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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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This David Schwimmer sweater ad is playing on ‘Friends’ nostalgia. So why are commenters talking about Israel?
David Schwimmer, who played Ross on Friends, is tapping into some late ’90s and early 2000s nostalgia as the star in an ad this week marketing his “dream sweater” for Quince, a clothing and home goods store.
In the ad, Schwimmer, who is Jewish, sketches the perfect red sweater in a notebook while he sits in Central Park and then begins to see it on everyone: a man riding an electric scooter, an angry taxi driver who almost runs into him, a beautiful woman riding in the back of the taxi, even a dog.
The gag is a reference to the Friends episode “The One with the Red Sweater,” where Ross’ on-again-off-again girlfriend Rachel is pregnant and has not told the father, whose identity is a mystery to the group; Joey, Monica and Phoebe know that the father left a red sweater at the apartment, so when Ross stops by and is relieved to find his sweater, they figure out he’s the dad-to-be.
“I’ve been looking for this for like a month,” he says, just after making a reference to the Yiddish-named snack, Mashuga Nuts.
The episode and the ad are apolitical. So why then are some people planning to cancel their Quince orders and boycott the company?
Schwimmer, many of the commenters on the ad are saying, is a Zionist.
“I don’t approve of you featuring a Zio in your ad,” one Instagram user commented. “Please do better.”
Schwimmer on Israel, antisemitism
Schwimmer has been outspoken about antisemitism since long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Over the course of his career, he’s spoken at multiple Anti-Defamation League events and called for other people to stand against hate, routinely saying, “Silence is complicity.”
The actor appears to have never explicitly identified as a Zionist, and his statements have focused more on galvanizing support for Jews and Israelis — rather than on the Jewish state. But this is of little importance to his critics.
His relationship with the ADL, a staunchly pro-Israel organization, is damning enough for some. Schwimmer also starred in an Israeli commercial for Meitav, an investment management company. The move puts him at odds with the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which stands against any financial relationship with Israel or Israeli companies.
After Oct. 7, Schwimmer put out a statement calling the Hamas attack an “atrocity” and a “genocide,” adding that any attempt to justify what happened is “indefensible and antisemitic.” In the same statement, he also touched on Palestinian suffering:
“One can condemn Hamas and still object to the Israeli government’s policies regarding the occupation (as many Israelis do), still believe in the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, and still mourn the loss of Palestinian civilians and the current destruction of their homes, schools, hospitals and places of worship.”
He’s also been vocal about sexual violence that occurred on Oct. 7, sharing the controversial New York Times piece headlined “Screams Without Words,” that investigated allegations of sexual assault committed by Hamas during the attack. Critics of the piece have questioned the validity of the reporting and argued that one of its reporters is biased toward Israel. The Times has stood by the piece.
Additionally, Schwimmer has criticized universities’ responses to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses that he said have veered into antisemitism.
Schwimmer spoke at a 2025 ADL summit about the backlash he’s gotten for his advocacy, noting that while he’s been “attacked” and “abandoned,” he’s found deep meaning in speaking out and has no plans to stop. He concluded his speech calling on fellow celebrities to do the same.
“You don’t have to say anything political,” Schwimmer said. “No one is asking you to solve the conflict in the Middle East. Just say that you stand with your Jewish friends, colleagues and neighbors against hatred and discrimination.”
The controversy isn’t bothering Quince.
“We’ve seen more than 8 million views across our social channels in the first 48 hours, alongside international press coverage and recognition from the marketing community for the creative,” said Dakota Isaacs, head of brand strategy and narrative, in an email to the Forward. “It’s been especially rewarding to see fans connect with the humor and nostalgia while discovering Quince.”
The post This David Schwimmer sweater ad is playing on ‘Friends’ nostalgia. So why are commenters talking about Israel? appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I urged my parents to avoid the counterprotest in Philadelphia
Parents usually tell their children whether they can go out, but last week, on a phone call with my parents, our roles reversed, and I urged them not to join a Philadelphia food crawl with their friends. The event was organized in response to a bicycle rally calling for the boycott of six restaurants, all Jewish-owned, to “show these zionist business owners that we see them for the disgusting humans they are.”
