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White House says it will not meet with Israel’s Bezalel Smotrich when he visits the US
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Biden administration officials will not meet with Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister who called for a Palestinian village to be “wiped out,” then backtracked, and who is visiting the U.S. next week to meet with leaders of Israel Bonds.
At least five liberal Jewish groups want the U.S. government to consider barring Smotrich from coming here. Ned Price, the department’s spokesman, said at Thursday’s daily briefing that questions on Israeli ministers’ travel should be referred to Israel, and that he does not comment on the eligibility of individuals to enter the United States.
The trip comes as Smotrich and his far-right allies in Israel’s governing coalition have upended traditions of comity between establishment U.S. Jewish groups and Israel. Those relationships have become even more strained in recent days, after Israeli West Bank settlers rioted in a Palestinian village. They also come amid raucous protests of the Israeli government’s plan to sap the power of the judiciary, which critics say endanger minority rights.
William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Smotrich’s remarks were “disgusting,” and a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, said the group would not be meeting with him.
Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency whether the minister will meet with the White House, a National Security Council spokeswoman said, “No U.S. government meetings are planned for this trip.” That includes officials in the U.S. Treasury, the counterpart to Smotrich’s ministry, she said.
Smotrich is also responsible for civilian affairs in much of the West Bank. His call to “wipe out” the West Bank village of Huwara came after a settler rampage through the village following a shooting there that killed two Israeli brothers. At least one Palestinian in another village died amid the riots.
“I think the village of Huwara should be wiped out, I think that the state of Israel should do it,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. A few hours later, he walked back his statement: “To remove any doubt, in my words I did not mean wiping out the village of Huwara, but rather acting in a targeted way against terrorists and supporters of terror, and exacting a heavy price from them in order to return security to local residents.”
This week, the State Department’s annual report on terrorism recorded a “substantial rise” in settler attacks on Palestinian in 2021, the first time it had made such an assessment. On Wednesday, Price called Smotrich’s remarks about wiping out the village “disgusting” and “incitement to violence.”
“Just as we condemn Palestinian incitement to violence, we condemn these provocative remarks that also amount to incitement to violence,” Price said in his briefing that day. “We call on Prime Minister Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials to publicly and clearly reject and disavow these comments.”
Netanyahu has yet to do so, and with Smotrich just days away from a visit stateside to give a speech to Israel Bonds in Washington D.C., five Jewish groups are saying the Biden administration should at least consider keeping him out and others will not sit down with him. AIPAC’s declining to meet with Smotrich is particularly noteworthy. It routinely meets with senior Israeli ministers.
“The administration should make clear that comments promoting grave violations of human rights, such as those made by Smotrich, are grounds for re-examination of a visa for entry to the United States,” J Street, the liberal Jewish Israel policy group, said in a statement.
Four other Jewish groups are saying outright that the Biden administration should keep Smotrich out, among them Americans for Peace Now, an affiliate off the Israeli left-wing group; the Israel Policy Forum, a group that advocates for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel; T’ruah, a liberal rabbinic human rights group; and Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group.
The T’ruah statement referred to U.S. immigration law, which bans entry to those who have “incited terrorist activity with intent to cause serious bodily harm or death.” It said the threat Smotrich poses is especially acute since he assumed responsibility for administering civilian life in parts of the West Bank.
“Smotrich’s comments are even more dangerous now that Israel’s de jure annexation of the West Bank has made him effectively the governor of the territory, with broad oversight over most areas of civil administration,” the T’ruah statement said.
IPF, a group led by former lay leaders of mainstream pro-Israel organizations, also joined the calls. its policy director, Michael Koplow, told JTA, “We believe that there are sufficient grounds to deny Smotrich a visa.”
The Americans for Peace Now petition, addressed to Biden, garnered more than 1,100 signatures less than a day after it was posted.
“Smotrich wants to bring his hatred to US soil. He has plans to travel to the United States later this month. We’re here to say that he is not welcome,” the petition says. “We have seen how incitement in Israel-Palestine has led to devastating violence and we urge your administration to deny entry to Smotrich and his hateful rhetoric.”
A sixth U.S.-based liberal group, the New Israel Fund, which raises money for social justice organizations in Israel, said Jewish groups should make clear Smnotrich is unwanted here. “Our responsibility right now as American Jews is to say ‘take your hateful racism, your homophobia your plans for an apartheid Israel and get out. We do not want you here’,” it said in a statement. Smnotrich has called himself a “proud homophobe.”
