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When Society’s Good Intentions for Jews Replace Equal Citizenship
An empty classroom. Photo: Wiki Commons.
A secular Manhattan school responded to October 7 by holding a Shabbat gathering. The head of school spoke with moral seriousness. Jewish families felt seen. Non-Jewish families showed up in solidarity. By any reasonable measure, this is a success story.
And that is precisely what makes it worth examining.
A Jerusalem Post report describes Town School’s response as sincere, generous, and embraced by the entire community. It is all of those things. But it also reflects a logic that deserves scrutiny — not because the intent is bad, but because the structure is fragile. What Town School offers is care. What it cannot offer is civic security. The difference matters more than most people realize.
The question is not whether warmth is preferable to hostility. It is whether a framework built on institutional affirmation can ever produce durable belonging — or whether it quietly substitutes recognition for citizenship, comfort for equality, and goodwill for rights.
The American alternative has a founding text. In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport that the new republic “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” As I have written elsewhere, this was not ceremony. It was a covenant.
Belonging depended on conduct, not creed. Citizenship was the baseline. Recognition was irrelevant.
Call this the Washington model: belonging is presumed, not conferred. The government does not identify groups, affirm them, or protect them through recognition. It simply refuses to make identity the basis of civic standing.
The affirmation model works differently. Jewish belonging is validated by institutions. Jewish life is welcomed through programming. Jewish safety flows from administrative judgment. This is the logic of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It feels compassionate. It is also a departure from the civic architecture that made America uniquely stable for Jews.
American Jews did not flourish because institutions learned to include them. They flourished because the regime limited the authority of institutions to decide who belonged at all. Jews attended public schools, served in the military, and entered professions — not because administrators welcomed them, but because the law made no provision for excluding them. That is pluralism as structure, not performance.
DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — inverts this. It treats belonging as something institutions must actively produce. Once belonging is conferred, it becomes conditional and, therefore, unstable.
None of this denies that schools should protect Jewish students in moments of fear, address antisemitism, enforce rules, and help manage difference. Care matters. Moral clarity matters. But short-term care does not require long-term structural dependency. The question is whether the framework makes Jewish belonging more secure over time or more fragile.
Critics of DEI often focus on excesses — ideological trainings, bureaucratic bloat, activist capture. They miss the point. The problem is not tone. It is structure. DEI replaces equal citizenship with managed identity. It reduces civic standing to recognition, safety to visibility, equality to representation. It grants institutions precisely the authority that liberal pluralism once denied them.
For Jews, this is perilous. Judaism is not simply cultural identity. It is a peoplehood and faith defined by continuity, obligation, and collective memory. America worked for Jews because the regime did not require Judaism to be translated into something thinner in order to belong.
DEI struggles with this. Jewish identity gets reframed as culture — ritual without peoplehood, heritage without permanence, symbolism without sovereignty. That version of Jewishness is easy to affirm because it makes no claims. But that ease is the warning sign.
This is not only imposed from outside. Jews have often been among the architects of DEI frameworks, usually with the best intentions. The same communal instinct that built hospitals, schools, and social agencies now sometimes builds systems that make Jewish belonging contingent rather than secure. Good faith does not neutralize structural risk.
Jews are not uniquely burdened by DEI, but they are diagnostically revealing. Any system that cannot accommodate a people simultaneously religious, ethnic, historical, and transnational will fracture under pressure from other complex identities. Jews expose the structural weakness. They are not the cause of it.
Feeling welcomed and being secure are not the same thing. Inclusion produces comfort. Citizenship produces stability. Belonging grounded in recognition depends on continued moral approval. Belonging grounded in citizenship does not. The former fluctuates with ideology; the latter endures through disagreement.
The educators at Town School appear to be acting in good faith. But no minority should rely on the personal virtue of administrators for its security. Sincerity is not a system. Good intentions do not correct for flawed design.
If Jewish security comes to depend on institutional affirmation rather than civic equality, Jews will be less secure, not more. And if this model becomes dominant, it will erode pluralism for everyone. No minority should want its standing to depend on recognition. No society should delegate belonging to administrators. No liberal order survives when citizenship is replaced by curation.
Institutions turn to DEI not out of malice but out of lost confidence. When leaders no longer trust law, equality, and restraint to hold, they substitute recognition for rights and symbolism for structure. DEI fills the vacuum left by civic uncertainty. It cannot repair it.
The American experiment succeeded not by perfecting inclusion but by constraining power. It did not ask institutions to decide who belonged. It presumed belonging and limited the authority of those who might question it.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Jews should be clear-eyed about this distinction. A pluralistic society is strongest when belonging is presumed rather than curated, and when citizenship is treated as a baseline rather than a reward.
Warmth matters. Goodwill matters. But they are not substitutes for equality under a civic order that does not ask groups to justify their place.
Jewish history is clear on this point. Societies where Jews are welcomed at the discretion of elites are less stable than those where Jewish belonging is assumed as principle. The former depends on mood and politics. The latter endures through disagreement.
