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In synagogues and on the streets, Israel’s new ‘faithful left’ is making itself felt
TEL AVIV (JTA) — “Everyone who answers, ‘Thank God’ when asked, ‘How are you,’ raise your hand,” Brit Yakobi asked the crowd of 700 people gathered in an Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem.
The overwhelming majority of hands shot up.
“Everyone who is mortified with our current government, raise your hand,” continued Yakobi, the director of religious freedom and gender at Shatil, an Israeli social justice organization founded by the New Israel Fund.
Once again, almost every hand went up.
The display took place at a Jan. 25 conference billing itself as for Israel’s “faithful left” — a demographic that many consider nonexistent but which is seeking to assert itself in response to the country’s new right-wing government.
Israel’s politics leave little room for left-leaning Orthodox Jews. In the United States, the vast majority of Jews vote for Democrats, and even in Orthodox communities, where right-wing politics are ascendant, liberal candidates hold appeal for some. But in Israel, the official leadership of religious Jews of all stripes is firmly entrenched in the right — and their followers tend to vote as a bloc.
The hundreds of Orthodox Jews at the conference hope to change that dynamic, and have already started doing so by showing up en masse — and to applause — at the anti-government protests that have swept the country since the beginning of the year. But while their list of goals is long, they are also taking time to appreciate the unusual experience of being together.
A view of the attendees at the first meeting of Smol Emuni, the Faithful Left, in Jerusalem shows many kippahs — typically not associated with left-wing politics in Israel. (Photo by Gilad Kavalerchik)
“Just being in a room and realizing I’m not the only one like me was amazing,” attendee Shira Attias told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The main takeaway for members of this niche and controversial group [is] to feel on their skin that they are not alone.”
Nitsan Machlis, a student and activist, agreed. “I’ve never seen so many people in a room together with whom I felt like I can identify with both religiously and politically.”
The conference took place inside the Heichal Shlomo synagogue, located adjacent to Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue at the same intersection as Israel’s prime minister’s official residence — a symbolic spot at the heart of Israel’s religious center.
“The fact that it was in Heichal Shlomo is quite significant because it’s a very Orthodox place,” said Ittay Flescher, educational director of an Israeli-Palestinian youth organization who attended the event. “It was chosen intentionally as an iconic Orthodox place, a place where Torah learning happens.”
That’s meaningful because members of the new government have disparaged critics of its policy moves as being anti-religious and opposed to Torah values.
According to haredi activist Pnina Pfeuffer, a member of the steering committee of Smol Emuni, which means faithful left in Hebrew, the conference was driven by the idea that leftwing values are an integral part of being Jewish.
“We’re not left-wing despite being religious, it’s part of how we practice our religious beliefs,” said Pfeuffer, who serves as the CEO of New Haredim, an umbrella organization for haredi education and women’s rights groups.
Organizer Mikhael Manekin, a veteran anti-occupation activist and religious Zionist, referred to it as a “very frum” conference, using the Yiddish word for the religiously devoted. Speakers heavily referenced both Jewish texts and previous generations of rabbis, such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who famously ruled it permissible under religious law to surrender land for peace, and the Lithuanian scion, Rabbi Elazar Shach, who likewise supported Jewish withdrawal from the Palestinian territories if it meant preserving Jewish life. (Rabbanit Adina Bar-Shalom, Yosef’s iconoclastic oldest daughter, was among the conference speakers.)
Rabbanit Adina Bar-Shalom, the eldest daughter of former Israeli Sephardic chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef, addresses the conference of religious leftists in Jerusalem, Jan. 25, 2023. (Photo by Gilad Kavalerchik)
“All of us understand there can’t be activism without religious study,” said Manekin, who runs the Alliance Fellowship, a network of Jewish and Arab political and civic leaders.
While Judaism is not a pacifist religion per se, there is a central theme in rabbinic literature of virtue ethics and an emphasis for caring for the weak on the one hand, he said, and a skepticism towards violence and power on the other. “Our role is to second-guess anything with power.”
According to Manekin, the current brand of religious Zionism and ultra-Orthodoxy’s “very recent” move to the right are emulating secular nationalist ethics a lot more than they are Jewish traditions.
“When somebody like [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir says, ‘We’re the landlords’ and ‘I run the show,’ that for me is a very non-traditional Jewish way of looking at the world,” he said.
“The immediacy with which we accept the current militantism of the religious right, when there are such clear rabbinic texts which don’t allow for that kind of behavior is insane,” he said. “The idea that Jews can walk around with guns on Shabbat is much more of a reform than the idea that Jews should support peace.”