Daroff, of the Conference of Presidents, declined to comment to JTA on whether he would meet with Smotrich.But he tweeted his agreement with Price. “I agree. His statement seeking to ‘wipe out’ Huwara was, as Ned Price said, ‘irresponsible, repugnant and disgusting’,” he wrote.
Israel Bonds, which promotes investment in Israeli government bonds, said in a statement that because it works closely with the Finance Ministry, welcoming the sitting finance minister to its events was a matter of routine. Smotrich will speak to the group’s Washington, D.C. leadership meeting.
“As part of their long-established responsibilities, Israel’s finance ministers from across the political spectrum have historically, over Israel Bonds’ 72-year history, attended our events,” a spokesman said, replying to a JTA query. “One of the organization’s most unique and paramount attributes is that it remains unbiased with regard to any political party or affiliation.”
Hundreds of rabbis have said they would not welcome Smotrich or his allies into their synagogues and would encourage their communities to boycott him. The Presidents’ Conference did not invite ministers from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party to address its annual colloquy in Israel last month, although they were invited to a luncheon for all Knesset members.
One group that backs settlements, the Zionist Organization of America, said not meeting with Religious Zionism leaders was a mistake.
‘Nobody has to agree with them or disagree with them,” Klein said. “But they should speak and whoever wants to challenge them, challenge them, criticize them, disagree with them.”
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One of America’s first Jewish farms was nearly lost to history. Now these Brooklyn parents are risking everything to keep their family’s legacy alive.
The 350-square-foot Brooklyn apartment where Malya and William Levin live with their four children is barely big enough for their family, much less their ambitions. From this compressed space, they’re reaching for something vast — the revival of one of America’s first Jewish farms, built by William’s ancestors in rural South Jersey.
Their quixotic quest is larger than acreage; it’s continuity, in a time and place where nothing stays rooted for long. It’s a tight staging ground for an unusually wide dream.
“We aren’t just trying to save land,” Malya said, their toddler Julius perched on her lap. “We are trying to save the story.”
The story she’s referring to reaches back to 1882, when 43 Jewish families fled pogroms in Russia and the Pale of Settlement. They carried what they could — and what they couldn’t bear to leave behind.
Backed by Baron de Hirsch and other Jewish benefactors who believed farming could offer both refuge and respectability, they were sent not to the teeming tenements of Manhattan but to a thousand acres of pine forest and sandy soil.
It was a bold wager: Eastern European Jews, often caricatured in their home countries as “unproductive,” could instead be seen growing their own food as capable, contributing citizens. Those same Jewish immigrants — tailors, peddlers, clerks — could become farmers, rooted and self-reliant, all trying to prove that Jews could stand on American land and make it yield.
“It’s almost a completely different story than we’re used to hearing,” said Adrienne Krone, a religious studies professor at Allegheny College and the author of Free-Range Religion. “We’re used to the Lower East Side and factories and crowded apartments, and what was happening in these farming communities was almost the exact opposite.”
Around the same time, dozens of such Jewish agricultural colonies were established across the United States, including in Louisiana, Utah, and both Dakotas. Yiddish-speaking socialists established a similar settlement, Happyville, in South Carolina.
In New Jersey, they called their 1,000-acre settlement the Alliance Colony.
What began as tents and barracks grew into a rural Jewish community of hundreds of families: homes, vineyards, chicken farms, a school, three synagogues, and a mikvah. The colonists built a tobacco factory that failed, and a button factory that didn’t. Reinvention wasn’t strategy so much as muscle memory.
Among the colony’s early leaders was William’s great-great-grandfather, Moses Bayuk. His generation carved Alliance out of wild ground: clearing land, organizing the community, building the institutions that held it together.
After World War II, a second wave of immigrants arrived in the region — Holocaust survivors who settled in nearby Vineland and Pittsgrove and built successful chicken farms. For decades they sustained a thriving Jewish agricultural center across South Jersey.
But by the 1970s, most families had moved into city jobs. The Jewish presence waned. The land quieted.
What led them back to the farm
For William and Malya, the draw toward Alliance was never just historical. It was personal.
Malya, 41, grew up in New Jersey steeped in Jewish text and memory. She is the daughter of Rabbi Arthur Kurzweil, the noted author whose career has long focused on Jewish continuity. Her childhood was Orthodox, threaded with rituals that made the past feel close enough to touch.
