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A chaotic response to Israel’s turmoil a reveals a fraught new dilemma for Jewish legacy organizations
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Major American Jewish organizations that hoped to send a unified message about the turmoil in Israel yesterday instead found themselves tussling, partly in the public eye, about what exactly they wanted to say.
Should they praise the massive anti-government protests that have taken shape in recent months? Should they criticize Israel’s sitting government? What, if anything, should they endorse as a next step in the ongoing crisis?
Five large Jewish organizations — all known for their vocal pro-Israel advocacy — began Monday afternoon trying to answer those questions in a unified voice that sent a positive message: praise for a decision to pause the government’s divisive judicial overhaul.
Instead, in a somewhat messy process that unfolded over the course of the afternoon, they ended up sending out a number of different statements that contrasted in subtle yet telling ways. The scramble to publish a statement reflecting consensus — and the resulting impression that consensus was lacking — was a reflection of how Israel’s politics have created a rift in the U.S. Jewish establishment.
For decades, large American Jewish groups have publicly supported Israel’s foreign policy, and mostly stayed quiet on its domestic conflicts. Now, a domestic policy issue threatening to tear Israel apart has compelled at least some of them to do two unusual things: opine on Israel’s internal affairs, and publicly chide the government that, in their view, is responsible for the crisis.
“For a long time any criticism of Israel, even criticism of very difficult policies, was thought to be disloyal, and couldn’t be spoken out of love,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, which was not a signatory to the statement but is a constituent of the group that organized it. “I think we now understand that there’s plenty of legitimate criticism and activism that comes from that very place.”
The five groups that began composing the statement together were the Jewish Federations of North America, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. All have historically been seen as centrist, pro-Israel and representative of the American Jewish establishment, speaking for American Jews in international forums and in meetings with elected officials. All have annual budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more.
Any vocal criticism from those groups has largely been limited to Israel’s treatment of non-Orthodox Jews. Because most American Jews are themselves not Orthodox, American Jewish groups have felt more comfortable advocating for policies that, they believe, will allow more of their constituents to feel welcome in the Jewish state.
But events this year have prompted the groups to speak out on another Israeli domestic issue: the judicial overhaul being pushed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which aimed to sap the Israeli Supreme Court of much of its power and independence. The court has, in the past, defended the rights of vulnerable populations in Israel such as women, the non-Orthodox, Arabs and the LGBTQ community.
“The recognition that what happens in Israel, the policies of the Israeli government and a broader range of issues in this particular case — on judicial reform, the perception of Israel as a vibrant democracy for all of its citizens — that perception has a significant impact on American Jewish life and American Jewish engagement,” said Gil Preuss, CEO of Washington, D.C.’s Jewish federation.
Most of the five groups had previously endorsed calls for compromise on the judicial reform proposal. The federations had also come out against one of its key elements. So when Netanyahu announced on Monday — in the face of widespread protests and dissent from allies — that he would pause the legislative push to allow time for dialogue, they all hoped to express their support.
What to write after that sentiment, however, proved contentious. A version of the statement put out by the American Jewish Committee included sharp criticism of Israeli politicians that was not in the other statements.
The Jewish Federations of North America sent out an addendum to the statement that was sympathetic to anti-Netanyahu protesters.
And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee ultimately opted out of the statement altogether — but not before a version had already been released in its name.
None of the five groups responded to requests for comment on the process behind the statement, but insiders said the differences between the statements, and AIPAC’s opting out, had little to do with policy differences. Instead, they blamed the confusion on missteps in the rush to get the statement out in the minutes after Netanyahu’s remarks, which aired in Israel at 8 p.m. and in the early afternoon on the East Coast, where all of the groups are based.
The statement that ultimately appeared, after declaring that the groups “welcome the Israeli government’s suspension” of the reforms, said that the raucous debate and protests over the legislation were “painful to watch” but also “a textbook case of democracy in action.”
A key line included rare advice to Israel from the establishment Jewish groups: “As a next step, we encourage all Knesset factions, coalition and opposition alike, to use this time to build a consensus that includes the broad support of Israeli civil society.”
The Conference of Presidents was the first to release the statement, just past 2 p.m., less than an hour after Netanyahu had completed his remarks. It listed its co-endorsers as the AJC, the ADL and JFNA.
