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Conservative political activism has grown increasingly crusading. These Jews feel right at home.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland (JTA) — A little more than a week ago, 120 Jews gathered at the Residence Inn in National Harbor, Maryland, to spend Shabbat together.
The Shabbaton, or programmed Shabbat, had a structure familiar to many observant Jews: Sabbath meals and prayer service options along with opportunities for group discussions and lectures. The vibe was also characteristic of observant Jewish gatherings on Friday afternoon: Frantic calls to family stuck in the Washington, D.C., area’s notorious Friday afternoon traffic, excited reunions in the lobby and a reverting to Hebrew-inflected Jewish vernacular.
“I come here to meet politically like minded Jews on a more spiritual level and for more like religious Jews, they express their political views and in a way that aligns with [their beliefs],” Jeremy Pollock, 33, said. “So it makes it all cohesive.”
The political views that Pollock alluded to are what set this Shabbaton apart from many others. The participants were there to attend CPAC, the annual conservative activist conference. And at the Gaylord National Resort conference center across the street from the Residence Inn, where the conference was being held, the atmosphere was starkly different.
The older, darker, slightly musty Residence Inn was packed with blocky furniture and buzzing with older staffers who were eager to help and to explain that yes, they understood about helping the Shabbat observant get to their rooms. In the conference center, the massive light-filled corridors across the street with overpriced eateries and harried younger staffers who were few and far between.
“This is a place for open dialogue on all topics,” said Mark Young, a Baltimore physician, noting that he still maintains a few of the liberal beliefs he grew up with, and would not hesitate to air them in the Jewish enclave. “I think it’s very much an open tent.” Pollock, who wears a kippah, said he has never been made to feel uncomfortable in his years of attending CPAC.
The attitude toward Jews at CPAC also felt different at times. One speaker called for mandatory Christian prayer at schools. Multiple sessions opened with Christian prayer. And “evil” was a word used repeatedly to describe George Soros, the Holocaust survivor, billionaire and philanthropist who funds liberal causes, and who even made it into the title of one of the events.
Paintings and prints depicting former President Donald Trump and Jesus are seen for sale on the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, March 02, 2023. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Soros wasn’t alone. “Evil” was also used frequently to describe liberals, Democrats, transgender activists and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).
But some Jews at the event said they didn’t mind that kind of language. Instead of feeling alienated by calls for Christianity in the public square, or bristling at conspiratorial statements surrounding a leading Jewish progressive philanthropist, Jews at CPAC demonstrated that they felt welcome at an event — and within a larger right-wing political movement — whose rhetoric and aims have grown increasingly assertive.
“If you look at the archives, almost every year one of the opening prayers is delivered by a Jew,” said Yitzchok Tendler, an Atlanta-based rabbi who launched the Shabbat gatherings at CPAC and who has long been involved with the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC. “Also any religious language would not be too different from what is heard in legislatures across the United States all the time.”
The conference also demonstrated a commitment to opposing virulent antisemitic rhetoric on the right. Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who Donald Trump had as a dinner guest last year (and who Trump later disavowed) attempted to enter the conference and was ejected.
“His hateful racist rhetoric and actions are not consistent with mission of CPAC,” Schlapp said in a statement. ”We are pleased that our conference welcomes a wide array of conservative perspectives from people of different backgrounds. But we are concerned about the rise in antisemitic rhetoric (or Jew hatred) in our country and around the globe, whether it be in the corridors of power and academia or through the online rantings of bigots like Fuentes.”
As an example of Jewish inclusion at the conference, Tendler referred to a panel at this year’s conference titled “A Rabbi, a Christian and a Cardinal walk into a Bar.” (The “cardinal” in this case was Deal Hudson, who is Catholic, which also makes him Christian, but is not a cardinal.)
Jack Brewer, a panelist who is a former NFL star, said “It’s up to the believer to preach the gospel of Jesus Chris, unabashedly.” Seated near him was his fellow panelist Rabbi Shlomo Chayen, a religious Zionist rabbi based in Tel Aviv who focuses his outreach on encouraging young couples to have a Jewish wedding.
Whether or not the references to Jesus made Chayen uncomfortable, that panel also showed one reason Jews may have felt at home at the conference. The moderator, Elaine Beck, a Christian podcaster, introduced Chayen by noting CPAC’s growing commitment to Israel, where it held an event last year.
