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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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‘Spatial restructuring’ razes hundreds of residences in West Bank refugee camps
The Israel Defense Forces refers to the systematic demolition of hundreds of homes in the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps as “spatial restructuring,” a bureaucratic euphemism for operations designed to create maneuvering space. For years, Israel has used house demolitions in the West Bank as a punitive measure against terrorists, but over the past 18 months, the purpose behind the policy has changed: Israel is now razing homes in order to widen roads inside the camps, which will allow for the easier passage of military vehicles.
The destruction is part of a trend whereby Israel is importing combat tactics it has used in the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to the occupied West Bank. The main difference is the Israeli settlers — who engaged in persistent efforts to expel Palestinian populations first from Israeli-administered areas of the West Bank, and now from zones under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the IDF distributed thousands of firearms to the settlers, some of whom were recruited as “regional defense soldiers.” As a result, IDF weapons have been used in many of the violent clashes between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. Last month, N12 News reported that the IDF will scale back the number of regional defense soldiers — and that Shin Bet will vet the recruits.
But even without the settlers — looking solely from the perspective of the IDF’s military activity — a significant change is underway. From the IDF’s perspective, the West Bank is turning from a place that is home to millions of Palestinians who are not involved in any hostile activity, into a combat zone. And combat zones can be “restructured” according to the military’s needs, even if that includes the demolition of entire neighborhoods or population transfer.
According to the IDF, the change was actually sparked by the Palestinian side. Even before Oct. 7 2023, the army claims, Palestinian terrorist organizations were setting up battalions — larger fighting units that held training exercises and activities based on an organized military doctrine. In July 2023, the IDF responded by launching Operation Home and Garden in the Jenin refugee camp — the largest Israeli military operation since Defensive Shield in 2002. It was a short, targeted maneuver that lasted just two days.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, the IDF described an uptick in the activity of these battalions, which led, in August 2024, to Operation Summer Camps, during which the army entered the refugee camps in Tulkarm and killed the commander of a local battalion. The same month, as Israel Hayom reporter Amir Ettinger revealed, Israel Katz — then minister of foreign affairs and now minister of defense — made the IDF’s intentions quite clear: “The refugee camps are the root of the evil,” he said during a closed-door meeting with leaders of the Yesha Council. “They are not controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but by Iran. The Jenin refugee camp must be cleared of its residents and dealt with the same way we dealt with the Gaza Strip.”
In January 2025, Katz’s words became reality when the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall. According to figures issued by the military, 208 homes were destroyed in the Jenin refugee camp and 234 in the Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps. The goal was to allow armored Israeli vehicles to move within the camp. Satellite images leave no room for doubt as to the extent of the devastation.
The IDF currently has troops stationed permanently inside the refugee camps and is not allowing the tens of thousands of residents who left to return to their homes. Some Palestinians who were expelled have petitioned to Israel’s High Court of Justice, via the Association of Civil Rights in Israel and attorneys Hila Sharon and Reut Shaer. In February, the IDF told the court that it “does not intend to maintain a permanent presence in the refugee camps and, once the goals of the operation have been fully achieved, the current operation in the camps will be ended.” At the same time, the IDF added that “the necessary operational conditions have not yet been fully met.”
“We are a household of six people, including four children,” says Bassem — not his real name — who lived on the outskirts of the Tulkarm refugee camp and who was expelled around a year ago. “They gave us 10 minutes to leave. And that was that. Since then, we haven’t been home.”
According to Bassem, despite the IDF’s claim that it issues individual permits for residents to visit their homes, his request has been denied. He did manage to get access to the home one time — without permission — in the early hours of the morning. “All of the furniture was broken. The doors were open, there were cats and dogs inside, the trees in the yard had no fruit. Everything was dead. And I regret going to see it. I don’t have any security charges against me and I have committed no crime. Why would they do that to my home? And even if they do give me a permit — there’s no furniture left.”
Bassem and his family now live in rented accommodation. The financial assistance they got earlier is dwindling and he cannot see any kind of future. “UNRWA gave us some money at the start and a few cartons of oil, rice and things like that. Now, 80% of the aid has ended. In my opinion, there’s not even a 1% chance we’ll ever get back to our home.”