Five minutes later, the AJC put out a version of the same statement that added AIPAC to the endorsers. It included the same sentence offering advice, plus another two that added criticism and a caution: “Israel’s political leaders must insist on a more respectful tone and debate. A hallmark of democracy is public consensus and mutual consideration.”
Statements from JFNA and ADL, which went out subsequently, hewed to the Conference of Presidents version. An AIPAC official told JTA that the group did not want to sign onto the statement because it had wanted more time to add edits.
Just before 3 p.m., more than 40 minutes after its initial email, AJC sent out an email advising recipients that its inclusion of AIPAC was an error.
But its new statement still included the line criticizing politicians, which the other groups had eschewed. In the end, AJC removed that line, too: It is absent from the version of the statement posted on the group’s website.
AIPAC ultimately settled on posting a tweet that stuck to praising Israel for its democratic process, without further comment.
“For many weeks, Israelis have engaged in a vigorous debate reflective of the Jewish state’s robust democracy,” it said. “Israel’s diverse citizenship is showcasing its passionate engagement in the democratic process to determine the policies that will guide their country.”
JFNA, in an explanatory email to its constituents attached to the joint statement, was more pointed in its criticism of Netanyahu. On Sunday night, the prime minister had summarily fired his defense minister, Yoav Galant, for publicly advocating a pause on the legislation. That decision sparked protests across Israel, which in turn prompted Netanyahu to announce exactly the same pause and compromise that Gallant had proposed.
“The response across Israeli society was immediate and angry,” said the email signed by Julie Platt, the chairwoman of JFNA, and Eric Fingerhut, its CEO. “Spontaneous protests gathered in the streets and commentators expressed shock at a decision to fire a Defense Minister for having expressed concern about the risks to the country’s military position … Netanyahu’s own lawyer in his corruption trial announced that he could no longer represent him.”
The groups weren’t alone in releasing pained statements about Israel’s volatility — which has also stirred anguish among groups that have previously defended the Israeli right.
This week, Rabbi Moshe Hauer of the Orthodox Union, who met earlier this month with far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, praised Israel’s leaders for “the recognition of the value of taking time, engaging with each other with honesty and humility, and proceeding to build consensus.” (Smotrich, for his part, supports the overhaul and opposed pausing the legislation.)
“Our Sages taught, ‘Peace is great; discord is despised’,” Hauer, the group’s executive director, said in an emailed statement to JTA. “We are deeply shaken by the upheaval and discord that has gripped our beloved State of Israel. In recent weeks, the Jewish tradition and the democratic value of vigorous debate have been replaced by something very dangerous and different.”
The two largest non-Orthodox movements were open about their opposition to the overhaul. “We believe ardently that the proposed judicial reform is fraught with danger and goes against the principles of democracy,” the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly said in a statement Tuesday.
A statement from the leadership of the Reform movement, including Jacobs, castigated Netanyahu for agreeing to create a national guard under the authority of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, and for being “willing to risk the safety and security of Israel’s citizens to keep himself and his coalition in power.”
That strong language, Jacobs suggested, reflects the wishes of those who fund establishment Jewish groups and congregations. He said those groups were hearing from donors whose frustration with the Netanyahu government is reaching a boiling point.
“I hear of donors telling organizations, ‘I have to tell you, I don’t hear your voice, speaking out in favor of Israel’s democracy at this very vulnerable moment. So I’ll tell you what, why don’t you hang on to my phone number when you find your voice?’”
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In her inspired and inspiring history of the Jewish Bund, Molly Crabapple has found her anti-Zionist heroes for our time
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund
By Molly Crabapple
One World, 453 pages, $32
The week of Passover, north Brooklyn bus riders found something unusual at several bus shelters. Swapped out for paid ads were quotes including one translated from a 1938 essay in Tsukunft, a Yiddish literary monthly once published by the Forward Association.
“If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine,” it read, “its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?”
There are pithier anti-Zionist slogans graffitied in Brooklyn, but this quote was from Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a staunchly anti-Zionist socialist party founded in Vilna in 1897 that became the most influential political party among prewar Eastern European Jews.
