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Behind the scenes of Justin Jones’ viral ‘tikkun olam’ encounter with Jewish teens in DC
(JTA) — Sam Rosen and Noah Segal were sitting with their friends on the steps of the Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on Monday when they spotted one of America’s most talked-about politicians.
Justin Jones, a Democratic lawmaker in Tennessee whom Republicans kicked out of the state’s legislature in retaliation for a gun-violence protest, was walking by in his signature white suit.
“I remember me and my friend looking at him and being like, ‘Is that him? Is that really one of the Tennessee Three?’” Rosen recalled on Wednesday from his home in Dallas. “To me, he’s kind of the face of upholding democracy right now, so it was very cool to see that.”
Jones waved at their group, this year’s crop of Bronfman Fellows, a prestigious leadership program that aims to empower Jewish teens. That initiated an encounter steeped in Jewish lingo that went viral after a liberal news outlet in Tennessee shared a video on social media.
“Can I shake your hand?” Segal, a high school senior from Ardsley, New York, asked Jones. Several of the other teens introduced themselves, too, and one explained that they were all Jewish teens from across North America.
“This is a Jewish program?” Jones asked after giving a brief pep talk about getting more young people involved in politics, drawing an affirmative response.
“Tikkun olam,” Jones ventured, seemingly testing whether he had correctly named the Hebrew term meaning “repair the world” that has come to signify social justice in progressive circles.
“Yes,” the teens replied in unison, many of their faces lighting up with excitement. “We just talked about that!” Rosen said, with apparent delight. After chatting with the group for a few more minutes, Jones said he had to head off for a White House meeting with President Joe Biden — but he took the time first to pose for a picture with the group.
For many of the people who saw and shared the video, produced and posted Tuesday by the Tennessee Holler news site, the exchange offered an example of cross-cultural solidarity at a time of polarization. The video has been seen well over 2 million times on Twitter and more on other platforms.
“It seems like it resonated because it was a genuine, uplifting moment that showed how impactful it can be to have young leaders showing other young people the way forward — and because it crossed lines. Racial lines. Religious lines. Geographic lines. It shows how essential it is to come together,” Justin Kanew, Tennessee Holler’s founder and editor, told JTA. (The site was the first to report that a Tennessee school board had banned the Holocaust novel “Maus” last year.)
Kanew added: “Also: Justin Jones is the real deal. Sincere, and inspirational. So that helps.”
Jones burst onto the national scene last month when he and another Tennessee lawmaker were ejected from the state legislature after staging a protest over the Republican-led body’s inaction after a school shooting in Nashville. Both men are Black; a third lawmaker who protested is a white woman and she was not ejected. The racial disparity in the lawmakers’ treatment drew widespread criticism, even after local elected officials in Nashville and Memphis reversed the ejections.
The saga has made Jones into a folk hero among progressives, as well as an inspiration to those who want to see young adults — he is 27 – play an active role in shaping the country.
“Thank you for being a role model for the young,” Dan Libenson, the head of a Jewish education philanthropy who teaches in the Bronfman program, tells Jones in the video.
WATCH: “Thank you for being a role model for the young.”
As the #TennesseeThree arrived at the White House a group of Jewish students from across were there on a tour, and they were thrilled to meet @brotherjones_. #TikkunOlam pic.twitter.com/vii89sTsIp
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 25, 2023
Libenson told JTA that it had taken the group a moment to realize that the man in the white suit was in fact Jones, as the group had been sequestered at a Jewish retreat center in Maryland and had not heard about Jones’ visit, or about the backlash from some conservatives against it.
“As you can see from the video, as soon as it registered, we all rushed down to greet him,” Libenson told JTA in an email. “It’s clear that Gen Z has been traumatized by the mass shootings that seem to happen every day, and I think many of the fellows see Justin Jones as a hero for not taking no for an answer with regard to the safety of young people like them.”
Said Segal, “The whole seminar theme was vision and the future, so it was random and funky and cool to see someone who is right there making a change.” About Jones’ invocation of tikkun olam, he said, “I was impressed with him before that and impressed with him after that.”
The Bronfman Fellows program is not partisan, and participants hold a wide range of political views, according to Becky Voorwinde, the group’s CEO. But she noted that applicants for the fellowship must write about a contemporary issue that matters to them, and many choose gun violence. “It cuts across political viewpoints,” she said. “They grew up after Sandy Hook. This is their reality.”
Asked whether the issue was one he thought a lot about, Rosen answered, “How can it not be?”
He went on, “It’s not like it’s one awful shooting a year. It’s every day. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before it’s me. It’s not something that controls my entire life, but it’s always in the back of my mind.”
