred from campus. This punishment, according to a letter Kupsh received from the Office of Student Conduct, resulted from an accumulation of five outstanding student-conduct cases he had collected for his activism over the past year; among the accusations in those cases was that Kupsh had been “repeatedly asking questions” of university officials at a Nakba Day protest “in an apparent attempt to distract” them. The office had determined that there was “reasonable cause to believe” that Kupsh’s presence on campus would “lead to other disruptive activity.” (Kupsh was one of three students who received similar letters that day.) Kupsh—now entering the fifth year of his PhD program—may lose his employment as a graduate-student instructor or even be forced to withdraw entirely. His fate will depend on Zoom-based student-conduct hearings like the one I attended across two sessions in June and July, where a panel of two students and one university staff member heard allegations that Kupsh “participated in setting up an unauthorized encampment . . . after having been warned and ordered by University officials to disperse.”

Dylan Kupsh in Los Angeles, October 2025.

Photo: Adali Schell

“There’s been a full year of investigation into this case, one that’s been pretty stressful,” Kupsh said in a prepared statement in the July session, sometimes pausing to draw a steadying breath. Ultimately, after hearing testimony from a dozen witnesses, including students and professors whom Kupsh had rallied to his defense, the panel found for Kupsh, citing “insufficient information.” If he wants to remain a student at UCLA, Kupsh must successfully repeat this exercise four more times.

“Vindication” for JFRG

In August, with the Trump administration demanding $1.2 billion from UCLA to settle claims over alleged antisemitism, David Myers, a prominent professor of Jewish history and director of the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, joined other faculty organizers in collecting more than 360 signatures for an open letter, “Jews in Defense of UC,” intended to show the university that campus Jews and alumni representing “a diverse range of approaches and opinions about how to define and combat antisemitism” stood united against the Trump administration’s efforts. But Trump has crudely written off the many Jews who dissent from his right-wing vision, while UC administrators have offered scant acknowledgment of the intra-Jewish ideological diversity that the letter reflects.

Dov Waxman in London, October 2025.

Sophie Davidson

Waxman, who also signed the letter, left his role last year as director of the university’s Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, which he had held since 2020. “I felt—I feel—strongly that the Nazarian Center is about the study of Israel. It’s not a pro-Israel center. Its mission is not to support the Israeli government,” Waxman told me. But the center’s funders, the Nazarian Family Foundation—a powerful Iranian Jewish family philanthropy run by the Tehran-born Sharon Nazarian, who also serves as a vice chair of the ADL—apparently felt differently. In May 2024, Waxman posted on X, welcoming the request by the International Criminal Court for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alongside leaders of Hamas. “This is not about drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel,” he wrote. “It is about upholding international law.” That tweet led the Nazarian Family Foundation to express “that they had no confidence in my leadership,” Waxman told me. On the face of it, the dispute was over whether the director of the Nazarian Center “should take public positions.” Yet “I felt that I was only being asked [not to take public positions] because my views were critical,” Waxman said, “whereas if I had been perceived to be pro-Israel, that demand would not have been made.” (The Nazarian Center and Nazarian Family Foundation did not respond to emailed requests for comment.) Ultimately, Waxman stayed on as director until the completion of his term at the end of 2024 (he continues to be a professor at UCLA). This August, in an introspective post on Medium, he wrote, “I no longer dispute the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” Ten days later, Waxman’s successor as director of the Nazarian Center, public policy professor Steven E. Zipperstein, staked out a different public position in The Times of Israel, with an article entitled “The Gaza genocide claim fails the test of law and fact.”

