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A conveniently timed conference offers Israel educators a safe space to explore complex feelings
CHICAGO (JTA) – At one point ahead of an international conference on Israel education, as raucous anti-government protests filled the streets of Israeli cities, conference organizers considered leaning into the tension created by the news: What if they focused one day of the gathering on conflict, and the next day on hope?
Ultimately, they decided “you can’t divorce the two,” in the words of Aliza Goodman, one of the organizers.
“If you separate them, then it means one is devoid of the other and vice versa,” said Goodman, director of strategy and research and development for the iCenter, the Israel education organization that hosted the conference in Chicago in March.
Israel educators, Goodman said, need to hold “the complexities together with the hopes for us to be able to move forward as human beings.”
That emotional challenge lay at the center of the conference, the iCenter’s fifth, called iCON 2023. The conference covered standard topics in Israel education, ranging from Hebrew literature and language to representations of Jews and Israel in popular culture to a bevy of subtopics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But the turmoil that has rocked Israel this year felt no less prominent. In sessions and on the sidelines, the more than 500 participants discussed the Israeli government’s proposed judicial overhaul, its far-right cabinet ministers and the preservation of Israel’s democratic character.
Conference attendees said they faced dual challenges: understanding the political issues at play and reckoning with what they mean for teaching about Israel. Their thoughts on the current historical moment suggested that those challenges would persist even though Israel’s government announced a pause on the judicial overhaul shortly after the conference concluded.
“We are responsible for doing something, don’t get me wrong, but my immediate responsibility is trying to really get a handle on understanding it for myself and for my students,” said Rebecca Good, the assistant director of education at The Temple, a Reform synagogue in Atlanta.
Good has found herself fielding new questions about Israel, mostly from adult congregants, “but we know that the questions and the feelings that are coming from the adults naturally play out in the home,” she said. In response to the perceived need she has recognized from her students, her synagogue planned a town hall-style meeting that took place in late March.
“It’s almost like you do triage, right? When things like this happen, it’s like, ‘OK, how are you?’” Good said. “You have to address that first and then you figure out what is needed and try to make that happen for people.”
Conference attendees included Hebrew school and day school teachers, executives from communal organizations, summer camp professionals, campus activists, young adult Israeli emissaries and more. iCON Program Director Ari Berkowicz estimated that 75% of the conference participants came from North America and 24% from Israel. Others joined from places like Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Educator Noam Weissman addresses the audience at a session of ICON 2023 at the Marriott Marquis in Chicago, Illinois, March 15, 2023. (Rachel Kohn)
“One of The iCenter’s approaches to education is to make all that we teach and all that we learn about both timely and timeless, but the current moment obviously has an impact on who we are as educators and who we are as learners,” said Berkowicz. While the sessions scheduled for iCON 2023 remained mostly unchanged, the facilitators, speakers, and educators were “different people” from what they had been three or six months ago due to the upheaval in Israel, he said.
“They aren’t the same people that they were even yesterday or two days ago,” Goodman added in an interview at the conference. “All of this is impacting them at the core.”
Questions and anguish about the judicial overhaul — and other Israeli government policies – filtered into the conference programming. A campus professional, who asked not to be identified because she wasn’t authorized by her employer to speak to the press, shared a practical concern during a breakout group: If the government follows through on its call to limit the Law of Return, which currently affords automatic Israeli citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent, what should she say to a student who wants to go to Israel but no longer falls under the government’s revised definition of who is a Jew?
In a nearby group, an Israeli expat from Dallas named Meirav said she likes that Israel doesn’t separate between religion and state. But she fears for women’s rights under a religiously conservative regime.
Another group endeavored to understand the specifics of the proposed judicial overhaul, comparing newspaper articles with Wikipedia text as they struggled to confirm how judges are appointed in Israel.
“It’s not only in America or everywhere else – I’m not sure everyone in Israel understands exactly what’s going on and the ramifications,” said Etty Dolgin, the Israeli-American principal of a Chicago-area Hebrew-immersion preschool and after-school program, in a different session. “I don’t know that anybody really knows what the ramifications are going to be.”
