Protests outside prominent synagogues in New York City and Los Angeles have roiled the Jewish community in recent weeks, prompting scrutiny of how authorities respond when demonstrators at a house of worship frame their actions as Israel-related political speech.

Rabbi Nadav Caine of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan has some experience with that: Every Shabbat for the past 22 years, protesters have shown up to Beth Israel holding signs with slogans like “Jewish Power Corrupts” and “No More Holocaust Movies.”

After years of legal battles that consistently sided with the protesters, Caine has been forced to accept that the courts view their actions as protected speech. More than two decades on, he has come to terms with the protesters’ enduring presence.

“There are long time members who come as little as possible, or who left the congregation, but for the most part, people have learned to ignore it,” Caine said.

‘Unseemly and distasteful’

The man behind the protests, Henry Herskovitz, was raised Jewish, had a bar mitzvah, and even attended Beth Israel for years. But he later adopted conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11, became a Holocaust denier, and openly expressed hatred for Jews.

Starting in 2003, Herskovitz and a small group began protesting at the synagogue weekly during Shabbat, brandishing signs like “Antisemitism is earned, never given.”

In 2019, fed up with passing the demonstrators, a congregant and local Holocaust survivor sued the protesters and the city, arguing that their First Amendment rights to safely practice their religion were being violated. The American Civil Liberties Union represented the protesters, acknowledging the speech was “unseemly and distasteful,” but legally protected nonetheless.

Ultimately, the courts sided with the ACLU: A lower court dismissed the case, the Supreme Court declined to hear it on appeal, and a district judge ordered the congregants to pay nearly $159,000 in legal fees to the protesters — prompting the congregants’ lawyer, Marc Susselman, to accuse the judge of antisemitism.

Now, while the number of protesters has dwindled — it’s typically two people nowadays, Caine said — they still show up, week after week.

Caine said the sustained protests have affected membership, particularly as newcomers weigh which synagogue to attend. Some longtime members avoid in-person events, and others have left entirely. The display can also shock unsuspecting visitors attending bar or bat mitzvahs.

“Before you get used to it, it’s a little traumatizing and triggering,” he said.

‘A community issue’

Caine said he isn’t surprised by recent protests outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan and Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. At Park East, demonstrators were protesting a synagogue event promoting immigration to Israel, chanting “death to the IDF” and “globalize the intifada.” At Wilshire Boulevard Temple, protesters took issue with the synagogue hosting speakers from the Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems.

Protesting at a synagogue is “not meant to raise consciousness about a human rights issue,” Caine said. “It’s about harassing a group.”

His advice for synagogues facing persistent protests: don’t engage. Beth Israel does not organize counterprotests, and Caine avoids posting about the protests on social media.

“These kinds of activists, they thrive on publicity. It’s their oxygen,” he said.

Still, Caine said he understands the desire to respond. One idea he finds promising: In New York City, two Jewish lawmakers introduced a bill that would ban protests within 25 feet of houses of worship. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has reportedly been receptive to the legislation.

Caine also cautioned against turning the protests outside synagogues  into a political debate.

“I wouldn’t make it about the Israel issue,” he said. “I would make it about the fact that it’s a community issue.”

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Some years ago, I traveled to South Africa with a group of Israelis to study the anti-apartheid movement. On our first morning, our guide posed a question: Why did apartheid end?

We offered the standard answers: because internal resistance grew stronger, because international pressure mounted, because the regime lost legitimacy. The guide listened and then said: Apartheid didn’t end for any of those reasons. It ended when the Berlin Wall came down.

His point was not that South Africans were passive. It was that political change does not happen on timetables set by internal movements alone. Power shifts systemically and globally, and when it does, the outcome depends on whether societies are prepared to move when the moment comes. Movements cannot control when history accelerates, but they can determine whether they have built the moral clarity, political vision and organizational capacity to act when it does.

A few years later, I traveled with the same group to Serbia and met former student leaders of Otpor, the movement that helped unseat the dictator Slobodan Milošević. They described how they began as a marginal, improvisational group, driven more by urgency than structure.

What eventually changed their trajectory, they told us, was recognizing that mobilization only works if people can see not just what they are resisting, but what they are building toward. They developed a concrete vision of a democratic Serbia that people could recognize as an alternative—not just to the regime, but to permanent instability. When the political opening arrived, there was something ready to replace what had collapsed.

Political change begins with imagination — but that imagination must be taken seriously.

This past weekend in Israel, something shifted quietly, and if you blinked, you may have missed it.

At a meeting for its 10th anniversary Standing Together — the largest Jewish–Arab grassroots movement in Israel — formally adopted a framework for ending the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that proposes two states not as sealed national projects but as overlapping political realities.

That vision, put forward by the group A Land for All, would see Israelis and Palestinians both have freedom of movement and equal rights in the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, and shared sovereignty in Jerusalem. It establishes mutual recognition of autonomy between the two peoples as a premise for peace, rather than as a final-status issue to address, as it was in previous peace efforts like the Oslo Accords.

This was not an organizational merger or a policy announcement. It was the articulation of a political horizon.