William, 54, arrived at Jewish life differently. He didn’t grow up religious. His first real brush with Judaism came through, of all things, animation: In the early 2000s, before the days of YouTube and social media, he was making viral Jewish videos that somehow found their way across the internet. Several, including a cartoon in which a robot meets 50 Cent and raps about the Ten Plagues, reached millions.
“I didn’t even know what the word frum meant until Frumster hired me,” he said of the Orthodox dating site. “They paid me in a Frumster.com membership.”
It worked.
He met Malya at a Jewish singles event in 2009. They married the next summer, on Tu B’Av, known as the Jewish festival of love.
“We both had a penchant for offbeat stuff,” Malya said. “Neither of us wanted to be accountants and move to the suburbs on Long Island.”
That sensibility carried them to Sukkahfest 2014 at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, where they witnessed a modern Jewish farming movement that wove land, ritual, ecology and community into a single experience.
“It was beautiful and intoxicating,” William said.
“All these young Jews were so into farming,” Malya added. “And we were like: Wait, we have the first Jewish farm.”
Their cramped apartment in Brooklyn feels like the furthest thing from this expansive ideal. A desk presses into a couch, the couch brushes against the mattress where William and Malya sleep. In the lone bedroom, their four children climb into a handmade Jenga-tower of bunk beds.
William opens a cigar box filled with brittle letters from Alliance’s earliest families — the kind of fragile paper that survives only because someone keeps choosing to protect it. For the couple, preserving the land has always meant preserving the story stitched through it.
The idea gained force. The place that kept resurfacing was the 85 acres William’s extended family still owned in the old Alliance Colony, land that had never fully slipped from their hands.
So the couple, an animator and an elder justice attorney, did something audacious: They spent their life savings to buy it back.
When the vision met reality
Their vision was expansive. They imagined retreats, Shabbatons, Jewish holidays at the farm, a hybrid life where city and country sat side by side. But figuring out what the land could actually do required trying almost everything.
They planted organic vegetables and heirloom crops. Built raised beds. Experimented with fruit trees. Started a micro-vineyard. (“Who doesn’t want wine tasting on a kosher vineyard in a historic Jewish farm?” Malya asked.) They considered raising geese, then heritage chicken breeds with old-sounding names. Partnered with local growers. Applied for grants. Taught programs on Jewish agricultural history.
Some ideas lived a season. Some never made it out of the notebook. They tried all these things because not trying felt like betrayal.
They fielded proposals — some compelling, some outlandish. A solar company wanted to cover their fields with panels. A hemp grower pitched them on the green rush. One man wanted to install cryptocurrency servers in the barn, a futuristic-sounding plan that fizzled when William learned the man was tied to a dubious investment scheme.
The Levins were not just fighting weeds and property taxes. They were fighting the economics that hollowed out rural America; the cultural drift that carried Jews away from small towns; the logistical strain of raising four children while holding two demanding jobs.
“We weren’t trying to be homesteaders,” Malya said. “We were trying to find something sustainable that didn’t require uprooting our whole life in Brooklyn.”
Their approach — try, fail, adjust, try again — echoed the original colonists. “Honestly, it’s what we’re doing,” Malya said. “Throwing these things against the wall and seeing what sticks, just like they did.” Reinvention has always been part of Jewish life here, as it is for many small communities trying to stay alive.
Some things they tried did stick.
Descendants began returning for regular Alliance reunions, gatherings that grew each year. Young Jews from the city arrived curious about Jewish farming. And as activity grew, the synagogue — which has hosted High Holiday services continuously since 1889 — flickered back to life, hosting monthly Shabbat services.
A visit to the farm
Driving to the site of the Alliance Colony 60 miles west of Atlantic City, the landscape dissolves into fields of corn, hay and soybeans. The road straightens, the sky widens, and then the white wooden synagogue appears. Tall, narrow, arched windows, still standing after 136 years.
Howard Jaffe is waiting on the steps.
He is 70, with a long white beard, a ponytail, and a gold hoop earring. He looks like a Jewish Santa Claus who once sold jewelry at Grateful Dead concerts — which, as it happens, he did.
His grandfather prayed in this sanctuary. Howard has made it his mission to maintain it. “This place raised me,” he says, and swings the door open. “I guess now I raise it.”
The building is neither grand nor fragile. It simply persists. Inside, the sanctuary offers the cool hush of old buildings: sunlight slanting across pews, floorboards worn to a soft gloss by generations of feet from farmers, factory workers, and families.
