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Diaspora alarm over Israel: Your guide to what the critics are saying
(JTA) — I started reporting on North American Jews and Israel in the last century, and for years covered the debate over whether Jews in the Diaspora had a right to criticize the Israeli government in public. The debate sort of petered out in the early-1990s, when Israel itself began talking about a Palestinian state, and when right-wing groups then decided criticizing Israel was a mitzvah.
Nevertheless, while left-wing groups like J Street and T’ruah have long been comfortable criticizing the Israeli government or defending Palestinian rights, many in the centrist “mainstream” — pulpit clergy, leaders of federations and Hillels, average Jews nervous about spoiling a family get-together — have preferred to keep their concerns to themselves. Partly this is tactical: Few rabbis want to alienate any of their members over so divisive a topic, and in the face of an aggressive left, organizational leaders did not want to give fuel to Israel’s ideological enemies. (The glaring exception has been about Israeli policy toward non-Orthodox Judaism, which is seen as very much the Disapora’s business.)
In recent weeks, there has been an emerging literature of what I have come to think of as “reluctant dissent.” What these essays and sermons have in common, despite the different political persuasions of the authors, is a deep concern over Israel’s “democratic character.” They cite judicial reforms that would weaken checks and balances at the top, expansion of Jewish settlements that would make it impossible to separate from the Palestinians, and the Orthodox parties that want to strengthen their hold on religious affairs. As Abe Foxman, who as former director of the Anti-Defamation League rarely criticized Israel, told an interviewer, “If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”
I read through the various ways Jewish leaders and writers here and in Israel are not just justifying Diaspora Jews who are protesting what is happening in Israel, but providing public permission for others to do the same. Here is what a few of them are saying (with a word from a defender of the government):
‘I didn’t sleep much last night’
Yehuda Kurtzer: Facebook, Feb. 8
Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, the New York-based branch of the Israeli think tank that promotes a diverse, engaged relationship with Israel. In a recent blog post, he neatly describes the dilemma of Diaspora Zionists who aren’t sure what to do with their deep concerns about the direction of the Israel government, especially the concentration of power in a far-right legislative branch.
Centrist American Jews who care about Israel are caught between “those to our right who would see any expression of even uncertainty about Israel’s democratic character as disloyalty, [and] those on the other side who think that a conversation about Israeli democracy is already past its prime,” he writes. He is also concerned about the “widespread disengagement that we can expect among American Jews, what I fear will become the absent majority — those who decide that however the current crisis is resolved, all of this is just ‘not for them.’”
Kurtzer likens Israel to a palace, and Diaspora Jews as “passersby” who live beyond its walls. Nonetheless, he feels responsible for what happens there. “The palace is burning and the best we can do is to tell you,” he writes. “It is also how we will show you we love you, and how much we cherish the palace.”
An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America
Matti Friedman, Yossi Klein Halevi and Daniel Gordis: Times of Israel, Feb. 7
Three high-profile writers who moved to Israel from North America and who often defend Israel against its critics in the United States — Gordis, for one, has written a book arguing that American Jewish liberalism is incompatible with Israel’s “ethnic democracy” — now urge Diaspora Jews to speak out against the current Israeli government. They don’t mention the territories or religious pluralism. Instead, their trigger is the proposed effort to reform the Supreme Court, which they say will “eviscerate the independence of our judiciary and remake the country’s democratic identity.” Such a move will “threaten Israeli-American relations, and it will do grave damage to our relations with you, our sisters and brothers in the Diaspora,” concluding, “We need your voice to help us preserve Israel as a state both Jewish and democratic.”
All Israel Is Responsible for Each Other
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Sermon, Jan. 27
Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of New York City’s Reform Central Synagogue, isn’t looking to Israeli writers for permission to weigh in on Israel’s political scene. In a sermon that takes its name from a rabbinic statement of Jewish interdependence, she asserts without question that Jews everywhere have a stake in the future of Israel and have a right to speak up for “civil society and democracy and religious pluralism and human rights” there. She focuses on the religious parties who are convinced that “Reform Jews are ruining Israel,” as you might expect, but ends the sermon with a call to recognize the rights of all Israeli citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish, “and also those living under Israel’s military control.” Of those Palestinians, she says, “We can’t feel comfortable sitting in the light of sovereignty next to a community living in darkness and expect to have peace.”
