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Alarmed by their country’s political direction, more Israelis are seeking to move abroad
TEL AVIV (JTA) — When Daniel Schleider and his wife, Lior, leave Israel next month, it will be for good — and with a heavy heart.
“I have no doubt I will have tears in my eyes the whole flight.” said Schleider, who was born in Mexico and lived in Israel for a time as a child before returning on his own at 18. Describing himself as “deeply Zionist,” he served in a combat unit in the Israeli army, married an Israeli woman and built a career in an Israeli company.
Yet as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power, assembled a coalition that includes far-right parties and started pushing changes that would erode hallmarks of Israeli democracy, Schleider found himself booking plane tickets and locating an apartment in Barcelona. Spain’s language and low cost of living made the city a good fit, he said, but the real attraction was living in a place where he wouldn’t constantly have to face down the ways that Israel is changing.
Israel’s strength over its 75 years, Schleider said, is “the economy we built by selling our brains.… And yet, in less than half a year, we’ve managed to destroy all that.”
Schleider has been joining the sweeping protests that have taken root across the country in response to the new right-wing government and its effort to strip the Israeli judiciary of much of its power and independence. But while he considered recommitting to his country and fighting the changes rather than fleeing over them, he also accepts the government’s argument that most Israelis voted for something he doesn’t believe in.
Daniel Schleider and his wife Lior are leaving Israel for Barcelona because of the political instability in their country. (Courtesy Schleider)
“I have a lot of internal conflict,” he said about the protests. “Who am I to fight against what the majority has accepted?”
Schleider is far from alone in seeking to leave Israel this year. While Israelis have always moved abroad for various reasons, including business opportunities or to gain experience in particular fields, the pace of planned departures appears to be picking up. No longer considered a form of social betrayal, emigration — known in Hebrew as yerida, meaning descent — is on the table for a wide swath of Israelis right now.
Many of the people weighing emigration were already thinking about it but were catalyzed by the new government, according to accounts from dozens of people in various stages of emigration and of organizations that seek to aid them.
“I’ve already been on the fence for a few years — not in terms of leaving Israel but in terms of relocating for something new,” said Schleider.
“But in the past year, with all the craziness and everything, I realized where the country was going. And after the recent elections, my wife — who had been unconvinced — was the one who took the step and said now she understood where the public is going and what life is going to be like in the country. You could call it the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.
“And then when the whole issue of the [judicial] revolution started, we just decided not to wait and to do it immediately.”
Ocean Relocation, which assists people with both immigration to and emigration from Israel, has received more than 100 inquiries a day from people looking to leave since Justice Minister Yariv Levin first presented his proposal for judicial reform back in January. That’s four times the rate of inquiries the organization received last year, according to senior manager Shay Obazanek.
“Never in history has there been this level of demand,” Obazanek said, citing the company’s 80 years’ experience as the “barometer” of movement in and out the country.
Shlomit Drenger, who leads Ocean Relocation’s business development, said those looking to leave come from all walks of life. They include families pushed to leave by the political situation; those investing in real estate abroad as a future shelter, if needed; and Israelis who can work remotely and are worried about the country’s upheaval. Economics are also a concern: With foreign investors issuing dire warnings about Israel’s economy if the judicial reforms go through, companies wary to invest in the country and the shekel already weakening, it could grow more expensive to leave in the future.
The most common destination for the new departures, Drenger said, is Europe, representing representing 70% of moves, compared to 40% in the recent past. Europe’s draws include its convenient time zones, quality-of-life indices, and chiefly, the relative ease in recent years of obtaining foreign passports in countries such as Portugal, Poland and even Morocco. Many Israelis have roots in those countries and are or have been entitled to citizenship today because their family members were forced to leave under duress during the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition.
Israelis protesting against the government’s controversial judicial reform bill block the main road leading to the departures area of Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv on March 9, 2023. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)
On the other hand, Drenger said, emigration to the United States, where the vast majority of the 1 million Israeli citizens abroad live, has declined significantly. The United States is known for its tough immigration laws and high cost of living in areas with large Israeli and Jewish communities, and even people who have no rights to a foreign passport have an easier time obtaining residency rights in Europe than the United States.
