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A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them
(JTA) — As a kid I went to Sunday school at our Reform synagogue. I didn’t hate it as much as my peers did, but let’s just say there were literally dozens of other things I would have preferred to do on a weekend morning.
As a Jewish adult, I had a vague understanding that Sunday school was a post-World War II invention, part of the assimilation and suburbanization of American Jews (my synagogue was actually called Suburban Temple). With our parents committed to public schools and having moved away from the dense urban enclaves where they were raised, our Jewish education was relegated to Sunday mornings and perhaps a weekday afternoon. The Protestant and Catholic kids went to their own religious supplementary schools, and we Jewish kids went to ours.
In her new book “Jewish Sunday Schools,” Laura Yares backdates this story by over a century. Subtitled “Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” the book describes how Sunday schools were the invention of pioneering educators such as Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children in Philadelphia in 1838. As such, they were responses by a tiny minority to distinctly 19th-century challenges — namely, how to raise their children to be Jews in a country dominated by a Protestant majority, and how to express their Judaism in a way compatible with America’s idea of religious freedom.
Although Sunday schools would become the “principal educational organization” of the Reform movement, Yares shows that the model was adopted by traditionalists as well. And she also argues that 20th-century historians, in focusing on the failures of Sunday schools to promote Jewish “continuity,” discounted the contributions of the mostly volunteer corps of women educators who made them run. Meanwhile, the supplementary school remains the dominant model for Jewish education among non-Orthodox American Jews, despite recent research showing its precipitous decline.
I picked up “Jewish Sunday Schools” hoping to find out who gets the blame for ruining my Sunday mornings. I came away with a new appreciation for the women whose “important and influential work,” Yares writes, “extended far beyond the classrooms in which they worked.”
Yares is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the MSU Program for Jewish Studies. Raised in Birmingham, England, she has degrees from Oxford University and a doctorate from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how your book came to be about the 19th century as opposed to the common 20th-century story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American Jewish history when it comes to the 19th century, chiefly because so many American Jews today trace their origins back to the generation who arrived between 1881 and 1924, the mass migration of Jews from from Eastern Europe. So there’s a sense that that’s when American Jewish history began. Of course, that’s not true at all.
The American Jewish community dates back to the 17th century and there was much innovation that laid the foundations for what would become institutionalized in the 20th century.
Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism. If they’ve treated it at all, they tend to be dismissive — you know, there was no substance, they just taught kids the 10 Commandments, it was run by these unprofessional volunteer female teachers, so it was feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of celebration of Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children.
That’s the first indication I had that there might be more of a story here. Rebecca Gratz is lionized as being such a visionary and being so inventive in developing this incredible volunteer model for Jewish education for an immigrant generation that was mostly from Western Europe. And yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, [Jewish historians] say it has no value. So what’s the story there?
Two other things led me on the path to thinking that there was more of a story in this 19th-century moment. I did my Ph.D in Washington, D.C. And as I was searching through the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were tons and tons of Jewish catechisms.
“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism,” says Dr. Laura Yares, author of the new book, “Jewish Sunday Schools.” (Courtesy of the author)
A catechism is a kind of creed, right? It’s a statement of religious beliefs. “These are things we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had that, but they were also philosophical meditations in many ways. Typically, the first question of the catechism was, what is religion? And then the second question is, what is Jewish religion?
And then I started reading them. They were question-and-answer summaries of the whole of Judaism: belief, practices, holidays, Bible, you name it, that the children were expected to memorize. This idea that you’ve got to cram these kids with knowledge went against this historiographic dismissal of this period as being very thin and that kids were not really learning anything. The idea that children had a lot to learn is something that Sunday school educators actually really wrestle with during this period.
What was the other thing that led you to pursue this subject?
When I was beginning to research my dissertation, I was working as a Hebrew school teacher in a large Reform Hebrew school in Washington, D.C. And I remember very distinctively the rabbi coming in and addressing the teachers at the start of the school year. He said, “I don’t care if a student comes through this Hebrew school and they don’t remember anything that they learned. But I care that at the end of the year they feel like the temple is a place that they want to be, that they feel like they have relationships there and they have an (he didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ [emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there by day at the Library of Congress, reading these catechisms that are saying, “Cram their heads with knowledge.” What is the relationship between Jewish education as a place where one is supposed to acquire knowledge and a place where one is supposed to feel something and to develop affective relationships? The swing between those two poles was happening as far back as the 19th century.