And like Kurtzer, she worries that concerned American Jews will simply turn away from Israel in despair or embarrassment, and urges congregants to support the Israeli and American organizations that share their pluralistic vision for Israel.
On That Distant Day
Hillel Halkin: Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2023
In his 1977 book “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic,” the translator and author Hillel Halkin made a distinction similar to Kurtzer’s image of Israel as a palace and the Diaspora as passersby: Jews who don’t emigrate to Israel are dooming themselves to irrelevance, while immigrants like him are living on the stage where the Jewish future would play out. His mournful essay doesn’t address the Diaspora, per se, although it creates a permission structure for Zionists abroad to criticize the government. Halkin sees the new government as a coalition of two types of religious zealots: the haredi Orthodox who want to consolidate their control of religious life (and funding) in Israel, and a “knit-skullcap electorate [that] is hypernationalist and Jewish supremacist in its attitude toward Arabs.” (A knit skullcap is a symbol for what an American might call the “Modern Orthodox.”) Together, these growing and powerful constituents represent “the end of an Israeli consensus about what is and is not permissible in a democracy — and once the rules are no longer agreed on, political chaos is not far away. Israel has never been in such a place before.”
Halkin does talk about Israeli expansion in the West Bank, saying he long favored Jewish settlement in the territories, while believing that the “only feasible solution” would be a two-state solution with Arabs living in the Jewish state and Jews living in the Arab one. Instead, Israel has reached a point where there is “too much recrimination, too much distrust, too much hatred, too much blind conviction, too much disdain for the notion of a shared humanity, for such a solution to be possible… We’re over the cliff and falling, and no one knows how far down the ground is.”
Method to Our Madness: A Response to Hillel Halkin
Ze’ev Maghen: Jewish Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2023
Ze’ev Maghen, chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University, is hardly a dissenter; instead, his response to Halkin helpfully represents the views of those who voted for the current government. Maghen says the new coalition represents a more honest expression of Zionism than those who support a “liberal, democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, individualist, environmentally conscious, economically prosperous, globally connected, etc., etc., society.” The new government he writes, will defend Israel’s “Jewish nationalist raison d’être, and keep at bay those universalist, Western-based notions that are geared by definition to undermine nationalism in all its forms.” As for the Palestinian issue, he writes, “I’d rather have a fierce, hawkish Zionist in the cockpit than a progressive, Westernized wimp for whom this land, and the people who have returned to it after two millennia of incomparable suffering, don’t mean all that much.”
The Tears of Zion
Rabbi Sharon Brous: Sermon, Feb. 4, 2023
Brous, rabbi of the liberal Ikar community in Los Angeles, doesn’t just defend the right of Diaspora Jews to speak out in defense of Israeli democracy and Palestinian rights, but castigates Jewish leaders and communities who have been reluctant to criticize Israel in the past. “No, this government is not an electoral accident, and it is not an anomaly,” she says. “This moment of extremism has been a long time in the making and our silence has made us complicit.”
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Gunfight Outside Israeli Consulate in Istanbul Leaves One Attacker Dead
A drone view shows police officers and medics standing at the scene, after a gunfire was heard near the building housing the Israeli consulate, according to a witness, in Istanbul, Turkey, April 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mehmet Emin Caliskan
One attacker was killed and two others were wounded in an extended gun battle with police outside the tower building housing the Israeli consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday.
Footage showed the backpack-wearing attackers firing with automatic rifles and handguns, and police officers returning fire and seeking cover, as they maneuvered among parked white police buses near a checkpoint. One body lay on the street.
Shots rang out for at least 10 minutes among the glass towers in Turkey’s main financial district, Reuters witnesses said. One person was seen covered in blood.
No Israeli staff were at the consulate, which occupies a floor in one of the towers, at the time of the attack, Turkish and Israeli authorities said.
Israeli diplomats had left Turkey shortly after the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza began in late 2023, a conflict that prompted large pro-Palestinian protests outside the consulate and across the country, and a deep chill in Turkish-Israeli diplomatic ties.
US ENVOY SAYS CONSULATE WAS TARGET
The three attackers had links to an organization that “exploits religion,” Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci said, without giving any name. Two of them were brothers, and they had traveled in a rented car from the city of Izmit, he added.
