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American rabbis, wrestling with Israel’s behavior, weigh different approaches from the pulpit
(JTA) — Rabbi Sharon Brous began a sermon at her Los Angeles synagogue last month with a content warning. “I have to say some things today that I know will upset some of you,” she began.
That same morning, across the country in New York City, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl was confessing something to her congregants, too: The sermon they were about to hear “kept me up at night.”
Both women — among the most prominent and influential Jewish clergy in the United States — went on to sharply criticize Israel’s new right-wing government, which includes far-right parties that aim to curb the rights of LGBTQ Israelis, Arabs and non-Orthodox Jews.
In taking aim at Israel’s government from the pulpit, the rabbis were veering close to what many in their field consider a third rail. “You have a wonderful community and you love them and they love you, until the moment you stand up and you give your Israel sermon,” Brous told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The phenomenon even has an informal name, she said: “Death by Israel sermon.”
Brous would know: A decade ago, she was the target of sharp criticism after she encouraged her congregants at IKAR, a nondenominational congregation, to pray for Palestinians as well as Jews during a period of conflict in Israel. The incident didn’t end her pulpit, but she has come to understand why many rabbis choose what she called “the path of silence” when it comes to Israel.
Now, she said, American Jews must depart from that path. “I want you to hear me,” she said in her sermon. “There is a revolution that is happening, and this moment demands an awakening on both sides of the sea, an honest reckoning.”
All over the country, non-Orthodox rabbis are making similar calculations in response to Israel’s new governing coalition, which has drawn widespread protests over its policy moves. (Orthodox communities, including their rabbis, tend to be more politically conservative and skew to the right of non-Orthodox communities on Israel issues.) Israel’s government is advancing an overhaul of the legal system that would sap the power of the Supreme Court, and is also contending with an escalating wave of violence.
Some rabbis feel more emboldened to speak aloud what they have long believed. Others are finding themselves reconsidering their own relationship to Israel — and bringing their congregants along on their journey. A few still feel that criticizing Israel from the pulpit is a misguided and even dangerous venture, one that could splinter American Jewish communities.
What cuts across the spectrum is a belief that Israel has been discussed too little from the synagogue pulpit. Brous said the tendency of liberal rabbis not to talk about Israel lest they anger their more conservative congregants has resulted in a painful reality: “American Jews have not developed the muscle that we now need to respond to this regime.”
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City launched a new program called Amplify Israel, which he hopes will encourage Reform movement leaders to embrace Zionism even as they navigate a “deeply problematic and even offensive” new Israeli government. (Shahar Azran/Stephen Wise Free Synagogue)
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, meanwhile, believes today’s rabbis must be vocal in fending off the influence of “competing values” about Zionism from “various organizations that are either cool on Israel or don’t like Israel or just downright anti-Zionist.”
Last year, angered by a letter signed by dozens of rabbinical students denouncing Israel’s actions during its 2021 conflict with Hamas in Gaza, Hirsch launched an initiative based at his New York City Reform synagogue to equip rabbis with tools to counter what he said was “the growing influence of an anti-Zionist element” in the next generation of Jewish clergy.
The initiative, Amplify Israel, is housed at his Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, and employs another rabbi, Tracy Kaplowitz, to work full-time to galvanize leaders from across the Reform movement to support Israel. Kaplowitz jokes that her new job won’t be complete “until every Reform Jew is a Zionist.”
Hirsch knows the new coalition is complicating his task. “The new government is going to make our promotion of Israel more difficult in the United States,” he said, noting that the government “has elements in it that are deeply problematic and even offensive to most American Jews.”
He and Kaplowitz contend that it is possible, in their view, for rabbis to criticize aspects of the Israeli government from the pulpit while still remaining broadly supportive of the Jewish state and encouraging their congregants to be the same. They also say the need to build Zionist sentiment within the American rabbinate transcends any particular moment, including this one.
“If we have to transform how we connect to Israel each time there’s an election, we’ll be driving ourselves a little bit batty,” Kaplowitz said.
