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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.”
—
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Kristof column alleging Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners sparks outrage, scrutiny and debate among Jews
(JTA) — A New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof published Monday detailed graphic allegations of sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli guards, amplifying claims that guards had used dogs to rape Palestinian detainees.
As the allegations in the column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” sparked a widening online debate over their credibility, Jewish groups and leaders began weighing in with a mix of condemnation, skepticism and concern over conditions in Israeli prisons.
Israel has rejected all of the allegations in Kristof’s column, which included claims that guards inserted objects into Palestinian detainees’ rectums, beat detainees’ genitals and subjected them to systematic humiliation. The Israeli Foreign Ministry described his writing as “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”
“In an unfathomable inversion of reality, and through an endless stream of baseless lies, propagandist Nicholas Kristof turns the victim into the accused,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that the country would “fight these lies with the truth – and the truth will prevail.”
Related: From Rutgers speaker to Kristof column, disputed dog rape claim against Israel goes mainstream
Several progressive Jewish groups and Israeli human rights organizations welcomed the scrutiny the column has placed on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But many others in the Jewish community have expressed outrage over reporting they consider dubious and agenda-driven.
The American Jewish Committee echoed the foreign ministry’s condemnation, calling the allegation that Israel trains dogs to rape prisoners a “modern-day blood libel,” a reference to historic antisemitic myths accusing Jews of ritual murder.
“Allegations of abuse toward Palestinians deserve serious, rigorous investigation,” the AJC continued. “Yet this piece, while opinion, appeared to be presented as an investigative report and fell alarmingly short of that standard while amplifying inflammatory narratives that have real-world consequences in a time of surging hatred toward Israelis and Jews worldwide.”
One of the most widely circulated allegations from the piece came from an anonymous Palestinian journalist, who said Israeli guards had ordered a dog to mount and penetrate him while he was blindfolded and handcuffed. The column also cited conversations with over a dozen former Palestinian detainees, who described sexual abuse or humiliation by Israeli settlers or security forces.
In the wake of the column’s publication, some pro-Israel voices are renewing their campaign against The New York Times, which they believe is biased against Israel. Pro-Israel groups, including EndJewHatred, Stop Antizionism, Hineni and the Movement Against Antizionism, are planning a protest outside the newspaper’s New York City headquarters on Thursday.
Michelle Ahdoot, EndJewHatred’s director of programming and strategy, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the column had been “hurtful and angering,” adding that she believed it was “direct cause of true incitement and violence against the Jewish people.”
“We’ve been calling on The New York Times and other media sources to stop the lies and stop the incitement that’s a result of this horrific reporting, and this, frankly, was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.
The column’s critics, who also include a handful of Palestinian voices who have previously condemned Hamas, have pointed to Kristof’s reliance on a report issued by an NGO that Israel has alleged for more than a decade serves as a Hamas propaganda operation.
While Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian writer and advocate in the United States, wrote that he had “no doubt” that “incidents of sexual abuse have occurred in Israeli prisons,” he criticized the sourcing used in Kristof’s piece, writing in a post on X that Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based NGO, and others have “troubling records on accuracy, conduct, and associations.”
“They are not credible sources, even if the article relied on others as well,” Alkhatib wrote. He said that other Palestinian testimonies were “anonymous due to shame and fear of retaliation for reporting sexual torture, which complicates verification but does not automatically invalidate their claims.”
Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, the senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, similarly criticized Kristof’s use of Euro-Med’s report in a post on X. Euro-Med’s leaders have long drawn accusations from Israel of being Hamas operatives, and the NGO has faced scrutiny for referring to the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas as having been “arrested and moved to the Gaza Strip” and for claiming that Israel steals the organs of deceased Palestinians.
“This is not a human rights organization with a bias,” Rodan-Benzaquen wrote. “It is an organization whose leadership has documented family and organizational ties to Hamas, operating under institutional cover at the heart of our democracies, and is cited by the @nytimes.”
Hen Mazzig, an Israeli activist, also maligned Kristof’s citation of a tweet by Shaiel Ben-Ephraim in a Substack post, pointing out that he left UCLA amid accusations of sexual harassment in 2020. (Ben-Ephraim has acknowledged that he engaged in “inappropriate behavior” at the time.)
Ben-Ephraim’s viral tweet from April, which Kristof linked to in his claim that Israel had trained dogs to rape Palestinian detainees, listed a series of alleged testimonies from Palestinians’ unnamed Israeli guards who claimed they had experienced or seen the practice.
