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Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians
(JTA) — When Rep. Rashida Tlaib joined a Zoom with 40 teenagers, she soon found herself talking about the kinds of topics — academic and otherwise — that tend to take up their days.
There was discussion of the stress of AP exams, embarrassing dads and social media memes. She showed them pictures on Instagram of her dog at the U.S. Capitol. Everyone was on a first-name basis.
“My son is a [high school] junior,” she said, responding to a message in the Zoom chat from one of the teen participants. “Oh my God, the SAT — I was stressed out. I’m stressed because he’s stressed. He had to take all his AP exams and stuff.”
Tlaib got personal too — talking about her grandmother, with whom she last spoke on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
But the conversation also turned to a question many of the teens had encountered at high school, camp, youth groups or elsewhere in their lives: Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?
As the only Palestinian-American in Congress — and perhaps the chamber’s most prominent anti-Zionist — Tlaib was in a unique position to answer. And the students on the call had a particular interest in the question as well: They were all Jewish.
The teens are all participants in a new initiative, launched last year, to expose young American Jews to Palestinian voices through video chats. Founded by Ezra Beinart, a junior at a Jewish day school in New York City, the project’s goal is to bring Palestinian perspectives to a demographic that, he says, sorely lacks them.
“I live in a very Jewish community and most of the people around me are very educated on the Israeli perspective, but not as knowledgeable about the Palestinian side,” Beinart said in an interview. “And that’s why I decided to create the group to inform young Jews about the other side of the story, which I don’t think most Jewish students know much about.”
In her response to the question about antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Tlaib again turned to her grandmother, Muftieh, whom she refers to with the Arabic term “Sity” and whom she has portrayed as the face of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. She said people were “weaponizing antisemitism” in order to chill criticism of Israel.
“My grandmother, literally solely based on the fact that she was born Palestinian, she just doesn’t have equality,” Tlaib told the teens. “Her life would be completely different if that wasn’t the case. And so, you know, for me criticizing that, if anything, is more chipping away at this form of government that does that to my Sity.”
Michigan House Rep. Rashida Tlaib speaks on stage at a concert in Detroit, July 16, 2022. (Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images)
Beinart said he wants to increase opportunities for Jewish-Palestinian interaction. So he said he has reached out to “very Jewish” communities around the country, through chat groups and progressive synagogues, to get the word out. He started out with just a handful of teens, but his numbers are growing: His session with Tlaib drew 40 viewers.
Such interest comes at a time of political flux in Israel, and as young Jewish adults in the United States view the country less favorably than their elders. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that Jews aged 18-30 were less emotionally attached to Israel than older generations, more skeptical of its efforts toward peace and likelier to support efforts to boycott it. In recent years, activist groups founded by young Jews have pushed institutions such as campus Hillels and the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah network to be more inclusive of Palestinian or anti-Zionist perspectives.
The initiative’s format has speakers introduce themselves for five minutes or so and then take questions, which Beinart selects, for another 30 minutes. It has held about half a dozen sessions with speakers like Ayman Mohyeldin, a journalist at MSNBC, and Amahl Bishara, a professor at Tufts University. Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, is its most prominent guest so far. (Her office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or for comment.)
Beinart wanted his peers to have their minds opened, as he said his was when he interned last summer at the Jerusalem Fund, a pro-Palestinian think tank and advocacy organization in Washington D.C. He noticed that a friend of his who worked there used “Palestine” as readily as he used “Israel,” and described to him how fraught traveling to the region was for her, whereas he took his ability to enter the country for granted.
“It made it much more tangible to have friends explain how Israel’s actions affect them in everyday life,” he said. “It’s different from just reading about it or seeing a video.”
If Beinart’s name is familiar, it’s because his father is Peter Beinart, the writer who was once an outspoken advocate for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and now is a prominent Jewish voice supporting a single, binational Israeli-Palestinian state. The elder Beinart declined to comment for this article, as the initiative is his son’s project rather than his. But for a decade, Peter Beinart has been making the case that American Jews need to spend more time listening to Palestinian voices.
Resistance to hearing from Palestinians, the elder Beinart wrote in 2013 in the New York Review of Books, “make[s] the organized American Jewish community a closed intellectual space, isolated from the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives.”
