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For Josh Shapiro, a run for governor borne of Jewish identity and political ambition
(JTA) — On the day before he was set to be sworn in as Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro had somewhere important to be: the Jewish community center in the state capital of Harrisburg.
Shapiro and his family spent Monday volunteering at the Alexander Grass Campus for Jewish Life, which was hosting a Martin Luther King Day celebration for the region.
It was an erev-inauguration stop that made sense for Shapiro, elected in November over a Republican whose campaign was continually mired in antisemitism allegations. From his stint as Pennsylvania’s attorney general to his gubernatorial campaign ads to his victory speech, Shapiro has long woven his Jewish identity into his politics — making him an archetype for a new breed of Jewish politician.
“They seem above politics because they exude pride,” said Scott Lasensky, a professor of American Jewish studies at the University of Maryland, about Shapiro and other Jewish politicians who demonstrate comfort with their identity. “It offers a much-needed respite from the reactive, defense posture that has seized the community.”
As Shapiro is sworn in Tuesday on a stack of three Hebrew Bibles — including the one that was on the bimah when a gunman massacred 11 Jewish worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 — the novelty becomes reality: A Jewish day school grad and dad is now one of the most influential elected officials in the United States.
“You’ve heard me quote my scripture before, that no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it, meaning each of us has a responsibility to get off the sidelines, to get in the game and to do our part,” Shapiro said in his victory speech in November, referring to the famous passage in Pirkei Avot, the compilation of ethical teachings excerpted from early Jewish writings.
It’s a speech that Shapiro’s friends, teachers and associates could have envisioned decades ago. In interviews with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, nearly a dozen of them said Shapiro, 49, has openly melded Jewishness and activism since his early teens, practicing a politics of bringing together disparate communities with his Jewish identity at the core.
“He gets done what he needs to get done, what he wants to get done,” said Robin Schatz, the director of government affairs at the Jewish Federations of Greater Philadelphia. “And it is always in that framework of Jewish values.”
Schatz contrasted Shapiro’s openness about his Jewish identity with one of his Jewish predecessors as governor, Ed Rendell, for whom Schatz worked when Rendell was mayor of Philadelphia.
“Josh shows up for us just by being so proudly Jewish and that is really something because Rendell, who I worked for and who I love, I mean, he never hid his Jewishness, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve,” she said.
Perhaps Shapiro’s most direct antecedent is Joe Lieberman, the Orthodox former Connecticut senator who was Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000. Lieberman, the first Jew on a major-party presidential ticket, recalled being ridiculed and questioned by Jewish groups for expressing his faith at campaign events.
That hasn’t happened for Shapiro, who is part of a relatively younger generation including congresspersons Elaine Luria of Virginia and Becca Balint of Vermont who express unabashed Jewish identities when campaigning among the broader public. Luria and two others just left Congress: Andy Levin of Michigan, who was defeated in last year’s primary after redistricting, and Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat who last year made the transition this year to leading the American Jewish Committee. None of them wears a kippah on the campaign trail or strictly observes Shabbat, as Lieberman did, but all infuse Jewishness in their public comments and personas.
What separates Shapiro is his outsized success in a competitive race in a swing state — a record that has insiders bandying about his name as a potential presidential candidate one day.
Shapiro’s political orientation was apparent early on. Fresh out of his bar mitzvah, a 13-year-old Shapiro looked forward to his chats with Mark Aronchick, who was a leader with Josh’s parents, Steven and Judi, in the movement for Soviet Jewry in the Philadelphia area.
Shapiro centered his bar mitzvah on a letter-writing campaign to free a refusenik, a Jew whose intended emigration was blocked by the USSR’s cruel bureaucracy, and he liked to ask Aronchick about the movement, about organizing activism. But then the conversations took a turn Aronchick didn’t expect. Josh wanted to know about running a big city.
“I had been the chief lawyer for the city of Philadelphia in the early 80s,” recalled Aronchick, who became a mentor to Shapiro. “He was fascinated when we talked about that.”
