Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post Conservative political activism has grown increasingly crusading. These Jews feel right at home. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Teenager eulogizes slain father who saved his life in West Bank terror attack just before Yom Kippur
(JTA) — Standing at his father’s grave after Yom Kippur 16-year-old Yoav Shukron thanked him for the warning that saved his life a day earlier, when a Palestinian gunman opened fire on the two of them at a West Bank spring.
“Dad, I want to say thank you for 16 years together. Thank you for giving me life,” Yoav said on Monday night as his father, Netanel Shukron, 48, was laid to rest in the West Bank settlement of Alei Zahav.
“Thank you for shouting out to me during the attack, when the terrorist came in. I don’t remember what you said to me, and I ran,” he added, in remarks carried by Channel 12 news.
Yoav had accompanied his father to the Ein Riya spring near the settlement of Neve Tzuf on Sunday to immerse ahead of Yom Kippur when the attack took place.
Yoav escaped unharmed. Shukron, a father of six, was critically wounded and later pronounced dead at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva.
Hundreds of relatives, friends and residents attended the funeral, held after the Yom Kippur fast ended.
“Nati was the most involved father in the world,” his wife, Merav Shukron, said.
Reflecting on their 18-year marriage, she said, “We came from different families, but that didn’t stop us from being soulmates. Nati, our family is perfect, everything was perfect.”
The couple had six children, ages 4 to 16. Shukron worked as an information systems analyst at Hachshara Insurance Company, while Merav Shukron is a lecturer at Ariel University.
Merav said the family had been due to travel abroad the following week and that her husband had carefully planned the trip around spending time together, including packing a sukkah and food for the holiday.
According to the Israeli military’s preliminary investigation, the Palestinian attacker drove to the spring and opened fire. An Israeli military tracker who was nearby in an armored vehicle returned fire and wounded the gunman, preventing him from continuing the attack.
The attacker fled and was located several hours later receiving treatment at a hospital near Ramallah, where soldiers from the elite Duvdevan unit arrested him.
Israeli security officials identified the suspected attacker as Qadri Samara, a resident of the Palestinian town of Biddu who is affiliated with the Hamas terror group and was previously known to Israeli security forces, according to Channel 13. Investigators said he had visited the spring the previous day and determined that large numbers of people would be there to immerse in its waters ahead of Yom Kippur, a practice observed by some Jews before the fast.
In the aftermath of the attack, Israeli troops carried out a large operation in Biddu, mapping Samara’s home ahead of its possible demolition, searching about 100 locations and questioning about 90 suspects. The military also reinforced its forces across the West Bank, including by deploying the elite Egoz unit to the area.
About an hour after the shooting, soldiers thwarted a separate attempted car-ramming attack at the Ganim military post in the northern West Bank. One attacker was killed and a second was arrested, Channel 13 reported, adding that no soldiers were wounded.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a post on X, “No terrorist is immune, neither are those who assist them; we will settle scores with all of them – in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical term for the West Bank.
President Isaac Herzog noted that the attack came “on the eve of Yom Kippur, as the people of Israel gather for the holy day.”
“Terror will not break us or shake our spirit,” he said. “We will stand against it together, united, determined and full of faith.”
Shukron’s killing has also become the first case in which Israeli officials are considering applying a death penalty law approved by the Knesset in March, according to the KAN public broadcaster.
The law, long championed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his far-right Otzma Yehudit party, makes death the default sentence for non-Israelis convicted in Israeli military courts of carrying out deadly nationalist attacks, while allowing judges to impose life imprisonment in “special circumstances.” It passed the Knesset 62-48 and immediately drew a High Court challenge.
Ben-Gvir raised the possibility of applying the law to Samara during a security meeting before Yom Kippur, arguing that the case was the first to meet the law’s criteria. Netanyahu did not rule out the proposal and asked IDF representatives for their position on applying the law, which they said they saw no impediment to doing, according to KAN, though the report noted that the military advocate general was not present at the meeting. The issue is expected to be discussed again in a smaller cabinet forum with the IDF’s legal chief present, the report said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Teenager eulogizes slain father who saved his life in West Bank terror attack just before Yom Kippur appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Herzog’s Yom Kippur pardon of soldier crystallizes choice for Israeli voters
On the eve of Yom Kippur, President Isaac Herzog pardoned Elor Azaria, an Israeli soldier convicted of manslaughter for shooting a wounded Palestinian attacker in the head in Hebron a decade ago.
Azaria served nine months of an 18-month sentence and was released in 2018. His conviction remained on his record, with the ordinary process leaving it in place until 2032, complicating life for the now 30-year-old.
