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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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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Attacks on Mamdani test Jewish efforts to confront Islamophobia as 9/11 anniversary nears
The image was vintage AI slopcraft: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his trademark black suit, holding a sealed cardboard package labeled 9/11 MEMORIAL.
“Honey,” the cartoon Mamdani calls, “where’s my box cutter?”
The cartoon, shared Sunday on social media by the Orthodox Jewish comedy account Heimish Humor and referencing the weapon used in the 9/11 hijackings, reflected an increasingly caustic attitude toward Mamdani, Muslim elected officials and Islam itself in some Jewish spaces as the 25th anniversary of the attacks approaches — with much of the charged rhetoric tied to Sept. 11.
Jewish groups that staged an anti-Mamdani protest in downtown Manhattan Tuesday invoked the mayor’s religion on a flyer for the event, which was sponsored by the Lawfare Project, the Israeli-American Council and a slew of other Jewish groups. The flyer depicted Mamdani with his eyes blotted out and read, “Islamist ideology was not defeated. It was normalized. In 2001 they needed planes. Today the DSA hands them a platform.” One speaker at the event said Mamdani believed law enforcement was “haram,” Arabic for forbidden.
To some who saw it, the poster — and many of the Jewish attacks against Mamdani — contained anti-Muslim dog whistling, if not downright Islamophobia.
“This is coded language to smear all Muslim leaders as terrorists to hold them accountable for 9/11,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “The same way that we as a community rightfully push back when we hear people using ‘Zionist’ as a pejorative — that’s what’s happening here. We should be calling it out if we expect people to call it out when it happens to us.”
The wave of antagonism in the Jewish community comes amid a broader Republican backlash to high-profile victories for Muslim elected leaders. Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, called incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is Catholic, “tone deaf” for wearing a hijab at a mosque so close to the 9/11 anniversary. Islamophobic posts targeting Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, surfaced by The Washington Post, found copious 9/11 references.
But no politician has attracted as much vitriol as Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor. His antagonism toward the Israeli government and his leftist politics have made him a target for many pro-Israel New Yorkers. Some have used his religion as a cudgel in joining calls for him to skip Friday’s memorial service at Ground Zero.
Spitalnick said such rhetoric was coming from a small, non-representative portion of the Jewish world that wanted to advance a conservative political agenda — but that Jews “should be concerned that this is ostensibly being done in our name.”
“We can be concerned for multiple reasons,” she added. “One, bigotry is wrong regardless, and two, it actually makes our work to fight the real and rising antisemitism our community is facing that much harder.”
Yet posts like the cartoon also revealed the resistance to growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Jewish spaces. Heimish Humor’s post drew a number of critical replies from Jewish accounts. “Incredibly racist, you should delete this,” wrote one. “Not funny,” said another. As anti-Muslim rhetoric escalates, Jewish voices are among those fighting hardest to combat it.
Echoes of history
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the rise in Islamophobic rhetoric has resurfaced old memories of its aftermath.
The end of 2001 was a dangerous time for Muslim Americans, who faced being conflated with the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the hijackings. Despite President George W. Bush’s admonition that the attacks were committed by extremists who did not represent the religion, anti-Muslim violence spiked across the U.S. A number of mosques were burned in arson fires, and eight Arabs or Muslims were killed in the three months following 9/11 in what some believed to be Islamophobic murders.
Relations between Jewish and Muslim American communities, already strained by the Second Intifada, bottomed out in some places after 9/11. But in the ensuing years, Jewish-Muslim relations took a surprising turn. By 2006, news media were describing an “unprecedented swell of interfaith activities” — including dialogue groups, “peace walks” and joint Israel trips — even as agreement on Middle East politics remained elusive.
And while the 2010 proposal for a mosque and Muslim community center at Ground Zero reignited some old tensions — with the Anti-Defamation League headlining the opposition — broader trends of Muslim-Jewish mutual aid held: When a St. Louis Jewish cemetery was defaced in 2017, Muslim groups raised tens of thousands of dollars to repair it. Jewish groups anchored the opposition to President Donald Trump’s 2017 immigration ban targeting Muslim countries. And in 2021, the ADL apologized for its earlier stance on the mosque near Ground Zero.
The day everything changed
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, however, caused many Jewish-Muslim partnerships to collapse. Israel’s response in Gaza only deepened resentments, as opposition to the war on college campuses and in public protests coincided with an increase in antisemitic incidents.
Then in 2025, Mamdani rode into office on the back of the pro-Palestinian movement. Mamdani vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was reluctant to disavow the slogan “globalize the intifada” — a phrase many see as calling for violence against Jews. Though Mamdani has repeatedly condemned antisemitic violence in the city, some Jewish New Yorkers say his anti-Israel invective has nevertheless exacerbated a dangerous environment for the city’s Jews.
“The DSA is a movement of hate, pro-terror anti-American and anti-minority ideology,” said Brooke Goldstein, the founding director of the Lawfare Project, which organized Tuesday’s anti-Mamdani protest. She said it was the DSA and the mayor who were promoting division, extremism and racism — not groups like hers, who were holding the mayor accountable.
The prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America is one key difference between today’s political environment and that of late 2001.
