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A law professor worries Israel could become the next Hungary
(JTA) — Israel’s new governing coalition has been called the “most right-wing” in the nation’s history. That’s heartening to supporters who want the country to get tough on crime and secure Jewish rights to live in the West Bank, and dismaying to critics who see a government bent on denying rights to Israel’s minorities and undermining any hope for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While the far-right politics of new government ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have drawn much of the world’s attention, a series of proposed changes to Israel’s judicial system has also been raising hopes and alarms. On Wednesday, new Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced an overhaul that would limit the authority of the High Court of Justice, Israel’s Supreme Court. It would put more politicians on the selection committee that picks judges, restrict the High Court’s ability to strike down laws and government decisions and enact an “override clause” enabling the Knesset to rewrite court decisions with a simple majority.
Levin and his supporters on the right justify these changes as a way to restore balance to a system that he says puts too much control in the hands of (lately) left-leaning judges: “We go to the polls, vote, elect, and time after time, people we didn’t elect choose for us. Many sectors of the public look to the judicial system and do not find their voices heard,” he asserted. “That is not democracy.”
Critics of the changes call them a power grab, one that will hand more leverage to the haredi Orthodox parties, remove checks on the settlement movement and limit civil society groups’ ability to litigate on behalf of Israeli minorities.
To help me make sense of the claims on both sides, I turned to Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, where he is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, which gathers and analyzes the constitutions of all independent nation-states. He’s also a Jew who has transformed a former synagogue on the South Side of Chicago into a cutting-edge arts space, and says what’s happening with Israel’s new governing coalition “raises my complicated relationship with the country.”
We spoke on Friday. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You have written about law in Israel, which lacks a constitution but relies on a series of “basic laws” to define its fundamental institutions. You’ve written that the Israeli judiciary had become “extremely powerful” — maybe too powerful — in imbuing the basic laws with a constitutional character, but worry that the current reforms will politicize the court in ways that will undermine Israeli democracy.
Tom Ginsburg: The proposed reforms were a campaign promise of certain elements of this coalition who have had longstanding grievances against the Israeli judiciary. The Israeli judiciary over the last decades has indeed become extremely powerful and important in writing or rewriting a constitution for Israel, promoting human rights and serving as a check and balance in a unicameral parliamentary system where the legislature can do anything it wants as a formal matter. A lot of people have had problems with that at the level of theory and practice. So there have been some reforms, and the court has, in my view, cut back on its activism in recent decades and in some sense has been more responsive to the center of the country. But there’s longstanding grievances from the political right, and that’s the context of these proposals.
A lot of the concerns about the new government in Israel are coming from the American Jewish left. But in an American context, the American Jewish left also has a big problem with the United States Supreme Court, because they see it as being too activist on the right. So in some ways isn’t the new Israeli government looking to do what American Jewish liberals dream of doing in this country?
Isn’t that funny? But the context is really different. The basic point is that judicial independence is a really good thing. Judicial accountability is a really good thing. And if you study high courts around the world, as I do, you see that there’s kind of a calibration, a balancing of institutional factors which lead towards more independence or more accountability and sometimes things switch around over time.
Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin holds a press conference at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, Jan. 4, 2023. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
You mean “accountability” in the sense that courts should be accountable to the public.
Right. The Israeli promoters of these plans are pointing to the United States, in particular, for the proposals for more political involvement in the appointment process. On the other hand, in the United States once you’re appointed politically, you’re serving for life. There’s literally no check on your power. And so maybe some people think we have too much independence. If these proposals go through in Israel, there will be a front-end politicization of the court [in terms of the selection commission], but also back-end checks on the court [with the override clause that would allow a simple majority to reinstate laws struck down by the Supreme Court]. So in some sense, it moves the pendulum very far away from independence and very much towards accountability to the point of possible politicization.
And accountability in that case is too much of a good thing.
Again, you don’t want courts that can just make up rules. They should be responsive to society. On the other hand, you don’t want judges who are so responsive to society that there’s no protection for the basic rights of unpopular minorities.
What makes Israel either unique or different from some of the other countries you study, and certainly the United States? Part of it, I would guess, is the fact that it does not have a constitution. Is that a useful distinction?
They couldn’t agree on a single written constitution at the outset of the country, but they have built one through what you might call a “common law method”: norms and practices over time as well as the system of “basic laws,” which are passed by an absolute majority of the Knesset, where a majority of 61 votes can change any of those. But while they’re not formally entrenched, they have a kind of political status because of that term: basic law.
By the way, the Germans are in the same boat. The German constitution is called the Basic Law. And it was always meant to be a provisional constitution until they got together and reunified.
