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An Israel analyst’s best- and worst-case scenarios for the new right-wing government
(JTA) — The recent Israeli elections, the fifth in less than four years, returned Benjamin Netanyahu to the driver’s seat for the third time.
The twice and future prime minister appears able to cobble together a coalition that has been called the most right-wing in Israeli history. It will include three far-right and two haredi Orthodox parties, and his partners include the far-right Religious Zionism party and its leader Bezalel Smotrich, who has sucessfully pushed for a heavier hand in controlling Israeli policies in the West Bank; Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the extremist Otzma Yehudit party, who is due to head a new National Security Ministry that will be given authority over Border Police in the West Bank; and far-right Knesset member Avi Maoz, whose Noam party campaigned on a homophobic and anti-pluralistic platform.
These developments have cheered the American Jewish right, which has long called for Israel to consolidate its power in — if not outright annex — the disputed territories of the West Bank that are home to 480,000 Israeli settlers and 2.7 million Palestinians, of whom 220,000 live in East Jerusalem.
For Jews on the center and left, however, the results have prompted anxiety. If the two-state solution has long looked out of reach, many were at least hoping Israel would stay on a centrist path and maintain the status quo until Israelis and Palestinians seem ready for their long-delayed divorce. American Jewish leaders are worried — privately and in public — that Jewish support for Israel will erode further than it has if Jews become convinced Israel doesn’t share their democratic and pluralistic values.
I spoke this past week about these issues and more with Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum and a senior research fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. The IPF supports a viable two-state solution, and Koplow acknowledges that he agrees with “almost nothing that I’m going to see from this Israeli government.” But he remains one of the most articulate analysts I know of the high stakes on all sides.
Our conversation was presented as a Zoom event sponsored by Congregation Beth Sholom, my own synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: What are the far right’s big asks, and what might we expect to see going forward?
Michael Koplow: There are a few issues that are really coming to the fore. The first is judicial reform. There’s a longstanding complaint among the Israeli right that the Israeli Supreme Court is perceived to be left-leaning — the mirror image of what we have here in the United States. Secondly, the Supreme Court is perceived by many Israelis to be an undemocratic institution, because it is an appointed body. In Israel, you have a selection committee for the Supreme Court that is actually composed mostly of sitting Supreme Court justices and members of the Israeli Bar Association. A common complaint is that the Knesset is a democratic body selected by the people and it’s hampered by this undemocratic body that gets to dictate to the Knesset what is legal and what is not.
And so for a long time on the Israeli right there has been a call to have a bill passed that would allow the Knesset to override Supreme Court decisions. At the moment, there’s no recourse. The ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel have long sought exemptions for haredi Israelis to serve in the IDF and the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that ultra-Orthodox members of Israeli society can’t get a blanket exemption. A Supreme Court override bill would allow the Knesset to exempt the ultra-Orthodox from serving in the IDF. For the more right-wing nationalist parties, particularly Religious Zionism, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that settlements cannot be established on private Palestinian land in the West Bank. Their main interest in a Supreme Court override is so that they can pass laws that will effectively allow settlements anywhere in [the West Bank’s Israeli-controlled] Area C, whether it’s state land or private Palestinian land.
Is Netanyahu interested for these same reasons?
Netanyahu is to a lesser extent interested in these things, but right now he’s on trial for three different counts, all for fraud and breach of trust, which is the crime that Israeli politicians get charged with in matters of corruption. He’s also in trouble for bribery. One of the things that he wants to do is to pass something called the “French law,” which would bar sitting Israeli prime ministers from being investigated and indicted. And in order to do that, he almost certainly will have to get around the Supreme Court.
The second thing that I think we can expect to see from this prospective coalition has to do with the West Bank. In late 2019 and early 2020, there was a lot of talk in the Israeli political sphere about either applying sovereignty to the West Bank or annexing the West Bank. This happened also in conjunction with the release of the Trump plan in January 2020, which envisioned upfront 30% of the West Bank being annexed to Israel.
This all got shelved in the summer of 2020, with the Abraham Accords, when the Emirati ambassador to the United States wrote an op-ed where he said to Israelis, “You can have normalization with the UAE or you can have annexation, but you can’t have both.” Israelis overwhelmingly wanted normalization versus West Bank annexation. Between 10% and 15% of Israeli Jews want annexation, so this annexation plan was dropped. In the new coalition, annexation is back, but it’s back in a different way. Bezalel Smotrich is a particularly smart and savvy politician, and understands that if you talk about annexation or application of sovereignty on day one, he’d likely run into some of the same problems — from the United States and potentially from other countries in the region. And so the way they’re going about it now is by instituting a piecemeal plan that will add up to what is effectively annexation.
How would that work?
For starters, there is a plan to legalize illegal Israeli settlements, and when I say illegal, I mean illegal under Israeli law. There are 127 settlements in the West Bank that are legal under Israeli law, because they had been built on what is called state land inside of the West Bank, and because they’ve gone through the planning and permitting process. In addition, there are about 205 illegal Israeli outposts and illegal Israeli farms, containing somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 Israelis. And what makes them illegal under Israeli law is that they were all built without any type of Israeli government approval. In many of these cases, they’re also built on private Palestinian land.
