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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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The post Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In upcoming Israeli election, Netanyahu is preparing to blame a loss on conspiracy
On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, retired Maj. Gen. Yair Golan woke to sirens and reports of something terrible happening in southern Israel. At around 8 a.m., as the scale of the Hamas invasion was becoming clear, the former deputy chief of staff told his wife he had to go back to the army, found his old military gear, got dressed and left home. He first drove to the Home Front Command headquarters where he grasped the dimensions of the catastrophe, obtained a weapon, vest and helmet, and continued south in his private car.
Eventually Golan began receiving the locations of young people hiding from Hamas gunmen around the Nova music festival and drove into the fields looking for them. Oz Davidian, the farmer who became one of the civilian heroes of Oct. 7, encountered Golan in a tiny Toyota Yaris that could not cross a ravine. Davidian helped him across in his truck; Golan covered him with his rifle, and together they went looking for three young people hiding from terrorist fire. Golan would ultimately rescue six survivors in three trips.
His actions became one of the day’s extraordinary stories of individual initiative amid the collapse of the Israeli state: a 61-year-old retired general – who currently heads the Democrats, a liberal opposition party dedicated to peace with the Arabs – put on his uniform, climbed into a Toyota and went looking for kids who needed saving. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on that dark Saturday, was not heard from until the evening.
Almost three years later, Sara Netanyahu has discovered something sinister in this story.
“When you’re a military man of such high rank,” the prime minister’s wife said in an interview Monday on the fiercely pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, “already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the prime minister?”
She followed this with a sarcastic question: “Who is the prime minister anyway to know that a war is breaking out? Why let him know?”
Asked directly about the increasingly popular theory that there had been “treason” from within Israel on Oct. 7, she left the possibility hanging, saying she wanted a genuine commission of inquiry to establish what happened.
It is the prime minister, of course, who has blocked an inquiry commission. It’s also Netanyahu who in the months preceding the attack refused to meet with the heads of the military, the Mossad and the Shin Bet, who were desperate to warn him that the uproar created by his authoritarian reforms was projecting weakness and inviting attack. Netanyahu is the author of the theory that there is value in Hamas ruling Gaza, since it undermines the West-Bank-based Palestinian Authority. It was his far-right political allies who were planning provocations against Palestinians in the West Bank on Oct. 7, causing the military to divert massive resources there, leaving the Gaza border catastrophically under-guarded.
With the Oct. 27 election fast approaching, Sara Netanyahu’s interview has become the talk of Israeli politics. In the strange calculus of the Netanyahu machine, it hardly matters that the claims make no sense – since there is no dispute about Golan’s aim that day: to fight Hamas and not assist it. There is a bizarre value in the very incoherence – the more confusion, somehow, the better (even if the cost is undermining public faith in the security establishment, in a country facing existential security threats).
Golan threatened to sue Netanyahu for 2.5 million shekels (about $800,000) for defamation and demanded an apology. Netanyahu responded with a demand that Golan apologize to her and threatened a million-shekel countersuit. Opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister, congratulated Golan for fighting back and described people who spread such conspiracy theories as “psychopaths.”
The uproar reflects a common understanding of the insinuation: Sara Netanyahu was invoking a conspiratorial universe that has been expanding on the Israeli right since the massacre. According to this conspiracy, Oct. 7 represented something more sinister than a catastrophic intelligence and military failure. In this universe, somebody inside Israel betrayed the country.
The theory comes in many variations. Senior officers knew what was coming. The Shin Bet knew. The generals deliberately kept Netanyahu in the dark. Leaders of the anti-government protest movement were somehow involved. Elements of a hostile “deep state” wanted Hamas to humiliate Netanyahu and bring down his government. The genuine mysteries, warnings and failures preceding the massacre supply endless material from which insinuations can be fashioned, transforming the most devastating security failure in Israeli history into a story of deliberate betrayal by Netanyahu’s domestic enemies.
