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In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial

PITTSBURGH (JTA) — How many times should an alleged synagogue shooter’s name be mentioned in a news story about his trial, now beginning after more than four years?

For the Pittsburgh Union Press last month, the answer was seven. For the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, it was an uneasy five, in a departure from its usual answer of zero — a number chosen out of deference to a community devastated by the shooting.

The slight difference was the only discrepancy between one set of stories published by the two news organizations covering the trial of Robert Bowers, accused of murdering 11 Jews in their synagogue here in 2018.

The anomaly offers a window into an unusual partnership between the two publications — the city’s Jewish paper and the news site established by striking staffers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — born in February when it became clear that the trial would last months.

Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle editor Toby Tabachnick was dreading the trial coverage, with a staff of just three on the editorial side: herself and two reporters, David Rullo and Adam Reinherz.

“I started getting really nervous. Like, how are we going to do this?” Tabachnick said on the eve of the trial, speaking at the federal courthouse where jury selection would soon begin. “Our regular reporters could have been here. But it would have been extremely taxing, difficult and emotional for us, because we’re so ingrained in the community too.”

Plus, she added, “In addition to this trial, which is going to be every day for three months, we’re covering the synagogues, events and the holidays, the lectures, we still have a regular community newspaper to put out.”

Tabachnick knew Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein, one of the Post-Gazette’s team that picked up a Pulitzer for their coverage of the massacre, from his time as a Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle intern. She also knew he was on strike and wondered whether he could use the extra freelance opportunity.

Instead, Goldstein immediately offered up a better idea: Join with the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the strike paper, in a joint reporting project, organized in part through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, an incubator for local journalism. (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is raising funds for the coverage.)

Working together just made sense, Goldstein said. The Chronicle was deeply resourced and credible in the Jewish community, and the Progress had on board Torsten Ove, a local legend.

From left to right, Bob Batz of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, Toby Tabachnick of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and Andrew Goldstein of the Progress pose in the Joseph Weis Jr. Courthouse in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)

“We have the all-star federal courts reporter in Torsten and we have a lot of really great journalists who love Pittsburgh, love this community, and we’ll do our best to cover it,” Goldstein said, noting that the Chronicle would also have access to the Progress’s photographers. “But the Chronicle brings something different entirely to the table, which is, they’re so deeply sourced in the Pittsburgh Jewish community, and they have such an interest in this trial in particular.”

Newsroom collaborations have become more frequent in recent years as publications realize they can expand their impact and audience by working together. But while there are a growing number of relationships between local and national publications and between daily and investigative outlets, ties between mainstream newsrooms and community or ethnic media are less common.

S. Mitra Kalita, the founder and director of URL Media, a network of Black and Brown community news outlets that share content and revenue, said the value in such partnerships was not just in delivering relief as media staffs shrink, but also in sensitizing mainstream media to minority sensibilities.

“Talking about who [the ethnic media outlet is] serving and why we’re doing it this way — the spirit of real collaboration is a bit of that give and take,” she said. “We make mainstream media way better because it starts to infuse mainstream media with aspects of community and thus redefine the mainstream.”

The residual trauma of the massacre in the Pittsburgh collaboration made it all the more important for the mainstream reporters to be sensitive to the nuances that the Jewish media was bringing, she said.

“Especially a story like this one, which was such an attack on a community — a community that was singled out for their sheer existence, the strategy cannot be ‘let’s just work in parallel,” Kalita said. “It’s not going to work. It has to be kind of a cross-pollination and a real collaboration.”

That’s exactly what is happening, according to the reporters and editors involved in the project, with communication easy between each publication’s editor and expertise flowing in both directions.

Ove a denizen of the Joseph F. Weis Jr. Courthouse for so long that he can tell stories about a sizable stretch of the portraits of judges that line its corridor walls; he may be the only court reporter to seek an interview with a judge after his death, to ask him why he was haunting the place. (The judge never showed, but his widow was less than surprised to hear that he was still working.)

