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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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If Mamdani is the future of the Democratic party, how will Jews respond?
Many Jewish New Yorkers are hoping that Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy is an aberration and that Democrats will soon return to candidates who embrace a close alliance with Israel and express a heartfelt understanding of the relationship many American Jews feel toward the country.
That aspiration describes many of the city’s most prominent Democratic officials, from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, to Reps. Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman. Eric Adams, the outgoing mayor, also fits the bill.
For these Jews, defeating Mamdani is especially urgent because loss could hasten a return to this norm, while a victory could signal a more permanent shift.
“Mamdani poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community,” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove told Park Avenue Synagogue congregants in his Shabbat sermon Saturday. “And if you play out the chess game of Democratic politics, a danger that could have much wider consequences.”
For Jews like Cosgrove, Mamdani’s political positions are the problem — they view his opposition to Zionism as antisemitic, and his efforts to reassure the Jewish community as an implicit confession that Jews would have something to worry about if he was in charge.
Other leaders, like Rabbi Rachel Timoner at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, are making a different calculation. Her synagogue hosted Mamdani for a private conversation with members, part of his Jewish outreach that has included synagogue and sukkah visits plus private meetings with clergy.
***
The divergent approaches — rallying congregants against Mamdani versus engaging with the candidate — showcase two different models for handling political candidates who are hostile toward Israel.
Timoner said she owed it to her congregants to bring Mamdani to the synagogue for a conversation. “I’m hoping that he is going to listen with an open mind and an open heart to the real pain and fear and experience of the Jewish community,” she told JTA.
Cosgrove acknowledged that Mamdani was likely to win but said that was no reason to try and extend an olive branch. “I understand the pragmatic instinct,” he said. “I choose principle instead.”
I expect many more Jewish leaders will be confronting this hard decision in the years to come, because polling shows that Mamdani’s views toward Israel are starting to align with a majority of Democratic voters.
Three times more Democrats in New York City sympathize with the Palestinians over Israel (57% to 18%), while nationally 69% of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Israel.
Sympathizing with Palestinians is not the same thing as opposing Israel’s existence, but 67% of Democrats also think Israel’s military actions in Gaza should be defined as either genocide or major war crimes akin to genocide, while only 7% considered them to be legitimate self-defense, a stance that does call Israel’s legitimacy into question.
And while many party leaders remain stalwart supporters of Israel, there is evidence some are starting to feel the heat. Sen. Cory Booker squirmed during an interview with liberal podcaster Jennifer Welch last week as she grilled him on receiving donations from AIPAC and taking a friendly photograph with Benjamin Netanyahu over the summer. “‘What in the actual f—-?” Welch asked.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, has been tagged “AIPAC Shakur” by popular radio host Charlamagne Tha God, and recently accepted an endorsement from J Street, a liberal AIPAC alternative, while other prominent Democrats are turning down AIPAC funding.
***
The pressure may ease if the ceasefire holds in Gaza, but it’s hard to see the overall trends reversing without an improbable breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
That suggests the kind of red lines that Jewish leaders have long sought to maintain around Israel and antisemitism — opposing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, for example — will start to lose their power.
If more Mamdanis start running for office, will concerned Jewish leaders shift their focus from these candidates’ views on Israel to how they treat their Jewish constituents?
One of the themes I’ve found in reporting on campus antisemitism is that students are often bothered more by how some of their peers act out their anger toward Israel — often by shunning Jews who don’t completely buy into anti-Zionism — than by the anger itself.
Is there anything that candidates who oppose Israel can offer Jewish leaders and voters who support Israel, short of changing their foreign policy positions?
Mamdani has tried. In addition to his charm offensive, he has sought to reassure Jews in New York City that he will not demonize Jews he disagrees with, telling Beth Elohim members that he would not impose a litmus test around Israel at City Hall and anticipated hiring Zionists of all different political persuasions if elected.
That comment only served to provoke Cosgrove, who said Mamdani had revealed an “assumption that Jewish self-determination is an ideology to be tolerated, rather than a birthright to be respected.”
But perhaps it comforted some of those in the audience at Beth Elohim.
Of course, Mamdani is still in campaign mode. The bigger test will come if he wins. How a Mayor Mamdani would ultimately relate to the city’s Jews— and whether antisemitic incidents spike, fall or remain flat — will almost certainly inform how other rabbis and Jewish leaders react to future candidates who share his views.
The post If Mamdani is the future of the Democratic party, how will Jews respond? appeared first on The Forward.
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Why the story of Noah’s Ark seems timelier than ever
Instead of going to therapy, a widower escapes his trauma by fleeing to an island halfway between Antarctica and Tasmania, where he’s supposed to be taking care of a broken seed vault meant to protect the global food supply against disaster. But various emotional and environmental twists get in the way of his success.
Published earlier this year, Charlotte McConaghy’s climate thriller Wild Dark Shore is the latest entrant in a genre that updates the Noah’s Ark story. It joins the Hulu series Paradise, set in an underground bunker in Colorado after a doomsday event, and the movie Interstellar, where astronauts bearing frozen embryos set off in search of a habitable planet. And then there’s Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars.
Wild Dark Shore is a little different, because the life forms that need to be protected from climate disaster are plants, not animals. “It was meant to outlast humanity,” McConaghy writes of the fictional Shearwater Global Seed Vault that her main character, Dom, has to protect, “to live on into the future in the event that people should one day need to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” In other words, a Noah’s Ark of seeds.
But one irony of climate change is that it threatens the very work humanity does to protect against it. The vault is supposed to remain frozen, but a storm damages its cooling system. Because of rising sea levels, the vault is being flooded, and even fewer seeds can be saved than Dom and the other characters once believed.
