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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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The post In synagogues and on the streets, Israel’s new ‘faithful left’ is making itself felt appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What the private equity takeover means for the bagel industry
The bagel’s stock is, apparently, rising — literally.
Private equity investors have decided, apparently en masse, that bagels are the new frontier for expansion.
A fund called Stripe invested $8 million into PopUp Bagels shortly after the trendy bagel shop, which hawks “rip and dip” bagels, first opened in 2023. A year later, they added $24 million to their contribution and became the majority owner. Now, PopUp Bagels boasts 30 locations.
Invus, an asset management fund, is now the majority owner of Call Your Mother, which began in D.C. but has expanded to 15 locations across the D.C. metro area and, for some reason, Denver. And Manhattan Funds, a large private equity firm, has a specific Bagel Equity Fund devoted to taking over bagelries. The industry is, they write on their site, “under-optimized at the national level.”
Even H&H Bagels, the iconic New York City institution — famed for its cameos in shows like Seinfeld and Sex in the City — has gotten shoveled onto private equity’s giant bagel baking tray. Though Wall Street investor Jay Rushin bought the brand over a decade ago, H&H, too, is beginning its boom era, opening dozens franchises outside of the city.
It’s time, these investment firms all contend, to scale bagels. But can the art of the perfect New York bagel be scaled?
Making the New York bagel in bulk is famously hard. The rings are finicky to roll out, they require boiling, and — perhaps most importantly — the long mythos to the New York bagel has at its core the premise that New York bagels cannot be made without New York water.
Many connoisseurs believe there is an alchemical process to the sought-after chew and crust only achievable with the particular water flowing in the city’s pipes, cascading down from the Catskill reservoirs almost unadulterated. Food science has somewhat debunked that concept, but the legend remains so strong that H&H is promising to par-boil its bagels in NYC water before shipping them to its new franchise locations to be finished in the oven. Even if it’s only marketing, that marketing is powerful.
This is far from the first time that companies have attempted to scale the bagel. In fact, it has worked, in a way: “bagels” can be found, at mass scale, in every major grocery store in the country, offered in plastic sleeves of a half-dozen.
The problem is that those bagels are gross. They’re made by machine, and steamed instead of boiled, which gives a glossy surface, yes, but none of the chew of a true boiled crust. The grocery store bagels are convenient and shelf-stable, sure, but they’re the Wonder Bread of the form: mushy and milquetoast. They have none of the hallmarks of a true bagel.
It’s possible that the private equity masterminds have landed on a secret to scaling the bagel without eventually reducing it to a wan grocery store offering. The results of the Wall Street takeover of the form are still emerging, and the business model could be dependent — at least at first — on devising the perfect product, and not just a passable one.
It just seems unlikely. The investment firms are built around, well, investors, not consumers. Their goal is producing equity and capital for their investors, not making the perfect bagel.
The term “enshittification,” coined by writer Cory Doctorow, has been around for a few years. It describes exactly what it sounds like — the phenomenon of everything growing, uh, worse. Specifically, it describes the way that large companies, often funded by venture capital and private investors, make their products worse over time in the process of wringing money out of the business to serve their CEOs and investors.
Doctorow, in his book on the subject, Enshittification, focuses largely on tech platforms as he examines the term. There’s Amazon: Long gone are the days of a well-priced product you could find more easily online than in a store. Now, search results are polluted by whatever someone has paid to boost to the top of the page, and it’s not even that cheap anymore. Or Twitter, which once bought by Elon Musk, fired its content moderation team to cut costs and turned its user verification, which was once limited to public figures, into a pay-to-play feature. As a result, the platform may have more income streams, but any regular user can attest that their feed is now full of neo-Nazis who shelled out for an algorithmic boost.
But it’s not just platforms — culture and aesthetics are targets for cash extraction now, too, with bad results. Netflix now churns out a constant stream of shows that are, instead of cultural touchstones, basically interchangeable, a far cry from their acclaimed early efforts like Orange is the New Black. Clothing brands like Reformation and even high-end designers like Escala, once symbols of luxury, taste and quality, are turning to lower quality materials and production in an attempt to churn out more designs, faster, and make more money. I’m trying to buy a couch right now, and have found through my research that age-old companies once lauded for their design and durability have been bought by private equity and changed their frames from hardwoods to particle board. (That information took a lot of research because you know what else has fallen prey to enshittification? Review sites.)
That means, regardless of whether these bought-out businesses have suffered yet, bagels are likely to fare poorly in the private equity boom eventually because of the need to extract increasing amounts of cash out of the project; the product itself is ultimately secondary. The Bagel Equity Fund is running trials on steaming their bagels instead of boiling them in its projected 400 shops it runs, the exact strategy that led to the mushy grocery store bagel. And a Washington Post review for the hyped new H&H location in D.C. was brutal, calling the bagels “generally unappealing” and “flavorless.”