The ambition around peace has set the faithful left apart from the wider anti-government protests, which have not focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A week after the conference, a Palestinian terror attack outside a Jerusalem synagogue that took the lives of seven residents after the Shabbat service put these beliefs to a test.
But Manekin said such events — another attack followed this week — would not change his worldview. “Our tradition is [that] the response to death is mourning and repenting. The political response shouldn’t be based on revenge but on what we think is for the betterment of our people,” he said after the Neve Yaakov attack.
Constant applause and cheers for our group of religious protesters, marching to join main event in Tel Aviv. pic.twitter.com/ohFMwpCeGc
— Hannah Katsman | חנה כצמן (@mominisrael) January 28, 2023
Despite hesitations from his co-organizers, Manekin was adamant about labeling the conference “left,” because, he said, among the fringes of the religious community is “a large group of people who are tired of this constant obfuscation of our opinions to appease the right who are never appeased anyway.”
According to Flescher, the left in Israel is no longer relevant “because it can’t speak the Jewish language.” Religious people often feel like the left is “foreign, and alien and even Christian in some regard,” he said.
One of the goals moving forward, Pfeuffer said, is to develop a religious leftwing language.
But as the conference demonstrated, even under the banner of the religious left lies a broad range of opinions. As Flescher put it: “The religious left is much more diverse than the secular left.”
Attias, who wears a headscarf for religious reasons, described herself thus: “I’m very progressive and I live in the settlements.”
Even though she is “very left economically,” Attias said, she refuses to label herself as a leftist because she remains “extremely critical” of the left which she says is often “very removed from Palestinians and poverty” and the issues it purports to champion.
Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, a coexistence activist who lives in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut, described his experience at the conference on Facebook. “I have rarely felt so at home and so comfortable in a sea of kippot in Israel,” he wrote, alluding to the fact that in Israel, the style and presence of one’s head covering is widely seen as indicative of his or her religious orientation and politics alike.
The conference did not shy away from raising hot-button topics that not everyone in the room saw eye to eye on. “Because we tried to include as much of a left-wing range of opinions as we could, everyone at some point felt a little bit uncomfortable,” Pfeuffer said, noting that there was an LGBTQ circle and even references to “apartheid” by one speaker, Orthodox female rabbi Leah Shakdiel.
“If you’re very comfortable then you’re probably not learning something new,” Pfeuffer said.
One thing that made the conference stand out from other leftwing gatherings was the sense of hope and optimism.
“The general mood from punditry on the liberal left is all doom and gloom,” Manekin said.
The atmosphere at the conference, on the other hand, was “emotionally uplifting, energizing, and proactive,” he said. “This feeling of ‘we now have an assignment’ is very indicative of religious communities in general. That feeling that once you congregate, you can actually do quite a lot.”
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Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to build a case to strip Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her citizenship and eventually deport her.
It is my hope that American Jews — even those who do not like Omar and can recite every questionable comment she has made over the past 15 years to illustrate why — will understand this as offensive and outrageous not only because they are Americans, but because they are Jews.
The Trump administration may claim that it is building a case against Omar due to paperwork (reports suggest that they are interested in whether her father listed her age as 17 on her citizenship application when she was really 18). It is similarly filing dozens of lawsuits attempting to denaturalize citizens by trying to prove they lied in the process of gaining citizenship. However, that this is happening now, ahead of the midterm elections against a sitting member of Congress, a high-profile progressive whom the president has said should “go back” to her country of origin, suggests that it is, to put it mildly, politically motivated.
Evidently, the Trump administration sees citizenship not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward, one that can be taken away if that is seen as useful to the president and his adherents. That use could be silencing political opposition or something as simple (and callous) as an opportunity to brag about the sheer number of attempted denaturalizations.
Jews, too, have found themselves on the wrong end of political denaturalization. I do not mean to compare the Trump administration to the Nazis, but the stubborn fact is that Jews were indeed stripped of their citizenship as part of a political project in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And in the early 20th century in the United States, it was Jews who politicians claimed were incapable of assimilating, of ever really being a part of the United States. These arguments culminated in legislation that kept out Jews who could have found refuge here. The threat of denaturalization and the experience of perpetual otherness is a grievous part of modern Jewish history; we should be offended by its presence in our political present.
Jewish tradition as well as history encourages us to stand up to authority when that authority is wrong. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman; Nathan yells at King David for sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband killed; Moses famously urges Pharoah to change his oppressive ways. Even God is on the receiving end of pushback when Abraham pleads and negotiates to spare Sodom.
