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
New Report Reveals Rampant Human Rights Abuses in Iran as Activists Warn of Another Wave of Mass Executions
People attend Eid al-Fitr prayers, marking the end of Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 21, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
A new report reveals the widespread scale of human rights abuses in Iran over the past year, as activists warn the regime may carry out another wave of mass executions to suppress growing opposition amid deepening unrest.
The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an independent group monitoring Iran, released a report last week, timed for Nowruz, the Persian New Year, outlining a deeply concerning human rights situation over the past 12 months, citing crackdowns on protesters, harassment of activists, threats to minorities, executions of children, violations of women’s rights, and dire prison conditions.
According to HRANA’s Statistics and Documentation Center, 78,907 people were arrested on ideological or political grounds from March 2025 to March 2026, highlighting a pervasive climate of repression across the country.
But the report warns that the number of arrests is likely much higher, given the difficulty of tracking such cases — especially earlier this year during recent nationwide anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, leaving thousands of demonstrators tortured or killed.
HRANA reports that at least 6,724 protesters, including 236 children, were killed during these protests, with an additional 11,744 cases still under verification. Multiple reports have put the death toll at over 30,000.
During the regime’s violent crackdown, the group also recorded 25,877 people sustaining serious injuries, with 53,777 arrests occurring on just Jan. 8 and 9 alone.
On women’s rights, HRANA reports that 105 women were murdered, including seven so-called “honor killings” — murders committed under the pretext of preserving family honor — and documents 68 cases of rape or sexual abuse.
Recent media reports indicate that Iranian security forces raped and tortured medical staff who treated wounded anti-regime protesters during the country’s nationwide uprising in January, targeting them in a campaign of intimidation against those aiding demonstrators.
As in past years, executions remain one of the starkest manifestations of human rights abuses in Iran, with at least 2,488 people executed last year, including 63 women and two children, 13 of them carried out publicly.
According to a report by Harm Reduction International (HRI), a global organization tracking drug policy and human rights, 955 people were executed for drug-related offenses in 2025 — an average of roughly three per day — with over 1,000 more currently on death row.
Nearly one in four of those executed were from ethnic minority groups, more than one in five were foreign nationals, and the majority were poor, accused of minor drug offenses, and denied proper legal protections, the report notes.
As the regime continues its campaign of executions, the report says at least 222 children have been left without parents.
United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran Mai Sato denounced the regime’s brutal treatment of individuals accused of drug crimes, highlighting the disproportionate impact on vulnerable families.
“Many of the drugs-related cases in Iran involve young fathers from minority ethnic backgrounds experiencing economic hardship who face not only execution but also confiscation of their limited assets – including family homes and farmland – devastating their families long after their execution,” Sato said in a statement.
According to HRI’s latest report, at least 65 executions were carried out in secret without prior notice, denying families the chance to say goodbye, and some occurred despite ongoing legal proceedings.
Iranian security forces also systematically used coercion and torture, while denying prisoners access to legal counsel, to force illegitimate confessions.
HRI also reports that under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, the principle of elm‑e‑qazi — which allows judges to determine guilt based solely on circumstantial evidence without confessions or witnesses — is frequently applied arbitrarily.
With an increasing number of reports exposing the scale of systematic abuses across the country, human rights groups are warning that the death toll may climb sharply, with over 100 detainees at risk of execution.
Last week, three young Iranian men, including 19-year-old wrestling champion Saleh Mohammadi, were executed as the regime intensifies its crackdown on dissent, The Associated Press reported.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, head of Oslo-based Iran Human Rights, told the AP the executions are “intended to instill fear in society and deter new protests” amid deepening unrest.
On Monday, Iran’s judiciary confirmed that cases tied to the January protests have reached final verdicts and warned that those convicted would face no leniency.
Uncategorized
‘Verbal sparring’ at a conference for religious Jews breaking from Israel orthodoxy? That’s not what I experienced
To the editors:
The Forward‘s article about the recent Smol Emuni conference seems to describe a different event than the one that I attended. There were certainly different viewpoints among the people assembled at the gathering for religious Jews who, per the organization’s mission, seek “justice, equality, and dignity for Jews and Palestinians.” And there were views and perspectives shared that felt challenging or even difficult to hear.
But to assert, as the Forward‘s article did, that the conference was riven by strife and anger is simply not true.
The basis of the article’s claim, and the focus of a flurry of subsequent op-eds and blog posts, was Rabbi Saul Berman’s address to open the afternoon session. Berman used his remarks to criticize the Palestinian activist who had spoken in the morning; in doing so, he invoked a broad, monochromatic description of Islamic theology that felt out of place to some of us, including me.