But the bagel itself is only part of the mystique of the food. Which brings me to the more spiritual offerings of a good bagel: an ephemeral cultural cachet. That may be at even greater risk.
Having a favorite bagel shop or loudly defending your bagel order as the only possible correct way to eat a bagel — untoasted, scallion schmear, with capers, red onion and lox, and anything else is heresy, thank you for asking — makes you a real New Yorker. Or, if you don’t live in New York, it’s the mark of a devout cultural (and maybe religious) Jew.
Other, earlier attempts to innovate on the theme, and make it trendier and more lucrative, were all one-and-done fads that eventually crashed and burned, becoming a kind of scarlet letter of cringe. (Remember the vanilla-flavored rainbow bagels that were all over social media in the 2010s? They came with funfetti cream cheese. Disgusting, and also deeply uncool.)
Bagel shops are not just places that produce chewy bread with a hole in the center. They have a cultural value. Each is often unique, with its own set of delightful quirks — the place selling Lactaid loosies behind the counter, the brusque man who nevertheless remembers your order. They’re a symbol of uniqueness and authenticity — which, of course, is definitionally impossible to buy. The more constructed something is, the less authentic.
Yet that’s really what the private equity investors are trying to monetize: the idea of a bagel. If it didn’t have that symbolic power, it wouldn’t be a particularly interesting business, given how difficult the baking is to scale well.
The Bagel Equity Fund describes its target market as “fragmented, inconsistent, and devoid of a dominant brand.” But isn’t that the charm of your local bagel place? Not to those investors, which promise to rebrand every store they take over as “Go Bagels,” likely alienating the exact “strong customer bases and community presence” at the stores they aim to acquire.
Bagels have long been a metonym both for New York and for Jewishness. See: the phrase “pizza bagel,” describing people of mixed Italian and Jewish heritage. Good bagels inspire poetic food reviews — and literal poetry — but also lengthy cultural takes. There are dissertations on its history — and I don’t mean that as a kind of humorous exaggeration, I mean actual papers filed to receive a doctorate.
They were also core to unionization of American workers. The Beigel Bakers Local, which conducted its meetings in Yiddish, led strikes over pay and conditions, and standardized the bagel’s form into the icon we all know. That union was so powerful that its members put the city, during strikes, into what is memorialized as a “bagel famine” — a near-emergency for the city’s devoted consumers. The bagel and its attendant culture is a product of the blood, sweat and tears of New York City’s Jewish workers.
The union was ultimately undone by the mechanized mass production of grocery store bagels — an inferior product, yes, but one accessible at a mass scale, exactly what private equity is attempting to reproduce. The fact that a paltry imitation of a bagel still had enough financial power to destroy a once-powerful union is also worrying. People in cities other than New York — cities, that is to say, with a poor selection of bagels — will probably eat the sub-par private equity bagels, because there’s no other option, a key element of enshittification, as Doctorow observes.
But once the big conglomerates have the power, will they be so strong that the bagels they produce take over even on the bagel’s home turf? Will they exterminate the original New York bagel, and with it, its cultural history?
I don’t want to overstate the symbolic power of private equity buying the bagel brand. But at a time when antisemitism is rising, and Jews are increasingly being accused of, once again, greed, malicious control and undue influence, it certainly can’t help. If the bagel represents Jews, and the bagel has sold out, well, that’s a bad look.
But the real deal can still shine through the enshittification haze. “I just stayed in Brooklyn for the first time and felt so alive surrounded by all those bagel shops!” wrote one user on Reddit. They were there to complain — about Denver’s newest private equity bagel. Clearly, the New York bagel’s brand remains strong, even to outsiders.
The post What the private equity takeover means for the bagel industry appeared first on The Forward.
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Suspicious Explosive Package Targeting Jewish Leader Heightens Antisemitism Fears in Argentina
People hold up pictures of the victims of the AMIA Jewish center bombing during a ceremony to mark the 22nd anniversary of the 1994 attack in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2016. Photo: REUTERS/Enrique Marcarian
Argentina’s authorities are investigating yet another suspected antisemitic incident after a suspicious package addressed to a local branch president of the country’s main Jewish umbrella organization was intercepted, further heightening alarms among community leaders amid a recent surge in attacks.
On Wednesday, the Pilares del Rosario medical center received a package containing explosive material addressed to Gabriel Dobkin, who serves as both the institution’s director and president of the local branch of the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA) in Rosario, a major city in the central-eastern Santa Fe province.
According to local media, clinic staff received a package containing a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes wrapped in transparent tape, which the facility’s manager said felt unusually heavy and immediately aroused suspicion.