He led a passel of Chronicle and Progress staffers through the warren-like courthouse on the Friday before the trial, handily impressing them with his intimacy with the building — he knew the provenance of the paintings in each courtroom — and its staff. Soo Song, the assistant U.S. attorney who is leading the prosecution team, smiled and nodded as she passed.

Torsten Ove, left, of the Pittsburgh Union Progress and Adam Reinherz of the PIttsburgh Jewish Chronicle confer on the first day of jury selection for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial, April 24, 2023. (Toby Tabachnick)

Ove showed the reporters how to access court records for free, and while they stood around him at one of the computer terminals, the teams’ different emphases emerged: Ove predicted that jury selection, which started last week and is expected to last as long as three weeks, would not be a news generator, because in his experience, it rarely has been.

Reinherz and Tabachnick, attuned to reporting on faith communities, were not so sure: Reinherz wondered whether believing Catholics, who reject the death penalty, would be eliminated, and Tabachnick wondered whether defense attorneys would seek to keep Jews off the jury — and how they would go about doing that.

Reinherz ended up covering the first day of jury selection. “Local and national reporters decided the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle should have one seat during the initial session of day one,” Reinherz explained in a story that appeared on both news sites. He noted that the first member of the public to enter the courtroom was Daniel Leger, one of two survivors of the attack.

Working together across platforms was odd, said Bob Batz Jr., the Progress’s interim editor, but he could get used to it.

“This is uncharted territory for someone like me, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, and we don’t, you know, we don’t collaborate,” he said.

“We compete!” Tabachnick interjected.

“What we’re doing is not common, and it’s not going to be easy,” Batz said. “Surely, we’re going to tick each other off about something or somebody is going to put the wrong word in or there’s a million things that can go wrong, but the breaking of ground where you’re actually working together, it just makes sense in so many ways on this story. We’re really trying to serve the community.”

Tabachnick said she saw added value in keeping journalists she admired in the limelight while they are on strike. Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went on strike back in October over wages and working conditions, in a crescendo of mounting tensions between the paper’s longtime owners and the staff that contributed to a newsroom exodus even in 2018, when the paper won a Pulitzer for its synagogue shooting coverage. The strike is now one of the longest in journalism history, and the staffers contributing to the Pittsburgh Union Progress are doing so despite earning well below than their regular salaries.

“I feel good about getting their names, their publication’s name out,” Tabachnick said.

Each story is running in essentially identical form on both publications’ websites, with a line crediting their collaboration. Tabachnick and Batz had a brief and friendly email exchange before each clicked “publish” on their story about debate among victims’ families about the appropriateness of the death penalty.

The Chronicle is minimizing appearances of the name of the accused killer, out of sensitivity to readers who may want to see their community members centered rather than their aggressor. Some researchers and law enforcement officials have also called on journalists not to print mass shooters’ names and photographs, citing evidence that doing so may contribute to their glorification and even copycat crimes.

Batz says he totally gets the Chronicle’s thinking, despite making a different choice in his newsroom.

“We’re still feeling our way, we’re still figuring this out,” Batz said. “They don’t name the defendant in their story, and they haven’t. And our guy Torsten who’s an all-star courts reporter, he’s going to use the guy’s name. And then in real time going back and forth on email and text we came up with his solution and that story was on both websites in minutes and it was really kind of cool.”

Tabachnick picked up the account of the previous night’s collaboration as if she’d been working across a desk from Batz for decades instead of online since February.

“The solution was that I realized that with the trial starting, it really didn’t make sense not to use his name at all anymore that we really needed to as a news organization,” she said. “But that didn’t mean we had to overuse his name. And I’m not saying Torsten overused his name. He used it as much as he needed to use it in terms of style, but I took out a few of them and replaced it with ‘the defendant’ and we were all happy.”

—
The post In an unusual alliance, Jewish media and striking journalists are uniting to cover the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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The Supreme Court considers ‘chutzpah’ case as rabbinical and civil courts collide

Can courts instruct a rabbinical court to withdraw accusations of chutzpah? This unlikely question was posed to the U.S. Supreme Court this month when a nursing home dispute offered a rare window into how American courts and rabbinical courts operate in parallel. The case illustrates how law – and life – get messy when one encroaches on the other’s authority.

