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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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‘Israel is politics’: Was a woman kicked out of a salon for supporting Israel or being Israeli-American?
An Israeli-American woman who was denied service at a Northern Virginia eyebrow salon is now taking legal action against the business.
The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law is filing a civil rights complaint on behalf of Jessica Walton, who was at Karimi Brows in Alexandria, Virginia, on Aug. 6 when Fatana Karimi, the shop’s owner, recorded and posted a video of her telling Walton to leave the store. The video has received more than 270,000 likes and garnered concern from antisemitism watchdog groups.
“This case is about a basic civil rights principle,” says Omer Wiczyk, senior counsel at the Brandeis Center. “A business that is open to the public cannot reclassify a customer’s Israeli identity as objectionable politics.”
The two sides disagree about whether Karimi’s decision was made based on Walton’s ethnicity, identity or politics.
Karimi said in a TikTok video that her decision to deny service to Walton was not about Walton’s identity but her politics. “Any ethnicity or nationality or person who comes from a certain religion, any religion, comes to me and tells me that they support Israel, I would kick them,” she said.
Karimi said she “would have, you know, let it slide by” if Walton had denounced the Israeli government and called the Israel-Hamas war a genocide.
Walton, in the video taken at Karimi Brows, characterized the dispute as being about her identity. “I had no idea that you would do this based on my ethnicity,” she said.
According to the complaint, Walton said she did not discuss politics and only mentioned she was Israeli-American before Karimi asked her to leave the studio.
In another video, Karimi explained that Walton said she was Israeli-American “three different times” before Karimi started “throwing shots back at her.” Karimi said that in that moment, she was imagining Palestinian people, “looking at me saying, ‘But I thought you supported us? Why are you playing nice with the girl that is the reason we’re going through this?’”
“I was like, ‘the gloves are f—ing off,’” Karimi said. “‘I’m not doing your f—ing brows. Get out of my f—ing face.’”
The complaint also says that before the camera started rolling, “Ms. Karimi stated that, for her, ‘Israel is politics.’ ”
Politics-based discrimination would not necessarily constitute a civil rights violation, said Michael Helfand, a professor at the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. However, if Karimi was placing special scrutiny on Walton’s beliefs because of her Israeli identity, it would — facts that the parties dispute.
“I think this gets you into the question of how you want to classify anti-Zionism,” says Helfand. “I think that’s a bigger question that the law hasn’t fully wrapped its head around.”
Both women said they have received violent messages online following the incident, including death and rape threats. Karimi said her Yelp reviews were spammed with negative comments from users she doubted had been to the store.
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Vance meets with Temple Israel rabbi on Michigan visit
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance recently met with representatives of Temple Israel in Michigan to offer “his support in the wake of the attack on our community,” clergy from the synagogue told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Vance’s Monday meeting with representatives of the suburban Detroit synagogue that had been attacked by a terrorist in March came as the vice president has upped his outreach to Jewish voters ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. He also invited a rabbi and security guard to a rally Monday in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, where he called them out from the podium and said he was “honored” to have them attend.
The Reform synagogue’s clergy later offered more details about his outreach, telling JTA that he had met with one rabbi, as well as with a security officer who had stopped the assailant from harming anyone at the preschool that was in session.
The meeting was held at Vance’s request, Rabbi Jen Lader told JTA, and the vice president did not visit the synagogue itself.
“This was an important opportunity to ask for the Vice President’s support in the fight against antisemitism, and for additional security funding through the Jewish American Security Act,” Lader wrote in an email to JTA, referring to a bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. House this summer to increase federal funds for both Jewish organizations and synagogue security.
Lader continued, “We’ve made the same requests to elected officials on both sides of the political aisle.”
Later that day the vice president traveled to Las Vegas, where he met in a closed-door session with members of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who have been riled by his close relationship with podcaster Tucker Carlson and other points of contention.