But the environment around Israel has also changed. “The response to 9/11, including from most Jewish organizations, was an American response,” said Jonathan Jacoby, president of the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism — whereas the response to Mamdani today, he said, is “coming from a quote-unquote ‘pro-Israel’ space.”
Jacoby said Mamdani’s election in particular had elicited an unprecedented level of panic among some pro-Israel groups. He pointed to the ADL’s Mamdani Monitor as an example, saying that there was a throughline between the efforts to undermine his candidacy and the calls for him to not attend the 9/11 ceremony. (The ADL has not commented on whether Mamdani should participate, and declined to comment for this story.)
Some of the people who have pushed back against the anti-Mamdani rhetoric consider themselves among the mayor’s critics.
“I’m not happy with the atmosphere he’s brought into New York City since being elected,” Avital Levene, a Jewish influencer who called the Mamdani cartoon “not funny,” said in an interview. “However, he’s stood with the Jewish people since taking office. People literally call him a terrorist and use terms like ‘yemach shemo’ (may his name be erased). There’s a way to criticize someone’s political views without using racist slurs.”
Like Levene and Spitalnick, Jacoby said he disagreed with some of the mayor’s beliefs about Israel. But he said those disagreements “pale in the face of the danger of authoritarianism, neo-fascism and white nationalism in this country.”
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Argentine court orders return of Nazi-looted painting to Jewish collector’s heir
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A Dutch journalist hunting for art treasures belonging to an Amsterdam Jewish art dealer spent years trying to get answers from Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of the Nazi financier who had made off with some of them, with no luck. So last year he went to her house in Mar del Plata, a resort city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
No one was home, but the journalist, Peter Schouten, noticed a “for sale” sign outside the property from Robles Casas & Campos, a local real estate agency.
Schoten went to the agency’s website, where the house was listed for $265,000. As he scrolled through the listing, he noticed something in a photograph of the living room. Schouten recognized the painting hanging above a sofa: “Portrait of a Lady,” most likely the work of the 18th-century northern Italian painter known as Il Pitocchetto.
On Friday, Argentine federal judge Santiago Inchausti authorized the restitution of “Portrait of a Lady,” which belonged to the collection of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, to his daughter-in-law and sole heir, Marei von Saher.
“The property had been listed for sale on a real estate agency’s website, and one of the photographs showed a painting in the living room that matched one of the works from Goudstikker’s collection that had been sought for years,” Inchausti wrote in his ruling.
Goudstikker was one of Holland’s most prominent Jewish art dealers before World War II. In 1940, he fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands with his wife and son, carrying a black notebook listing some 1,400 artworks. After his death during the voyage, his widow preserved it, and the notebook later became key evidence in the family’s restitution efforts.
His gallery and collection fell under Nazi control. Hermann Goering, a powerful deputy to Adolf Hitler, acquired hundreds of paintings from Goudstikker’s collection in a forced sale that Dutch authorities later determined was directly linked to Nazi persecution.
Herberto Robinson, von Saher’s lawyer who specializes in estate planning and asset protection, described what happened after Schoten’s sleuthing in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“At that point, the journalist contacted attorney Yael Weitz in Freedman Normand Friedland of New York where she specializes in art and cultural property law,” he said “She then contacted us and asked us to take on the case. The family’s sole intention was to recover the painting. They were not interested in pursuing those who had possessed it or in seeking financial compensation, they wanted the artwork returned.”
Kadgien is the daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a German financial official who worked for the Nazi regime and later escaped to South America. The elder Kadgien, who had close ties to Goering, fled Germany in 1945 to Switzerland, eventually making his way to Argentina, where he started a business and raised a family. He died in 1978.
Kadgien and her husband at first did not cooperate. The realtor’s listing was removed after the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad published its report. Argentine authorities then searched the property on Aug. 26, 2025, but the painting had been removed and replaced with another artwork, while an outline matching its dimensions remained visible on the wall.
Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were placed under house arrest for 72 hours while authorities searched the family’s other properties. They subsequently turned the artwork over to federal prosecutors and were charged with aggravated concealment.
Experts from Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts attributed the work to Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as Il Pitocchetto, and valued it at approximately €250,000. The local and national Jewish communities took a keen interest in the case.
“We are very pleased and hope this marks the beginning of many more restitutions, as we know there are undoubtedly other works out there that rightfully belong to families who suffered this tragic fate,” Clauda Beatriz Malamud, the president of Sociedad Union Israelita Marplatense, the local Jewish community body, told JTA.
Under an agreement Inchausti approved, the criminal proceedings against the couple were suspended for two years, subject to a set of conditions. They irrevocably renounce any right or claim to the artwork, clearing the way for its restitution. The painting will remain in the custody of Argentina’s Supreme Court until the restitution is carried out. They also agreed to pay 4.8 million Argentine pesos — approximately $3,180 — in 24 monthly installments to the support association of Mar del Plata’s Interzonal Specialized Maternal and Child Hospital.
According to well-placed sources at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, von Saher has expressed interest in lending the painting to the museum for a temporary exhibition, possibly for one or two years. The exhibition would help raise awareness of the systematic theft of Jewish-owned art under the Nazi regime and the continuing international effort to return such works to their rightful owners. No final agreement about this has been announced.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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