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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
The post Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Beyond the Headlines: What Is Actually Happening in Gaza Right Now
A Red Cross vehicle, escorted by a van driven by a Hamas terrorist, moves in an area within the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli troops withdrew under the ceasefire, as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in Gaza City, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alk
After Israel recovered the remains of Ran Gvili, the last hostage in Gaza, the Gaza-Egypt border crossing at Rafah has been re-opened.
Gvili’s body was found by Israeli forces buried in a Palestinian cemetery. Though Hamas claims its assistance was critical to finding the body, it in fact did nothing whatsoever to assist. The body’s location was discovered by Israeli intelligence after it was determined that several members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad knew where it was, one of whom was captured in a special operation.
The cemetery was adjacent to the Yellow Line in Gaza, separating Israeli-controlled territory and Hamas-controlled territory. Operating there required the Israelis to cross the Yellow Line, and it took approximately one month to reach an agreement with Hamas to allow this to happen without fighting. Approximately 250 bodies were collected and checked before Israeli troops found the body of Gvili, an Israeli policeman. He was killed on October 7, 2023, while fighting to protect the Israeli community of Alumim near the Gaza border. He lived in a village in the central Negev, heard about the Hamas attack, and on his own initiative rushed to the nearby police station, armed himself, and drove to Alumim, where, despite being wounded shortly after his arrival, he fought the terrorists until he ran out of ammunition. He was captured and died of his wounds some days later in captivity.
Militarily speaking, skirmishes along the Yellow Line have continued daily.
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad personnel constantly attempt to infiltrate into the Israeli-controlled area to scout, salvage weapons, or attack Israeli positions and patrols. A few Israeli soldiers have been wounded in the last month, and one who was severely wounded during such an incident a few months ago died from his wounds.
A few dozen Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad personnel have been killed or wounded. Most incidents are brief exchanges of stand-off fire across the Yellow Line. In one case, six Hamas personnel dug a shaft from an undiscovered tunnel adjacent to an Israeli position and wounded two Israeli soldiers before being killed by Israeli return of fire. Given the soft soil composition in the area, digging new tunnels or new shafts from existing tunnels is a fairly quick process. In another case, a rocket was launched from Hamas-controlled territory, but it failed and fell inside Gaza. Israeli troops respond to stand-off fire in kind and shoot at infiltrators. After major incidents, Israel retaliates by striking specific Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad commanders in Hamas-controlled territory.
Israeli forces continue to scour the territory in Israeli hands, and almost every day find new caches of weapons hidden in buildings or other sites, as well as new tunnel entrance shafts and tunnels. The weapons are collected, and the buildings and tunnels demolished.
Meanwhile, the flow of trucks carrying supplies into Gaza continues at approximately 800 per day, though a quarter of that is sufficient to meet the needs of the population. A large portion of these supplies continues to flow to Hamas itself. A video report by an anti-Hamas Palestinian showed a store of baby food that has been held back by Hamas rather than supplying it to the population. He claims the film was made during the period when Israel was falsely accused of deliberately starving Gaza’s population.
A report published by the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria did not go so far as that, but did state that Hamas controlled both the import and the dissemination of humanitarian assistance and used that control to fund itself at the population’s expense.
The wealth of supplies entering Gaza is enabling Hamas to continue to solidify its control over the population, enlist new troops, and build up its arsenal of weapons. Currently, this arsenal consists primarily of light weapons and explosives salvaged from destroyed storage sites and unexploded aerial bombs dropped by the Israelis during the war.
The number of small explosive devices that can be created from a salvaged bomb depends on its size, ranging from a dozen to several dozen. There are probably a few hundred such unexploded aerial bombs scattered throughout the area controlled by Hamas. In addition, the Israelis have intercepted quadcopters carrying weapons from Egypt into Gaza. How many of these have already managed to get through is not known. In the past, Hamas has also smuggled in weapons by sea, exploiting the natural current directions to float waterproof barrels from Egyptian Sinai to Gaza. Israeli naval patrols have intercepted some but not all of these barrels. Since the beginning of the war and the increased presence of Israeli naval patrols, naval smuggling has been more difficult for Hamas to accomplish, but it might still be happening.