In an interview last year with the Forward, after a campaign event with union organizers, Shapiro said he understood organizing as an effective tool when he was 6 and he joined his parents in campaigning for the release of Jews in the Soviet Union. (The refusenik who was the focus of Shapiro’s bar mitzvah activism, made it out in time to attend Shapiro’s bar mitzvah, which earned Shapiro Philadelphia news coverage.) Shapiro’s parents “set a very good example for me to live a life of faith and service,” he said.
From left: Then-Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator John Fetterman, former President Barack Obama, Josh Shapiro and President Joe Biden at a rally at the Liacouras Center in Philadelphia, Nov. 5, 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Sharon Levin taught Shapiro government at Akiba Hebrew Academy (now called Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy) and said he stood apart at an age when boys interested in politics tend to flex their intellectual muscles through outspoken opinions and grandstanding.
“This was a pretty difficult group of kids, I don’t mean problematic, but kids who like to argue, to debate every point,” she said. “And Josh believes in cooperation, I think of him in those days as a team-builder.”
Todd Eisenberg, now a Montgomery County judge, recalled playing basketball with Shapiro for the high school team.
“He was the point guard so he was always the leader of everything,” Eisenberg said. “And he would always try to get everybody involved and make everybody feel like they’re a part of the process.”
Eisenberg was impressed by Shapiro’s leadership but not surprised — Shapiro had been pulling together kids from across the playground since first grade, when they first met.
“You know how kids are in cliques or they’re picking on other kids, he was never like that,” he said. “He was always nice to everybody involved in everything.”
In high school, Eisenberg said, Shapiro organized a chapter of Students Against Drunk Driving. “I remember him standing up for everybody and being a part of everything,” he said.
Shapiro ran for student president and lost, to classmate Ami Eden (who is now CEO of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s parent company, 70 Faces Media). Shapiro has for decades told people it was the only race he lost.
Levin, his government teacher at Akiba, said Shapiro had a realistic assessment of his skills and what he needed to do to succeed. He went to the University of Rochester, qualifying for the Division III basketball team, but soon realized that excellence on the Akiba court was mediocrity in an NCAA setting, she recalled.
“So he said, ‘my fallback from school was government,’ and he was the first sophomore ever to be student president at the University of Rochester,” she said. “I knocked on every door,” Shapiro recalled to Philadelphia Magazine in 2007.
From Rochester, he moved to a series of legislative aide positions in the 1990s on Capitol Hill, working for Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Hoeffel and New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli. His bosses remember a guy in his early 20s who was soon supervising staffers, and his colleagues recall not minding. Shapiro was pleasant, they say, but clearly on a track for greater things.
“No one ever worked for me who was as bright and focused, with such steely determination,” Torricelli told The Philadelphia Inquirer last year.
By the time he was 31, in 2004, Shapiro was running for his first elected position as a Pennsylvania state representative. He ran against Jon Fox, a Jewish Republican who had been a congressman. Shapiro impressed people in the district with his lowkey straightforwardness, said Betsy Sheerr, a Jewish lay leader and a Democrat who was friendly with both candidates, and that provided a contrast with Fox, who would shift his positions depending on the listener.
“We used to joke that John Fox was multiple choice, you know that one day he was pro-choice and the next day he wasn’t,” Sheerr recalled. “With Josh, there never has been any confusion about where he stands on things.”
Within two years, Shapiro rose to statewide prominence when he brokered a deal to break a deadlock in the state house, where Democrats had a one-seat majority. Under Shapiro’s plan, Democrats would back a moderate Republican, Denny O’Brien, to keep the scandal-plagued incumbent speaker, Republican John Perzel, from reelection. As soon as he got the job, O’Brien named Shapiro deputy speaker.
Shapiro’s backers cite the now-legendary episode as a sign of Shapiro’s leadership; his detractors say it is a signal of his self-promotion and gamesmanship. In 2008, Shapiro turned on a one-time mentor, Democratic state Rep. Bill DeWeese, saying he should step down from the party leadership because of corruption investigations. (DeWeese and Perzel both ended up serving time in prison.)