The case centers on an ownership dispute over a New York nursing home, with millions of dollars at stake.

To resolve the dispute, one of the parties — Samuel Strulovitch — turned to a beit din, or rabbinical court, in Monsey, New York. Rabbinical courts across the United States regularly resolve a wide range of business disputes like this one. Beit dins have been growing across the U.S., with more locations, increasing caseloads, and a growing number of rulings popping up in civil courts.

Their popularity reflects two legal systems working together. First, Jewish law generally requires disputes between Jews to be resolved before rabbinical courts rather than civil courts — a rule that, like any good Jewish law rule, comes with plenty of exceptions and caveats. Second, American law treats rabbinical arbitration like other forms of commercial arbitration. When parties voluntarily agree to arbitration, a civil court will generally confirm the resulting “award,” giving it the force of a legal judgment. Going to a beit din thus serves two purposes simultaneously: satisfying a religious obligation and resolving a commercial dispute.

In this case, overlapping interests of multiple investors complicated matters. Strulovitch obtained an award from the Monsey beit din granting him an ownership stake in the nursing home. But the proceeding included Strulovitch and one co-owner, while other owners never agreed to submit the dispute to that beit din. That agreement matters to American courts because arbitration rests on consent, and a beit din’s award cannot bind parties who never agreed to its authority.

The result was more than two years of litigation in two civil courts and three rabbinical courts. That litigation ultimately wound its way before Judge Linda Jamieson of Westchester County, New York. Initially, she barred Strulovitch from confirming or enforcing the original rabbinical award while the court considered whether it affected the rights of investors who had never agreed to arbitration. The bar on civil enforcement was largely uncontroversial: deciding whether a religious ruling should carry the force of an American legal judgment is the civil court’s job.

A second injunction, however, transformed this commercial dispute into a constitutional controversy worthy of the Supreme Court’s attention. After Strulovitch summoned another investor, Moshe Bain, before a Brooklyn beit din, Bain asked Jamieson to bar proceedings in any other forum, “including any beis din,” which she did. In Jamieson’s view, the new beit din proceeding could encompass the same ownership disputes already before her court.

The beit din, however, viewed the order as a form of judicial overreach into religious matters. It thus issued a seruv — a religious contempt order that can expose its target to communal shunning — against Bain, citing the “chutzpah of enjoining [Strulovitch] from pursuing his Halachic rights.” The rabbis emphasized that the beit din had acted “of its own volition,” without any request from Strulovitch or his agents following Jamieson’s injunction.

Such a contempt order, of course, carries no civil legal force, but can have reputational consequences — and trigger social sanctions — within the Jewish community. Judge Jamieson nevertheless viewed the beit din’s actions as an attempt to circumvent her injunction and draw the dispute away from her court. She therefore ordered Strulovitch to “take all steps necessary” to have the beit din withdraw it, “including withdrawing the entire proceeding.” And while Strulovitch argued that intervening in internal rabbinical court matters violated the First Amendment, Jamieson concluded that the matters before the beit din were “not religious,” but commercial disputes that her court had authority to resolve under secular law.

It is here that the judge began to veer from her lane, causing Strulovitch to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court. By requiring Strulovitch to seek reversal of a religious contempt order that has no civil consequences, the court moved beyond determining civil legal rights and into matters of religious practice. Participation in a beit din is both a means of resolving a commercial dispute and a religious requirement, which under Jewish law is no different than observing Shabbat or keeping kosher. Its commercial subject does not erase its religious significance. And under the First Amendment, it is the believer, not the state, who defines what his faith requires.

The key constitutional question is which authority gets to decide. Courts should decide legal questions, such as whether to enforce an agreement to arbitrate before a beit din or give its award the force of a legal judgment.

But questions of whether to pursue a case in beit din or religiously sanction a party for refusing to participate generally stand beyond the court’s authority so long as those decisions do not violate an independent civil legal right.

