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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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California lawmakers pass bills to address antisemitism, deem ‘Jewish’ an ethnicity, and protect religious observance
(JTA) — California is poised to become the first state to deem “Jewish” an ethnic and racial identity, after lawmakers gave final approval to the groundbreaking legislation on Monday.
The SB 1387 bill, which would expand the definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” in demographic data collection, will now head to the governor’s desk. If the legislation becomes law, state agency forms that allow for voluntary disclosures of ethnicity or race would also need to offer a “Jewish” option.
Both the State Assembly and Senate granted final approval to the bill in the last few hours of California’s 2026 legislative session, which concludes at the end of the day on Monday. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has until Sept. 30 to sign bills into laws or veto them.
The SB 1387 ethnicity legislation has been a priority among many California Jewish organizations, who argue that Jewish peoplehood should be connected to much more than just religion — and that the law should reflect that understanding.
This bill, which would take effect in 2030, would affect forms issued by agencies ranging from public schools to unemployment offices to prisons. Data collected would serve to inform research initiatives, identify disparities and guide policy decisions, while banning the disclosure of personal information, per the bill.
Joining SB 1387 in heading to the governor’s desk are five other bills that are relevant to the state’s 1.2 million Jews and that had the support of the Jewish California coalition.
On Sunday, the legislature passed AB 1853, a bill that bars threatening false and misleading information from California voter guides. Jewish California, which represents 43 organizations, praised the legislation’s advancement, stressing that 54 Jewish groups voiced their support for the bill within 48 hours of its introduction.
“Hate speech does not belong in a state-approved document paid by tax dollars,” David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, said in a statement.
“AB 1853 boldly declares that our state’s official election documents can’t be used to spread conspiracy theories and bigotry,” added Bocarsly, whose coalition was not only a sponsor of this bill but also of SB 1387.
Also on Sunday, lawmakers approved AB 2664, the Safe Worship Zone Act, which would create a 100-foot zone around the entrances of houses of worship, where no one would be able to come within 8 feet of a congregant without their consent.
The bill, which received the backing of a wide-ranging interfaith coalition, is modeled after Colorado’s bubble zone law that offers patients protection around reproductive health clinics.
“The rise of antisemitism is undeniable, and our communities must be protected,” Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s author, said in a statement.
“AB 2664 gives communities an important tool to push back against harassment and intimidation and protect the sanctity of our houses of worship,” Bauer-Kahan added.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, the legislature approved AB 395, which would require government agencies, K-12 schools and public universities to avoid scheduling major events or meetings on days “that members of the public would be unable to participate or be present due to the ritual observance of a religious, cultural, or ancestral holiday.”
Among the Jewish observances that would be codified on a list of such holidays are Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the first and last two days of Passover.
“For too long and in too many communities, religious minorities and other people of faith have been asked to make difficult choices on the days that matter most to them,” Democratic Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, the bill’s author, said in a statement.
“This legislation would help to prevent that injustice and ensure that Californians of all backgrounds can fully participate, particularly when important decisions are being made,” added Gabriel, who chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
Lawmakers on Thursday also approved another Gabriel bill, AB 1836, which seeks to close a gap in the current structure of the California State Nonprofit Security Grant Program. Because the program allocates security funds only for a nonprofit’s physical building, off-site events like menorah lightings on Chanukah were not eligible.
A fifth bill relevant to the Jewish community, AB 1763, is also heading to Newsom’s desk, after passing in the legislature last Tuesday. This bill would include religious holiday observance as a type of excused absence in schools, without requiring a written request from a parent or guardian.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Massachusetts progressive Markey, a longtime Israel critic, expected to rout centrist challenger
(JTA) — Massachusetts incumbent and Israel critic Sen. Ed Markey, 80, is expected to handily fend off the more moderate 47-year-old Rep. Seth Moulton on Tuesday, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.
Although polls project that Markey, a progressive stalwart, will retain his seat, this race began as a neck-and-neck battle between the old and new guard. Yet in contrast to many recent primaries, the junior candidate in this case is the more centrist of the two.
If current numbers hold, Markey could go from leading Moulton by just single digits two months ago, to trouncing him by 30 percentage points. The incumbent recently “opened a large lead,” with the University of New Hampshire’s Bay State Poll projecting a 63% to 28% victory. That’s a dramatic shift from June, when the survey estimated a 41% to 35% margin. Since then, according to Bay State, Moulton lost moderate support while Markey consolidated socialist and progressive backing.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst offered similar predictions, placing Markey far ahead of his competitor, 60% to 32%. Emerson College Polling, meanwhile, showed a comparable lead for Markey, with the incumbent at 60% and Moulton at 33%.
