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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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Nithya Raman, LA mayoral candidate who clashed with DSA on Israel, wins their endorsement
Ever since Councilmember Nithya Raman’s last-minute entry into the Los Angeles mayoral race, questions have loomed about her relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America — and whether her stance on Israel would chill the group’s support for her underdog campaign.
Raman, a dues-paying DSA member, had criticized the group for a statement the national organization made after Oct. 7. In 2024, she was censured by the LA chapter for courting a pro-Israel group in her campaign for re-election to city council.
But following weeks of debate in the local chapter, Raman won its official endorsement Wednesday, paving the way for the leftist group to organize for her campaign to unseat incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.
The endorsement, which reportedly came with the support of more than 60 percent of some 1,400 voting members, vindicated Raman’s breaking with the group on Israel and other issues. It also comes after the councilmember stated definitively that she believed the war in Gaza constituted a genocide — a basic litmus test inside the hardline anti-Zionist group.
Raman, 45, seemed to allude to the conflict in a statement thanking the organization.
“This endorsement means something because of what it represents: a coalition of people who don’t always agree on every question, but who agree that LA needs real change,” Raman wrote on Instagram, adding. “It’s not about everyone thinking alike. It’s about building power together toward the same goal.”
The contentious endorsement process around Raman, one of the group’s national success stories and its first member to win citywide office in Los Angeles — three more have since joined her on city council — underscored the fierce ideological commitments in the DSA. Yet its outcome may not be entirely in her favor, as mainstream Jewish groups have come to hold DSA and its candidates in contempt.
Raman has rarely fit neatly into the group’s political conventions. On Oct. 7, 2023, when more than 1,200 people were killed in Israel, the national DSA club publicly blamed Israel for incurring the Hamas-led attack. Raman — whose district included heavily Jewish neighborhoods like Hancock Park and Sherman Oaks — had quickly issued a statement standing with her Jewish and Israeli constituents. A few days later, she also disavowed the DSA response, calling it “unacceptably devoid of empathy.”
Her positions on the Middle East frustrated Israel’s supporters, too. In June 2024, she helped pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire and release of hostages, infuriating the local Jewish federation and other Jewish groups, which said she was selling out Israel’s ability to defend itself.
Nevertheless, she earned the backing of Democrats for Israel-Los Angeles in her run for re-election that year, with the president of the liberal Zionist group crediting her statement that Israel had a right to exist and her general engagement with Jewish constituents. Outraged, DSA’s members voted to censure her.
In the runup to June’s mayoral primary, Raman joined the livestream of leftist firebrand Hasan Piker, telling him she agreed that it was committing genocide in Gaza. But DSA did not endorse any candidate in the June 2026 primary — even as Raman was locked in a tight race with the conservative reality star Spencer Pratt for a spot in the November runoff. (Another DSA candidate, Rae Huang, placed a distant fifth.)
Asked whether she believed Israel was an apartheid state, Raman said, “Yeah, I think that they’re treating people unfairly, that they’re not treating people equally, and I’m critical of that.”
Israel is not the only wedge issue for Raman in DSA. She split with the group — and her democratic socialist peers on city council — on a local “mansion tax,” saying that it discouraged new multifamily housing construction. And she was one of only two councilmembers who railed against a controversial multibillion-dollar expansion of the LA convention center — even as the other DSA members, who have strong backing from the building trades unions, voted for it.
The debate within DSA was framed as ideological purity versus political pragmatism. Bass, a historically unpopular incumbent whose tenure included the most catastrophic wildfire the city had seen in decades, has governed as a centrist Democrat; though Raman is broadly aligned with DSA policy, some of the group’s members who opposed the endorsement wrote in a communist magazine this week that it should not be “rewarded based on ideological proximity.”
The DSA’s endorsement was the second major pickup for Raman in the last week; the powerful hospitality workers union, Unite Here Local 11, officially threw its support behind Raman Tuesday, though organized labor still largely backs Bass.
Now a new question emerges: whether the endorsement of a group with a few thousand members came too late. Peer-to-peer betting markets currently have Bass as a roughly 2-to-1 favorite.
Sean Wakasa, co-chair of the Los Angeles DSA chapter, told The New York Times the group was warming to the challenge.
“We have thousands of members who are ready to organize, talk to their neighbors, knock on doors and build power to shake up Los Angeles and build a brighter future,” Mr. Wakasa said.
The post Nithya Raman, LA mayoral candidate who clashed with DSA on Israel, wins their endorsement appeared first on The Forward.
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Why is this chef opening a kosher Israeli restaurant in LA right now?
How do you explain Malka, the new kosher Israeli restaurant in Beverly Hills?