Washington’s letter to Newport promised something no amount of programming can replicate: a republic that gives to bigotry no sanction because it refuses to make belonging a matter of official judgment at all. That is an inheritance worth defending. The distinction between the affirmation model and the Washington model is not only a Jewish concern. It is central to the durability of pluralism.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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At the edge of America, six Jewish graves endure
A July 1954 funeral in Fairbanks, Alaska, drew unexpected attention from Jewish newspapers across the country. The woman being buried, Lena Ferguson, was laid to rest in what the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner described simply as the “Jewish plot” inside the city’s Clay Street Cemetery — a small, largely forgotten burial ground that many outside Alaska did not even know existed.
Reports in papers from Florida to Chicago described the “discovery” of what was believed to be the only known Jewish cemetery in the Last Frontier. Some emphasized the unusual circumstances of a Jewish burial in the remote Alaskan interior. Others noted that Ferguson had been married to a non-Jew.
Long before Alaska had a purpose-built synagogue, the Jewish plot at Clay Street had already begun preserving the names of Jews who lived and died in the territory.
The six graves within the plot preserve fragments of a largely forgotten Jewish world built around mining camps, frontier trade, military outposts and isolated immigrant lives. Together, they show how Jewish life appeared in one of the most remote corners of the United States, often before the institutions that sustained it elsewhere.
Ferguson’s funeral itself reflected that improvisational frontier Judaism. According to accounts published at the time, her Jewish identity only became widely known after her brother, Joseph Wishengrad of Catskill, New York, contacted a Fairbanks funeral chapel and requested that she be buried according to Jewish law.
Alaska’s only rabbi, military chaplain Jacob Rubenstein, happened to be away visiting Jewish servicemen stationed at remote military installations. In his absence, Jack Frankel — a former Biloxi, Mississippi, resident working for the United Service Organizations-Jewish Welfare Board — helped officiate the service alongside Robert Bloom, a former Klondike Gold Rush miner who later opened a hardware and general merchandise store in Fairbanks.
Jewish newspapers reported that the cemetery plot had not been used for more than 25 years because many Jews who died in Alaska were sent “to the states” for burial instead.
Before Ferguson, the most recent burial there had been Gussie Beckman in 1939. Born in New York in 1882, Beckman operated the Palace Baths and the Palace Liquor Store on Fourth Avenue in Fairbanks. Her obituary noted that “nothing is known in this city of any surviving relatives.”
Her funeral demonstrated how tenuous Jewish communal life in Alaska could be: a Christian minister, Rev. Rudolph G. Fitz, conducted the service, while Leonard Newman, a University of Alaska mining engineering student from New York City, read the burial prayers. Her pallbearers included future state senator John B. Hall, Deputy Marshal Pat O’Connor and other Fairbanks civic figures.
Other graves preserve similar fragments of frontier life.
Thomas Robin, a Romanian-born immigrant who arrived in Alaska in 1893, was buried in 1923 under the auspices of the Pioneers of Alaska, a fraternal organization founded by early settlers in the territory. His obituary identified him as a member of the Iditarod Igloo chapter.
Julia Warren, buried in 1929, lived near the Mason Creek gold mine and died in an automobile accident alongside three others. Her husband worked as a miner.
Anna Marks, who died in 1915, received a public funeral in Moose Hall, reflecting how civic lodges and fraternal organizations often doubled as gathering places in frontier towns where formal Jewish institutions scarcely existed.
Little survives about David Hurvitz, who died in 1920, beyond a brief bankruptcy notice published years earlier.
And that absence itself forms part of the story. The record preserves only fragments: names, occupations, scattered newspaper clippings and weathered gravestones. Yet together they reveal that Jewish life in Alaska did not begin with synagogues or other organized institutions. It began with individuals — merchants, miners, and immigrants — carrying pieces of Jewish identity into an isolated region where religious infrastructure barely existed.
Alaska’s first purpose-built synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom in Anchorage, would not be dedicated until 1965, more than a decade after Lena Ferguson’s burial and nearly 360 miles south of Fairbanks.
Clay Street Cemetery eventually closed to new burials as Fairbanks shifted to Birch Hill Cemetery after 1938. In 1982, the historic cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Today, Jewish life in Alaska is more visible than it once was. Congregation Or HaTzafon was founded in Fairbanks in 1980, and Chabad established a center there in 2024. The closest active Jewish cemetery is now in Anchorage.
The six graves at Clay Street remain among the earliest surviving records of Jewish life at the edge of America.
The post At the edge of America, six Jewish graves endure appeared first on The Forward.
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Texas candidate’s antisemitic rhetoric sparks outrage ahead of Tuesday runoff. Did it fuel her rise?
(JTA) — When Maureen Galindo finished first in a crowded Democratic primary for a newly redrawn South Texas congressional district in March, the result surprised even seasoned observers of San Antonio politics.
With voters set to decide the Democratic nomination Tuesday, as Galindo faces off with sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia, local officials and political observers are grappling with how a little-known candidate with a history of inflammatory remarks about Israel and Jews has come within striking distance of a seat in Congress.
The local housing activist went into the race with little political profile, having received less than 3% of the vote in a San Antonio City Council race last year. Local officials familiar with the contest chalked up Galindo’s success to a litany of factors, including low voter awareness of the candidates and a newly drawn Republican-leaning district that attracted few high-profile Democratic contenders.
