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Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians
(JTA) — When Rep. Rashida Tlaib joined a Zoom with 40 teenagers, she soon found herself talking about the kinds of topics — academic and otherwise — that tend to take up their days.
There was discussion of the stress of AP exams, embarrassing dads and social media memes. She showed them pictures on Instagram of her dog at the U.S. Capitol. Everyone was on a first-name basis.
“My son is a [high school] junior,” she said, responding to a message in the Zoom chat from one of the teen participants. “Oh my God, the SAT — I was stressed out. I’m stressed because he’s stressed. He had to take all his AP exams and stuff.”
Tlaib got personal too — talking about her grandmother, with whom she last spoke on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
But the conversation also turned to a question many of the teens had encountered at high school, camp, youth groups or elsewhere in their lives: Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?
As the only Palestinian-American in Congress — and perhaps the chamber’s most prominent anti-Zionist — Tlaib was in a unique position to answer. And the students on the call had a particular interest in the question as well: They were all Jewish.
The teens are all participants in a new initiative, launched last year, to expose young American Jews to Palestinian voices through video chats. Founded by Ezra Beinart, a junior at a Jewish day school in New York City, the project’s goal is to bring Palestinian perspectives to a demographic that, he says, sorely lacks them.
“I live in a very Jewish community and most of the people around me are very educated on the Israeli perspective, but not as knowledgeable about the Palestinian side,” Beinart said in an interview. “And that’s why I decided to create the group to inform young Jews about the other side of the story, which I don’t think most Jewish students know much about.”
In her response to the question about antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Tlaib again turned to her grandmother, Muftieh, whom she refers to with the Arabic term “Sity” and whom she has portrayed as the face of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. She said people were “weaponizing antisemitism” in order to chill criticism of Israel.
“My grandmother, literally solely based on the fact that she was born Palestinian, she just doesn’t have equality,” Tlaib told the teens. “Her life would be completely different if that wasn’t the case. And so, you know, for me criticizing that, if anything, is more chipping away at this form of government that does that to my Sity.”
Michigan House Rep. Rashida Tlaib speaks on stage at a concert in Detroit, July 16, 2022. (Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images)
Beinart said he wants to increase opportunities for Jewish-Palestinian interaction. So he said he has reached out to “very Jewish” communities around the country, through chat groups and progressive synagogues, to get the word out. He started out with just a handful of teens, but his numbers are growing: His session with Tlaib drew 40 viewers.
Such interest comes at a time of political flux in Israel, and as young Jewish adults in the United States view the country less favorably than their elders. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that Jews aged 18-30 were less emotionally attached to Israel than older generations, more skeptical of its efforts toward peace and likelier to support efforts to boycott it. In recent years, activist groups founded by young Jews have pushed institutions such as campus Hillels and the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah network to be more inclusive of Palestinian or anti-Zionist perspectives.
The initiative’s format has speakers introduce themselves for five minutes or so and then take questions, which Beinart selects, for another 30 minutes. It has held about half a dozen sessions with speakers like Ayman Mohyeldin, a journalist at MSNBC, and Amahl Bishara, a professor at Tufts University. Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, is its most prominent guest so far. (Her office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or for comment.)
Beinart wanted his peers to have their minds opened, as he said his was when he interned last summer at the Jerusalem Fund, a pro-Palestinian think tank and advocacy organization in Washington D.C. He noticed that a friend of his who worked there used “Palestine” as readily as he used “Israel,” and described to him how fraught traveling to the region was for her, whereas he took his ability to enter the country for granted.
“It made it much more tangible to have friends explain how Israel’s actions affect them in everyday life,” he said. “It’s different from just reading about it or seeing a video.”
If Beinart’s name is familiar, it’s because his father is Peter Beinart, the writer who was once an outspoken advocate for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and now is a prominent Jewish voice supporting a single, binational Israeli-Palestinian state. The elder Beinart declined to comment for this article, as the initiative is his son’s project rather than his. But for a decade, Peter Beinart has been making the case that American Jews need to spend more time listening to Palestinian voices.
Resistance to hearing from Palestinians, the elder Beinart wrote in 2013 in the New York Review of Books, “make[s] the organized American Jewish community a closed intellectual space, isolated from the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives.”
Ezra acknowledges his father’s influence, albeit reluctantly. The first speaker in the series was Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist Ezra met when he accompanied Peter on a West Bank tour.
“Yeah, obviously, but I’m going my own way with it,” Ezra Beinart said, asked about his father’s influence. “I’m connecting Israel-Palestine to what I see going on with my peers, my friends.”
In the Zoom session, Tlaib intuited Ezra’s ambivalence about bringing his father into the conversation, so she trod carefully when she quoted the elder Beinart to make a point.
