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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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Israel Rejects Lebanon’s Claim of Hezbollah Disarmament as ‘Insufficient’
Lebanese army members stand on a military vehicle during a Lebanese army media tour, to review the army’s operations in the southern Litani sector, in Alma Al-Shaab, near the border with Israel, southern Lebanon, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Aziz Taher
The Lebanese government announced it has completed the first phase of a US-backed ceasefire plan aimed at disarming the terrorist group Hezbollah and asserting a state monopoly on weapons in the country’s south — a claim rejected by Israeli officials as insufficient.
On Thursday, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) said it had “achieved the objectives of the first phase” of the US-backed deal, which focused on “expanding the army’s operational presence, securing vital areas, and extending operational control” south of the Litani River.
As part of a 2024 ceasefire brokered with Israel, the Lebanese government committed to disarm the Iran-backed terrorist group. Hezbollah has long wielded significant political and military influence across Lebanon while maintaining extensive terrorist infrastructure in the southern part of the country, which borders the Jewish state’s northern region.
Last year, Lebanese officials agreed to the disarmament plan, which called for Hezbollah to be fully disarmed within four months in exchange for Israel halting airstrikes and withdrawing troops from five occupied positions in the country’s southern region.
Israel has continued to hold those five strategic positions south of the Litani River to prevent the terrorist group from rebuilding its military capabilities and rearming near its northern communities.
On Friday, Israeli officials sharply rejected the Lebanese Army’s claim that Hezbollah had been disarmed, warning that the government and military’s efforts, while a cautious first step, fall far short of curbing the Islamist group’s entrenched military power.
“Efforts made toward [disarming Hezbollah] … are an encouraging beginning, but they are far from sufficient, as evidenced by Hezbollah’s efforts to rearm and rebuild its terror infrastructure with Iranian support,” the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement on Thursday.
According to Israeli intelligence assessments, the terrorist group still possesses hundreds of long-range missiles and thousands of short-range rockets, representing between 10 percent and 20 percent of its pre-war arsenal.
Hezbollah also reportedly maintains more than 1,000 drones and continues expanding its arsenal. While its recruitment falls short of pre-war numbers, the group still reportedly retains over 40,000 terrorists.
“The facts remain that extensive Hezbollah military infrastructure still exists south of the Litani River. The goal of disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon remains far from being achieved,,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a post on X.
“Hezbollah is rearming faster than it is being disarmed,” the statement read.
Despite the statements published today in Lebanon, the facts remain that extensive Hezbollah military infrastructure still exists south of the Litani River. The goal of disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon remains far from being achieved.
This can be seen in the attached… pic.twitter.com/NPTIEbUapQ— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) January 8, 2026
Recent reports indicate that the terrorist group has been actively rebuilding its military capabilities, in violation of the ceasefire agreement with Israel.
With support from Iran, Hezbollah has been intensifying efforts to bolster its military power, including the production and repair of weapons, smuggling of arms and cash through seaports and Syrian routes, recruitment and training, and the use of civilian infrastructure as a base and cover for its operations.
In recent weeks, Israel has conducted strikes targeting Hezbollah’s rearmament efforts, particularly south of the Litani River, where the group’s operatives have historically been most active against the Jewish state.
For years, Israel has demanded that Hezbollah be barred from carrying out activities south of the Litani, located roughly 15 miles from the Israeli border.
Despite pressure from US and Israeli officials to disarm, the group has repeatedly rejected efforts to relinquish its weapons, even threatening protests and civil unrest if the government tries to assert control over its arsenal.
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Jewish New York State Assembly Candidate Vows Change in Campaign Announcement
Will Sussman, candidate for New York State Assembly 4th District. Photo: Provided by Sussman4NY
Will Sussman, a Jewish civil rights activist and Yeshiva University professor, launched his campaign to become the next assemblyman for New York State’s 4th District in Long Island on Tuesday, promising to address “affordability,” government transparency, and waste caused by the alleged mismanagement of public programs.
In a press release, Sussman’s campaign contrasted his promises with the actions of the 4th District’s current representative in Albany, Rebecca Kassay, whom it described as a “pretend moderate” who once supported far-left Democrats’ initiative to “ban” gas-powered appliances such as stoves, furnaces, and water heaters. New York has already proscribed linking newly constructed buildings to natural gas lines despite its abundance and what energy experts have described as its deflationary effect on energy prices.
Combined with what Sussman called “more regulations” and imprudent “policies,” the radical wing of the Democratic party is making New York uninhabitable, Sussman argued, driving its tax base to other states even as the government promises more services that won’t pay for themselves.
“People aren’t leaving New York because they want to,” Sussman said on Monday. “They’re leaving because Albany has made it impossible to stay.”
He added, “We need an assemblyman who will say ‘no’ to [Gov.] Kathy Hochul and [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani — no to higher taxes, no to bail reform, and no to antisemitism. And we need someone who will shine a light on fraud, waste, and abuse in state government.”