Some Israelis aren’t picking anywhere in particular before leaving. Ofer Stern, 40, quit his job as a tech developer, left Israel and is now traveling around the world before deciding where to settle.
“We’re living in a democracy and that democracy is dependent on demography and I can’t fight it,” he said, alluding to the fact that Orthodox Jews, who tend to be right wing, are the fastest-growing segment of the Israeli population. “The country that I love and that I’ve always loved will not be here in 10 years. Instead, it will be a country that is suited to other people, but not for me.”
While others have already started their emigration process, American-born Marni Mandell, a mother of two living in Tel Aviv, is still on the fence. Her greatest fear is that judicial reforms could open the door to significant changes in civil rights protections — and in so doing break her contract with the country she chose.
“If this so-called ‘reform’ is enacted, which is really tantamount to a coup, it’s hard to imagine that I want my children to grow up to fight in an army whose particularism outweighs the basic human rights that are so fundamental to my values,” Mandell said.
Most people who look into emigrating for political reasons do not end up doing so. In the weeks leading up to the United States’ 2020 presidential election, inquiries to law firms specializing in helping Americans move abroad saw a sharp uptick in inquiries — many of them from Jews fearful about a second Trump administration after then-President Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn white supremacists. When President Joe Biden was elected, they largely called off the alarm.
The Trump scenario is not analogous with the Israeli one for several reasons, starting with the fact that the Israelis are responding to an elected government’s policy decisions, not just the prospect of an election result. What’s more, U.S. law contains safeguards designed to prevent any single party or leader from gaining absolute power. Israel has fewer of those safeguards, and many of those appear threatened if the government’s proposals go through.
Casandra Larenas had long courted the idea of moving overseas. “As a childfree person, Israel doesn’t have much to offer and is a really expensive country. I’ve traveled around so I know the quality of life I can reach abroad,” she said. But she said she had always batted away the idea: “I’m still Jewish and my family are still here.”
Clockwise from upper left: Benjamin-Michael Aronov, Casandra Larenas and Ofer Stern are all leaving Israel because of political unrest there. (All photos courtesy)
That all changed with the judicial overhaul, she said. While not against the idea of a reform per se, Laranes is firmly opposed to the way it is being carried out, saying it totally disregards the millions of people on the other side. Chilean-born, Laranes grew up under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
“I still remember [it] and I don’t want something like that again,” said Larenas, who has purchased a plane ticket for later this spring and plans to take up residency abroad — though she said she would maintain her citizenship and hoped to return one day.
The departure of liberal and moderate Israelis could have implications on Israel’s political future. Israel does not permit its citizens to vote absentee, meaning that anyone who leaves the country must incur costly, potentially frequent travel to participate in elections — or cede political input altogether.
Benjamin-Michael Aronov, who grew up with Russian parents in the United States, said he was taken aback by how frequently Israelis express shock that he moved to Israel in the first place. “The No. 1 question I get from Israelis is, ‘Why would you move here from the U.S.? We’re all trying to get out of here. There’s no future here.’”
He said he had come to realize that they were right.
“I thought the warnings were something that would truly impact our children or grandchildren but that our lifetime would be spent in an Israeli high-tech, secular golden era. But I’m realizing the longevity of Tel Aviv’s bubble of beaches and parties and crazy-smart, secular people changing the world with technology is maybe even more a fantasy now than when Herzl dreamt it,” Aronov said. “I found my perfect home, a Jewish home, sadly being undone by Jews.”
Not everyone choosing to jump ship is ideologically aligned with the protest movement. Amir Cohen, who asked to use a pseudonym because he has not informed his employers of his plans yet, is a computer science lecturer at Ariel University in the West Bank who voted in the last election for the Otzma Yehudit party chaired by far-right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir. Cohen was willing to put aside his ideological differences with the hared Orthodox parties if it meant achieving political stability — but was soon disillusioned.