The counterprotest intended to show solidarity with these businesses by patronizing and protecting them on the day of the protest, given the hostile framing of the boycott against the restaurants and their Jewish owners. However, I was concerned that it would be co-opted by pro-Israel partisans, who not only would instrumentalize it for their own agenda — one which, in my view, is actively detrimental to the fight against antisemitism — but would also stoke chaos and violence. It’s a film that’s played out time and again, including when I was an undergraduate at UCLA: A call is put out that Jews are under attack, counterprotesters mobilize in response, and anger quickly morphs into belligerence, hostility, and violence.
Fortunately, it appears that no one was seriously hurt during Sunday’s bike rally and counterprotest. As I had feared, though, some demonstrators became aggressive as verbal confrontations and scuffles broke out across Rittenhouse Square. While it’s likely that some of the pro-Israel demonstrators were there for the sole purpose of displaying that they are not “Jews with trembling knees,” others ostensibly were there because, as the names of two of the organizations behind it would suggest, they want to StopAntisemitism and EndJewHatred.
If those were the goals, the demonstration was an unmitigated disaster. And much of the discourse surrounding the boycott laid the groundwork for failure.
To many Jews, it may seem self-evident that the boycott was illegitimate and antisemitic. For the protesters, though, there seems to be a genuine inability to understand how it could be. They also seem unable or unwilling to condemn antisemitism.
Anger at the protesters is understandable, but if the goal is to stop antisemitism and end Jew hatred, it is important to address the root of the problem, which starts with understanding why the protesters might have such a profound misunderstanding of antisemitism.
For several decades, following the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Cold War period, pro-Israelism has been a core, essential feature of hegemonic anti-antisemitism advocacy. Groups like the ADL have made the phenomenon of so-called “new antisemitism” – a term that explains hostility toward Israel by claiming that the nation is maligned out of bigotry, as the proverbial Jew among the nations – a central focus of their work, especially in times of increased Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Though this is hardly “new,” the stakes and intensity of attacks against the “new antisemitism” have been raised in a post–Oct. 7, post–destruction of Gaza reality. In effect, this approach has been successful in as much as it has led to a public perception that the fight against antisemitism and the fight in defense of Israel are the same fight, and cannot be separated.
As a result, when anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian activists are accused of antisemitism or expected to condemn it, they view it as purely cynical — an attempt to delegitimize their movement rather than a true objection to how they have treated or spoken about Jews. This very refusal to condemn antisemitism is often read as itself antisemitic by many Jews. This “acrimonious circle,” as philosopher Brian Klug described it 13 years ago, could go on forever.
As the acrimonious circle spins and spins, there are a few options that groups fighting antisemitism can consider:
- They can continue pushing pro-Palestinian activists to see both condemning antisemitism and supporting Israel as intertwined moral duties.
- They can insist on that interconnection, but tell pro-Palestinian activists to choose combatting antisemitism no matter what their beliefs about Israel are.
- They can accept that pro-Palestinian activists will rarely condemn antisemitism at their own initiative, and deploy tactics of intimidation, bullying, harassment, and/or violence against them.
- They can accept that pro-Palestinian activists will rarely condemn antisemitism at their own initiative, and present condemning antisemitism as a human-rights oriented stance, in line with standing up for all marginalized people, including Palestinians.
The first option is the one that organizations like the ADL have often chosen. In its statement about the bike rally and boycott, the group said that criticism of Israeli government policies are acceptable, but discrimination is not. Criticisms that the ADL considers ipso facto discriminatory, however, include claims that Israel has committed the crimes of genocide and apartheid. As a result, activists lend the ADL and groups like it no credibility and will dismiss any of their condemnations out of hand.
The third option is what the protest on Sunday became. Any Philadelphian can tell you that a brawl in the middle of Rittenhouse Square during an Eagles game is far from unusual. But the fighting in this instance broke out because of the boycott — one side driven by a fervor that they needed to defend Jews facing an existential threat from anti-Zionists, the other driven by a fervor that they needed to bring justice to a city ravaged by what protesters believe are business-owning war criminals.