The bus shelter takeover was part of a guerrilla ad campaign for Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund, a new book by the artist, activist and writer Molly Crabapple. The campaign, which started the same week the Justice Department sued Harvard University, accusing it of tolerating antisemitism by failing to crack down on anti-Zionist student protesters, also included wheatpasted posters of a model in fishnets holding Crabapple’s book.
The Trump administration and leading American Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee argue that opposing Zionism, defined as Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, is antisemitic; Crabapple’s response is a 400-page Jewish history lesson.
Before World War II, most Jews were not Zionists. Many Orthodox communities felt that forming a Jewish state was heresy, others thought the mass migration of 9 million Jews from a hostile Europe was impractical. The Bund’s opposition to Zionism was not religious or pragmatic; it was ideological. Bundists argued that the future of Jews was linked to all workers, and they should stay and fight repression in Europe, not leave. They called this form of solidarity doikayt, Yiddish for here-ness, as opposed to Zionism’s there-ness.
Crabapple places the Bund, initially an outlawed group in Tsarist Russia, at the center of both the failed 1905 and successful 1917 revolutions. In interwar Poland, as a legal party, it became the most powerful Jewish political movement, even winning seats in municipal elections, and during the Holocaust, Bundists became ghetto fighters and partisans. But the Bund was purged by Stalin, who killed Erlich four years after his Tsukunft essay, and decimated by the Nazis. In postwar America, the Bund was mostly forgotten.
Crabapple, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and an Occupy Wall Street alumna, learned of the Bund through a watercolor by her great-grandfather the artist Sam Rothbort. The painting, set in the Belarusian shtetl of his youth, shows a young woman in a blue dress throwing a rock through a cottage window. The caption reads: “Itka, the Bundist.”
In her 2018 New York Review of Books essay “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist,” Crabapple recounts discovering that Rothbort’s activism in Tsarist Russia forced him to flee to New York in 1904.
Since the publication of her article, Crabapple spent six years learning Yiddish, visited the former centers of Eastern Europe Jewish life, and dug through obscure Yiddish socialist tomes to produce her book. During the same time, Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and Israel responded by killing over 70,000 in Gaza in attacks which many, including the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have called a genocide. At the time of this writing, Israel is occupying southern Lebanon and along with the United States is at war with Iran. For the first time, Gallup polls show more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, and an increasing number of younger Jews have rejected Zionism outright and are rediscovering the Bund.
Crabapple’s book is written for this moment. More than translating Bundist theory from Yiddish, she puts it into the language of today’s left. When Julius Martov declared in 1894 “that Jewish workers were oppressed both as workers and as Jews, as a race and a class,” Crabapple explains that he was invoking what the modern-day scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “intersectionality” and was a form of “identity politics.”
To tell the Bund story, Crabapple focuses on a cast of characters including Erlich’s wife, the poet and activist Sophia Dubnow; the militant leader Bernard Goldstein; the famous ghetto smuggler Vladka Meed (nee Feigele Peltel); and her own great-grandfather Sam Rothbort. In some instances, she relies on memoirs; for Rothbort, she interprets the hundreds of paintings and sculptures in her great-aunt’s Brooklyn home and pulls on genealogical threads from her mother’s shoebox of family papers.
Crabapple, whose artwork is in the permanent collection of MoMA and the Rubin Museum, and has posters currently on display at the Poster House, introduces each character with an ink drawing portrait. Her artwork tends to lay bare her political perspective. She renders Donald Trump grotesque, while her sketches of Bundists are more similar to her portraits that glorify leftist icons like Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of the United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson.
When asked in 2020 on the progressive Jewish podcast Treyf if progressives were engaging with a “romanticized fantasy of the Bund,” she didn’t disagree. “There’s actually a great value to simplified and aesthetic symbols in politics,” she said. “The fantasy of the Bund that I see is a muscly Jewish guy in a newsboy cap saying ‘fuck the Zionists’ with one middle finger while the other hand punches a Nazi.”
Here Where We Live Is Our Country is not a caricature of the Bund, nor a work of fan fiction; it’s a deeply researched portrait, but at its core lies this romantic vision. The Bund ran soup kitchens, sports programs and day camps, and promoted the Yiddish language, but Crabapple is most attracted to their street-fighting militancy. And her narrative can be one-sided. The Erlich quote in the book and on the bus shelter was part of a public debate with his father-in-law, the historian Simon Dubnow. Dubnow’s response goes untold.