Delivering a message
“Spatial restructuring” is not a new concept, but, in the West Bank, its meaning has changed. In the past, it mainly referred to roadblocks designed to control the movement of Palestinian and Israeli vehicles and to allow the Israeli authorities to impose a military closure at will. In the past year it has taken on a new significance: the destruction of Palestinian homes and infrastructure.
For example, in August last year, Maj.-Gen. Avi Bluth, the head of the Central Command, ordered the uprooting of thousands of Palestinian olive trees from an area of about 300 dunams (74 acres) belonging to the village of Al-Mughayyir, following a shooting attack in which a Jewish Israeli was lightly wounded. “Every village and every enemy must know that if they carry out an attack against the [Israeli] residents, they will pay a heavy price. They will experience a curfew, they will experience a siege, and they will experience restructuring operations,” Bluth said. “We are now bearing down on this village, which has been responsible for quite a few attacks lately. We will also deliver this message to the village.”
Similar measures were also taken after the terror attack in May 2025 in which 30-year-old Tzeela Gez was shot dead while on her way to the maternity hospital to give birth. The IDF demolished homes in the adjacent village of Burkin overlooking Route 446 — including a four-story apartment block.
Another indication of the change in the IDF’s approach is the increase in the number of Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank since Oct. 7. According to data released by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 478 and 474 Palestinians were killed by IDF fire in 2023 and 2024 respectively. In 2025, that figure dropped to 221. These have been by far the most deadly years for Palestinians in the West Bank since the early 2000s, at the height of the second intifada. Figures issued by the IDF’s Central Command show a similar trend.
One of the reasons for this increase is the order issued by Bluth — which was revealed last year by Haaretz — that expanded open-fire orders in the West Bank. Here, too, the IDF is importing its operating tactics from the Gaza Strip. The instructions appear to reflect a broader change in the IDF’s combat doctrine, possibly influenced by the fact that many of its soldiers also fought in Gaza.
“A lot of things have changed,” says Meir — not his real name — an officer in the reserves who served for many months in the West Bank before and after Oct. 7. “I’m not sure whether this is something imported from another region, or rather that the security reality has simply changed. Once October 7 happened, it was understood that we can no longer just take it. So, we’re beefing up security: adding posts, bringing back patrols — every patrol that was ever cut has been brought back and every patrol that never existed before has been added.”
Meir claims that the rules of engagement have not been changed and insists that “no one is firing indiscriminately.” At the same time, he adds: “It’s true that there was an understanding that we have to respond more forcefully. Before October 7, people were less eager to use firearms; afterwards, the IDF suddenly remembered that you can’t fight terrorism with the foul odor of tear gas. We are given weapons so that we can use them. When there was a need — we used them. There was a long period of time when we were afraid to shoot, when even shooting in the air would mean that all hell broke loose. You shoot your gun — that’s what it’s for. We don’t walk around with our weapons slung over our shoulders just because it looks good.”
Meir also believes that the change is primarily a response to Palestinian terror. “The Palestinians responded very strongly to October 7. There were Hamas flags, rallies — even violence. It was something out of the ordinary. So, we used the means at our disposal to quiet it down. The Palestinians did things we hadn’t seen before — three armed men tried to infiltrate Adora [a settlement northwest of Hebron], for example, and there were bomb-making factories. We found crazy amounts of terrorist infrastructure.”
‘There’s a problem here. We’ll pay the price’
Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Gadi Shamni, a former Central Command chief, sees things differently. “It’s all a question of proportionality,” he tells Shomrim. “There has been a significant increase in the threat level — a lot of underbelly IEDs and all of that organization [of Palestinian battalions]. That said, October 7 and everything that’s happened since, along with the footage coming out of Gaza, ultimately mean that in a lot of places [the IDF] is sometimes using a ton of force — more than is always necessary. There are some sensitivities which, in the past, [the IDF] treated very seriously. Today, those sensitivities have disappeared — and that’s not a good thing.”