Vance sought to draw a contrast with Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, who spent the weekend offering apologies for his earlier comments about the temple attack, when he appeared to describe the attack as a response to Israel’s incursion in Lebanon.
Some Michigan Jewish leaders are publicly mobilizing against El-Sayed, a harsh critic of Israel: As of press time, more than 400 Jews in the state, including some who hold prominent community positions, have signed a petition pledging to vote for the GOP candidate, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, in the Senate race.
A representative for Vance did not respond to a request for comment on the vice president’s Temple Israel meeting or for his views on the Jewish American Security Act.
At the RJC meeting, where he also received a standing ovation but did not address his Carlson ties, attendees told JTA that Vance highlighted his outreach to Temple Israel.
The nation’s largest Reform synagogue, Temple Israel was attacked in March by a man who had recently lost family in an Israeli strike on a Hezbollah position in Lebanon. In two statements following the attack, El-Sayed initially condemned it outright. He then changed his wording to include what he now says was “context” about Israel’s war in Lebanon, including the phrase, “Hurt people hurt people.”
Speaking with the state Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus at the party convention on Saturday, El-Sayed apologized for those remarks, saying, “I made a mistake.” He also attended the caucus’s “Summer Simcha” fundraiser the next day, where he repeated his apology and asked for forgiveness. He told JTA the “context” he’d sought to include in his initial remarks was related to “violence in all its forms, in all circumstances.”
Temple Israel clergy have declined to comment to JTA on El-Sayed’s two apologies for his past comments. Lader had penned an op-ed in The Free Press criticizing his response.
Vance’s Michigan visit also included a rally in Sterling Heights, where he discussed the synagogue attack and called it “a terrible, antisemitic terrorist attack.”
“It could have been so much worse, ladies and gentlemen,” Vance told the crowd, who had given the Temple Israel personnel a standing ovation. “That guy showed up at that synagogue, at that school with a desire to kill a lot of children, and he killed precisely zero children because of the brave security guards who did their job and did it very well.”
Vance also called El-Sayed, a progressive and a Muslim, “very, very evil” from the podium.
“Abdul El-Sayed made an apology for the very people who would perpetrate violence against hundreds of innocent American school children,” Vance told the crowd. “You’ve got to ask yourself, if he’s willing to empathize, not with the children who almost had their lives destroyed at the most innocent and what should be the safest place in the world, their school, what is he going to do when he goes to Washington, D.C. when the cameras aren’t on?”
Vance added, “What I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t. A person who will apologize for a murderer so long as he looks the right way, but will not understand the plight of an innocent child if that person has the wrong faith.”
The Jewish voters petition, titled “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” was spearheaded prior to El-Sayed’s apologies but has picked up more signatures in their aftermath.
The petition’s language states that “many” of the signatories “have been fiercely supportive of Democratic candidates and principles,” but that all of them “declare our intent to vote for Mike Rogers for US Senate in 2026.”
“If El-Sayed were to win the general election in this important swing state, we fear the far-left and anti-Jewish elements in the Democratic Party would become dominant, including in the imminent 2028 presidential race,” the petition says. “We cannot allow him to become the Democratic standard-bearer or Michigan’s senator.”
The petition specifies that their vote for Rogers “does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump.”
Benji Rosenzweig, a real-estate agent and music podcaster based in West Bloomfield, was one of the letter’s signers.
“I’ve watched Abdul El-Sayed, for the last number of months, surround himself with people who cheer for the destruction of our families and the annihilation of our community,” Rosenzweig told JTA. He signed the petition before El-Sayed’s apologies but wasn’t swayed by them: “What he said was, ‘I’m sorry that you were hurt.’ That’s not an apology.”
Rosenzweig describes himself as a “centrist” who holds “liberal values,” and who would have voted for El-Sayed’s primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, in the general November election if she had won the nomination. He recently met Rogers at an event, he said, and told him that “I will be holding him accountable to the liberal values that I still value.”