While Turkish authorities did not say what motivated the attackers, Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey, said on X that it was an attack on the Israeli consulate and he condemned it.
President Tayyip Erdogan said the “heinous terrorist attack” would not dent Turkey’s trust and security. Israel’s foreign ministry said it appreciated Turkish security forces’ “swift action in thwarting this attack.”
Two police officers were also lightly wounded, Istanbul Governor Davut Gul told reporters at the scene of the midday incident, which occurred next to a major motorway as thousands of nearby workers were breaking for lunch.
DIPLOMATIC CHILL AMID GAZA WAR
Turkey, a fierce critic of Israel’s military operations in Gaza as well as in Lebanon and Iran, had recalled its ambassador from Israel in November 2023, and diplomatic relations have been effectively frozen since then.
At the same time that year, Israeli diplomats left Turkey due to security concerns, including the protests. Since then, heavily armed police and armored vehicles have been stationed in a broad area surrounding the consulate.
Militant violence has mostly subsided in Turkey in recent years after a violent spate from 2015 to 2016 when Islamic, Kurdish, and leftist militants carried out attacks amid the spillover from the Syrian civil war.
The latest incident was late last year when three Turkish police officers and six Islamic State terrorists were killed in a gunfight in the town of Yalova in northwest Turkey, amid raids on militant cells believed to be planning Christmas and New Year attacks.
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Ivy League Schools Are Cutting Jewish Admissions, While Faculty Attack Israel and Jews
Graduating students rise in support of 13 students not able to graduate because of their participation in anti-Israel protests during the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
In an escalation of its fight with Harvard, the Trump administration announced a lawsuit accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students, and threatening to cut off Federal grant money. The lawsuit alleges the university was deliberately indifferent to campus antisemitism, failed to discipline “campus agitators,” refused to enforce its own rules regarding demonstrations, and says the institution was in violation of Title VI.
The US Department of Education also announced two new investigations into Harvard focusing on racial discrimination and antisemitism. The lawsuit came as many universities have quietly adopted a strategy of waiting out the Trump administration.
The other notable development in March regarding campus antisemitism was the release of the report by the House Education and Workforce Committee. Among the more shocking revelations detail how Qatar Foundation officials dictated terms to Northwestern University regarding the institution’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
Particularly disturbing details described Qatari efforts to prevent the university from censuring faculty member Khaled Al-Hroub, who had denied that Hamas members had committed rape. The report also emphasizes that faculty affiliated with Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine “played a significant role in legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism on college campuses.
Elsewhere, legal systems continue to protect pro-Hamas protestors who vandalize university property. In one recent example, a New York State judge ruled that Columbia University cannot discipline students who occupied and vandalized buildings in May 2024 on the grounds that there was no evidence the students “acted to endanger Hamilton Hall or University property within Hamilton.” The judge, an adjunct Columbia Law School faculty member, deemed expulsions and other sanctions “arbitrary and capricious.”
In another case, pro-Hamas protestors who occupied and vandalized a building at the University of Washington in 2024 were charged with misdemeanor trespassing by county prosecutors, who claimed there was insufficient evidence for felony charges. These protestors caused more than $1 million damage to the building. Most have returned to campus.
In Michigan, a Federal court ruled that a lawsuit by Palestinian students who accused the University of Michigan of targeting their “activism” could advance. The suit alleges that disciplinary procedures and its suspension of the leading pro-Hamas student group constituted viewpoint discrimination.
More positively, the University of California Regents voted to settle a suit which alleges the institution failed to respond to antisemitic harassment and discrimination. The suit focused on pro-Hamas protests in 2024 where Jewish students were assaulted and harassed. The agreement stipulates antisemitism training for staff, faculty and students, an annual survey of Jewish life on campus, and the creation of a Title VI office.
Pro-Palestinian students complained the settlement is “a tool to silence the lived experiences of Palestinians and to criminalize student organizing against the ongoing dispossession and oppression of Palestinians in their homeland.” Immediately after and in contravention of the settlement, law school dean Edwin Chemerinsky announced to students that there would be no changes to the speakers policy.
The demographic composition of universities has been recognized as one of the bases for intensified hostility towards Jews and Israelis. The international component of student bodies, reaching in excess of 50% at some institutions, has imported students relentlessly hostile towards Israel and Jews. Complementing this, however, have been efforts to deliberately reduce Jewish populations.