But there are plenty of academic texts that dissect 90-year-old political debates. Crabapple’s book is different, and better for it. Here Where We Live Is Our Country reads like an epic novel with the Bundists as its tragic heroes.
Crabapple, as narrator, relates her experiences protesting at the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment, canvassing housing projects with the DSA, reporting from the West Bank and Gaza, and traveling through war-torn Ukraine. The personal interjections remind the reader that this is not a dispassionate history. Naomi Klein’s blurb praises the book as “a portal to an irresistible, lost world,” but Crabapple’s goal is not to write an elegy. She calls the Bund’s history a “candle to illuminate the tumultuous present” and hopes her book “serves as a guide to our urgent moment.” She decouples Zionism from Jewishness and shows that anti-Zionism alone is not antisemitic, but she leaves largely unresolved the question of what the Bund’s example demands of us today.
The Bund organized eastern European Jewish workers who lacked basic civil rights. Today’s challenge is less about Jewish empowerment, than it is about how Jews wield power, vis-a-vis the state of Israel and its military. In the book, however, Israel barely appears as an actual place where millions of Jews and Palestinians live. Instead, Israel is seen through the prism of its founding ideology, Zionism — one which pre-war Bundists argued adopted the worst quality of European ethno-nationalism.
As the Erlich quote argues, a Jewish state in Israel was destined to repeat endless cycles of violence and tribalism. In this view, the socialist kibbutzes that seduced leftists like a young Bernie Sanders or the overtures of peace and coexistence by Liberal Zionists like Yitzhak Rabin, are all illusions. For Crabapple, the inescapable reality of Zionism is instead the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, the violent settlers, and increasingly brutal wars and occupation.
The antidote is the Bundists’ concept of solidarity — where Jews join with the workers of the world but, unlike in Communism, hold on to their Jewish identity. One of the quotes Crabapple returns to several times is from the Socialist Congressman and Bundist ally Meyer London in 1905, where he inverts the story of Exodus: “Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives for liberty? They pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt.”
The quote, like Crabapple’s book, is poetic and noble. It goes against everything I learned in Hebrew School, yet somehow reflects Jewish values in its call to be empathetic to the oppressed, because we “were once a stranger in a strange land.”
Reflecting on a 1938 Erlich speech about the rise of Nazism, where he calls on Polish Jews to stand in solidarity with the same people who had carried out pogroms across their country, Crabapple writes: “This was it. There was only Egypt, the Bund knew, and they were stuck with the Egyptians. They were people first, not Jews or goys.” It is a beautiful and heartbreaking line, knowing what came next.
This tragic solidarity is presented as a point of inspiration, but how? The 2023 Jewish Voices for Peace cease-fire protest that filled Grand Central Terminal is offered as an example of Bundist-like solidarity in action, but Crabapple, who has supported a cultural boycott of Israel, stops short of prescribing what this anti-Zionism should mean today.
Vast numbers of Jews, including Bundists, did leave Egypt and cross into Israel — not not because of ideology or religion, but because of history. American labor leader David Dubinsky, who is featured in the book, was exiled to Siberia by the Tsar and escaped to New York, where he co-founded the Jewish Labor Committee in 1934, providing Bundists critical support during the Holocaust.
In his memoirs, Dubinsky recalls telling David Ben-Gurion after the war, “even though I am sympathetic to the creation of Israel, I am not a Zionist.” He then spent decades steering American labor to support Israel financially and politically.
Crabapple also includes Vladka Meed, the celebrated ghetto smuggler, drawing on her memoir Both Sides of the Wall, the proceeds of whose English edition were donated to the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel, where Meed led groups of Americans on educational trips.
The historian David Slucki in his 2012 book, The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945, finds that over time the Bund came to terms with the state of Israel; the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee accepted it as an important Jewish community, but not the sole political and cultural center, and eventually advocated a two-state solution.