“The accusations against Israeli settlers and security officials deserve serious investigation,” Mazzig wrote, later adding, “But if you are willing to platform a man accused of sexual harassment, and an organization that calls Jewish rape allegations propaganda, to make your case on the same topic, the conversation is over.”
Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, told the Free Press that his comments in the column appearing to validate the allegations appeared out of context. Many have also questioned the timing of Kristof’s column, coming just a day before a widely anticipated report from an Israeli civil commission about the extent of sexual violence during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Neither The New York Times nor Kristof responded to questions from JTA. But a spokesperson for the newspaper, Charlie Stadtlander, defended the column and its author late Tuesday, writing online about a viral claim that it could be retracted, “There is no truth to this at all.”
On Wednesday morning, he also rejected claims that Kristof’s column had been timed in relation to the Oct. 7 sexual violence report, which he said the Times had not known about before its release. The newspaper covered the report late Tuesday.
Kristof, too, has waved off concerns, dismissing criticism that the piece ran in the Times’ opinion section rather than its news pages. He also greeted skepticism about the possibility of training dogs for sexual assault with “exasperation.”
“I appreciate the intense interest in my column,” Kristof wrote in a post on X. “For skeptics, why not agree on Red Cross and lawyer visits for the 9,000 Palestinian ‘security’ prisoners? If you think these abuse allegations are false, such monitoring visits would be protective. So why not?”
Allegations of abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israel surfaced repeatedly before and during the war in Gaza, including in testimonies by detainees and prison guards by Reuters and the Associated Press, albeit not necessarily in as much detail as many of the cases described in Kristof’s piece. In January, reports obtained by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel from the country’s Public Defender’s Office found evidence of widespread, systematic abuse in Israeli prisons against Palestinians.
In March, Israeli military prosecutors canceled indictments against five IDF reserve soldiers who were accused of sexually assaulting a detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility, a case that was caught on video and sparked international outcry.
And in January, an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, released a report alleging sexual abuse in Israeli prisons. The group cited the column in a post on X Tuesday, writing that “the international community continues to stand by and allow Israel to commit crimes against the Palestinian people” even as the column and others report on them.
Kristof’s column is indeed prompting some to give new attention to the conditions in Israeli prisons, its ostensible purpose. Some Jewish critics of the column are emphasizing that they find the broad allegation of abuse in Israeli prisons plausible, troubling and deserving of scrutiny and action. Many point to comments boasting of poor conditions in prisons by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister who has overseen the Israel Prison Service since late 2022, to say they believe that abuse may have worsened, and the consequences diminished, in recent years.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group J Street, wrote on Substack that while “disputed” details in the piece must be “rigorously investigated,” the report’s “serious allegations of systemic abuse cannot simply be waved away because they are painful or politically inconvenient.”
The Nexus Project, a liberal-leaning antisemitism watchdog, took aim at the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s assessment of the column, writing in a post on X that “to weaponize the term ‘blood libel’ to dismiss Kristof’s thorough reporting is dangerous.”
Other progressive Jewish groups have also called for the allegations in the piece to be investigated, including the rabbinic group T’ruah, which demanded “an impartial independent investigation, so the perpetrators can be brought to justice.”
Elissa Wald, a Jewish activist living in Oregon, argued in a Substack essay late Monday that while she believed The New York Times had a “strong anti-Israel bias,” many things could be true at once.
“The wide[s]pread, knee-jerk denial of everything Kristof wrote by many of my fellow Jews is incredibly troubling to me,” she wrote, adding, “Just as we don’t know enough to immediately believe everything written in this piece, especially given the context we’re all familiar with, I also don’t think we know enough to immediately discount and dismiss it all.”
Others worried that Kristof’s approach might set back the effort to get to the bottom of these allegations. Israeli policy analyst and pro-Israel influencer Eli Kowaz argued in a Substack post that Kristof had foregrounded the most sensational allegations in his piece and neglected claims that were more documented, including Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric and a recent report by the Israeli Public Defender’s Office documenting systematic violence from prison guards.
“By Thursday, the conversation will be about Euro-Med’s credibility and whether unverified accounts can be trusted,” Kowaz wrote. “The documented case — the one that required no advocacy org, no anonymous source, no unverifiable claim — will be largely beside the point. That is what this kind of journalism costs, and someone should say so.”
The post Kristof column alleging Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners sparks outrage, scrutiny and debate among Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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From Rutgers speaker to Kristof column, disputed dog rape claim against Israel goes mainstream
(JTA) — A week after a university commencement speaker was canceled because of a tweet claiming that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, the allegation leapt into the pages of The New York Times.