The betrayal theory has steadily traveled from social media and fringe broadcasters toward the political mainstream. A Reichman University survey previously found that almost a third of Israelis believed to some degree that elements within Israel assisted Hamas in order to harm Netanyahu. Likud Knesset member Tally Gotliv has accused security officials, protest leaders and other political enemies of varieties of treachery, while the prime minister’s son Yair has repeatedly promoted suspicions about the security establishment’s conduct surrounding the attack.
From conspiracy to campaign
This week brought the conspiracy theory directly into the election campaign. Channel 12 political correspondent Daphna Liel reported, citing a Likud source, that an intentional campaign is underway to promote Oct. 7 conspiracy theories in order to distance Netanyahu from responsibility for the massacre “at all costs.”
Golan himself described the same pattern after Sara Netanyahu’s interview, arguing that the remarks represented a planned effort in which Netanyahu’s political opponents are branded as traitors and conspiracy theories supply the evidence.
This fits neatly into Netanyahu’s fixation with avoiding the blame for Oct. 7 – and it comes amid a wider context: The Netanyahu political machine has spent years cultivating distrust of the police, prosecutors, judges, journalists, civil servants and military commanders who come into conflict with the prime minister. The Oct. 7 betrayal narrative folds the greatest catastrophe in Israeli history into this already familiar worldview.
The episode fits an election campaign already distinguished by extraordinary personal ugliness. Netanyahu has circulated an AI-generated video depicting his principal challenger, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, running toward a young man wearing a shirt bearing the words “Israeli unity,” only to run past him and embrace Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Ra’am party. The young man in the commercial bore sufficient resemblance to Eisenkot’s son Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023, provoking outrage over what many Israelis saw as an exploitation of Eisenkot’s bereavement. The underlying message of the video was that Eisenkot’s willingness – very much felicitous in a country whose population is one-fifth Arab – to cooperate politically with Arab Israelis amounted to treason.
The same campaign has returned repeatedly to the proposition that Netanyahu’s opponents depend upon hostile or alien forces. A Likud billboard displayed New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani alongside the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Turkey beneath the slogan: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.”
Former Netanyahu allies from the right increasingly describe a political culture in which ordinary democratic rivalry has been replaced by a language of enemies, traitors and conspirators amid an obsession to cling to power.
Naftali Bennett, another former leader of the Israeli right, has warned that the “poison machine” surrounding Netanyahu has grown sufficiently toxic to create the possibility of physical violence against political opponents.
Lieberman’s furious response to the Golan affair comes from the same place. The strategy presents an obvious electoral paradox. Netanyahu enters this campaign needing precisely the voters this rhetoric is likely to repel. Polls have repeatedly given the parties opposed to him a substantial advantage, with most surveys forecasting the broader anti-Netanyahu bloc above 70 of the Knesset’s 120 seats – a landslide by Israeli standards.
The route back to 61 – the number of seats Netanyahu needs to stay in power – therefore runs through Israelis outside Netanyahu’s committed base, with voters who in many cases are security-minded, suspicious of the Palestinians, uncomfortable with the traditional left and deeply critical of the military and intelligence leadership for the failures of Oct. 7.
Netanyahu’s campaign increasingly appears designed to intensify the worldview of the committed rather than soften it for the persuadable. Persuadable voters can readily believe that generals failed catastrophically, that intelligence officials succumbed to groupthink, that the protest movement behaved irresponsibly or that Netanyahu’s opponents have pursued him obsessively. A claim that Yair Golan’s rescue missions indicate advance knowledge of the Hamas attack asks them to enter a considerably stranger universe.
Netanyahu has spent years turning political conflict into an existential contest in which his supporters defend their democratic choice against hostile “elites” and institutions. The betrayal theory takes this to its logical destination by placing the catastrophe of Oct. 7 itself inside the conspiracy.
Striking similarities
Here the comparison with Donald Trump goes considerably deeper than the familiar spectacle of a populist leader attacking judges, prosecutors or unfavorable election results. In both the United States and Israel, something profound has happened to the traditional conservative relationship with the state. Institutions once revered because they embodied national continuity — the military, intelligence services, law enforcement, the courts and the permanent civil service — increasingly become suspect whenever they demonstrate that their loyalty runs to the country and its laws rather than to the political leader who temporarily governs it.