In Phase 2 of the Ceasefire, Hamas is supposed to disarm, a technocratic government is to be established in Gaza, and an international force is meant to take over “peacekeeping,” enabling Israel to withdraw its forces closer to the border. Hamas continues to declare it will not disarm, and some of the mediators (Egypt, Qatar, and, according to a recent unverified report, the British government) are attempting to change this requirement. In theory, the technocratic government has been set up and is ready to begin work, but as long as Hamas remains armed, this government will be only a façade behind which Hamas will continue to control Gaza. This is especially true in view of the fact that most of the administrative personnel in this government previously worked for Hamas. This includes a 10,000-man armed police force that is meant to enforce the policies of the new government but that is actually manned almost entirely by Hamas personnel.
Furthermore, there is still no international force willing to replace the IDF in compelling Hamas’ disarmament. This could lead to a swift reigniting of the fighting.
Meanwhile, the IDF has completed preparations for at least one site on which to build a new tent/hut city for Gazans who will be transferred to live there, via security checkpoints to filter out Hamas personnel, and receive humanitarian support. More such sites are under discussion. If this works, it will reduce, possibly dramatically, the number of civilians living under Hamas authority. This would give the IDF a freer hand for operations against Hamas and the other organizations.
On the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, the rebuilding and return of the population forced to evacuate because of the October 2023 attack and subsequent war has continued, with most of the Israeli refugees now returned to their homes. In the town of Sderot, seven kilometers from the border, there has been a large-scale operation to build new neighborhoods. In addition to nearly all the original residents having returned, at least 3,000 new residents have moved to Sderot from other parts of Israel.
Dr. Eado Hecht, a senior research fellow at the BESA Center, is a military analyst focusing mainly on the relationship between military theory, military doctrine, and military practice. He teaches courses on military theory and military history at Bar-Ilan University, Haifa University, and Reichman University and in a variety of courses in the Israel Defense Forces. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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When ‘Bearing Witness’ Collides With Neutrality: Doctors Without Borders in Gaza
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Médecins Sans Frontière (MSF) — known in English as Doctors Without Borders — is a large humanitarian organization that provides medical assistance around the world.
While much of its work is with victims of natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and internally displaced people, one fourth of the group’s activity is helping people affected by armed conflict.
In order to do this work, MSF pledges neutrality and impartiality, as only on that basis can it demand that parties to conflicts allow it unimpeded access to help those in need.
But Israel is concerned that humanitarian non-profits are exploiting their Gaza access to shield militants and work against Israel politically.
Therefore, the Israeli government decided last March to require these organizations to provide detailed information about their activities and the identities of their employees, giving them a generous 10 months to comply. This information will enable Israel to make sure these organizations are exclusively humanitarian, and that their employees are not Hamas members or anti-Israel activists seeking to enter Gaza in disguise.
MSF loudly protested, claiming that revealing the identity of its employees to Israel would put them in danger, and that these requirements are really a cynical attempt by Israel to force MSF to abandon its mission.
But MSF has made numerous anti-Israel statements, on social media and on its website, which the Israel government has compiled in a report.
MSF has repeatedly claimed that Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and systematic extermination. It has called for an arms embargo against Israel, while praising and supporting the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement. MSF also says that Israel is guilty of colonization, systemic oppression, and apartheid.
To be clear, the issue is not whether one agrees with these views (which are greatly disputed). The question is whether an organization that publicly accuses Israel of genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing — and campaigns for boycotts and arms embargoes against it — can still claim to be neutral in any ordinary sense of the term.
MSF claims that this is the case. It says “Bearing Witness” is also one of its core values. It states that, “The principles of impartiality and neutrality are not synonymous with silence … we are duty-bound to raise our voices and speak out on behalf of our patients.”
In their view, as long as they provide medical care without discrimination and keep actual military combatants off their payroll, no amount of political action compromises their neutrality and the privileges it entails.