“At the end of the day, one of the reasons for Moulton’s flame-out is that he had no case to make other than ‘I’m younger than Ed Markey,’” Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Senate investigative counsel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“He wasn’t able to obscure that very well,” added Robbins, who also served as delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission under President Bill Clinton. He also began organizing rallies in support of Israel in 2012, during his time serving as chairman of the New England Board of the Anti-Defamation League.
Markey began serving in the U.S. House of Representatives 50 years ago, staying in that role until he was elected to the Senate in 2013. During his time in the House, he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and in the Senate, he has voted for multiple resolutions aimed at cutting military aid and munitions sales to Israel.
Moulton, meanwhile, was born two years after Markey arrived on Capitol Hill. He has been serving in the U.S. House since 2015 and has been critical of both the Democratic socialist agenda and the aging establishment, instead calling for “new energy, new ideas and leaders willing to put people over politics.”
He established the Serve America PAC in 2017 to support the campaigns of “military veterans, other service-driven candidates and next generation leaders” in the 2020 election cycle. The Boston Globe recently threw its support behind Moulton, calling for “new vision and vigor” in “an aging, ailing and deeply unpopular Democratic Party.”
Yet a recent New York Times piece described Moulton as a “rebel without a cause,” who has “tried to drift where he thinks the political winds are blowing.” One such drift relates to his breakup with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last October, when he announced that he would be “returning AIPAC donations and refusing to accept any donations or support from them.”
“In recent years AIPAC has aligned itself too closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government,” Moulton said. “I’m a friend of Israel, but not of its current government.”
Track AIPAC, a group that documents political spending by pro-Israel lobbies, declared in response that “returning AIPAC’s blood money is better late than never.” The group demanded that Moulton call the war in Gaza a genocide and “stop writing blank checks” to Israel’s “tyrannical regime.”
Citing Federal Election Commission records, Track AIPAC found that pro-Israel PACs have spent about $101,500 on Moulton over his career — a relatively modest amount for a six-term congressman..
“It is clearly the safe thing to do, if you are running for a nomination in the Democratic Party, to aggressively distance yourself from Israel,” said Robbins.
He described the situation as “reflective of the reality that we have seen play out in spades over the last year,” in which Democratic candidates are “running for the hills about AIPAC and treating it as a boogeyman.”
Not only was Moulton’s decision insufficient to recruit AIPAC detractors to his campaign, but it also rattled many members of the Jewish community.
Political scientist Samuel Abrams at the time described the decision as “the moment when an ambitious, mainstream Democrat concluded that distancing himself from the organized Jewish community is a political asset, not a liability.”
“In today’s Democratic ecosystem, the act of rejecting traditional Jewish institutions has become a badge of progressive credibility,” wrote Abrams, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right public policy think tank.
David Frum, a writer for The Atlantic and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, suggested that Moulton was “opening the door *just a little* to anti-Jewish feeling,” In other words, Moulton would seek to win his primary by borrowing some “Mamdani energy,” Frum added, referring to the popular progressive mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani.
“If you want to have a prayer of being elected in a Democratic primary in this country, you had better be able to say, ‘I don’t take money from AIPAC. In fact, I never heard of it before,’” Robbins said.
But he stressed Moulton’s 30-point lag in the polls has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with his opponent’s political shrewdness and refusal to allow anyone “to run to the left of him.”
Markey is not new to staving off a younger, center-left candidate. In 2020, at 74, he defeated the then-39-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy III — marking the first loss for a Kennedy in a Massachusetts election, according to the Cook Political Report.
If the current polls prove accurate, Tuesday’s race could “mirror Markey’s successful ‘peak-late’ approach to winning in 2020,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said in a statement. “Younger voters appear more likely than older voters to support Markey, suggesting the campaign did not create the generational divide Moulton may have anticipated.”
As for Moulton’s relationship toward American Jews, he has historically denounced hate crimes and voted for resolutions on antisemitism. He also condemned Claudine Gay, former president of his alma mater, Harvard University, when she refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the institution’s code of conduct.