A former chief legal officer of BlackBerry and Verizon Wireless, Zipperstein was “highly recommend[ed]” by Kira Stein and other leaders of JFRG, in a March 2024 email to medical school dean Steven Dubinett, as a resource on “left-wing antisemitic anti-Zionism.” Yet if Dubinett had declined, in that instance and others, to overhaul the medical school curriculum according to Stein’s wishes, he received a letter this summer that bolstered her ongoing campaign: Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, informed Dubinett that his committee was pursuing its own Title VI investigation into reports that the medical school had not “meaningfully responded” to “hostility and fear” felt by Jewish students and faculty. In the August letter, Walberg demanded years of internal documents and aired Stein’s personal grievances, including details about the fallout from the “Depathologizing Resistance” lecture. Stein, in a brief appearance on a local Spectrum News channel, declared: “This vindicates us.”

As her advocacy gets results, Stein has had to strike a delicate balance in her public statements, neither endorsing the Trump administration’s funding suspension—which overwhelmingly affected her colleagues in medicine and the sciences—nor condemning it. “Our members did not create the illegal encampments, occupations and acts of intimidation that brought about UCLA’s recent crisis,” Stein and a colleague wrote in an October letter to the editor published in the Daily Bruin. The university’s own negotiators, meanwhile, are “totally aligned” with the Trump administration “on the issue of antisemitism,” Frenk said in an online event hosted by an LA Jewish group in September; still, he objected to the Trump administration’s approach, which, he warned, could make antisemitism “worse.” “Now we hear people saying, ‘It’s because the Jewish faculty are complaining so much, now I had my grant canceled,’ ” Frenk said.

When we met for an interview in the spring, Kupsh, who wryly describes himself as “the most doxed person in SJP,” told me that he had gotten used to being recognized by the police and private security officers who patrol campus. “They’ll start waving at me, like, ‘Hey, Dylan!’ ” The morning of Frenk’s inauguration ceremony in early June, the day before Kupsh was barred from campus, he was approached, he said, by a security officer who had a photograph of Kupsh as a child, evidently pulled from the internet, as his phone background. (That same morning, UCPD officers charged at a group of activists outside Royce Hall and made four arrests.) Stories of police harassment abound. “Most of the UCPD officers know my face,” another SJP member who is currently barred from campus told me in the spring. “They’ll follow me home. When I encounter them on campus, they’ll say ‘hello’ in a way that’s like, ‘I’m watching you.’ ” The day after the attempted film screening, campus police detained eight students in a parking garage for at least 20 minutes after a traffic stop, according to witness accounts. The students, seven of whom were cited for not wearing seatbelts, had been wearing keffiyehs. It remains to be seen whether the mounting punishments for individual activists will succeed in permanently quieting their movement. The stately façade of Royce Hall, briefly covered in anti-colonial graffiti, is now pristine, just like in the brochures, as if the encampment had never happened.

What is special and even unique about universities in American political life is the freedom that tenured professors have to challenge authority, whether that authority is a long-dead writer, the president of the United States, or the administrators of the university itself—a freedom that professors extend to their students, whose own political identities are still being formed. “My biggest concern is not so much what the university will lose in terms of money, but what it will lose in terms of integrity,” Robin D. G. Kelley, a distinguished professor of history at UCLA who served on the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, told me recently. “I don’t know any students now who love the university. They’re all so worn out and pissed, even those not involved in the encampment. It’s a question of the integrity of an institution that claims to believe in academic freedom and intellectual inquiry showing that it doesn’t give a shit about any of that.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Will Alden is a writer living in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Jewish Currents, The Nation, The New York Times, BuzzFeed News, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He has been a recipient of the Larry Birger Young Business Journalist prize and a finalist for the Nonprofit News Awards.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/portrait-of-a-campus-in-crisis at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

ESSAY | 31 OCT 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 11 DEC 2025, 6:31 PM UTC

The View from Evin

My family’s history with the notorious Iranian prison links me to a world of unfinished liberation movements.