The first part of this plan is to legalize retroactively these illegal outposts. The coalition agreement that has already been signed between Likud and Religious Zionism, Smotrich’s party, calls for, within 60 days of the formation of the government, the state paying for water and electricity to these illegal outposts. I should note there already is water and electricity to these illegal outposts, but it’s paid for by the regional settlement councils. This would have water and electricity paid for by the Israeli government, and then within a year to retroactively legalize all of them. That’s step number one.
Step number two has to do with the legal settlements inside the West Bank. There is a body called the Civil Administration, which is the body that is in charge of all construction for both Israelis and Palestinians in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank that is controlled entirely by Israel. As part of the agreement between Likud and Religious Zionism, Smotrich is going to be finance minister, but also appointed as a junior minister in the Defense Ministry, and he will control the Civil Administration and will be in charge of all settlement construction in the West Bank. He will also have the power to decide whether Palestinians can build in Area C and whether Palestinian structures in Area C that were built without a permit can be demolished. And so this will almost certainly be increasing at a very rapid rate. The Supreme Planning Committee that plans West Bank settlement construction normally would meet about four times a year, and under the [current] Bennett/Lapid government it only met twice, but Smotrich said in the past that he would like to convene it every single month. So the pace of settlement construction is almost certainly going to grow at a pretty rapid pace.
What will Itamar Ben-Gvir, an acolyte of Meir Kahane, the American rabbi barred from Israel’s parliament in the 1980s because of his racism, gain in the government?
Itamar Ben-Gvir is the head of Otzma Yehudit, the Jewish supremacist party that now has six seats in the Knesset. As part of his negotiations with Netanyahu, he is going to be appointed to a new position known as the “national security minister,” which is currently called the public security minister, but they’ve increased its powers and renamed it. They’ve also given this new ministry control over the West Bank border police, who operate in the West Bank. And they’re also giving this minister power over the police that normally belongs to the police commissioner. And so Ben-Gvir, who I should note has seven criminal convictions on his record, including one for support of a terrorist organization and incitement to racism, is going to be the minister who’s in charge of the police — not only inside of Israel, but he’ll be in charge of the police who operate in the West Bank and who operate on the Temple Mount.
Michael Koplow is the chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum and a senior research fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. (Courtesy IPF)
And this is important because Ben-Gvir is one of the figures in Israel who has talked a lot about changing the status quo on the Temple Mount, probably the most sensitive spot in the entire world, and certainly the most sensitive spot anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Which is why Israeli governments, including very right-wing governments, have not changed the status quo [allowing Jews to enter the Muslim-administered mount, but pray there], certainly not formally. He’s also talked about increasing his own visits to the Temple Mount.
And he’s also talked about changing the rules of engagement for Israeli police, whereby they would be allowed to shoot anybody on sight, for instance, who’s holding a stone or holding a Molotov cocktail. Right now the current rules of engagement are that people like that can only be shot if they present an imminent and serious threat to a soldier or police. Changing that is certainly going to have an effect on relations between Israelis and Palestinians and likely lead to the types of clashes we’ve seen in Jerusalem over the past few years.
This is all very good news for folks who want to solidify Israeli control in the West Bank. It’s not such good news for people who support more autonomy for the Palestinians and certainly support the two-state solution — and I think I can include the Israel Policy Forum in the latter camp. I want to hear your thoughts on what you’ve called the best-case scenarios and the worst-case scenarios, and on where Netanyahu fits in.
When I say best-case scenario, I mean in terms of preserving the status quo, because a best-case scenario where you’d actually have an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians is nowhere. It’s not in any conceivable future.
I think the best-case scenario would be that Netanyahu understands Israel’s place in the international system and he understands how issues inside the West Bank impact Israel’s foreign relations. This is somebody who has served as Israeli prime minister longer than anybody else. He was prime minister when the Abraham Accords came into being, and that accomplishment is rightfully his. Netanyahu understands these factors and has a long history of being very cautious as prime minister. He’s not a prime minister that uses force. He’s not a prime minister under whom Israel has undertaken any major military operations outside of Gaza. I think that it’s not unreasonable to think that his history of relative caution isn’t just going to go away. And that means doing things to make sure that the fundamental situation in the West Bank doesn’t get overturned.
Netanyahu is operating in a political context in which his voters and voters for the other parties in his coalition do expect some real radical changes. Interestingly, however, part of this agreement with Religious Zionism is that everything has to be approved by [Netanyahu], and so there will be a mechanism for Netanyahu to slow some things down. I think that there is a situation in which he lets things proceed at an increased pace, but doesn’t do anything to really fundamentally alter the status of the West Bank.
I also think that voters voted for Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit not because they’re looking for big, massive changes in the West Bank or an explosion in settlement construction, but because they were voting on law and order issues. Many Israelis are still very shell-shocked, literally and figuratively, by the events of May 2021, particularly the riots that broke out in mixed Israeli cities. And despite the fact that Itamar Ben-Gvir was blamed by the police commissioner at the time for instigating some of the violence in mixed cities, he ran a very effective campaign where he said, “Vote for me and effectively I will restore order.”