Rabbi Tracy Kaplowitz is a full-time Israel Fellow at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City. She jokes that her job won’t be finished “until every Reform Jew is a Zionist.” (Ryen Greiss/Stephen Wise Free Synagogue)
Hirsch sits on the advisory board of another new pro-Israel initiative, the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition. Helmed by Stuart Weinblatt, senior rabbi at Conservative Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Maryland, the group is an interdenominational network of more than 200 rabbis who advocate to ”strengthen the ties between American Jewry and the State of Israel.”
Weinblatt hews to an early generation’s view of how rabbis should approach Israel from the pulpit. He told JTA that he believes his colleagues should always be supportive of Israel in public, even if they choose to pressure the Israeli government and advocate against certain policies in private — which, he says, is “the appropriate vehicle” for voicing concerns. “My position has always been that support for Israel should be unconditional,” he said.
“If we as rabbis are sharply critical of Israel, the result can often lead to a distancing from Israel, which ultimately may diminish the connection people feel to Judaism and the Jewish people,” he added. “People do not always distinguish and differentiate between opposition to a particular policy and broader criticisms of Israel which can do lasting damage.”
Asked whether the Israeli government could ever conceivably take a step that would necessitate a public response from American rabbis, Weinblatt ruminated for days. He ultimately told JTA that the current debate around proposed changes to the Law of Return, the Israeli policy that allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to claim citizenship, would be such an example, as that is a policy that would have a direct effect on Diaspora Jews.
Tightening who is eligible under the Law of Return is in fact a goal of some elements of Israel’s governing coalition, although the Diaspora minister assured an audience in the United States that, unlike with the proposed changes to the government’s judicial system — which have earned criticism across the political spectrum — there would be an effort to build consensus and no changes would happen overnight.
Still, the prospect of such a change so alarmed Rabbi Hillel Skolnick of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, Ohio, that he traveled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, Israel’s lawmaking body.
“The members of my congregation and my movement have a spiritual connection with Judaism and also a political connection because we live in a democracy, so they see a Jewish democracy as an ideal that they can look to as a light unto the nations,” he said, in a speech he delivered as a representative of the Conservative/Masorti movement.
“By even questioning the idea of the Law of Return,” he went on, Israel “takes away from both the Jewish connection and the democratic connection they have with this country.”
Skolnick suggested that he was unsure of how to speak to his congregation about the new government and its agenda. “My question to you is, what message can I go home with?” he asked.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, founder and chair of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition, shown with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Weinblatt believes American rabbis’ “support for Israel should be unconditional,” and that disagreements with its government should be hashed out in private. (Courtesy of Stuart Weinblatt)
This week, hundreds of American rabbis will be returning to their congregations with messages honed by a week in Israel. The Reform movement just concluded its biennial convention, which was held there for the first time since before the pandemic. Their visit coincided with major developments in the country’s twin crises: The Knesset advanced the judicial reform legislation, and three people were killed in a Palestinian shooting and subsequent settler riot in the West Bank.
In a sign of the balancing act that American rabbis are navigating, the Reform movement’s leader, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who has been among the earliest and most outspoken critics of the new Israeli government, will also be a featured speaker at Amplify Israel’s conference this May aiming to encourage Zionist sentiment among Reform Jews.
At the convention, the leader of the Central Conference of American Rabbis called for Reform clergy to move away from defining Israel in stark black-and-white terms — an apparent reference to Jews who speak of “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” forces.
“In order to connect better with those in our communities around Israel in a nuanced and meaningful way, we must be able to move beyond the pro/con dichotomy which only serves to divide us in ways that are a distraction to the actual issues at hand,” Rabbi Hara Person told the attendees. During the conference, the rabbis attended and voiced support for Israeli protests against their government.