Sahar Delijani

Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran, January 1987

AP

When Evin Prison erupted in flames on the night of October 15th, 2022, Iran was already alight. A month prior, Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, had been beaten to death by the Gasht-e Ershad, Iran’s morality police, for the crime of not wearing her hijab in accordance with government standards. Grief gave way to fury, and fury to defiance as women flooded the streets, tearing off their headscarves and rejoicing around bonfires. The uprising came to be known as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, its name drawn from a slogan first popularized by the Kurdish liberation leader Abdullah Öcalan. It soon grew into one of the largest and most enduring rebukes to the theocratic regime that, for the past 46 years, has relentlessly smothered dissent and denied even the smallest acts of self-determination, attempting to control how people dress, what they eat and drink, whether they sing or dance. The state had met the movement with characteristic brutality, countering the people’s hope with batons and bullets. Within the prison—which held thousands of activists, artists, and others who had dared to contest this oppressive order—chants of “Death to the Dictator” sounded in unison with the cries of the protesters outside.

No journalists were able to report how the fire started or document the casualties. From my Brooklyn apartment, where I sat clutching my phone, I could see only what was captured by flickering videos taken from neighboring windows and rooftops. I watched plumes of smoke tower over the prison, and what looked like Molotov cocktails hurled from the hills. I heard the echo of gunfire. As sporadic news came of security forces taking injured prisoners not to hospitals but to other detention centers, and blocking streets to prevent families from reaching their incarcerated loved ones, I felt myself unravel.

I called my parents in California. “Are they about to kill everyone inside?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Burn them alive? Is this another massacre?” My parents were silent. We knew the horrific possibilities of that place intimately. My uncle Mohsen, my father’s brother, was among the thousands of people executed there during the notorious 1988 massacres of political prisoners that took place around the country. My parents only narrowly avoided this fate; they had once been political prisoners in Evin. I, too, had passed through its halls. This was the place where, in 1983, blindfolded, handcuffed, and chained to a bed, my mother gave birth to me.

A room in Evin Prison following a fire that killed four prisoners, October 16th, 2022.

Koosha Mahshid Falahi/Mizan News Agency via AP

As flames engulfed the prison that day three years ago—and again this past summer, under Israeli bombardment—this truth confronted me: I am undeniably tethered to this place. Evin is not just a distant cluster of buildings where I happened to be born; it is the axis of my geography. The prison stamped its coordinates on my body. In the key of its fearful and tyrannical map, my destiny was fixed. This map seeks to contain not only me and my family but the very idea of us and our people. Denying the enduring evidence of resistance, it aims to trap us within a familiar script, rendering us unruly people in need of discipline or helpless victims awaiting salvation.

And yet, because Evin is, for me, where everything began, my compass points out from this narrow place toward a wider world. My origin directs me to return, always, to what the regime, along with its imperial co-conspirators, disclaims: those stubborn histories of revolt it has never been able to fully crush—the archives it has endeavored to destroy, the voices it has tried to silence, the lives it thought it had extinguished. When I look out from Evin, the view widens beyond Tehran’s walls: toward other uprisings, other unfinished liberation struggles, every place where people refuse the borders drawn to contain them.

Evin Prison’s role as an antagonist of popular struggle precedes the Islamic Republic. Opened in 1971 in the beautiful village of Evin in northern Tehran under the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the prison was originally a high-security detention center run by SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded secret police. The complex comprised two large communal blocks designed to hold 300 people, 20 cells for solitary confinement, a court room, and an execution yard. In 1953, after the US and UK, hoping to protect Western oil interests, orchestrated a coup ousting the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the CIA assisted in establishing SAVAK, and the prison became a key site for the secret police to incarcerate, torture, and kill opponents of the Shah. (In the 1960s, as relations between the US and Iran became increasingly strained, Israel’s Mossad helped to train SAVAK agents, with whom they also carried out several joint operations.) By the 1979 revolution, Evin held more than 1,500 people, including 100 political prisoners in solitary confinement.

