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Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action
(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.
“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.
“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”
Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.
Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”
Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.
A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)
The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.
In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.
Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.
The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.
“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time.
The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.
More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.
For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.
“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.
“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.
The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.
In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded.
Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.
The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices.
“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.”
The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year.
“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said.
The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group.
Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)
Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers.
Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.
She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.
“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said.
Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.
“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”
Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah.
“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said.
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Israel didn’t play in this World Cup. It has dominated the games anyway.
Sunday’s World Cup final has been billed as a contest between soccer powerhouses, colonizer versus colonized, and soccer’s past against its future. But the matchup of Spain and Argentina also represent two sides of today’s polarized global politics on Israel.
Under the leadership of President Javier Milei, Argentina has become one of Israel’s most steadfast supporters; the national team’s captain, Lionel Messi, a practicing Catholic, has made multiple trips to Israel.
Spain, on the other hand, styles itself as Israel’s most fervent Western adversary. It was among the first European countries to recognize a State of Palestine. There, too, politics have extended to the playing pitch: Spanish soccer prodigy Lamine Yamal — widely touted as Messi’s heir apparent — waved a Palestinian flag in May after his club team won the Spanish championship.
Their meeting in the final dovetails with a World Cup during which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often felt unavoidable — even as neither of those teams appeared.
Throughout the six-week tournament, fans, players and national sporting bodies have used the World Cup as a platform to criticize Israel, highlight the suffering of Palestinians and call for Israel’s expulsion by FIFA, the soccer federation that organizes international competition. Marketed as a symbol of and catalyst for international unity, the 2026 World Cup also offered a reminder of Israel’s unique power to divide — and demonstrated that the wars raging in the Middle East remain fixed in the global popular imagination.
Much of the attention on Israel could be attributed to the Egyptian team, whose coach, Hossam Hassan, repeatedly foregrounded the Palestinian cause during his press conferences as the team forged into the tournament’s knockout rounds.
After Hassan in an interview dedicated Egypt’s victory to the Palestinian people, he said, “May God grant them victory, and may God have mercy on their martyrs.”
His comments decrying the situation in Gaza made him a hero in the enclave, where a mural depicting Hassan was painted on the rubble of a destroyed building. After Egypt’s ouster by Argentina, the coach confronted a fan who seemed to be taunting him with an Israeli flag; the referee of that game faced antisemitic smears afterward.
It was one of several incidents involving flags, as the stands became proxy battlegrounds for the conflict. One man waving an Israeli flag at an Iran game in Los Angeles had it confiscated, seemingly for provocation; the only official explanation reportedly provided was “security reasons.” with no mention of Israel’s war with Iran. Palestinian flags have flown in the terraces no matter who was playing, but especially at games involving first-time contestant Jordan.
There were larger protest actions, too: Thousands of Bosnian fans chanted “Palestina” in the streets of Toronto on their way to a game against Canada; Morocco fans broke out into “Free Palestine” chants in Houston. (There was a rumor that Morocco’s pro-Israel king, Mohammed VI, had a top player pulled from the team for waving a Palestinian flag on the pitch earlier this year.)
As the drama played out on fields across North America and in the concourses, a campaign to get Israel banned over the war from international soccer competition, which dates to 2024, continued apace. The national soccer federation of Norway, which became a tournament darling during the country’s first-ever run to the quarterfinals, joined several Middle Eastern nations in calls for Israel’s ouster from World Cup organizer FIFA and European soccer federation UEFA, citing those groups’ ejection of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.
It was only logical that the relentless focus on Israel would culminate in Sunday’s final, where arguably the two biggest stars in the sport, Messi and Yamal, have played into the theme.
Messi’s appearances in Israel over the years on Barcelona and Argentina team trips — including a 2013 visit when he was photographed wearing a kippah at the Western Wall — have long made him a lightning rod for criticism and occasionally antisemitic slander from Arab leaders. Social media platforms filled with anti-Messi political sentiment in the last weeks as that photo recirculated.
The Argentine’s perceived Zionism — and if Yamal’s flag-waving is any indication, the apparent pro-Palestinian stance of Messi’s 19-year-old Spanish foil — mirrors the respective positions of the nations they play for. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called to end arms sales to Israel and for travel bans on “anyone who has participated in the genocide.” Spain was also the site of the most successful anti-Israel protest in sports last year, when protesters repeatedly ground the Spanish Vuelta to a halt over the presence of an Israeli team.
On the other hand, breaking with its longstanding support for Palestinians, Argentina opposed their bid for statehood last September at the United Nations. Milei, who has described himself as the “most Zionist president in the world,” has proposed renaming Palestine Street in Buenos Aires to “Bibas Family Street” after the murdered Israeli hostages.
