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Far-right Israeli minister finds enemy in JDC, the mainstream American Jewish aid group
(JTA) — An American Jewish group that has provided aid to Jewish communities in crisis for more than a century has become the target of one of Israel’s newly empowered far-right ministers.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who serves as national security minister, said on Wednesday that he was shutting down a program dedicated to reducing violence in Arab Israeli towns. His reason: The program is operated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which he called a “leftist organization.”
“JDC is a nonpolitical organization and has been so since our founding in 1914,” Michael Geller, a spokesperson for JDC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Ben-Gvir’s characterization baffled many across the Jewish communal world who know the JDC as a nonpartisan group with an extensive track record of providing humanitarian aid to Jews in distress.
To them, Ben-Gvir’s criticism of the group is the latest sign that the rupture of political norms in Israel extends beyond the judicial reforms advanced by the government, which have drawn unprecedented protests.
“To call the JDC a left-wing organization is a joke. It is not political in any way,” said Amnon Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, co-CEO of the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that works toward an “equal and shared society” for Jewish and Arab Israelis.
Be’eri-Sulitzeanu, who is Jewish, said he anticipated changes by the right-wing government, which was inaugurated in December. But he was surprised by Ben-Gvir’s announcement.
“I could expect revisiting collaboration with organizations that are branded as civil rights or human rights or Israeli-Palestinian organizations,” he added. “But the JDC — it’s very strange.”
Founded in 1914 by the American Jewish banker Jacob Schiff to aid Jews living in Palestine, the “Joint” has distributed billions of dollars in assistance across 70 countries — including, over the last year, to 43,000 Ukrainian Jews amid the war there. It played a central role in aiding Holocaust survivors following World War II, as well as in the resettlement of Jews from the former Soviet Union.
Among its biggest sources of support are Jewish federations, the nonpartisan umbrella charities found in nearly every major North American Jewish community.
“JDC is an apolitical organization that has worked with every government since the establishment of the State of Israel, providing critical services to the elderly, youth-at-risk, people with disabilities and other underserved populations across all sectors, including Haredim and Arab-Israelis,” the Jewish Federations of North America said in a statement. “JDC’s activities are a living and breathing example of the Jewish values of tikkun olam and tzedakah that guide Jewish Federations’ work every day,” Hebrew phrases that connote the Jewish imperative to repair the world, as well as charity.
JDC staff packing matzahs and haggadahs for online seders in Odessa, Ukraine, April 7, 2022. (JDC)
In Israel, the group funds and operates efforts to help needy populations — including immigrants, the elderly, people with disabilities and people living in poverty. Those efforts often involve working with the government, which in 2007 gave the JDC Israel’s most prestigious prize for its work. This year, according to a spokesman, the group is spending $129 million on Israel initiatives.
The JDC’s government-funded programs include the anti-violence effort that Ben-Gvir is targeting. It was made possible last year due to nearly $1 billion in funding to curb crime in Arab communities by the previous governing coalition, which was centrist. The allocation followed lobbying by Arab and civil society organizations, including the Abraham Initiatives, which is now monitoring how the money is being used as well as its impact.
Arab citizens of Israel make up 84% of crime victims despite comprising just 20% of the population, according to government data released last year that showed a sharp rise in the proportion of Arab Israelis who had experienced violent crime.
Many in Arab communities have called for heightened law enforcement and have charged Israeli police with making inadequate efforts to keep their communities safe. This week, commenting on the shooting death of an Arab Israeli woman, Arab Israeli opposition lawmaker Ahmad Tibi accused Ben-Gvir of being “occupied with other matters,” such as clashes with the attorney general and police officials in Tel Aviv. “Maybe the time has come for senior officials to demonstrate responsibility when it comes to crime organizations and weapons running rampant,” Tibi said.
Other initiatives have aimed to tackle the violence in ways that go beyond policing. The program that Ben-Gvir said he is shutting down is one of them. Called Stop the Bleeding, it involves multiple government ministries as well as local community groups and education efforts and has operated in seven cities with large Arab populations, including a Bedouin town and Lod, a city with significant Arab organized crime networks that also has a large Jewish population.
Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said the program was already starting to bear fruit and had contributed to a slowdown in a multi-year rise in murders. Canceling the program, he said, reflects the current government’s general approach to tackling Israel’s problems.
“It’s not about collaboration. It’s not about hearing the concerns and pain and hopes and needs of the Arab community,” he said. “It’s about doing everything unilaterally, and really without a lot of care for the lives of those people. I think that’s what we are watching.”
MK Ahmad Tibi attends a meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem, Dec. 6, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
A year ago, around the time when the previous government awarded the Stop the Bleeding contract to the JDC, Bezalel Smotrich, a key Ben-Gvir ally who was then an opposition lawmaker and now serves alongside Ben-Gvir as finance minister, proposed that Israel create a “command center” of “all of the relevant entities” that provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian Jewish refugees. Included on his list, alongside the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Red Cross: the JDC.
The JDC is not the first mainstream group to be targeted by far-right members of Israel’s new right-wing government, whose signature legislative effort aims to sap the power and independence of the country’s judiciary. That legislation has given rise to a sweeping protest movement and to grave warnings about Israel’s future from a broad range of public figures — including elder statesmen, foreign governments and religious leaders.
Avi Maoz, the leader of the anti-LGBTQ Noam Party who briefly held a leadership role in Israel’s Education Ministry, compiled a list of American and British groups that he believes are trying to impose their liberal values on Israeli schoolchildren. “We must protect our people and our state from the infiltration of the alien bodies that arrive from foreign countries, foreign bodies, foreign foundations,” Maoz once said. Maoz has since resigned from that role, saying that he did not think he was being sufficiently empowered to fulfill his goals by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
But Be’eri-Sulitzeanu said he remains concerned about civil-society programs, especially those falling under the purview of far-right ministers including Ben-Gvir or those funded by American Jews, whom some on the right perceive as universally liberal.
People who are paying attention to local governance in Israel expect further tensions around initiatives that do not match Ben-Gvir’s attitudes about harsh policing. Ben-Gvir wants officers to have the right to shoot Arabs who throw stones, has called for a crackdown on anti-government protesters and is increasingly clashing with police officials who believe his orders could jeopardize public safety. Multiple former police commissioners have called for his dismissal.
“Ben-Gvir has his own political agenda and he has his own ax to grind, and at the moment, I think he’s not keen on developing services of the Arab population, either in security or juvenile delinquency or education,” said Amos Avgar, who worked for the JDC in Israel, Russia and the United States for 30 years until 2010, including as chief programming officer.
Avgar emphasized that the JDC has always studiously avoided political activity. “If there’s one thing that the JDC is not, it is not political,” he said. “It always shied [away] from anything that had the smell of politics and never dealt with any project by political agenda.”
It’s unclear how quickly Ben-Gvir’s announcement, made during a government meeting and first reported by Israel’s public broadcaster, will ultimately translate into changes. Geller, the JDC spokesman, said the organization had learned about the criticism only from the media, not from Ben-Gvir’s office. Later, amid an outcry, Ben-Gvir’s office said the funding decision had followed a review of contracts that revealed missing documentation from the JDC, a charge that the JDC denied.
Amnon-Sulitzeanu said he didn’t have high hopes for the program’s future.
“I think the first [characterization] is unfortunately going to be the correct one — that he is actually intending to stop it, which is very unfortunate because it is among the more serious programs that are willing to deal with this catastrophe,” he said. “And it shows again that the current minister is not so much interested in saving lives of Arab citizens.”
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Two plays stage three years of infighting over Israel
The last three years of Jewish life can be read as a singular drama with no last act.
The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 proved to be just the first bloodletting in a renewed cycle of violence and recrimination. Israel responded with its destructive campaign in Gaza. Far from the theater of war, American Jews reckoned with renewed fears of antisemitism and fractures within their own communities and families.