In the Noah’s Ark story, Noah can propagate every species, but individual people and animals left behind are drowned. In Wild Dark Shore, only some seeds can be rescued — however many as can be jammed into a small freezer — and part of the challenge is deciding which seeds to save and which ones to allow to go extinct.
Should they pick seeds based on their capacity to nourish the human species, like wheat? Dom’s youngest child has a soft spot for less consequential yet still cool seeds, like that of the wollemia nobilis, a (real-life) evergreen tree that was thought to have been extinct for millions of years then discovered in Australia in 1994.
The seed vault in the book is loosely based on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle, whose tunnel flooded in 2016 due to melting permafrost, or frozen soil, during an extremely hot (for that part of the world) winter. (Thankfully, no seeds were lost.) The vault opened in 2008 and is owned and operated by the Norwegian government. With over 1.3 million seed samples, it’s the world’s largest facility of its kind.
The mental gymnastics necessary to picture a world so radically different, so much worse, than one’s own, is part of what makes science fiction compelling. Mentally, most people struggle to fathom what scientists tell us about the changing climate. Environmental disaster seems too abstract, too far away, and too unpleasant to think about. Books and movies create a mental safe space where we can begin to see what’s at stake.
The Noah’s Ark story takes place long before anyone ever thought about carbon emissions, but it still offers a blueprint for science fiction. “Whether we want to or not, we keep retelling a version of that story every time we imagine what it’s like to survive disaster,” said Jeffrey Cohen, an English professor and the author of Noah’s Arkive, a series of essays analyzing the biblical story through the lens of modern times. “One of the things that the ark gifted the imagination forever with is a kind of self-contained survival-ship. Without the ark, we wouldn’t have spaceships.”
Without spoiling too much of Wild Dark Shore, I’d argue the best lesson climate thrillers offer is that we as a society are emotionally unsuited for the pressures doomsday could place on us. Our best bet is to avoid any situation where our species’ fate winds up in the hands of a traumatized widower, Elon Musk, or any other modern-day Noah — to create a future where everybody can be saved, because there is nothing to be saved from.
The post Why the story of Noah’s Ark seems timelier than ever appeared first on The Forward.
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NJ Republican gubernatorial nominee faces backlash after aide says he wouldn’t take ‘money from Jews’
(JTA) — The Republican nominee for New Jersey governor has come after one of his aides said he wasn’t “taking money from Jews” at a campaign event.
Ibrar Nadeem, the Muslim relations adviser to Jack Ciattarelli, made the remarks at a “community dinner” in Piscataway, New Jersey, on Saturday organized by a group called Muslims 4 Jack.
“People from my community, when I was blamed that somebody said, ‘You are taking money from Jews.’ I said, ‘I check my bank account every day, brother, it is not there,’” Nadeem told the crowd.
Minutes earlier, Nadeem also said that Ciattarelli’s campaign wanted to have a “ban on same-sex marriage.”
#NJ gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli is getting an endorsement so big, it might lead to victory (Lakewood Vaad). He made an appearance with Muslims4Jack too “We want to have a ban on same-sex marriage…I was blamed that somebody said you are taking money from Jews.” https://t.co/3Lz4jHXWQv pic.twitter.com/ap71tBQEX9
— Michael Matthews (@mcm1071989) October 20, 2025
Following Nadeem’s remarks, Ciattarelli took to the stage and praised Nadeem, telling the crowd that the advisor “hasn’t let me down one day” since the pair met eight months ago. He also boasted that he was the “first gubernatorial candidate in history that has a Muslim as part of his inner circle of advisors.”
Both men’s remarks swiftly drew criticism from Ciattarelli’s opponent, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who is currently leading the race by single digits in most public polling.
“This blatant antisemitism is coming from a member of Jack’s inner circle,” wrote Sherrill in a post on X Monday. “Jack could have condemned it but instead sang his praises. Absolutely disgraceful.”
Hours later, she demanded that Ciattarelli denounce Nadeem’s comments, fire him and apologize for “praising him right after he made these antisemitic and homophobic statements” in another social media post.
Ciattarelli’s response to Nadeem’s comments also drew condemnation from Jewish Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who lost his gubernatorial bid to Sherrill earlier this year.
“A real friend of the Jewish community doesn’t applaud disgusting antisemitic tropes,” Gottheimer told reporters Tuesday. “They condemn them.”
In response to Sherrill’s allegations, Ciattarelli accused the Democratic candidate of being a “Mamdani supporter” — a reference to the Muslim and anti-Zionist Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City — who didn’t “have the moral courage to stand with Israel.”
“Do you ever get tired of lying @MikieSherrill? You know I support same sex marriage. You also know the full clip of Dr. Nadeem’s remarks are clear: He was talking about the grief he gets from some BECAUSE of my unwavering support for the Jewish community and Israel and his own efforts to build bridges between Muslim and non-Muslim communities,” wrote Ciattarelli in a post on X.
The Vaad, a group of Orthodox community leaders in Lakewood, New Jersey, and neighboring towns, is expected to endorse Ciattarelli in the coming days, according to the Lakewood Scoop.
Nadeem thanked Ciattarelli for his defense in a post on Facebook where he claimed he had worked to foster ties between Muslim and Jewish communities in New Jersey.
“Mikie Sherrill, your attacks are false. I’ve spent years building bridges—especially between Muslim and Jewish communities—and I’m proud of that work,” wrote Nadeem. “To my Jewish friends, thank you for standing with me and rejecting division. Truth and unity will beat political lies—every time. 🇺🇸”
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