This simple but potent dichotomy has determined Sunday’s rooting interest for many neutral fans, and plenty non-neutral ones. Pro-Palestinian social media activists have built the case for Spain by pitting Messi against Yamal. Israelis — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — have cited Milei’s support of Israel as a reason why they are rooting for Argentina. (To be sure, a lot of Israelis also just love the 39-year-old Messi because of what he can do with a soccer ball.)
The persistence of the conflict at the World Cup reflects the snowballing animus toward Israel in global cultural discourse. From Eurovision to literary societies to soccer, it’s all Israel all the time — an obsession that will feel disproportionate to the country’s supporters, but less so for Palestinians themselves. Saleem Al-Ashqar, a Palestinian goalkeeper, was shot dead by Israeli forces in Gaza last month; he is one of hundreds of Palestinian athletes who have been killed in the war that followed Oct. 7, 2023, according to Palestinian officials.
The international fixation on Israel at events like the World Cup is showing no signs of abating. The only thing that might dim the fervor is organizing bodies bowing to pressure to remove Israel — or the country itself altering course.
The post Israel didn’t play in this World Cup. It has dominated the games anyway. appeared first on The Forward.
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The real outrage of Rep. Ro Khanna’s West Bank visit
The settler violence that Rep. Ro Khanna experienced on his recent visit to the West Bank has made headlines. But what was most important about this trip wasn’t what his delegation — of which I was a part — went through, but rather the people we met in the West Bank and the truths they told.
It’s the daily humiliations and abuse they suffer at the hands of Israeli settlers. It’s the dehumanization they feel, and the silence they encounter when they try to tell their stories to the world.
I’m an Israeli-American, and I’ve known Khanna for a decade. During that time, we’ve often agonized together over how best to leverage United States foreign policy to achieve a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My family lived in Jerusalem for six generations; I emigrated to the U.S. 50 years ago. I am a peace activist who has spent the last two decades as a student of the conflict through my work with, among others, J Street and Combatants for Peace.
After years of deep engagement on these issues — including meetings with the families of multiple Israeli hostages and participation in several diplomatic trips to Israel — Khanna told me that he wanted to go see a part of the region that had been off limits with past delegations, and to truly understand the lives of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. As the stories of settlement expansion, movement restrictions, settler terrorism and home demolitions in the West Bank have grown louder and more intense in recent months, Khanna wanted to hear about life under occupation from people on the ground.
He especially wanted to meet members of marginalized Palestinian Christian communities, as well as Palestinian Americans living in the West Bank. He didn’t want a tour where someone else controlled the agenda. He wanted to see and hear the occupation for himself.
As we discussed this plan, it was clear that it was essential that the trip be Palestinian-led — a low-profile personal trip, not a diplomatic entourage. Many Palestinians will not meet with tours led by pro-Israel organizations. (Khanna’s staff was in touch with the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem around the personal visit, despite Ambassador Mike Huckabee alleging otherwise.) Even a liberal Jewish organization like J Street, whose congressional delegations I’ve had the privilege of accompanying, is not welcome in many places in the West Bank.
The itinerary involved visits to three areas that would show life in distinct sections of the West Bank. We began by visiting Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala and meeting with their mayors. These are Christian communities with tourism economies. We heard about the water shortages with which they must contend, because Israel restricts the water supply to Palestinians. We heard about the Israeli settlement of Yatziv seizing Beit Sahour’s only remaining open land for its own construction. We heard about the difficulty of being a Christian minority in a place that is holy to all three religions.
From there we moved to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills. In Hebron, we visited streets that are open to Israeli Jews and tourists but closed to local Palestinians. We saw markets where violent Israeli settlers have thrown refuse, urine and sometimes even acid on Palestinians.
South of Hebron, we visited the village of Umm al-Khair, where we met Eid Suleiman, a Palestinian peace activist deported from San Francisco while on a humanitarian mission in 2025. His travel companion, his cousin Awdah Hathaleen, was shot and killed by Israeli settler Yinon Levi — who was filmed at the scene and never charged — in the summer of 2025.
We mourned Hathaleen. And we saw the sheer terror that continues to be inflicted on this village by the neighboring Israeli settlements — the daily violence, harassment, destruction of property and land confiscation.
On the last day, we visited Turmus Ayya in the north.
It is an amazing place, populated mainly by Palestinian Americans. These families have kept their homes and their land for generations. We spent hours with Palestinian Americans who live 11 months of the year in the U.S. and spend one month tending to their homes and land in the West Bank. In the U.S., they are police officers, doctors, psychologists — equal participants in a pluralistic democracy. When they return to their homeland, their rights are stripped away within minutes of landing in Tel Aviv.