That leads to the reasonable best-case scenario of plenty of things happening that will cause friction with the United States and plenty of things that will cause friction with the Palestinians, but nothing that can necessarily be undone by a different government down the road.
And the worst-case scenario, from your perspective?
The worst-case scenario is all of these things that Smotrich, in particular, wants to carry out leads to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority. Based on my own experience in the West Bank in recent months, the Palestinian Authority has fundamentally lost control of much of the northern West Bank. In many places they have chosen not to engage in many ways. They effectively operate in and around Ramallah, and have a token presence in other spots, but don’t really have the power to enforce law and order. They’re under enormous political strain.
As a very quick refresher, the West Bank is divided into three areas, A, B and C. In theory, Area A is supposed to be entirely under the PA control and where you have between 1.3 and 1.5 million Palestinians. If the Palestinian Authority collapses, that means that Israel must go in and literally be the day to day governor and mayor of Area A and all its cities, providing services to 1.3 million Palestinians. It means acting as traffic cops, dealing with all sorts of housing and construction and literally everything that municipal governments do that Israel has not done in Area A in almost 30 years.
Does Israel even have that capability?
The standard is that 55% of all active-duty IDF soldiers are currently stationed in the West Bank. If the Palestinian Authority collapses it’s not hyperbole to say that every single active-duty IDF soldier will have to be stationed in the West Bank just to run things, just to maintain basic law and order. That means not having IDF soldiers on the border with Egypt, on the borders with Syria and Lebanon. It will effectively have turned into nothing but a full-time occupation force. And that’s Option A.
Option B is that Israel elects not to do that. And then Hamas or Islamic Jihad steps into the vacuum, and they become the new government in the West Bank. And at that point, everything that you have in Gaza, you have in the West Bank, except for the fact that the West Bank is a much larger territory. It cannot be sealed off completely. This is literally the nightmare scenario not only for Israeli security officials, but for Israeli civilians. And that’s even before we talk about the impact that will have on terrorism and violence inside of Israeli cities inside the green line, let alone what happens in the West Bank.
The United States and the European Union, and the U.N., presumably, won’t stand idly by through a lot of these changes. What leverage do they have and can they use to maintain the status quo?
The U.S. and E.U. are going to have some pretty clear, very well-defined red lines. I think it’s reasonable to expect that the Biden administration and many members of Congress will put the formal declaration of annexation as a red line. The same goes for European countries. But certainly the Biden administration doesn’t want to be in a position where they are getting into constant fights with the Israeli government. The administration rightly views Israel as an ally and an important partner and wants to maintain military and security and intelligence cooperation with Israel in the region. All those things benefit U.S. foreign policy. This is not an administration and certainly there isn’t support in Congress for things like conditioning security assistance to Israel or placing new usage restrictions on the type of weapons that we sell to Israel. And so there isn’t a huge amount of leverage in that department.
But I do think we’re going to see more diplomatic and political-type measures. People remember the controversy that ensued in December 2016 at the United Nations when the Obama administration abstained from a Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements. I think that if some of these measures go ahead, on the Israeli side, there’s a good chance that we will see the United States once again abstain from some measures in the Security Council. At the moment, the Israeli government has been working very hard to get the United States to help with [thwarting] investigations into Israeli activity in the West Bank in the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. I think that those sorts of things become a lot harder if Israel has fundamentally changed the status of the situation in the West Bank.
There are probably all sorts of trade relationships with the European Union that may be at risk. One big factor here is the other states in the region, the Abraham Accords states. There’s reason to think that they may act as a check on the Israeli government, given the popularity of normalization among Israelis, and given the fact that the UAE was the party that really stepped in and prevented annexation from taking place in the summer of 2020. In a country like Saudi Arabia, where you have a population of between 25 and 30 million, or Iraq or Kuwait, [the far right’s agenda] makes normalizing relations with those countries very, very difficult, if not impossible, and it’s possible that Netanyahu will use that also as a way to try and appeal to some of his coalition partners.
Another outside partner is Diaspora Jewry. A vocal minority of American Jewry supports the right-wing government, but a majority would support a two-state solution. They connect to Israel with what they see as a shared sense of democracy and liberal values. Does Netanyahu and his coalition partners think at all about them and their concerns? Do those Diaspora Jews have any leverage at all in terms of moderating any of these trends?
The short answer is not really. The parties in a prospective coalition are not ones that historically have cared very much about the relationship with the Diaspora. Haredi parties are not concerned about the erosion of liberal values inside of Israel or the situation in the West Bank for the most part. And parties like Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit really don’t care what American Jewry thinks about much of anything. We’ve already seen demands in some of these coalition agreements to amend the Law of Return, where right now, anybody who has one Jewish grandparent is eligible to be an Israeli citizen. These parties have been requesting that it be amended so that you are only eligible if you are halachically Jewish, meaning you have a Jewish mother [or have converted formally].
