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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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Feds investigating antisemitism allegations at American Psychological Association
(JTA) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is opening an antisemitism investigation into the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization for mental health professionals, the agency announced Wednesday.
The investigation stems from several complaints by Jewish and Israeli psychologists alleging that the association has promoted or failed to discipline anti-Israel activism among some of its affinity groups. The complaints also allege that the APA has encouraged “decolonizing therapy” methods that attack Zionism.
These allegations are part of a sweeping complaint filed in August by the legal group Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which has frequently filed similar antisemitism complaints against educational institutions that it says are in violation of federal anti-discrimination rules. This is the center’s first complaint against a healthcare organization to result in a federal investigation.
“We want to see the APA brought into compliance with federal civil rights laws,” Rebecca Harris, litigation staff attorney at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We want the APA to stop promoting discriminatory and harmful psychology practices.”
In its August letter to HHS, the Brandeis Center accuses the APA of being “one of the worst purveyors of anti-Semitism and extremist ideology in healthcare.” It adds, “HHS should not fund groups that use taxpayer dollars to engage in anti-Semitic and discriminatory behavior.”
A representative for the APA did not immediately return a request for comment. In response to recent Congressional inquiries, from both Republicans and Democrats, into similar allegations of antisemitism at the organization, the APA has stated, “Some of our Jewish members and community organizations have voiced concerns about antisemitism within the broader psychology field and within APA’s divisions. We have taken and continue to take those concerns seriously.”
Jewish mental health professionals have been raising concerns about antisemitism and growing anti-Israel sentiment within the profession since Oct. 7, 2023, including in a letter signed by more than 3,500 mental health professionals last year. That letter, referenced in the Brandeis Center complaint, criticizes the APA for failing to discipline a former division president, Lara Sheehi, for various incendiary comments about Zionism.
In another prominent incident, the psychiatrist and bestselling author Bessel van der Kolk faced discipline and apologized for comments that Jewish attendees at a seminar of his deemed antisemitic. In June 2025, Democratic New York Rep. Ritchie Torres urged the APA to address antisemitism in its ranks, prompting the organization to commit to new listening sessions and “strengthening discourse standards.”
Under the Trump administration, HHS has also mounted several antisemitism investigations at medical schools, pulling millions of dollars in federal funding for medical research over the issue.
The APA’s alleged encouragement of “decolonizing therapy,” Harris said, is harmful to Jews and Israelis. “It’s essentially a pathologizing of Zionism and Jewish identity,” she said. (A past president of the organization has advocated for decolonial psychology, and the organization has offered webinars and other training modules based around decolonizing trauma healing.)
The center also alleges that the APA has put up roadblocks to allowing an official Jewish affinity group to form, while excusing inflammatory language about Zionism from an Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African affinity group.
The news of the APA’s federal antisemitism investigation came as the Trump administration announced it would be moving the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which handles antisemitism complaints, to the Department of Justice.
The move, being done as part of a larger effort to dismantle the education department, drew praise from Brandeis Center chair Kenneth Marcus, himself a former OCR official under the first Trump administration. It also drew criticism from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and other Jewish groups that said the move to the justice department would make it harder for students alleging discrimination to file complaints.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Britain, a Jewish Culture Month aims to move the conversation beyond Oct. 7
(JTA) — In the almost three years since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, Great Britain has seen “a relentless focus on everything to do with the Jewish community in the public domain, and it’s about antisemitism or Israel,” said Adam Ma’anit, the communications manager for the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Over the past four weeks, a flurry of performances, lectures and art exhibits has been an opportunity to move past that.
The Board of Deputies, which represents a community of diverse and often competing views under its umbrella, created Jewish Culture Month, a first-of-its-kind series held under the banner of “Less Oy, More Joy.” The month was designed to bolster Jewish communal confidence and to introduce wider audiences to aspects of Jewish life that rarely make headlines.
The month, which wrapped up Tuesday, sought to make clear that British Jewish identity is, and always has been, about far more than conflict. “We’re not defined as a community by pain,” Ma’anit told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’ve got great architects, writers, and musicians as well.”
Those artists were featured in more than 150 events over four weeks across the country at major museums and galleries , including London’s British Museum, Oxford’s Bodlein Library, Bath’s Little Theatre Cinema, Nottinghamshire’s National Holocaust Museum and local synagogues and private homes nationwide.
Among them was The Klezmer Village Band, which introduced Jewish culture to primary schools in Plymouth. “We wanted to bring Jewish culture back into the community,” Plymouth Jewish Community Director Louise Clements said. “This is the first time in many years that something like this has happened here.”