Before that October had even ended, about two weeks into a discourse that’s still nowhere near to disappearing, Michel Hausmann, the artistic director of Miami New Drama, reached out to playwright Jonathan Spector to create a play reacting to the moment.
The writer’s response: a categorical no.
“I was like, ‘That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard. I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole, it’s too scary and hard and complicated,’” Spector, a Tony winner for his play Eureka Day, recalled, “but you know, he was very persistent.”
“I think I wore him down,” Hausmann, a Venezuelan-born Jew, told me.
The result of this exploration is Birthright, a domestic epic that touches on international news and centuries of Jewish thought. The play, now at MCC Theatre after a 2025 debut at Miami New Drama, follows six friends, most of whom met on a Birthright trip in 2006. It opens in the pre-smartphone age and ends in the social media-saturated aftermath of Oct. 7. Overall, it covers 18 years, an intentionally Jewish number.
“I feel like so many of the ways that these kinds of arguments play out is people leap very quickly from a thing that happened yesterday to a thing that happened 80 years ago to a thing that happened 2000 years ago,” Spector said. “It’s too narrow a lens if we’re only looking at this moment.”
Spector landed on the organizing idea of a Birthright trip after conducting interviews with a diverse group of American Jews, most of whom mentioned the free journey to Israel. (Spector, raised Conservative in the DC suburbs, like his characters, didn’t participate in Birthright; he hasn’t been to Israel since he was 15.)
Hausmann, whose theater only produces world premieres and designs its season to cater to the local Cuban, Venezuelan and Jewish communities, commissioned Spector because as early as Oct. 8, he imagined the response from the cultural field would be missing complexity or morphing into activism.
In truth, theaters have been slow to respond. Seasons have featured shows about antisemitism and Israel, but for the most part, they’d been in development before these issues were on everyone’s minds and social feeds.
Joshua Harmon’s A Prayer for the French Republic moved from its 2022 off-Broadway run to a Dec. 2023 Broadway opening largely unchanged. But amid the mounting headlines, the historical irony of the central family’s ultimate choice to relocate to Israel for safety was devastating in its new theater.
Itamar Moses’ The Ally, which premiered at the Public in Feb. 2024, looked prescient in its dissection of campus activism surrounding Israel. It concerned a Berkeley professor caught between his liberal values and his Israeli parentage. Moses’ show was scheduled for the season well before Oct. 7, but debuted just after. The playwright chose not to touch the Hamas attack, but conclude right on the cusp of it.
By the time Giant, about Roald Dahl’s antisemitism, transferred from the West End to Broadway earlier this year, many online seemed to have no problem with Dahl’s blithe Holocaust inversion, accusing the play of vilifying someone who was merely an advocate for the persecuted neighbors of the Jewish state.
Birthright and S. Asher Gelman’s The Zionists: A Family Storm, which opened at Miami New Drama in April and is now playing at Barrington Stages in the Berkshires, are the first major American plays directly addressing a post-Oct. 7 Jewish world.
Gathering the storm
Gelman told me his play emerged out of what he saw as betrayal from his progressive artistic community, which immediately sought to “contextualize” Hamas’ barbarity.
“I watched complex histories become flattened and simplified for ostensibly propaganda,” said Gelman, whose previous plays include the gay polyamory play Afterglow. He was floored by the views of some people in his circle who labeled him, as an American-born Israel citizen who lived in Tel Aviv from 2006 to 2016, a “white colonizer.”
He started taking notes, and about a year after Hamas’ invasion of Israel, began work on his play, about a wealthy and well-connected Jewish family on vacation in the Turks and Caicos. (Gelman’s parents are Jewish philanthropists, like the matriarch and patriarch in the play; one of his sisters, like the play’s youngest son, has funded pro-Palestinian groups.)
In setting up the drama, a kind of staged debate between the liberal Zionist family and the anti-Zionist wicked son and his husband, Gelman had to think of a way to keep the warring factions in the room to have the conversation.