North American Jewry is a real asset to the State of Israel given its role traditionally in supporting the state economically and politically. And yet over the past decade and a half there have been repeated comments [among Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer] that it’s more important to be making inroads with evangelical Christians than with North American Jews, given the politics of evangelical Christians and given their size.
Many American Jews, particularly from the Reform and Conservative denominations, have already been angry that Israel doesn’t fully recognize the authenticity of non-Orthodox Judaism, and that an agreement to create a permanent egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall has been repeatedly shelved under pressure from Israel’s religious right.
We are in for a tough time in terms of Diaspora-Israel relations. You know, it’s not just about the issues that have been on the table over the past few years that have been disappointing to Diaspora Jewry, whether it be the Western Wall arrangement, whether it be recognition of Conservative and Reform Judaism inside of Israel, whether it be things like the Law of Return, which now seems to be under threat. In general, this question of values, which has been a big deal, is going to be even more front and center. Many American Jews have looked at Israel and thought of it as a place that shares liberal values with the United States. To some extent, that’s been historically accurate. But that picture, whether it’s accurate or not, is going to be under incredible strain.
What about within Israel? Are there any countervailing powers that might moderate the far right — professional military leadership, major business leaders, other opinion-makers outside the political process?
Thankfully, there is no history of IDF leadership interfering in the political decisions of elected civilian leaders in Israel. I hope that will continue. The way the security establishment has generally dealt with these sorts of things is by presenting a united front when they speak to the political leadership and give their opinions and advice and warnings about what might happen. They tend to be very savvy at leaking those opinions to the media. I’m certain that that sort of thing will continue. We already saw some discord over the past week between IDF leadership and some of the members of the prospective new coalition over disciplinary measures that were taken against soldiers who were serving in Hebron, one of whom punched a [Palestinian] protester, another who verbally assaulted a protester. And that can be a moderating influence, but I actually do not expect to see the military leadership stepping in any way in preventing something that the government may want to do.
The biggest check will be Israelis themselves. There was something else interesting that happened [last] week: Avi Maoz, who was the single member of Knesset from Noam, which is one of these three very, very radical right-wing parties, was appointed as a deputy minister in the prime minister’s office, and he was given control over effectively everything in education that is not part of the core curriculum and Israeli schools — like culture and Jewish identity issues. And that led to a revolt from Israeli mayors. You’ve had over 100 mayors of over 100 municipalities signing a letter saying that they are not going to be bound by Maoz’s dictates on curriculum. And this includes right-wing cities. I think that the most effective check is going to be government overreach, which leads to a backlash like this among Israeli citizens and among Israeli politicians who are not members of Knesset.
We’ve covered a lot of ground. Is there something we haven’t touched upon?
It’s really important that people don’t look at what’s taking place in Israel, throw up their hands and say, “You know, there’s nothing we can do to change this and Israelis are increasingly uninterested in what we think and so we’re going to disengage.” To my mind, the relationship that American Jews have to Israel is too important to just throw up our hands and say it doesn’t matter.
If we take American Jewish identity seriously, and we take the American Jewish project seriously, we have to think about two things. First, how we build an American Jewish identity that’s uniquely American. But second, how we preserve some sort of relationship with Israel, even when we see things coming from Israel that don’t speak to our Jewish values. We’re living in a time where we have an independent Jewish state with Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. This is a historical anomaly. If we turn our backs on that, despite all of the difficulties, it really would be a tragedy and catastrophic for American Jewish identity.
If you don’t like what you see going on in Israel, try to figure out what your relationship with Israel will look like and how to have a productive one. And that doesn’t have to mean supporting everything the Israeli government does. I consider myself you know, somebody who is a strong Zionist, strongly pro-Israel. It’s a place that I love. I agree with almost nothing that I’m going to see from this Israeli government. But I’m still able to have a strong, meaningful relationship with the State of Israel, and I hope that people are able to do the same, irrespective of the day-to-day of Israeli politics.
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Lawn signs for Abdul, door knocking for Haley: Michigan Jews split in Senate Democratic primary
(JTA) — OAK PARK, Michigan – Karen Bick has spent the days leading up to Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary fielding calls from Jewish friends urging her to vote for U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.
Despite the pressure, Bick, 69, said she plans to sit out the race altogether. As much as she is compelled by the campaign of Stevens’ progressive opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, his accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza have kept her from voting for him. Stevens’ campaign, she said, hasn’t given her enough reason to vote for her instead.
“I am very pro-Israel. I’m not pro-Netanyahu, which is part of the whole thing. A lot of my friends who are Jewish have been calling me, trying to get Haley, but it’s like they’re looking at one issue,” said Bick, a Jewish resident of Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit. “I don’t think that Israel should take precedence over all the other issues just because somebody’s pro-Israel.”
Bick’s ambivalence reflects a divide among Michigan Jews in a primary where Israel has emerged as one of the sharpest contrasts between the candidates. Stevens has served in the House since 2019 as a reliable supporter of Israel, while El-Sayed, a former county health official, has made opposition to U.S. support for Israel and AIPAC’s spending in the race a hallmark of his campaign.