“We are seeing a shift for the better, in my opinion, about how Jews are feeling comfortable critiquing Israel’s policies,” Rabbi Sarah Brammer-Shlay told JTA last fall, before the Israeli elections. Brammer-Shlay was a signer of the 2021 rabbinical students’ letter who graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and today is a rabbi and chaplain at Grinnell College.
That kind of shift has Weinblatt worried. “Sometimes, rabbis are actually out of sync and out of touch with their congregations, who do want to hear messages of support of Israel,” he said.
That may well be the case, particularly at synagogues with aging populations, but survey data suggests that American Jews are moving to the left on Israel at the same time that Israel itself has shifted to the right. The most recent Pew Research Center survey of American Jews, in 2021, found that most have a negative opinion of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; only one-third think Israel is making a sincere effort to achieve peace with Palestinians; and 10% support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel.
While rabbis typically consider what they think their congregants want to hear, they aren’t bound to say it. And some rabbis say this moment is a time to take a stand, even if there is blowback.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed, a Conservative congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, announced in December that his congregation would no longer recite the Prayer for the State of Israel, part of most congregations’ Shabbat morning liturgy since 1948. He said the extremism of Israel’s leadership meant the words no longer applied, and replaced the prayer with the more generally worded Prayer for Peace in Jerusalem.
”I couldn’t just say, ‘God, please guide our leaders well,’” Kalmanofsky said, pointing specifically to the fact that extremist politicians Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich were now government ministers who would be the beneficiaries of such prayer. “The things that they’re saying cannot possibly represent the Israel that I want to support.”
Kalmanofsky had not previously been outspoken as a critic of Israeli policy. He said he has faced some tough feedback from some in his community, including from those who believe this is a moment that demands more, not less, prayer for Israel — “not an unreasonable response,” he said. But a month into the liturgy change, he said he is confident he has made the right decision.
“Something really meaningful had changed in the public life of the state of Israel,” he said. “That deserved real recognition, and a real response.”
Continuing to focus on preserving a Jewish connection with Israel without “dealing like grown-ups” with its “very serious problems” would render the rabbinical voice irrelevant, Kalmanofsky said. “At best, we’re kind of like, ‘blind love, blind loyalty.’ And at worst, we’re totally obtuse, and have nothing meaningful to say about the real world.”
“If you’re going to have a pulpit,” Kalmanofsky added, “you’re going to have to use it once in a while.”
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Romania’s secret police trailed a Jewish photographer. Decades later, their files have become a film.
(JTA) — BERLIN — He had wild hair and wore jeans. He was American — and Jewish. He had a camera.
That was enough to trigger surveillance by the notorious secret police of communist Romania, the Securitate.
Now, 41 years after photojournalist Edward Serotta boldly stepped behind the Iron Curtain, we can see just how obsessed the Romanians were with him, thanks to a short documentary by renowned Romanian director Radu Jude and historian Adrian Cioflâncă.
“Plan contraplan/Shot Reverse Shot,” which had its world premiere at the Berlinale international film festival last month, gives equal time to Serotta’s reminiscences about Romania in the 1980s, and to the Securitate’s observations of him.
And of course, to the photos: After his Romania adventure, Serotta put down new roots in Europe, and has spent decades documenting the Jewish life that was nearly obliterated in the Holocaust. He has published several books of photographs documenting Jewish communities. He also documented the fall of the communist regimes in which he’d set foot as a young man.
Twenty-two minutes long, the film was one of several shown at the festival with themes related to Jewish life and history, or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The obsessive spying of the communist regime, as documented here, appears absurd today. But it was fully serious at the time.
In his narration, Serotta — born in 1949 in Atlanta — recalls how communist authorities in 1985 “had given me the permission to come to Romania under the idea that they would have glowing and fine articles and positive articles about Romania.” His stated intention was to document World War II memorials, of which at the time there were only a handful. Today, there are many more.
“He will be put under surveillance,” declares the spy, narrated in the film’s second half by Romanian political scientist Diana Mărgărit, “in order to prevent contact with parasitic protest elements.”