Because the package had arrived unrequested via a delivery service, the clinic’s manager quickly raised concerns and called in the police explosives unit.
Police bomb squad dogs later detected explosive material inside the cigarette pack. According to the ongoing investigation, the package also contained a strange substance, though authorities have not yet released further details.
After digging a pit in the facility’s backyard, police experts carried out a controlled detonation of the material.
Even though the package did not include an automatic triggering mechanism, it reportedly contained a number of coins intended to serve as shrapnel in the event of an explosion.
Local law enforcement is treating the incident as a targeted antisemitic attack, describing it as either an attempted act of violence or, at the very least, an act of intimidation.
As the investigation continues, detectives are still analyzing the substance found inside the package but have not yet determined its composition or origin. Surveillance footage from the area is being reviewed, and staff from the clinic are also expected to be interviewed.
DAIA Rosario strongly condemned the attack, describing it as a troubling escalation of threats against Jewish institutions, reflecting a wider atmosphere of hostility toward the community.
“This is an expression of hatred that not only targets the Jewish community, but also undermines the fundamental values of coexistence, respect, and democracy. Such acts must be condemned unequivocally and confronted with resolve. Simply denouncing them is not enough — decisive action is essential,” the organization said in a statement.
“Impunity cannot be an option. Every act of antisemitism that goes unpunished sends a message of tolerance toward hatred,” it continued. “Every firm response from the state is a clear signal that society will not back down. To prevent these acts from recurring, determination, action, and justice are essential.”
This latest incident comes amid heightened security concerns within Argentina’s Jewish community after unknown individuals threw a homemade firebomb at the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish Community Center in La Plata, a city in southeastern Buenos Aires Province, last Sunday.
The Buenos Aires Security Ministry and Police Counterterrorism Division have opened an investigation into the incident, examining possible links to another attack last week that appears to share a similar modus operandi.
The Israelite Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata were also targeted last Thursday when unidentified individuals threw a homemade Molotov-type device at the building’s entrance.
Although the device failed to ignite, it shattered the building’s windows and caused some material damage. Fortunately, no fires broke out and no injuries were reported.
In response to these latest attacks, Jewish institutions across the country have strengthened preventive protocols and reinforced internal security and surveillance measures.
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US, Israel Cripple Iran’s Nuclear Weaponization Work, New Report Shows
Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
More than two months into the war, Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons has suffered a major setback as US and Israeli strikes have ravaged critical facilities, crippled essential infrastructure, and killed personnel central to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, according to a new analysis
On Friday, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, DC–based think tank, released a new assessment of the impact of Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, concluding that the attacks significantly damaged Tehran’s ability to advance nuclear weapons development, particularly by disrupting its weaponization activities.
A nuclear program generally begins with uranium enrichment, the process of producing material that can power civilian reactors or, at higher levels of purity, be used in a nuclear weapon. Much of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure was destroyed during last year’s 12-day war.
The second element is weaponization, which involves the design, testing, and production of the components needed to assemble a functioning nuclear device — a central focus of the more recent Israeli and US military campaign.
According to ISIS’s newly released report, at least six confirmed nuclear-related sites were destroyed so far, with three additional locations possibly connected to the program also struck, bringing the total number of targeted facilities linked to nuclear weapons development to between nine and 12.
Since the start of the war earlier this year, Israel and the United States have struck a wide range of military-industrial facilities involved in missile, drone, and conventional weapons production.
However, the report indicates that some previously undisclosed sites may also have had connections to Iran’s nuclear activities, potentially raising the true scale of the damage.
By analyzing satellite imagery, the report concludes that Iran’s ability to successfully complete a nuclear weapon has been significantly degraded, with the strikes greatly extending the timeline required to produce a bomb while sharply increasing the likelihood of technical failure.
Before the June 2025 war, intelligence assessments estimated Iran could likely produce a nuclear weapon in less than six months with a high probability of success.
Now, the regime’s chances of successfully completing the weaponization process are considered technically low even over a one- to two-year period, largely because the strikes destroyed not only facilities, but also critical equipment and personnel involved in the final stages of bomb development.
ISIS’s latest findings contradict earlier US intelligence assessments, which reportedly concluded that Iran’s nuclear timeline had not been significantly delayed, arguing that such data is inconsistent with extensive visible destruction across key nuclear sites.
The report also argues that there are no signs Iran has resumed uranium enrichment activities, as facilities repeatedly targeted by Israeli and American airstrikes remain heavily damaged with no detectable reconstruction efforts underway.
Despite extensive damage to the regime’s infrastructure, the report cautions that Iran’s nuclear threat has not been fully eliminated.
ISIS has identified tunnel complexes near Esfahan and Natanz in central Iran that were not directly targeted and are believed to contain most of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, including roughly 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent — far above civilian requirements and much closer to weapons-grade material.