New research has now shown how Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Columbia have systematically reduced the percentages of Jewish students in the past decades. Harvard reduced its Jewish population from approximately 25% in 2004 to the current low of 7%. Analysis of Columbia suggests the number was reduced from approximately 19% in 2004 to 9% today. Dramatic reductions in the number of white students admitted are also apparent.
Most Ivy League and elite institutions showed similar drops, with Cornell holding steady and Brown increasing the number of Jewish students. Muslim enrollment particularly at Columbia increased in the same period from approximately 4% to 7%. In response, Harvard denied reports that it had increased recruitment at Jewish day schools.
The rapid replacement of Jewish and white students at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia appears part of deliberate efforts to expand institutional “diversity,” globalize the student body and thus the subsequent donor base, and to “deAmericanize” the faculty and curriculum.
The replacement correlates with a massive upswing in anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic activity at these institutions. Downstream effects on American and global society may also be inferred as institutional cachets bolstered hateful stances from graduates.
Faculty Lead the Antisemitism Effort on Campus
Faculty continue to stand at the vanguard of anti-Israel and antisemitism on campus, a reality highlighted by details in the House Education and Workforce Committee report. In the wake of the Iran conflict Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups have also become outspoken in support of the Iranian regime and have decried the US.
The University of California Ethnic Studies Council and Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism stated, “We reject imperialist and fear mongering narratives that position Iran as the intruder in the region, rather than US military bases and US interventionism.”
Union Theological Seminary announced the creation of a “Religion and Public Life” program led by two former Harvard Theological Seminary faculty who had left that institution after the program had been scrutinized for its goal to “dezionize Jewish consciousness.” The appointment of Harvard faculty member Rosie Bsheer as Columbia’s “Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature” also installs a reliably anti-Israel if mediocre figure in a high profile position. Reports regarding Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies also depict a Jewish founded academic unit that has been thoroughly colonized by “anti-Zionist” faculty.
Elsewhere the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health also held another “human rights” event in which participants accused Israel of “genocide.” The head of that center, Kari Nadeau, has now been named dean of public health at UCLA.
In an unusual case that suggests the methods used by Qatar supporters to police academia, Kings College London academic Andreas Krieg was forced to apologize and compensate two individuals in separate defamation cases. Krieg had falsely alleged one of the academics was a UAE agent operating in Sweden which generated official investigations. Krieg was formerly a contractor for the Qatari Ministry of Defense and has a long history of promoting explicitly Qatari viewpoints.
Students Embrace Iran
The most notable development in the student sphere in March were expressions of support for the Islamic Republic of Iran in response to the American-Israel campaign. This included mourning Ayatollah Khamenei by the Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society at Kings College London, which called his death “an unimaginable loss.”
At the University of Washington, a pro-Hamas student group endorsed a message from the PFLP affiliated Tariq el-Tahrir Youth and Student Network praising “the raining of blessed missiles over US military bases” and calls for “DEATH TO AMERICA, DEATH TO ISRAEL, GLORY TO THE MARTYRS, LONG LIVE THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN, LONG LIVE THE AXIS OF RESISTANCE!”
The infamous pro-Hamas umbrella group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) also posted the message “Marg bar Amrika” or “death to America.” This forced the university to state the group was not “affiliated in any way with the University,” and that, “There is no evidence that anyone currently in control of their account is a current Columbia student, staff, or faculty member. They are illegally using the Columbia name.” Columbia was also forced to suspend the Young Democratic Socialists of America group for its continuing affiliation with CUAD.
Antisemitism in British education continues to intensify. The depth of hostility towards Jews on British campuses is depicted in a new report from the Union of Jewish Students, which details among other things that 20% of students would be reluctant or unwilling to have a Jewish housemate. Some 47% of students indicated they had been exposed to slogans or protests celebrating the Hamas massacres of October 7. The massacres were widely hailed by pro-Hamas student groups who celebrated the killing of Israeli civilians and soldiers. Jewish students are also routinely subjected to harassment and even violence on and off campuses
K-12 Teachers Support Iran and Oppose Israel
Teachers unions remain the focal point for anti-Israel and anti-American activism (and in the case of Philadelphia for training “revolutionary abolitionists”). They have now also taken the lead as supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In response to the attack on Iran the Chicago Teachers Union co-sponsored a “hands off Iran and Lebanon” rally along with Palestinian, communist and other groups.