The columnist Nicholas Kristof included the claim in a column alleging widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.
Detailing the account of an unnamed Gaza journalist who says guards summoned a dog when he was imprisoned in 2024, Kristof writes, “He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.” Linking to a range of pro-Palestinian sources, he notes that other prisoners had recounted similar experiences elsewhere.
Israel has rejected all of the allegations in Kristof’s column, which has elicited condemnation from Jewish groups for what they say is a “a modern-day blood libel” even as some say they believe it is important to take seriously claims of abuse in Israeli prisons. The New York Times has stood behind the column and said Kristof’s column reflects rigorous reporting and standards.
Neither Israeli officials nor The New York Times have commented specifically on the dog-rape claim, and the newspaper and Kristof did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s requests for comment. But a canine training expert said the allegations seem implausible if not completely impossible.
James Crosby, a retired police lieutenant and canine aggression expert affiliated with Harvard University’s Canine Brain Project, told JTA that it was “highly unlikely that anybody is going to be able to train a dog to successfully commit a sexual assault.”
Crosby said dogs can be trained to carry out some behaviors that could be seen as sexual but he was much more skeptical of the central claim that Kristof described.
“You could train the physical behaviors of jumping up and moving the hips back and forth and so forth. That is not necessarily sexual behavior from a dog,” Crosby said. “The actual penetration and so forth, I think that would be a lot more problematic.”
Israeli human rights groups have separately alleged both sexual assault in security prisons and the use of dogs to intimidate and assault Palestinian prisoners.
Kristof is defending the claim that the two phenomena happen in tandem, tweeting on Tuesday, “To those who say that canine rape is impossible, despite the many Palestinians who have described it, I’d note that at least three different medical journal articles discuss rectal injuries in humans from anal penetration by dogs. Sigh.”
A handful of records in medical literature have concluded that injuries to humans came from being penetrated by a dog. A review of the cases included in PubMed, a medical research database, showed that most reflect instances where humans forced dogs to perform sexual acts on them, but one 2019 case report from Uruguay described injuries to a 6 year old girl that a physician attributed to the family’s pet.
Crosby said that he was unsure if it was biologically possible to train a dog to have an erection on command but stopped short of saying that training dogs to rape humans was “impossible.”
“I’m not saying it can’t happen because, I mean, I’m a retired police officer, and I’ve also been dealing with fatal dog attacks and dog stuff for a long time, and there are always people out there that are twisted enough to do what you don’t think they can,” Crosby said. “The depths of human stupidity and nastiness are just always unplumbable.”
Whatever the case, it’s clear that the dog-rape claim has escalated rapidly as a charge against Israel in recent months.
The accusation has circulated for nearly two years but became turbocharged only in the last month, according to Travis Hawley, a Jewish self-described “open source intelligence” analyst who works as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and is also affiliated with the Network Contagion Research Institute, a center affiliated with Rutgers University that produces research about how information spreads online. The institute referred him to JTA.
After seeing the discourse about Kristof’s column, Hawley decided to trace the claim’s path on social media. He shared his findings with JTA on Tuesday.
Hawley found that the claim made a brief splash on social media in 2024 before falling dormant until last month. The 2024 cycle stemmed from an interview with the director general of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry posted by Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language X account in June, according to his research. The official said that Israelis “made these dogs carry out vile actions against these detainees.”
Al Jazeera’s post got relatively little traction on its own. But days later, the account “Suppressed News” shared it in English, increasing the spread and introducing the word “rape” into the online discourse.
The account TrackAIPAC, which opposes the Israel lobby’s influence on U.S. politics, shared that post, Hawley found, as did the journalist Ryan Grim, whose coverage often criticizes Israel, and Briahna Joy Gray, a former press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign who has frequently shared anti-Israel posts that have drawn allegations of antisemitism.
After the June 2024 cycle, the claim simmered online but was relatively inconspicuous compared to more prominent allegations against Israel, including that it was deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza, a claim that Israel similarly rejected as a blood libel.
Then in March, Israeli authorities dropped charges against Israeli prison guards who had been accused of sexually assaulting prisoners at the Sde Teiman detention facility, in an incident caught on video that had shocked many Israelis, roiled the country’s security establishment and fueled allegations that Israel was seeking to cover up abuse.
Hawley found that Sde Teiman’s return to the news cycle provided “the contextual hook the dormant June 2024 dog-rape narrative needed to re-ignite.”