Of course, there is a vast chasm between the statements MSF and its employees are making and what “bearing witness” requires. MSF and its staff could describe the problems they face in fulfilling their medical mission, such as lack of supplies, equipment, and the like, without assigning blame or taking sides. Whether the tragic Gaza situation is the fault of Israel, Hamas, or others is a matter of opinion, which a neutral party should not voice.
Genocide is a legal determination that hinges on intent and military necessity, neither of which can be inferred from treating the wounded. When a humanitarian organization claims otherwise, it oversteps its bounds.
That is the position of the Red Cross, another humanitarian organization pledged to neutrality. The Red Cross does not make public accusations, specifically in order to maintain trust and keep the working relationships that enable it to fulfill its mission. And even though many in Israel believe the Red Cross should have pressed harder to visit the hostages, the Israeli government has made no effort to stop the Red Cross from operating in Gaza — and in fact, even cooperated with the Red Cross to facilitate hostage exchanges.
The MSF has become so critical of Israel that even former MSF Secretary General Alain Destexhe says the organization is now “biased, partial, and militant,” and accuses it of effectively siding with Hamas.
Israel has every right to tell MSF that the anti-Israel political campaign it tries to pass off as “bearing witness” is in direct conflict with its obligation to neutrality. If MSF wants to campaign against Israel, it has no right to expect Israel’s cooperation and help.
If Israel ultimately forces MSF to leave Gaza, MSF will likely portray this as proof that Israel is attempting to cut off humanitarian aid. But Israel has made clear through its continued cooperation with other neutral organizations that it welcomes bona fide humanitarian assistance. The predicament MSF now faces follows directly from its decision to mix humanitarian work with political campaigning. In doing so, MSF has put both its access to Gaza and its patients’ care at risk.
Shlomo Levin is the author of the Human Rights Haggadah, and he uses short fiction to explore human rights at https://shalzed.com/
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Trying to influence progressives in New Jersey, AIPAC may actually help one get elected
Politics has always been a dirty business – just ask King David, Socrates or Confucius. But AIPAC’s latest reckless move should raise even the most cynical of eyebrows.
It’s happening here in my home district, New Jersey’s 11th, which has had a vacant congressional seat since former congresswoman Mikie Sherrill became governor last month. The primary election is Thursday, and since this is a deep blue district, it’s almost certain that the Democratic nominee will go to Washington in a few months.
Not surprisingly, the field is crowded, but four front-runners have emerged: former congressman Tom Malinowski, who narrowly lost his seat in 2022 after his district was redrawn; Essex county commissioner Brendan Gill; former lieutenant governor Tahesha Way; and progressive Analilia Mejia, who has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and seemingly the entire left wing of the party.
In the last month, a group called the United Democracy Project has been attacking Malinowski from the left, alleging that he supports ICE. Factually, this is poppycock: Malinowski has vociferously spoken out against ICE’s excesses. But he did vote for an omnibus, bipartisan DHS funding bill in 2019, which included funding for ICE.
Unfair, perhaps, but also fair enough — this is politics as usual.
What’s unusual is that the “United Democracy Project” is actually a Super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, as reported in this publication a few weeks ago. Even more unusual is that AIPAC has poured over $2.2 million into this primary election, according to FEC data. And even more unusual than that is the fact that AIPAC, which has embraced Republicans and the Trump administration for their support of the Netanyahu government, is suddenly taking a progressive, anti-Trump line by targeting a candidate for supporting ICE.
Except, of course, that is all a shell game.
AIPAC isn’t running ICE ads because they care about immigrants; they’re attacking Malinowski for his temerity to defy AIPAC’s demand that aid to Israel be completely unconditional, which no other foreign aid ever is. A spokesman for “United Democracy Project” told Punchbowl News that the organization turned on Malinowski because “he talks about conditioning aid — that’s not a pro-Israel position, and he knows it.”
AIPAC also knows that, because of a quirk of congressional rules, Malinowski would become a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, because previous stints in Congress count for seniority purposes. And because, before serving in Congress, Malinowski was the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor under President Obama, he is widely respected as a foreign policy expert and would surely become a key member of the committee.