You write that owing to gaps in the archives, it was really hard to get an idea of the classroom experience. But to the degree that there’s a typical classroom experience in the 1860s, 1870s and you’re the daughter or grandchild of probably German-speaking Jewish immigrants, maybe working or lower middle class, what would Sunday school be like? I’m guessing the teacher would be a woman. Are you reading the Bible in English or Hebrew?
You are probably going for an hour or two on a Sunday morning. It’s a big room, and your particular class would have a corner of the room. It’s quite chaotic. Most of the teachers were female volunteers. They were either young and unmarried, or older women whose children had grown. Except for the students who are preparing for confirmation — the grand kind of graduation ritual for Sunday schools. Those classes were typically taught by the rabbi, if there was a rabbi associated with the school.
There would be a lot of reading out loud to the students with students being expected to repeat back what they had heard or write it down so they had a copy for themselves. Often the day would begin with prayers said in English, and often the reading of the Torah portion, typically in English, although in many Sunday schools, we do have children reporting they learned bits of Hebrew by rote memorization. Or they memorized the first chapters of the book of Genesis, for example, but I’m not sure that they quite understood what they memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” is a song that often children tell us [in archival materials] that they had memorized in Hebrew. They probably would have learned at least Hebrew script, and a little bit of Hebrew decoding. But it is fair to say that if they were reading the Bible, they were reading it mostly in English, because you have to remember that most of the women who were volunteering to teach in these schools came of age in a generation where Hebrew education wasn’t extended to women.
What’s the goal of these Sunday schools?
The Sunday school movement arose because there was a whole generation of immigrant children who did not have access to Jewish education, because their parents didn’t have either the economic capital or the social capital to become part of the established Jewish community. They couldn’t afford a seat in the synagogue, they couldn’t afford to send their children to congregational all-day or every-afternoon schools [which were among the few options for Jewish education when Gratz opened the Philadelphia Sunday school]. Sunday schools are really a very innovative solution to a problem of a lack of resources.
You also write that the founders of these supplementary schools want to defend children against “predatory evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz described her goal when she created the first Sunday school. She was very, very worried about the Jewish kids who were not receiving any kind of Hebrew school education. She talks about Protestant missionaries and teachers who would go out onto the street ringing the bell for Sunday school and offering various kinds of trinkets, and Jewish kids would get kind of swept into their Sunday schools. There was a very concrete need to give Jewish children somewhere else to go.
So Gratz and the people who created the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia looked at what the Protestants were doing and they saw that Protestant Sunday schools were providing very accessible places where kids could go and get a basic primer in their religious tradition.
The approach was to teach Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Judaism as a people or culture, to demonstrate that being Jewish was as compatible as Protestantism with being wholly American.
That is certainly part of it. It’s a demonstration that Judaism is compatible with American public life. But I think there’s actually a much bigger claim that the Sunday schools are making. The claim is not only that Judaism is as good as Protestantism, but that Judaism does religion better than Protestantism. These rabbis who were writing catechisms and teaching confirmation classes were saying that Judaism does liberal religion better than liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics and other kinds of liberal denominations. You see the same sentiment in the Pittsburgh Platform as well, which is the foundational platform of the Reform movement written in the 1880s. Sunday schools take that idea and bring it down to a grassroots level.
There are many, many fewer Jews in America in much of the 19th century, before the waves of Eastern European immigrants arrived beginning in the 1880s They didn’t really have strength in numbers, or the kind of self-confidence to have a system of day schools, yeshivas or heders, the elementary schools for all-day or every day Jewish instruction.
And this is also a community that has grown up at the same time as the birth of public education in America, independent of churches. That really emerged beginning on the East Coast in the 1840s.This generation of Americans really believes in the power of public education to craft an American public. It’s a project that 19th-century American Jews believe in and want to sustain. So Sunday schools don’t just become the preferred Jewish model because of lack of resources, but because American Jews really believe in the idea of public education.
What happens at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Eastern Europeans with different models for Jewish education?
A new generation tries to reform Jewish education, led by a young educator from Palestine named Samson Benderly, who leads the new New York Bureau of Jewish Education. He tries to change American Jewish education to make it more professionalized, but to bring more traditionally inclined Jews on board he has to convince them that he doesn’t want to make more Sunday schools, because Sunday schools by the end of the 20th century had become very much associated with the Reform movement in a way that they weren’t when they were founded and for much of the 19th century.