“I have spoken to soldiers and officers, young and old, who used to see things very differently,” Shamni adds. “Today, what they say is: ‘Take no chances — shoot at everything.’ This is a problematic approach and the IDF, at some stage, will have to take control of the situation — because we will end up paying a price. Once, officers dealt with these sensitivities, they briefed their soldiers on how to treat civilians, how to behave in sensitive areas. Today, the lower-ranking soldiers are unaware of any of this, because nobody talks to them. Everything is black or white. There’s no middle ground. And that’s a problem when you’re operating in a civilian environment.”
“[The principle of] proportionality has vanished,” he adds. “When you talk about proportionality, you are told, ‘Now’s the time to kick ass.’ There is also intense pressure from the settlements, the government, from [ministers] Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Ultimately, the IDF carries out the government’s policies. You can see what Smotrich is doing on the ground and it is incumbent on the IDF to execute those policies. We have a problem here.”
IDF: Freedom of action remains a necessary condition for regional security
The IDF submitted the following response: “The intensive efforts of the IDF to thwart terrorism in Judea and Samaria began before the outbreak of the war. Terrorist infrastructure developed in the refugee camps of the northern Samaria region, from which attacks were launched. In light of this, the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall in January 2025, during which operational and engineering activities were carried out to enable freedom of action for security forces, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent terrorist organizations from establishing a presence.
“In addition to these operational activities, there has been a decrease of about 80% in the volume of terror attacks in northern Samaria recently. Most of the measures implemented during the operation, including the clearing of access routes and other engineering work, were also reviewed by the Supreme Court in response to petitions that were subsequently dismissed following the submission of a formal response and a hearing attended by all parties.
“Vegetation clearing is carried out according to established protocols, with the approval of relevant authorities in Central Command and based on operational requirements. These measures are designed to ensure the safety of road users, protect travel routes and prevent infiltrations and terrorist attacks. Every operation is preceded by a professional assessment. The IDF operates in accordance with the law and its decisions are subject to judicial review. Security forces act against structures built without authorization, prioritizing enforcement against illegal construction near roads that poses a security risk. Such enforcement actions are carried out under the planning and building laws applicable in the region.
“IDF forces continue to operate throughout Judea and Samaria, focusing on targeted counterterrorism efforts to ensure the safety of citizens. The freedom of action maintained by the IDF in terrorist hubs across northern Samaria remains a necessary condition for regional security.”
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Whether it’s viral dot cakes or Love Shack Fancy skirts, Chloe Hechter wants you to know that “Jewish-American Princesses did it first”
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Butterfield Market currently boasts hour-long lines for the viral “dot cakes,” which are entirely covered by tiny sprinkles. For influencer Chloe Hechter, however, these cakes are nothing new — she saw them at every college bed party, birthday and Bat Mitzvah she ever went to.
“Jewish-American Princesses did it first,” she claimed in a recent Tiktok.
Hechter, who is 25, regularly receives thousands of likes on her content which is centered around relatable modern Jewish experiences: summer relationships at Jewish summer camp, drama within Jewish sororities, coming home from college for Passover seder. She’s described her mission as reclaiming the “Jewish-American Princess” stereotype, which often brings to mind a girl who is spoiled, materialistic and boy-obsessed. Hechter hopes to present a different narrative.
“Jewish American Princess means a headstrong, confident Jewish woman who knows what she’s worth,” Hechter wrote in a February Substack post. “A girl who knows her place in the world as a woman and as a Jew, and who isn’t afraid to be exactly who she is in those spaces.”
The modern-day stereotype of a “Jewish-American Princess” is known for a dress code of sweat sets from Free City or Aviator Nation, Roller Rabbit pajamas and ruffly skirts from Love Shack Fancy. Before that, as Jamie Lauren Keiles discussed in a 2018 Vox article, the “JAP” uniform included Juicy tracksuits in the 2000s, Calvin Klein jeans in the ‘80s and cashmere sweaters in the ‘50s. But, as the ‘princess’ moniker suggests, these looks have always come at a price (Free City sweatpants currently retail for $168).
Keiles explains that JAPs’ historic reputation for dependence on “daddy’s money” stems from Jewish men in the 1950s, still seen by many as nouveau riche, who sought someone to blame. The Jewish-American Princess was encapsulated, Keiles writes, in Goodbye, Columbus’ Brenda Patimkin, who, though educated and beautiful, is also characterized as vain, demanding and uncompromising. It is this kind of portrayal that Hechter hopes to challenge. Though she acknowledges her own privileged background, she also argues that privilege doesn’t necessarily mean out-of-touch.