I do not think one needs to be Jewish to be outraged by the attempt to denaturalize Ilhan Omar. I think it is also bone-chilling as an American who believes we, including our elected officials, have the right to openly oppose our president, and I am worried as a person who thinks it would be good to continue to live in a democratic republic. And I am sure that there are Jews who will say that Omar deserves to lose her citizenship because she has said things about Israel they do not like.
But the Jewish lens through which I see this is that it is right to challenge power when it is abused, and it is wrong for the powerful to make a show of trying to cast their opponents out of the country.
The point is not whether Trump can make good on the threat to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her, but that it is obscene to use denaturalization as punishment for being a high-profile political opponent in the first place. If he is trying to make it more dangerous to speak out while being from the “wrong” country, then the rest of us need to say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an American citizen.
We should do this because we are Americans and we should do this because we are Jews. We should do this because of the ways in which our American and Jewish identities bleed into one another. And, we should do this because we may not know exactly whether it is as Americans or as Jews that we know we have to protect the right to speak truth to power, but we know we need to do it all the same.
The post Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s?
Herding political opponents into prisons and concentration camps, suspending civil liberties, and sending SA thugs to destroy newsrooms and beat up journalists were among the means used by Adolf Hitler to game Germany’s parliamentary election of March 5, 1933, won by the Nazis.
As much as Donald Trump might fantasize about deploying such brutal tactics to subvert our midterm elections, he hasn’t done so — yet. But his objective is the same: Detonate constitutional barriers standing in the way of his lust for power. “Cheat like hell,” Trump told the GOP’s midterm convention last month.
Historian Timothy Ryback has just published a book about the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, titled 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled A Democracy. The 53 days begin when Hitler becomes chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, and end with the Reichstag’s March 23 passage of the Enabling Act, which gave him absolute power.
For our own perilous time, there is another number to take note of: 652 — the number of days between Trump’s second inauguration and our Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Hitler’s long march to despotic power occurred over 3,422 days — from his failed Beer Hall Putsch on Nov. 8-9, 1923, up until passage of the Enabling Act.
After spending less than a year of a five-year sentence for the failed 1923 coup, Hitler returned to a Nazi party that was in utter disarray. But the Great Depression turned the Nazis’ fortunes around, as jobless and disaffected Germans flocked to Hitler with his promises to make Germany great again. In parliamentary elections in 1930, the number of Reichstag seats held by the Nazis rose dramatically from 12 to 107, and more than doubled that in elections in 1932, making them the largest party. After some backroom political wheeling and dealing, President Paul von Hindenburg offered the chancellorship to Hitler, which he accepted on Jan. 30, 1933.
Even though Hitler was chancellor, his coalition wasn’t dominated by Nazis. When the Reichstag went up in flames on Feb. 27, 1933, der Führer had the pretext he needed to begin dismantling the last remnants of democracy. The Nazis’ first targets were Communists. More than 4,000 were arrested in the initial hours after the fire. It didn’t take long for Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jews to also face raids, arrests, beatings and terror, as Hindenburg — at Hitler’s urging — issued a decree that suspended Germans’ civil liberties.
There was still a barrier standing in Hitler’s way: the Reichstag. But Hitler had a scheme for getting rid of it: calling for a new election and ultimately engineering a vote by the Reichstag to abolish itself.
In the days and nights before the national election, set for March 5, Nazis carried out a campaign of repression and menace across the country. Brandishing firearms, storm troopers ruled the streets. Homes of Hitler critics were raided. His campaign speeches were blasted from loudspeakers. Voters were offered rides to the polls in transports organized by the Nazis, an unsubtle hint at which party they should vote for.
In the election, the Nazis and their Nationalist allies won a majority of seats in the Reichstag but fell short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution. But Hitler had a workaround: Convene the Reichstag to vote on a measure that would allow him to declare laws without the approval of the federal legislative body. With Communist delegates of the Reichstag either in hiding or in custody, Hitler already had a structural advantage; they wouldn’t be there to vote. With the Reichstag building destroyed, the delegates convened on March 23 inside the Kroll Opera House, which swarmed with armed storm troopers and members of the SS who harassed and threatened delegates who were either on the fence about giving Hitler absolute power or were known to oppose it.
In the end, weeks and months of trying to tilt elections through terror and intimidation gave Hitler his ultimate prize: of 538 delegates in the Kroll Opera House, only 94 — all Social Democrats — voted against the Enabling Act. In effect, German democracy was steered by Hitler into committing suicide.