Berman argued that Islamic Law prohibits any territorial concession, suggesting that Islamic law, but not Jewish law, continues to make peace impossible. The implication that Jewish theology has not blocked work toward peace is quite problematic, given the central role of religious leaders and communities in building settlements and in right-wing politics in Israel.
It is precisely this line of argument that many came to this conference to escape. In too many Jewish communities, it feels impossible to acknowledge the ways in which Judaism has contributed to Palestinian suffering and injustice. Smol Emuni was created in part to end that silence. That is why Berman’s words felt jarring.
But reading the Forward‘s article, one might think that Berman spoke with anger or that the audience actively derided him.
In fact, Berman spoke for close to 20 minutes. As far as I could see, everyone listened to him attentively. Most of the audience applauded when he concluded; I heard no boos. While a few people came and went during his remarks, as is the case at any such event, I saw no evidence that anyone “walked out in protest.”
One of the organizers did feel the need to note, after Berman concluded, that the conference organizers specifically did not share all of his views. She did so gracefully, while thanking him warmly for speaking and affirming her deep respect for him. I do not know how Berman felt, but he was not visibly angered and he stayed for the remainder of the program.
It was an awkward moment, to be sure, but not one of rancor or disrespect. It certainly did not define the conference, which elevated a range of important voices and viewpoints that I found both thoughtful and thought-provoking.
The post ‘Verbal sparring’ at a conference for religious Jews breaking from Israel orthodoxy? That’s not what I experienced appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran Launches Missile Featuring Poster Thanking Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez
An Iranian missile carries a poster of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, featuring a message in Farsi and English thanking him for condemning the war and praising Tehran. Photo: Screenshot
Iran has launched a missile toward “US-Israeli assets” bearing a poster thanking Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for what it portrayed as his support for the regime and condemnation of the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign in the Middle East.
According to Iranian state-owned and semi-official media, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Sunday released footage of a missile carrying a poster of the Spanish leader, thanking him for his message of solidarity as part of one of the regime’s latest propaganda moves.
“We praise the Spanish minister who calls this war illegal. We say: not only is this war illegal, it is also inhuman. Thank you, Prime Minister,” the poster reads, featuring a portrait of Sánchez in both Farsi and English.
Iran released footage of the 75th wave of missile attacks against US-Israeli assets.
Follow: https://t.co/B3zXG73Jym pic.twitter.com/Z1aY7cRT5M
— Press TV
(@PressTV) March 22, 2026
Ahead of a European Union summit in Brussels last week, Sánchez once again denounced the ongoing war against Iran, saying Madrid “has condemned the war from the very first moment” and describing the US-Israeli operations against the regime as “illegal.”
As diplomatic ties between Madrid and both Washington and Jerusalem fray over Spain’s refusal to back the US–Israeli offensive and its increasingly outspoken posture on the conflict, Israel’s Foreign Ministry blasted the move as a troubling alignment with Tehran’s narrative.
“Pedro Sánchez – Iran’s mullah regime is thanking you by putting your words on the missiles it fires at civilians in Israel and the Arab world,” the statement read.
“How does it feel knowing your face & words are on these missiles?” it continued. “Keep in mind that Europe – including Spain – is within range of these missiles.”
Pedro Sánchez – Iran’s mullah regime is thanking you by putting your words on the missiles it fires at civilians in Israel and the Arab world.
How does it feel knowing your face & words are on these missiles?
Keep in mind that Europe – including Spain – is within range of… pic.twitter.com/emDyJPokkh
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) March 23, 2026
In one of its most recent moves, the Spanish government blocked the United States from using its bases for military operations against the Islamist regime, prompting US President Donald Trump to threaten Madrid with the suspension of trade ties.
Iran earlier this month praised Spain for its decision.
Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Spain has become one of Israel’s fiercest critics, a stance that has only intensified in recent months, coinciding with a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents targeting the local Jewish community — from violent assaults and vandalism to protests and legal actions.
From unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state to repeatedly branding the war in Gaza a “genocide,” Sánchez has spearheaded an aggressive diplomatic campaign aimed at undermining and isolating the Jewish state on the international stage.
Most recently, Spain permanently withdrew its ambassador from Israel, further straining relations and garnering the praise of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Last year, the Spanish government announced a ban on imports from hundreds of Israeli communities in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
In September, Spain passed a law to take “urgent measures to stop the genocide in Gaza,” banning trade in defense material and dual-use products from Israel, as well as imports and advertising of products originating from Israeli settlements.
Spanish officials also announced that they would bar entry to individuals involved in what they called a “genocide against Palestinians” and block Israel-bound ships and aircraft carrying weapons from Spanish ports and airspace.
As the local Jewish community continues to face an increasingly hostile climate and targeted violence, Sánchez has drawn mounting criticism from political opponents and Jewish leaders who accuse his rhetoric of fueling antisemitic hostility across the country.