So, why is AIPAC making a target of a potential ally? Notice how the goalposts have shifted: Malinowski is not an anti-Zionist. He’s not even a critic of Israel, like Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who AIPAC spent $14 million to defeat in 2024. He espouses the same views as a majority of the American Jews: supportive of Israel as a Jewish state with a right to defend itself, but critical of the Netanyahu government’s actions in Gaza, which killed over 70,000 people. (The government recently accepted the Gaza/Hamas Health Ministry’s casualty numbers, after Israel’s right-wing supporters spent two years attacking journalists who cited them. No apologies for said attacks have been issued.)
On this issue, Malinowski is a centrist Democrat, not a progressive firebrand. Yet, Malinowski said at a recent event I attended in Montclair, AIPAC wants to make an example of him. Cross us, and we will come for you – no matter how moderate you are.
Rep. Ilhan Omar was excoriated for an offhand remark she made in 2019 that AIPAC’s power is “all about the Benjamins,” using a common slang term for hundred dollar bills. But AIPAC has dropped more than 22,000 Benjamins on one primary race to warn everyone not to cross them. Though she later apologized (under duress) for invoking antisemitic tropes about Jews and money, in terms of AIPAC’s political power, Omar was right.
Presumably, AIPAC is hoping that its efforts will turn voters away from Malinowski, who currently has a small lead, and toward Way or Gill, who, disappointingly, have declined to condemn the ads.
But if you’re paying attention to the NJ-11 race, you might suspect that their efforts will have an unintended effect: boosting Mejia, who, unlike Malinowski, is a strong critic of Israel in the familiar Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/ZohranMamdani mode.
Think about it: Who benefits from AIPAC’s ads? Yes, Gill, like Malinowski, has spoken out against Trump and ICE – I saw him give an inspiring speech at a ‘No Kings’ rally a few months ago. But after a year of mainstream Democrats being perceived as ineffectual in their opposition to Trump, no one’s going to be motivated by an anti-ICE ad to vote for either of the Democratic machine’s candidates.
No, they’re going to vote for the strongest progressive in the race, and that is clearly Mejia, who is running in second place and has Rep. Ro Khanna visiting the district. (Khanna is fighting his own battle with AIPAC, which is spending to defeat him this year.) Along with Khanna, legions of Indivisible activists are doing Get Out The Vote work for Mejia. The wind is at her back, and AIPAC just gave her a squall.
To be sure, Mejia is not running on Israel, Gaza or support for Palestinians. She is following the successful progressive ‘affordability’ playbook, highlighting her support for a $15 minimum wage, free child care, Medicare for All and so on. Israel does not appear on her campaign website at all.
But she’s not hiding her views either. At a candidates forum last week, she affirmed that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, and pledged not to visit Israel on a trip sponsored by AIPAC. (No other candidate in this race took those positions.) And she has spent many years as a progressive activist expressing similar views.
The irony would be rich: AIPAC defeats a supporter of Israel, and puts another Squad member in the House instead. Talk about instant karma.
And then there’s the bigger picture. As everyone knows, the last two years have seen an unprecedented rise in antisemitism, along with conspiratorial thinking of all kinds – especially because, as we now see from the latest Epstein Files release, some of the conspiracies are real. And it’s at this moment that the leading organization of the “Israel Lobby” covertly tries to bait progressives into voting a certain way? Do they not see that this kind of secretive manipulation is exactly what the antisemites say about us?
Obviously, AIPAC is not responsible for antisemitism, and even if they played fair, bigotry would not go away. And again, politics is a dirty business. But did no one in the room even raise this as a concern? That it might be problematic for the Israel Lobby to hide its identity, lie to progressives (many of whom, of course, would be repulsed to learn that AIPAC is targeting them), and, under false pretenses, persuade them to vote for AIPAC’s agenda? Do they have no concern for how this conspiratorial chicanery might enflame antisemitic sentiments, or, God forbid, actions?
At this point, I can’t tell who I’m rooting for more: Malinowski, to show AIPAC that not every politician can be intimidated, or Mejia, to hand them a massive self-own. Either way, AIPAC would get what it deserves. I just hope no one else pays the price.
The post Trying to influence progressives in New Jersey, AIPAC may actually help one get elected appeared first on The Forward.