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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?”


The post Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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He went to a different Manhattan synagogue every week. Here’s what it taught him.

(JTA) — Reporting on the Jewish community is a lot like ornithology, except instead of birds the goal is to describe the dress, the habits and the particular behavior that distinguish, say, the Black-Hatted Monsey Orthodox from the Greater Philadelphia Jewish Renewalist. The careful shul-watcher notes their habitats, listens carefully to their songs and pays close attention to the things they eat.

Andrew Waxman is a banking and risk management consultant, not a journalist or an ornithologist. Yet he’s written what amounts to a field guide to the varieties of being and praying Jewish in New York City. For “My Year in New York Synagogues,” he spent his Friday evenings and Shabbat mornings in 2025 visiting nearly every synagogue within walking distance of his home on the Upper West Side.

That’s close to 50 synagogues, including most of Manhattan’s significant congregations. He also includes a few unclassifiable communities, such as a Jewish runners’ club and meetings of the Hostages Forum in Central Park.

The result is part sociological field trip to New York City’s Jewish landscape and part love letter to the city’s Jewish variety: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Moroccan, LGBTQ, Modern Orthodox, haredi Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and independent, to name a few.

Written at a time when the city’s Jews are on edge, buffeted by waves of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Waxman wants to remind them that the community’s diversity and creativity are its strength.

“The impetus for the book really was just the awe in which I find myself around the number of amazing communities, and the diversity that we have in New York that I really think is unparalleled in Jewish history,” he said in an interview.

His stops include familiar places like Central Synagogue, where Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s Asian-American background, a talented musical ensemble and distinct Moorish Revival architecture helped Waxman, who describes himself as liberal Orthodox, see a “community very comfortable in its approach to spirituality and Judaism, forging its own path, authentic in its own way, distinctive even amongst all the differences that characterize so many New York communities.”

At Or Zarua, the egalitarian Conservative synagogue on the Upper East Side, the intimate scale allowed a lively back-and-forth between rabbi and congregants during the Torah reading.

Meanwhile, the cavernous Young Israel of the Upper West Side offered a surprise: A synagogue he remembered as nearly empty and elderly had, decades later, become packed with young Orthodox Jews.

Less well known is the Koznitz. Behind an unmarked green door on the Upper West Side, Waxman found what a friend called the “speakeasy minyan.” There 70 or so men gather for “no frills, fast and lay-led” Shabbat prayers in a congregation named after the 18th-century Koznitzer Rebbe and his descendants.

“I realized that everybody feels that their community is special,” Waxman said. “And their community, whether it’s Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, they feel proud and they feel very connected.”

Waxman’s synagogue year included the bittersweet resolution of the Israeli hostage crisis, as well as the simmering aftermath of the campus protests and growing political tensions over Israel and antisemitism after Oct. 7. Many congregations added prayers or other rituals remembering the hostages, efforts that crossed political lines.

Other times, the ideological divides were stark. In Orthodox synagogues, Waxman heard rhetoric about Israel and the war that he described as “aggressive, jingoistic almost.” At the Orthodox Fifth Avenue Synagogue, one member of the “Kiddish Club” joked about Upper West Side liberals and another proudly mentioned his apartment in Trump Tower. At the liberal independent B’nai Jeshurun, the rabbis’ remarks included concern for Palestinians as well as Israeli Jews.

Few of those political discussions make it into his guidebook, however. If some congregations were seeing a growing contingent of anti-Zionists in the pews, for example, he doesn’t mention it. Waxman acknowledges that he sought to avoid labelling congregations by their politics. “It has been distressing to see political discord come between families and communities and I have no wish to put a pin on that,” he writes.

man and book cover
Andrew Waxman’s book, “My Year in New York Synagogues,” is a subjective guide to close to 50 different communities. (Courtesy)

Waxman tends to focus on the positive, ending each entry with a short description of the synagogues’ “strengths” and “distinctiveness.” In the admittedly very tiny genre of synagogue reviewing, others have been a little more pointed in their assessments. London’s Jewish Chronicle used to run reviews by Secret Shulgoer that awarded (and took away) stars based on “warmth,” “welcome,” “decorum” and “service.” In the 1990s, Kol Ha’Ir, an alternative Jerusalem weekly, dispatched the sharp-tongued Jacky Levy to review synagogues as he would a play or restaurant; he once compared a Reform synagogue to a church.

More recently, David A.M. Wilensky of J., the Northern California Jewish weekly, took  a journalistic approach in his “Jew in the Pew” column, offering his own observations and quoting congregants on their impressions, positive and sometimes negative, about their Bay Area synagogues.

Waxman’s goal appears more boosterish than critical or journalistic. He sees his ideal reader as someone who has just moved to the city and is looking for a spiritual home. Anticipating their criteria, he describes not only the prayers and sermons but the people, clothes, melodies, architecture and conversation.

And, yes, the kiddush.