Weeks later, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based NGO that Israel has accused of having affiliations with Hamas, issued a report promoting the allegation. The organization is frequently cited by critics of Israel, and some of its claims have overlapped with those of independent sources. But its reports have also argued that Israel exhumes Palestinians to steal their organs — a claim with no evidence that medical experts say is impossible.
Euro-Med’s founder and chairman, Ramy Abdu, had shared the dog rape allegation during the 2024 wave. Now his organization said it had interviewed former prisoners who had experienced the phenomenon themselves.
Just days later, the claim had its biggest moment online yet, when an Israeli living in the United States, a former UCLA researcher and prominent online anti-Israel influencer named Shaiel Ben-Ephraim posted that an Israeli source had confirmed the dog rape allegation to him. He did not name the source or offer any additional evidence.
Ben-Ephraim had long faced challenges to his credibility from pro-Israel voices, in part connected to his admitted record of misconduct. But Hawley said Ben-Ephraim’s post, which echoed comments the Israeli had made on a pro-Palestinian podcast days earlier, appeared pivotal to the claim’s ascendance. He said Ben-Ephraim had injected a crucial element to the claim structure: that Israelis, and not just Palestinians and their allies, believed the dog rape claim.
Before April, “it wasn’t some acceptable narrative. It was allegations and bots and stuff like that,” said Hawley, who emphasized that he could not say whether the allegation was true. “It took a couple viral moments in the last two months before you could call it, I guess, mainstream.”
Hawley’s findings lined up with those published independently last week by Eli Kowaz, an American-Israeli analyst who formerly worked at the Israel Policy Forum. Kowaz published an essay arguing that the dog rape allegation was not credible, several days before Kristof’s column.
“You can hold two things at once: that Israeli detention conditions have produced credible, documented abuse allegations warranting serious investigation — and that a viral claim about trained rape dogs, built on a collapsed case and an advocacy podcast, does not meet any serious evidentiary bar,” he wrote. “Choosing which claims to believe before examining them tells you what the ‘evidence’ was ever actually for.”
Days after Ben-Ephraim’s tweet, the dog-rape claim had such reach that Ramy Elghandour, a bio-tech entrepreneur who had been invited to give the commencement address at Rutgers University’s engineering school, included it in a tweet condemning Israel.
“They’ve committed genocide,” Elghandour wrote in the tweet, a response to a Democratic lawmaker’s vow not to allow additional military aid to Israel. “They’re running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners … Weapons embargo is the absolute minimum.”
His invitation to speak was rescinded, but the claim was still climbing. Days later, Kristof’s column was published, bringing the claim to a vast audience including many people who would not previously have been exposed to it but who may have followed Kristof’s award-winning, impactful career as a columnist reporting about the Darfur genocide, human trafficking and global poverty. As evidence, Kristof’s column cited the Euro-Med report and linked to Ben-Ephraim’s post.
The prominence of the platform surprised even Hawley, who routinely watches discourse cycles reach unexpected heights. “To go from very obvious anti-Israel-narrative people, and then to the New York Times directly, is like, OK, how do we make that big jump?” he asked.
To some critics of Kristof’s column, the answer is that a well oiled pro-Palestinian propaganda machine had worked exactly as intended.
“His attempt to slip a salacious ‘dog rape’ trope from reportedly Hamas-linked operatives into the paper under the guise of an opinion piece is a failure of basic gatekeeping,” tweeted Albert Aaron, a pro-Israel Jewish New Yorker who posted that he was canceling his subscription, in one representative social media comment.
“Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve,” Haviv Rettig Gur, an Israeli commentator, said in a viral post in which he described feeling a sense of relief to encounter what he believed were obvious lies in Kristof’s column. One of them, he said: “Dogs did not rape anyone.”
Claims of dogs trained to rape have been attached in the past to some of history’s most vicious figures. The journalist Lawrence Wright wrote that Egypts used dogs to rape prisoners under the regime that fell during the Arab Spring in 2011.
Ingrid Olderock, a Chilean-born German, is known as “The Dog Lady” because of allegations that she trained German shepherds to rape female dissidents during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
And JTA reported in the 1980s about allegations that Klaus Barbie, the Nazi Gestapo leader known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for his brutality, had trained a dog to rape women.
Some who are inclined to believe the dog rape allegation about Israel say the stories about Barbie have difficult implications for those who reject the claim.
