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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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WATCH: Yiddish and German — old relatives, new neighbors
במשך פֿון הונדערטער יאָרן איז מיזרח־אייראָפּע געווען דער צענטער פֿון ייִדיש־לעבן. הײַנט, נאָך דעם חורבן, האָט זיך די מאַפּע אַריבערגערוקט: אַחוץ ענגלאַנד, קלינגט ייִדיש הײַנט בעיקר אין מערבֿ־ און מיטל־אייראָפּע, דווקא אין לענדער וווּ דײַטש איז אַן אָפֿיציעלע שפּראַך — אין אַנטווערפּן, בערלין, ווין, ווײַמאַר, ציריך און אַנדערע ערטער.
אין דעם ווידעאָ, געפֿירט אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש, רעדט אלי בענעדיקט מיט די ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסטן דזשייק שנײַדער, איידל מלובֿיצקי, מענדי קאַהן, אסתּר סאַנדרוי און אַנדרעאַס שמיטגעס וועגן דעם וויכטיקן פֿענאָמען.
דער ווידעאָ ווערט געשטיצט פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע.
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Howard Zinn: a radical historian with a Jewish conscience
“I am a sportswriter by trade,” Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation, told me. Zirin has written 11 books, all of them dealing with the knotty and oft-controversial politics of sport, coming at the games he loves — and the machinations behind them — from a progressive position. His previous subjects have included Colin Kaepernick, Barry Bonds and John Carlos.
But Zirin’s latest book, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, is not that. It’s a biography of the late Boston University professor and self-described “radical historian,” best known for the long-running bestseller, A People’s History of the United States, which was first published in 1980.
“I never would have thought in eight trillion years that I was ever going to write a book about Howard Zinn,” Zirin, 52, told me by phone from Washington, D.C.. “He was a hero of mine, a great influence, and I would have thought it presumptuous to even think about it, not just to mention that I never gave thought to writing a non-sports book.
“But I just had so many people in recent years want to engage me in this discussion of ‘What would Howard say about these incredible demonstrations in 2010 of the Black Lives Matter movement, and, especially, in the age of Trumpism, the rise of neo-fascism, not just in this country, but abroad?’”
If Zirin couldn’t divine an exact answer, he was at least in a position to hazard an educated guess. Turned on to an abbreviated 20th century-focused version of A People’s History as a high school graduation gift by his sister, Zirin became a history major at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Much later in life, Zirin found himself hosting Q & A sessions with Zinn at venues throughout the country.
Zirin says that the events of the two Trump terms made people wonder: “‘Would that have shaken Howard’s faith in the power of the people to make positive change and the ability for people to bend the arc of history, as they say, toward justice?’ That made me want to write the book.”
When he started work on the biography, Zirin knew the basics of Zinn’s public trajectory: his service in WWII as an Air Force bombardier; his stint teaching at Spelman College and his role in the Civil Rights movement, his protests against the Vietnam War, his ongoing conflict with Boston University president John Silber, his work as a playwright, the Hollywood actors and rock musicians who read his prose and wanted to meet and work with him. The bottom line: Zinn had an unwavering commitment to unions and organization, the power of the people.
“The power of tyranny is overestimated (not in the short run, but in the long run),” Zirin quotes Zinn as saying in his preface, “and can be overcome by the unity, the determination, of apparently powerless people.”
“When we were on stage,” Zirin told me, “he would speak about things he was a central player in, but he would kind of leave himself out of the narrative, partly out of humility but I also think that’s the political training of people who came up in the 1930s during the Depression. They’re always thinking about the movement, not about themselves.
Still, Zirin added, “Howard had so many great stories that he would tell about his life offstage. So, I really wanted to tell his story because I felt truly that it hadn’t been told and I wanted to learn about him. I wanted to invest in it.”
What did Judaism mean to Zinn and, now, to Zirin? “Judaism was expressed through the pursuit of knowledge, of questioning established truths, and always standing with the underdog,” said Zirin. “It is why he felt strongly that Jews of conscience needed to advocate for the Palestinian people. I am inspired by this commitment to tikkun olam and I share his approach to how we need to apply our faith: as voices against apartheid and genocide.”