For most of its history, Standing Together has focused on equality within Israel itself: advocating for labor rights and a reasonable cost of living, combatting racism, and promoting shared civic life. Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, it has been one of the only Israeli movements willing to organize sustained opposition to the war in Gaza, engage in civil disobedience, and try to deliver humanitarian aid in the face of increasing hostility.

Through this vote, the movement sought to expand its domain of responsibility — from Israel’s internal democracy, to the scope of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole.

It’s just one group; just one vote. But it’s also a reframing of what the future is allowed to look like, and a landmark moment of Israelis and Palestinians engaging in a joint political process. Its importance lies less in its technical details than in its structural ambition: replacing separation as the organizing principle, and establishing equality as the baseline.

In a context where imagination itself has been steadily eroded, this matters.

Israeli life has been governed for years by a doctrine of management — managing conflict, managing unrest, managing despair. The public has been trained to treat war as permanent; inequality as unavoidable; and a punishing power hierarchy as necessary for survival. This is not an accident. It is a governing logic that eliminates alternatives by framing them as incoherent, naïve or dangerous.

The most lasting damage done by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Israel may turn out not be the ways in which he’s degraded the country’s electoral system and democratic institutions. It may be psychological.

On his watch, Israel’s political culture has been systematically emptied of credible futures. What remains is a society fluent in fear, and increasingly unable to articulate what it is trying to become.

Comprehensive political visions change the conditions of organizing. When people can describe a wished-for future in concrete, realizable terms, political engagement stops being purely reactive and starts becoming constructive. It reshapes alliances, alters the language of debate, and changes the kinds of risks individuals and movements are willing to take.

South Africa understood this. Serbia understood it. Even New York City saw a version of this dynamic recently, when Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani went from polling at around 1% in the early days of the primary to winning the general election on a platform of affordability and thriving that did not dilute its goals in exchange for political safety.

Israel’s ruling order will not last forever. Regimes built on a premise of permanent emergency aren’t sustainable. What matters is whether there will be anything ready to replace it when it cracks.

Standing Together did not change reality with its vote in favor of a different kind of future — but it clarified what that future could practically look like, and in a country trained to believe that no future exists. And that, on its own, is a political marvel.

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(JTA) — The leader of a Lithuanian party in the ruling coalition government was convicted on Thursday for inciting hatred towards Jews and grossly minimizing the Holocaust in a series of public statements and social media posts in 2023.

Remigijus Žemaitaitis, the head of the populist Nemuno Aušra party, was fined 5,000 euros, or $5,835, by the Vilnius Regional Court.

In her decision, Judge Nida Vigelienė said that Žemaitaitis had “publicly mocked, demeaned and encouraged hatred” toward Jews as well as “grossly minimised the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany on Lithuania’s territory in an offensive and insulting manner,” according to the Lithuanian public service broadcaster LRT.

Žemaitaitis’ conviction was related to statements he had issued in May and June of 2023, including social media posts, a speech delivered in Parliament and an exchange with a journalist, in which he falsely accused Jews of killing Lithuanians.

“How long will our politicians continue to kneel to the Jews who killed our countrymen, contributed to the persecution, torture and destruction of Lithuanians,” wrote Žemaitaitis in all-caps, according to the country’s constitutional court. “There was a Holocaust of the Jews, but an even greater Holocaust of Lithuanians was in Lithuania!”

In other posts, Žemaitaitis also baselessly blamed Jews for the 1944 Nazi massacres in the Lithuanian villages of Pirčiupiai and Kaniukai.

The ruling Thursday was not the first time that a Lithuanian lawmaker has come under fire for Holocaust distortion. In 2021, Valdas Rakutis, a member of Lithuania’s parliament, was criticized by the U.S. ambassador to Lithuania for claiming in a speech that there was “no shortage of Holocaust perpetrators among the Jews themselves.”

In another post about the demolition of a school building in the West Bank, Žemaitaitis quoted an antisemitic nursery rhyme that encourages children to kill a wounded Jew.

“I want to give you a chance, dear Jews of Israel, to apologize to Palestine and the EU for your disgusting actions in a foreign country,” he wrote. “And I will repeat, ‘After such events, it is no wonder why such sayings are born: A Jew climbed a ladder and fell by accident. Take a stick, children, and kill that Jew.’”

The lawmaker, who frequently posts about the war in Gaza on social media, resigned from Lithuania’s parliament in April 2024 after the country’s constitutional court found his rhetoric had violated his oath and its constitution.

But he was reelected in October 2024 and his party joined the country’s new coalition government led by the Social Democrats.

Žemaitaitis and his lawyer were not present during the ruling Thursday in Vilnius and are expected to seek an appeal. He told reporters after the ruling that “everybody understands that this is a politicized decision,” according to the Associated Press.

“Any form of antisemitism, hate speech, or Holocaust belittling is unacceptable to us and incompatible with our values,” wrote the Social Democrats party in a post on Facebook following the ruling. “We respect the decision of the court. Together we point out that this decision is not yet final.”

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