That doesn’t mean El-Sayed is without Jewish supporters.
Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a longtime Detroit resident who helped found the city’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, has been campaigning for El-Sayed since the beginning of the race, including organizing fundraisers, phone banking and canvassing. She also helped organize “Jews for Abdul,” a group of Jewish supporters working to elect him.
Weinberg Barefield, 76, said that El-Sayed’s use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza was an essential component of her support for him.
“We are trying to let people know that there are many Jewish people that support Abdul and support his objectives and support his voice,” Weinberg Barefield said. “Justice, equality, and freedom are part of the fabric of me being a Jew and the message that we put forth for ‘Jews for Abdul:’ that he is a candidate that represents our morality, our ethics, and frankly, I think these are the things that most people in this country want.”
Suzanne Levin, an 83-year-old Jewish Michigander, initially supported Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, whose withdrawal from the race left progressive Jews in the state facing a political dilemma.
For Levin, the choice quickly became clear. She got an El-Sayed lawn sign and “Jews for Abdul” t-shirt and threw her support behind his campaign.
In doing so, Levin has rejected accusations from Stevens and some Jewish Democratic leaders in the state that El-Sayed’s rhetoric and associations have crossed the line into antisemitism.
“They believe all this crap about El-Sayed, that he’s antisemitic, and I have listened to so many of his talks, and when they ask him ‘should there be an Israel,’ he says there should be a place where people could all be safe and and people should be okay,” Levin said.
Other Jewish Democrats have reached a starkly different conclusion about El-Sayed, who has said the Israeli government is as “evil” as Hamas and often accuses Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza while advocating that U.S. aid to Israel be diverted to domestic priorities.
Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Stevens, said that she had been “concerned” by El-Sayed’s response following the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
At the time, El-Sayed sparked outcry by putting out a statement that discussed Israel’s war in Lebanon, where the attacker’s brother was killed. Soifer said she believed El-Sayed “equivocated and provided a justification for a situation, which there was no justification.”
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population, he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism,” Soifer said. “On that issue in particular, Haley has been a leader in Congress.” The state has close to 130,000 Jews.
Soifer said her group’s volunteers had put out close to 10,000 calls to Michigan voters urging them to back Stevens.
Zach Nessel, a 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and the secretary of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus, shared many of Soifer’s concerns as he knocked on doors for Stevens in Oak Park Monday.
“I’m absolutely concerned about his rhetoric,” said Nessel, whose mother is Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. “I think he’s spending more of his time trying to ostracize pro-Israel Democrats than he is looking to fight Trump, and that’s what I see amongst a lot of his allies.”
Nessel said he had been especially concerned by El-Sayed’s campaign event at his alma mater in April alongside Hasan Piker, an anti-Israel streamer whose rhetoric has been called antisemitic by many Jewish groups and leaders.
“The fact that my former Dem Club is hosting an antisemite that has positive things to say about Hezbollah, a U.S. designated terrorist organization that has killed Americans, that’s horrifying,” Nessel said. “And the fact that you know Abdul is campaigning with someone like that is insane.”
Nessel said that he had visited over 500 homes across the Detroit area to champion Stevens. During his visits, he said voters rarely brought up Israel or AIPAC on their own.
But Nessel said he worried that a potential El-Sayed victory Tuesday could encourage other candidates to adopt similar tactics, with consequences for Jewish participation in the Democratic Party.
“Most people, they want to fight Trump and they want to make things more affordable,” Nessel said. “And if this sort of commotion is successful, then they’ll keep on doing it, and that’ll make it hard for members of the Jewish community to continue to participate in our party.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In a world of AI run amok, Yiddish folktales are making these theater wizards ‘cranky’
A unique theatrical performance inspired by Yiddish folk tales features dead Jews dancing at a cemetery, a prophet appearing in the form of a bunny rabbit and a stone-munching worm named Shamir. It all takes place within the confines of a 2’ X 4’ box known as a cranky and it’s coming to New York later this month as part of the International Puppet Fringe Festival.
For those unfamiliar with the decidedly low-tech medium, crankies are portable stages through which a panorama is scrolled by cranking a pair of wooden dowels. The characters and scenery on the scroll are usually accompanied by narration and music, in this case a live klezmer trio. In backlit crankies, shadow puppets can also be used for characters.
The cranky performance of Shterna and the Lost Voice was created by the Magid Ensemble, a far-flung interdisciplinary collective that includes a storyteller, a graphic artist and three former members of the Boston klezmer band Mamaliga. The members met when they were all living in Northampton, MA, which was described in one review of the ensemble as a “queer Yiddish diasporic hub.”
The decision to create a cranky grew out of the group’s frustration when they tried to keep performing a silent Yiddish film score they had composed. The score was played at a Toronto Jewish Film Festival screening in 2023. The cost for the rights to subsequent screenings of the silent film was prohibitively expensive, so the ensemble decided to create its own show. Accordion player Mattias Kaufmann said they really wanted to do a multimedia project that combined a concert, storytelling and visuals. Kaufmann had worked on some crankies years earlier and saw them as an exciting way to tell a story.