Zinn’s cultural identification as a Jew often emerged in his sense of humor that Zirin calls his “secret sauce.”
“It’s not like I think Howard Zinn was like Billy Crystal with a history book,” Zirin said. “His ability was to keep an audience listening through humor. [He could] apply history to the present and make people think about it, bring it alive in present terms and then Howard had that third layer, that third gear, where he could be funny and affable and work that twinkle in his eye and that smile and keep an audience focused. I think that allowed him to speak in a lot of diverse circumstances.”
Zinn, of course, attracted negative heat, too. In 2020, President Donald Trump said, “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” Zinn caught flak not just from the expected bastions of the far-right but also from other historians. The latter, Zirin says, were critical of Zinn mostly out of jealousy. Zinn was popular and well-read; they were not.
“He was able to break out of the academy and impact the world,” Zirin said, “He saw academic praise meaning very little relative to the world. He took greater joy in writing 800-word columns that spoke to what was happening rather than writing another 800 -page book the likes of which a lot of academics write, these things that no one reads.”
As to the right-wing trolling, Zirin said, “I think he would have just taken that as a badge of honor. I think for Howard that just rolled off his back because of his interests, which was in teaching and seeing how what he was teaching applied to the world — he loved bringing the lessons of the street into the classroom and he loved seeing what was in the classroom applied to the streets. He was blessed to have lived in interesting times and in important places.”
The book explores Zinn’s family life, too. Zirin got co-operation and input from Zinn’s son Jeff, an activist-playwright, and his daughter, Myla, an educator and environmental advocate. Some of those stories involve their upbringing. Howard was on the road frequently, and Zirin writes that his wife Roslyn (Roz) had to play good cop and bad cop, neither role she relished.
Roz Zinn, who died at 85 from ovarian cancer in May 2008, was also an activist and artist, and though the couple remained happily married for 64 years, she lived, to an extent, in his shadow. Her death crushed him.
“Howard stayed extremely active after Roz passed and in many ways that was his therapy,” Zirin said. “He took to email voraciously. He traveled, he spoke, he did events like the ones I did with him where he could sit because, while he was still sharp, he didn’t want to stand that long. The twinkle would go out during those moments when the warmth of a crowd, or a friend, would leave the stage or his presence.”
“At the very end,” Zirin said, “he had these moments of looking very sad. How do you comprehend what it’s like to lose someone you’ve been married to for 64 years? Incomprehensible.”
Zinn died from a heart attack at 87 on Jan. 27, 2009. He’d been in a swimming pool in a Santa Monica, California hotel. He was not, as some said, swimming laps; he didn’t have the strength for that. At the memorial service at the Arlington Street Church in Boston April 23, 2010, Myla said he was standing in the pool. A pool worker pulled him out of the water and asked if Zinn wanted an ambulance. He reportedly said, “No, I’m OK.”
Zinn’s friend Noam Chomsky spoke at the service, as did Matt Damon — whose family grew up next to the Zinns in Newton, Mass. — and poet Martín Espada, who read a tribute poem written for Zinn. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon — founding member of the SNCC Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, cultural historian and activist — led the crowd in singing “This Little Light of Mine” and “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho.”
Zirin told me that Zinn’s writings and words have made him less pessimistic about the world. “It irrevocably changed me,” he said. “The main effect that Howard had on my own outlook was that there are answers in history. Howard imbued me with this idea that you had to be more than angry. You had to have a sense of the world if you wanted to change it. I also really thought about how we could not just be objects but subjects of history.”
“So many people out there want the world to be a different place and are disgusted by the state of things, of what Naomi Klein describes as ‘end times fascism,’” Zirin said. “You try to imagine a sense that if you can root your ideas and even your anger in history, there’s a path out, there’s a road map out.”
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Israel is revoking entry permits for U.S. activists involved in West Bank
Hannah was on her way to class on Jan. 8 when she opened her inbox and found an email from Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority. Due to a change of circumstances, it said, her authorization to enter Israel had been revoked.
“I had to read it a few times, honestly, and then I Googled it and just started crying. I was on my way to class. I was bawling,” Hannah told the Forward. Hannah asked that her last name not be published because she fears that speaking to the media could affect her ability to visit Israel in the future.
