Uncategorized
When Jews face violence, we’re told to move to Israel. Does that really make us stronger?
My grandfather, Reuven Helman, was born in Palestine in 1927. He fought for Israel’s independence in 1948, and competed in the international Maccabiah Olympics. He and my grandmother, Leah, raised their children, including my mother, in the town of Kfar Chabad outside Tel Aviv. I have visited Israel many times. I studied at a rabbinical school in Jerusalem. Zionism is a deeply meaningful part of my story.
But I was born in the United States, live in the United States, and will always claim it as home. Which is why I’m so dismayed to see ardent Zionists insisting that all Jews belong in Israel — unconsciously echoing a call that’s becoming increasingly popular among antisemites, too.
Antisemites intend the statement that Jews belong in Israel as a threat. Zionists intend it as a calling. Either way, they deny the central truth that Jews built lives across a dispersed world, and that dispersal helped us survive.
Influencers like tech marketer and Israel advocate Hillel Fuld have repeatedly urged American Jews to migrate to Israel, arguing that there are “millions of people around the world who want to see a Holocaust 2.0,” making security in the diaspora precarious. After the recent Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said that Jews in Western countries should immigrate to Israel.
But Judaism did not endure because we concentrated in one place. We endured because our identity, values, and Torah are portable. Because we dispersed, no single empire could target every Jew at once. No single campaign could end us. Diaspora didn’t just happen to us. It preserved us.
After the Holocaust, some survivors rebuilt in Israel, but many others chose instead to make new lives in the U.S., and in other democratic countries that opened their doors. Their choice reflected the reality that Jews need multiple safe havens — one of the lessons of the Shoah itself. (Think of the many Jewish Holocaust refugees rejected by every country to which they turned, in desperation, for aid.) As a people, we thrive when we are members of societies that protect minorities.
Antisemites would have our American society, instead, treat minorities as permanent outsiders. After his recent friendly interview with the right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, the white nationalist Nick Fuentes said Jews who don’t accept his “America First” vision should “get the f*** out of America and go to Israel.” His message: You don’t belong here.
What’s the reason for this odd alignment in rhetoric? Why would some impassioned advocates for Israel and open antagonists of Jews appear, when it comes to this one point, to agree?
The reality is, of course, that they don’t.
The Zionist voices in this equation are telling Jews to retreat, rather than work toward helping their countries — whether the U.S., Australia, or any of the other nations to experience contemporary upswings in antisemitism — to restore values of pluralism and equality. And the antisemitic voices are saying, simply, that they want fewer Jews in their countries.
I refuse to accept either proposal. I cannot speak for all diaspora Jews. But I don’t want to retreat. Instead, I want my country, the U.S., to enforce its own ideals and protect minorities, because that is what a free country does.
The Torah warns that Jews may be scattered “among the nations,” yet it insists that even “in the land of their enemies” God will not cast the Israelites away. Jeremiah tells Jews exiled to Babylon not to flee, but rather to build homes, plant, raise families and “seek the peace of the city,” because our welfare intertwines with its welfare. Joseph sustains his family and feeds nations from inside Egypt, and Esther saves Jews inside Persia.
These many biblical endorsements of a diasporic Jewry don’t deny the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Instead, they refute the idea that the only answer to antisemitism is for Jews to disappear when it crops up.
We survive by carrying Torah into the world, speaking truth where we stand, and spreading light precisely where darkness tries to push us out. And the surest way to do that is to build Jewish traditions sturdy enough to outlast any moment and thrive in any place. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs said it best: “To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend a civilisation, you need schools.”
After all, while Israel offers Jews dignity and sovereignty, it does not function as a simple refuge from antisemitism. Palestinian terrorists murdered my cousin, Meir Tamari, two years ago, leaving his wife a widow and his two small children fatherless. Just this weekend, two Jews in Israel were murdered in a car ramming terrorist attack. In our current reality, Jews face real danger in Israel precisely because it sits at the center of conflict and terror. That isn’t an argument against Israel, but it shows that moving there does not automatically solve Jewish vulnerability.
So I hold two commitments at once. I support Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. I also support Jews returning to their ancestral homeland so long as that choice is driven by meaning and longing. But I reject the idea that Jews should leave the U.S. in fear of growing antisemitism at home. Our country needs Jews who stay visible, who speak truth and who bring light into public life, and above all, Jews who teach their children that belonging is not something you beg for. It is something you live.
The post When Jews face violence, we’re told to move to Israel. Does that really make us stronger? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court
A civil rights attorney who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court and made social media posts viewed as pro-Hezbollah and antisemitic, has won his bid for the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
Michigan is one of a few states in which voters play a direct role in choosing university overseers. As a regent, Amir Makled (D) will help oversee expenditures at the university where his clients, the student protesters, were arrested. The position is unpaid and carries an eight-year term. Democrat Paul Brown won the other seat up for election, maintaining the board’s 6-2 Democratic majority.
Makled beat out Republican challenger Lena Epstein, who is Jewish and previously identified as a “Jewish Messianic believer of Christ,” but recanted the statement and later said she was “100% Jewish.” Mainstream Judaism does not accept Messianic Jews because they believe in the divinity of Christ and try to convert Jews to Jesus.