I’m not talking about the food — I haven’t eaten there yet — I’m talking about the fact that it’s opening at all. Why would Eyal Shani — many of whose restaurants worldwide have faced protests, vandalism and physical attacks — dare to open another restaurant at this particularly fraught time?
“The whole situation is leading me to open more, more, more,” Shani told me when we met last week. “That is my reaction as a Jewish man. If they are trying to kill you, you should make a lot of children. And these are my children.”
We were sitting in the empty restaurant on the ground floor of the boutique SIXTY Hotel. Shani, who is 67, wore a T-shirt and dark khakis. With his stubbly beard and unruly gray hair, he could pass for an intense, very post-grad philosophy major. He put a plate of farmers market green grapes between us.
The night before, at a pre-opening event for journalists, influencers and, it seemed, models, the same space was packed. Piles of fresh raw vegetables — a Shani signature — filled the long bar counter along with perfect rectangles of toasted focaccia topped with either steak tartare or smoky eggplant caviar. The crowd swelled, the music blared, trays of mojitos and palomas disappeared. It was signature Shani — a frolic of nature, noise and Israeli food.
Now, the large, modern space — a rare high-end restaurant in Los Angeles’ ever-struggling kosher restaurant scene — was quiet. Shani leaned back into an earth-toned banquette and reflected for a moment on how those two words, “Israeli food,” have become so toxic, especially following Oct. 7.
Demonstrators accuse Israeli chefs of passing Palestinian food off as Israeli and of being complicit in their government’s actions. Shani’s business partner, Shahar Segal, did engage in marketing work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the controversial U.S.-Israeli organization established to feed Gazans. But Israeli restaurants around the world with no such involvements have faced similar protests, as have Jewish-owned restaurants with no ties to Israel.
Malka’s opening follows the closure of Shani’s restaurants Miznon in Melbourne and Gila & Nancy in Berlin, both targeted by mobs chanting anti-Israel slogans.
The rioters in Melbourne entered MIznon, threw chairs, chanted “Death to the IDF!” and only stopped when the two owners of a nearby pizza place — both Lebanese — confronted them.
“In the end, they succeeded to kill the restaurant,” Shani said. “They almost killed our staff there.”
Shani happened to be at the restaurant in Berlin when dozens of protesters surrounded it, shouting, “Stop feeding genocide!”
He raced into the kitchen, put together some food platters and went outside to offer the demonstrators the opportunity to eat and talk.
“They didn’t want to eat,” he said. To them, he added, “Eating from an Israeli is like eating from Satan.”
Shani rejected the charge commonly leveled at Israeli chefs — that they have stolen Palestinian foods and recast them as Israeli.
“I always declare that I took a lot of inspiration from the Palestinians,” he said.
In 1989, Shani opened his first restaurant, Oceanus in Jerusalem. He was 29 and, he said, he knew nothing about food except that he loved bringing people together around it. He wanted to make something like the fresh focaccia an Italian Jewish neighbor once served him. The closest thing to it was the Arabic laffa Shani would buy from a closet-sized bakery in West Jerusalem.
“I had a cook, a Palestinian man from Hebron, a very talented man,” Shani said. “I loved him. He said, ‘Eyal, no problem, my grandmother makes it every day.’ He showed me.”
Shani brushed the finished bread with olive oil and showered it with fresh rosemary.
I told Shani that I ate at the now-closed Oceanus at the tim and to this day remember being served, when we sat down, fragrant sheets of his focaccia-laffa.
“It was a hybrid,” Shani said, “Palestinian, Italian and new Israeli. Each one is getting influenced by the other. You can’t do it with just one brain.”
Malka, a strictly kosher restaurant, presents a different kind of challenge to Shani, who is not an observant Jew. His Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant Shmone offers, for instance, “A mountain of grilled calamari, okra, tomatoes and yogurt.”
But the chef who turned flour, yeast and water into a hybrid Palestinian-Israeli-Italian flatbread revels in facing constraints like kashrut.
“Each culture leads with its limitations,” he said. “These limitations are a blessing — they’re shaping your creation.”
The kosher stricture against cooking meat together with dairy products didn’t faze him.
“Take me off dairy, put a beautiful bottle of olive oil in front of me — what are the limitations?” he said. “And if there would be no olive oil anymore in the world, I would quit, I would not cook.”
Beyond the kitchen, Shani said he wanted to reach more Israelis with his food. About 70% of Israelis are strictly kosher or prefer it.
“So how can it be that we’re only cooking for the hipsters in Tel Aviv?” Shani said. “It’s unfair.”