Hechter’s upbringing was “a gift I’ve been given,” she said. Although she didn’t discuss her background in detail, Hechter expressed her admiration for her parents, who run their own businesses and worked hard to make sure that she grew up in comfort. As opposed to the stereotypical Jewish-American princess, searching for a wealthy husband to provide for her, Hechter said that she uses her background as motivation to be self-sufficient — and as inspiration for her content.
Hechter started out as a child actor, and later went to high school at LaGuardia, the famed performing arts school in New York. At heart, though, she says she was also a writer. Even from a young age, she told me, she would write down funny or ridiculous situations she observed. For a Reform Jewish girl going to New York City private school, there was a lot of material — particularly during B’nei Mitzvah season.
“I’d be like ‘why am I in a party bus to a country club?,’” she joked.
For Hechter, Jewish experiences like these — along with her summers at sleepaway camp — were primarily cultural as opposed to religious. She observed the major holidays, but didn’t go to services regularly; she found the teachings of the Torah interesting but didn’t follow them to the letter.
After she graduated from Syracuse, Hechter began posting skits, which eventually began to go viral. Her first big video, currently at over 660,000 likes, was themed around getting ready for a camp social. In an interview with her college newspaper, she joked that she “would’ve put on makeup” if she had anticipated the video’s success.
Inspired that social media could be her calling, Hechter initially pushed herself to post five times a day, a pace that now seems inconceivable to her. It paid off, though; Hechter currently boasts over 186,000 followers on TikTok and 79,000 on Instagram.
In her videos, Hechter is dedicated to representing a version of her Jewish experience that is rarely shown on screen. Most Jewish characters in film, she says, tend to follow a limited set of archetypes: they’re deeply religious, there’s a depressing undertone or, like Shoshanna Shapiro from Girls, their religion isn’t discussed. When a funny, secular Jew appears on screen, he’s almost always a man.
“I love Adam Sandler and Larry David as much as the next girl, but I wish growing up that I had a cool, fun Jewish girl to look up to,” Hechter said.
Hechter explained that many of her skits draw from experiences she observed on the outskirts; as she tells it, she went to camp but wasn’t the mean girl, she attended lavish Bat Mitzvahs but didn’t have a party of her own, she was in a Jewish sorority but wasn’t super involved. Still, her characters are immediately recognizable.
“People either are experiencing these things firsthand and are like ‘oh my god, this is so me,’” she said. “Or they see it and they make fun of it, like ‘oh my god, this is so my daughter. Oh my god, this is so the people in my sorority.’”
Hannah Wiener, a high school senior from Oceanside, Long Island, is a longtime fan of Hechter. For Hanukkah one year, her sister gifted her a personalized Cameo video in which Hechter talked about their similarities and common interests.
Wiener said that she loves Hechter’s content because she finds it relatable. There are a lot of influencers who make similar videos about Jewish life, but Wiener feels like they make fun of it, rather than treat it “as a normal event like Chloe does.” For Wiener, who went to sleepaway camp herself, Hechter’s camp videos are her favorite. She said that she finds them “to be so funny and also just so heartwarming.”
Middle and high schoolers make up a large proportion of Hechter’s audience — she told me that summer “camp girls”, like Wiener, are her biggest fans. Hechter believes her younger self would have been one of them.
“I genuinely think I would have been my own favorite creator,” she said.
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The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
A war that began with immense ambition has ended with profound setbacks for both the United States and Israel.
With an emerging U.S.-Iran peace agreement, what initially appeared to be a historic demonstration of military dominance evolved into a vivid illustration of the limits of both Israeli and American power. The conflict also exposed profound failures in strategic competence within that alliance. Washington and Jerusalem planned effectively for the initial decapitation strikes, but were unprepared for the economic and geopolitical consequences that followed.
The result is a war that may ultimately strengthen the Iranian regime politically, despite the damage it suffered militarily; has weakened international perceptions of American military might; and has diminished both Israel’s own strategic circumstances and its most important alliance.