For generations, the right in both countries occupied almost the opposite position. American conservatives wrapped themselves in the FBI, the armed forces and the authority of the state, while Israeli conservatives placed enormous cultural weight on the IDF and the security services as guardians of the Jewish state. The populist transformation has turned this on its head, producing a peculiar new mutation in which loyalty to the state becomes subordinate to loyalty to a leader who claims to embody the state.
Thus, a general who has devoted his life to Israel but challenges Netanyahu can become the target of a sinister conspiracy theory vehiculated by the prime minister’s wife on a propaganda channel.
The Oct. 7 conspiracy theories represent an especially extreme version of this logic. Israel’s military and intelligence establishment can be accused of having tolerated or even facilitated the greatest massacre in the country’s history because such a theory shifts responsibility away from Netanyahu and toward the institutions whose independence has become a political problem for him. Once such a proposition enters ordinary political discourse, distrust of judges, civil servants and election administrators requires a comparatively modest leap of imagination.
The connection to the coming election follows directly from this inversion. A public taught that generals and intelligence chiefs were capable of concealing an impending invasion from the prime minister has already been asked to believe in a conspiracy vastly more elaborate than anything required to manipulate an election.
A public taught that judges, prosecutors, police, journalists, civil servants and opposition politicians have joined a campaign to overthrow its chosen leader has been supplied with an explanation for almost any future defeat. Victory can be presented as the triumph of the people over the establishment; defeat can be interpreted as further evidence of the establishment’s power.
Israel already entered this campaign amid extraordinary anxiety about the integrity of the coming election. Earlier this summer, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak publicly warned that Netanyahu might attempt to sabotage it. Supreme Court Justice Noam Solberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, has discussed the narrow legal circumstances under which a genuine national emergency could justify postponing a vote. Golan has warned about attempts to alter election rules and announced plans for extensive monitoring of the vote. Scenarios that would have sounded fantastical during most of Israel’s history have entered ordinary political discussion as Netanyahu approaches an election that threatens to end his extraordinarily long political career.
Oct. 7 vs. Oct. 27
Trump’s experience shows how this political logic can operate when an election finally produces the wrong answer. His campaign against the legitimacy of American elections began years before Jan. 6, 2021, through the repeated proposition that an election system capable of producing his defeat must itself be fraudulent. By the time the 2020 election arrived, millions of supporters already possessed an explanation for a Trump loss. The epistemological groundwork had been laid. Victory demonstrated the people’s will, while defeat demonstrated the conspiracy.
Netanyahu operates in a different political system and national culture, but his increasingly conspiratorial campaign is constructing a comparable political logic in Israel. The institutions capable of declaring that he has lost overlap increasingly with the institutions his supporters are being taught to distrust. The judges belong to the hostile legal establishment; the civil servants belong to the bureaucracy; the media cannot be believed; the security establishment might have betrayed the country on Oct. 7; political opponents may themselves have participated in the conspiracy. A movement immersed in this worldview enters Election Day with an explanation already available should the voters remove its leader.
The transformation of Yair Golan’s Oct. 7 story captures where these politics lead. On the worst morning in Israel’s history, thousands of citizens waited desperately for a state that had disappeared. Reservists, retired officers, farmers, police officers and ordinary people rushed south to fill the vacuum. Golan put on his uniform, found a weapon, climbed into his little Toyota and drove toward the massacre, eventually helping rescue young Israelis hiding from Hamas gunmen in the fields.
Three years later, the prime minister’s wife points to the speed with which he responded as grounds for suspicion, turning evidence of initiative into an insinuation of foreknowledge. The same political method turns military failure into treason, institutional independence into disloyalty and political opposition into subversion. Carried through an election campaign, the logic has one further destination: electoral defeat itself can become another suspicious event requiring explanation.
Much of the Israeli center recoiled from Sara Netanyahu’s interview because the innuendo seemed grotesque. The larger danger lies in the political culture being constructed around precisely such innuendo, one in which patriotism is measured by loyalty to a leader and every person or institution standing between Benjamin Netanyahu and continued power can be cast as part of the plot.
