Uncategorized
Mamdani said NYPD boots were ‘laced by the IDF.’ What is the relationship between American police departments and Israel?
New York mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s recently resurfaced remark that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” has renewed concerns from some Jewish voters about his potential administration’s attitude toward Israel — and renewed questions about the Israeli military’s relationship with police departments across the U.S.
Mamdani made the comment during an August 2023 conference for the Democratic Socialists of America. Mamdani, a DSA member representing Queens in the New York State Assembly, was a keynote speaker at the conference and appeared on a panel about “Socialist Internationalism.”
Mamdani said during the panel that for Americans to care about international issues, “We have to make them hyper-local. We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF. We have to make — not specifically that example all the time — just to say that for working class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn’t much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life.”
Mamdani told CNN last week that he had been referring to training exercises that have taken place between the New York Police Department and the Israel Defense Forces, not suggesting that the two were in close collaboration.
American Jewish leaders have widely objected to the comments. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the head of prominent New York Reform congregation Central Synagogue, said it “contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.” Meanwhile, progressive groups outside the Jewish establishment say Mamdani hit on an uncomfortable truth about American law enforcement.
The image of an NYPD boot laced by an IDF soldier evokes a broader claim that the militarism and brutality of American law enforcement was imported from Israel in police training programs. The claim first gained traction in anti-Zionist spaces following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin.
The relationship between American police departments and Israel has since become the subject of ongoing criticism by groups who say Israel’s law enforcement practices promote aggressive surveillance, discrimination and violent intervention, and otherwise infringe on human rights.
But police aggression in the U.S. long predates Israel’s founding, much less American law enforcement training visits. The anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, though it opposes the trips, has cautioned against the notion that Israel is the origin of American police violence or racism, saying that such claims “obscure the fundamental responsibility and nature of the U.S.” and “further an antisemitic ideology.”
So what is the actual relationship between Israel and American police today, and what is its impact on law enforcement tactics in the U.S.?
Roots in counterterrorism
American law enforcement’s relationship with Israel dates back to the 1990s, but accelerated after 9/11, when police departments across the U.S. were responding to the threat of terrorism. In September 2002, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, an American nonprofit, brought high-ranking law enforcement officials from several major U.S. metro areas — among them New York, Los Angeles, South Florida and Dallas — to Israel to learn best practices for terrorism deterrence and response.
According to a press release JINSA issued at the time, the Americans observed “methods and techniques” that included bomb disposal, forensics, crowd control and coordination with the media and the public. The release also said the group visited police and IDF outposts to study Border Guard operations in the Galilee and the West Bank.
Since then, the trips have become routine. As of 2020, more than 1,000 American police officers from across the country have made similar training visits, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. JINSA isn’t the only group organizing the trips; the Anti-Defamation League and a program called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange have also led American police trips to Israel.
JINSA maintains that its trips focus on management and policy issues, and that officials do not learn about physical tactics. But that may be little consolation to groups that oppose the visits in the first place, who say that observers of any Israeli police operation in Palestinian areas are witnessing live demonstrations of repressive violence.
The trips are only one aspect of the relationship. There is also a more direct collaboration between the NYPD and Israel: the former has had an office — though it reportedly consists of a single officer — at the Israeli police headquarters since 2012, as part of the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts.
Backlash to the relationship
One group leading opposition to the trips is JVP, which in 2018 published a 57-page report about them called “Deadly Exchange.”
The report documented not only what officers encounter on the trips — for example, a network of hundreds of surveillance cameras around Jerusalem’s Old City — but also their parallel tactics in the U.S.; it points to a 5,300-camera surveillance system in Atlanta that the Atlanta Police Department said was modeled after the command center in Jerusalem. It also claimed that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police used Skunk, a foul-odor spray, on protesters in Ferguson in 2014 after seeing it deployed in Israel.
Not all of its claims are substantiated. One section that describes a Jewish lawmaker’s push for increased surveillance states that he was influenced by Israel’s example; that lawmaker never said such a thing and had not attended a police exchange program. Other cases cited in the report show similarities in American and Israeli law enforcement practices but do not show a causal link between them.