Prior to his rejection of AIPAC money, Moulton’s stance on Israel was fairly balanced, with consistent messages on Israel’s right to defend itself, alongside criticisms of the country’s military operations in Gaza and calls for expansions of humanitarian aid.
Moulton’s objections have paled in comparison to Markey’s stance, which has ranged from demanding an end to arms sales to accusing the country of committing war crimes.
Markey did condemn Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel as terrorism, continuing to deplore the “dark day” as “heinous” in a statement two years later. But in that same statement, he also stressed that “more than 65,000 Palestinians have lost their lives in the brutality of the war in Gaza” and called “to stop the bloodshed.”
However, the senator didn’t always disapprove of Israel.
“For a long time he was right there with the Jewish community,” Barry Shrage, a professor of practice at Brandeis University and the longtime former president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, told JTA.
In fact, Shrage and Robbins recalled in a recent Boston Herald column that during a November 2012 Hamas-Israel conflict, Markey asked them to help him organize a pro-Israel rally. The event, they wrote, was “full of appreciation for the fundamental fact that Israel is surrounded by non-state and state actors committed to annihilating it.”
But less than two years later, the tides had turned. After winning a 2013 special election to serve out the remainder of John Kerry’s Senate term, Markey then faced a general election in 2014 for a full Senate term. That summer, Hamas rockets rained down on Israel again, and the military responded to the attacks, as it did in November 2012.
Robbins said that when he and his colleagues decided to organize another rally in support of Israel at the time, he reached out to Markey.
“He ducks. He dodges. He doesn’t return the phone calls. He doesn’t return the emails,” Robbins recalled. “He had calculated correctly that it was not in his interest to have anything to do with Israel anymore.”
Shrage echoed these sentiments, observing that “it turned out to be at least from a political standpoint, if not from a moral standpoint, the right path.”
“It’s not a surprise that Markey is separating himself from Israel in every way that he can,” he added.
Looking toward the future, Shrage said that he had some hope for a turnaround on Israel in the Democratic party if, perhaps, a recent progressive primary winner lost against a Republican in the general election. Some possible examples could include Senate candidates Angie Nixon in Florida or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
While Robbins agreed that a loss for El-Sayed could give a slight bump to Democratic supporters of Israel, he was pessimistic about the long-term ability to reverse the party’s increasing hostility toward the Jewish state.
“The only conceivable trigger for a walking back of this trend would be some massacre of Israelis so terrible that even the left would have to concede that Israel had the right to do what it did,” Robbins said.
“The problem with that is, it’s already occurred,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘Jews.com’ is posted on billboards across NYC — meet the Messianic Jewish preacher putting them up
Billboards have been popping up around New York City, with a simple, if cryptic, message: Jews.com. There are several across from the Barclay’s Center in downtown Brooklyn. There’s one on the Upper East Side. Another looms over a highway.
If you visit the site, however, you won’t find information about Judaism, at least not as Jews understand it. Instead, you’ll find videos of a man named Kirt Schneider. And he’s talking about Jesus.
Schneider is a Messianic Jewish self-proclaimed rabbi — though, when we spoke on the phone about the billboard campaign, he did note that he had not been ordained, nor had he gone to yeshiva. “I realize the Orthodox community wouldn’t understand me as a rabbi,” he said.
Schneider’s mission with the site and billboard campaign — which he said was inspired by a vision he had while sleeping — is to introduce Jews to “to simply look at the evidence” that Jesus is the Jewish messiah, he said.
Most of Schneider’s sermons and writings on Jews.com talk about prophecies throughout the Hebrew Bible that he — along with most Christians — believe prove that Jesus is the messiah. Jesus, Schneider pointed out, was a Jew as were his early followers; he said this means there is no conflict between being a Jew and a Christian.
“What I’m wanting to do is shed the veil and the misinformation over the Jewish people that’s been placed upon them by almost 2,000 years of rabbinic tradition and to help them see through at least some of that,” Schneider told me. “I love my rabbis, but I think there’s been a coverup in the sense that rabbis have tried to prevent the Jewish people from taking a serious look at Jesus. I believe that Jesus is the Jewish messiah.”
But, of course, for centuries now, one of the main differences between Judaism and Christianity — arguably the defining difference — is that Jews do not believe that Jesus is the messiah, and Christians do. And that difference of opinion has driven centuries of antisemitic persecution of Jews, who Christians have accused of killing Jesus, going against God and taking part in a demonic cult by continuing to practice Judaism. Jews, for their part, often see proselytizing as disrespectful and harmful; every Jewish denomination as well as many major groups reject Messianic Judaism as a form of Judaism, and most scholars consider it a form of Protestant Christianity.