The union also adopted a resolution calling for a May Day civic action that would shut down schools. The protest calls for “No Work, No School, and No Shopping” to “defend our Democracy, demand ICE out of our cities, and tax the rich to support our schools and vital services.”
Anti-Israel activity by teachers unions and state officials in Canada continues to follow the path of Britain toward antisemitism and boycotts of Israel. In one development the British Columbia Teachers Federation passed a motion endorsing the BDS movement. In another, Montreal school officials announced they would be investigating reports of Israeli soldiers speaking in Jewish schools as violations of public funding laws.
In a third case a Holocaust survivor’s talk at a Canadian private school’s symposium was canceled. The school pointed to safety and the “current volatile geopolitical climate and … the high-profile nature of the dignitaries scheduled to attend,” and said it was “reviewing the format of its annual Holocaust commemoration ceremony.” The move came as “anti-Palestinian racism” continues to be elevated as the single most important and untouchable form of discrimination and pedagogical pivot in Canadian schools.
Dr. Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian specializing in the Middle East and contemporary international affairs. A completely different version of this article was originally published by SPME.
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Ambulances Burned in London: How Many More Warnings Do We Need?
Charred remains of ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish community organization, which were set on fire in an incident that the police say is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, in northwest London, Britain, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
The world woke up last week to the news of yet another antisemitic attack in the UK, this time in the form of an arson attack, where three masked individuals set alight four Hatzola ambulances outside a synagogue in Golders Green, London.
The police were surprisingly quick to label this as an antisemitic attack. Tweets started flooding in from political leaders such as the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, declaring “This is a deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack,” and “Antisemitism has no place in our society.”
We need to ask ourselves a simple question: Is condemnation really enough to stop this?
On September 27, 2025 — a late Saturday night — I sat down at a pub in Manchester. Not even 60 seconds passed before my kippah caught a middle-aged woman’s attention. She leaned right over me, demanding answers: “Do you believe in genocide?” “Do you believe in free Palestine?”
Trying to de-escalate and enjoy my pint in peace, I respond, “Let’s keep politics away from the pub.”
She repeated herself in a more aggressive tone, and then picked up my pint, threw it in my face, and ran out straight into a taxi.
With just 12 hours until my flight, the police agreed to meet me the next morning to take a statement. I gave them a very clear message: If you don’t deal with the minor antisemitic attacks, there will be something way bigger, and it will be too late.
Five days later, just 0.5 miles from that pub, the Yom Kippur attack occurred — when an Islamist terrorist committed a heinous act of violence, leaving two Jews murdered in cold blood.
Following the shocking terror attack, I hoped the police would finally enforce a zero-tolerance policy on minor antisemitic attacks, especially the antisemitic assault that happened to me at the pub five days prior, as they had promised during the interview.
I stayed hopeful for four months, until the case was closed with no action taken. What does that tell us?
The Jewish community in the UK has reached a stage where they often don’t bother calling the police after antisemitic assaults or attacks, because receiving a crime reference number and a “we won’t tolerate antisemitism in our society” condemnation isn’t enough.
When British political leaders and police turn a blind eye to hundreds of antisemitic assaults in the UK, while thousands march and scream “globalize the intifada,” and Israelis are banned from attending a soccer game on British soil, does that reduce antisemitism — or risk encouraging it?
If the UK is serious about making Jews feel safe, they must end these marches calling to “globalize the intifada,” and crack down on every single minor antisemitic attack.
What starts small doesn’t stay small.
A group calling themselves the “Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand” has claimed responsibility for the arson attack on the Hatzola ambulances, and several other arson attacks targeting synagogues in Europe over the past month. This terrorist organization has ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), yet the UK still fails to formally proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization. We must ask ourselves: What signal does that send to those willing to attack Jews?
The warning signs are there. They’ve been there.
At what point are they actually going to be taken seriously?
Chaim Frankenhuis is a UK-born commentator based in Israel, focusing on the rise of antisemitism, distorted media narratives, and developments surrounding Jewish heritage.