Still, the JVP report became a proof text following George Floyd’s death, when Black Lives Matter protesters were building coalitions with the pro-Palestinian resistance. Protesters pointed to the Minneapolis police officers’ attendance at a security exchange conference at the Israeli Consulate in Chicago in 2012, saying the knee-to-neck restraint Chauvin used to strangle Floyd was a hold IDF soldiers often employed on Palestinians.
Palestinians have described similar treatment by IDF soldiers. But records show neck restraints had been used in MPD training since at least 2002, and it’s unclear whether Israeli officials even taught the chokehold at the conference, or whether Chauvin — who was on the force at the time — was in attendance.
Moreover, reasons for increasing militarism in American police forces are manifold. To explain why American police departments look more like military bases now, observers would point to the military industrial complex and civilian access to military-grade weapons (which led law enforcement to keep up).
Nevertheless, the charge of Israeli influence has become all-encompassing; as in countless other examples, it is a simple explanation for complicated, maddening and seemingly unsolvable American institutional dysfunction. And as Mamdani said in 2023, it’s a convenient way to make international concerns feel “hyper-local.”
The post Mamdani said NYPD boots were ‘laced by the IDF.’ What is the relationship between American police departments and Israel? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
From the bimah to ‘Squid Game’: A rabbi finds Torah in unexpected places
(JTA) — Jamie Field was still a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in New York City when she watched the first season of “Squid Game: The Challenge” and saw a call to action flash across the screen: “Could this be you? Apply now.”
It was 2023, and Field, who had long gravitated toward other reality television shows like “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” said she saw something deeply Jewish in them.
“The really beautiful thing about these shows is that when you’re in such a pressure cooker, for me, it’s not about the challenges, although those are fun to watch, but it’s about watching people be people and make mistakes and grow and foster connections between one another, and I’ve found so much Torah in these moments,” Field said in an interview. “I know it’s very rabbi to say.”
Two years later, Field is bringing that approach to the Netflix show’s second season, which premiered Tuesday. She was chosen to be one of over 456 contestants from around the world competing in a series of physical and mental challenges for a $4.56 million prize.
While Jewish contestants have competed on a number of reality TV shows, ordained rabbis have been rarer. Field said she went into the experience feeling a weighty responsibility around portraying Jewish clergy even as she was shackled to a team of players and competed in a relay race of mini games like stacking a house of cards and swinging a ball on a string into a cup.
“I never expected to be the very best of the challenges,” she said. “I’ve always said, I have a heart of gold, but I’m not very dexterous, and so for me, it was about trying my best and giving it my all, and also trying to be true to myself and bringing my values and wisdom and sense of community and representing the rabbinate as best I could into the show.”
Field grew up in Los Angeles and where her family attended Temple Ahavat Shalom, a Reform congregation in the San Fernando Valley.
After graduating from Boston University in 2017, she worked for the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a Reform synagogue in Washington D.C., before enrolling at HUC in 2019, spending her first year in Jerusalem.
After being ordained in 2024, Field began working as the director of education at Beth El Temple Center, a Reform synagogue in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Just four months later, she received a call back from “Squid Game: The Challenge’ asking her if she was still interested. She was soon on her way to London for an extended break for filming.
A year later, in a post on Instagram announcing her appearance on the show, Field said her experience reminded her of what she has learned from Jewish tradition.
“I often share that the Torah is a sacred story of people being people — of being hurt, of making mistakes, of building connections, of adventure, and of finding the divine in it all,” she said. “I felt this so deeply during my experience on Squid Game.”
Among her co-competitors was a NFL cheerleader, a former bomb technician and an Anglican priest with whom Field said she connected on set.
“I had a really good conversation about religion and what it means to sort of be a faith leader on the show with the priest,” said Field. “I actually found that I had conversations about faith with almost everyone I talked to because, you know, people bring things up when you tell them you’re a rabbi.”
The post From the bimah to ‘Squid Game’: A rabbi finds Torah in unexpected places appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner
(JTA) — An Arizona man who sent hundreds of threatening messages to a Jewish-owned hotel in New York City was sentenced to 49 months in prison on Thursday in federal court.
Donovan Hall, 35, of Mesa, Arizona, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats and interstate stalking of the Jewish owners of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel in Manhattan. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.