“I want to say thank you for having me all the way from Israel, I want to to bless everyone here,” Chayen said, prompting a round of applause and oohs and ahhs from the audience.
The session also hinted at the tensions Jews face in negotiating such an event. Brewer advocated that schools, both public and private, should be required to offer parents the option of teaching children the Christian gospel.
“We should be demanding every single public, private school give parents an option to give their kids the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said.
He also pushed for corporal punishment. “Some kids need their butts whooped!” he said. “Amen!” said Beck, to applause.
Chayen skillfully navigated what united the four people on the stage, a commitment to family. His work, he said, focuses on weddings and procreation. “Look at our children and grandchildren and know that we’re leaving behind the set of values that they will continue,” he said.
Another panel may have felt less welcoming to Jews — or to two Jews in particular. The session was titled “The New Axis of Evil: Soros, Schwab, and Fink,” referring to Soros’ Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, who is not Jewish); and Larry Fink, the CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, who is Jewish.
Much of the panel focused on ESG funding, an acronym for environmental, social and corporate governance funding, and the perils of using political criteria to determine investment. (That principle wasn’t universally upheld: A panel just two hours later promoted investment in businesses that embrace conservative and Christian causes.)
Despite the title of the program, Soros was the only name to come up during the conversation between former Trump White House spokesman Sean Spicer, Heritage Foundation think-tanker and former hamburger chain CEO Andrew Puzder and Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall. Spicer cast Soros as a sinister, all-pervasive presence.
“In the title of this [session] is Soros, and one of the things that I find fascinating is over the last several cycles. George Soros has created this web where he has gone into state government, whether it’s secretaries of state, local attorneys, and started to help fund the elections of a lot of these organizations, a lot of these individuals,” Spicer said.
The singular focus on Soros, among a batch of billionaires who fund the left, and the imagery and rhetoric attached to attacks on him — he is often depicted as maintaining secretive control, sometimes as an octopus — has led Jewish organizations to call out the obsession as at least borderline antisemitic.
There were two sessions devoted to Israel, one after the other, and because of delays, they came hard on the arrival of Shabbat. One featured David Milstein, an adviser to David Friedman, the Trump administration ambassador to Israel, and another featured Eugene Kontorovich, a George Mason University professor, and Josh Hammer, a conservative Newsweek editor whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled as “embracing the anti-democracy hard right,” who explained what they said were the stakes for conservatives in the current controversy over judiciary reforms in Israel.
Netanyahu’s proposed reforms, which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power, have triggered a political crisis, sparking weeks of massive protests in the country as well as acts of civil disobedience.
Kontorovich and Hammer made the case that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced the same nefarious elites that riled the conservatives at CPAC. “In Israel, there is a deep state,” Kontorovich said. “There’s a small group of elite lawyers and technocrats that have managed to control the country.”
Kontorovich told JTA it made sense to get into the weeds with the CPAC crowd.
“I believe the U.S. should stay out of its allies’ domestic governance, and it is particularly foolish to take sides in what are largely foreign domestic partisan disputes,” he said. “But as I said in my comments, now that the Biden Administration seems to be weighing in on the reform, it unfortunately becomes an issue for U.S. foreign policy, which those who care about Israel should have informed positions about.”
President Joe Biden has expressed his concern that Netanyahu’s proposed reforms would erode Israel’s democracy, as have almost half of Congressional Democrats and a majority of Jewish Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Support for Israel was one element that underscored the necessity of a Jewish presence at events like CPAC, said Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the managing director of the right-wing Orthodox rabbinical group the Coalition for Jewish Values.
“If you look at both the right and the left, there are voices that want to cut off aid to Israel,” Menken said in an interview. “And we know that Israel is a bastion of freedom and democracy in the Middle East and unlike most other countries where a US military presence is requested, Israel’s willing to do the work and have the boots on the ground all by themselves, they just need help to be that bastion of democracy.”
Another factor was making clear to conservatives that the Jewish community was not monolithically liberal, Menken said. “Jews need to make their presence known, especially in value spaces where there is a prevailing Jewish narrative that goes in the opposite direction,” he said. “They need to see, meaning the larger audience needs to see, that there are Jewish people who stand with them on those issues.”
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At Sundance, the AIDS crisis through the eyes of a bar mitzvah boy
If you were swept up by Aftersun when it debuted on the festival circuit three years ago, Israeli director Moshe Rosenthal’s new film Tell Me Everything may hit you immediately with a sense of deja vu.