One of the band’s musicians, Ilana Cravitz, also noted after the event that “music is a wordless language. People respond from inside — they stop thinking, they feel. And we really saw that today.”
Notables featured throughout the celebrations included British broadcaster and television personality Vanessa Feltz, who spoke at the opening at London’s Freud Museum; comedian Bennett Arron, who performed stand-up routines in Hampstead, London; and acclaimed British artist and vocal Israel critic Anish Kapoor, whose exhibit opening on Tuesday closed out the month.
“Part of Jewish Culture Month is about us celebrating our own culture and being proud, British Jews, and asserting ourselves in an environment where it has been the most challenging to be that very British Jew,” said Ma’anit.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust noted another aspect of the festival soon after it kicked off on May 16. “At a time when division and prejudice continue to affect communities across the country, initiatives like Jewish Culture Month can help build understanding and strengthen social cohesion,” it posted social media.
However, some thought it difficult to focus on social cohesion when discussing contemporary British Jewish identity without discussing how that identity dovetails with British Jews’ relationship with Israel.
It’s something that Jewish Renaissance, the online magazine of Jewish culture, raised ahead of the opening. Freelance writer and former Jewish Quarterly editor Matthew Reisz wrote that while there was definitely diversity in the program, “We seem unlikely to hear much about the deep divisions within the community, not least in relation to Israel/Palestine, or the crucial, though often tense dialogue with other minority communities on both shared and contentious issues.”
Ma’anit insisted that the choice was a deliberate one. “It’s not a rejection of Zionism or distancing ourselves from Israel,” he said. “Quite the opposite. The board’s leadership remains openly supportive of Israel and many of the figures involved in the project have deep personal and family ties to the country.”
Israeli-born Ma’anit is one of those figures. He is the cousin of the Idan family of Nachal Oz, a kibbutz close by the border with Gaza. Eighteen-year-old Maayan Idan was shot and killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 while trying to help her father, Tsachi, hold their safe room door closed. The entire event was livestreamed by the terrorists. Tsachi was abducted into Gaza, where it was believed he was still alive as the war on Gaza raged. It was discovered only later that he had been murdered, with his body finally returned in the hostage deal in February 2025.
Ma’anit, who spent those years lobbying for the hostages’ return, appearing on news programs and organizing hostage vigils in his hometown of Brighton, has been forced to meld the personal with the professional when it comes to the post-Oct. 7 era.
It’s why, he said, Jewish Culture Month is about creating space for aspects of Jewish identity that have been overshadowed post Oct. 7. “The argument is not that Israel is unimportant,” he said, “it’s that Jewish life cannot be reduced to Israel alone.”
Yet even without a focus on Israel and Zionism, the month did not pass without the conflict in the Middle East affecting the program. In May, a culture month lecture titled “Ancient Israel and Judah” at the British Museum had to be postponed, the museum said, because of “security concerns” over potential “disruptions” by protesters who had obtained tickets. The rescheduled event, held June 11, was the best-attended of the entire series, with around 4,000 people joining in person and online.
Ma’anit called the incident “overblown. It was just procedural,” he said. “People fill in the blanks and then it gets out of control.”
However, the speed with which the controversy escalated and elicited angry reactions from many in the community only served to highlight how questions about Jewish visibility and any event with “Israel” in the name — even a reference to thousands of years ago — have become highly charged in the last three years.
“It just shows how on edge the community is,” Ma’anit said.
That has intensified the need for something like Jewish Culture Month in the eyes of many British Jews. Steph Thwaites, head of a group dedicated to helping Jewish publishing professionals navigate an increasingly hostile publishing industry, said after a Jewish Culture Month event on the topic that the professionals felt “a sense of community and a source of comfort,” as well as a space to “combat anti-Jewish racism in publishing and to support Jewish creatives.”
Ultimately, as UK Communities Secretary Steve Reed put it in his speech at the launch of the festivities, Jewish Culture Month “is a time to celebrate Britain’s Jewish community and its contribution to our shared story. It’s a time for coming together. It’s a time for friendship. Jewish experience cannot just be about defending against fear; it also has to be an expression of hope and joy and freedom.”
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This Jewish activist was arrested and deported for her book ‘Lesbian Love.’ 100 years later, will NYC apologize?
In 1926, New York City police arrested Eve Adams, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who ran a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, for the crime of being gay.
The formal charges were more euphemistic. Officially, Adams was charged with disorderly conduct — that is, flirting with an undercover police officer who had entrapped her, and obscenity, for writing and possessing the book Lesbian Love.