“I feel like they’re really powerful, especially the backlit crankies,” said Kaufmann, who composed the music for Shterna. “It’s not really full-fledged theater, but in many ways it is. It’s a cool in-between space of performance.”
Artist Kiah Raymond had done several crankies and violinist Rachel Leader had seen some.
“I just loved their portability,” Leader told me. “They’re quite small and we can travel with them.”
And travel they have. Shterna and the Lost Voice has been performed more than 50 times around the U.S. and Canada since April 2024. Many of the shows have been sold-out.
Into the cranky-verse
Painted moving panoramas date back many centuries but emerged as a popular form of entertainment in the 1800’s. They were constantly on tour in the U.S. and a number of European countries. The cranky is a smaller scale version of the panoramas and its revival in America is traced back to the mid-2010’s. Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater is widely credited with sparking the resurrection of the cranky.
Jenny Romaine, a Bread and Puppet alumnus who works with the Great Small Works theater collective in New York, praised the work of the Magid Ensemble.
“They’re taking the crafts of performance and visual theater and puppetry to new heights,” Romaine said. “I love their work.”
To consider how the cranky craze has spread in recent years, consider the Seattle-based cranky maker Sue Truman’s experience joining a Facebook group devoted to crankies in 2014. There were 30 people in the group at the time. It now has 4,500 members worldwide. Truman, who teaches people how to make crankies and runs the Crankie Factory website, estimates there are currently between 15 and 20 cranky festivals in the U.S. every year.
“It’s incredible how it has exploded,” she told me. “I get emails every week from people all over the world.”
As if to illustrate how quirky the cranky universe is, Truman is collaborating with a couple of Seattle’s old-timey musicians on a piece about a meteor storm in 1833 and its impact on quilters in the Pacific Northwest.
Or there’s Katherine Fahey, one half of the Baltimore cranky team known as The Lantern Sisters. which did a show about Baltimore’s horse-drawn street peddlers known as Arabbers.
Fahey ran into the Magid Ensemble at a cranky festival in New Jersey where each performer had ten minutes to strut their stuff. She was impressed with the excerpt of Shterna they presented.
“Their narrator was such a good storyteller,” Fahey told me in a phone interview after returning from a performance in Ohio. “And I liked how they kept the artwork simple. Just did paper cuts, all one color on the scroll. They told the story in this straightforward, beautiful way. I thought it was really lovely.”
A talent for cranking
Kiah Raymond, a Portland, Oregon-based tattoo artist and muralist, made the cranky for Shterna and the Lost Voice on a long roll of 24” wide butcher paper. It took them between four and six months to cut the characters and scenery into the paper and laminate the finished cuts with clear packing tape. Raymond pulled designs and patterns from a book about traditional Jewish paper cuts and used them as borders and backgrounds. Additional inspiration came from ketubas.
Raymond operates the cranky during the performance, which involves a lot more than just mindlessly cranking the two scrolls.
“You’re holding it taut but turning it at the same time,” Raymond explained. “You turn it faster or slower, depending on what’s happening in the story.”
There’s another quirk to cranking: At times you’ll be turning one hand considerably faster than the other, depending on where in the scroll the story is.
The lost voice in the Shterna story belongs to a man whose beautiful davening is cherished in his shtetl. After he loses the ability to daven, a woman named Shterna goes on a quest to retrieve it. Her sojourn takes her through the physical world, the underworld and the heavens.
A.C. Weaver, a scenic carpenter and Yiddish translator based in Northampton, came up with the story in collaboration with the ensemble’s members. Weaver narrates the show.
Weaver said their connection to traditional Jewish storytelling is thanks to their childhood rabbi, Steve Sager, at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, NC. Weaver said the late rabbi was an “incredible extemporaneous storyteller.”
The story line for the cranky emerged, Weaver said, during the COVID pandemic’s dark days when a lot of friends and neighbors were becoming sick or disabled.
“I felt motivated to make up a story having to do with disability and what it means to lose something around which a lot of your identity is based,” Weaver told me.
Storytellers and teachers
The word magid can mean storyteller, itinerant teacher or preacher. The role of the magid has been documented as far back as the 16th Century and there have been some major magids, including the Dubner Maggid of the late 18th Century and the Kelmer Maggid, who was a big macher in Musar, a spiritual practice focused on living a meaningful and ethical life.
The Magid Ensemble likes to define the word magid as “storyteller,” but the group also serves as a teacher and preacher to some degree.
Though not overtly political, Shterna does project values with a distinct world view: a woman as the hero and a nod to compassion for the disabled. The ensemble has also raised funds for a family from Gaza.
The production was created with start-up funding from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston and local cultural councils in Massachusetts. Leader said that altogether around $15,000 came in, including a $3,000 New England States Touring grant.
Analog in a digital world
Many in the cranky scene say one of the medium’s appeals is its analog nature at a time when so much of our entertainment is digital — and increasingly AI-generated.
More than one practitioner has likened cranky performances to “telling stories around a fire.” It’s an immersive experience, said Raffi Boden, a Brooklyn-based cellist in the ensemble.