Ezra acknowledges his father’s influence, albeit reluctantly. The first speaker in the series was Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist Ezra met when he accompanied Peter on a West Bank tour.
“Yeah, obviously, but I’m going my own way with it,” Ezra Beinart said, asked about his father’s influence. “I’m connecting Israel-Palestine to what I see going on with my peers, my friends.”
In the Zoom session, Tlaib intuited Ezra’s ambivalence about bringing his father into the conversation, so she trod carefully when she quoted the elder Beinart to make a point.
“Ezra, your dad said something once — I know you don’t want me to mention your dad, you’re like my son,” she said. But she then brought up a quote by Peter Beinart to explain why she had chosen, despite considerable backlash, to host an event in the U.S. Capitol commemorating the Nakba, the word meaning “catastrophe” which Palestinians use to describe their displacement during and after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Peter Beinart’s quote was, “When you tell a people to forget its past, you are not proposing peace, you are proposing extinction.”
Tlaib said, “I used [Beinart’s quote] today when I got interviewed because I love this, but when Peter says it, it’s like okay, look at this is, this is a Jewish American man speaking up about the importance of understanding history.”
After the meeting, Ezra Beinart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he chose questions that reflected the narrative Jewish youth were exposed to in their communities. In addition to discussing anti-Zionism and antisemitism, one question was, “What is your response to those who believe that using the word ‘occupation’ is harmful?” (Avoiding accurate terminology inhibits the advance of peace and human rights, Tlaib said.)
“Jewish people, when they think about Palestinians, they think of terror, most of them,” Beinart said. “So that’s something they should hear about from Palestinians.”
Teaneck, the northern New Jersey suburb that would qualify as a “very Jewish” community by nearly any standard, is where one of the participants, Liora Pelavin, 15, lives. Her mother, who is a rabbi, saw a post about Beinart’s Zoom meetings on Facebook and thought her daughter might be interested.
“Hearing from Palestinians really humanizes them,” Pelavin, who attended a Jewish day school through eighth grade and now goes to a public high school, said in an interview. “It makes me learn and also realize that they all have different opinions, too.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, an organization whose programs include facilitating dialogue between American Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, said any interaction would be welcome.
However, he was concerned that most of the Palestinians Ezra Beinart had selected were political or advocacy leaders, instead of ordinary Palestinians who might be better suited to explain everyday realities to high school students.
“There’s probably a version of a way to do this like Encounter,” a long-running program that brings American Jews to the West Bank for dialogue with Palestinians, “where you are hearing from people and learn their stories, and you are free to come to the political conclusions you want,” Kurtzer said. “But you humanize their experience. That’s one way of doing any of this work. There’s another way to do this work, which is, ‘I want to influence the politics of your own community.’”
Jonathan Kessler — a former senior official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who now leads Heart of a Nation, a group that facilitates dialogue among Jewish American, Palestinian and Israeli teens — said he was aware of Beinart’s initiative, and that it is an example of how Gen Z may be better able to break down barriers than their elders.
“A generation that does not think of gender and sexuality in binary terms is uniquely well positioned to approach a conflict, which has for too long been defined in a binary way,” Kessler said.
Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian political scientist who has spoken to Beinart’s group, said it was particularly important for Palestinian speakers to reach Jewish teens.
“Within the Jewish community, particularly in the organized Jewish community, there may be a lot of pro-Israel perspectives represented and not a whole lot of Palestinian perspectives represented,” he said. “I’m always inspired when I speak to younger people about this issue who have an interest in learning more.”
For Tlaib, it was also a forum where she had expressed views that she hasn’t otherwise voiced publicly — saying that she felt conflicted about evacuating Israeli settlers because they had lived in the West Bank for so long.
“Just the idea around taking families that — that’s been their home — it’s just completely uprooting, forcibly displacing,” Tlaib said. “It’s something I struggle with because, like, we’re doing it all over again, right? This happened during the Nakba.”
Beinart said he and others on the call, including Pelavin, were moved by her sentiments.
“A lot of the Jewish community thinks like, ‘Palestinians hate us, and don’t think we’re people too,’” Pelavin said. “I think that’s so wrong, and being on these calls has just confirmed that for me.”
Ezra Beinart favors a single binational state — Tlaib is the only elected lawmaker who also takes that position — and Pelavin said her views on Israel trended left. But while much of the organized American Jewish community has historically bristled at criticism of Israel, neither teen said that they were made to feel like a pariah in their Jewish milieus.