Schatz said Shapiro remained sensitive to the issues affecting the Jewish community, helping expand Medicare assistance for the elderly, instituting Holocaust education and targeting terrorist-backing countries like Iran for sanctions.
A moderate Democrat, he also stood out for breaking with the establishment. Aronchick recalled Shapiro in 2004 seeking the endorsement of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who was then a standard bearer for progressives.
“Josh is a consensus builder,” he said. “Others might think, ‘Do I look too progressive?’ It wasn’t a thought on Josh’s mind.”
In 2008, Shapiro was among just a handful of establishment Democrats who endorsed Barack Obama for president in a state that Hillary Clinton won in the primaries. Shapiro defended Obama when his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, came under fire for antisemitic comments.
Obama did well enough in the state, Shapiro told JTA at the time, that he believed he would do well nationally. “I think that demonstrates that the hype that Senator Obama had a problem with the Jewish community was just that — it was hype. It was not reality.” He would be proved right.
The Democratic machine killed off the “deputy speaker” title in 2009, leading the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent to muse, “The Once-Lofty Shapiro; Has He Been Brought Down a Few Pegs?”
But Matt Handel, a onetime Republican activist who left the party after Donald Trump was elected president, said that while Shapiro made enemies in the statehouse, he never let it get to him.
“He can be angry about things, you know, he can find them offensive. But if you watch him speak, he maintains control of what he says and how he responds,” said Handel, who interacted with Shapiro when Handel chaired the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition, a statewide advocacy body.
Shapiro soon was looking elsewhere: He ran for and won a spot on the three-member Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, where he was elected chairman, effectively the mayor of the populous and prosperous suburban Philadelphia area.
Levin, his high school teacher, recalled a call Shapiro made when he was considering a run for the U.S. Senate.
“What he said was, if, if I end up going to Washington, I’m gonna do a Biden, you know, back and forth on the train, because it’s so important for my kids to remain at the school where I went to school.” A while later he called back.
He said, “You know, I’m not a legislator. I’m an executive.” (Levin remains close to Shapiro and his family; last fall, she ran into Shapiro and his daughter Sophia, who led student outreach during his campaign, at an airport in San Antonio. “Look who I saw!” she said in an email, photos of hugs attached.)
In 2016, Shapiro was elected Pennsylvania attorney general. He led battles against Trump’s efforts to limit entry to the United States of people from a number of Muslim-majority countries, and to keep Trump acolytes from overturning his 2020 loss in the state. He also led a widely publicized investigation of child abuse in the Roman Catholic church.
Shapiro’s gubernatorial campaign launch last April was an ad in which he declared, “I make it home Friday nights for Sabbath dinner,” while the camera closed on challahs. (It also stars his four kids and his wife, Lori, whom he refers to as his “high school sweetheart.”)
Josh Shapiro embraces his wife, Lori Shapiro, on stage after giving a victory speech to supporters at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Penn., Nov. 8 2022. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Shapiro’s ultimate victory was especially sweet to many Jews because he defeated a Republican, Doug Mastriano, who had centered Shapiro’s Jewishness, but not in a positive way. Mastriano had allied with an outspoken antisemite, Andrew Torba, the founder of the far-right social media site, Gab, paying for promotion on Gab and accepting a donation from Torba. (Mastriano renounced antisemitism, but pointedly, not Torba.) Mastriano also mocked the Jewish school Shapiro attended and where he sends his four children.
It is a source of delight to Shapiro and his backers that his open Jewish identity did not alienate Pennsylvanians; indeed, he fared well in the conservative center of the state, a fact that his campaign boasted about in an email sent to the media a week after the election, when most campaigns are wrapping up business.
“Josh Shapiro won Beaver, Berks, Cumberland, and Luzerne counties — significantly outperforming Joe Biden’s margins in 2020 and flipping those counties blue,” the campaign said, attaching a chart showing the flips. “From the very beginning of his campaign, Josh vowed to go everywhere. That meant campaigning heavily where other Democrats don’t often win and investing in communities across the state.”