Hannah, whose boyfriend lives in Israel and who has family there, has spent almost every summer of her life in the country. She was left dumbfounded by the email. There was no explanation of the reason for the revocation, and nothing about how, or whether, she could appeal.
The closest thing to an incident she can point to came the previous July, when she joined her rabbi and a group of volunteers accompanying a Palestinian farmer during the grape harvest — a practice known as protective presence, in which foreign witnesses aim to deter settlers and soldiers from interfering. Israeli soldiers stopped the group and held them for hours. “They asked to see my passport and said they were looking to see if there was any reason to deport me,” she said. They found none, and told her she was free to go.
Hannah came up through the institutions Israel counts on to keep American Jews attached to it. In high school, Hannah was involved with hasbara fellowships, and her mother is active in her local Jewish federation. “It’s so odd that almost the more I become familiar with the place in ways that I wasn’t as a kid, and maybe less naive about it, now I don’t have the ability to be there,” she said. “I’m not welcome there anymore.”
Hannah is one of seven American Jews who told the Forward that Israel had revoked their electronic travel authorization, or ETA-IL, after they participated in protective presence activities in the West Bank.
A loose network of Jewish organizations recruits diaspora Jews for the work and frames it as an expression of Jewish values. Programs range from 10-day delegations to seasonal olive-harvest cohorts to Hineinu, Hebrew for “here we are,” a three-month placement in Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta that the Center for Jewish Nonviolence launched in 2021.
According to figures from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, dozens of participants in its Hineinu program and other protective presence initiatives have had their authorizations revoked since the system took effect.
Israel launched ETA-IL as a pilot in June 2024 and made it mandatory for travelers from visa-exempt countries, including the United States, on Jan. 1, 2025. The application is a brief online form, usually approved automatically within minutes, that allows visa-free entry for tourism or business. It functions as Israel’s counterpart to the U.S. ESTA system, and followed Israel’s admission to the American Visa Waiver Program in 2023.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on individual cases or on the department’s discussions with Israeli officials, but said the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with State, regularly reviews whether Visa Waiver Program participants meet program requirements.
Israel was admitted to the program in 2023 only after signing a memorandum of understanding committing it to treat all American citizens equally at its borders, a longstanding program requirement that had kept Israel out for years over its treatment of Palestinian American travelers.
None of those who spoke to the Forward had been arrested or charged with a crime. Some received no notice at all, which Daniel Roth, executive director of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, said has become increasingly common. Those who did get revocation emails received identical notices citing a change of circumstances, with no explanation of the duration of the ban.
By the letter of the law, all of those whose authorizations were revoked remain eligible to make aliyah — immigrate to Israel — unless they are deemed a security threat under a provision of the Law of Return. Neither of two immigration attorneys who spoke with the Forward could recall any applicant being blocked as a security threat.
The visitors could open a file with the group Nefesh B’Nefesh and, in theory, be Israeli citizens within months. For now, they are barred from entering.
The Forward asked the Population and Immigration Authority how many ETA-IL authorizations have been revoked and on what legal basis, and the Israel Police asking whether it recommends revocations. Neither responded.
The Jewish Agency, which facilitates immigration by Jews to Israel under the Law of Return, said in a statement: “There is no connection between the ETA process and the Aliyah process. Regardless, we cannot comment on ETA refusal because we do not handle any part of that process. The criteria for eligibility for Aliyah remain unchanged.”
Change of circumstances
That Israel’s government sees protective presence workers as an adversary and target for law enforcement is no secret.
In April 2024, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the creation of a police task force to handle foreign and Israeli left-wing activists in the West Bank, which he described as a team for dealing with “anarchists.”
The unit sits under the West Bank district police and works in coordination with the Population and Immigration Authority. Ben-Gvir publicly credited the immigration authority for its role in deporting 32 foreign activists in October 2025 following an olive harvest action in the northern West Bank.
Of the Jews the Forward interviewed, one described himself as an anti-Zionist. The others were liberal Zionists who said they are concerned about the rise of settler violence in the West Bank and the preservation of Israel as a liberal democratic state. They were day school and summer camp alumni. Most have family in Israel and visit regularly.