In February 1979, a month after the Shah fled Iran, as Ruhollah Khomeini rose to power, the doors of Evin opened to the public for the first and only time. Crowds stormed the prison to bear witness to the torture chambers and solitary cells that had come to symbolize the Shah’s brutal rule. Hours later, the gates shut again. The revolution had prevailed; the Shah was gone for good. But what awaited the population was not the end to state violence that the newly formed Islamic Republic had promised, but a new wave of it, even deadlier than before. Inside Evin, the regime established the notorious Ward 209, where political prisoners—including dual nationals and foreign citizens—are held in particularly brutal conditions, and which has since become synonymous with fear in the Iranian imagination. People incarcerated here are kept in prolonged solitary confinement, denied legal access and medical care, and subjected to torturous interrogations designed to coerce confessions.

When the Iran–Iraq War began in 1980, the regime used the fighting as a pretext to further crush internal opposition. Among those arrested and sent to Evin were my aunts and uncles, my father, and my mother, who was pregnant when she was taken. After my birth, I stayed with her in her cell for just over a month, and then was handed to my grandparents, who raised me along with my cousin and my brother until my parents were released in the mid-1980s.

A bracelet of date pits the author’s father made while incarcerated in Evin, from the early 1980s.

Courtesy of the author.

The author’s father on the day of his release from Evin Prison with, from left to right, the author’s brother, the author, and the author’s cousin, 1986.

Courtesy of the author.

By the time Iran entered the final stretch of its eight-year war with Iraq, the Islamic Republic had suffered an estimated half a million casualties. The regime, humiliated by its failure to deliver the divine victory it had promised the nation, turned its wrath inward. In July 1988, Khomeini issued a fatwa to execute all those members of the opposition forces judged unrepentant “in their war against God.” A “Death Committee” was formed to adjudicate. The doors of Evin and other prisons were sealed shut. As desperate families camped outside prison gates, and the world’s attention shifted to the UN-backed ceasefire between the warring nations, a hidden massacre was unfolding. In a matter of months, thousands of prisoners—including my uncle Mohsen—were hanged or shot, their bodies dumped into unmarked mass graves. The massacre clarified in no uncertain terms what many had long feared: Utter impunity was the blueprint of the regime. Families like ours were banned from displaying photographs of the murdered, holding funerals, or speaking publicly about what had happened.

A few years after the massacre, my family moved to California, where a different kind of silence enveloped us. Here, no one knew anything, no one asked anything, no one seemed to care. The agonizing stories we carried felt surreal against the imperturbable placidity of our new surroundings. What was I supposed to say amid the Christmas parties, sleepovers, and green lawns? How could I possibly explain the tangled labyrinth of our inherited trauma to the people living by the bright blue ocean? In America, I wasn’t afraid to speak. What I feared was the void I’d face once I did.

Still, that past was inscribed deep in me, waiting to resurface. It was as simple as that: One day I beckoned the stories, and they began to arrive. To tell them, I turned to fiction, which felt like the genre that welcomed them most fully. It offered distance from the regime’s official records—its denials of the atrocities, its criminalizing of our grief—and a route to enter memory, to speak in the language not only of the survivors but of the dead and the disappeared. I began writing my novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree. Drawing on my family’s experience, the book traces the way the horrors within Evin’s walls reverberate in lives far beyond them.

Fiction offered distance from the regime’s official records—its denials of the atrocities, its criminalizing of our grief—and a route to enter memory.

When I approached my parents as part of my research, it had been years since we had spoken about their time in Evin. As they told me about the interrogation my mother endured while in labor; about the bracelet my father carved from date stones for a daughter he’d seen only once in the prison courtyard; about my grandparents raising three grandchildren while fleeing Iraqi bombs; about my uncle, his lifeless body swaying from a noose—something felt different. I’d heard these stories before, but now they would no longer be ours alone. They would leave the safety of the private world we’d worked so hard to build and enter the realm of a public we had never trusted. And, in 2013, as the book began to make its way in the world, I felt the warnings we had received as children to never speak of where our parents had been or what had been done to them surge within me once again. My hands shook as I read from the novel to audiences gathered in bookstores. My voice caught every time I said “Evin.” At night, I dreamed of abandoning my mother and father to drown at sea. But despite my fear, making this suppressed, private history public also felt like a kind of release. For me, Children of the Jacaranda Tree was not the narrow story of a few people living in the shadow of Evin; it was a bid to stoke what the prison itself aims to extinguish. It was a small rebuttal to power’s claim to its singular truth, to its attempts to erase our stories and deny our will to speak.