Jill Zipin, a longtime Shapiro backer who leads Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania, said Mastriano’s Christian nationalism did not play well in a state that was founded on religious freedoms. “Pennsylvania was founded on religious pluralism, it was founded by Quakers,” she said. “Anyone of any religious stripe was welcome.”
Mastriano’s team, toward the end of the campaign, appeared to notice the resonance Shapiro’s beliefs had among Pennsylvanians. His surrogates pivoted to claiming Shapiro was not a genuine Jew, with one consultant saying Shapiro’s defense of abortion rights made him inauthentic, and Mastriano’s wife claiming she and her husband loved Israel more than Jews did.
The moves may have backfired, said Schatz. Shapiro’s Jewish expression, she said, “was a way of actually relating to religious conservatives. They say that ‘maybe he doesn’t follow our religion, but because he does have a belief, he’s a religious person.’”
In a sign of his polish with Pennsylvanians, Shapiro’s margin of victory was substantially wider than that of John Fetterman, the Democrat elected to the state’s open Senate spot.
“While we won this race — and by the way, we won it pretty convincingly — I want you to know, the job is not done, the task is not complete,” Shapiro said during his victory speech, prompting 15 seconds of cheers and applause.
Shapiro has stayed largely out of the public eye since his election, instead focusing on putting together a transition team and preparing for his inauguration on Tuesday. He did not respond to JTA’s requests for an interview.
That transition team bears signs of Shapiro’s long and deep Jewish ties. Marcel Groen, a retired attorney on the economic development advisory committee, first met the new governor because he attended synagogue with Shapiro’s father. He became a mentor to the inchoate politician, who several years ago recruited Groen’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, to speak to incarcerated teens.
During the encounter, which Groen and Shapiro did not make public at the time, the teens went from standoffish to hugging 93-year-old Sipora Groen after hearing her story. (Sipora died in 2017.) It was, Groen said, typical of Shapiro’s approach to changing hearts and minds: “Josh realized that’s how you reach kids who got in trouble and who needed to understand life in a different manner,” he recalled.
Shapiro’s plans for his inauguration are laced with Jewish significance. In addition to the Tanakh from the Tree of Life synagogue, his swearing-in will reportedly take place on a Bible used by a Jewish soldier from Pennsylvania in World War II.
But asked by CNN’s Dana Bash after the election if he wanted to make history as America’s first Jewish president, Shapiro demurred.
“I have an ambition to get a little bit of sleep, to reintroduce myself to my kids, and then to serve the good people of Pennsylvania as their governor,” he said.
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The post For Josh Shapiro, a run for governor borne of Jewish identity and political ambition appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Florida redistricting scrambled the map. Three Jewish Democrats found a way through.
Three Jewish Democratic House members from Florida emerged victorious from their party primaries Tuesday amid a redistricting shakeup that scrambled South Florida’s congressional map and threatened to end some of their political careers.
U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Lois Frankel and Jared Moskowitz all won Democratic nominations in newly redrawn districts, each facing different challenges from the new map and their primary opponents.
But their victories only secured their spots on the November ballot. The bigger question is whether they can win reelection under a successful Republican effort designed to flip four Democratic seats. Earlier this year, Florida’s state legislators approved the new congressional lines at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis, to increase the number of Republican seats from 20 to 24 of the state’s 28 districts.
The three Jewish incumbents took different routes for survival.
After her old seat was transformed into more favorable territory for Republicans, Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee and one of Congress’ most prominent Jewish members, moved into Broward County’s heavily Democratic Black-majority precincts, raising questions about representation in a district with a large Black population.
Wasserman Schultz’s opponents argued that the seat should continue to be represented by a Black lawmaker. In her victory speech, Wasserman Schultz promised “to work every day to live up to the legacy of Alcee Hastings,” the congressman who represented the district from 2013 until he died in 2021.
Frankel, a seven-term Jewish Democrat and outspoken supporter of Israel, also relocated to the neighboring district and easily defeated Lake Worth Beach activist Victoria Doyle, winning 75% of the Democratic vote. The seat is now ranked solid Democratic, according to the Cook Political Report.