A painting of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish education activist Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully. (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia)
Benderly is surveying the scene of recent immigrants living in New York City [tenements] and other kinds of downtown environments, and his proposal is to create these community institutions for these dense communities, where children can be taught Hebrew in Hebrew. His disciples also created Jewish camps as a way to get children out of the inner cities and develop the muscular Zionist ideal of healthy bodies and a robust sense of Jewish collectivity.
You write that Benderly’s vision is a sort of masculine response to the “feminizing” perception of the Sunday schools.
These women teachers are recognizing that they’re being criticized for the kind of thinness of the Jewish education that they’re teaching in comparison to other models, but in periodicals like The American Jewess women are writing back and saying, “But you didn’t teach us Hebrew! I didn’t get that opportunity as a woman, so what do you expect?” It’s really important to note that the women did the best that they could in the time that they had available, and that they were the product of opportunities that were denied to them.
What lessons did you learn about Sunday school and Hebrew school education in the 20th century that relate to your research into the 19th century?
The move that is so decisive for shaping American Jewish education is suburbanization. Rather than having a large immigrant generation who are living in these tight ethnic enclaves, you have American Jewish children who are predominantly growing up in the suburbs, and socializing with children from all sorts of different backgrounds who are attending public schools. The place that you go to get your Jewish education is the synagogue supplemental school, which becomes the dominant model for American Jewish education up until today. Benderly might reflect that it looks a lot more like the Sunday school movement of the 19th century than his vision.
Today’s model is really a religious model. And by that I mean that students go to Hebrew school primarily to kind of check a religious box, to learn about the thing that makes them distinctive religiously, and to achieve a religious coming-of-age marker, which is the bar, bat or b mitzvah. Certainly the curriculum today is more diverse, embracing more aspects of traditional Judaism then you would have seen in a 19th-century Sunday school: more Hebrew, more of a sense of Jewish peoplehood, ethnic identity and Zionism of course. But the question that American Jews are increasingly asking themselves is, is this a model that they still want? So you may have seen that the Jewish Education Project published a report recently on supplemental schools, which saw that enrollment has really, really declined.
Sunday schools are based on a vision of Judaism as a set of a religious commitments that American Jews actualize through belonging to a synagogue and sending their children to a synagogue or a religious school, where they will learn primarily a set of religious skills: the ability to read from the Torah, the ability to decode Hebrew, the ability to navigate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that most American Jews have for what Judaism means to them? I think increasingly the answer seems to be no.
How else did experience in a Hebrew school classroom influence you? Did you access anything else when you were writing the book?
I think about the number of college kids and graduate students and empty nesters who are either volunteering or earning minimum wage, working at Hebrew schools, all over the country. That’s the labor force of American Judaism. These people also bring so much to the table. There are a lot of skills, dispositions and knowledge that don’t tend to get taken very seriously because this is a workforce that just gets kind of put into the category of “oh, they’re part time.” That made me look really closely in the historical archives to see if I could find anything out about the women who are volunteering to teach in Sunday schools. And what I found out was that [many] were public school teachers. And they brought a lot to the table. It was women in fact who were really pushing to make the Sunday school curriculum more experiential and to move away from rote memorization.
As a historian formed by feminist methods, I find it really important to recognize that these women were giving over what they had, as opposed to critiquing them for not teaching in a more traditional way. I think we need to pay attention when women are being scapegoated for problems that are described as problems of Jewish continuity. It blinds us to the role that women’s volunteerism has played in American Jewish life. This whole Sunday school movement was possible only because these women volunteered their time and largely were not paid.
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Ossoff vs. Collins: The choices facing Jewish voters in the Georgia Senate race
(JTA) — Georgia Jews will choose between a Democratic politician who wants to limit arms sales to Israel and a Republican with ties to white nationalists when they head to vote Tuesday in a Senate race that will help determine which party controls the chamber.
The race pits incumbent Jewish Sen. Jon Ossoff – widely expected to be a 2028 presidential contender – against GOP Rep. Mike Collins. The Republican challenger has received a good deal of media attention, as well as attacks by his opponent, over family members’ and former employees’ far-right political views. Ossoff, meanwhile, sparked outrage among some in the Jewish community when he became one of the earliest Senate Democrats to vote to halt certain arms sales to Israel.
Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has invoked the Jewish Bolsheviks conspiracy theory propagated by Nazi Germany that blamed Jews for atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. He has also complained about Holocaust education and media on the subject.
“They don’t tell us the history of Germany before World War II,” Scheer said in a YouTube video last year, titled “I’m NOT a Judeo Christian.”
He continued, “All we’re told is Germany bad, Hitler evil, don’t ask questions. Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust. Here’s 50 movies every year about the Holocaust and why it’s so bad.”
In the same video, Scheer also said that “Jewish executives run the entire mainstream media complex” as well as “homosexual propaganda, they run all of the fraudulent banking systems and insurance scams. They are behind this orchestrated downfall of what was once the most prosperous nation in the world.” Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that Scheer apparently lives in a house built on property owned by Collins.
The Collins campaign did not return the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment. But elsewhere Collins has addressed Scheer’s statements by saying, “I don’t believe or support those views.”
Scheer did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, a former Collins staffer had posted Nazi imagery and an image of what appeared to be himself in KKK robes, The Washington Post reported in August. Collins replaced another staffer — his chief of staff Kip Talley — in 2024 after Slate reported that he was in a group chat with streamer Nick Fuentes, widely accused of being one of the internet’s foremost antisemites, and white supremacist Richard Spencer. Slate reported that the chat was dedicated to trying to help Charles Johnson, who has been accused of promoting Holocaust denial and was in jail at the time.
In a statement, Talley told Slate that he acted “solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care.”
The Georgia congressman also appeared at last year’s New York Young Republican Club gala, which drew controversy as it hosted white nationalists and a number of officials from Germany’s far-right AfD party. Fuentes said that he received an invitation that was later rescinded, and Jewish New York City Council member Inna Vernikov backed out of the event and suggested the decision was connected to antisemitism on the right.
Collins has responded to questions about his connections to these white nationalist elements by saying he condemns “all forms of antisemitism” and hate, and citing his support for Israel.
J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group, homed in on Collins’ far-right connections in a 15-second ad released last week that ended with the message, “Mike Collins: Dangerously extreme for Georgia.”
The attack ad was the first released in J Street’s $3 million campaign this year to take down six Republican candidates who are backed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC. In a piece for the Atlanta Jewish Times, Collins wrote earlier this month that he supports Israel “because my faith tells me to and because it is the right policy for America.”
Ossoff, meanwhile, has long targeted Collins over his white nationalist ties, calling him a “notorious bigot, antisemite and extremist” in June. Ossoff told Collins during a debate that he “hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office.”
The quip drew some pushback. “Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up,” said The Atlantic’s center-right staff writer David Brooks, during a PBS NewsHour conversation about personal attacks in this year’s U.S. Senate races. “That’s just not what we do here in this country.”
Meanwhile, Collins’ Jewish supporters have said that Ossoff’s status as a Democrat — a party that increasingly includes strident anti-Zionist voices — is more damning than the headlines around Collins.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, at a time when Jewish Americans need friends, Mike Collins has been a friend to the Jewish community,” Sam Markstein, spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA. He said that Collins was “a friend to the Jewish community in the aftermath of Oct. 7” and pointed to his voting record on Israel.
Eric Levine, an RJC board member, said he has not been involved in this particular race but that extremes “must be condemned” on both sides.
“It is never a good thing to have ties to antisemitic/far-right figures,” he told JTA in a text. “I will also say, it is never a good thing to have ties to antisemitic/far left figures like Hasan Piker, [New York Mayor] Zohran Mamdani, [Michigan Senate candidate] Abdul el-Sayed and much of the DSA/Democratic caucus.”
Piker, an anti-Israel streamer who has campaigned with some left-wing Democratic candidates, has drawn heat for remarks about American Jews’ connection to Israel. Earlier this year, he named Ossoff positively as a “dark horse” contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Ossoff later distanced himself from Piker and has said he will not run for president in 2028. Ossoff endorsed El-Sayed after he won the Democratic nomination in Michigan.
Ossoff has also come under fire for his decision to vote to block certain arms sales to Israel during the height of the Gaza war in November 2024, a position that he has generally stuck to since then.