The marketplace has rewarded Shani’s ability to combine local ingredients and techniques with creativity and showmanship. The chef has around 70 restaurants — neither he nor his publicist knew the exact number — including Malka’s in Tel Aviv, Miami and New York.
And the backlash isn’t close to stopping him. Shani just announced a new restaurant project in, yes, Melbourne.
“It doesn’t make me frightened,” he said. “It’s the way my personality reacts. I think it’s the instinct of survival. You just keep going.”
The post Why is this chef opening a kosher Israeli restaurant in LA right now? appeared first on The Forward.
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An unvarnished look at Polish Hasidic life before the Holocaust
In the decades before the Holocaust, Warsaw still teemed with Hasidim. Muranowska Street was virtually lined with shtiblekh (prayer and study houses), each with its own dynastic affiliation. But one day, a young man established a new shop on the street and brazenly kept it open on the Sabbath. Modernity had arrived.
Some Hasidim didn’t seem too concerned. As we read in the new English translation of Yechiel Hofer’s Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl, the protagonist, Reb Zalman, dismissed the whole scandal. The Sabbath, he shrugged, was simply too holy to be violated by people so unworthy. And in truth, Warsaw’s Hasidic enclaves continued to thrive, albeit in a more concentrated form.
Most Yiddish authors assumed the inevitable demise of Jewish tradition. In story after story, we read about pious, aging parents watching helplessly as their sons and daughters reject their ancestors’ ways to become Zionists, revolutionaries, assimilationists and, of course, Yiddish writers. Nobody, it seemed, could hold back the tide of progress.
But many interwar Polish Hasidic leaders were actually galvanized by the challenge of secularization. They launched ambitious, transnational fundraising initiatives, refurbished thousands of heders [traditional primary schools], and built hundreds of Hasidic yeshivas and Bais Yaakov girls’ schools. And as Hofer’s book shows, their shtiblekh recovered and proliferated down to the bitter end.
Hasidic Warsaw is one of the few works of modern Yiddish literature to present Hasidism as something other than moribund. Reminiscent of I.B. Singer’s In My Father’s Court, but more gracious, Hofer’s stories bring us into one corner of this impossibly thriving world: a Warsaw shtibl attended by followers of the Aleksander Rebbe. Reb Zalman, an irritable luftmensch (unemployed dreamer), is the shtibl’s most zealous member and the Hofer family’s most frequent Sabbath guest.
Reb Zalman’s pauper’s arrogance exasperates even his fellow Hasidim, who cannot resist pranking him. They appoint him “Purim Rabbi,” ply him with liquor, and get him to accept bribes. They lure him out of his Hasidic enclave to experience Gentile taunts and glares. Some try to help him gain a livelihood, but he proudly self-sabotages. Their most lucrative scheme, a tavern in the shtibl, fails because Reb Zalman decides to give all the liquor away.
Then there is Reb Zalman’s misogyny. He disdains his kind host, Hofer’s mother, who is “strictly observant, pious and indeed a Hasid in her own right.” She tactfully challenges his prejudices by recounting stories of her Grandmother Brayndl, a passionate follower of a Hasidic group called the Porisover Hasidim, who used to travel regularly to see the Rebbe, Reb Yankev Hersh [and] was deeply respected at the Rebbe’s court.” Yet Reb Zalman scoffs at even the most revered Hasidic women.
Hofer, in short, doesn’t romanticize interwar Hasidism. But he doesn’t dismiss it either. His family’s Sabbath table, he writes, provided even the ungrateful poor with a slice of Heaven. In the Aleksander shtibl, “deep seriousness combined with high-minded joy reigned.” Reb Zalman’s gift for quirky storytelling almost redeemed him in Hofer’s eyes.
Jonathan Boyarin is among the few scholars able to grasp not only the external, quantitative significance of the Polish Hasidic shtibl but its inner life: imperfect men swaying in prayer, chants, and study, occasionally halting to make a toast with vodka and herring or recount another edifying story. Yet Boyarin remains deeply attuned to Hofer’s gentle irony.
Hasidic Warsaw, with its multitude of stories-within-stories, is in a sense a work of collective authorship. We behold a community of storytellers constantly striving to make each other better by means of humorous, cautionary tales. Secularist Yiddish writers drew liberally from such stories, stylizing and serializing them to great acclaim while assuming the demise of the very movement that sustained them. But only physical annihilation could do that.
The reader of Hasidic Warsaw is left with a deep sense of loss. Without storytelling, how can we hope to regain that kind of connectedness? How can future Jewish literature emerge as easily and naturally? In honoring the art of storytelling, Hasidic Warsaw reminds us of yet another world that was lost in the Holocaust.
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