Moskowitz survives the left. Now he faces a Jewish Republican.
For Moskowitz, who was elected in 2022 after Ted Deutch retired to become chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, Tuesday’s outcome is likely just the beginning.
Moskowitz, who built a reputation as an outspoken supporter of Israel and one of the more bipartisan members of the House, defeated Oliver Larkin, a democratic socialist and fierce critic of Israel, by a 63%-37% margin.
Larkin called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel and accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. He also associated with popular streamer Hasan Piker, who has been embraced by progressive insurgents even as he has championed terrorist groups as righteous fighters against Israel — leading to accusations he trafficks in antisemitism.
“I’ve taken on extremes in the DSA and won,” Moskowitz said in his victory speech, adding in a post on X: “My condolences to @hasanthehun.”
But the new district with a substantial Jewish population was deliberately drawn to be far more favorable to Republicans than Moskowitz’s previous seat, which Frankel will now represent, making him one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the state this fall.
His Republican opponent, Scott Singer, the Jewish former mayor of Boca Raton, won a five-way GOP primary with 31% of the vote. Singer, a Miami Beach native and Georgetown Law graduate, highlighted his support for Israel and his roots in the district.
This setup will test Moskowitz’s political strength.
“We’re running in a tough district hand-drawn by Republicans to defeat me, but I plan to win that too,” Moskowitz said on Tuesday night.
“People here don’t want ideological purity tests. They want someone who will lower costs, fight for the middle class, and stand up to antisemitism and hate in both parties.”
Fine easily defeats openly antisemitic Bilzerian
Elsewhere in Florida, Jewish Republican Rep. Randy Fine easily fended off a primary challenge that attracted national attention because of the antisemitic rhetoric of Dan Bilzerian, the social media influencer once known as the “King of Instagram.”
Bilzerian had repeatedly attacked Fine as a “fat Jew,” called Judaism “terrible,” promoted conspiracy theories about Jews and said he wanted to “kill Israelis.” In the final days of the campaign, Bilzerian posted antisemitic dog whistles, expressing confidence that each voter in the district “understands the Jewish problem,” and that “a vote for Randy is a vote for Israel.”
The race was one of several Florida Republican primaries that tested whether a growing online movement on the right — hostile to Israel and that has at times slid into outright antisemitism — could translate social media followings into electoral success.
Fine won 57% of the vote, which is located just under the northeast part of the state and includes Daytona Beach. Bilzerian came in second, securing nearly 19%.
The race to succeed Ron DeSantis
A somewhat similar dynamic played out in the Republican primary for governor.
U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed frontrunner, won the nomination to succeed DeSantis with about 48% of the vote. James Fishback, a 31-year-old investment manager who made opposition to Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign, finished third with about 10%.
Fishback, who ran what The New York Times described as a “rage bait” campaign, promised to pull Florida’s investments from Israel Bonds, criticized politicians who “visit another country” only to end up “kissing a stupid wall,” and associated himself with antisemitic personalities on the far-right.
Donalds, by contrast, has been a strong supporter of Israel, though he voted in 2024 against the Antisemitism Awareness Act, bipartisan legislation addressing rising antisemitism on college campuses. He is now listed as a cosponsor of a modified bill that clarifies First Amendment protections. Born in Brooklyn and raised for part of his childhood in Crown Heights, he has spoken of his familiarity with Jewish communities and has maintained relationships with Chabad leaders in Florida.
He will face former Republican Rep. David Jolly, who won the Democratic gubernatorial primary, in November. Both nominees are outspoken supporters of Israel.
A progressive upset for Senate
The night was not a clean sweep for establishment candidates.
State Rep. Angie Nixon, a new member of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated Alex Vindman, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union, for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.
Vindman, who became nationally known after testifying during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, entered the race with greater national name recognition and establishment support. Nixon, who pushed a pro-Palestinian agenda on a state level and actively campaigned with members of the Squad and alongside Larkin, pulled off an upset win, receiving 56% of the vote to Vindman’s 44%.