Sussman is making his pitch to the 4th District, located in Long Island’s Suffolk County and including Stony Brook University, backed by a variety of experience which includes teaching, writing columns, and testifying before the US Congress about rising antisemitism on American college campuses.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Sussman was a plaintiff in an explosive lawsuit in June by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
According to court documents shared with The Algemeiner, Sussman and his co-plaintiff Lior Alon alleged that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) became inhospitable to Jewish students after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as pro-Hamas activists there issued calls to “globalize the intifada,” interrupted lessons with “speeches, chants, and screams,” and discharged their bodily fluids on campus properties administered by Jews. Jewish institutions at MIT came under further attack when a pro-Hamas group circulated a “terror-map” on campus which highlighted buildings associated with Jews and Israelis and declared, “Resistance is justified when people are colonized.”
All the while, MIT’s administration allegedly refused to correct the hostile environment.
“This is a textbook example of neglect and indifference. Not only were several antisemitic incidents conducted at the hands of a professor, but MIT’s administration refused to take action on every single occasion,” Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement announcing the suit. “The very people who are tasked with protecting students are not only failing them, but are the ones attacking them. In order to eradicate hate from campuses, we must hold faculty and the university administration responsible for their participation in — and in this case, their proliferation of — antisemitism and abuse.”
Sussman, who was forced to leave MIT in 2024 and walk away from work he had started in 2017, was himself personally harassed by a professor who “posted a message targeting Sussman by name on his X platform of over 10,000 followers, and another message.”
Policymakers in New York State have sent mixed messages regarding their views on rising antisemitism. While Hochul, a Democrat, recently approved a new Holocaust memorial, a candidate she endorsed, Mamdani, reversed the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism on his first day of office last week and revoked an executive order that opposed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
Leading US Jewish groups, including the two main community organizations in New York, rebuked Mamdani for his first steps as mayor.
“Our community will be looking for clear and sustained leadership that demonstrates a serious commitment to confronting antisemitism and ensures that the powers of the mayor’s office are used to promote safety and unity, not to advance divisive efforts such as BDS,” the groups said in a statement. “Singling out Israel for sanctions is not the way to make Jewish New Yorkers feel included and safe, and will undermine any words to that effect. Bringing New Yorkers together and building broad coalitions will be foundational to the mayor’s ability to advance a more inclusive New York.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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What does Marjorie Taylor Greene’s break with Trump mean for Jews? Nothing good
Since her widely-publicized break with President Donald Trump, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been on a public redemption tour, including with an extended profile in The New York Times — the kind of media source that the far-right firebrand might have shunned for being biased against the right just a few short months ago.
Amid this reputation management tour, a familiar media reflex has kicked in: Pundits have rushed to frame the split between Greene and Trump as a sign of ideological moderation on Greene’s part. Perhaps Greene was “softening,” “repositioning,” or inching toward a more liberal posture. The editor of the center-left anti-Trump publication The Bulwark even declared that Greene’s break with Trump “gives me hope.”
In this telling, any deviation from Trump is assumed to be a move toward the center, or at least away from the hard right. But this framing badly misunderstands both Greene and the political tradition she increasingly represents, with potentially serious consequences for Jews.
Greene is not, in fact, becoming more centrist or less right-wing. Instead, her departure is the most dramatic symptom to date of deepening fractures on the far-right — largely over issues related to Israel, antisemitism and the meaning of nationalism itself.
To understand this, we need to stop thinking of the American right as a single ideological line running from “moderate” to “extreme.”
A political aberration on the right
The contemporary right is a coalition of sometimes incompatible traditions. Trump fused them temporarily, building a coalition of business-friendly Wall Street Republicans; conservative evangelical Christians; conspiracy-minded populists; and a younger, online, nationalist right. But now, after a year of Trump’s final term, the MAGA movement is under greater strain than ever before.
Perhaps the central factor in that strain is Israel.
Trump has loudly embraced Israel, cultivated high-profile Jewish allies, and positioned opposition to a certain kind of left-wing antisemitism associated with pro-Palestinian college student protestors as an essential part of his brand. During his first administration, he moved the United States embassy to Jerusalem, normalized relations between Israel and certain Gulf Arab states, and made support for Israel a litmus test for Republican loyalty.
But the striking philosemitism that characterized Trump’s first term has always coexisted uneasily with his fondness for dog whistles about “globalists” and conspiracy theories about George Soros, and with his early cultivation of a far-right fan base. Still, for a nationalist movement defined by border walls, civilizational rhetoric, and suspicion of cosmopolitan elites, the fact that Jews were rarely at the center of Trump’s list of enemies was rather unusual — in part because the kind of nationalist, closed-border politics Trump embodies has almost always placed Jews at the symbolic center of its animus.
In late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe, nationalist antisemitism was not simply a matter of old Christian religious prejudice, or of personal hatred. Rather, it was a cohesive worldview in which Jews were imagined as the antithesis of the nation-state: rootless, transnational, disloyal and corrosive to organic national unity.
In this ideological framework, Jews symbolized border-crossing itself. They were cast as the people who moved too freely, who belonged everywhere and nowhere, who undermined the stable boundaries that nationalism sought to impose.