It opens on thrashing bodies moving in slow motion in a dark club. Slowly, the strobe lights reveal a figure: a vision of a lost father, just out of reach to his adult child. The scene recalls, and could even be read as a quotation of Charlotte Wells’ semi-autobiographical portrait of a daughter and her tortured father on vacation at a Turkish resort in the 1990s.
While that sequence is very after Aftersun, Rosenthal’s film, in competition at Sundance, has its own merits and its own unwelcome glut of cliches. Tell Me Everything concerns the relationship of a son and a father, and where the source of the anguish of the father in Wells’ is never stated outright, here it’s made explicit.
A memory film split between the 1980s and 1990s, Rosenthal’s drama is told almost exclusively through the perspective of Boaz (Yair Mazor), introduced in the 1980s as a self-conscious soon-to-be bar mitzvah boy. One day, amid the confusion of the early AIDS crisis, Boaz sees his father Meir (Assi Cohen) with another man behind a stall at the pool showers.
Keeping the secret, Boaz grows paranoid about illness and insecure about his own masculinity. Where before he danced to Ilana Avital, voguing with the encouragement of his older sisters, he soon pivots to the edgier pop-rock of the Israeli band Mashina, punching the air with his sister’s mini weights. (He wraps the weights in black tape, he tells Meir, pointedly, using a slur for gay men, because they were pink.)
Teased in school for being small and coddled by the women in his family, not least his beautician mother Bella (Karen Tzur), when Boaz learns of Meir’s sexuality it awakens him to the ways he may fall short of the stereotypical Israeli swagger.
Rosenthal, who broke out four years ago with his debut feature Karaoke, has a deft touch for the period. Shooting in soft focus and working with a pastel palette, he evokes the haziness of the remembered past, half-understood even in the moment.
Tell Me Everything captures how kids process — in overheard snippets, glimpsed scenes — the adult world and the tactics of older siblings shielding a younger one from parental fights. (This family plays Scattergories when voices are raised in the hall.) It also gets at, a bit too strongly, the surrogate husband role often forced on a son by an unsatisfied and possessive mother.
Rosenthal sometimes overdoes it. He shows Boaz in bed, reading sensationalist newspaper headlines about AIDS by flashlight. His growing awareness of his father’s sexuality — and predicament — are shot like a horror film, a sarcoma lensed like a zombie bite. A later montage, showing the redesign of the home after Meir’s exit, is so on-the-nose it belongs in a different kind of ‘80s movie (one from the actual 1980s).
A cut to the late ‘90s, where Boaz (now played by Ido Tako) works at a gas station and nurses an ill-defined homophobia, brings a contrived closure that leaves an earlier plot point dangling.
But when the film works, as in a notable sequence set to Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” — Boaz and his sisters scramble to tape it off the car radio — it can be moving.
It won’t do for that song what Aftersun, a far quieter film, did for “Under Pressure” in the one moment it got loud, but the drama works as a time capsule. While today Israel is heralded as a gay mecca in the Middle East, the stigma the film hints at still exists with its own strain of toxic masculinity and machismo. (That Boaz’s army service doesn’t feature is notable, and could have made the film a richer text.)
Rosenthal has made a sensitive, if at times excessive, portrait of family life grounded in an uncertain past. That its story speaks to today is to be expected; that it might, at times, seem quaint or nostalgic is a sad truth of history.
Moshe Rosenthal’s Tell Me Everything debuts Jan. 25 at the Sundance Film Festival. More information can be found here.
The post At Sundance, the AIDS crisis through the eyes of a bar mitzvah boy appeared first on The Forward.
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I’m a rabbi arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. The Book of Exodus shows us how this ends
On Friday, hours before Shabbat began, I was arrested with 96 other multifaith clergy members and Faith in Minnesota leaders while protesting ICE in Minneapolis.
“Who could have imagined such times as these?” we sang, in the words of local songmaker Sarina Partridge. “We will grieve through these times, and soon enough we’ll be grieving on the other side.”
We cannot keep on with business as usual when our federal government is engaged in escalating state terror right here, right now. To grieve through these times is not enough; we must also act.
In the bitter cold, thousands of Minnesotans gathered at that airport. Tens of thousands more marched downtown, and others simply stayed home in the largest work stoppage in this country in many decades, the Day of Truth and Freedom. Nearly one thousand interfaith clergy answered the call to come to Minnesota — as they did for the Civil Rights Movement call to march in Selma in 1965 — to join us in the fight.