“They think it’s cool that I do these types of things, but I think a lot of their goal is to just stay away from this topic around me, because they don’t really want to get into an argument about it,” Pelavin said of her peers.
And Beinart said holding a minority viewpoint hasn’t been a problem for him, either. “The kids in my school know who I am,” Ezra Beinart said. “No one’s mean to me. There are kids who share my views — a few, but not many.”
Despite the weighty subject matter, the conversation had an informal, friendly feel. Tlaib also wanted to learn more about the participants, but when she asked what colleges they were planning to attend, no one spoke up — until she noticed answers to her question piling up in the Zoom chat.
“Oh look there — you guys looove the chat!” she said. She then attempted to get her dog to hop on screen, but settled for showing the teens photos.
Ezra Beinart said he was fine with Tlaib’s cooing and kvelling about the college plans.
“I’m not going to pretend that this is a group of well-educated adults,” he said. “This is a group of kids who don’t know about this stuff as well. And that’s why that’s why I’m doing it — it’s not supposed to be for people who are experts, right?”
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‘Israel is politics’: Was a woman kicked out of a salon for supporting Israel or being Israeli-American?
An Israeli-American woman who was denied service at a Northern Virginia eyebrow salon is now taking legal action against the business.
The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law is filing a civil rights complaint on behalf of Jessica Walton, who was at Karimi Brows in Alexandria, Virginia, on Aug. 6 when Fatana Karimi, the shop’s owner, recorded and posted a video of her telling Walton to leave the store. The video has received more than 270,000 likes and garnered concern from antisemitism watchdog groups.
“This case is about a basic civil rights principle,” says Omer Wiczyk, senior counsel at the Brandeis Center. “A business that is open to the public cannot reclassify a customer’s Israeli identity as objectionable politics.”
The two sides disagree about whether Karimi’s decision was made based on Walton’s ethnicity, identity or politics.
Karimi said in a TikTok video that her decision to deny service to Walton was not about Walton’s identity but her politics. “Any ethnicity or nationality or person who comes from a certain religion, any religion, comes to me and tells me that they support Israel, I would kick them,” she said.
Karimi said she “would have, you know, let it slide by” if Walton had denounced the Israeli government and called the Israel-Hamas war a genocide.
Walton, in the video taken at Karimi Brows, characterized the dispute as being about her identity. “I had no idea that you would do this based on my ethnicity,” she said.
According to the complaint, Walton said she did not discuss politics and only mentioned she was Israeli-American before Karimi asked her to leave the studio.
In another video, Karimi explained that Walton said she was Israeli-American “three different times” before Karimi started “throwing shots back at her.” Karimi said that in that moment, she was imagining Palestinian people, “looking at me saying, ‘But I thought you supported us? Why are you playing nice with the girl that is the reason we’re going through this?’”
“I was like, ‘the gloves are f—ing off,’” Karimi said. “‘I’m not doing your f—ing brows. Get out of my f—ing face.’”
The complaint also says that before the camera started rolling, “Ms. Karimi stated that, for her, ‘Israel is politics.’ ”
Politics-based discrimination would not necessarily constitute a civil rights violation, said Michael Helfand, a professor at the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. However, if Karimi was placing special scrutiny on Walton’s beliefs because of her Israeli identity, it would — facts that the parties dispute.
“I think this gets you into the question of how you want to classify anti-Zionism,” says Helfand. “I think that’s a bigger question that the law hasn’t fully wrapped its head around.”
Both women said they have received violent messages online following the incident, including death and rape threats. Karimi said her Yelp reviews were spammed with negative comments from users she doubted had been to the store.
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Vance meets with Temple Israel rabbi on Michigan visit
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance recently met with representatives of Temple Israel in Michigan to offer “his support in the wake of the attack on our community,” clergy from the synagogue told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Vance’s Monday meeting with representatives of the suburban Detroit synagogue that had been attacked by a terrorist in March came as the vice president has upped his outreach to Jewish voters ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. He also invited a rabbi and security guard to a rally Monday in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, where he called them out from the podium and said he was “honored” to have them attend.