His solution was a violent metaphor: a hurricane raging outside their deluxe bungalow.
“I think that the beauty of The Zionists is that you have to sit down through it, you have to hear a point of view, wherever you stand,” said Hausmann. Perhaps because of the play’s title, he said, members of Jewish Voice for Peace picketed the production in Miami. In one performance, an audience member shouted back as one character made his case for anti-Zionism.
“All extremes are upset at us, and so I think that we’re doing something right,” Hausmann said.
The yelling matches in the play tip into the tedious at times, and the grievance-laden backstory given to the anti-Zionist Aaron — he’s a recovering drug addict whose IDF donor brother outed him as gay when they were kids — seems to support a familiar claim made against Jewish critics of Israel: They are acting out against their upbringing rather than out of a real conviction.
While the show pays lip service to the Jewish value of questioning, it often seems disinterested in the anti-Zionist perspective, privileging the gradient spectrum of liberal Zionism in a queer, multiracial modern family with at least one convert and two descendants of refugees.
Gelman, 42, says he thinks anti-Zionist Jews of a younger generation (the Aaron character is 34) may arrive at their beliefs because they don’t remember a pre-Netanyahu Israel or Rabin and Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn.
They’ve only “known one type of Israel,” he said.
The art of argument
Spector wrestled with the arguments he wanted his characters to make. The show could have easily been a back and forth about the Peel Commission or suicide bombings during the Second Intifada, but the more ideas he included, the more the play flatlined.
“It’s, like a three hour 10 minute running time and only 15 minutes of it is arguments,” Spector said, “but I probably wrote and have cut two hours worth of arguments.”
He took care to make sure the points of view were rooted in character and their evolution: The most outspoken anti-Zionist character, Izzy (Molly Bernard), evolves from working for J Street to leaving the group chat when her friends send a link to The New York Times walking back its reporting on the 2023 Al-Ahli hospital explosion, which rushed prematurely to blame Israel for the strike. By that point, we can glean how everything from Izzy’s fertility to her disillusionment with her work has shaped her worldview.
Spector came to realize that the question he was examining wasn’t a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis or in winning a debate (he thinks social media has gamified conversation), but a change within American Judaism.
In the second half of the 20th Century, he said, Jewish institutions made an effort to pitch a big, tolerant tent to embrace all levels of observance. “As the main dividing line within American Jewish life has shifted from your religious practice to your beliefs about Israel, there’s been a similar kind of shift away from tolerance from people on both sides of that divide,” he said.
He’s less interested in passing judgment on this development than trying to make sense of it. It’s a view expressed by the character of Izzy in his play.
“I can go up on the bimah at my parents’ shul and I can say I am married to a woman, I can say I don’t keep kosher, I can say I don’t believe in God,” she said, noting how she’d not just be accepted but welcome. “The one thing that would get me kicked off the bimah, kicked out of the shul, kicked out of my family is if I say I am an anti-Zionist.”
Spector said so far a minority of audience members have been uncomfortable with his show. (The evening I saw it, there were young people with tattoos and men in kippot; by contrast, the crowd at The Zionists, typical of my theatergoing there, looked to be almost exclusively of retirement age.) His own views have naturally evolved with the play – he’s been working on it for years, and the facts on the ground have changed.
“It’s a little bit difficult for me to separate the work on the play and the evolution of my own feelings and beliefs,” he said. “If I could sum those up in a sound bite, I wouldn’t need to write a three-and-a-half hour play.”
Hope for healing?
Birthright was the first entry in Miami New Drama’s Jewish Play Commission. Hausmann said some donors wished the piece was more “feel-good,” but said he thinks it is, ultimately, healing.
Spector doesn’t use that word.
”Midway through writing it, I was definitely like, ‘Oh my God. How am I going to find an ending to this that is not just like unrelentingly bleak and depressing,’ because that was certainly how I felt in the moment about where things were.” We black out on a scene of people coming together in a shared grief.