Standing there among them, on erev shabbes in the cold, I thought about the Torah portion we would read the next morning in shul: parashat Bo, from the Book of Exodus.
In it, the darkness of the ninth plague that befell the Egyptians is described as something that the oppressors — the mitzrim, which I’ll translate as “the ones of narrowed sight” — could actually touch. It was so thick that it kept them isolated from each other, unable to move.
In contrast, the dwellings of those seeking liberation were full of light.
I imagined that palpable darkness not as a punishment, but as a reflection of reality. The oppressors were unwilling to see the humanity of their neighbors. But if they had been, they too could have found themselves in dwellings full of light, able to clearly perceive the richness and possibility of living in a multiethnic community.
So too with the federal oppressors here in Minnesota, and those who collude with them. They are so welcome to join us in the light of that recognition. We were there at the airport to invite them in.
Instead, they arrested nearly 100 of us, while we sang and prayed for the protection of our people in the languages of our diverse traditions. Doing this work in coalition builds the power we need to break through the oppression: Our differences make us stronger.
As a minister next to me chanted the Lord’s Prayer, and a clergy member close by meditated with closed eyes, I chimed in with “Ana Bekoach,” a kabbalistic prayer that is part of Friday night services, envisioning divine protection holding close all the people of this place.
At our airport, Signature Aviation is facilitating the internment of our fellow Minnesotans every day, adults and children alike, flying them to detention centers where they suffer in conditions that deny their humanity. ICE is even disappearing workers at that airport from the jobs they work every day, keeping all of us safe and supported as we travel.
The airport is supposed to encourage connection. Come join us in our city, it is supposed to say; come see the beauty of our communities. Come, with your eyes open, to join a dwelling of light. Instead, it has turned into a hub of darkness, and separation.
As Jews, so many aspects of our history are particularly resonant in this moment.
As ICE has engaged in a campaign of terror in our city since the start of the year, I have heard Jews in my community reflecting on their families’ experiences with state terror in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and under dictatorships in Latin America. We join neighbors, refugees and immigrants from around the world, who never thought those feelings of suffocating fear would again define their lives here in the United States.
Now that they are, our obligation is to resist.
I was moved to tears during a march last week, when I saw families in hiding peeking out from behind their attic blinds as we sang of our love for our immigrant neighbors. It reminded me of Jewish families reduced to hiding in Nazi Germany, and of those brave souls who tried to protect them.
When I was arrested, I felt my heart open to the clergy standing and kneeling together with me, and all those in our state who have stood up with courage and generosity throughout these weeks and months. I hoped that all those who would see or hear of our arrest would be motivated to join this work.
The safety of all marginalized communities in this country, our Jewish community included, depends on our efforts to protect our democratic practices, and one another. You can join us, in Minnesota, or wherever you are.
Call for ICE to get out of Minnesota. Their presence is endangering us all. Just yesterday, Alex Jeffrey Pretti — an ICU nurse, mountain bike enthusiast, dog lover and beloved community member — was shot and killed by federal agents while attempting to aid a fellow protester. Our government, rather than accept responsibility for the injustice of his death, and that of Renée Nicole Good, is already lying about who these upstanding Minnesotans were and what those agents did.
Learn from us and protect each other in your home communities. You can stand with Minnesota; we’ll stand with you too. Call your senators to demand that they deny ICE funding in an upcoming vote this week. Push for prosecution of ICE agents who kill our civilians. Together we will fight the plague of narrow sight, instead creating dwellings of warm light where we hold and honor the fullness of humanity of each and every one of us.
On Saturday night, Minnesotans gathered in candlelight vigils on street corners in our neighborhoods to mourn and remember Pretti. I was with hundreds of my students on campus. We imagined, together, all the vigil-goers, holding candles to decry Pretti’s death and honor his memory, as points of light, linked across Minnesota and the country, and around the world.
The stars came out just then, as if the universe was joining us in a vast web of care and light. We sang a song from Heidi Wilson: “Hold on, hold on, my dear ones, here comes the dawn.”
The post I’m a rabbi arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. The Book of Exodus shows us how this ends appeared first on The Forward.