A vision of billboards
This is not the first time Schneider has attempted to bring Jews to Jesus; he runs a TV show on Christian cable networks called Discovering the Jewish Jesus, and has radio shows on the same topic — success that has made him a millionaire, thanks in part to donations from believers. He even blessed Donald Trump as part of a group of evangelical pastors and televangelists.
This is not even Schneider’s first billboard campaign targeting Jews; he ran billboards in Times Square in 2019 advertising a different website, theJewishJesus.com, also attempting to bring Jews to Jesus. (Schneider would not answer how he paid for these expensive billboard placements beyond saying that he had been “very successful” in his career.)
Schneider was raised as a secular Jew, and was bar mitzvahed at a Conservative synagogue in Cleveland, Ohio. However, in his early adult years, while working as an encyclopedia salesman — in a story he has written about online and repeated almost verbatim to me over the phone — he had a vision of Jesus on the cross while asleep, or, as he put it, in a “supernatural state of conscious awareness.”
From then on, despite the best efforts of his family, he became a follower of Jesus.. (The billboard campaign, he told me, was also the result of a vision.) Schneider just does not consider following Jesus to make him any less Jewish, because Judaism, to him, is purely carried by blood, not belief.
“A Jew is someone who is born a physical descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You can be a Jew and be an atheist and still be considered a Jew, you can be agnostic and still be considered a Jew,” he said. “The only Jews that aren’t considered Jews are the Jews who believe in Jesus,” something he said was “very sad.”
This is why Schneider said he does not refer to himself as a Christian; the term, he said, comes from the Greek word for messiah. He wants to emphasize his belief that Jesus is specifically the Jewish messiah through avoiding Greek in favor of Hebrew terms like “moshiach.”
“A Christian is someone who is not born a Christian, technically, a Christian is someone who makes the decision to follow the Christ. I am a Jew, and I believe in the Jewish messiah,” he said. “And if you want to use the Greek, then I’m a Christian.”
Schneider’s sermons and writings on jews.com are similarly peppered with small bits of Hebrew: He refers to God as “Hashem” and Jesus as “Yeshua,” the Hebrew form of the name, both of which are common practices in groups Messianic Jewish groups including Jews for Jesus. In some videos — though not those on jews.com — he sports peyot (sans kippah) and a tallis, as though he is Hasidic, all choices he makes, he said, as a way to “incorporate his Jewish identity” into his discussions of Jesus.
But aside from those aesthetic markers, Schneider makes little mention in the videos on the site of the usual Jewish practices, like keeping kosher or observing Shabbat, and instead focuses on Jesus. And though he may prefer not to call himself a Christian, he did attend a Christian Bible college where he met his wife and even preached in “mainline” Protestant Christian churches in 1985, before becoming a salesman for several decades. He founded his current ministry, Discovering the Jewish Jesus, in 2002.
Bringing ‘Messiah Yeshua’ to Jews
Messianic Jewish organizations have long sought to convert Jews to Christianity, and have incorporated markers of observant Judaism as a strategy to attract Jews to the fold — one of the reasons various Jewish organizations have sometimes labeled Messianic Judaism a form of antisemitism and fraud, arguing that by representing themselves as Jews, they confuse people into attending their services or believing they speak on behalf of the larger Jewish community.
Schneider is taking a page out of the proselytizing playbook beyond his aesthetic and linguistic choices; his jews.com billboards are placed in the New York City area. And outside of Tel Aviv, he has a Hebrew language campaign with billboards asking passersby, in Hebrew, “What if he was right?” There’s a matching website for that campaign, too, also in Hebrew.
On the main website of his ministry — where monthly donors are promised a shofar made in Israel — there is a page about “Jewish outreach” that states “God has placed a specific burden on Rabbi Schneider to lovingly, directly, and faithfully bring the truth of Messiah Yeshua to Jewish people,” and create a “spiritual harvest among Jewish people.” The billboards concentrated in the heavily Jewish areas of Tel Aviv and New York City, are Schneider’s attempts to do just that.
“This thing is going to blow up,” he said of his attempts to bring Jews to Jesus, “and nothing’s going to be able to stop it.”
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