Sam Sherman, an actor and writer who lives in New York City, was in Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the southern West Bank, when he opened an email telling him that his ETA-IL had been revoked due to a change of circumstances.
He was about seven weeks into his stint with a Hineinu group, and he was not the only one. “It happened to me and a few others in my cohort … within the same hour,” Sherman said. “A few of us got the same email within minutes of each other.”
Sherman was never arrested. He describes one incident that he believes amounts to a detention in place, and otherwise a pattern of identification, soldiers, police and armed settlers photographing his passport during confrontations he says were initiated by settlers.
“We were just there hanging out with people, essentially,” he said. “But we were treated as if it was almost criminal for us to be there.”
His first reaction was confusion. “I was like, what does this mean?” he said. More experienced activists told him what it meant: once he left Israel, he would be unable to return unless he chose to make aliyah. “If I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Israel,” he said, “sure. Great.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the CEO of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization that has been sending American clergy to the West Bank for years. She said the revocations cut against Israel’s founding promise.
“The promise of Israel is that it’s going to be a refuge and a home for Jews everywhere in the world, not just for Jews with certain political opinions,” said Jacobs. “Israel should be the place in the world that is safest for Jews, no matter what your religious practices are, what country you’re coming from and what your political views are.”
Another participant in Hineinu said she never received an email at all.
Nina, who asked to be identified by her first name only, had a valid authorization when she left the country for a weekend in Cyprus to reset her tourist visa. When she tried to re-enter Israel, she said, she was held at the border and denied entry.
“I never got an email that my ETA had been revoked,” she recounted. “I never got any correspondence at all, and I never got anything written, that said that ETA had been canceled or revoked or anything.” Hours later she resubmitted the application from her phone and got an automatic rejection.
‘Nothing’s out of the question’
Critics of the volunteers say it is simply a law enforcement matter.
Naomi Kahn, director of the international division at Regavim, a right-wing Israeli legal advocacy group that campaigns against unauthorized Palestinian construction in the West Bank and lobbies for demolitions, said some of the accompaniment activity takes place in closed military zones and active IDF firing zones.
“It should not be considered unusual when a sovereign state chooses to deny entry to people whose declared intention is to break the law,” Kahn said. “It should come as no surprise when tourists are disinvited when they break the law. I don’t think this raises eyebrows anywhere else in the world.”
Closed military zones have become a point of contention between activists and the Israeli military. In late October 2025, two American Jewish women, Rachel Beth Flamholz and Leila Stillman-Utterback, were deported and banned from Israel for 10 years after entering a closed military zone imposed on the Palestinian village of Burin the same day they had arranged to pick olives there.
“In my experience, closed military zones are used as a tool to clear Palestinians and those supporting Palestinians, including us, from an area,” Roth said, “and by and large, to leave space for Israeli settlers to do whatever it is they want.”
Jacobs draws a distinction between conduct and status. A tourist who commits a crime in Israel is subject to Israeli law, she said, as a tourist would be subject to the law of any place they were visiting. That, she argues, is not what is happening here. None of the volunteers were charged with anything.
“These are the best of the best,” Jacobs said. “These are people who are devoting, in some cases, months or more of their lives, that they could be spending doing anything, to trying to make Israel a more just place for both Jews and Palestinians. And that’s exactly who Israel should want to be standing by and supporting.”
This fall, some will head to the West Bank as part of Protect the Harvest, an initiative run by an international coalition of Palestinian, American, Israeli and Jewish organizations responding to an invitation from Palestinian farmers. The campaign runs in week-long cohorts from mid-October through mid-November.
T’ruah is bringing a clergy delegation from Oct. 18 to 23, ending four days before Israel’s national elections. Jacobs expects many American rabbis on the ground, some bringing their own congregants.
“I don’t know what the Israeli government is going to do,” she said. “But I think if they decide they’re going to start deporting American rabbis, that would basically be picking a very big public fight with the American Jewish community.” Even people who haven’t been paying attention, she said, will be furious.
Asked whether she thought it was actually possible that an American rabbi could be deported during the harvest, she did not rule it out. “Nothing’s out of the question,” she said.
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