“I think that there’s something really beautiful about seeing everything happening before your eyes’” he told me. “I think people are moved by witnessing something that comes together created in front of them in this beautiful, complete way.”
The immersion that audiences experience is likely why children as young as preschoolers have sat and watched the entire 50-minute show without interruption.
“I was a little worried going in because I was wondering, what if everybody starts screaming after 10 minutes because they’re bored?” Boden said.
Despite the embrace of the crankies’ intrinsic analog nature, more and more cranky festivals are providing live video projection if the performance is taking place in a big hall. It’s counterintuitive, concedes Truman, but on the other hand, “If you can’t see it, that’s not good. In the festivals where I’ve performed, nobody is complaining about them providing live video projection.”
Shterna and the Lost Voice will be performed during the International Puppet Fringe Festival August 13, 15 and 16 at Teatro LATEA on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that.
(JTA) — Missouri primary voters will travel back two years when they head to the polls on Tuesday. There they’ll confront a rematch of two candidates whose previous face-off was largely defined by an influx of AIPAC cash that helped oust one of Israel’s most ardent critics in Congress.
In 2024, AIPAC “demonstrated its clout,” in the words of The New York Times, with a massive contribution that knocked out incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush in favor of challenger Wesley Bell. In her concession speech, she promised revenge.
On Tuesday, Bush is seeking to make good on the pledge. But while she is competing against the same candidate, the political landscape around them has changed dramatically.
Since Bush’s loss in the district representing the St. Louis metropolitan region, AIPAC has become a bogeyman in the Democratic Party and Israel a major campaign issue. Other anti-Zionist members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been racking up victories in blue districts across the country throughout the 2026 primary season.
The changing winds might have given Bell incentive to shift to the left instead of leaving himself vulnerable to a challenger whose background and political stances are otherwise similar. But Bell has held firm in his support for Israel, enjoying the backing of mainstream Democrats and a continued financial infusion from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to the tune of more than $1 million this cycle.
As a result, Tuesday’s rematch is one of the most striking tests of whether AIPAC still has traction in Democratic strongholds or whether Bush and other DSA candidates have subdued the once-powerful lobby.
“The war is a lot different today than it was two years ago,” Braxton Payne, a St. Louis-based Democratic strategist, told JTA, referring to the Israel-Gaza conflict that unfolded following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. “Sentiment inside the Democratic Party, even among the establishment, has changed.”
In the past few years, the AIPAC has faced growing hostilities from ultra-left-wing politicians, who have denounced Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“AIPAC is now a household name in Democratic politics,” Payne noted.
But heading into Tuesday’s primaries, it wasn’t clear that the anti-AIPAC activism had moved the needle for St. Louis voters. While the polymarket prediction platform has given Bell a 66% chance of winning, compared to Bush’s 34%, there’s a dearth of nonpartisan polling. Bush’s campaign commissioned one of the few publicly available survey results, an April HIT Strategies poll that declared the candidates “statistically tied,” with Bell in the lead at 44% and Bush at 40%.
On paper, the two candidates have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, Bell and Bush are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
After protests for police reforms surged across the area for about a year, Bell won a seat on the city council and worked on enacting such changes. In a 2018 race for St. Louis County prosecutor, he defeated Bob McCulloch, a 27-year incumbent who had come under national scrutiny for failing to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown. Bell is now serving his first term in Congress.
Bush, meanwhile, first became engaged in politics as a participant in the Ferguson protests. Though she lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, success in 2020 led her to serve Missouri’s 1st Congressional District for two terms. But in 2024, Bush fell short, losing in the primaries to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates agree on most of their political platforms, both of which prioritize issues like reproductive freedom, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as reducing the costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they diverge when it comes to the Middle East, with Bush’s campaign promising to “stand for justice in Palestine.”
Like other DSA candidates in New York, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan, Bush’s campaign accuses Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza with the backing of “U.S. weapons and U.S. dollars.”
Following her loss to Bell in 2024, Bush threatened to tear down AIPAC’s “kingdom” after it spent nearly $9 million on her takedown, in one of the most expensive House races in U.S. history. Federal Election Commission records show that of that total, AIPAC invested about $3.4 million in support of Bell and about $5.2 million in opposition of Bush, through the lobby’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
“People are beginning to understand that — much like the crypto industry, AI, Big Oil, and Big Pharma — AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement.
“In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us,” Bush added.
Throughout her current rematch against Bell, Bush has gone after her opponent for his ties to AIPAC.
“Wesley Bell is a former Republican campaign manager who is bought and paid for by AIPAC,” Bush posted last month on X. Bush was referring to a 2006 period when Bell served as campaign manager for a conservative, which he has maintained was no more than a favor for a friend.
“We’re going back to DC, and we’ll do it with no corporate cash or AIPAC funded-trips,” Bush added, referencing Bell’s trip to Israel with the lobby group last year.