Former Jewish day school principal Noam Weissman, whose lecture at the conference drew a standing-room-only crowd of some 150 people, said in an interview that the current moment is an important one for Israel educators to be able to contextualize.
“Part of why cultural literacy is important is because history informs the present,” Weissman said. “People like to jump to judicial reforms, but if people don’t know about Israel’s lack of a constitution, it’s hard to be conversant in that.”
Weissman, the former head of Los Angeles’ Shalhevet High School who is now executive vice president of OpenDor Media, where he develops educational content on Judaism and Israel, said in his session that the goal of Israel educators shouldn’t be defending the country but “understanding and connecting.” He’s grateful, he said, that “the Israel education world has really, from a professional perspective, moved on from hasbara,” a Hebrew term for public relations or advocacy on Israel’s behalf.
“When someone recently said to me, ‘I don’t envy Israel educators at this moment’ … I actually said I feel zero pressure,” Weissman told his audience. “You feel pressure when you’re trying to defend everything Israel does. That’s the world of Israel advocacy, where you train young people to defend Israel. … If my job is to defend something that I have no interest in defending, this doesn’t work.”
Good said she appreciated the “brain trust” of fellow Israel educators she gets to interact with at the conference. At the same time, she likened the sense of uncertainty she is feeling these days to the concerns many Americans have felt in recent years when looking at their own fraught political landscape.
“That kind of feeling we all get, like, ‘Where could this go?’” she said. “That’s as best as I can put it.”
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‘This is sort of their normal’: Israelis confront yet another wartime flare after Iranian fire
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — As missiles flew toward Israel on Sunday night, beleaguered Israelis once again took to Facebook from their safe rooms.
“Whoever is in charge of naming wars over here, please do not give it a fierce animal name this time,” one Israeli wrote in an English-language group. “The last military operation was called ‘Roaring Lion,’ and the Twelve Day War in June 2025, ‘Rising Lion.’”
Another replied with a suggestion: “I hope it’s something like ‘The One Day War.’”
The idea may not have been far off. U.S. President Donald Trump said early Monday that he hoped both Iran and Israel would halt their fire. By mid-morning, Iran’s military announced the strikes were on pause, saying it had sufficiently retaliated for the Israeli strikes in Beirut, a tit-for-tat exchange. By Monday evening Israel time, Netanyahu, too, said the fighting was halted, but warned that Israel would respond “with force” to any future attacks.
Despite the tenuous pause — not quite a ceasefire — Home Front Command restrictions remained in place by Monday evening, touching every layer of daily life in Israel. Schools were closed through at least Wednesday. Or Erez, head spokesperson for Clalit, Israel’s largest health care network, told JTA, “We will continue to remain operating in shelters until the Home Front Command restrictions change.”
By 10 p.m. Sunday, NICU infants and those in critical care were already being moved to bunkers beneath Beilinson hospital, home to the largest emergency room in the Middle East.
“This is the third time within a year that we have carried out such a transition,” said Dr. Erez Barenboim, director of Beilinson and Hasharon Hospitals.
Hospital staff were visibly fatigued but resilient. Soroka University Medical Center was struck by an Iranian ballistic missile during the June 2025 conflict, and as is standard during attacks, health care staff canceled non-essential visits and moved operations to shelters.
Alexi Wirpel, a student at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, was on a Birthright trip in the Galilee when the first sirens rang out. “We could hear the dome working, so we knew we were going to be relatively okay,” she said.
It was not Wirpel’s first trip to Israel, but it was her first time hearing sirens signaling incoming missiles. Others on the Birthright trip were more anxious and had to be consoled by staff, she said.
When word came of a tenuous pause, Wirpel said, she and others didn’t believe it would last long.
“All day today we’ve all kind of been just waiting for something to go off again,” she said. “It’s become a very real reality that this is something that my family has to go through instead of just hearing about it.”
Caroline Flannery manages an after-school program at a Tel Aviv middle school and has watched the cumulative toll of two and a half years of conflict reshape an entire generation of Israeli children. Added to the time lost during the pandemic, students in those grades have missed the equivalent of a year of school.