If you don’t have a written constitution, what’s the source of the legitimacy of judicial power? What is to prevent a Knesset from just passing literally any law, including ones that violate all kinds of rights, or installing a dictator? It has been political norms. And because Israel has relied on political norms, that means that this current conflict is going to have extremely high stakes for Israeli governance for many decades to come.
Can you give me a couple of examples? What are the high stakes in terms of democratic governance?
First of all, let me just say in principle that I don’t oppose reforms to make the judiciary more independent or accountable in any particular country. But then you obviously have to look at the local context. What’s a little worrying about this particular example is that several members of this coalition are themselves about to be subject to judicial proceedings.
Including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Right. And for example, they need to change the rules so that [Shas Party chairman] Aryeh Deri can sit in the cabinet despite his prior convictions. That indicates to me that maybe this isn’t a good-faith argument about the proper structure of the Israeli, uncodified constitution, but instead a mechanism of expediency.
Any one of these reforms might look okay, and you can find other countries that have done them. The combination, however, renders the judiciary extremely weak. Right now, it’s a multi-stakeholder commission that nominates and appoints judges in Israel, and the new coalition wants to propose that the commission be made up of a majority of politicians. We know that when you change the appointments mechanism to put more politicians on those committees, the more politicized they become.
Think about the United States process of appointing our Supreme Court judges: It’s highly politicized, and obviously the legitimacy of the court has taken a big hit in recent years. In Israel, you’d have politicized appointments under these reforms, but then you also have the ability of the Knesset to override any particular ruling that it wanted. Again, you can find countries which have that. It’s called the “new commonwealth model” of constitutionalism, in which courts don’t have the final say on constitutional matters, and the legislature can overrule them on particular rulings. But I think the combination is very dangerous because you could have a situation where the Knesset — which currently has a role in protecting human rights — can pick out and override specific cases, which really to me goes against the idea of the rule of law.
You mentioned other countries. Are there other countries where these kinds of changes were enacted and we saw how the experiment turned out?
The two most prominent recently are Hungary and Poland, which are not necessarily countries that you want to compare yourself to.
Certainly not if you are Israel.
Right. There’s so much irony here. When the new Polish government came in in 2015, they immediately manipulated the appointment system for the Constitutional Court and appointed their own majority, which then allowed them to pass legislation which probably would have been ruled unconstitutional. They basically set up a system where they were going to replace lower judges and so they were going to grow themselves into a majority of the court. And that’s led to controversy and rulings outside the mainstream that have led to protests, while the European Union is withholding funds and such from Poland because of this manipulation of the court.
In Hungary, Victor Orban was a really radical leader, and when he had a bare majority to change the constitution he wiped out all the previous jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. I don’t think the Israeli government would do that. But still there is this kind of worrying sense that they’re able to manipulate interpretation of law for their own particular political interest.
Another thing I want to raise is the potential for a constitutional crisis now. Suppose they pass these laws and the Israeli Supreme Court says, “Well, wait a minute, that interferes with our common law rules that we are bound by, going back to the British Mandate.” It conflicts with the basic law and they invoke what legal scholars call the “doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendments,” which is basically saying that an amendment goes against the core of our democratic system and violates, for example, Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic society. Israel has never done this, but it is a kind of tool that one sees deployed around the world in these crises. And if that happened, then I think you would have a full constitutional crisis on your hands in Israel.
Supreme Court President Aharon Barak speaks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a ceremony in the Supreme Court marking 50 years of law, Sept. 15, 1998. (Avi Ohayon)
What does a constitutional crisis look like?
Suppose you have sitting justices in Israel who say, “You know, this Knesset law violates the basic law and therefore it’s invalid.” And then, would the Knesset try to impeach those judges? Would they cut the budget of the judiciary? Would they back down?
When you compare Israel’s judicial system to other countries’ over the years, how does it stack up? Is it up there among the very strong systems or is it known for flaws that might have maybe hobbled its effectiveness?
It’s always been seen around the world as a very strong judiciary. Under the leadership of Aharon Barak [president of Israel’s Supreme Court from 1995 to 2006] it became extremely activist. And this provoked backlash in Israeli politics. That led to a kind of recalibration of the court where it is still doing its traditional role of defending fundamental rights and ensuring the integrity of the political process, but it’s not making up norms left and right, in the way that it used to. This is my perception. But it’s certainly seen as one of the leading courts around the world, its decisions are cited by others, and because of the quality of the judges and the complex issues that Israel faces it’s seen as a strong court and an effective court and to me a balanced court.
