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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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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song appeared first on The Forward.