In July 2025 he voted to block a sale of rifles to Israel, citing mass starvation in Gaza caused by “the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government,” but voted against a resolution that would block an air-to-ground munitions sale.
Ossoff wrote at that time that the U.S. “must continue to support the Israeli people, who face the persistent threat of rocket and missile attack and have been subjected to intense aerial bombardment from Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen.”
Though Ossoff called his commitment to Israel’s security “ironclad” in a Senate floor speech ahead of the arm sales vote, some Jewish voters and organizations said it rang hollow.
Michael Morris, publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, penned an open letter this August blasting Ossoff for “lying to me and your constituents” about his support for Israel.
Ossoff’s first vote against weapons in November 2024 spurred another critical letter from several Georgia Jewish organizations including synagogues, Jewish schools, the local Anti-Defamation League chapter and other groups. His vote also drew the attention of AIPAC, which released 30-second ads attacking U.S. senators — including Ossoff — who had voted to block weapons sales.
Asked about Collins’ far-right ties, Morris told JTA he did not believe they were disqualifying.
“Most of the complaints about him are about his son-in-law who is a virulent antisemite,” Morris said in a text. “But his son-in-law does not get to vote, and as a father of 4 girls I can tell you that we do not get ANY say in who our girls marry, so from that standpoint, I am not concerned.”
Morris also said that neither President Donald Trump nor President Joe Biden condemned the most extreme among their voters, and opined that when it comes to Collins’ own extreme backers, he “can maintain their support without taking in their position.”
A number of readers disagreed with Morris’ sharp criticism of Ossoff, however, and wrote letters to the editor expressing their disapproval, as well as their concern about Collins.
“Mike Collins has peddled antisemitism. He has surrounded himself with bigotry while refusing to denounce white supremacy,” wrote a reader named Richard Mitchell, who said he is from Atlanta. “These values do not represent Georgians and are fundamental to why I will not be supporting Collins this election.”
Halier Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Ossoff, wrote in a statement to JTA that her organization recognizes Ossoff’s “steadfast support for Israel’s security and future as a Jewish and democratic state.”
“Georgia voters should remember that a vote for Mike Collins is a vote for Donald Trump, and Collins is one of the most extreme candidates on the ballot,” she wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Ossoff vs. Collins: The choices facing Jewish voters in the Georgia Senate race appeared first on The Forward.
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Arab parties have rarely been full partners in governing Israel. It’s time to let them into the tent of Abraham.
Like a goal-line pileup in football, with half the players signaling a touchdown and the other half celebrating a defensive stop, everyone is claiming victory in Israel’s election. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu points to Likud’s status as Israel’s largest party. His opponents point to the loss of his governing majority. Did Netanyahu win? Did the opposition win? Those of us watching from the stands are waiting for the referee’s signal, unsure of what exactly is going on in the field.
The arithmetic is straightforward. In Israel’s 120-seat Knesset, a governing coalition needs 61 seats. Netanyahu’s bloc won 53. The principal Jewish-led opposition parties won 48. Israel’s Arab parties won an unprecedented 19 seats, nearly doubling their previous representation. Neither major bloc can govern alone. The election is over, but the overtime game of coalition politicking has just begun.
There are several paths forward. Netanyahu and his opponents could form a national unity government. Alternatively, either bloc could seek cooperation with Arab parties. The difficulty is that political leaders have drawn red lines against both possibilities.
Herein lies one of the most uncomfortable paradoxes of Israeli democracy: Arab citizens have exercised their democratic rights in extraordinary numbers, yet the very parties whose votes could break the political deadlock are those whom much of Israel’s political establishment refuses to consider as governing partners.
Arab parties have rarely been full partners in Israeli governing coalitions. During Israel’s early decades, Arab lists affiliated with the ruling party participated but enjoyed little autonomy. In the 1990s, Yitzhak Rabin relied on Arab parties from outside his coalition. In 2021, Mansour Abbas and his Islamist Ra’am party became the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli government. Ironically, Netanyahu himself had explored cooperation with Abbas earlier that year.
Since Oct. 7, political boundaries have hardened. The attack, the hostages, the war, the continuing grief and fear have shattered trust. Many Israeli Jews now regard cooperation with non-Zionist parties with profound suspicion. These anxieties cannot be dismissed; there remains a trauma through which much of Israeli society sees its present and future.
The predicament has been called a “dilemma from hell.” Either politicians find a way to cross red lines or Israel risks another election, another round of recriminations, another deepening of its internal divisions.