“None of it is working. And now we’re on our way to civil war, it’s that simple. I figured, ‘I don’t need this nonsense, there are plenty of places in the world for me to go,’” he said.
Thousands of Israeli protesters rally against the Israeli goverment’s judicial overhaul bills in Tel Aviv, March 4, 2023. (Gili Yaari Flash90)
Cohen stuck with the country after one of his brothers was killed in the 2014 Gaza War. Now, he said, his other brothers have recently followed his lead and applied for Hungarian passports in an effort to find a way to move abroad permanently.
“I’m not alone,” he said. “Most of my friends and family feel the same way.”
Others still, like Omer Mizrahi, view themselves as apolitical. A contractor from Jerusalem, Mizrahi, 27, headed to San Diego, California, a month ago as a result of the reform. Mizrahi, who eschewed casting a vote in the last election, expressed a less common impetus for leaving: actual fear for his life. Mizrahi described sitting in traffic jams in Jerusalem and realizing that if a terror attack were to unfold — “and let’s be honest, there are at least one or two every week” — he wouldn’t be able to escape in time because he was caught in a gridlock. “Our politicians can’t do anything about it because they’re too embroiled in a war of egos.”
Now 7,500 miles away, Mizrahi says he feels like he’s finally living life. “I sit in traffic now and I’m happy as a clam. Everything’s calm.”
Back in Israel, Schleider is making his final preparations for leaving, advertising his Tesla for sale on Facebook this week. He remains hopeful that the massive anti-government protests will make a difference. In the meantime, though, his one-way ticket is scheduled for April 14.
“I dream of coming back, but I don’t know that it will ever happen,” he said. “We made a decision that was self-serving, but that doesn’t mean we’re any less Zionist.”
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The original anti-Zionists have been all but forgotten. Molly Crabapple wants to change that.
I first met nationally acclaimed artist and journalist Molly Crabapple in 2020 during the dark days of COVID. After discovering that we had both studied Yiddish at YIVO, albeit in different classes, we did a socially distanced fresh-air visit to Mt. Carmel, the Jewish cemetery in Queens where Sholem Aleichem is buried. Many tombstones there are inscribed not in Hebrew but in Yiddish. They include the graves of people who, in life, belonged to the Bund.
Founded in 1897 in Eastern Europe, the Bund was a socialist revolutionary group whose name, translated from Yiddish to English, is General Jewish Labor Union (“bund” is Yiddish for union). By the 1930s, Bundism in Poland, where most Ashkenazic Jews lived, had grown bigger and more politically powerful than Zionism. The group was a tireless promoter of Yiddish as the linguistic and literary underpinning of Jewish peoplehood. Bundists also fiercely opposed Zionism and a Jewish state; they believed in fighting for democracy and inclusion in the countries where Jews already lived.
The organization ended up being destroyed not just by the Nazi Holocaust but also by Stalinism. Except for people like me, who’ve been ensconced in the Yiddishist world, it is nearly forgotten today by all but a few academics. But by the time we met, Crabapple was writing a book about the Bund.
Almost six years later, she has finished it. Titled Here Where We Live is Our Country, it is part hefty historical documentation, part loving family memoir, and part literary nonfiction. Thoroughly engaging throughout, it moves back and forth from the author’s lefty-artsy life in contemporary New York City to earthshaking events in vintage Jewish Europe. Crabapple has disinterred the memory of a once-vibrant movement that waned even as its nemesis, Zionism, waxed.
I met her last month in her fifth-floor walkup apartment in Williamsburg to talk about how she made her book. Our conversation is edited for length and clarity.
Here Where We Live devotes significant space to the saga of your great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort. As a young man in 1904, he immigrated from the Pale of Settlement to New York City, under somewhat murky circumstances that he barely discussed after the move. In America, he made a living as a self-taught artist, including on a dairy farm in the Catskills, an egg farm in Long Island and in a big house near Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. But he died over a decade before you were born. When did you first realize he’d been an interesting guy who you wanted to tell the world about?