Yet compared to 2024, AIPAC has spent much less on the current race. Through its UDP super PAC, the lobby has invested in the neighborhood of $3 million in the rematch, with the vast majority spent opposing Bush, according to FEC data. Overall in this race, the candidates themselves have also raised fewer funds than they did two years ago, according to the FEC. Bell has secured $3.6 million and Bush $1.3 million, as opposed to $5.4 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in 2024.
Deryn Sousa, spokesperson for AIPAC, told JTA in a written statement that his group was proud to support Bell’s campaign.
“Bell is a principled fighter for the people of St. Louis, while Cori Bush spent her time in Congress missing votes and demonizing a key democratic ally,” Sousa added.
Bell did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
However, on the campaign trail, Bell said he was “proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, and support Israel, particularly in a time that has been very tumultuous,” in a March video posted by AIPAC.
“When we see what has happened in the last few years, I think it’s even more apropos to stand with our friends and one of our greatest allies,” he continued. “Oftentimes, what gets lost is yes, we support Israel, but Israel also supports us.”
And in Congress, Bell voted last month against an amendment that aimed to cut military aid to Israel. He has also previously co-sponsored a bill to increase defense partnerships with Israel, while also voting in favor of legislation that would have sanctioned the International Criminal Court for seeking to arrest U.S. allies, including Israeli officials.
David Cohen, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis, which does not endorse candidates, said the recent Iran war transformed “a national conversation about the Middle East into something more common.”
“The sheer number of conversations on this topic compared to the last race look different,” Cohen said. “The confluence of conspiracy theorists from the left and the right have blown out of proportion since the war started.”
Within these national conversations, which he described as “catchy” talking points and “black and white” discussions about AIPAC and Israel, Cohen warned that certain campaigns are “playing that dangerous game of demonizing Jews.”
Cohen said he believes that Bush’s campaign decided to focus on Israel because “they thought it would get her traction,” as opposed to focusing on the “many issues that people in Missouri care about.” Payne echoed Cohen’s sentiments, stressing that he “wouldn’t consider the Israeli-Hamas conflict as the top issue” at the ballot box amid higher-priority concerns like the “insane” cost of living. He noted that Bush’s “central campaign issue is AIPAC money,” a message that “motivates her base” but might not sway the everyday voter.
Jewish leaders and activists in the state have followed the race closely. Rabbi Ze’ev Smason, president of the Coalition for Jewish Values – Missouri, told JTA in an email that his organization also doesn’t endorse candidates. But the difference between Bell and Bush, he said, was obvious to his regional chapter of a national Orthodox rabbinic group.
While Bell “supports Israel’s right to self-determination” and to exist as a Jewish nation, Bush has “established an adversarial relationship with Israel abroad, as well as with the overwhelming majority of her Missouri constituents,” according to Smason.
“At home in her district, Cori Bush was a ‘no-show’ for her Jewish constituents,” Smason stated. “She regularly refused requests for interviews from the local Jewish press, and was shockingly absent from the dedication ceremony of the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, with no explanation.”
Cohen, whose JCRC branch serves 36 Jewish groups from “liberal to Conservative to Orthodox,” said that “almost none of them believe what Cori Bush believes about Israel.” Jews made up 4.1% of the population in the district as of 2024, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank.
On the other hand, Michael Berg, a volunteer for St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace, which is not a JCRC member, is among a minority of organized Jewish voices who oppose Bell due in large part to the candidate’s support for Israel. It was upsetting, Berg said, that Bell was “perfectly willing to take $15 million from the interests of a foreign government that’s committing a genocide.”
For Berg, the Israel-Gaza conflict is by no means a fringe concern. He praised Bush for her “unwavering advocacy” for a Gaza ceasefire and support for “multi-ethnic democracy,” as well as her refusal to accept corporate funds, her commitment to fighting climate change and her history of standing up for the interests of St. Louis’s people.
Bush has also earned the support of a second local Jewish group, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, who described her as “a champion for our St. Louis community and a brave leader in the fight for justice and peace for all people, regardless of where they call home.”
Out-of-state Jewish groups have also been vocal about their stances on this race, with the vast majority backing Bell, but some groups, like the IfNotNow movement, advocating for Bush. The Washington, D.C.-based IfNotNow, which calls for “a thriving future for all Israelis and Palestinians,” praised Bush for leading “the call for a ceasefire in Congress.”
In contrast, Jacob Spiegel, communications director of the Washington-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, recounted his organization’s grassroots action in favor of Bell. A network of volunteers, he explained in an email, is working to “elect the candidate we believe aligns with our Jewish values.”
Nonetheless, Berg maintained that even if Bell wins this race, the future “of the Democratic Party is only going in one direction,” which he said is the “direction of Democratic socialism.”
“The United States is increasingly becoming an anti-Zionist country,” Berg said. “The people understand they do not want the United States to continue to fund and support an ethno-national state in the Middle East that oppresses half of its people.”
Regardless of who is victorious, Payne predicted that the outcome would give “fodder” to the triumphant side. Payne, who noted his position as a non-Jewish “outsider,” said he believes that a fear of antisemitism will be motivating many Jewish voters as they head to the polls.
“To be frank, I think it’s a fear that it’s not ill-placed or unfounded,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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