On June 23rd, 2025, Evin Prison was once again targeted, this time by Israeli airstrikes. Bombs struck the visitation center, administrative buildings, and multiple wards, including Ward 209. The assault came during Israel’s Twelve-Day War, which struck not only government targets, as Israel claimed, but also hospitals and residential buildings. When Israel, followed by the US, attacked Iran, it was no aberration but a continuation of a long, bloody campaign of domination and control: the slaughter of Palestinians, the bombing of Syrians, Lebanese, and Yemenis. Within hours of the attack on the prison, Minister of Defense Israel Katz took to X to boast that Israeli forces were assailing “regime targets and government repression bodies in the heart of Tehran”; an IDF press briefing called Evin “a symbol of oppression for the Iranian people,” emphasizing that “individuals defined as enemies of the regime” are imprisoned there and “subjected to severe torture.” With this familiar rhetoric, Israel attempted to frame its assault as an act of solidarity with the Iranian people, even as the bombs reportedly killed not only staff and guards but also prisoners, visiting relatives, social workers, and a five-year-old child.

According to testimonies from political prisoners inside, security forces stormed the prison just hours after the bombing, not to offer protection to the besieged inmates but to force terrified prisoners back into blown-out cells at gunpoint. Wounded, thirsty, and starving, many lay trapped for hours while the shaken regime scrambled for its next move. As dusk fell over Tehran and Israeli bombardments continued, prisoners were ordered to prepare to evacuate under the threat of death. Given just minutes to gather what remained of their belongings, they were chained together, passing corpses in body bags as they were marched at gunpoint through the wreckage. Those who had been held in Evin were dispersed to other prisons and detention centers, and, yet again, all information was withheld from anxious families outside the prison. Days later, some relatives received brief phone calls. Many received nothing at all. Once more, people who lost loved ones were interrogated and made to promise their silence in exchange for the return of the bodies of their kin.

The Israeli attack against Evin Prison was part of a long, unholy alliance between imperial forces that claim to free us and the regimes that claim to protect us from them.

Iranian journalists gather outside an office building at Evin Prison, destroyed by Israeli strikes in northern Tehran, July 1st, 2025.

Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via AP

I sat with this torrent of news, struggling to assimilate another iteration of the same structure of violence that has terrorized my family, my people, for generations. Following events from the US, which had endorsed and participated in Israel’s strikes, the terrible logic they revealed was especially clear. Despite their outward antagonism, and beneath a thin pretense of care, the Islamic Republic and Israel—along with its sponsor—acted in unison against the Iranian people; the attack was thus part of a long, unholy alliance between imperial forces that claim to free us and the regimes that claim to protect us from them.

It should come as no surprise that the locus of this shared assault was Evin. The prison, filled with generations of dissidents, contains—and attempts to extinguish—a story that defies the one upheld by dictatorship and empire alike. Its crowded cells speak not of masses cowed into submission or awaiting salvation, but of a people fiercely committed to their own liberation. Contrary to the isolation these oppressive orders seek to impose, those who reject the imposition of such violent enclosures—from Kurdistan to Iran to Palestine—draw the lines of a different map pointing the way toward a future where not only the prisons, but the very orders that sustain them, will burn.

Sahar Delijani is the author of Children of the Jacaranda Tree, an internationally acclaimed novel, translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, BOMB, and many other publications.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-view-from-evin at 27 January 2026, 11:02 PM UTC.

Table of Contents

Jewish Currents: 2026 Jan 27

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The View from Evin: 2025 Oct 31