I was fucking born knowing he was interesting! My mother and my great-aunt and my dad told me about him constantly. I was surrounded by his paintings and stuff that he said. After he died, my great-aunt Ida still lived in his house. As a child, I would visit and it was exactly like when he was alive. I remember the pigments and oils still on the palette in the basement.
How did you find out he’d been in the Bund?
I’d always known he was involved in something illegal before he came to the United States. It was a cool family anecdote. In a book from 1952 that he published about his art, he wrote that as a teenager and young man he hadn’t known much about girls because “I was in the underground.” Another book, a catalogue of his art from a show, said he’d been in the Bund. My mom had a million of those catalogues in a bookcase, and I’d been looking at them since I was 11 or 12 years old. I also saw one of his watercolors, of a woman throwing a rock. He’d titled it “Itka the Bundist Breaking Windows.”
I had very little idea then of what “the Bund” was. But as an adult, one of my bad habits has been that sometimes when I get drunk, I Google things. That might be how I first understood.
From his own unpublished writing, you later found evidence suggesting that Sam might have fled to America at age 22 because he’d joined other Bundists in shooting a Tsarist policeman during a state-encouraged pogrom. You also read the yizkor book for Volkovysk, a town in what is now Belarus. It was Sam’s hometown. He is cited in the book as having helped produce its chapter about the Bund.
Look at this! [She walks me to her bedroom and points to an antique photograph on the wall.] When I was younger I’d always only thought of this as a very cool old picture that my mom had. But this same photo is in the yizkor book! It says it’s the members of the Volkovysk Bund in 1905. It’s Sam’s friends a year after he left for America. Look at this guy in the photo — he’s hot! Which one do you like the best?
The blonde.
Ugh!
I got really obsessed trying to track down these guys. When I went to the cemetery where my great-grandfather is buried I saw the tombstone of one of them. Later, in a box of family memorabilia, I found a photo of this same person in an old Yiddish news clip about people in New York City who were in the Workmen’s [now Workers] Circle’s Volkovysk branch. I asked the cemetery who was paying to maintain the grave. It was this guy’s grandson. I contacted him and he said his own father was still alive but very old. “Can you just ask him to look at this photo and see if that’s his dad?” I asked. I said I was writing about a revolutionary group. He says, “My grandfather never would have been involved in that! He was a truck driver.” And he hung up.
Why couldn’t the grandson entertain this history about his grandfather? Why did he not know it?
The Bund was an organization incredibly devoted to Yiddish language and literature. But it was also a socialist revolutionary political party. One thing I’ve noticed about how it has been written about is that certain things are de-emphasized and certain things emphasized. In the 1950s in the U.S. in the McCarthy years, Bundist survivors of the Holocaust were terrified they would be accused of being Communists, and deported. They had no faith that Americans would know the difference between a socialist and a communist. I think that sometimes the Bund’s’ Yiddishism is emphasized far more than the fact that they were revolutionaries. To focus on linguistic and cultural things is safe. To talk about revolutionaries as internationalists — and as people who always opposed Zionism — is dangerous.
Were you raised Jewish?
My father is Puerto Rican and a Latin American studies professor who’s a Marxist. He told me about Marx’s theory of surplus value when I was 6 years old. I’ve been a leftist in a leftist family all my life! My mother — Sam’s granddaughter — is very strongly culturally Jewish. When I was a child we’d do Hanukkah lights, and she made the best latkes. We were not religious, but I identify strongly as a secular Jew. I studied Yiddish in order to do research for the book. I’m not so good at Yiddish, but I can work my way through a socialist text using a dictionary.
I remember when we were at the cemetery and you were so excited about having just discovered that the political work of some Bundists in Poland was armed self-defense. They fought in militias, with their bodies and with weapons, to protect Jews from murderous pogroms, murderous Communist Party violence against socialists, and, finally, murderous Nazis. You called these militia members “thugs.”