“We have kids in fifth and sixth grade that still don’t know the alphabet,” Flannery said.
Israel’s education system has been among the hardest hit since Oct. 7. Leaked results of a government aptitude test found that only 3% of Israeli ninth graders met the national benchmark for science, and just 22% met the benchmark for English, figures that prompted opposition leaders to call for a declaration of a “national educational emergency.”
The disruption extends to staff, who are just as rattled as students when a siren sounds and a week of lesson plans is suddenly worthless.
Flannery moved to Israel in 2019 and hadn’t planned to stay, but the impact she could make on Israeli children convinced her to commit to another year, and then another, until she was running the after-school program herself.
The conclusion she has come to in the wake of Oct. 7 is that many of her students, faced with constant disruption, will never fully catch up.
“It’s not just that they miss school, so now they have to work extra hard and catch up,” she said. “Their whole routine was disrupted and they come back. They’re not ready, not used to, not prepared to sit, to come into class, to sit in their seats, to learn. Their minds aren’t there.”
With Trump pressing Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table, Flannery discussed contingency plans already on the table — such as Zoom classes, home visits — should the war return to its March tempo.
“This,” she said, “is sort of their normal.”
The post ‘This is sort of their normal’: Israelis confront yet another wartime flare after Iranian fire appeared first on The Forward.
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Celebrated German Jewish bakery closes, saying ‘the hatred reached Berlin’ after Oct. 7
(JTA) — BERLIN — A Jewish bakery owned by Polish and Israeli immigrants in this city has shut its doors, citing a combination of economic pressure and antisemitic harassment.
Babka & Krantz opened in the Friedenau district in November 2022 and added a second location in December 2024, adjacent to the memorial at the site where the Nazis devised their “final solution” for the Jews during the Holocaust.
The second location at the House of the Wannsee Conference closed on Nov. 30, according to the bakery’s Instagram account, which directed followers to a statement from the memorial that has since been deleted from its website.
“We regret the verbal abuse and the difficult situation to which the managing directors and employees of BABKA & KRANTZ Meisterkonditorei were exposed and express our full understanding for the termination of the cooperation under these circumstances,” said the March 10 statement, which was preserved by the Internet Archive.
Now, the original location has closed, too.
Café owners and married couple Shahar Elkin and Marcin Liera-Elkin said in a statement to friends and supporters that a construction site had blocked access to the bakery for more than a year, curbing foot traffic.
But they also said they had been affected when, after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, “the hatred reached Berlin as well.” The bakery was “subjected to constant verbal abuse” since that time, they said in their statement, which has circulated on social media.
Elkin and Liera-Elkin declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying they were turning down all media inquiries for the time being. “We and our family need to settle down and attend to a few matters,” they said.
Some would-be customers in the neighborhood said they were already missing the Babka & Krantz on Sunday.
“I was actually going there every day recently, after I found out they were closing. I found that really unfortunate,” said Rebecca, who declined to share her last name. She said she had heard about both the economic impact of the construction and about harassment that had taken place at the store, adding, “It makes me sad that things are this way. I’m trying not to cry.”
Babka & Krantz joins a growing list of beloved eateries that have cited the aftermath of Oct. 7 in announcing their closures. Also in Berlin, the hummus bar Kanaan, which was jointly owned by an Israeli and a Palestinian, closed in March after experiencing protests. An Israeli restaurant in Portugal cited harassment when it announced its closure in January, as did an Ethiopian-Israeli eatery in New York City that recently ceased operating as a traditional restaurant. In Washington, D.C., a local chain of Israeli restaurants closed down late last year following a boycott campaign.
Elkin came to Berlin in 2012 from his home city of Haifa, Israel, and in 2019 earned a master baker’s certificate, becoming the first Jewish master baker accepted into the Berlin Bakers’ Guild. Liera-Elkin was born in Posen, Poland, and grew up in Berlin.
The couple said they were proud to be producing Jewish baked goods in a city with a resurging Jewish population.