The same holds for a religious obligation to pay: A civil court can decline to enforce a beit din’s award, but whether Jewish law nevertheless requires payment remains a matter for the beit din. By demanding Strulovitch work to withdraw the seruv, however, Jamieson crossed into determining religious matters — precisely the sphere the First Amendment protects from judicial interference. That boundary makes this case worthy of Supreme Court inquiry: a judge can decide whether a religious ruling has legal force, but deciding what Jewish law counts as chutzpah is another matter.

For now, the Supreme Court has left those questions unresolved. Justice Sonia Sotomayor required Bain to formally respond to Strulovitch’s request — a sign that it warranted closer consideration. And while she ultimately declined to intervene, she left the door open for him to return once the case played out in the New York courts.

No doubt, as the beit din system grows, harder questions will emerge. But a good rule of thumb is this: Matters of religious doctrine, or of a party’s standing in a religious community, generally lie beyond a civil court’s reach, so long as they leave the party’s rights under American law untouched. Matters that affect those rights belong to the civil courts, even if they also implicate matters that Judaism considers religious. That is how these parallel legal systems can operate alongside one another — each staying in its lane.

(Both of us are affiliated with the Beth Din of America, which is not involved in this case.)

The post The Supreme Court considers ‘chutzpah’ case as rabbinical and civil courts collide appeared first on The Forward.

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Huckabee calls settler attack on Washington Post photographer a ‘despicable act of terror’

(JTA) — U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee on Saturday condemned an attack in the West Bank by masked settlers on a Washington Post photographer. The attack, which also targeted Palestinians harvesting their olives, occurred Friday and comes amid a sharp rise in settler violence.

Heidi Levine, the Washington Post photographer who holds U.S. citizenship, described the attack to reporters from her hospital bed.

“I got jumped and I saw in the very beginning at least 25, maybe 50 of them, and I was on the ground and they were kicking me for like 10 minutes,” she said.

“We have called for a full investigation, arrest, and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law to whoever participated in this,” Huckabee wrote on X. “Attacking a female photographer is a despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards. Dishonorable act of senseless violence.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog also condemned the “shocking violence” and said he had called Levine to apologize. “I expressed my deepest sorrow to Heidi and apologized for what she went through. The despicable behavior of the perpetrators of this attack does not represent the citizens or the values of the State of Israel.”

Video footage from the scene shows masked settlers surrounding and attacking Levine. Some settlers at the scene were masked and carrying weapons. Palestinians can also be seen throwing stones toward the settlers.

A Palestinian was reportedly shot in additional clashes in the area. The Israel Defense Forces alleged in an official statement that soldiers “fired toward a suspect who ran toward them, carrying a sharp object and posed a threat.” Several vehicles were set on fire by the settlers.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was equivocal in addressing the attack, stopping short of directly condemning the assailants.

He said that the circumstances in which Levine was allegedly assaulted “remain unclear,” while adding that “Israel unequivocally condemns violence against anyone.”

According to Netanyahu’s statement, “200 Arabs and far-left activists confronted approximately 40 Israeli youths.”

“We will not allow disputed incidents to be exploited to demonize the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,” the statement said, using the biblical names for the West Bank.

Netanyahu faces elections in less than two weeks and can ill afford to alienate his far-right coalition partners who are aligned with extreme settler factions.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, by contrast, issued a forceful condemnation of the attack and linked it to the policies of Netanyahu’s government.

“Jewish terror attacks, this time targeting a Washington Post photographer as well, are not a failure of the government — they are the government’s policy,” Lapid said.

“We will put an end to this. It is a disgrace to the State of Israel, a disgrace to the Jewish people, and a disaster on the international stage,” he added. Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has surged since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. Netanyahu’s government has sought to downplay the phenomenon, often portraying the perpetrators as a small group of violent youths. But numerous figures in Israel’s political and security establishments have warned that the violence is a broader and dangerous phenomenon.

Levine told reporters the settlers forcibly took her equipment. “All I remember afterwards is that Palestinians managed to come and rescue me and try to carry me, and then an ambulance came,” she said.