While Serotta was aiming his lens, the informants were sneaking around, snapping quick shots and jotting down observations. They also slipped into his hotel room one day, and exposed a roll of film.
The things they frantically recorded are “funny right now,” a reminder of a bygone regime that at the time was deadly serious, said Cioflâncă in an interview. Cioflâncă is on the advisory college of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, a state institution that deals with the history of communism. “I lived for 15 years when I was a child under communism. And it was not fun.”
For 41 years, until the regime’s fall and the execution of president Nikolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, in 1989, the Securitate spied on and terrorized citizens of Romania, suppressing dissent. According to the virtual Cryptomuseum, based in the Netherlands, the Securitate had up to 11,000 agents and 500,000 informants monitoring a population of 22 million.
In 2006, a governmental commission reported that more than 600,000 Romanians — and potentially around 2 million — were incarcerated for political crimes, and more than 100,000 died.
Western journalists, though suspect and surveilled, were to some extent wooed — at least in the 1980s. When Serotta requested to visit in 1985, Ceaușescu had been president for some 11 years (after heading the communist party from 1965). Ceaușescu was seen as more friendly to the west: He had refused to contribute troops to invade former Czechoslovakia in 1968; and he kept up relations with Israel when other communist countries severed their ties.
At the time, the regime wanted to gain “most favored nation” economic status from the United States, which depended on their allowing some freedom of movement to its population.
“There were 855 western journalists coming to Romania during the Ceaușescu period, and 80 of them were American,” said Cioflâncă, who also directs the Bucharest-based Center for the Study of Jewish History, under the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.
“Many of these visits were organized as a propaganda instrument. In all the cases, they wanted to interfere with the journalist and to influence his work. They tried something similar with Edward when he came,” he added.
“They felt that the Jews are so influential, especially in the relationship with the United States,” Serotta said in an interview.
“In their mind, everything that was Israeli, Jewish, or American Jewish was deemed like an important piece of influence to use for their political PR at that time,” said Serotta, who eventually moved to Europe and in 2000 founded the Centropa nonprofit archive aimed at preserving Jewish memory in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics, and the former Soviet Union.
Centropa was purchased by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2024.
Given Serotta’s obsession with documenting history, Cioflâncă said he was surprised to learn that his friend had never viewed his Securitate files. Several years ago, he asked Serotta if he’d like to see them.
“The funny thing is, I didn’t think I was important enough to have any,” Serotta recalled.
Cioflâncă found some 300 pages of documents. The informants had tried to influence the photojournalist, saying that the World War II killings of Jews in the region were “a marginal moment,” Cioflâncă noted. “They wanted to make sure that their reputation remained clean, that they were not collaborators” with the Nazis.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, at least 380,000 Romanian Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
“I was there for a matter of several weeks,” Serotta said. He recalled “a very tense atmosphere. Nothing worked properly. We barely found food in stores. It was awful.”
And he is still astonished that the Securitate spent so much time following him. “It’s funny stuff.”
“Many Securitate officers were pretty stupid,” Serotta said in the interview. “They were so distorted in doing their job that they didn’t have this sense of [the] ridiculous and humor.”
Moreover, “their [photo] equipment, first of all, was not very good. Secondly, they were usually doing it surreptitiously: behind a wall or a door or something or something like that. But as the old expression goes, the pictures are great because I look young. I look like a casting reject from ‘Flashdance.’”
Serotta, for the most part, ignored or was unaware of the surveillance, except for when the only two cars on remote roads, hour after hour, were his and that of a spy on his tail.
And yet the trip to Romania was priceless. On one of his first visits to a Jewish community in Romania, he said to himself, “Wow, this is interesting. This is like the old country.”
“Then I said, ‘It’s not like the old country. It is the old country, and I’m in it,’” he added. “From that moment on, I felt like I had opened a door, and I’ve never come back through it.”