He had initially joked with a friend that the book might simply be about kiddushes, the receptions that follow most Saturday morning Shabbat services. Do they serve meat? Will it be enough food to count as lunch? Who showed up “JFK” — just for kiddush?

But the food turned out to be more than comic relief. Kiddush, Waxman said, is where community happens. People who may not see one another during the week reconnect. They talk about their children, their problems, who’s getting married, who might be ill.

And he suspects that kiddush has become competitive.

At Altneu, a new Orthodox synagogue that broke away from Park East Synagogue in 2022, Waxman found a bartender, tequila and an impressive selection of whisky. He notes that other Orthodox synagogues in the area now regularly offer meat kiddushes, suggesting that congregations are using food to lure and hold on to members.

As for clothes, Waxman grew up in an Orthodox synagogue in Manchester, England, where the congregation president and other leaders wore top hats. The custom persists at The Jewish Center on the Upper West Side, where the rabbis and officers wear top hats and morning suits between Sukkot and Shavuot. Elsewhere, especially but not exclusively at non-Orthodox synagogues, the codes have loosened: Reflecting a similar change in corporate life, men have doffed their jackets and ties; women often swap skirts and dresses for slacks.

Waxman hadn’t attended a Reform service before setting out on his grand tour, and he said that the experience changed him. Himself a member of Darchei Noam, a “partnership minyan” that combines Orthodox ritual with expanded roles for women, he appreciated how the Reform congregations included Hebrew selectively but intentionally in their prayers. He admired congregations like Romemu, which resists easy denominational categorization, for their willingness to bend the traditional service structure — to go “off piste,” as he put it — rather than treat the prayer book as a script that must be followed exactly.

Waxman may have set out to write a Yelp for synagogues, but the project came to mean more. In addition to a sense of abundance, he found a spirit of hospitality. Currently working on a project in Mexico City, he noted how synagogues there won’t admit strangers — even the author of a book on New York synagogues — unless they sign up in advance. He insisted that, despite heightened security, New York’s synagogues are still welcoming places for newcomers.

“I’m hopeful that New York can remain as open as it is to the stranger,” he said. “Judaism, at the end of the day, for me, is really about giving people a community, a sense of belonging.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post He went to a different Manhattan synagogue every week. Here’s what it taught him. appeared first on The Forward.

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Miami-Dade county in Florida raises the limit on investments in Israel bonds

(JTA) — The Miami-Dade region in Florida can spend millions more tax dollars on Israel, after officials increased the share of county investments that can include Israeli bonds.

The Board of County Commissioners approved a resolution last week toward the start of a seven-hour meeting, in a unanimous, single vote that grouped together numerous ordinances. This action enables the county to invest up to 5%, rather than 3%, of its $9 billion in investments in these bonds — debt issued by the Israeli government sold by a U.S. underwriter.

Despite the previous cap of 3%, Israeli bonds only make up about 1.48% of Miami-Dade’s portfolio, or roughly $130 million, according to the county’s third-quarter investment report.

Known as “Israel Bonds,” these loans are deeply rooted in the Diaspora’s relationship with the country. Israel, like many countries, raises money by selling bonds to investors, who then receive repayments with interest after a specified time period. But for American Jews, these bonds are issued via the U.S.-based Development Corporation for Israel, which has served as the underwriter since 1951.

As for Miami-Dade, the county began purchasing Israeli bonds in 2016. But these investments increased substantially just after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. At the time, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced that the county would be boosting these investments from $51 million to $76 million.

Palm Beach County made a similar decision at the time, as did cities, counties and states around the country.

Nonetheless, activists nationwide have increasingly been pushing governments to stop investing in Israel bonds, citing the Jewish state’s military operations in Gaza.

An initiative called “Break the Bonds,” launched by the progressive Jewish Voice for Peace group, claims that “the Israeli military is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” and that community investments in such bonds are enabling the situation.

“At a time when so many people in our community are struggling, we believe our public dollars should be invested in our communities and in meeting the needs of the people who live here,” JVP South Florida said in a statement, prior to last Tuesday’s vote.

Israel Bonds representatives did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

Given the resolution’s swift passage, which occurred without a public hearing at the board meeting, detractors signed up to testify about an unrelated item in order to voice their concerns.

“My tax dollars should be kept safe and should be working to benefit my community,” Coconut Grove resident Jared Simon, who identified himself as Jewish, told the commissioners.

“You didn’t even allow public comment on it before voting,” he said. “Your constituents do not want their tax dollars funding the functions of the Israeli government.”

Addressing the lack of public hearing, the commissioners responded that residents already had the opportunity to speak about the resolution during a session earlier this summer.

That session occurred on July 15, when the Intergovernmental and Economic Impact Committee advanced the rule to the Board of County Commissioners with a favorable recommendation.

Among the most prominent speakers to take the podium — even though he had apparently not registered to do so — was James Fishback, a far-right former gubernatorial candidate and sharp critic of Israel. Alleging that the commissioners “unanimously voted to give up to $450 million of money to Israel,” Fishback said he’d rather not be “escorted out by these great men in uniform.”