But, you know, I’m not in Israel, and ultimately, they’re going to figure out the question how balanced it is or where it’s going to go. I do worry that an unchecked majoritarian system, especially with a pure proportional representation model like Israel, has the potential for the capture of government by some minorities to wield power against other minorities. And that’s a problem for democracies — to some degree, that’s a problem we face in the United States.
How correctable are these reforms? I am thinking of someone who says, “These are democratically elected representatives who now want to change a system. If you want to change the system, elect your own majority.” Is the ship of state like this really hard to turn around once you go in a certain direction?
This is an area in which I think Israel and the United States have a lot of similarities. For several decades now, the judiciary has been a major issue for those on the political right. They thought the Warren Court was too left-leaning and they started the Federalist Society to create a whole cadre of people to staff the courts. They’ve done that and now the federal courts are certainly much more conservative than the country probably. But the left didn’t really have a theory of judicial power in the United States. And I think that’s kind of true in Israel: It’s a big issue for the political right, but the political left, besides just being not very cohesive at the moment, isn’t able to articulate what’s good about having an independent judiciary. It is correctable in theory, but that would require the rule of law to become a politically salient issue, which it generally isn’t in that many countries.
How do you relate to what is happening in Israel as a Jew, and not just a legal scholar?
That’s a great question, because it really raises my complicated relationship with the country. You know, I find it to be a very interesting democracy. I like going to Israel because it’s a society in which there’s a lot of argument, a lot of good court cases and a lot of good legal scholars. On one level, I connect with my colleagues and friends there who seem very demoralized about this current moment. And I honestly worry about whether this society will remain a Jewish and democratic one with the current coalition.
The rule of law is a part of democracy. You need the rule of law in order to have democracy function. And I know others would respond and say, “Oh, you’re just being hysterical.” And, “This isn’t Sweden, it’s the Middle East.” But the ethno-nationalist direction of the country bothers me as a Jew, and I hope that the court remains there to prevent it from deepening further.
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Yad Vashem says it has identified 5 million Holocaust victims with help of AI
(JTA) — Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, says it has reached a major milestone in its efforts to uncover the identities of all of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, crossing the 5-million name threshold with the help of AI.
That leaves 1 million names still unknown from the tally of 6 million murdered Jews that is synonymous with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.
Two years ago, Yad Vashem inaugurated a 26.5 foot-long “Book of Names,” which included the names of 4,800,000 victims of the Shoah, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.
Since then, researchers deployed AI technology and machine learning to analyze hundreds of millions of archival documents that were previously too extensive to research manually, according to Yad Vashem. In addition to covering large amounts of material quickly, the algorithms were taught to look out for variations of victims’ names, leading to the new identification of hundreds of thousands of victims.
Yad Vashem estimates an additional 250,000 names could still be recovered using the technology.
“Reaching 5 million names is both a milestone and a reminder of our unfinished obligation,” said Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, in a statement. “Behind each name is a life that mattered — a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever. It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”
The post Yad Vashem says it has identified 5 million Holocaust victims with help of AI appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish exodus underway from Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism initiative over Tucker Carlson
The Heritage Foundation’s marquee effort to combat antisemitism, a coalition known as Project Esther, is rapidly losing members following the conservative think tank’s public defense of Tucker Carlson after he gave a friendly interview to the white nationalist and antisemitic provocateur Nick Fuentes.
At least seven individuals and organizations affiliated with Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, launched last year under the Project Esther banner, have resigned or threatened to do so, citing Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s decision to stand by Carlson and his description of the television personality’s critics as a “venomous coalition.”
The defections suggest that Project Esther — unveiled on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack as a conservative “national strategy to counter antisemitism”— could be imploding.
Neither the co-chairs of the initiative nor the Heritage Foundation immediately responded to a request for comment about the resignations.
Conceived as a counterweight to the Biden administration’s 2023 antisemitism strategy, Heritage’s plan focused almost entirely on left-wing and pro-Palestinian activism, portraying what it called a “Hamas Support Network” as the chief driver of antisemitism in America.
From the outset, the project drew skepticism for not including most mainstream Jewish organizations and for downplaying antisemitism on the political right. That tension has now widened into a rupture.
The first public resignation from the task force came Sunday with an announcement from Mark Goldfeder, an Orthodox rabbi and the CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, that he was quitting in protest of Roberts’ defense of Carlson.
“Elevating him and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech. It is a moral collapse disguised as courage,” Goldfeder wrote in a letter posted to X.
On Monday, the New York Post reported on the resignation of David Bernstein, author of “Woke Antisemitism” and founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, who had served on the Heritage task force. Bernstein said Roberts’ language felt like “a real attack against Jewish political agency on the American scene.”