The following year, the U.S. government deported Adams to Poland, in what was effectively a death sentence: 16 years later, Adams would be murdered at Auschwitz.
Now, a century after Adam’s arrest, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal — the first openly gay person to hold the elected position — is urging New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to formally recognize the city’s role in Adams’ persecution.
He sent a letter to Mamdani requesting that the city issue a formal declaration acknowledging Adams’ conviction in 1926 “was unjust and rooted in discriminatory law enforcement and affirming that New York City failed her as a pioneer of LGBTQ+ life, as an immigrant, and as a Jewish woman who was ultimately deported to her death.”
“Adams’s story is among the most unjust in our city’s history,” the letter reads. “One hundred years after her arrest, we have the obligation and the opportunity to say plainly that she deserved better.”
In a statement to the Forward, the Mayor’s office said they are reviewing the request.
“The Mamdani Administration is deeply committed to uplifting the stories of New Yorkers that have gone unheard throughout history,” deputy press secretary Sam Raskin said.
A pioneer
Born with the name Chawa Zloczower in Poland in 1891, Adams immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island at age 20.
In America, she adopted the name Eve Adams — a playful nod to her androgyny, invoking the biblical Adam and Eve — and wore men’s clothing.
“She was a vibrant activist, who was daring. She had an androgynous appearance, which immediately identified her as a lesbian,” said Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. “Wearing pants for women was just unthinkable in the time period.”
Adams soon immersed herself in New York’s anarchist circles, befriending prominent Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. She worked as a traveling saleswoman for leftist publications including Mother Earth, activities that landed her on the Bureau of Investigation’s watch list during the First Red Scare.
In 1923, Adams published Lesbian Love, a collection of essays about the romantic lives of dozens of women in Greenwich Village. Katz described the book as far ahead of its time.
“The word “lesbian” was not used much. It was like a dirty word at the time, so you didn’t say it out loud,” Katz said. “Here she was, putting it on a book jacket.”
Two years later, Adams opened Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village. The underground tearoom became a rare refuge where lesbian women could socialize openly.
But the haven proved short-lived. In 1926, an undercover detective named Margaret Leonard visited Eve’s Hangout, where she met Adams. The following day, the two attended a play in Times Square together. Adams gave Leonard a copy of Lesbian Love — evidence of “obscenity” that prosecutors later used against her — and Leonard alleged Adams made sexual advances toward her during the taxi ride to the theater.
Adams was convicted and spent 18 months in jail before the United States deported her to Poland.
She settled in Paris, where she began a relationship with Jewish cabaret singer Hella Olstein Soldner. In 1943, the two women were arrested and sent to the Drancy internment camp. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz, where both were murdered.
Adams’ legacy
Over the years, Adams has come to be recognized as a Jewish LGBTQ icon. Her life inspired the play The Great Lesbian Love of Eve Adams, and she was the subject of a New York Times obituary published as part of the newspaper’s “Overlooked” series, which chronicles the lives of notable people throughout history whose deaths went unreported.
Hoylman-Sigal said he was inspired to commemorate Adams by the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, a nonprofit that documents local queer history, which asked him to send the letter to Mamdani. The Sites Project also offers historic walking tours of the city featuring Adams’ story.
“Their jaws drop when we tell them these stories, standing in front of the building where her tea room was,” said Ken Lustbader, co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.
On Wednesday, the centennial of Adams arrest, the Sites Project is hosting a performance and vigil in Adams’ honor at the former site of Eve’s Hangout — today, home to La Lanterna, an Italian cafe and pizzeria.
The site of Eve’s Hangout has also been recognized by the National Park Service as part of a roundup of Greenwich Village landmarks significant to LGBTQ history.
New York City, however, has never formally acknowledged the injustice of Adams’ arrest, conviction and deportation.
A posthumous apology would be unusual, though not without precedent: In 2019, the NYPD formally apologized for its 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn, describing the department’s actions as “discriminatory and oppressive.”
“I would love to see the mayor do it, but we could have one from the police department — an apology for sort of framing her,” Katz said. “They sent in a plainclothes policewoman to entrap her, and so that was really beyond a democratic process.”
The NYPD did not respond to the Forward‘s request for comment.
Whether or not the city issues an official acknowledgement, Hoylman-Sigal said he hopes the campaign will help keep Adams’ story alive.
“It’s an extremely poignant story, sorrowful, outrageous, sad — and one that most people don’t know about,” he said. “So I thought bringing attention to it was a righteous cause.”
Jacob Kornbluh contributed reporting.
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