In this sense, Oct. 27 is emerging as a perhaps ever more fateful date than Oct. 7. If the Netanyahu machine is not decisively routed, it is not at all clear that the country can recover as a democracy where the discourse is sane.
The post In upcoming Israeli election, Netanyahu is preparing to blame a loss on conspiracy appeared first on The Forward.
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‘New year, play a happy tune’
צום נײַעם יאָר שיקן מיר אַ באַגריסונג צו די לייענער מיט אַ וווּנטש זיי זאָלן זיך אויסבעטן אַ גוט־יאָר — אַ יאָר פֿון גליק, געזונט, מזל און שלום. זאָל דעם ייִדישן פֿאָלק באַשערט זײַן צו לעבן אין פֿרידלעכע צײַטן און זאָל דער פֿאָרווערטס ממשיך זײַן, ווי ביז אַהער, זײַן ראָלע ווי אַ שײַנטורעם פֿון ליכט פֿאַרן ייִדישן פֿאָלק. מיר ברענגען ווײַטער עטלעכע מוסטערן פֿון דער פּאָעזיע וואָס ייִדישע פּאָעטן האָבן געשאַפֿן לכּבֿוד ראָש־השנה אין פֿאַרשיידענע צײַטן.
(ח. מ.)
לשנה טובֿה תּכּתבֿו
פֿון י. ל. פּרץ
לשנה טובֿה תּכּתבֿו!
אַלע, אַלע, וווּ איר זײַט!
צי אײַך האָט דאָס האַרטע מזל
אויף אַ וויסטן סטעפּ פֿאַרשפּרייט!
צי איר קילט די הייסע שטערן
בײַ דער נאַסער מערבֿ־וואַנט,
צי איר שיפֿט אײַך איבער ימען
צו אַ נײַ פֿאַרשפּראָכן לאַנד!
צי איר טראָגט דעם יאָך דעם שווערן
מיט אַ שמייכל: אײַ, ווי גרינג!
און איר קויפֿט די לופֿט צו לעבן
און איר צאָלט פֿאַר יעדן שלינג!
אַלע אײַך צום יאָר צום נײַעם —
יעדער שפּראַך און יעדעס קלייד —
לשנה טובֿה תּכּתבֿו!
אַלע, אַלע, וווּ איר זײַט!
•
ראָש־השנה
פֿון ב. י. ביאַלאָסטאָצקי
עס קלאַפּט אין טיר אַ נײַער יאָר:
— איך קום צו אײַך מיט פֿריידן נאָר.
דאָס הויז ווערט אָנגעפֿילט מיט שײַן.
— לשנה טובֿה, קום אַרײַן!
און ס׳רעדט דאָס נײַע יאָר און זאָגט:
„— גענוג געוויינט, גענוג געקלאָגט.
איר האָט געליטן לאַנג, צו לאַנג,
שוין צײַט צו זינגען אַ געזאַנג.
איך ברענג אײַך גוטס, נאָר איר אַליין
דאַרפֿט זײַן אין האַרץ אויך גוט און ריין.
אַ מענטש צו מענטש דאַרף ברודער זײַן,
און אויס מיט קריג, און אויס מיט פּײַן.“
מיר הערן צו די רייד זיך צו,
דער שופֿר בלאָזט: טרו־טרו־טרו.
די באָבע בעט און מורמלט פֿרום:
לשנה טובֿה, קום שוין, קום.
•
לשנה טובֿה
פֿון ישׂראל גובקין
צי איר רעדט העברעיִש,
ייִדיש, אַראַמיש;
צי איר רעדט כינעזיש,
צי גאָר פּאָרטוגעזיש.
צי איר וווינט אין כינע,
צי אין אַרגענטינע;
צי איר וווינט אין בעמען,
צי אין ווײַטן יעמען.
וואָס איר זאָלט נישט רעדן,
וווּ איר זאָלט נישט זײַן,
ייִדן־קינדער זײַט איר,
קינדער קליין און פֿײַן.
שיק איך אײַך פֿון ווײַטנס
ברכות אָן אַ צאָל.