“The phrase ‘venomous coalition aligned against him [Carlson]’—that’s me and any Jewish person who cares about condemning antisemitism,” Bernstein said. “It allows you to justify almost anything said in the name of political conservatism, and that empties it of all meaning.”
There’s no public list of all Project Esther members, but several groups that are named on the initiative’s website told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that they had disaffiliated or were prepared to do so.
Lori Lowenthal Marcus, a lawyer with the Deborah Project, a legal group that fights antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, said she had resigned from all Heritage affiliations.
“The Heritage folks I’ve encountered on the Task Force have been uniformly terrific and sincere about fighting antisemitism,” she wrote. “But the edifice of Heritage is no longer one which I can trust. … I cannot be questioning the commitment of those who claim to be at my side.”
The Jewish Leadership Project, a conservative network co-founded by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, said it is “evaluating our involvement” and will withdraw absent “a vigorous explanation that Judaism and Jews are inherently allies of Christians” and “a disconnect from Carlson immediately.”
The Coalition for Jewish Values, led by Rabbi Yaakov Menken, said it has already communicated its intent to resign if Roberts does not retract his remarks and sever ties with Carlson. “Today Heritage has chosen to vocally stand with an antisemite, call his Jewish critics a ‘venomous coalition,’ and slander organizations like CJV,” the group said. “Whether we continue is a ball that is at present in their court.”
Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, echoed that warning: “If [Roberts] doesn’t retract, apologize, and condemn Tucker Carlson… we at the ZOA will no longer be part of the Esther Project.”
And in a statement, Young Jewish Conservatives, another member group, said it was withdrawing its membership entirely. The group accused Carlson of “spewing antisemitism,” ridiculing Christian Zionists, and spreading propaganda for “enemies of the United States.” Roberts’s defense of him, YJC said, was “100% inconsistent with conservative values. … Anyone who aligns with Adolf Hitler must be unequivocally disavowed.”
The World Jewish Congress, an international federation representing Jewish communities and organizations in over 100 countries, remains listed as a participating organization on Project Esther’s website, despite its assertion that it has never been involved.
“WJC was not involved in the creation and is not involved in the implementation of Project Esther,” a spokesperson said.
Asked to respond, a Heritage spokesperson said in a statement, “The WJC was among those present at the launch stage of the task force, which informed the initial list of participants and is reflected on our website. We appreciate the engagement of those who contributed at all stages of this critical mission.”
When Project Esther debuted in 2024, Heritage hailed it as proof that the conservative movement takes antisemitism seriously. The 33-page blueprint called for purging “Hamas propaganda” from school curricula, firing “Hamas-aligned faculty” from U.S. universities, and pressuring social-media platforms to restrict antisemitic content. The goal, it said, was to make “Hamas Supporters” as socially toxic as the Ku Klux Klan or al-Qaida.
Yet the rollout was chaotic. Multiple groups Heritage named as participants — among them Christians United for Israel, the Hudson Institute, the Atlantic Council, and the Republican Jewish Coalition — denied any involvement.
Heritage officials responded by saying they had “invited” numerous Jewish organizations but purposely limited their inclusion. “More of my concern was really with the non-Jewish groups,” James Carafano, Heritage’s senior counselor and a leader of the antisemitism task force, told Jewish Insider. “Quite honestly, if [Jewish groups] were being effective, we wouldn’t have the problem that we have.”
Carafano told Jewish Insider he did not believe antisemitism was a problem on the American right. “White supremacists are not my problem,” he said. “They are not part of being conservative.”
Carafano declined to comment for this story.
Those comments, along with remarks from Luke Moon, executive director of the Christian-Zionist Philos Project, reveal how Heritage’s internal debates foreshadowed today’s crisis. Moon last year disclosed that task force members had discussed whether to call out Carlson and conservative commentator Candace Owens, who has also trafficked in antisemitic tropes, but decided against it.
“We had a long conversation several times about whether or not to, or how much energy do we spend going after, like, Tucker and Candace Owens, or do we really focus on where the majority are right now, at least, which is these folks on campus, [Students for Justice in Palestine] and stuff,” Moon told Jewish Insider last year.
He did not respond to a request for comment about recent events.
That decision now looms large as critics accuse Heritage of adopting a “no enemies to the right” ethos.
Robert’s statement drew swift rebukes from Republican senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell, as well as from Ben Shapiro, Mike Huckabee, and others who denounced Carlson’s platforming of Fuentes.
“I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer, either,” Roberts said.