To ease that burden, Defense Minister Yisrael Katz, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, in July asked Israeli President Isaac Herzog, to grant Azaria clemency, expunging the record.
This Herzog did on the eve of Yom Kippur. There is a coherent argument for that decision. Azaria was a young soldier when the shooting occurred, he served his sentence, and a criminal record can continue to impose practical obstacles on civilian life long after a formal prison sentence has ended. Herzog invoked reconciliation and the possibility of a new beginning, as well as the consequences Azaria had already endured.
But the army did not agree. Current military chief Eyal Zamir and other senior officers opposed the request, arguing that Azaria had never expressed genuine remorse.
The pardon has now returned the Azaria affair to the center of Israeli politics at a particularly consequential moment.
Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the military chief at the time who publicly pushed for prosecution, is now the main political leader in the opposition and its leading candidate for prime minister. Netanyahu, the prime minister at the time who called for Azaria’s pardon, is still leading the other side of Israel’s great political argument. After the Oct. 27 election, Herzog will consult the elected factions and probably assign the task of forming a government to one of them, based on who he believes has the best chance.
If the numbers leave neither Eisenkot nor Netanyahu with a clear path to a majority of 61, Herzog could face a genuinely consequential exercise of presidential judgment between the two men who stand on opposite sides of the Azaria case – which he himself has turned into an election issue.
The roots of that divide go back to March 24, 2016, when Israeli soldier Azaria aimed his rifle at Abdel Fattah al-Sharif and pulled the trigger. Al-Sharif had attacked Israeli soldiers with a knife and was shot and incapacitated. Minutes later, as he lay on the ground, Azaria nonchalantly raised his rifle and fired, from a few meters away. Al-Sharif was clearly not threatening the numerous soldiers milling around.
The shooting was captured on video, and what might otherwise have remained a disputed incident became one of the defining political arguments in Israel. It was a moment when Israeli politics – notoriously complex and sometimes inscrutable even to insiders – briefly came into focus: the fault line is whether you think this is OK.
The military treated the shooting as a serious criminal matter,. Eisenkot’s position, which earned vilification from the political right, was that a soldier could use lethal force against a genuine threat but could not simply kill a captive. The case became a test of whether the IDF’s rules meant anything when enforcing them was unpopular.
Netanyahu, who then as now was prime minister, is a man of sharp political instincts. During the controversy he called Azaria’s father, Charlie, offering sympathy. The eventual conviction was for manslaughter. After Azaria’s conviction, Netanyahu openly went all the way to politicize the case, calling for Azaria to receive a pardon.
The difference was unmistakable. Eisenkot saw the case through both the institutional obligations of the army and morality; he still believed in the old Zionist notion of the IDF as the world’s most ethical military. Netanyahu saw the political benefit in amplifying and harnessing the emotional identification of many frightened people with the soldier.
Israeli society was changing, the inflection point being the Second Intifada – a campaign of barbaric suicide bombings against civilians that was launched between 2000 and 2004, even as Israel was offering Palestinians statehood on the vast majority of the West Bank and Gaza. In 2005 Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza, uprooting thousands of settlers, resulting in Hamas jihadists taking over and years of rocket fire. The 2010s saw more killings.
After so many disappointments and so much bloodshed, many Israelis had just given up on the Palestinians (and to be fair, the feeling was mutual, largely because of the continuing occupation and the constant expansion of West Bank settlements). A significant part of the public had become indifferent at best to the idea that a soldier confronting a terrorist should be constrained by rules that might prevent him from firing. Netanyahu was either riding the tiger or goading it on, and perhaps both at the same time.
A decade later, the institutional divide exposed by the case remains remarkably intact. The current military leadership’s opposition to the pardon places today’s IDF, at least on this issue, in the same institutional tradition that Eisenkot represented in 2016: the conviction that the army’s rules must survive the political passions surrounding a particular soldier.
On the baseline level, this sad affair is about where self-defense ends and vengeance begins, and what to do when many citizens no longer care. But on a higher level, it encapsulates a contradiction from the earliest days of Zionism. The founders wanted two things at once: to turn the Jews, via national sovereignty, into “a people like all others”; and to make of their state “a light unto the nations.” Both sound good, yet one must choose.
The bullet that Azaria fired in Hebron helped crystallize that choice, which maps neatly into the political one between Eisenkot and Netanyahu. In placing his own signature on the final page of the Azaria affair, Herzog ensured it will be a highlight of the campaign, and of the legacy of both Eisenkot and Netanyahu.
It is no coincidence that the same person advocating for a man many consider a murderer is also feverishly machinating to dismantle the foundations of liberal democracy in Israel, while on trial for corruption. For Netanyahu, the ship of old-time Zionist mythology has sailed, and he’s not aiming to cast any light unto the nations. Eisenkot, essentially, still is.