I loved them!
You mentioned their resistance in a piece you wrote in 2018 for the New York Review of Books about the organization. I’ve heard that many people were astounded and very happy to learn about this self-defense and to discover the Bund.
Especially young Jews, like in their 20s. They had no idea that Jews had fought back in Europe even before the Holocaust, or they had only vague ideas about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and that Bundists played a major role in it. It was very meaningful for them.
So much for the idea that only Zionists have been modern Jewish fighters.
Zionists have tried to say that they were the only tough Jews. Which is utterly untrue.
What do you think is most original about your book?
It’s very concerned with the emotional life of being in a movement. I think that sometimes the way that leftist movements are written about is as a series of conferences and decisions that are written down as texts, and people sign onto a resolution because that’s what they are thinking. The writing doesn’t show any awareness of emotional life. The love affairs, the gossip, the beefs that are going on, the thrill of thinking that you can change the world. I was much more concerned with that.
And as I worked on the book I quickly realized that I wasn’t just writing about the Bund. I was writing a history of the 20th century from the point of view of the defeated. The work was a form of necromancy. I would go to people’s graves and take dirt, and light candles in front of it and try to ask them if I could tell their story. At Ponary Forest, [near Vilna, where at least one prominent Bundist leader, a woman, was massacred by the Nazis in World War II and dumped into a mass pit] I went to the bottom with flowers and played Di Shvue [Yiddish for “The Oath,” the Bund’s anthem] on my phone.
What do you mainly hope that your book will accomplish?
I want leftists to know about something from our shared international history as leftists. I want young Jews to get to know their ancestors.
The Bund was anti-Zionist, of course, and many young American Jews are now also rejecting Zionism.
Yes. A lot of them were sold a bill of goods about their history, and when they reject that bill of goods, there’s a big hole in them. They don’t have any actual, positive Jewish history. They just have shit they’re ashamed of, because they realize [that Zionism] was actually a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. One of the things my book does is give them ancestors.
I’m an anti-Zionist. Whenever you have an ethnostate project, it always does unspeakable crimes. If Jewish institutions in America keep conflating Jews here with a state that is doing a livestreamed genocide and is now primarily known for the most heinous shit possible, it’s extremely dangerous for us Jews, as a small minority in America.
Some people internationally have been starting new Bund groups. What future do you see in that? And can you imagine Yiddish being resurrected as a secular Jewish language?
It’s hard to imagine huge numbers of people adopting Yiddish. But I think about a Jewish literary figure in the 1930s whom Isaac Deutscher quotes in his book The Non-Jewish Jew. He said that Yiddish was a dying language. But he didn’t mind, because Greek and Latin are dead languages, yet many people study them anyway, to access their linguistic treasures. And God bless everyone who’s doing leftist, anti-Zionist organizing and cultural work reclaiming our heritage! But is there a future for the Bund? The thing I’ve learned both from reading history and being a participant is, you never know what the spark is going to be. So you should always avoid making prognostications.
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Georgia political candidate apologizes for Passover ad that featured challah
(JTA) — When readers of the Atlanta Jewish Times opened their Passover edition last week, they saw something surprising: a fluffy challah.
The leavened bread, forbidden for Jews to consume during the holiday, appeared in an ad placed by Nathalie Kanani, a candidate for state Senate in a Metro Atlanta district.
“Have a blessed Passover,” the ad said, over an image of a challah draped in an Israeli flag alongside two towering candles. “Wishing you a Passover rich in divine love and blessings.”
The ad quickly drew ridicule online, particularly after Greg Bluestein, a Jewish Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, tweeted about it on Saturday, writing, “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”
That night, Kanani issued an apology, calling the inclusion of challah in the ad “an oversight that should not have happened” and saying that her campaign was instituting new processes to prevent similar snafus in the future.
“My intent was to honor our Jewish neighbors and friends. We are all human, and even with the best intentions, honest mistakes can happen,” she wrote. “I believe in meeting those moments with grace and using them to bring people of different cultures together, not tear them apart.”