He walks upstairs to the women’s gallery, a reminder of the building’s Orthodox roots. From here, the sanctuary stretches below like a diorama. Then Howard opens a small doorway into the attic, a low, sloping space where traveling rabbis once slept, the rafters forming a rib cage of wood.
The Alliance Cemetery, 20 acres across the road, tells the story more plainly than any archive. The early graves belong to the colonists who cleared the land; the later ones to the survivors who arrived after the war and tried to build something new.
Howard stops to brush leaves from one stone. Names repeat across the rows: Gershal, Shiff, Brotman — the same names that mark the roads nearby. Some headstones tilt like old teeth; others sink into the earth as if tired of holding their stories upright. A few mark children. Many bear Hebrew inscriptions weathered thin by rain and time.
Deeper in, on a small rise, stands the cemetery’s most arresting structure: a large Holocaust memorial carved with the names of camps: Auschwitz. Buchenwald. Dachau. Treblinka.
It was built in the 1990s, by Irving and Esther Raab, who met in Auschwitz and immigrated to the area after the war. It’s where they built a successful kosher poultry business, at one point employing 12 butchers. Howard worked for them for a stretch, managing the killing room.
Its heavy stone rises among wooden farmhouses built by immigrants who had fled an earlier era of violence. It’s a reminder that the colony, like so much of American Jewish life, was shaped both by those who fled Europe in the 1880s and those who survived it in the 1940s.
Today, thanks to the Levins’ efforts and a new documentary about Alliance, Howard finds himself giving more tours than he has in years — to school groups, descendants, even curious Mennonites.
The work of reanimation
To the left of the cemetery stands a bright mural, painted last summer, which retells the colony’s story in bold colors. A shtetl burning. A steamship crowded with families. A wide field waiting for them. The present looking back at the past, asking what it still requires.
The last panel centers on William’s own lineage. In vivid purples stands Moses Bayuk holding a cluster of grapes from the Alliance vineyards — grapes that Welch’s once bought from this very farm.
The mural is not decoration. It is instruction: a reminder of how the story began, painted so it cannot be forgotten by whoever comes next.
Past the mural stands William’s grandparents’ home, which had long sat empty. But the bones were good: the clean lines of midcentury design, a peaceful view of fields, the kind of quiet that city families crave.
So the Levins renovated it.
They’ve now opened it as a kosher Airbnb, a place where Jewish families could spend Shabbat, celebrate holidays, or simply breathe outside the city without worrying about kitchen logistics. It wasn’t the centerpiece of their vision, but it became a steady foothold — a way to bring people onto the land, reconnect them with Alliance, and slowly rebuild around the place.
When the Levins go down to Alliance, they line up events — a tour, a talk, a small gathering — that fold into their monthly visits. The point isn’t profit. It’s presence.
For Krone, the professor who studies Jewish agricultural communities, what the Levins are doing at Alliance is not a resurrection. It’s a reanimation.
“Alliance is unique in that they have this historic connection,” she said. “They’re part of a contemporary movement of Jews reconnecting to agriculture, but they’re doing it in a place where there has been that connection before, and they’re very intentional about that.”
In her view, the Levins have already begun shifting the trajectory.
“I think they’ve reinvigorated it,” she said. “They’re growing food through collaborations, hosting events, drawing descendants back at regular reunions, keeping the synagogue active. The community that’s forming around them — that’s already the project.”
In a world where Jewish stories often end with what was lost, Alliance is a rare one still asking what might yet be found.
When William and Malya talk about Alliance now, they sound like hopeful realists with a mortgage. The early, expansive dream has settled into something steadier — less about rebuilding a vanished colony and more about tending what remains so it can keep growing.
“We really like our life in Brooklyn, but we also really like having this other place that is meaningful,” Malya said. “It’s rare for Jewish kids in America to have a place where their family has six generations of history.”
Alliance has always been an exercise in reinvention: first by the colonists, then by the survivors, and now by a family trying to reconcile two very different forms of Jewish life. The Levins move between the noise of one life and the quiet persistence of another.
They are not trying to rebuild the past. They’re trying to keep it from disappearing. And in doing so, they’ve carved out a place where Jewish life, in all its improvisation and resilience, can still take root.
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Liberal Zionist groups criticize Trump administration’s travel ban on those with Palestinian Authority passports
(JTA) — The Trump administration has extended its travel ban to Palestinian Authority passport holders amid a crackdown on legal immigration and travel.
The White House said the ben was needed because “several U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip and have murdered American citizens.”