What the Bronfman Youth Fellows’ group photo with Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones looked like from the vantage point of where they’d been sitting before they spotted the prominent lawmaker. (Courtesy of Becky Voorwinde)
Segal said that he, too, viewed the threat of gun violence, alongside climate change, as one of the widest problems facing young people. In fact, he said, for part of a final project in the fellowship, he’d facilitated a discussion about what it means to fight antisemitism for a generation surrounded by mass shootings.
The Washington trip was a closing activity for the cohort of Bronfman Fellows, who first spent five weeks together last summer before getting together throughout the year virtually and in person. Before running into Jones, the group had been meeting with four Jewish White House staffers; afterward, they broke into small teams to meet with past fellows working in a wide array of jobs in the area.
The day before the viral encounter, the group visited a haredi Orthodox yeshiva in Baltimore. There, too, tikkun olam came up in discussion — but the head of the yeshiva seemed to dismiss it as a meaningful framework for Jewish life compared to the commandments of traditional Jewish law.
Rosen, who belongs to a Reform synagogue in Dallas and is headed to Brandeis University in the fall, pushed back.
“I said, ‘Rabbi, this is an obligation that we all uphold in our community. It’s a core value of Judaism and who I am,’” he recounted. “To me, that’s why it was so cool that Justin Jones said that.”
The entire encounter with Jones, Rosen said, felt authentic and empowering. And that feeling, Kanew said, could be contagious.
“Everything we need to save this country from descending into a dark place was right there in that exchange,” Kanew said. “And the beauty of it is everything that moment represents will inevitably come to fruition if people stay engaged and keep fighting for it. So it’s an incredibly hopeful moment, and hope is what people are looking for right now.”
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The post Behind the scenes of Justin Jones’ viral ‘tikkun olam’ encounter with Jewish teens in DC appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In a viral social media showdown, a glimpse of the real Israel
In amateur video footage circulated across Israeli social media in recent weeks, a disturbing scene unfolds. A young man in his mid-twenties, wearing a military-style jacket, looms over a silver car in the heart of Tel Aviv. Inside the vehicle sits an 89-year-old man, mouth agape, expression frozen.
“Dictator! Khamenei!” the young man shouts, his voice sharp, emotional and aggressive.
The young man was Mordechai David, a provocateur who has been documented in a series of confrontations with public figures, journalists and protesters, adopting a style built on creating moments designed for virality. The elderly passenger was former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak — the man whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s propaganda machine has painted as a demon, blamed for building, during his tenure in the 1990s, an allegedly over-independent judiciary that supposedly obstructs “governance” by a government eager for unrestrained power.
David, raised in Bnei Brak as the son of a convert to religious life, has become something of a celebrity. His past includes multiple criminal highlights. Blocking Barak’s car may have marked his peak. In a subsequent social-media video, David “apologized” for not blocking Barak’s vehicle “more.”
Two different visions of Israel
David’s stunt is one of several intertwined recent stories in Israel that, between them, outline the contours of a deeper struggle over the character of its society. It is a clash between two fundamentally different visions for the country. And Israel’s fate hangs in the balance.
David’s is a political culture where perpetual confrontation and boundary-breaking increasingly define public behavior. On the other side sits Lucy Aharish, a 44-year-old journalist who grew up in Dimona.
Aharish studied political science at the Hebrew University, and over the years has worked at a variety of radio and TV stations in Israel, including I24News in English, a channel on which I also frequently appear. Today, she hosts a current affairs program. The mother of a little boy, she is also a fierce opponent of Netanyahu and his circle.
That has attracted the ire of the Netanyahu machine’s street rabble. This week, Mordechai David arrived at her doorstep with a megaphone. According to reports, David and one of his followers managed to enter her building — and at the entrance, a tense confrontation unfolded.
This requires the introduction of another character: Tsahi Halevi, 50, an artist of unusual charisma. He is a singer and highly accomplished actor who portrayed Naor in the internationally acclaimed series Fauda, a character admired for intelligence, composure and moral clarity.
In a twist that could only occur in Israel, Halevi also partly plays himself. The son of a Mossad officer, he, like Naor, served as an officer in an elite undercover unit. On Oct. 7, 2023, he volunteered for reserve duty and rushed to the scenes of devastation, where he helped save many lives.
Matan Gendelman, a survivor of the Kfar Aza massacre, recently recounted in Israeli media that Halevi helped rescue her trapped family members after being directed to the scene by his wife, who received the family’s location through social media.