She will face incumbent Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, who easily won her primary. Moody was appointed to the seat after Marco Rubio left the Senate to become President Donald Trump’s secretary of state.
The post Florida redistricting scrambled the map. Three Jewish Democrats found a way through. appeared first on The Forward.
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I drove a friend to a protest in Jerusalem. Now Israel’s government wants to send me to prison.
‘The people fighting to save Israeli democracy are fighting for the only version of Zionism that can last.’
META: Amit Cahanovich is charged with five counts of joint arson after giving someone a ride to a demonstration where recycling bins were set ablaze.
For nine months I was a political detainee in Israel. My trial is about to begin.
I am as Israeli as they come. My grandparents came to this country — then Palestine, in the 1930s — as Europe began to burn. They helped found a farming village in the Jezreel Valley, Beit Shearim, while most of the family they left behind was murdered in the Holocaust. My late father was a colonel in the Israeli army. I served as a combat soldier in a classified unit, and after Oct. 7, I used my expertise as a data professional to consult for the army during the war. I am married with three young children.
We have no other passports, no other identity than Israeli. But I am now facing charges as an alleged criminal, part of a conspiracy no less — for nothing more than aiding a protest. My story speaks to the lengths of the Israeli government’s efforts to silence dissent.
On Sept. 3, 2025, around the 700th day of the war in Gaza, the families of hostages still held and tortured in Hamas’s tunnels begged Israelis to take to the streets. More than 40 hostages were already dead in captivity, some murdered, some dead from other causes. Like many Israelis, I could not stand by while the government worked to frame this as the families’ private grief rather than a national emergency — anything to delay a reckoning and stay in power a little longer.
I was arrested after a demonstration day in Jerusalem, where a few recycling bins were set on fire — a common occurrence at such protests, before and since. My alleged part is giving a ride to a friend who allegedly lit one of them. Seven of us now face charges that would fit an organized crime indictment. I’m charged with five counts of joint arson, each carrying a sentence of up to 15 years.
I did not know most of my co-defendants. Lawyers call this a legal dragnet, a familiar tool in democracies that are sliding.
For 33 days I was incarcerated in appalling conditions, classified as a danger to the public, moved between three prisons, and even spent one night in a dungeon, for no real reason. After those 33 days, I was released, but remained on house arrest. A probation officer eventually found I posed no danger. The prosecution fought the finding anyway. It took a High Court justice, ruling on a co-defendant’s appeal eight months in, to confirm what we had argued from the start: that “dangerousness” was being used not to assess a threat but to punish us before any verdict. A month after that ruling, I was released.
Since Oct. 7, Jewish terror against Palestinians in the West Bank has surged, met by law enforcement so weak it barely counts as such. Yet dozens of investigators were assigned to the conspiracy cases that included my own, and, according to press reports, the Shin Bet itself took part in interrogations over recycling bins. The Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent to the FBI, exists to fight terrorism and espionage, not to regulate protest. When a government routes political dissent through its most powerful security service, the question is no longer whether a protester broke a law. It is whether the state has begun treating opposition itself as a threat.
This is not incidental. It is the method of a coalition that unites Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the heirs of the banned, terrorist-designated Kach movement founded by the radical American-Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane; and with ultra-Orthodox parties that take state money while keeping their youth from modern education and army service. Together they have spent years capturing the institutions meant to check them, the security services, the state comptroller’s office, a weakened judiciary. None of this happens in the dark. It happens on television, because the government’s allies all but run the news agenda. Nearly all criticism gets folded into “Israel as victim.” Antisemitism, though it does exist, gets invoked even when it doesn’t, as a method to silence dissent internationally. Protesters, including hostage families whose only demand was that the state bring their own home, got called traitors and enemies from within.
Meanwhile war has become the alibi. War in Gaza. War in Lebanon. War in Iran. Every operation begins with tactical wins and promises of strategic victory that never fully arrive. Every day of it was used to postpone the prime minister’s own corruption trial a little further.