Kanani added, “While this content was created by a consultant working with my campaign, I take full responsibility for everything shared in my name. We are implementing stronger review processes to ensure this does not happen again. As always, my campaign stands for inclusion, respect, and bringing all people together.”
The incident is also spurring potential reforms at the Atlanta Jewish Times. “The ad should not have passed proofing checks,” Michael Morris, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, wrote in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
Kanani’s apology earned the Democrat dozens of supportive comments on Facebook — as well as constructive criticism that highlighted the complexity of Jewish American identity.
“We all make mistakes and learn from the[m],” wrote one man. “If you want to honor your Jewish neighbors, however, you might also want to rethink using a foreign flag. While many (though not all) of us, myself included, feel close ties to Israel (if not its government and policies), American Jews are Americans, not foreigners.”
Another woman offered an opposing take. “If you want to reach out to the Jewish community then you need to hire a Jewish consultant for Jewish content. Not only was the picture a big gaffe that you are undoubtable being mocked relentlessly for, but the wording sounds Christian,” she wrote. “But I do appreciate the Israeli flag.”
Kanani’s ad is not the first Passover bread to ignite a social media firestorm: The sight of leavened bread at Christian seders, which have surged in recent years, has generated sharp criticism in the past.
Unlike the Christian seders, which are widely denounced as appropriative, Kanini’s ad also elicited appreciation at a time when antisemitism is making many American Jews feel insecure.
“Unpopular opinion: we shouldn’t dunk on non-Jews who are trying to be nice to Jews,” tweeted David Greenfield, the head of a Jewish anti-poverty organization in New York City.
Kanani is a former prosecutor who is running in the May primary against Kevin Abel, who says his values are rooted in his identity as a South Africa-born Jew whose grandfather escaped Nazi Germany. Abel has chaired the American Jewish Committee’s local antisemitism task force.
Esther Panitch, a Jewish member of the Georgia House, urged her followers to back Abel when criticizing Kanani’s ad.
“Bless her heart, someone put challah in a Passover ad. This candidate wants to be my senator,” she tweeted on Saturday. “As the only Jewish member of the Georgia General Assembly, I am available for holiday consults — or you could just consider a candidate who knows the difference, whose ad is just a few pages after this one.”
After Kanani’s apology, Panitch said she had heard from Kanani’s campaign.
“I appreciate Nathalie Kanani’s campaign reaching out and taking responsibility for the challah-in-a-Passover-ad mix-up,” she wrote on Facebook. “Mistakes happen. What matters is how you respond, and she responded with grace. This is how we build understanding across communities. My door is always open for holiday consults. 
“
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Georgia political candidate apologizes for Passover ad that featured challah appeared first on The Forward.
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4 killed in Haifa strike as Trump issues ‘you’ll be living in Hell’ ultimatum to Tehran
(JTA) — Four people — including a couple in their 80s — were killed when an Iranian missile crashed into their home in Haifa on Sunday, in the latest direct strike in the month-old U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
The missile was not intercepted because it had broken off from a larger munition, determined Israeli authorities, who said the people killed were not in their building’s bomb shelter at the time of the strike.
The strike brings the civilian death toll in Israel to 18 as uncertainty reigns about the future of the war, with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening multiple times over the weekend to pummel Iran imminently if it does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipping imminently.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Sunday. “Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Iran offered no indication that it would meet Trump’s deadline, which comes as the president has extended previous deadlines for action by Tehran. A top Iranian official said the regime would respond “crushingly and extensively” to further attacks on civilian targets, including power plants and bridges. And a spokesman for the foreign ministry responded to questions about a reported framework for a ceasefire by saying, “Negotiations are in no way compatible with ultimatums, crimes, or threats of war crimes.”
The sparring comes after a dramatic weekend in the war. U.S. forces rescued an airman whose plane had been shot down during a commando raid in rural Iran, while Israel said it had killed the intelligence chief of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards during a strike on an office building in Tehran.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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