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Avraham Burg, longtime fixture of Israeli left, meets Tucker Carlson on his own turf
(JTA) — Tucker Carlson has set off alarm bells among many Jewish groups and even some conservative allies by hosting conspiracy theorists, grilling the U.S. ambassador to Israel and dabbling in sinister-sounding theories about Benjamin Netanyahu and Chabad.
But on Monday a notable Israeli opted to appear on Carlson’s show: former politician and left-wing figurehead Avraham Burg. And their talk was demonstrably cordial — though not without some gentle ribbing.
“Listen, Tucker, I cannot stand you,” Burg told his interviewer over a video call. “But you’re a nice person, so I talk with you.”
“I’ll take that as a half compliment,” Carlson responded, laughing.
A former speaker of the Knesset, interim Israeli president and onetime chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel and World Zionist Organization, Burg today remains an outspoken member of Israel’s dwindling left. A proponent of positions like post-Zionism and the Palestinian right of return that are deeply unpopular in Israel, he is also a frequent Netanyahu critic and current member of Hadash, an Israeli far-left party with Communist roots.
In his newsletter, Burg explained his decision to appear on Carlson’s show by saying the influential podcast host was “one of the most powerful voices in today’s American Right.”
“This interview was born out of a genuine desire to step outside familiar patterns and meet the person behind the public image that has been built around him, not out of prior agreement and not out of any need to adjudicate, but out of a willingness to seriously engage with the challenges he poses to the political and cultural discourse of our time,” Burg wrote in his Substack.
In a veiled swipe at other Jewish groups and Israeli leaders that have denounced Carlson, he added, “Carlson manages to touch a raw nerve of an American society whose doubts are deepening, and the temptation is to dismiss that with slogans. I chose not to do that.”
Indeed, throughout their 90-minute conversation, Burg did not push Carlson on the more outlandish claims the pundit has made on his shows in the past, even as he noted he watched the show frequently. He did object to Carlson’s past contentions that Israel would consider using nukes against Iran, as well as to Carlson’s rejection of the question of whether Israel “has the right to exist.”
Another area of pushback came when Burg insisted that, contrary to Carlson’s claims, Israel doesn’t have a consistent security policy, let alone a grandiose religious or conspiratorial vision.
“I listened to you very carefully in the last couple of weeks, and the way you try to conceive the Israeli strategy, from Netanyahu’s 40-year life mission to the greater land of Israel,” as biblical, “Messianic” or “eschatological,” said Burg. “I envy you that you really believe that we have something like that.” However, he added, “It doesn’t work that way.”
He instead focused on what he referred to as the Israeli mindset, which he called “a very, very hard, stiff-necked” one. Israelis, Burg said, do not believe in a “win-win” solution to their conflicts with their neighbors: “We live in a zero sum game.”
“‘I want to win alone. I want you to be dead. I want to humiliate you. I want to cancel you,’” Burg said, explaining that mindset. “‘Whomever you are, you are my enemy.’ And when you look at this philosophy, you understand where comes the political rhetoric that every adversary, never mind who [he is], minor or major, but at the end of the day, he is a Hitler.”
Israelis, Burg claimed, are also isolated from much of the English-language media, and reflexively dismiss any media criticism of their actions as antisemitic, creating “a thick filter that enables us to reject any kind of legitimate criticism.”
Carlson, who himself has offered various denunciations of the Israeli mindset on other episodes, took a soft approach to interviewing Burg. He praised Burg as “a pretty brave guy,” citing a recent op-ed in which the Israeli had opposed war with Iran, and ended by stating, “This conversation has really been a blessing for me.”
He avoided testier subjects he had raised with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and other guests in recent episodes, such as suggesting genetics testing for all Israelis to test the Jewish claim to the Holy Land, or musing that the Chabad Hasidic movement orchestrated the war as a means of building the Third Temple.
Whether his audience appreciated the apparent sincerity is an open question. On YouTube, commenters variously described Burg as complicit in Israel’s failings despite his politics or offered backhanded praise for the ways he confirmed their worst suspicions about Israelis. “If what he’s saying is true then what an unbearable group of people,” read one comment.