It’s hard to imagine the Bund simply “Standing with Israel” today. But nearly half of Americans under 30 describe Hamas as a militant resistance group rather than a terrorist organization, and anti-Zionism has been taken up by far right antisemites. Crabapple doesn’t spell out what the Bundist response would be today; she leaves that to the reader. What she does is resurrect a buried political tradition in a way her Bundist heroes would appreciate: not just in book form, but in the streets for everyday Brooklyn bus riders.
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Long Island town ordered to pay $19M after blocking Chabad synagogue construction
(JTA) — After nearly two decades of legal sparring, a town on Long Island has been ordered to pay a local Chabad center $19 million, settling claims that officials unlawfully blocked the construction of a synagogue on its rabbi’s property.
Rabbi Aaron Konikov and Lubavitch of Old Westbury sued the Village of Old Westbury in 2008, after the village passed a law in 2001 governing places of worship as Konikov sought to build a synagogue on his property.
Local officials enacted the law two years after Konikov planned a ceremony to announce a new building on the land where he already operates a synagogue. They decreed that houses of worship could be built only on plots of 12 acres or more. Konikov owns a 9-acre plot.
In October, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown ruled that the 2001 ordinance “unconstitutionally discriminates against the free exercise of religion and is therefore facially invalid.”
Old Westbury agreed to pay the plaintiffs in the suit $19 million as part of a consent decree, which was signed by Brown on March 18, Newsday reported this week.
“This consent decree may not be modified, changed or amended except in writing signed by each of the parties approved by the court,” Brown wrote. “Each party participated fully in the negotiation and drafting of the terms of this decree, and any ambiguity shall not be construed against any party.”
Kornikov did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. But he may soon be switching into construction mode for his long hoped-for synagogue, for which preliminary plans show a 20,875-square-foot building and an adjacent parking lot.
The $19 million payment will be made by the village’s insurance providers, and Lubavitch of Old Westbury has until Jan. 15, 2027, to apply for a special-use permit from the village to build a synagogue, according to Newsday.
The ruling marks a notable victory for emissaries of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, who have often been met with legal challenges when establishing centers. Last July, the Village of Atlantic Beach in New York agreed to pay Chabad of the Beaches $950,000 to settle a legal battle over the construction of a new community center.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Long Island town ordered to pay $19M after blocking Chabad synagogue construction appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran claims synagogue in Tehran was ‘completely destroyed’ by US-Israeli strike
(JTA) — Iranian state media claimed on Tuesday that a synagogue in Tehran was “completely destroyed” by a U.S.-Israeli strike.
The claim was impossible to verify. Footage of the alleged attack on the Rafi-Niya Synagogue posted online showed open Hebrew prayer books scattered among the rubble of a building.
The synagogue was damaged when a nearby residential building in Tehran was attacked, according to Iranian news agencies. The Rafi-Niya Synagogue is located near Palestine Square, an epicenter of the Iranian regime’s anti-Israel propaganda.
The United States and Israel have been bombing sites in Tehran for more than a month since launching a war on the Islamic Republic regime. Israel emphasized that it does not target religious sites.
Homayoun Sameyah Najafabadi, the only Jewish representative in Iran’s parliament, condemned the attack in a video published by Iran’s official IRIB News outlet.
“The Zionist regime showed no mercy towards this community during the Jewish holidays and attacked one of our ancient and holy synagogues,” Najafabadi said. “Unfortunately, during this attack, the synagogue building was completely destroyed, and Torah scrolls remain under the rubble.”
About 8,000 Jews live in Iran and worship in dozens of synagogues. The war has exacerbated their delicate position, as they are technically granted freedom of religion but face peril if they demonstrate any connection to Israel or dissent against their government. Hundreds of Iranian Jews who have applied for refugee status because of religious persecution are trapped in the country after the United States halted refugee admissions.
The alleged attack comes one day after the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted footage of an undetonated missile on a street, writing that an “Iranian regime missile struck next to a mosque in Israel.”
“A regime that targets civilians and sacred spaces of all religions has no red lines,” the ministry wrote in a post on X. “Nothing is off limits for them.”
On Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister’s office issued a statement about the alleged damage to the Rafi-Niya synagogue. “Iran is firing missiles at civilians, Israel is striking terror infrastructure,” it said. “Missiles on civilians versus precision strikes on terror targets. That’s the difference.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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