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US-Brokered Peace Talks Break Off Without Deal After Overnight Russian Bombardment of Ukraine
Some windows glow in a residential building left without heating and facing long power cuts after critical civil infrastructure was hit by recent Russian missile and drone strikes, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, January 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Alina Smutko
Ukraine and Russia ended a second day of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi on Saturday without a deal but with more talks expected next weekend, even as overnight Russian airstrikes knocked out power for over a million Ukrainians amid subzero winter cold.
Statements after the conclusion of the talks did not indicate that any agreements had been reached, but Moscow and Kyiv both said they were open to further dialogue.
“The central focus of the discussions was the possible parameters for ending the war,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X after the meeting.
More discussions were expected next Sunday in Abu Dhabi, said a US official who spoke to reporters immediately after the talks.
“We saw a lot of respect in the room between the parties because they were really looking to find solutions,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We got to real granular detail and (we feel) that next Sunday will be, God willing, another meeting where we push this deal towards its final culmination.”
A UAE government spokesperson said there was face-to-face engagement between Ukraine and Russia — rare in the almost four-year-old war triggered by a full-scale Russian invasion — and negotiators tackled “outstanding elements” of Washington’s peace framework.
Looking beyond next week’s negotiations in Abu Dhabi, the US official voiced hopes for further talks, possibly in Moscow or Kyiv.
“Those sorts of meetings have to happen, in our view, before we get a bilateral between (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and Zelensky, or a trilateral with Putin, Zelensky and President Trump. But I don’t think we’re so far away from that,” the official said.
BOMBARDMENT OF UKRAINE BEFORE SECOND DAY OF TALKS
The bombardment of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and its second-largest city Kharkiv by hundreds of Russian drones and missiles prompted Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha – who was not at the talks – to accuse Putin of acting “cynically.”
“This barbaric attack once again proves that Putin’s place is not at (US President Donald Trump’s) Board of Peace, but in the dock of the special tribunal,” Sybiha wrote on X.
“His missiles hit not only our people, but also the negotiation table.”
Saturday was scheduled to be the final day of the talks, billed by Zelensky as the first trilateral meeting under the US-mediated peace process.
The UAE statement said the talks were conducted in a “constructive and positive atmosphere” and included discussions about confidence-building measures.
Kyiv is under mounting Trump administration pressure to make concessions to reach a deal to end Europe’s deadliest and most destructive conflict since World War Two.
US peace envoy Steve Witkoff said at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos this week that a lot of progress had been made in the talks and only one sticking point remained. However, Russian officials have sounded more skeptical.
RUSSIA WANTS ALL OF DONBAS
After Saturday’s talks, Zelensky said the US delegation had raised the issue of “potential formats for formalizing the parameters for ending the war, as well as the security conditions required to achieve this”.
The US official said the proposed security protocols were widely seen as “very, very strong.”
“The Ukrainians and many of the national security advisors of all the European countries have reviewed these security protocols. And to a person, and this includes NATO, including (NATO Secretary General) Mark Rutte, they have expressed the fact that they’ve never seen security protocols this robust,” the official said.
Ahead of the discussions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday Russia had not dropped its insistence on Ukraine yielding all of its eastern area of Donbas, the industrial heartland grouping the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Putin’s demand that Ukraine surrender the 20 percent it still holds of Donetsk – about 5,000 sq km (1,900 sq miles) – has proven a major stumbling block to any deal. Most countries recognize Donetsk as part of Ukraine. Putin says Donetsk is part of Russia’s “historical lands.”
Zelensky has ruled out giving up territory that Russia has not been able to capture in four years of grinding, attritional warfare against a much smaller foe. Polls show little appetite among Ukrainians for any territorial concessions.
Russia says it wants a diplomatic solution but will keep working to achieve its goals by military means as long as a negotiated solution remains elusive.
Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said late on Friday that the first day of talks had addressed parameters for ending the war and the “further logic of the negotiation process.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine came under renewed Russian bombardment.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched 375 drones and 21 missiles in the overnight salvo, which once again targeted energy infrastructure, knocking out power and heat for large parts of Kyiv, the capital. At least one person was killed and over 30 injured.
Before Saturday’s bombardment, Kyiv had already endured two mass overnight attacks since the New Year that cut electricity and heating to hundreds of residential buildings. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said on Saturday that 800,000 people in Kyiv – where temperatures were around -10 degrees Celsius – had been left without power after the latest Russian assault.
Zelensky said on Saturday Russia’s heavy overnight strikes showed that agreements on further air defense support made with Trump in Davos this week must be “fully implemented.”