Roberts later issued a follow-up post condemning Fuentes’s antisemitism but stopped short of retracting his praise for Carlson.
Shapiro pushed back on Roberts’ characterization. “It is not cancellation to draw moral lines between viewpoints,” Shapiro said in an episode of his podcast Monday. “In fact, we used to call that one of the key aspects of conservatism.”
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Mamdani Remains Favorite on Eve of New York City Mayoral Election Despite Struggling With Jewish Voters
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivers remarks while campaigning at the Hanson Place Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, US, Nov. 1, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ryan Murphy
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani remains the favorite heading into Election Day on Tuesday, polling indicates, despite the Democratic nominee facing huge vulnerabilities among Jewish voters amid concerns over antisemitism and far-left policies outside the mainstream.
Most polling over the past month of the race has shown Mamdani ahead of his chief rival — former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary earlier this year — by 10 to 18 percentage points, with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa trailing in third place. One outlier was an Emerson College poll released last week showing Mamdani in the lead by 25 points.
However, a new bombshell survey from AtlasIntel published on Monday showed Cuomo within striking distance, trailing Mamdani by just five points, 44 percent to 39 percent. The survey — which came a day after the same polling outfit had Cuomo trailing Mamdani by six points, indicating an upward trend for the former governor — also found that Cuomo would beat Mamdani 50 percent to 44 percent in a hypothetical two-way race.
Mamdani is currently struggling to win over Jewish New Yorkers, according to several polls, including one from Quinnipiac last week showing only 16 percent of the Jewish vote going to the Democratic nominee compared to 60 percent for Cuomo. A striking 75 percent of Jewish voters said they hold an “unfavorable” opinion of Mamdani, echoing similar findings from other surveys in recent months, such as a Sienna College poll from August.
New York City has the highest Jewish population of any area outside of Israel, giving the Jewish vote in the largest US city significant weight. The lack of support for Mamdani is especially telling given the Jewish community’s typical overwhelming support for Democrats in New York.
Despite his apparent failure to galvanize the Jewish vote ahead of the election, Mamdani has signaled that he will fight on behalf of the city’s Jews if elected mayor.
In a new Jewish Telegraphic Agency interview, Mamdani struck a conciliatory tone, acknowledging Jewish concerns about his candidacy. “I don’t begrudge folks who are skeptical of me,” he said. “I hope to prove that I am someone to build a relationship with, not one to fear.”
The statement marked a notable shift in tone for the outspoken progressive, who has faced criticism for past comments describing Israel as an “apartheid state” and for his refusal to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist aligned with the left flank of the party, has long been an anti-Israel activist who has supported boycott campaigns targeting Israeli-linked institutions and frequently joined rallies condemning Israeli military actions targeting Hamas terrorists in Gaza. While he insists that his positions are aimed at achieving what he calls “equal rights” in Israel, many Jewish groups have accused Mamdani of engaging in antisemitic tropes.
Mamdani sparked outrage over the summer after he repeatedly refused to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” a phrase widely interpreted as a call to harm Jews and Israelis worldwide.
“I fear living in a city, and a nation, where anti-Zionist rhetoric is normalized and contagious,” Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, a prominent Jewish voice at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, said during Shabbat services on Friday night. “Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.”
She cited Mamdani’s reluctance to label Hamas, which calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel, a terrorist group and his 2023 remark, which surfaced this past week, erroneously saying the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had learned aggressive policing tactics from the Israeli military.
“We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” Mamdani said.
A CNN analysis of his electoral strategy noted that Mamdani’s relationship with Jewish voters “remains fraught.” Polling data suggests that while he performs reasonably well among younger progressive Jews, support among Orthodox and traditional Jewish blocs, particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, remains minimal.
Jewish voters will likely only harden their opposition amid reports that Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the UK Labour Party who has long been accused of antisemitism, was working the phones on Sunday for Mamdani at a Democratic Socialists of America fundraiser.
Cuomo quickly seized on the development, accusing Mamdani of promoting extremism into New York’s politics.
“Having Jeremy Corbyn — someone whose party was found to have committed unlawful acts of discrimination against Jewish people under his leadership – phone-banking for @ZohranKMamdani says everything you need to know,” Cuomo posted on social media. “NY doesn’t need politics of moral compromise. We need leadership that rejects antisemitism, extremism, and division in every form and in every corner.”
Mamdani, for his part, has repeatedly tried to reassure voters that he would advocate for Jewish New Yorkers, reiterating that “antisemitism has no place in this city” and vowing to expand funding for the protection of houses of worship if elected. Yet, for many Jewish voters, his reassurances have not been enough.