On X, Carlson’s other main platform, prominent pro-Israel Jews denounced Burg as a Communist and traitor to Israel.
Burg’s willingness to find common cause with Carlson was the latest sign of how some on the Jewish left, finding little appetite among institutional Jewish groups and Israeli society for sustained pushback against Israel’s actions in Gaza and Iran, may be looking instead to fringe voices on the right, where anti-Israel sentiment is also growing.
American Jewish left-wing intellectual Norman Finkelstein has appeared on Candace Owens’ podcast, while Israeli left-wing activist Miko Peled has aligned with Carrie Prejean Boller, a former religious liberties commissioner under Trump who was ousted over her stated Catholic opposition to Zionism.
Also this week Jewish journalist Peter Beinart, a leading progressive critic of Israel, praised former Trump counterterrorism director Joe Kent — another recent Carlson guest — as “a brave man” for resigning from his post while citing his opposition to war with Iran. Kent’s resignation letter accused Israel not only of manipulating Trump into war but also of having started the Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, raising concern among American Jewish groups and providing further fodder for antisemitic elements on the right. (Beinart criticized aspects of the letter as “faulty” in his Jewish Currents essay, which was publicly assailed by a former magazine board member.)
For Burg and Carlson, the meeting revealed more similarities than differences in their worldviews. Toward the end of their talk, Burg expressed optimism that his grandchildren’s generation “will stand up and say, ‘We are ready to defend the legitimate Israel, but we’re not ready to sacrifice our life or to sacrifice the life of others on the altar of this craziness.’ This day is close.’”
“That’s a very reassuring thing to hear,” Carlson responded, in agreement.
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King Charles named patron of British Jewish security nonprofit following ambulance attack
(JTA) — King Charles has been named the first-ever patron of a British Jewish security nonprofit, a move announced in the wake of an arson attack that targeted four ambulances owned by a Jewish volunteer emergency service in north London.
The Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, announced that King Charles had accepted the role — indicating a royal’s endorsement of a cause — during an annual fundraising dinner Monday night, where British leaders condemned the attack.
“His Majesty’s longstanding commitment to promoting tolerance, inclusion and interfaith understanding align closely with CST’s mission to protect British Jews and CST is honoured by this recognition and looks forward to working under His Majesty’s patronage to further its vital work across the country,” CST wrote in a statement.
While the attack is being investigated as an antisemitic hate crime but not a terrorist incident, counterterror officers have been leading the investigation after an Islamist group claimed responsibility for the attack. (The same group also claimed responsibility for synagogue bombings in Belgium and the Netherlands.)
“It is too early for me to attribute last night’s attack in Golders Green to the Iranian state … but whoever was responsible, the impact is serious,” London police chief Mark Rowley said at the annual dinner on Monday.
Police believe three suspects were involved in the attack, although no arrests have been made yet. Security footage of the scene of the attack in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood of London, appeared to show three individuals approaching the ambulances parked outside the Machzike Hadath Synagogue.
In the wake of the attack, Rowley pledged to deploy over 250 additional police officers to protect Jewish communities and the British government announced it would provide four replacement ambulances to Hatzola.
In a speech at the dinner, British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that antisemitism was on the rise and vowed that those responsible would be “pursued and made to face the consequences of their vile actions.”
“It is so warped it defies words,” Mahmood said of the arson attack. “This was more than an attack on four ambulances; it was more than an attack on one organisation or on one community. It was an attack on this country and on us all.”
In the days following that attack, donations to fundraising campaigns on behalf of Hatzola reached nearly $2 million following a plea from the organization for urgent support.
“We are launching an urgent appeal to rebuild what has been lost — we cannot to afford to let our life-saving work be put on pause,” Hatzola said in a statement. “We need immediate support so we can source: new ambulances, strengthening security, equipping the teams, restocking and ensuring we can continue to respond safely and effectively in every emergency.”
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