The Zionists ends at a moment of uncertainty amid a wrathful, Act of God weather event. For Gelman, the ambiguity and anger are the point, and point to a way forward.
“Discomfort, disagreement, it’s a feature of a great relationship, not a bug,” Gelman said. “With the privilege and luxury of actual physical safety comes the responsibility to be brave and the responsibility to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is the price we pay for community.”
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Colorado congressional race upset hinged on Israel
A democratic socialist who put condemnation of Israel front and center in her campaign defeated a long-serving member of Congress in Colorado’s congressional primary Tuesday, adding to recent upsets that are rocking the Democratic party and Jewish politics.
Melat Kiros beat U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent first elected in 1996, just one week after two New York members of the Democratic Socialists of America movement defeated sitting congressmen targeted as supporters of military aid to Israel.
“Denver voters of all ages, of all races, of all religions sent a clear message: We will not wait!” Kiros declared in her victory speech, which took aim at U.S. aid for Israel. “We will not wait to reject corporate PACs like AIPAC. No, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine.”
She will face Republican Christy Peterson in the general election but is favored to win the heavily Democratic district.
Meanwhile, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, won the Democratic nomination to replace the term-limited Gov. Jared Polis, who also is Jewish. David Seligman, a progressive Jewish candidate for the open attorney general seat, lost in a four-way contest to Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who gained notoriety for removing Donald Trump from Colorado’s 2024 ballot.
Kiros, who was born in 1997, the year DeGette took office, used Israel as a wedge throughout the campaign — calling for an arms embargo against Israel, including a suspension of funding for defensive weapons including the Iron Dome.
She also vows to abolish the federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency and pass Medicare for all.
Hasan Piker, the progressive streamer who has been accused of trafficking in antisemitism, attended Kiros’ victory party in Denver Tuesday. She also picked up endorsements from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and a slew of leftist groups. Some Jewish Coloradans supported her, saying that her harsh criticism of Israel is necessary and warranted.
In her victory speech on Tuesday, Kiros reminded supporters that she did not flinch when her former law firm, Sidley Austin, threatened to fire her if she didn’t take down a post on Medium addressed to law firms nationally supporting anti-Israel student protesters on college campuses — and was ultimately terminated.
Kiros’ victory on Tuesday comes on the heels of the defeat of two Democratic incumbents in New York targeted specifically for their support of aid to Israel. A former Gaza war encampment leader on Columbia University’s campus, Darializa Avila Chevalier, beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, while former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander will replace Rep. Dan Goldman. Another candidate who campaigned on Israel, Claire Valdez, secured the nomination for another House seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez in New York’s 7th district.
Like Kiros, both Valdez and Avila Chevalier are DSA members. Lander, who is Jewish, left DSA after Oct. 7, 2023, when DSA promoted a pro-Palestinian Times Square rally that Avila Chevalier attended.
Like Avila Chevalier, Kiros has come under scrutiny for her repudiation of Israel and its supporters.
In the final stretch of her campaign, Kiros gained national attention for declining to declare antisemitic the 2025 firebombing of a group holding a vigil in Boulder, saying in an interview: “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed,” adding that she could not say what they believed, either: “most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
The attacker, Mohammed Soliman, was heard saying “Free Palestine” as he threw molotov cocktails and used an improvised flamethrower to burn 13 people, including an 82-year-old woman who later died of her wounds.
As a candidate, Kiros has said in interviews that weapons that defend Israeli citizens against attacks from Iran and Hezbollah “give Israel the cover” to continue policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing. (Genocide scholars have debated whether the war in Gaza rises to the level of genocide.)
And asked whether Israel “had it coming” on Oct. 7, Kiros told a local news channel “no, not at all — it’s about understanding the conditions in which violence and war happens.” She said Israel had resisted change despite decades of international frustration with its policies; her job as a member of Congress, she said, was to change those conditions.
In the gubernatorial contest, Weiser’s victory over U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet made him the likely next governor of the state. Colorado has not had a Republican governor since 2007.