His wife is Lucy Aharish. “Pure gold, the salt of the earth,” Gendelman said of the couple.
The likes of David would vehemently disagree.
Why? Because Aharish, in addition to being a Netanyahu critic, is a member of Israel’s Arab minority. And because Aharish and Halevi are a mixed couple, the hostility against them burns even more intensely.
Back at their house, there was a scent of violence in the air as the decorated officer and provocateur traded barbs.
“You come to my home?” Halevi challenged; “I feel like protesting against your wife!” David replied. “How far do you want this to go?” Halevi asked, menacingly, as police separated the two. The police dragged David away, but he ensured himself another viral success; his future may hold a respectable place on the Likud list for the Knesset.
‘The affliction of Israeli society’
Aharish chose to respond on television. “Bullying — this is the affliction of Israeli society,” she said. “It is escalating. We see it in the streets, on the roads, in public discourse — and now it has reached my own doorstep.”
Worse, she added, “The spirit of this government is a bad spirit that encourages bullies. I will not bow my head before these inciters.” She also addressed Netanyahu directly: “This is precisely your way, Mr. Prime Minister — not to see, not to hear, not to know what is happening under your nose. … One day, these bullies will reach your doorstep as well.”
In the vision of Israel embodied by Aharish and Halevi, with their impassioned but civil approach, even the most fierce political disagreement remains bounded by restraint. An important distinction is drawn between rival and enemy.
In that advanced by David, those boundaries erode. Confrontation becomes personal. Intimidation is standard.
The first vision leads to an Israel that strives for peace within itself and with its neighbors, and remains a prosperous liberal democracy grounded in basic rights and openness to the world. The second leads to an unstable, isolated and increasingly theocratic state, which will be in constant conflict with its neighbors, and from which the most productive citizens will steadily depart. In short order it will be unrecognizable, and nothing will be left of “Start-Up Nation.”
The 2026 elections, which must be held by October, will not merely determine a government. They may decide with finality which of these two Israels prevails. And after four years of trauma under Netanyahu’s far-right government, there is urgency in the air.
The post In a viral social media showdown, a glimpse of the real Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump’s pick for surgeon general gets her ‘daily dose of inspiring Kabbalah wisdom’
Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general, preaches a broad, loosely-defined spirituality that blends ideas such as the “divine feminine,” meditation, and connection with nature. In her email newsletter, she has endorsed practices such as full moon rituals and talking to trees. And, though she was raised Roman Catholic, she has expressed interest in kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition focused on esoteric interpretations of scripture and the nature of the soul, the cosmos, and the divine.
In May 2025, she wrote about drawing inspiration from Kabbalah teacher and influencer David Ghiyam to help deal with those who judge her for taking breaks from work to rest and recover during certain phases of the lunar cycle, which she views as essential to “feminine creativity.” She directed her readers to follow Ghiyam “for a daily dose of inspiring Kabbalah wisdom.”
Cathy Heller, a Jewish wellness influencer who preaches mindfulness and manifestation drawing on her studies of Jewish mysticism with rabbis in Israel, told the Forward in a phone interview that Means is a close friend — and often asks her to share wisdom about the Torah and kabbalah.
“She loves it,” Heller said. “She sees such beauty and wisdom in this body of work, and how universal it is and how applicable it is.”
Means’ interest in mysticism expands well beyond kabbalah. In Good Energy, a book she co-wrote with her brother, Calley Means, who works as a senior advisor to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., she quotes Rumi, an influential figure in Sufism — the mystical dimension of Islam — and encourages her readers to practice yoga, tai chi, or qigong, try aromatherapy, and consider taking psychedelics. She has also opposed bans on raw milk despite the risk of serious bacterial infections, said more research is needed on a possible link between vaccines and autism, and criticized hormonal contraception as reflecting a “disrespect of life.”
Means’ interest in Kabbalah seems to reflect less a desire to engage in Jewish religious observance than a core belief of the Make America Healthy Again movement: that physical ailments often have underlying spiritual causes, and that tapping into the mind-body connection has the power to heal. Her promotion of kabbalah also represents the further mainstreaming of an ancient practice once reserved for only the most learned of Jewish scholars — repackaged for non-Jewish audiences and finding its way into spaces as unlikely as the U.S. Public Health Service.
“The idea that it’s controversial that we should BOTH trust unbiased scientific information AND our divine intuition is a sign of darkness in our culture,” Means wrote in November 2024.
‘A manifester’
Heller met Means in 2024 through a mutual friend in Los Angeles who hosts sound baths and other wellness events. They now take long walks and hikes together, share meals, and have celebrated several Shabbat dinners.