“Our families come from cities with a vibrant Jewish life and a formative culture of debate. Today, few or no Jews live in these places anymore,” they said in their statement last week. “That’s why Berlin is such a miracle.”
Germany is home to an estimated 200,000 Jews, including many from the former Soviet Union and a large contingent of Israeli expats. The bakery catered to them, offering special menus for Jewish holidays, devising baked goods that reflect diverse Jewish traditions and even bringing in a rabbi to answer visitors’ questions.
But the bakery catered not only to Jewish customers. According to the owners, non-Jewish locals learned about Jewish culture at their tables. “Our neighbors have seen that different people can eat together at one table and speak to each other,” they wrote in their goodbye note.
The business also won professional recognition, earning a Craftsmanship Award sponsored by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs last year.
The couple said the good relations they had built as unofficial ambassadors of Jewish culture – introducing Berliners of all backgrounds to Jewish culinary specialties – were endangered when the construction site went up in their neighborhood, blocking the street view of their business. They lost customers and money, they said, and their anxiety was increasingly visible on their Instagram account, where they chronicled their fruitless efforts to make their story accessible again.
Speaking to the Berliner Morgenpost in November, Liera-Elkin hinted that the two-pronged pressure — economic and harassment — might force them to close. He reported that their vehicle had been vandalized and that they had “experienced numerous verbal and even physical attacks in our private life, received hate-filled letters and calls.” The couple said they had even sent their daughter to stay elsewhere for a time.
“We are just a bakery that wants to offer great products. But now we are only confronted with problems and politics that leave us in despair,“ he told the Morgenpost. “We really don‘t know if Berlin is still the right place for us.”
The post Celebrated German Jewish bakery closes, saying ‘the hatred reached Berlin’ after Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
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Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic
(JTA) — Dave Matthews, the frontman of the American rock band Dave Matthews Band, pushed back on allegations Friday that his vocal criticism of Israel in recent years had crossed into antisemitism.
Reading his remarks from a sheet of paper on stage at the Coastal Credit Union Music Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, Matthews, whose criticism of Israel has drawn backlash from some Jewish and pro-Israel voices, pushed back on accusations of antisemitism.
“It’s no secret, at least I don’t try to make it a secret, that I disagree with the policies of Israel and the United States, and their treatment of the civilian population in Gaza and the West Bank,” Matthews said. “But that should by no means be twisted into anybody thinking that I am bigoted or antisemitic in any way at all.”
Matthews continued: “On the contrary, I have a deep respect and love for all of my life that I can remember, and an admiration for the culture and history of the Jewish people.”
The frontman of the band continued to list a host of prominent Jewish figures he admired, including Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Hannah Arendt and Anne Frank, and described being at a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel.
“I hold the Jewish people in the highest regard, and it breaks my heart that my opinions born out of deep commitment to nonviolent resolution and resistance can be twisted to serve any hateful or racist or bigoted ideas,” Matthews said.
Matthews’ remarks come after years of outspoken criticism of Israel, including in 2024 when he joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Washington, D.C., against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.
“I’m ashamed that my tax dollars are going to the brutalizing of an entire people,” Matthews told Al Jazeera at the time. “It’s shameful. And I’m ashamed that our government is welcoming him here.”
At a New Jersey concert last year, Matthews also donned a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf, and held up signs reading “Stop The Genocide” and “Stop Killing Children.”
A representative for Matthews did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of what prompted his remarks Friday.
Matthews is among a growing number of prominent artists who have become outspoken critics of Israel in recent years, including Macklemore, the Irish rap group Kneecap and the British punk band Bob Vylan.
Matthews’ statement Friday was not the first time the artist has defended his rhetoric. In a December 2023 letter to his Jewish fans obtained by JNS, he also assured fans that he “strongly and unequivocally condemn the horrific events of Oct. 7.”
“I will never stop calling for an end to the violence in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon, and for that matter, the Congo and Sudan and Ukraine, or the violence, or the horrific violence against immigrants and their neighbors in our country,” Matthews concluded during his remarks Friday.
The post Dave Matthews pushes back on claims his criticism of Israel is antisemitic appeared first on The Forward.