“Ezra, your dad said something once — I know you don’t want me to mention your dad, you’re like my son,” she said. But she then brought up a quote by Peter Beinart to explain why she had chosen, despite considerable backlash, to host an event in the U.S. Capitol commemorating the Nakba, the word meaning “catastrophe” which Palestinians use to describe their displacement during and after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Peter Beinart’s quote was, “When you tell a people to forget its past, you are not proposing peace, you are proposing extinction.”
Tlaib said, “I used [Beinart’s quote] today when I got interviewed because I love this, but when Peter says it, it’s like okay, look at this is, this is a Jewish American man speaking up about the importance of understanding history.”
After the meeting, Ezra Beinart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he chose questions that reflected the narrative Jewish youth were exposed to in their communities. In addition to discussing anti-Zionism and antisemitism, one question was, “What is your response to those who believe that using the word ‘occupation’ is harmful?” (Avoiding accurate terminology inhibits the advance of peace and human rights, Tlaib said.)
“Jewish people, when they think about Palestinians, they think of terror, most of them,” Beinart said. “So that’s something they should hear about from Palestinians.”
Teaneck, the northern New Jersey suburb that would qualify as a “very Jewish” community by nearly any standard, is where one of the participants, Liora Pelavin, 15, lives. Her mother, who is a rabbi, saw a post about Beinart’s Zoom meetings on Facebook and thought her daughter might be interested.
“Hearing from Palestinians really humanizes them,” Pelavin, who attended a Jewish day school through eighth grade and now goes to a public high school, said in an interview. “It makes me learn and also realize that they all have different opinions, too.”
Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, an organization whose programs include facilitating dialogue between American Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, said any interaction would be welcome.
However, he was concerned that most of the Palestinians Ezra Beinart had selected were political or advocacy leaders, instead of ordinary Palestinians who might be better suited to explain everyday realities to high school students.
“There’s probably a version of a way to do this like Encounter,” a long-running program that brings American Jews to the West Bank for dialogue with Palestinians, “where you are hearing from people and learn their stories, and you are free to come to the political conclusions you want,” Kurtzer said. “But you humanize their experience. That’s one way of doing any of this work. There’s another way to do this work, which is, ‘I want to influence the politics of your own community.’”
Jonathan Kessler — a former senior official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who now leads Heart of a Nation, a group that facilitates dialogue among Jewish American, Palestinian and Israeli teens — said he was aware of Beinart’s initiative, and that it is an example of how Gen Z may be better able to break down barriers than their elders.
“A generation that does not think of gender and sexuality in binary terms is uniquely well positioned to approach a conflict, which has for too long been defined in a binary way,” Kessler said.
Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian political scientist who has spoken to Beinart’s group, said it was particularly important for Palestinian speakers to reach Jewish teens.
“Within the Jewish community, particularly in the organized Jewish community, there may be a lot of pro-Israel perspectives represented and not a whole lot of Palestinian perspectives represented,” he said. “I’m always inspired when I speak to younger people about this issue who have an interest in learning more.”
For Tlaib, it was also a forum where she had expressed views that she hasn’t otherwise voiced publicly — saying that she felt conflicted about evacuating Israeli settlers because they had lived in the West Bank for so long.
“Just the idea around taking families that — that’s been their home — it’s just completely uprooting, forcibly displacing,” Tlaib said. “It’s something I struggle with because, like, we’re doing it all over again, right? This happened during the Nakba.”
Beinart said he and others on the call, including Pelavin, were moved by her sentiments.
“A lot of the Jewish community thinks like, ‘Palestinians hate us, and don’t think we’re people too,’” Pelavin said. “I think that’s so wrong, and being on these calls has just confirmed that for me.”
Ezra Beinart favors a single binational state — Tlaib is the only elected lawmaker who also takes that position — and Pelavin said her views on Israel trended left. But while much of the organized American Jewish community has historically bristled at criticism of Israel, neither teen said that they were made to feel like a pariah in their Jewish milieus.
“They think it’s cool that I do these types of things, but I think a lot of their goal is to just stay away from this topic around me, because they don’t really want to get into an argument about it,” Pelavin said of her peers.
And Beinart said holding a minority viewpoint hasn’t been a problem for him, either. “The kids in my school know who I am,” Ezra Beinart said. “No one’s mean to me. There are kids who share my views — a few, but not many.”
Despite the weighty subject matter, the conversation had an informal, friendly feel. Tlaib also wanted to learn more about the participants, but when she asked what colleges they were planning to attend, no one spoke up — until she noticed answers to her question piling up in the Zoom chat.
“Oh look there — you guys looove the chat!” she said. She then attempted to get her dog to hop on screen, but settled for showing the teens photos.