ווינטש איך אײַך שוין ווידער,
זאָג איך נאָך אַ מאָל:
לשנה טובֿה תּכּתבֿו!
•
ראָש־השנה
פֿון אַבֿרהם זאַק
ס׳קומט ווידער אונדזער ראָש־השנה,
אַ נײַער יאָר קומט ווידער —
מיט שאַל פֿון תּקיעות אין די שילן,
מיט אַלטע תּפֿילה־לידער.
עס שטייען ייִדן אין טליתים,
עס בעטן ייִדן פֿרומע,
און ס׳טראָגן זיך אַוועק די תּפֿילות
הויך צו די הימלען שטומע.
דער חזן זינגט — ס׳אַראַ מתיקות
נעמט דורך די גאַנצע עדה,
זינגט־מיט דער טאַטע אינעם טלית,
אין קיטל זינגט דער זיידע.
און אַלע זײַנען איצט מכוון:
אַ יאָר פֿון פֿרייד און פֿרידן —
פֿאַר אונדזער ייִדישער מדינה,
פֿאַר אַלע, אַלע ייִדן.
•
נײַ־יאָר
פֿון שמעון פֿרוג
נײַ־יאָר — שפּיל, מײַן אַלטע פֿידל!
שפּיל אַ נײַ, פֿריילעך לידל,
זינג אַ נײַעם, זיסן שיר —
דײַנע סטרונעס זאָלן קלינגען,
אַלע הערצער זאָלן זינגען,
זינגען, פֿרייען זיך מיט דיר…
און די פֿידל ענטפֿערט:
— אויף אַ בוים בײַם טײַך פֿון בבֿל
בין געהאָנגען איך אַמאָל,
און נאָר קלאָגן ווי אַן אָבֿל
קאָן פֿון דעמאָלט אָן מײַן קול…
ניין. איך האָב קיין נײַע לידער,
אַלטע קען איך, ליבע ברידער
דאָרט, בײַם גרויסן אַלטן טײַך
האָב איך זיי געהערט פֿאַרצײַטן
און אויף אַלע נײַע צײַטן
איינס נאָר ווינטשן וועל איך אײַך:
מיט זײַן ליבע, מיט זײַן טרײַהייט
זאָל גאָט שענקען אײַך צוריק
אײַער אַלטע קראַפֿט און פֿרײַהייט,
אײַער אַלטע גליק…
The post ‘New year, play a happy tune’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
How Hamas still holds Gaza captive
Almost 10 months after the October 2025 President Trump‑brokered ceasefire and hostage‑release agreement that formally ended the war between Israel and Hamas, the conflict is anything but over.
For there to be real progress, both sides of this discourse need to confront an uncomfortable truth: Palestinians retain real agency even within a profound power imbalance, and Hamas — not just Israeli policy — bears direct responsibility for wrecking Gaza and the Palestinian national project. That means an honest reckoning with a pattern of strategic miscalculation running from the Second Intifada through Oct. 7, and a clear-eyed recognition that until Hamas’s grip on Gaza is broken, two million Palestinians remain its hostages as much as anyone else’s.
Gaza’s conditions continue to deteriorate. What was meant to launch a phased transitional process is paralyzed. The Trump‑created Board of Peace has achieved almost none of its stated objectives. Gaza remains largely destroyed, with the Israeli military now controlling nearly two‑thirds of the territory, expanding well beyond the original “Yellow Line.” Hamas, the fascistic terror group whose catastrophic Oct. 7, 2023 attack unleashed unprecedented suffering on Palestinians in Gaza, is vastly weakened but still rules a third of the Strip, where two million people remain trapped under its totalitarian grip.
Equally troubling is the state of discourse around Israel and Palestine, especially in Western societies like the United States. Many who call themselves “pro‑Palestine” have refused, out of negligence, ignorance, or deliberately, to confront Hamas’s narrative, behavior, and agenda. Yet they played a significant role in worsening and escalating the discourse, promoting overtly pro‑Hamas ideas under slogans of “resistance” while normalizing or excusing the group’s criminality, history, and anti-Palestinian behavior for nearly two years after Oct. 7.