On one hike in Los Angeles, they came across a rabbi, and Heller says she asked him to offer a teaching. He shared an explanation of why Jacob’s name derives from the Hebrew root for “heel,” saying that Jacob had the capacity to draw the highest consciousness down into the lowest places.
Means “was literally beaming from ear to ear. We both had tears in our eyes,” Heller recalled. “I said, ‘What’s your name?’ And he said, ‘Rabbi Heller,’ which is funny because that’s my last name. And Casey’s like, ‘You’re such a manifester, that’s crazy.’”
In November 2024, Means promoted Heller’s book, Abundant Ever After: Tools for Creating a Life of Prosperity and Ease on her blog.
“Cathy is a goddess friend and her message resonates with me profoundly about how to live a limitless and spiritual life. Abundant Ever After is a transformative guide blending Jewish mysticism, meditation, and practical tools,” Means wrote. “Manifestation is real. Why wouldn’t we want to learn?”
One month later, Means appeared on Heller’s podcast, “Everything is Energy with Cathy Heller,” where she said that meeting Heller felt like “divine timing” and that their relationship was helping her make sense of concepts from Good Energy, including her belief that everything is interconnected.
“This idea that we’re oneness and everything is connected, it’s not a metaphor. It’s not hippie,” Means said on the podcast. “It’s literally truth on the physical, chemical level. And it’s so absent from our paradigm of healing.”
MAHA and religion
Adrienne Krone, a professor at Allegheny University and author of Free-Range Religion: Alternative Food Movements and Religious Life in the United States, sees a direct connection between the MAHA movement and religious ways of thinking about food, health and the body.
She said that the internet has accelerated a broader shift in wellness culture and its relationship to spirituality. On social media, mystical teachings can often be mistranslated and blended together, she said, sometimes losing their original cultural context.
“Some of what’s going on is people are picking up other religious ideas, other secular ideas, scientific research, and they bring it all together,” Krone said. “That’s what forms their understanding of what they’re supposed to eat, how they’re supposed to treat their bodies, what kinds of extra exercise regimens they should be doing. And so it doesn’t surprise me that Casey Means has this kind of collection of ideas that are more accessible than they used to be.”
Still, Means’ spirituality seems to be an outlier among the traditional Christian conservative worldview touted by most of Trump’s other nominees. Her calls to “EMBRACE THE ‘WOO WOO’” and engage in various spiritual ceremonies have drawn the ire of some activists, including conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson, who critiqued Means as “a near Wiccan” who has “dabbled in occult practices that amount to witchcraft.”
Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have not yet committed to vote “yes” on Means’ confirmation, and pressed Means at her confirmation hearing about her stance on vaccines and past use of psychedelic mushrooms.
If confirmed as the nation’s top doctor, Means has signaled that spirituality will play a significant role in how she approaches the position.
“I do believe that Americans are ready to hear about spirituality when it pertains to medicine,” Means said at her confirmation hearing.
The post Trump’s pick for surgeon general gets her ‘daily dose of inspiring Kabbalah wisdom’ appeared first on The Forward.
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More Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, new poll finds
(JTA) — Another major poll has founded that sympathy has surged among Americans for Palestinians and now exceeds support for Israelis.
Gallup, one of the country’s most respected polling outfits, found that 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians, compare to 36% who sympathize more with the Israelis. A year ago, a Gallup poll showed a 13-point advantage for the Israelis.
The poll comes nearly six months after a national poll found for the first time that Americans’ sympathies had flipped. In a New York Times and Siena University poll released in September, 35% of registered American voters said they sympathized more with Palestinians compared to 34% with Israel. Prior to the war in Gaza, 47% of respondents said they sympathized more with the Israelis.
Both pollsters have asked about voters’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades. They each said the sympathy gap in their latest polls was not statistically significant but that the trajectory of sentiments was.
Between 2001 and 2018, the Gallup poll found that Americans were more sympathetic to the Israelis by an average margin of 43 points. The gap began narrowing the following year but did not flip until now.
In both polls, the stark recent shift was driven by sharp shifts in sentiments among Democrats. The Gallup poll found that voters under 55 prefer the Palestinians by a wide margin, while older voters remain more sympathetic to the Israelis. The New York Times poll found that older, college-educated Democrats had seen their sentiments shift most harshly.
The polls add to the data points showing a sharp drop in sympathy for Israelis since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the subsequent war in Gaza, for which the United States brokered a ceasefire in October. The Gallup poll is the first to demonstrate post-ceasefire sentiments among Americans.
The post More Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, new poll finds appeared first on The Forward.