In 1938 the Yiddish poet Mordechai Gebirtig wrote “Undzer Shtetl Brent” — “Our Town Is Burning” — about the violence closing in on Polish Jews. It calls out to brothers standing with folded arms, watching the fire instead of fighting it. By the time the song became an anthem, the fire had become a catastrophe. I think about it constantly now, not because I believe Jews are fated to see danger only once it’s too late, but because I fear we are, again, mistaking smoke for weather.
Israel is scheduled to hold elections in late October. Ahead of them, the government’s allies are working to inflame the West Bank, the same cynical mechanism that has worked before: unite a divided public against an external enemy, and postpone the reckoning again. There are even signs that the government could try to postpone the election using so-called emergency regulations or putting up other obstacles. Netanyahu himself once made this exact argument when he demanded former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resign while on trial for corruption, warning that a leader facing charges can never be trusted to put the country’s survival ahead of his own. He was right then. The dynamic he described is now his own government.
The people fighting to save Israeli democracy are fighting for the only version of Zionism that can last: an independent judiciary, free elections, equality before the law, a state that answers to its citizens rather than demanding loyalty to one man. If this government is not replaced, if it teaches a country that dissent is danger, the price will not be paid only by protesters like me. It will be paid by the dream my grandparents crossed the sea to build.
Amit Cahanovich is a native Israeli, married and a father of three, and an independent data consultant. He recently spent nine months as a political detainee in Israel and is now writing a play based on his experience.
The post I drove a friend to a protest in Jerusalem. Now Israel’s government wants to send me to prison. appeared first on The Forward.
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Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab
A new whistleblower report alleges that the Trump Administration’s investigations into campus antisemitism were merely efforts to extract millions from universities, under the pretense of rooting out hate.
The report, written by the Washington, D.C.-based Government Accountability Project on behalf of former Department of Justice Attorney Haley Van Erem, alleges that the administration’s antisemitism task force carried out “politically motivated” investigations that were “unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” The investigations did not follow proper Title VI procedure, she said, adding that they were opened with predetermined outcomes, and did not respect the First Amendment.
The report has prompted Jewish U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) to initiate an investigation into the allegations. The Nexus Foundation, a watchdog organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and protecting free speech, released a statement supporting Raskin and Van Erem.
This is not the first time Raskin or Nexus have criticized the administration’s antisemitism task force. Many left-leaning Jewish organizations have long criticized Trump’s efforts, with Raskin describing them as “weaponizing, distorting and exploiting the reality of antisemitism to attack academic freedom.”
In a statement to the Forward, the DOJ denied that Van Erem worked on university investigations. “And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations,” a spokesperson wrote.
According to the report, Van Erem was involuntarily re-assigned from her role as a DOJ Civil Rights attorney to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in order to investigate alleged antisemitism at medical schools — a probe prompted by a single New York Post article about protesters shouting “Free Palestine” and wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at a medical school graduation.
Unable to find enough evidence of antisemitism at medical schools, Van Erem said, the task force soon expanded its probe to entire universities to increase the chances of finding it.
“This was one of the first major indications to the DOJ assignees that the investigations were not grounded in law or fact,” the report reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to request to comment.
Van Erem also criticized the administration for breaking the protocol of Title VI investigations, pursuing enforcement before first issuing a finding and allowing universities to resolve issues voluntarily. That enforcement: withholding funds.
To restrict funds, the administration used a separate legal mechanism that allows them to do so “for convenience” and for “not satisfying purpose.”
“The funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative findings,” according to the report.
Van Erem and colleagues found no evidence at Brown of “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, the report said. But a supervisor allegedly discouraged sending Brown a closure letter stating those findings. According to the report, the administration settled with Columbia before an investigation was finished. Harvard sued the Trump administration, before its own investigation was complete, claiming the funding freeze was unlawful.
Van Erem said she observed findings of discrimination that she believed were actually “protected First Amendment activity” and believed that the task force’s settlement “content-based conditions” violated free expression.
Brown and Columbia both settled with the administration to restore federal funding, with Columbia paying the government $200 million and Brown agreeing to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. A federal judge recently dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, saying antisemitic incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to constitute a Title VI violation.
The post Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab appeared first on The Forward.