Ezra Beinart said he was fine with Tlaib’s cooing and kvelling about the college plans.
“I’m not going to pretend that this is a group of well-educated adults,” he said. “This is a group of kids who don’t know about this stuff as well. And that’s why that’s why I’m doing it — it’s not supposed to be for people who are experts, right?”
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The post Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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At the edge of America, six Jewish graves endure
A July 1954 funeral in Fairbanks, Alaska, drew unexpected attention from Jewish newspapers across the country. The woman being buried, Lena Ferguson, was laid to rest in what the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner described simply as the “Jewish plot” inside the city’s Clay Street Cemetery — a small, largely forgotten burial ground that many outside Alaska did not even know existed.
Reports in papers from Florida to Chicago described the “discovery” of what was believed to be the only known Jewish cemetery in the Last Frontier. Some emphasized the unusual circumstances of a Jewish burial in the remote Alaskan interior. Others noted that Ferguson had been married to a non-Jew.
Long before Alaska had a purpose-built synagogue, the Jewish plot at Clay Street had already begun preserving the names of Jews who lived and died in the territory.
The six graves within the plot preserve fragments of a largely forgotten Jewish world built around mining camps, frontier trade, military outposts and isolated immigrant lives. Together, they show how Jewish life appeared in one of the most remote corners of the United States, often before the institutions that sustained it elsewhere.
Ferguson’s funeral itself reflected that improvisational frontier Judaism. According to accounts published at the time, her Jewish identity only became widely known after her brother, Joseph Wishengrad of Catskill, New York, contacted a Fairbanks funeral chapel and requested that she be buried according to Jewish law.
Alaska’s only rabbi, military chaplain Jacob Rubenstein, happened to be away visiting Jewish servicemen stationed at remote military installations. In his absence, Jack Frankel — a former Biloxi, Mississippi, resident working for the United Service Organizations-Jewish Welfare Board — helped officiate the service alongside Robert Bloom, a former Klondike Gold Rush miner who later opened a hardware and general merchandise store in Fairbanks.
Jewish newspapers reported that the cemetery plot had not been used for more than 25 years because many Jews who died in Alaska were sent “to the states” for burial instead.
Before Ferguson, the most recent burial there had been Gussie Beckman in 1939. Born in New York in 1882, Beckman operated the Palace Baths and the Palace Liquor Store on Fourth Avenue in Fairbanks. Her obituary noted that “nothing is known in this city of any surviving relatives.”
Her funeral demonstrated how tenuous Jewish communal life in Alaska could be: a Christian minister, Rev. Rudolph G. Fitz, conducted the service, while Leonard Newman, a University of Alaska mining engineering student from New York City, read the burial prayers. Her pallbearers included future state senator John B. Hall, Deputy Marshal Pat O’Connor and other Fairbanks civic figures.
Other graves preserve similar fragments of frontier life.
Thomas Robin, a Romanian-born immigrant who arrived in Alaska in 1893, was buried in 1923 under the auspices of the Pioneers of Alaska, a fraternal organization founded by early settlers in the territory. His obituary identified him as a member of the Iditarod Igloo chapter.
Julia Warren, buried in 1929, lived near the Mason Creek gold mine and died in an automobile accident alongside three others. Her husband worked as a miner.
Anna Marks, who died in 1915, received a public funeral in Moose Hall, reflecting how civic lodges and fraternal organizations often doubled as gathering places in frontier towns where formal Jewish institutions scarcely existed.
Little survives about David Hurvitz, who died in 1920, beyond a brief bankruptcy notice published years earlier.
And that absence itself forms part of the story. The record preserves only fragments: names, occupations, scattered newspaper clippings and weathered gravestones. Yet together they reveal that Jewish life in Alaska did not begin with synagogues or other organized institutions. It began with individuals — merchants, miners, and immigrants — carrying pieces of Jewish identity into an isolated region where religious infrastructure barely existed.
Alaska’s first purpose-built synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom in Anchorage, would not be dedicated until 1965, more than a decade after Lena Ferguson’s burial and nearly 360 miles south of Fairbanks.
Clay Street Cemetery eventually closed to new burials as Fairbanks shifted to Birch Hill Cemetery after 1938. In 1982, the historic cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Today, Jewish life in Alaska is more visible than it once was. Congregation Or HaTzafon was founded in Fairbanks in 1980, and Chabad established a center there in 2024. The closest active Jewish cemetery is now in Anchorage.
The six graves at Clay Street remain among the earliest surviving records of Jewish life at the edge of America.
The post At the edge of America, six Jewish graves endure appeared first on The Forward.
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Texas candidate’s antisemitic rhetoric sparks outrage ahead of Tuesday runoff. Did it fuel her rise?