What they did not credit for her success was her antisemitic rhetoric. While the race heading into Tuesday night’s runoff has been defined by scrutiny and criticism of Galindo’s views toward Zionists, local political analysts and activists told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that her controversial positions were not widely known ahead of her March win and, if anything, are hurting her chances against Garcia.
Israel is a growing flashpoint in a number of Democratic primaries across the country, and several candidates have drawn allegations of antisemitism as they employ harsh criticism of Zionism. Galindo’s rhetoric has been even more extreme – including vows to turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists” – but San Antonio political observers caution against lumping her early success in with the recent wins of progressive candidates in urban districts.
Jon Taylor, a political science professor at University of Texas San Antonio, told JTA that Galindo’s antisemitic rhetoric had been largely unknown at the time of the primary.
“What I can tell from previous candidate forums, she talked about the 1%, she talked about going after Trump and ICE,” Taylor said. “None of the stuff on Zionism, from what I could tell, was ever mentioned.”
Now that her antisemitic tirades have received so much attention, Taylor predicted they would turn off voters in the socially conservative district, where elections are usually driven by pocketbook issues.
“To be honest, talking about Israel, talking about some sort of Zionist conspiracy, is not what voters are looking for,” Taylor said.
Galindo has previously told local outlets that it was her “perception that Zionist billionaires run the world” and posted on social media that “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS,” After Texas Senate candidate James Talarico revealed to JTA that he would not back or campaign with Galindo, she told JTA that “coordinated media attacks declaring my anti-Zionist rhetoric as anti-Semitic” were “causing MORE harm to the Jews of San Antonio by playing into all the stigmas that they own the media.”
Galindo, who has raised almost no direct funding for her campaign, has benefitted from an opaque, newly formed Political Action Committee, which Democrats are charging is Republican-backed.
For some Jewish Democrats, the purported GOP-backed funding is evidence that Galindo’s anti-Israel rhetoric is a political liability rather than a strength.
“Republican dark money groups are spending big to elevate anti-Israel Democratic candidates who are out of touch with voters — because they’d rather face a weaker opponent in races that will decide the House majority in November. It’s cynical and it’s disturbing,” the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, Brian Romick, said in a statement to JTA.
Taylor noted that the GOP would only be promoting Galindo because the party wants Democrats “to nominate the worst candidate possible,” backing up the notion that her views are not appealing to voters.
The newly launched Lead Left PAC, which has not disclosed its donors, has spent more than $900,000 on ads and mailers promoting Galindo. Campaign finance watchdogs accuse the group of structuring its activity in a way that allowed it to bypass donor disclosures before voters cast their ballots.
Last week, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing the PAC of having “strategically gamed federal reporting deadlines” in order to not disclose the sources of its funds ahead of the primaries.
The alleged GOP interference in the Texas race also spurred a row between the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Democratic Majority for Israel, which, after it called on Democrats to condemn Galindo, asked the RJC if it would “condemn the Republican Super PACs promoting her?”
The RJC, Texas GOP and Winred – a Republican donation platform that reportedly was at one point linked in the metadata for the website of Lead Left PAC – did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
A local Democratic Party official familiar with the race told JTA in an emailed statement that it was likely voters did not know much about Galindo ahead of the race, but that with “more knowledge and media attention, voters are now much better equipped about their choices.”
The race has unfolded against the backdrop of a major Republican redistricting overhaul. Congressional District 35, where Galindo is competing, was impacted so heavily that the incumbent Rep. Greg Casar is now running for a different seat, while roughly 43% of residents of Bexar Country, which the district partially covers, were placed in a new district, according to the San Antonio Report.
On Wednesday, a host of Texas Democratic Party leaders released a joint statement decrying Galindo’s rhetoric, writing that her comments “do not reflect our values as Democrats or as Texans.”
Casar, who chairs the U.S. House Progressive Caucus and currently represents much of the district, made the unusual move last week of endorsing Garcia, Galindo’s moderate runoff opponent, telling the San Antonio Express-News that Galindo’s “very inappropriate remarks” sealed the deal.
“I’m a progressive Democrat. Johnny has been endorsed by the more conservative Blue Dogs. But we can all agree that he’s the candidate who can win this race,” Casar told the outlet.
Rabbi Mara Nathan, the senior rabbi of Temple Beth El, a Reform congregation in San Antonio, told JTA that she did not think Galindo had drummed up support heading into her campaign from voters over her antisemitic rhetoric, adding that “if that had been the case, we would have heard about it much earlier on.”
She explained, “An alarm would have been sounded pretty early, and not necessarily from Jewish people, but from other people in the San Antonio community who are our friends and allies.”
Looking to Tuesday’s primary, Taylor said he believed the public spotlight on Galindo’s remarks had changed the race by making voters more aware of her record.
“With this animus now out there and highly visible, people are really alerted to the danger of this woman and what her rhetoric could mean,” Taylor said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Texas candidate’s antisemitic rhetoric sparks outrage ahead of Tuesday runoff. Did it fuel her rise? appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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