The opening phase of the war appeared spectacularly successful. Israeli intelligence and airpower decapitated large portions of Iran’s military and security leadership with astonishing speed, including by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Key military infrastructure suffered major damage, and for a brief moment, it seemed plausible that the Iranian regime might genuinely face collapse or surrender on terms dictated by Washington and Jerusalem.
That perception proved short-lived.
Iran shifted the battlefield away from conventional military confrontation and toward economic coercion. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the extraordinary vulnerability of the global economy to relatively inexpensive forms of pressure. Energy markets panicked almost immediately. Governments across Europe, Asia, and the Gulf pushed urgently for de-escalation.
The central strategic reality became impossible to ignore: the U.S.could not tolerate sustained economic disruption, and the Iranian regime has a strong stomach for suffering. The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. and Israel effectively ceased to matter.
That asymmetry changed the balance of the conflict. And the resulting agreement appears to preserve much of Iran’s architecture of mischief, which the regime’s many critics had hoped to see dismantled.
Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been harmed but can be rebuilt; long-term reductions to that firepower are reportedly not on the table in a planned 60-day negotiation. The regime’s regional proxy network — including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad — survives, even though Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered.
And as Israel is not a party to the ceasefire, it cannot advocate for more stringent terms on this front.
The regime itself remains firmly in power and may receive enormous sanctions relief and renewed economic access. Demands for democratic reforms seem to have been set aside, as has any kind of punishment for the regime’s massacre of thousands — and by some reports tens of thousands — of domestic protestors in January.
The latter aspect is especially galling given that President Donald Trump was driven to intervene because of the January massacre, after he promised Iranians that “help is on its way.” Upon launching the war, he declared that it would enable Iranians to “take your country back.”
Ironically, Trump in his first term pulled out of former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal over objections that it provided funds for the regime while allowing it to run riot. Now, he is settling for an effective reconstitution of that deal — except one with substantially less American leverage.
The implications extend far beyond Iran itself. The war demonstrated that Tehran can generate immediate global economic panic through relatively cheap tools and can leverage that panic into diplomatic concessions. Before the war, fears about Iran’s ability to blackmail the world economy remained somewhat theoretical. After the war, those fears became a demonstrated geopolitical reality.
There is little evidence that either the American or Israeli governments understood in advance the degree to which the global economy had become vulnerable to this form of coercion. This, even though the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was completely predictable and indeed expected by every strategist I’ve spoken to for decades.
This outcome may be most devastating for the Iranian people themselves. Many Iranians who despise the regime interpreted the opening phase of the conflict as evidence that the dictatorship might finally face genuine collapse. Instead, the regime not only survived but also regained leverage. The machinery of repression remains intact.
But this result is damaging for every party to this war aside from the Iranian regime.
The war has transformed perceptions of American power. For decades, the U.S. has anchored a global system built on the assumption that Washington could manage regional crises with some strategy in mind. That strategy wasn’t always brilliant, but it was rarely clueless. With the Hormuz confrontation, the world watched the U.S. confront a regional adversary with vastly inferior capabilities and fail to control events.
For Israel, the alliance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years cultivating with the American right and with Trump personally has become dangerously fragile. As pressure mounted to stabilize energy markets and prevent wider regional escalation, Trump increasingly presented himself not as a partner coordinating with Israel but as a superior authority managing Israeli actions. He repeatedly framed Israeli military action as dependent on his approval. He cursed Netanyahu in public. He presented Israel as a vassal doing his bidding — something no U.S. president has previously done.
This will destabilize Israel, where much of the governing right previously viewed Trump as a uniquely reliable ally who would support Israeli military objectives without hesitation or conditions.
Previous American presidents pressured Israel privately while still preserving the outward presentation of a relationship between sovereign allies. Trump discarded much of that convention. The new perception weakens Israel’s deterrence dramatically. Plus, with bipartisan support for Israel in Washington even more completely collapsed than after the deleterious war in Gaza, and relations with much of Europe — Israel’s top trading partner — similarly deteriorated, Israel finds itself at a new peak of dangerous international isolation.
This strategic shipwreck bears no resemblance to the sweeping regional transformation that supporters of the war — myself included — initially envisioned. I assumed, partly because of the first days’ successes, that Trump and Netanyahu had a plan. This is not a mistake serious people are likely to make again.
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