This is why antisemitism became so tightly enmeshed in nationalist politics. Jews were not hated merely as Jews, but as embodiments of everything against which nationalism defined itself: cosmopolitanism, international finance, liberal universalism, and the erosion of traditional hierarchies. The figure of the Jew in nationalist antisemitic thought was a cipher for the destabilizing forces associated with modernity itself.
From this perspective, Trumpism’s early philosemitism was not the norm. It was the exception.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, and a different kind of nationalism
Greene has always been different from Trump when it comes to Israel — and to Jews.
Since her election to Congress in 2020, she’s engaged in critiques of U.S. support for Israel and flirtations with antisemitic conspiracy theories. In doing so, she has signaled alignment with a more traditional nationalist logic — one that views Jews, whether in Israel or in the diaspora, as challenges to a purified vision of the nation-state.
She’s not alone. For younger activists on the American right, especially those shaped by online subcultures and post-Iraq War cynicism about an assertive U.S. role in global affairs, Israel has increasingly become seen as a problem, rather than a partner.
In the past three years, the percentage of young Republicans who have a negative image of the state of Israel increased from 35% to 50%, a shockingly rapid change in such a short time. As one young staffer at the Heritage Foundation explained, “Gen Z has an increased unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy.” During a recent focus group, one young, extremely online conservative said that Jews are “a force for evil.” These younger far-right voters frame Israel not as a civilizational ally but as a foreign state entangling America in unwanted wars.
And in so doing, they treat American Jewish influence as suspect, recycling old tropes about dual loyalty, financial manipulation and media control.
In November, at a Turning Point USA event, a young conservative activist asked Vice President JD Vance why the U.S. was expending resources on “ethnic cleansing in Gaza” and declared that Judaism “as a religion, openly supports the prosecution of ours.”
Vance did not challenge him. Vance likewise dismissed leaked chats from young Republican leaders praising Adolf Hitler and joking about gas chambers, commenting: “They tell edgy, offensive jokes, like, that’s what kids do”— even though some of these “young Republicans” were in their thirties.
To interpret Greene’s break with Trump as a move toward moderation is to assume that Trump defines the far-right baseline. In reality, Trump has actually moderated certain aspects of far-right politics, even as he radicalized others. His movement was nationalist, but selectively so. It was anti-globalist, but not uniformly antisemitic. It was populist, but protective of certain elites.
Greene represents a faction that wants to resolve these internal contradictions within the MAGA movement. In her worldview, nationalism should be consistent. All foreign aid, including to Israel, is suspect. All international alliances are burdensome. And groups perceived as transnational — whether immigrants, NGOs, or Jews — are inherently destabilizing.
A perilous future
Greene and Trump didn’t fall out over Israel. Instead, the final breaking point appears to have been related to Greene’s demand that Trump’s Justice Department release all of the files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But their rupture over the Epstein files exposed the deeper gap between how Trump understands right-wing nationalism, and how Greene does.
Greene framed Epstein as proof of a corrupt, transnational, globalist elite that must be confronted openly, even if doing so means attacking powerful figures within her own movement. Trump, by contrast, prioritized loyalty, message control and coalition management, treating the issue as a political risk rather than a moral crusade.
In that sense, their fight reflected a clash between grievance-driven, anti-elite populism, and a leader-centered nationalism organized around personal loyalty and strategic discipline.
The reasons behind their rift thus helps to explain why Israel has become a flashpoint.
Support for Israel, and for Jews who advocate for it, increasingly feels incoherent to many on the far-right who share Greene’s populist vision. If nationalism is about defending one’s own people, why privilege another nation’s security over domestic concerns? And if elites are corrupting the nation — so the antisemitic thinking goes — why exempt those associated, whether fairly or not, with global networks?
It is telling that younger right-wing activists increasingly view Trump’s Israel policy as a betrayal rather than a triumph. For them, Trump’s philosemitism looks like an accommodation to donors, evangelicals or geopolitical inertia.
Instead, they hold postures like Greene’s: suspicious of foreign entanglements, hostile to perceived cosmopolitan influence, and willing to revive taboos that Trump temporarily suppressed.
None of this means Greene is destined to lead the Republican Party. But it does suggest she may be closer to the future of Trumpism than Trump himself.
That trajectory should concern anyone committed to pluralism and democratic stability. But it should also sharpen our analytical clarity. Calling Greene more moderate because she breaks with Trump obscures what is actually happening.
The conflict is not between right and center. It is between two versions of the right. One is at least marginally pragmatic, transactional and selectively inclusive. The other is ideological, purist and draws deeply from historical antisemitic tropes.
This is what those Jews who cast their lot in with the Trump administration in the name of policing campus protests failed to understand. It was never going to be possible, in the long term, to build a right-wing nationalist movement that was fine with Jews.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is not an aberration. She is a correction. And if the past is any guide, it is her version of nationalism, not Trump’s historically exceptional philosemitism, that more closely resembles where far-right movements end up.
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