At the heart of this political dilemma lies a question as old as the Jewish people itself: Can the Jewish family make room for those who do not share its Jewish identity? Can we affirm our own destiny without excluding another?
The biblical precedent
This is not the first time the Jewish people have confronted the question of whether there is room in the Jewish family for those who do not share its identity. The question goes back to the very first Jewish family. In the biblical account, Abraham and Sarah are blessed with Isaac, their long-awaited son. But Isaac is not Abraham’s firstborn. Years earlier, Sarah had given her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar had borne Ishmael. When Isaac arrives, Sarah perceives Ishmael as a threat. Biblical commentators debate her motivations: Was Ishmael behaving dangerously? Was Sarah concerned about inheritance? Whatever her concerns may have been, Sarah’s demand is unequivocal: “Cast out that woman and her son.” Despite Abraham’s distress, Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the wilderness.
The first Jewish family could not find a way to live together.
Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions have long associated Ishmael with the ancestry of Arab peoples. It raises the question. What if Isaac’s covenantal destiny had not required Ishmael’s expulsion? What if Abraham’s tent had been large enough for Isaac to remain Isaac, Ishmael to remain Ishmael, and both to know they belonged?
We cannot rewrite Genesis. But given the crossroads Israel faces today, we can ask whether its tragedy must remain ours.
Three considerations make this moment worthy of serious political imagination.
First, consider Israel’s internal political health. Imagine what cooperation across entrenched political divisions might communicate to Israeli society. Coalition politics have always required compromise: Religious parties negotiate military-service exemptions and yeshiva funding. Why should negotiations with Arab parties be categorically unthinkable?
Not all Arab parties are alike, and their differences matter. Mansour Abbas condemned the atrocities of Oct. 7 and has acknowledged Israel’s Jewish character. Surely the “Start-Up Nation” can devise an agreement that safeguards Israel’s security and Jewish character while giving Arab representatives substantive governance over the issues affecting their communities.
Second, consider Israel’s international standing. Israel faces mounting criticism and accusations of discrimination and apartheid. Arab participation in government would not resolve the Palestinian question or erase existing inequalities. But imagine the Jewish state’s democratic promise expressed not only through Arab citizens voting, or the oft-cited presence of Arab pharmacists, but through Arab representatives sharing responsibility at the highest levels of government. What happens in Israel does not stay in Israel. Those of us who defend Israel in the public square understand the significance such an arrangement could carry.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, consider Israel’s Arab citizens. Their communities face violent crime, inadequate policing, infrastructure deficiencies, housing shortages and educational disparities. Effective representation matters. As the saying goes, nobody brings a rental car to the car wash. People invest in institutions in which they have a stake. Giving Arab representatives governing responsibility would strengthen the sense that Israel belongs to all its citizens.
An Israeli friend offered a simple observation this week: “If everyone keeps their pre-election promises, we’re going to have another election.” His comment reminded me of hatarat nedarim, the Jewish legal institution for annulling certain vows. Judaism takes promises seriously. Yet Jewish law also recognizes, as reflected in the tradition of hatarat nedarim and the familiar words of Kol Nidre, that commitments made without full knowledge of future circumstances may, under prescribed conditions and for the greater good, be reconsidered. What good could be greater than the future welfare of the Jewish state?
Jews love invoking Abba Eban’s famous observation that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I can’t help but wonder if this is a moment that future generations will turn that observation back on us.
Perhaps what appears to be a dilemma could become an opportunity to break political deadlock and reconsider entrenched patterns of exclusion – a moment calling for political imagination across the spectrum.
It is the great “what if” of our people, from the first Jewish family to the present day. What if Abraham had found a way to keep Ishmael in the fold? Israel’s leaders now have a chance to recognize possibilities that have longed seemed out of reach; its citizens have a chance to give those leaders the political room to act, and together the opportunity to summon the courage and collective imagination to build a Jewish and democratic state capacious enough for all who seek a place within the tent of Abraham.
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American Jews have fought BDS for 20 years. Israel’s election just handed them the winning move.
For decades, the American Jewish community has battled the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. Now, in the aftermath of the election there, it has the opportunity to deal it the biggest blow yet. All it has to do is send one clear message to the Israeli opposition leaders: Join with the Arab parties.