The Reform synagogue’s clergy later offered more details about his outreach, telling JTA that he had met with one rabbi, as well as with a security officer who had stopped the assailant from harming anyone at the preschool that was in session.
The meeting was held at Vance’s request, Rabbi Jen Lader told JTA, and the vice president did not visit the synagogue itself.
“This was an important opportunity to ask for the Vice President’s support in the fight against antisemitism, and for additional security funding through the Jewish American Security Act,” Lader wrote in an email to JTA, referring to a bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. House this summer to increase federal funds for both Jewish organizations and synagogue security.
Lader continued, “We’ve made the same requests to elected officials on both sides of the political aisle.”
Later that day the vice president traveled to Las Vegas, where he met in a closed-door session with members of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who have been riled by his close relationship with podcaster Tucker Carlson and other points of contention.
Vance sought to draw a contrast with Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, who spent the weekend offering apologies for his earlier comments about the temple attack, when he appeared to describe the attack as a response to Israel’s incursion in Lebanon.
Some Michigan Jewish leaders are publicly mobilizing against El-Sayed, a harsh critic of Israel: As of press time, more than 400 Jews in the state, including some who hold prominent community positions, have signed a petition pledging to vote for the GOP candidate, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, in the Senate race.
A representative for Vance did not respond to a request for comment on the vice president’s Temple Israel meeting or for his views on the Jewish American Security Act.
At the RJC meeting, where he also received a standing ovation but did not address his Carlson ties, attendees told JTA that Vance highlighted his outreach to Temple Israel.
The nation’s largest Reform synagogue, Temple Israel was attacked in March by a man who had recently lost family in an Israeli strike on a Hezbollah position in Lebanon. In two statements following the attack, El-Sayed initially condemned it outright. He then changed his wording to include what he now says was “context” about Israel’s war in Lebanon, including the phrase, “Hurt people hurt people.”
Speaking with the state Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus at the party convention on Saturday, El-Sayed apologized for those remarks, saying, “I made a mistake.” He also attended the caucus’s “Summer Simcha” fundraiser the next day, where he repeated his apology and asked for forgiveness. He told JTA the “context” he’d sought to include in his initial remarks was related to “violence in all its forms, in all circumstances.”
Temple Israel clergy have declined to comment to JTA on El-Sayed’s two apologies for his past comments. Lader had penned an op-ed in The Free Press criticizing his response.
Vance’s Michigan visit also included a rally in Sterling Heights, where he discussed the synagogue attack and called it “a terrible, antisemitic terrorist attack.”
“It could have been so much worse, ladies and gentlemen,” Vance told the crowd, who had given the Temple Israel personnel a standing ovation. “That guy showed up at that synagogue, at that school with a desire to kill a lot of children, and he killed precisely zero children because of the brave security guards who did their job and did it very well.”
Vance also called El-Sayed, a progressive and a Muslim, “very, very evil” from the podium.
“Abdul El-Sayed made an apology for the very people who would perpetrate violence against hundreds of innocent American school children,” Vance told the crowd. “You’ve got to ask yourself, if he’s willing to empathize, not with the children who almost had their lives destroyed at the most innocent and what should be the safest place in the world, their school, what is he going to do when he goes to Washington, D.C. when the cameras aren’t on?”
Vance added, “What I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t. A person who will apologize for a murderer so long as he looks the right way, but will not understand the plight of an innocent child if that person has the wrong faith.”
The Jewish voters petition, titled “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” was spearheaded prior to El-Sayed’s apologies but has picked up more signatures in their aftermath.
The petition’s language states that “many” of the signatories “have been fiercely supportive of Democratic candidates and principles,” but that all of them “declare our intent to vote for Mike Rogers for US Senate in 2026.”
“If El-Sayed were to win the general election in this important swing state, we fear the far-left and anti-Jewish elements in the Democratic Party would become dominant, including in the imminent 2028 presidential race,” the petition says. “We cannot allow him to become the Democratic standard-bearer or Michigan’s senator.”
The petition specifies that their vote for Rogers “does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump.”
Benji Rosenzweig, a real-estate agent and music podcaster based in West Bloomfield, was one of the letter’s signers.
“I’ve watched Abdul El-Sayed, for the last number of months, surround himself with people who cheer for the destruction of our families and the annihilation of our community,” Rosenzweig told JTA. He signed the petition before El-Sayed’s apologies but wasn’t swayed by them: “What he said was, ‘I’m sorry that you were hurt.’ That’s not an apology.”