Epstein told the Forward in an April interview that the Democrats had handed her an opportunity to win the seat by endorsing Makled, who was facing intense scrutiny. In one of his controversial posts, Makled called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a “martyr” after he was killed by Israeli strikes in 2024. He lost an endorsement from Service Employees International Union for the posts and later deleted them.
In the regents race, voters picked up to two of six candidates, with the top two winning. Makled received 25.6% of the vote while Brown received 27.2%. Epstein received 22.2% while her fellow Republican Michael Schostak received 22.6%.
Makled’s election comes as part of a wave of Democratic Party wins, including in Michigan, which elected as Senator Abdul El-Sayed (D), who also faced severe backlash for statements related to Israel and Gaza and for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
Israel played a major role in the rhetoric surrounding Michigan’s midterms. But voters, including 60% of Jewish voters that voted for El-Sayed according to early exit polls, favored sharp critics of the Jewish state to candidates in support of it.
The post University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record.
The election of Daniel Biss, a Jewish critic of Israel, to an Illinois congressional seat Tuesday has sparked a public feud between the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal Zionist group J Street over whether the ADL remains a credible voice in the fight against antisemitism.
After Biss, the former Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., won his seat Tuesday night, the ADL Midwest took to social media to express “serious concerns” about Biss’ “approach to antisemitism.”
J Street, which had endorsed Biss, hit back, noting that Biss is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and calling the ADL’s statement “a shanda,” the Yiddish word for disgrace.
“It is hard to read this statement without wondering how far the ADL has drifted from the organization it once was – a gold standard in our community for standing up against bigotry, hatred and discrimination,” J street wrote on X.
Biss, who speaks Hebrew and spent childhood summers in Israel, was elected with 75% of the vote in a district where 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
“It saddens me to watch the ADL, once a preeminent civil rights organization, devolve into an entity that traffics in fear, intimidation and extremism,” Biss wrote in a statement to the Forward. “This kind of rhetoric does nothing to keep the Jewish people safe—in fact, it undermines that very cause.”
The ADL has long faced scrutiny from critics who view the watchdog group as labeling too broad a swath of Israel criticism as antisemitic, while less forcefully condemning antisemitism when it comes from the political right.
“Our statement speaks for itself,” an ADL spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
In its statement, the ADL pointed to a specific set of concerns involving Biss’ record as mayor of Evanston, Illinois, the college town home to Northwestern University.
Biss did not provide Evanston police support that Northwestern requested after reported “antisemitic conduct” at the Gaza war encampment on campus in April 2024, the ADL said, “raising serious questions about whether the safety, dignity, and equal access of Jewish students were treated with the urgency they required.”
Biss has defended his decision not to dispatch police to the encampment, writing in response to a congressional inquiry that forcibly clearing the protest would have gone against police department advice and suppressed “constitutionally protected speech.”
The ADL also said that Biss “dismissed scrutiny of his response as a politically motivated attack fueled by AIPAC, rather than substantively addressing the concerns raised by Jewish students and community members.”
Biss made opposition to AIPAC a central theme of his primary campaign for Congress after the hardline pro-Israel lobbying group spent millions opposing him and supporting another candidate, state Sen. Laura Fine.
In an interview with the Forward in March, Biss said it was “absurd” that AIPAC opposes imposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
At the same time, Biss faced pressure to his left on Israel in the primary, defeating Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American who has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide. Biss, who has described himself as a progressive Zionist, declined to use the word genocide, despite repeated calls from Abughazaleh to do so.
In a March op-ed in The Nation, Biss wrote that he believed he was one of AIPAC’s top targets partly because “I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. My mother is Israeli. My extended family lives in Israel. AIPAC knew that they couldn’t dismiss me as anti-Israel or antisemitic.”
The ADL also criticized Biss for supporting the repeal of an anti-BDS law, which bars Illinois from investing public pension funds in companies that boycott Israel. That position, the ADL said, “raises additional concerns about his willingness to stand against efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.”
In an April Substack post explaining his position, Biss said that he personally opposes the global movement to boycott Israel, but he does not believe the government should “stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values.”
Biss will succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish lawmaker who represented the district for nearly three decades and was also an outspoken critic of AIPAC.
The post This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration
On Wednesday, two senior citizens, Robert Zimmerman, 85, a Jew originally from Minnesota, and Robert Prevost, 71, a Catholic of Chicago, had a brief meeting at the younger man’s office in central Italy.
Sources on the scene report that Zimmerman was in town for business and Prevost, who goes professionally by Leo, had recently cited Zimmerman’s work in the preface to a book about nuclear disarmament.
Both men dressed in uniform, looking a bit Spy Vs. Spy, with Zimmerman in a black hoodie and Prevost in white with a small white skull cap. The confab was brief, a bulletin from Prevost’s workplace reported, consisting of “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.”
Prevost gifted Zimmerman with prayer beads, and Zimmerman presented Prevost with a copy of his memoir, published under his pen name, Bob Dylan.
While Zimmerman was raised in a Jewish home, he had, for a time in the late 1970s to early 1980s, converted to born-again Christianity, confounding many.
The post At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration appeared first on The Forward.