Bennet’s mother, like Weiser’s, survived the Holocaust. She was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto as a child before her family immigrated to New York. But Bennet was raised Christian and does not identify as Jewish.
Estare Weiser was born in Buchenwald the day before the camp was liberated. Now 81, she was photographed celebrating with Weiser, 58, at his victory party Tuesday.
Weiser’s platform focuses on expanding the state’s universal preschool program, defending LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and countering Republican gerrymandering efforts in other states. He entered the race as an underdog, but successfully attacked Bennet for backing several Trump cabinet nominees.
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Survey: Jews in smaller communities feel less heard when raising concerns about antisemitism
(JTA) — Jews living in smaller communities are less likely than those in large communities to feel their concerns about antisemitism are taken seriously by law enforcement and would-be allies, a new survey from the Jewish Federations of North America has found.
Jews in smaller communities were “lacking a sense of allyship in the communities around them,” said Mimi Kravetz, the chief impact and growth officer for JFNA.
“Jews in small communities tell us that they feel deeply concerned that they’re looking for support, that their leadership is looking for network and resources, because it can feel like they’re on their own,” Kravetz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The JFNA survey, which was compiled from its March 2025 study of Jewish Life in North America, found that 22% of Jews live in small communities. Defined as Jewish communities with fewer than 5,000 Jews living within five miles of their zip code, small Jewish communities are also more likely to be found in the South or in rural or suburban areas.
Although the survey found no statistically significant difference in the antisemitism experienced by Jews in smaller and larger communities, it found that Jews in small communities are more likely to feel that antisemitism is invalidated or dismissed.
Among respondents, 58% of Jews in small communities reported feeling more likely to be invalidated, compared with 48% of Jews overall.
Jews in small communities were also less likely to express confidence in local law enforcement’s responses to antisemitism. Just 39% of Jews in small communities say local law enforcement takes antisemitism seriously, compared with 47% of Jews in larger communities.
Leaders of small Jewish communities also feel less physically safe in Jewish spaces than their big city counterparts: 60% of those small-community leaders said they feel safe, compared to 86% of community leaders overall.
While the survey found that 50% of Jews in smaller communities report being unengaged in Jewish life, compared to 36% of Jewish respondents overall, they were just as likely to say they wanted greater connection to Jewish life.
The survey suggested that geographic constraints and limited availability of Jewish life likely caused the disparity in engagement, even as Jews sought out Jewish connections in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
Kravetz said Jews in small communities were just as likely as Jews in big communities to crave those connections.
“What’s needed in small Jewish communities is more leadership infrastructure and support for Jewish life,” Kravetz said.
The survey was conducted before the January arson attack on Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, which drew renewed attention to the security challenges facing smaller Jewish communities.
Michele Schipper, the CEO of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a nonprofit that supports Jewish communities across the South and was housed inside Beth Israel Congregation prior to the arson attack, said security remains a challenge for some smaller congregations.
“For some of those smaller communities, they may not be able to have personnel on site every time they’re open,” Schipper said. “It may be an older building. Not everyone is able to get one of the secure community grants,” she said, referring to federal and state government grants to nonprofits seen as vulnerable to attack.
Earlier this month leaders from Jewish communities across the South convened at the ISJL’s annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Schipper said they discussed strategies for keeping smaller communities safe.
“One of the things we really did share is how important it is not to isolate ourselves in these communities, but to continually build relationships with the local community, with local law enforcement, so that when, God forbid, something happens, you’re not starting to reach out or wait for somebody to contact you,” Schipper said.
Looking ahead, Schipper said her message to Jews in small communities was to “continue to build relationships in your own local community, and just continue to participate in the Jewish community and stay strong and positive.”
The study, which was conducted online by JFNA from March 5-25, 2025, surveyed 5,798 total U.S. adults, of which 1,877 identified as Jewish. The margin of error for Jewish adults was ± 2.26%, and samples were weighted to be representative of the U.S. population and Jewish community.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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