On the other side, many who identify as “pro‑Israel,” whether they are diaspora Jews, non-Jews or Israelis, have insisted on treating or considering all Gazans as Hamas — either supporters of the terror group, endorsers of its actions, or perpetual enemies of Jewish existence. Whether due to dehumanization, misinformation, or difficulty parsing complex evidence, many could not grasp that Gazans, despite their contemporary grievances with Israeli policy or historic ones with Zionism, were deeply antagonistic toward Hamas long before Oct. 7 and have turned against the terror group en masse since then.
As a Palestinian who spent much of his childhood in Gaza, and lost many family members in Israeli attacks, I want to reach both these camps: those who consider themselves pro‑Palestine, as well as those in the pro-Israel camp who need to see how Israeli policy choices have influenced Hamas’s rise and control in Gaza.
For the pro-Palestine group, introspection, accountability, and soul-searching are urgently needed to assess historic and contemporary Palestinian failures, including Oct. 7, the latest tragic iteration of strategic miscalculation. Hamas has catastrophically damaged the Palestinian national project, destroying hopes for statehood, weakening pragmatic leadership, empowering far-right forces in Israel, and eroding Palestinian values and social cohesion from within. Yes, there is an imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians. But within that imbalance exists meaningful space for Palestinian agency. Acknowledging this is not “blaming the victims,” as detractors claim; it is the first step toward empowering Palestinians to make decisions and choices that improve their prospects and outcomes.
Needed: An honest critique of Hamas
Hamas embedded itself across Gazan society by weaponizing religion and social services, especially in the refugee camps that had become mini-cities. Crucially, and often forgotten, Hamas’s first victims were Palestinians, not Israelis — only after 1987 did Israel become its primary target.
I watched the group’s rise in Gaza City firsthand, including encounters my own family had with senior Hamas figures, without falling into its grip. The Second Intifada, the 2005 disengagement, and Hamas’s violent takeover on June 14, 2007 — the very day I had my U.S. political asylum interview, making me the first Gazan granted asylum on the basis of Hamas’s control of the territory — are the hinge points that led to Oct. 7.
As I lay out at greater length in my new book, Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages, this is a story of Oslo’s optimism curdling into the trauma of the Second Intifada, the collapse of the political process, and Hamas’s steady rise to power. Much of today’s pro-Palestinian discourse is saturated with critique of Israel but starved of honest critique of Hamas, and of the Palestinian leaders, groups, and elites who have failed and even betrayed their own people.
The “pro‑Palestine” community, especially diaspora Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians in the U.S., refuses to face this reality. A recent Pew survey found that 44% of American Muslims say they support Hamas, a figure that is likely an undercount based on my negative experiences in trying to promote the kind of perspectives I offer here. An April poll found that over 40% of Americans aged 18 to 34 said they supported Hamas over Israel.
My plea to the pro-Palestinian movement
These numbers prove pro‑Palestine discourse is in shambles. Failed, ineffective, and morally reprehensible types of armed “resistance” like taking women and children as hostages on Oct. 7 are glorified. Hamas is excused, supported, and whitewashed. Extreme anti‑Zionism is now the mainstream, increasingly merging seamlessly with antisemitism. And there is no realism or pragmatism; no viable solutions that actually help Gazans, and a discourse that is completely detached from the very people it proclaims to champion.
The gap between what Gazans think, feel, want, and believe is wider than ever from the majority of the pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist movements in the Western world. When Hamas tortures, beats, kills, and abuses Gazans, they are ignored at best, or labeled collaborators, traitors, and worthy of execution at worst. For the most part, Palestinians in Gaza have devolved into being mere pawns — convenient elements of broader anti-Western, post-colonial, anti-capitalist, and social-justice narratives that have little to do with actually helping Gazans.
This is a plea to those who genuinely care about the Palestinian people: learn the bare minimum about the most destructive force in contemporary Palestinian history. Separate the Palestinian people’s just and urgent aspirations for freedom and prosperity from Hamas, Jihadi Islamism and violent extremism. Until that is done, Hamas will continue to hold two million hostages in Gaza.
The post How Hamas still holds Gaza captive appeared first on The Forward.