“Dogs were used to rape humans during the Holocaust. I did not expect Israeli propaganda to turn into literal Holocaust denial,” tweeted the progressive journalist Ziad Jilani in response to a Jewish physician who had written, “Dogs cannot anatomically rape humans. As a physician, I thought I would just point that out. Why are antisemites such idiots?”
The Pinochet example and others like it that allege canine rape of women is not relevant in the case of the prisoners Kristof spoke to, Rabbi Natan Slifkin argued in a Substack essay on Wednesday. Slifkin runs Israel’s Biblical Museum of Natural History, which reflects his passion for and expertise in zoology.
“Without getting into gruesome detail, suffice it to say that the stories were not comparable. There are physical differences between male and female humans, and physical and behavioral differences between male humans and male dogs, alongside other differences in circumstances and in the descriptions of what happened in each case,” Slifkin wrote.
Noting that allegations have also circulated that the Israeli military has trained sharks and eagles to surveil and attack Palestinians, he continued, “The general view of experts in canine behavior … is that dogs cannot be trained to rape men.”
While Crosby, the dog scientist, said he was familiar with accounts of law enforcement and military personnel using dogs to intimidate individuals, citing the illegal use of dogs at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, he said he had never encountered an example in his research of a dog raping a human being. If misconduct involving dogs is taking place in Israeli prisons, he said, he is skeptical of the specific claims of rape.
“I would be more focused on the idea that they’re doing it as a form of intimidation and harassment,” Crosby said, “rather than literally having the animals sexually abuse somebody.”
The post From Rutgers speaker to Kristof column, disputed dog rape claim against Israel goes mainstream appeared first on The Forward.
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Rand Paul’s son apologizes after reportedly making antisemitic attack on Rep. Mike Lawler
(JTA) — After an altercation Tuesday with a congressman during which he made repeated antisemitic comments, Sen. Rand Paul’s son William apologized and said Wednesday he is “seeking help” for his drinking problem.
“Last night, I had too much to drink and said some things that don’t represent who I really am,” William Paul tweeted on Wednesday afternoon. “I’m sorry and today I am seeking help for my drinking problem.”
The incident between Paul and Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, occurred late Tuesday at the Tune Inn bar and restaurant in Washington, D.C. in front of NOTUS reporter Reese Gorman, who reported first-hand about the incident.
Paul approached Lawler and that said if Kentucky incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie loses his primary on May 19, it will be because of “your people,” NOTUS reported.
Lawler, who is not Jewish, clarified that he is Irish, Italian and Catholic, according to Gorman’s account.
“And he goes, ‘Oh! Oh, I’m sorry to accuse you of that,’” Lawler recalled during a press availability tweeted by a reporter from CourthouseNews. “Which is just a remarkable statement in and of itself. But he then went on a roughly 10-minute diatribe about Israel, about Jews, about Paul Singer and accusing Jews of being responsible for so many things, playing right into the typical antisemitic tropes that so many people rely on.”
A TV spot for Massie that began running this week targeted hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer with a Pride flag-patterned Star of David placed next to Singer’s head. The ad called Singer a “major pro-gay, pro-trans activist who works with far-left, hardcore Democrats.”
Singer, who is Jewish, is a Republican and a major donor to Republican candidates. His son is gay and he is a longtime supporter of gay rights.
William Paul’s father Rand is Kentucky’s junior senator. A Republican who has run for president, Rand Paul announced his endorsement of Massie in October.
“At one point, he said that he hates Jews and hates gays and doesn’t care if they die,” Lawler recalled about his encounter with William Paul in the interview. “And I think that’s f—ing disgusting. So, you know, the conversation shortly thereafter ended, he gave me the middle finger and then tripped on his way out the door.”
Lawler is the representative for New York’s 17th district, a swing district that includes a significant Orthodox Jewish population in Rockland County.
The Kentucky Jewish Council, which advocates against antisemitism in the state, issued a statement denouncing the incident.
“We are deeply disturbed both by the antisemitic conspiracy theories posited by Mr Paul and with his comfort in harassing someone he thought was Jewish in a public place,” the group said. “We regret that Congressman Lawler had to experience the kind of abuse far too many American Jews suffer on a regular basis.”
Tuesday night’s altercation between Paul and Lawler was not the first time in recent months that a public figure who is not Jewish was the target of an antisemitic attack. In March, following the attempted car ramming on a synagogue and Jewish preschool in Michigan, Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, who is not Jewish, said he had been the target of antisemitic memes and insults.
The post Rand Paul’s son apologizes after reportedly making antisemitic attack on Rep. Mike Lawler appeared first on The Forward.