In an essay for Literary Hub, Timothy Ryback noted parallels between Hitler’s election victory on March 5, 1933 and our midterm elections and cataloged them.
They include Trump’s “brazen attempt to quash negative press coverage” and Hitler’s and Trump’s virtually identical pre-election low approval ratings. Both the Nazi leader and the American president had gone to court to try to have earlier election results overturned, and the German election, like our fast-approaching midterms, was seen as a referendum on the nation’s leader.
“Amidst all the turmoil, everyone understood that the March 5 election was a make-or-break moment not only for the Hitler chancellorship but for democracy itself,” Ryback wrote.
With the midterms just around the corner, this can be said about America as well.
Since Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, he has thrown more effort into trying to rig the midterms for the Republicans than into virtually any other endeavor — other than perhaps misusing his powers to enrich himself and his family, and dreaming up monuments to himself.
Trump’s pardon of 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6 was an early signal that the defeated president had no intention of playing fair during the 2026 midterms. What followed was a barrage of assaults on the election system. Here’s just a partial list: lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data, the gutting of oversight bodies, intimidation of election officials and orders for key GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts — all designed to both undermine Americans’ trust in the election system and manufacture pretexts for contesting any midterm outcomes that displease him.
Amid these relentless attempts to subvert the midterms, the Democrats have had success at blocking some of Trump’s poisoned salvos, such as holding the line against the so-called SAVE America Act and fending off Trump’s attempts to seize voter information. But none of this deters Trump, who just comes back with more schemes. The latest revelations come from documents obtained by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization.
Those documents show that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding state election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of a sweeping federal effort to find alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms,” according to Democracy Docket, which reviewed the documents.
“This is an absolute smoking gun,” said Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.
Trump has openly suggested a federal takeover of election administration, and during the past several months it seems like he’s been laying the groundwork for that to happen if he doesn’t get the results he wants on Nov. 3. It’s all too easy to imagine horror scenarios: Trump claims massive voter fraud, his supporters storm county election offices in protest, the FBI seizes ballots and voting machines, unrest erupts across the country, Trump declares martial law.
If Trump’s schemes trigger the kind of disorder he appears to be preparing for, the question will be whether our courts, our press, our civil servants and our voters stand firm. Germany’s institutions bent until they broke. Ours have bent, but they have not yet snapped. What happens next will reveal whether they still possess the steel that Germany’s lacked.
The post Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s? appeared first on The Forward.
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Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs
(JTA) — Sally Rooney’s publisher says it will stop supplying her books in the United Kingdom because current legislation prevents it from passing her earnings on to her.
The best-selling Irish writer, whose work includes the novel “Normal People,” which was adapted into a hit BBC drama, has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
Faber said it would no longer supply her books in the United Kingdom because of her backing for Palestine Action, a group that the British government last year proscribed as a terrorist organization, saying it had “orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions.”
“Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work,” the publisher said.
“To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” it said. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”
Faber had no further comment, the statement said.
Yvette Cooper, then the Home Secretary, banned Palestine Action last year following an attack by the group on the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton which caused millions of pounds of damage. It had previously targeted businesses and premises which it said were linked to Israeli defence companies.
Soon after the announcement, Rooney wrote an opinion piece in the Irish Times in which she doubled down on her support for Palestine Action, adding that she would give the proceeds of her books to back the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under British law, so be it,” she wrote.
In a statement following the action announced by Faber, Rooney cited her Irish Times opinion piece as she explained that the publication of her books “could now constitute a serious criminal offence.”
The ban of Palestine Action has proven to be highly contentious in Britain. Back in February, the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori challenged the move in the High Court, with Rooney providing a supportive witness statement. She said at the time that she was “almost certain” her work would be dropped in Britain if the ban persisted.
The court ruled in Ammori’s favor, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in June. The Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal next month.
Rooney said on Wednesday: “After a process of consultation and deliberation, and with my full agreement, my publisher Faber has therefore determined that it can no longer supply my work within the UK.
“I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences.”
Rooney’s support for the Palestinian cause predates the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. In 2021 she declined to sell Hebrew translation rights for her novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” to the Israeli publisher that had previously released her books in Hebrew.
At the time, she said she supported the BDS movement and would not work with an Israeli publisher unless it is willing to “publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
That move prompted backlash in Israel and beyond, including calls to boycott Rooney’s work. Israeli bookstore chains reportedly removed some of her books from shelves.
However, earlier this year she agreed to have her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” published by an Israeli publisher approved by boycott activists.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs appeared first on The Forward.