The Blue Moon Hotel is “dedicated to Jewish community in every way that we can be,” Randy Settenbrino said in an interview last year from his hotel, which includes rooms named for icons of the Jewish Lower East Side, a kosher cafe and a mural depicting 2,000 years of Jewish history.
At the time, Settenbrino and his employees had just begun to get what prosecutors said were nearly 1,000 threatening messages from Hall. Sent between August and November 2024, the messages threatened to “torture, mutilate, rape, and murder them and their families,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
In October, Hall texted photographs of two firearms and a machete to one of his victims, writing, “I’ve got something for you and your inbred children” and “for the Zionist cowards,” according to his federal indictment.
“Donovan Hall targeted Jewish victims with a sustained campaign of intimidation, terror, and harassment,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a statement. “The approximately 1,000 threats he sent to these New Yorkers were alarming and brazen.”
Hall’s messages coincided with a boycott campaign against the hotel launched after Settenbrino’s son, an Israeli soldier, was identified as having posted videos of shooting at destroyed buildings and detonating bombs in homes and a mosque in Gaza.
Hall, who has been held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest last year, apologized for his actions in a sentencing submission to the court, writing that he “wanted to champion for a cause and hunt down the bullies, not realizing that it was me the whole time.”
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after Hall’s sentencing, Settenbrino said “baby killer” had been spray painted on the windows of his hotel, and flyers were posted around Manhattan calling for its boycott and referring to his son, Bram, as a “war criminal.”
“We’re sitting at a pivotal time in New York City, where we’re feeling the encroachment of hate and antisemitism in the West, like our brethren are feeling it in Europe, and so it’s very scary for everyone concerned,” said Settenbrino. “It’s very important that there are strong sentences handed out to this, not just for us, but for klal yisrael [the Jewish people] in general.”
The post Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel, India Sign Deals to Boost Defense, Industrial, Tech Cooperation
Israel’s Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram and Indian Defense Secretary Shri Rajesh Kumar Singh sign new agreements in Tel Aviv to expand defense, industrial, and technological cooperation between the two countries. Photo: Screenshot
Israel and India on Tuesday signed new agreements to expand defense, industrial, and technological cooperation during high-level talks in Tel Aviv, as both nations aim to deepen ties amid shifting Middle East power dynamics and rising regional tensions.
Israel’s Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram and Indian Defense Secretary Shri Rajesh Kumar Singh signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) during the annual bilateral Joint Working Group meeting.
“This strategic dialogue with India takes place at a critical juncture for both countries. Our strategic partnership is based on deep mutual trust and shared security interests,” Baram said during a joint press conference.
“We view India as a first-rate strategic partner and are determined to continue deepening cooperation in the fields of defense, technology and industry,” the Israeli official continued.
Strengthening Defense Cooperation: Israel MOD Director General and Indian Defense Secretary Sign Strategic Memorandum of Understanding
@SpokespersonMoD
Read more: https://t.co/ito3P1sCQg pic.twitter.com/FjxBkwFf1C
— Ministry of Defense (@Israel_MOD) November 4, 2025
As part of the visit, the Indian delegation — which included senior officials from the Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces — met with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and participated in a forum with CEOs of Israeli defense companies to advance industrial-defense cooperation between the two countries.
Among other areas of cooperation, the newly signed agreement aims to advance joint efforts in defense manufacturing, research, and technological development.
Israeli-Indian diplomatic relations have been steadily growing since India established full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992.
Since then, the two nations have signed multiple agreements to deepen cooperation across industries, further strengthening defense and security ties.
In recent years, trade between the two countries has been rapidly expanding, with India now being Israel’s seventh-largest trade partner globally. Israeli exports to India rose from $200 million in 1992 to $2.5 billion in 2024.
Over the past decade, Israel’s exports to India have grown by about 60 percent, and investments in the tech sector are becoming increasingly significant.
Military cooperation has also grown, with Israel selling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons systems to India and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Indian military regularly participating in joint exercises.
India is one of the largest consumers of Israeli military equipment, accounting for almost 40 percent of Israel’s total arms exports.
According to media reports, India is set to acquire rockets for its ground forces and surface-to-air defense missiles developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) for approximately $3.75 billion.
IAI is also expected to convert six commercial planes into Indian Air Force refueling aircraft for $900 million.