As of press time, the petition’s signatories include Brian Hermelin, current president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit; Mark Davidoff, CEO of the Michigan Israel Business Accelerator; Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld, CEO of the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills; Amy Newman, CEO of Jewish Family Service of Metro Detroit; and David Victor, past president of the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The petition included their names but not their titles, suggesting they were signing as individuals and not as representatives of their organizations. The list also includes the names of several people who had previously told JTA they would commit to fundraising for Rogers if El-Sayed won the Democratic primary.
Local rabbi Asher Lopatin, currently on leave from his role as community relations director for the Ann Arbor Jewish federation, has stumped for Rogers but told JTA he does not have a formal role with the campaign. In the Forward this week, Lopatin again urged the state’s Jewish Democrats to back Rogers over El-Sayed.
“To show the Democrats that such candidates should never be nominated, we must show them that such candidates can never win,” the rabbi wrote on Monday.
The El-Sayed campaign did not return a request for comment from JTA about the petition.
For the approximately 100,000 Jews in Michigan, the question of whether to vote for El-Sayed has proven hugely divisive. At the same Sunday event that hosted the candidate, state Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and has publicly sparred with El-Sayed over his rhetoric, implored the crowd to “place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival” — suggesting that Jewish voters should put their own feelings of personal safety aside in order to elect a Democrat.
Nessel’s comment, coming one day after she sat out a state Democratic convention over what she said was fear of antisemitic harassment, has sparked some backlash outside of Michigan. Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, called the attorney general “an absolute embarrassment.”
Mark Goldfeder, who runs the litigation group National Jewish Advocacy Center, wrote on the social network X, “Jewish voters can care deeply about democracy, climate, health care and the welfare of their neighbors while still treating Jewish safety as entirely nonnegotiable.”
Rosenzweig said he had once been an admirer of Nessel but that he was “really sad” over what he interpreted as her suggestion that voting for Abdul “may put Jewish people in danger, but do it anyways.”
“If Abdul wins she gets to say, ‘Well, Jews are endangered,’” he said. “It’s just such a crazy place to put people in.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Spain’s prime minister blames Israel, Russia for disinformation around Ceuta border crisis
(JTA) — MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Monday that Israel and Russia spread disinformation about Spain’s migration policy after a rush of migrants arrived in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa.
Over 72,000 migrants crossed into Ceuta between July 30 and July 31, with at least 100 people dying in the attempt, according to local authorities. Sánchez, along with Morocco’s Interior Ministry, have blamed the surge on human trafficking networks that exploited misinterpretations of a change in Spain’s border policy.
In Sánchez’s first interview since the border crisis, he also said that Israel and Russia organized internet campaigns to undermine Spain’s government during the chaotic aftermath. Online theories proliferated widely after the Ceuta crossings, including some that said Israel orchestrated the crisis.
“After July 30th and 31st, there was an expansion of these hoaxes and this disinformation by social networks associated with both Russia and Israel, and with an international far-right movement that always uses migration, not only to attack Spain, but also to attack Europe and divide it,” Sánchez said in an interview with the Spanish radio network Cadena SER.
Sánchez said research from the European Union’s European External Action Service showed that Israel and Russia were behind disinformation campaigns, without giving further details on the evidence. The EEAS did not immediately respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
He added that it was “evident” that Israel and Russia were motivated by Spain’s political positions “regarding the genocide in Gaza and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Sánchez is among Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Iran.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Monday that Sánchez was “lying shamelessly,” adding that the statements “will not distract from Sánchez’s disgraceful failure to manage his country’s affairs.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also told the Russian state broadcaster RBC that Russia had no involvement in the migrant crisis or disinformation campaigns.
Spanish-Israeli diplomatic ties, first established in 1986, have deteriorated since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, with Madrid since recognizing Palestine as a state and banning ships carrying arms to Israel from docking in its ports. By 2026, both countries had recalled their ambassadors.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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