The IDF acknowledged the incident in an official statement, saying that “a female journalist was injured” during a “confrontation.” The military said troops dispersed those involved and that “details of the incident will be examined.”

“Violence against innocent civilians is a grave and intolerable phenomenon that requires a coordinated, multi-agency response. The IDF will work together with the relevant authorities to eradicate this phenomenon,” the military said.

The IDF did not announce any arrests in connection with the attack. Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has frequently gone unpunished, with many such incidents resulting in no arrests.

The Foreign Press Association, which represents international media in Israel and the Palestinian territories, condemned the attack, saying Levine was “badly beaten by Israeli settlers” and had sustained moderate injuries.

“This is the latest in a long line of violent attacks by Israeli settlers against journalists and other civilians in the occupied West Bank. Yet our repeated calls for action to confront this lawlessness have been ignored by Israeli authorities,” the association said.

Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post, issued a statement calling for an investigation. “While we are relieved that Heidi has received medical care and is safe, we are outraged by this unwarranted attack on a journalist doing her job and urge a thorough investigation and follow-through from authorities,” Murray said.

The post Huckabee calls settler attack on Washington Post photographer a ‘despicable act of terror’ appeared first on The Forward.

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As Netanyahu loses support before election, Ben-Gvir rises in polls

(JTA) — RAMLA – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the parties in his coalition seem to be losing support heading into Israel’s first election since Oct. 7 – with one exception. Otzma Yehudit, headed by Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, is seeing a rise in the polls.

Ben-Gvir’s growing popularity ahead of the Oct. 27 election was on full display on a recent weekday when the far-right politician, surrounded by a massive entourage of security guards, police and flag-waving fans, made his way through the central Israeli city of Ramla’s marketplace.

Yet, amidst the cheering and celebration, the extreme nationalism that has contributed to his meteoric rise through the ranks of Israel’s political system – and made Ben-Gvir a household name even beyond Israel’s borders – also drew ire and deep-seated fear in this city known for its mixed Jewish-Arab population.

“Here comes the next defense minister,” a gaggle of teenage boys in matching Ben-Gvir T-shirts chanted as the minister walked through the market, greeting shoppers and stallholders begging for selfies. Ben-Gvir has his sights set on being Israel’s next minister of defense, a huge promotion from his current role managing internal security.

At several of the stalls, the controversial minister stopped to embrace vendors. At a pickle stand, he sampled olives. At a candy store, the owner joyously threw handfuls of small candies over the passing group. And at a juice stand, Ben-Gvir and his entourage were treated to complimentary cups of lemonade.

The minister, elated by the welcome, smiled and waved at passersby, grabbing phones to take selfies, and even chatting with excited fans on video calls.

Beyond the celebration in Ramla, however, Ben-Gvir has been condemned in Israel and beyond for calling for the expulsion of Gazans and using dehumanizing language about Palestinians. A disciple of Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, he for years kept a photo of Baruch Goldstein, who mowed down Palestinian worshippers at a Hebron mosque, in his living room.

It is not only his rhetoric and symbolic gestures that have drawn polarizing admiration and anger. During his four years as national security minister, Ben-Gvir has actively downgraded conditions in Israeli jails, pushed through a law establishing a death penalty for Palestinian terrorists and has led the police during the proliferation of settler violence against West Bank villagers.

These measures have earned opprobrium abroad, but they appear to be winning votes. His supporters are ever more impressed with how he puts his words, and paperwork, into action – and shares it proudly on TikTok.

Polls published this week show that even as Netanyahu and his coalition partners are losing votes to the opposition bloc led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, Ben-Gvir is getting more. Otzma Yehudit, translated as “Jewish Power,” is predicted to increase from its current six seats to as many as nine.

On the ground, in the marketplace in Ramla, Ben-Gvir’s visit drew extreme reactions ranging from sheer joy to pure anger.

“I love Ben-Gvir,” gushed Hodaya Nabara, 52, who seconds before snapped a selfie with the politician. “He does what he says he will do.”