Many Israelis, such as The Democrats party leader Yair Golan, are making the same argument. Arab Israelis voted in historic numbers in this week’s national election, winning a total of 19 seats with all votes counted. Together Zionist and Arab parties would, with 67 seats, become the country’s ruling coalition and bring an end to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot pledged not to bring Arab parties into his coalition, and doing so would be no easy task. But if pressure builds at home and abroad — and if he gets cover and encouragement from Jewish leaders around the world — he might find a way. It’s a big ask of Eisenkot and more conservative opposition members, but it’s the right ask.
Breaking that one promise would enable Eisenkot to keep many more. He could pass his top legislative priorities, including an independent inquiry into Oct. 7, a crackdown on Jewish terrorism in the West Bank and a restoration of democratic norms.
Those are the immediate — and sufficient — Israeli reasons. There is a more basic one: a democracy shouldn’t treat the votes of 20% of its citizens as treyf. And from abroad, there’s an added benefit, one that could have a long-term impact on Israel’s well-being: Undermining the BDS movement.
For a generation, the movement to boycott, divest and sanction the Jewish state has called on governments, businesses and institutions to pull their investments from Israel, cancel Israeli academics and performers, and ban the import of Israeli goods.
It hasn’t succeeded — yet. Israeli international exports surged to $169 billion in 2025, the highest ever, and more than 35 states have passed anti-BDS laws. But BDS has been notching some major wins: In June, United Auto Workers delegates voted — barely — to divest from Israel bonds, the first major union to do so. Internationally, at least 50 universities, institutions and academic groups ended cooperative programs with Israeli universities, and there have been more than 1,000 cases of academic boycotts, cancellation of student exchange programs and research grants.
Some of that is in direct response to the Gaza War, but the BDS movement has built the infrastructure that turned outrage over the war into concrete actions.
The BDS movement has also normalized, or tried to normalize, the idea that entities that do business with Israel are complicit in apartheid, that Israel is a sham democracy and that Zionism is racism. BDS supplies the vocabulary of anti-Israel diatribes on social media.
Now Israel’s election provides a historic opportunity to prove BDS wrong, to take the steam out of a movement that shows no sign of slowing. Bringing together Jews and Arabs in a ruling coalition would be the single greatest blow to BDS.
For decades, American Jewish leaders and organizations have lobbied government officials, organized counter-petitions and worked to stem the BDS tide.
That job can now either get much easier, or immeasurably more difficult. A Jewish-Arab ruling coalition that acts on the issues of crime and under-investment plaguing Israel’s Arab communities would belie BDS advocates’ claim that a Jewish state and democracy are mutually exclusive.
That same Jewish-Arab partnership would have to work toward resolving Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza disaster — but those enormous tasks will be much easier with a strong majority and in a country not facing constant international pressure.
And if those 19 Arab seats amount to nothing? If the Jewish parties do all within their power to disempower Arab citizens who turned out in historic numbers?
Try arguing against the BDSers then. Try defending Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” when 20% of its citizens were just shut out of national representation.
Of course, there are other good reasons to bring the Arab parties into the government. One of them is written into Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which promises Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel, “full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”
For decades many Arab Israelis didn’t believe that sentence because they didn’t experience it. They stayed home, many because they refused to participate in a system that they believed would never truly serve them. This time, enraged by the Gaza War, fearful of violence in their own community and disgusted by the overt racism of Netanyahu’s Kahanist cabinet ministers, they chose to vote.
“I also wanted to show that Palestinians can participate when we choose to, and that our exclusion cannot be blamed on our refusal to enter the political arena,” wrote the journalist Nagham Zbeedat in Haaretz.
Seeing Arab Israelis dance in celebration when the election results were announced is a testament to the power of democracy and the hope it brings.
I know that what gives hope to American Jews like me instills fear in many Israelis. Palestinians from Gaza came over a border and slaughtered their loved ones.
But Palestinian citizens of Israel did not join the terror — something Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar counted on them doing. Arab Israelis were killed alongside their Israeli Jewish neighbors. And in many cases, they rescued Jews under attack.
American Jewish institutions need to step up and fight as hard for including Israeli Arabs in a new government as they do against boycotting Israel. Because fighting for democracy and fighting against BDS — it’s the same fight.
The post American Jews have fought BDS for 20 years. Israel’s election just handed them the winning move. appeared first on The Forward.