Rosenzweig describes himself as a “centrist” who holds “liberal values,” and who would have voted for El-Sayed’s primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, in the general November election if she had won the nomination. He recently met Rogers at an event, he said, and told him that “I will be holding him accountable to the liberal values that I still value.”
As of press time, the petition’s signatories include Brian Hermelin, current president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit; Mark Davidoff, CEO of the Michigan Israel Business Accelerator; Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld, CEO of the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills; Amy Newman, CEO of Jewish Family Service of Metro Detroit; and David Victor, past president of the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The petition included their names but not their titles, suggesting they were signing as individuals and not as representatives of their organizations. The list also includes the names of several people who had previously told JTA they would commit to fundraising for Rogers if El-Sayed won the Democratic primary.
Local rabbi Asher Lopatin, currently on leave from his role as community relations director for the Ann Arbor Jewish federation, has stumped for Rogers but told JTA he does not have a formal role with the campaign. In the Forward this week, Lopatin again urged the state’s Jewish Democrats to back Rogers over El-Sayed.
“To show the Democrats that such candidates should never be nominated, we must show them that such candidates can never win,” the rabbi wrote on Monday.
The El-Sayed campaign did not return a request for comment from JTA about the petition.
For the approximately 100,000 Jews in Michigan, the question of whether to vote for El-Sayed has proven hugely divisive. At the same Sunday event that hosted the candidate, state Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and has publicly sparred with El-Sayed over his rhetoric, implored the crowd to “place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival” — suggesting that Jewish voters should put their own feelings of personal safety aside in order to elect a Democrat.
Nessel’s comment, coming one day after she sat out a state Democratic convention over what she said was fear of antisemitic harassment, has sparked some backlash outside of Michigan. Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, called the attorney general “an absolute embarrassment.”
Mark Goldfeder, who runs the litigation group National Jewish Advocacy Center, wrote on the social network X, “Jewish voters can care deeply about democracy, climate, health care and the welfare of their neighbors while still treating Jewish safety as entirely nonnegotiable.”
Rosenzweig said he had once been an admirer of Nessel but that he was “really sad” over what he interpreted as her suggestion that voting for Abdul “may put Jewish people in danger, but do it anyways.”
“If Abdul wins she gets to say, ‘Well, Jews are endangered,’” he said. “It’s just such a crazy place to put people in.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Spain’s prime minister blames Israel, Russia for disinformation around Ceuta border crisis
(JTA) — MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Monday that Israel and Russia spread disinformation about Spain’s migration policy after a rush of migrants arrived in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa.
Over 72,000 migrants crossed into Ceuta between July 30 and July 31, with at least 100 people dying in the attempt, according to local authorities. Sánchez, along with Morocco’s Interior Ministry, have blamed the surge on human trafficking networks that exploited misinterpretations of a change in Spain’s border policy.
In Sánchez’s first interview since the border crisis, he also said that Israel and Russia organized internet campaigns to undermine Spain’s government during the chaotic aftermath. Online theories proliferated widely after the Ceuta crossings, including some that said Israel orchestrated the crisis.
“After July 30th and 31st, there was an expansion of these hoaxes and this disinformation by social networks associated with both Russia and Israel, and with an international far-right movement that always uses migration, not only to attack Spain, but also to attack Europe and divide it,” Sánchez said in an interview with the Spanish radio network Cadena SER.
Sánchez said research from the European Union’s European External Action Service showed that Israel and Russia were behind disinformation campaigns, without giving further details on the evidence. The EEAS did not immediately respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
He added that it was “evident” that Israel and Russia were motivated by Spain’s political positions “regarding the genocide in Gaza and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Sánchez is among Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Iran.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Monday that Sánchez was “lying shamelessly,” adding that the statements “will not distract from Sánchez’s disgraceful failure to manage his country’s affairs.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also told the Russian state broadcaster RBC that Russia had no involvement in the migrant crisis or disinformation campaigns.
Spanish-Israeli diplomatic ties, first established in 1986, have deteriorated since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, with Madrid since recognizing Palestine as a state and banning ships carrying arms to Israel from docking in its ports. By 2026, both countries had recalled their ambassadors.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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