The second option is a sensible demand from a moral perspective. However, it is not a strategic one. The hard truth is that for many, though certainly not all, pro-Palestinian activists, the cause comes before all else, including standing up against antisemitism.
Therefore, the only way forward for Jews is the fourth option: to frame the fight against antisemitism as a fight for the rights of all people. This is not a perfect solution — no solution could be. There will always be some unwilling to oppose antisemitism no matter what tactic is deployed. However, it will make plain that there is no contradiction between condemning antisemitism and supporting Palestinian rights, that in fact the task is to support human rights universally and to condemn all who violate these rights. That necessarily includes standing against Israeli war crimes and its regime of inequality, and that includes condemning those who hold Jews as Jews complicit for Israel’s actions and condemning those who harass, intimidate, and scrutinize Jewish business owners for their presumed political stances.
My parents, fortunately, decided to remove themselves from the chaos of this day and went to support the targeted businesses as regular patrons on other days throughout the week. I was pleased to see that our rabbi, who leads one of the largest synagogues in Center City, made a point of trying to de-escalate tensions and confrontations from within the Philadelphia Jewish community, as well as highlighting the strength and vibrancy of Philly’s Jewish life on its own terms.
These are important, positive things we can do in the short term. That said, if we want long-term change to come from the pro-Palestinian movement – and I think this moment requires it – anti-antisemitism groups that cannot meet the moment must step aside and make room for those that are capable and prepared to frame the fight against antisemitism as a fight for, not against, fairness, justice, and equality for all.
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Israel approves $31.5 million plan to strengthen Jewish education in North America
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s government has approved a NIS 100 million ($31.5 million) plan, initiated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to strengthen Jewish education in North America, a statement from his office said Wednesday.
Based on a partnership and joint investment with North American Jewish communities, the goal of the plan is to strengthen Jewish identity and ties to Israel among the next generation of Diaspora Jews in the United States.
The approval of the plan, which was developed with representatives of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), follows a government decision made in June.
It comes a day after Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, was sworn in and two weeks after a national election left Netanyahu facing a battle to stay in power as his rival, Gadi Eisenkot, received the mandate to form the next government.
It also comes amid signs of growing disaffection among Diaspora Jews, particularly younger generations, toward Israel and the Netanyahu-led government. Recent polls suggest that support for Israel among Diaspora Jews, especially in response to its policies in Gaza and on matters of democracy, is slipping.
A February survey of American Jews by the Jewish Federations of North America found that only one-third of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as Zionist, even as nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
A separate Pew poll in May examining American views of Israel found that Jewish attitudes have shifted since 2024. The survey found that 83% of Jews view the Israeli people favorably, down from 89% in 2024, while 47% view the Israeli government favorably, compared with 54% in 2024.
“The plan we approved today, in partnership with Jewish communities in North America, is an investment in the future generation of Diaspora Jews. Together, we will strengthen Jewish identity, deepen the connection to Israel and ensure that our heritage and values are passed proudly from generation to generation,” Netanyahu said in the statement.
“The future of the Jewish people depends on our ability to ensure that future generations know their heritage, connect to their Jewish identity and maintain their deep ties to the State of Israel,” he said, adding that Israel would not “stand idly by in the face of challenges,” such as antisemitism.
Under the framework of the plan, which will focus on increasing the number of students enrolled in Jewish educational frameworks, the Israeli government allocation will be matched 50% with funding from Jewish Federations and other non-governmental sources.
JFNA said in a statement that it welcomed the Israeli cabinet’s decision to invest in Jewish education across the U.S. and Canada, calling it an “unprecedented partnership between the Government of Israel and North American Jewish communities to strengthen Jewish identity and ensure a vibrant future for the Jewish people.”
“We are proud to launch this historic partnership with the Government of Israel to expand access and grow enrollment in Jewish day schools across North America,” said Gary Torgow, chair of the Board of Jewish Federations of North America.
Eric D. Fingerhut, JFNA’s president and CEO, said the partnership “reflected the shared commitment of Israel and North American Jewry to strengthening Jewish identity and expanding educational opportunities for more families.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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