The post Herzog’s Yom Kippur pardon of soldier crystallizes choice for Israeli voters appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump urges nations to unite against Iran in UN address
(JTA) — U.S. President Donald Trump called upon nations to stay united in their pressure on Iran’s economy, as he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.
Indeed, Trump showed no sign of walking down from the military conflict he began with Tehran in February amid criticism that the U.S. is not accomplishing its goals, though he did hold out the prospect of a negotiation solution later this fall.
“I have a big decision to make: Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?” Trump asked. “Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to destroy people and countries again?”
Despite these threats, the president expressed his belief that the two countries will “make a deal, right after the election because it doesn’t make sense for them not to,” referring to the House and Senate elections on Nov. 3.
During a bilateral press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump confirmed that envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner participated in a three-hour meeting with the Iranian delegation on Tuesday.
“It went very well,” Trump said. “It was a very good meeting. It’s potential greatness or obliteration. It could be a great country.”
Trump said in his speech at the General Assembly that Iran was likely waiting for the results of the midterm elections to make a deal.
Stressing that he “gave absolutely no credence” to the election when making decisions on Iran, Trump maintained that the regime is “weak and desperate.”
Despite Trump’s characterization of Iran as weak, Tehran has largely succeeded in disrupting commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial route for global energy supplies.
Trump continued to maintain that he “will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” slamming the regime’s leaders for their repeated refusal to make deals and their focus instead on making missiles capable of hitting Europe.
“Iran’s goal was to complete their mad dash to a nuclear bomb from behind this conventional ballistic missile shield,” he added. “After giving Iran every chance for a deal, I took action.”
He linked the fight against Iran with the Hamas invasion of southern Israel nearly three years ago, reminding the world that the two wars are connected.
“In two weeks, we will mark the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel, where terrorists funded by Iran tortured, mutilated and killed 1,200 very innocent civilians, including dozens of Americans and many babies — little, tiny, beautiful babies,” Trump said.
The State Department has said an estimated 1,200 people were killed in the attack, including at least 843 civilians and dozens of Americans.
“Iran’s supreme leader celebrated that massacre and called it a service to humanity,” the president continued. “The same regime slaughtered over 72,000 of its citizens this year. Recently, 10,000 were killed for protesting.”
Death toll estimates from Iran’s crackdown on anti-government protests have varied widely, and neither Trump’s figure of 72,000 people killed by the government this year nor his figure of 10,000 protesters killed has been independently verified.
While Democrats have argued that Trump hasn’t accomplished strategic goals in the conflict, the president cited a list of accomplishments thus far in the war. He said that all 159 Iranian naval ships are lying at the bottom of sea, with the air force destroyed, radars gone, missile capacity reduced and inflation devastating the country.
The president also commended the U.N. Security Council “for voting overwhelmingly to pass a resolution condemning Iran’s despicable terrorist attacks on commercial ships,” while calling upon nations to remain “united in maintaining pressure” on Iran’s economy.
Trump described the dangers posed by Iran to the world as “a reality that far too many preferred to ignore.” He declared that there is no greater threat in the world than “the No. 1 sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which he accused of “spreading death and carnage and chaos across the entire Middle East and beyond.”
The president noted that just a year ago, when he addressed global leaders at the same assembly, the war in Gaza “was still raging brutally.” Hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, remained “deep in Hamas tunnels and there was no end in sight.” But on the sidelines last year, he said that steps taken “changed everything.”
“A few weeks later, we ended the war in Gaza saving untold thousands of lives,” Trump said. “We also brought home all remaining hostages, both living and dead — every single one of them. Everyone thought it was a miracle that we were able to do so, and people celebrated in the streets.”
He then expressed his gratitude to the U.N. Security Council for its unanimous endorsement of his 20-Point Gaza Peace Plan and for approving the Board of Peace tasked with managing those efforts. Israel rejected the plan this summer, arguing that it did not provide sufficient guarantees of Hamas disarmament.
Nonetheless, Trump recognized the nearly 30 countries that have joined the board and contributed billions of dollars to relief funds. Trump also thanked nations that have contributed police and troops to the region.
He also boasted of the U.S. having invested $1.5 trillion this term in the military, a sum he described as “more than ever before.” Denying reports that the country was running low on weapons, Trump declared that the country has “more munitions than we could ever possibly think of using.”
“I do not believe in letting problems fester,” Trump said. “So while others have talked, I have acted.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump urges nations to unite against Iran in UN address appeared first on The Forward.