A resident of southern Israel, Nabara said she was most impressed by how he had ordered the demolition of illegally built homes, in some cases whole villages, built by the burgeoning Israeli Bedouin population, in the Negev region where there is little oversight of construction, and where Bedouin say the government neglects their needs.

“They need to know there is a red line and they can’t do whatever they want,” she said.

But as the entourage passed by Michal Sharabi, the 53-year-old began hurling insults at him and shaking.

“I can’t stand him at all, because of him there is no peace in this country,” she told JTA after calming down. “He is a lowlife, and the people going with him don’t believe in themselves. Is he not embarrassed to come to this city, where Jews and Arabs live together … It’s a chutzpah. I’m furious.”

In a nearby grocery store, a mixed group of Arabs and Jews frowned at the unfolding spectacle.

“We don’t like being defined as Arabs or Jews; we are ‘Ramlaim’ (residents of Ramla),” insisted Uri, who said he was Jewish but declined to give his full name. “We are all neighbors here, and he is making people fight.”

His friend, Hamudi Abu Ghanam, said Arab residents of the city like him were impacted by the events of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched deadly raids inside Israel, just like the Jews, and many came to help out but that Ben-Gvir still incited against them.

“He is racist,” he said. “Since Oct. 7, we are all against Hamas, and instead of saying thank you, he comes and destroys people’s homes.”

Ben-Gvir’s stop in Ramla struck a particular nerve because the city, which is about 78% Jewish and 22% Arab, was a central point of tension in 1948 when Israel was created. For Arabs, the evidence of the Nakba, which Palestinians call the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation that displaced the local Palestinian Arab population during its war of independence, is all around in ruins.

At one point on his jaunt through the market, two Arab girls donning traditional hijab headcoverings hovered nearby, but they quickly made a U-turn when they realized who was at the center of the commotion.

Some Jewish onlookers pointed to his theatrics as reasons they were unimpressed by him. Benny Muhtar, 68, a Jewish resident of Ramla, told JTA he thought Ben-Gvir was full of “hot air” – a populist with no substantial policies.

“Look at the young men surrounding him; they are making a lot of noise like this is a serious campaign … that is what is making the people look up and take notice, but none of it is real, and he is doing a lot of damage,” he said.

Others enjoyed the spectacle but, with less than two weeks to go until casting their vote, were still unsure whom they would choose.

“He’s done a lot of really good things,” said Edna Mahbesh, 65, who was handing out the free lemonade. “I really hope he is successful in the election.”

But she was not sure if she would actually vote for him.

“I’ll decide that next week,” she said.

Arbel Flehandler, 19, a first-time voter, stood on the side, watching in awe as the politician passed by.

“He is really good and does a lot of good things,” he said. “I am definitely going to vote for a right-wing party, but not sure if I will vote for him or not. This is my first time, and I am still thinking about it.”

Zehava Perets, 80, said the reactions to Ben-Gvir showed just how polarized Israel is right now.

“It is such a shame there are so many divisions,” she said. “I really don’t know who I will vote for … There are a few good people in each bloc, but it is impossible to get them to work together.”

Liron Lavie, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, said the extreme reactions for and against Ben-Gvir “speaks to how politics works these days” – as politicians “connect with the electorate through emotional reaction and a sense of pride or fear.”

She said Ben-Gvir should be viewed as part of the “larger global trend where far-right parties are getting stronger.”

Lavie assessed that Otzma Yehudit benefited from the growing appeal of providing simple solutions and simple messaging – and that Ben-Gvir was especially effective on social media platforms such as TikTok.

“At the end of the day, people prefer simple messages,” said Lavie.

She also said that Ben-Gvir, despite being in the government on Oct. 7, had successfully distanced himself from that fact and positioned himself as a strong alternative to Netanyahu on the right.

“Likud and Netanyahu are losing ground,” she said. “They are being criticized about how they managed the situation, either from the center and left or from the right, allowing voters to go to Ben-Gvir, who was able to position himself as an [alternative] to Netanyahu from the right.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post As Netanyahu loses support before election, Ben-Gvir rises in polls appeared first on The Forward.

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