“Also, the recent war in these areas likely resulted in compromised vetting and screening abilities,” the announcement continued. “In light of these factors, and considering the weak or nonexistent control exercised over these areas by the PA, individuals attempting to travel on PA-issued or endorsed travel documents cannot currently be properly vetted and approved for entry into the United States.”
The ban formalizes a practice revealed this fall when the United States declined to issue visas to Palestinian officials, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, to attend the United Nations General Assembly. It includes waivers for certain cases, including athletes traveling to compete in the Olympics or World Cup.
The expansion of the travel ban was condemned by several liberal-leaning Jewish groups, including J Street, a liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group.
“At a time when the Trump administration claims that it is working to advance the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, its decision to bar Palestinian travel to the US is both deeply damaging and counterproductive,” said Adina Vogel-Ayalon, J Street’s vice president and chief of staff, in a statement. “Rather than advancing stability, this policy further delegitimizes and weakens the Palestinian Authority at the very moment when US policy should be focused on strengthening its capacity to sideline Hamas, improve governance, and help stabilize and secure Gaza and the West Bank.”
Hadar Susskind, the president and CEO of New Jewish Narrative, a progressive Zionist Jewish organization, also criticized the ban.
“We urge the administration to reverse these restrictions and to pursue security policies that are targeted, evidence-based, and consistent with human rights,” said Susskind in a statement. “True security is built through inclusion, engagement, and justice—not through walls or racist bans.”
The White House announced the ban on travelers with P.A. passports on Tuesday along with similar prohibitions on nationals from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria.
The countries join 12 others whose passport-holders were barred from entering the United States starting in June, which included Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
“AMERICA FIRST SECURITY 🇺🇸,” wrote the White House in a post on X. “President Donald J. Trump just signed a new Proclamation, STRENGTHENING our borders & national security with data-driven restrictions on high-risk countries with severe deficiencies in screening & vetting.”
The new additions come as the White House continues to impose severe restrictions on immigration following the shooting of two National Guard members by a suspect who is an Afghan national last month.
Last week, the Trump administration also rolled out new draft regulations that would require travelers from Israel and dozens of other countries to provide five years of social media history for entry to the United States.
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Richmond mayor facing resignation calls over posts calling Sydney massacre ‘false flag’
Bay Area Jewish leaders are calling for the resignation of Richmond Mayor Eduardo Martinez after he re-shared multiple LinkedIn posts that called Sunday’s massacre of Jewish people in Sydney an Israeli “false flag attack.”
Martinez, who was elected by the city just north of Berkeley in 2023, also shared posts claiming that “the root cause of antisemitism is the behavior of Israel and Israelis.”
Martinez has since removed the posts from his account and apologized for sharing them “without thinking” — but he did not disavow the false flag conspiracy theory about the attack. He clarified only that “we know that antisemitism was here before the creation of the state of Israel.”
“As I’ve said many times before, we should not conflate Zionism with Judaism,” Martinez wrote on LinkedIn. “They are two separate beliefs.”
He later added, “I want to assure everyone that these postings are my opinions (or my mistakes) and mine only. They are not statements from my office or the city of Richmond. If I make a mistake, that mistake is mine only. Once again, I apologize for posting in haste without full understanding of the posting.”
He did not discuss the attack, which killed 15 people and injured dozens.
The Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area was outraged by Martinez’s online activity and left cold by his apology. It called for his resignation Thursday in a statement posted to JCRC social media.
“These actions reflect a consistent and deeply troubling disregard for the safety and dignity of Jewish people,” the organization wrote on Instagram. “They erode public trust and send a chilling message to Jewish residents that they are neither protected nor respected by their own mayor.”
The local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, ADL Central Pacific, also condemned the post.
“There’s no excuse for an elected leader to be amplifying warped antisemitic conspiracy theories that seek to blame the victim,” ADL regional director Marc Levine wrote in a statement to J. The Jewish News of Northern California. “The Australian community has already faced enough tragedy over the last few days. We hope Mayor Martinez will reconsider his hurtful words, which have absolutely no place in public discourse.”
The Forward has reached out to Martinez for comment.
Martinez’s LinkedIn posts were the latest in what local leaders say is a slew of antisemitic incidents during the progressive’s tenure. In 2023, just weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, Martinez
Martinez, a former schoolteacher, posts regularly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on LinkedIn, sometimes multiple times per day.
In August, speaking at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Martinez likened the Oct. 7 attack to someone snapping after being bullied on the playground, J. reported, adding that whether he supported Hamas was “complicated.”
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