“Do you serve the people of Hialeah or of Haifa? Do you serve the people of Aventura or of Tel Aviv?” he asked the commissioners. “Do you serve the people of South Miami or of Jerusalem? This money should be invested here in this community.”

As the sergeants escorted Fishback out of the auditorium, another individual screamed “America First!” from the audience.

Oliver Gilbert, one of the commissioners, responded that the “board today didn’t vote to give any money to anyone,” stressing that they just “set investment criteria.”

Before Tuesday’s meeting reached its most heated point, Keon Hardemon, another commissioner, told the audience that he and his colleagues “don’t care what you’re talking about, what subject it is that you don’t like, what you care for, what you don’t care for, what your politics are.”

“What we are not going to stand for are people who want to make anyone in this room feel uncomfortable,” Hardemon added.

Yet immediately after this intervention, public outcry over the resolution, known as 11A2, continued.

Miami resident Mina Trachtenberg argued that county investment policies require the prioritization “of public funds and liquidity of public funds above all else.”

“The resolution passed today achieves the opposite of that, opening the door to the purchase of high-risk, even junk-quality bonds of a foreign entity,” Trachtenberg said. “Please divest from apartheid.”

Anthony Rodriguez, the chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, eventually instructed the sergeants in the room to eject anyone who refused to comply with the rules.

Just after those instructions, Miami resident Mohammed Mohammed came to the podium, voicing his alarm that he was “going to be escorted out just for being Palestinian.”

“That’s not the case. Let’s not put words in anybody’s mouth,” a visibly frustrated Rodriguez responded. “You just have to follow the order and speak on the item.”

Mohammed then declared “that 11A2 is an absolute disgrace,” leading Rodriguez to summon the sergeants and declare that the speakers just “want their minute of fame.”

The rule’s sponsor, commissioner René García, explained that the county invests about $9 billion, with the intention of generating “a greater return of money” to fund public needs. García, a former Republican state senator, explained that the rule simply ensures “more flexibility and more liquidity” for certain investments.

In addition to raising the investment cap from 3% to 5%, the resolution would also reduce the maturity of “bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the state of Israel” from five to three years.

Within that text, the authors also deleted a clause that previously had required Israel to have an “A” credit rating from at least two agencies. That revision stemmed from a recent Florida statute allowing investments in Israel bonds regardless of the country’s rating. This change was particularly noteworthy because credit ratings of Israel have fluctuated in the past few years.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Miami-Dade county in Florida raises the limit on investments in Israel bonds appeared first on The Forward.

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Israeli expats voting case dismissed by Israel’s High Court

(JTA) — TEL AVIV – Israel’s High Court on Wednesday dismissed a petition by Israeli expatriates seeking to vote in the Oct. 27 election after discovering that they had been excluded from the voter rolls under a little-known Interior Ministry classification that records certain citizens as nonresidents.

The petition was filed by some 100 expatriate Israelis challenging their exclusion from the voter rolls under an Interior Ministry classification known as “Code 51,” which records them as having ceased to be Israeli residents.

The petitioners said they had never asked to give up their status as Israeli residents and questioned the legal authority, criteria and process by which the classification was imposed. Some only discovered the designation when they checked their eligibility ahead of the election.

The court did not resolve that factual dispute, instead dismissing the petition on procedural grounds. Justice Yechiel Kasher said the case was filed too late, a week before the voter registry was due to be finalized, and that the petitioners had not first used the statutory appeals process available to challenge their registration status. The court also said the petition lacked a detailed factual record showing how each of the petitioners came to receive Code 51.

The case arose as tens of thousands of Israeli citizens living abroad are making plans to return to Israel to cast ballots in the country’s first national election since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. More than 30,000 expatriates had registered with Fly&Vote, an initiative helping Israelis arrange election travel, which has already secured seven dedicated flights to Israel.

The Interior Ministry told the court that Code 51 is given to citizens who informed a population registry official that they were leaving Israel and asked not to remain registered as residents. The petitioners disputed that account, saying they had never asked for their registration as Israeli residents to be canceled.

Ilana Mittman, a retired social scientist living in Baltimore and a petitioner in the case, discovered this summer that her residency status had been changed under Code 51 on March 7, 1986, the same date she visited the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco to register her newborn son.

Mittman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that consular staff took away her Israeli ID card during the 1986 appointment without explanation. “I remember how bad of a feeling it was to give that document away,” she said. “I felt I gave a part of myself away when that happened. But I didn’t know that my biggest right as a citizen – the right to vote – was just robbed from me.”

The petition also challenged the law tying voting eligibility to residency, arguing that it conflicts with Israel’s Basic Law governing the Knesset, which guarantees every Israeli citizen aged 18 or older the right to vote unless a court has deprived them of that right. The court did not decide that question, and Kasher said the petitioners could raise it again after the election.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israeli expats voting case dismissed by Israel’s High Court appeared first on The Forward.

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