They told us how they undergo intense interrogations and delays at Ben Gurion Airport. How, at checkpoints, many endure abuse for not speaking Hebrew. They told us how their towns and homes have been damaged and their cars burned by mobs of marauding settlers. They told us they feel human in the U.S., but subhuman in Palestine.
These are the important points of this trip. These are the things we should be talking about. The finger-pointing and accusations that have followed Khanna’s accurate account of having our road blocked by settlers are a distraction.
The life stories we heard from Palestinians over three days were jarring. These truths will reverberate in my mind for years, long after the finger-pointing is over.
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More Democrats than ever are voting against aid to Israel. That could actually be good for Israel
Israel is losing Democratic support in the same way a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly.”
When 103 House Democrats voted for a resolution that would eliminate United States aid to Israel yesterday — that was the “suddenly.” Even though the resolution didn’t pass, what seemed unimaginable on a few years ago now, after a period of gradual change, looks inevitable. When the current $38-billion weapons aid agreement between the U.S. and Israel winds down in 2028, the next one will involve what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called “a major reset” in the relationship.
And you know what? It’s long overdue. This shocking, historic vote is an opportunity to redefine the U.S.-Israel relationship in a way that benefits the U.S., Israel, Palestinians and the region.
Proponents have always framed U.S. aid to Israel as a win-win. We give them money — most of which has to be spent on American-made weapons — and in exchange Israel serves as a kind of land-based battleship in the Middle East. It looks out for American interests in a volatile region.
But increasingly, Americans are failing to see the value in that bargain. A recent poll found that 48% of Americans feel the U.S. is too supportive of Israel. At least among young people, this antipathy doesn’t just exist on the left: 53% of Republicans under age 45 oppose renewing the current aid agreement.
The fact of Israel’s booming economy, driven by the high tech and weapons industries that make it a valuable U.S. partner, has fueled that opposition. Why, a growing number of Americans ask, should our tax dollars fund a country that ranks 24th in median adult wealth according to a newly released USB survey — while the U.S. itself ranks 28th?
But what opponents mostly object to is Israeli government policy under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has cashed American checks and carried on with policies in Gaza and the West Bank that most Americans — including most American Jews — reject. What defenders have long asserted is a mutually beneficial arrangement increasingly feels more like a teenager with a credit card and a bad attitude.
A better approach, the “reset” Jeffries speaks of, would adjust the relationship from one of parent and child to one of peers and partners.
Ensuring Israel’s long term security would continue to be a key goal of that partnership. The U.S. might stop funding Israeli weapons purchases, but it could still sell Israel defensive systems.
But the security of Palestinians and other Israeli neighbors would also be key. The U.S. ought to consider defense guarantees to Israel and certain neighbors, including the Gulf States and even, perhaps, a reformed Syria. Those guarantees should come with sanctions if any government misuses American-made weapons. Security also means funding humanitarian aid that is attached to rooting out extremism and promoting freedom and self-determination.
Such a reset could make Israel itself stronger: less reliant on the whims of U.S. foreign and domestic policy; better able to diversify its sourcing and sale of weapons; and a key player in a regional peace, which includes the Palestinians. All of those changes could help bring true security.
These outcomes may seem aspirational. But it’s not like the old and now defunct patterns of aid were bringing Israelis the security they need. Democrats and Republicans, by listening to changing public opinion, have a chance to establish a new relationship rooted in a new vision.
Make no mistake, this vision will not satisfy the hardcore anti-Israel crowd on either side of the aisle. They want no aid and no partnership. They want to boycott Israeli products, artists and academics and arrest Israeli leaders. Their solution is the dissolution of the Israeli state.
Some of the Democrats who voted for the resolution no doubt belong in this category — among them the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who was the sole House member to vote “nay” on a Nov. 2023 resolution affirming Israel’s right to exist.
But many Democrats who voted for the Wednesday resolution said they did so despite their ongoing support for Israel, as a way to lodge their dissatisfaction with Netanyahu’s policies.
“We simply cannot continue to condone Netanyahu’s actions that are against our moral conscience and our own national security interests by perpetuating the status quo,” said Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who has a long record of support for Israel.
Rep. Jake Auchincloss, also of Massachusetts, voted for the bill, but said it “should not impair the state of Israel’s right to defend itself against the atrocities of the terrorist regimes that threaten it.”
Both Auchincloss and Moulton pointed out the bill’s flaws, among them that it would deny Israel purely defensive weapons systems, as well as humanitarian aid that also serves Palestinians.
But if Israel’s sensible supporters can, once the current agreement expires, put one in place that allows for defensive weapons and humanitarian aid, they’ll be on the way to promoting a more effective partnership than that we have now. Doing so could dampen the extremes both here and in Israel. It could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
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