(JTA) — When Maureen Galindo finished first in a crowded Democratic primary for a newly redrawn South Texas congressional district in March, the result surprised even seasoned observers of San Antonio politics.
With voters set to decide the Democratic nomination Tuesday, as Galindo faces off with sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia, local officials and political observers are grappling with how a little-known candidate with a history of inflammatory remarks about Israel and Jews has come within striking distance of a seat in Congress.
The local housing activist went into the race with little political profile, having received less than 3% of the vote in a San Antonio City Council race last year. Local officials familiar with the contest chalked up Galindo’s success to a litany of factors, including low voter awareness of the candidates and a newly drawn Republican-leaning district that attracted few high-profile Democratic contenders.
What they did not credit for her success was her antisemitic rhetoric. While the race heading into Tuesday night’s runoff has been defined by scrutiny and criticism of Galindo’s views toward Zionists, local political analysts and activists told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that her controversial positions were not widely known ahead of her March win and, if anything, are hurting her chances against Garcia.
Israel is a growing flashpoint in a number of Democratic primaries across the country, and several candidates have drawn allegations of antisemitism as they employ harsh criticism of Zionism. Galindo’s rhetoric has been even more extreme – including vows to turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists” – but San Antonio political observers caution against lumping her early success in with the recent wins of progressive candidates in urban districts.
Jon Taylor, a political science professor at University of Texas San Antonio, told JTA that Galindo’s antisemitic rhetoric had been largely unknown at the time of the primary.
“What I can tell from previous candidate forums, she talked about the 1%, she talked about going after Trump and ICE,” Taylor said. “None of the stuff on Zionism, from what I could tell, was ever mentioned.”
Now that her antisemitic tirades have received so much attention, Taylor predicted they would turn off voters in the socially conservative district, where elections are usually driven by pocketbook issues.
“To be honest, talking about Israel, talking about some sort of Zionist conspiracy, is not what voters are looking for,” Taylor said.
Galindo has previously told local outlets that it was her “perception that Zionist billionaires run the world” and posted on social media that “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS,” After Texas Senate candidate James Talarico revealed to JTA that he would not back or campaign with Galindo, she told JTA that “coordinated media attacks declaring my anti-Zionist rhetoric as anti-Semitic” were “causing MORE harm to the Jews of San Antonio by playing into all the stigmas that they own the media.”
Galindo, who has raised almost no direct funding for her campaign, has benefitted from an opaque, newly formed Political Action Committee, which Democrats are charging is Republican-backed.
For some Jewish Democrats, the purported GOP-backed funding is evidence that Galindo’s anti-Israel rhetoric is a political liability rather than a strength.
“Republican dark money groups are spending big to elevate anti-Israel Democratic candidates who are out of touch with voters — because they’d rather face a weaker opponent in races that will decide the House majority in November. It’s cynical and it’s disturbing,” the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, Brian Romick, said in a statement to JTA.
Taylor noted that the GOP would only be promoting Galindo because the party wants Democrats “to nominate the worst candidate possible,” backing up the notion that her views are not appealing to voters.
The newly launched Lead Left PAC, which has not disclosed its donors, has spent more than $900,000 on ads and mailers promoting Galindo. Campaign finance watchdogs accuse the group of structuring its activity in a way that allowed it to bypass donor disclosures before voters cast their ballots.
Last week, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing the PAC of having “strategically gamed federal reporting deadlines” in order to not disclose the sources of its funds ahead of the primaries.
The alleged GOP interference in the Texas race also spurred a row between the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Democratic Majority for Israel, which, after it called on Democrats to condemn Galindo, asked the RJC if it would “condemn the Republican Super PACs promoting her?”
The RJC, Texas GOP and Winred – a Republican donation platform that reportedly was at one point linked in the metadata for the website of Lead Left PAC – did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
A local Democratic Party official familiar with the race told JTA in an emailed statement that it was likely voters did not know much about Galindo ahead of the race, but that with “more knowledge and media attention, voters are now much better equipped about their choices.”
The race has unfolded against the backdrop of a major Republican redistricting overhaul. Congressional District 35, where Galindo is competing, was impacted so heavily that the incumbent Rep. Greg Casar is now running for a different seat, while roughly 43% of residents of Bexar Country, which the district partially covers, were placed in a new district, according to the San Antonio Report.
On Wednesday, a host of Texas Democratic Party leaders released a joint statement decrying Galindo’s rhetoric, writing that her comments “do not reflect our values as Democrats or as Texans.”
Casar, who chairs the U.S. House Progressive Caucus and currently represents much of the district, made the unusual move last week of endorsing Garcia, Galindo’s moderate runoff opponent, telling the San Antonio Express-News that Galindo’s “very inappropriate remarks” sealed the deal.
“I’m a progressive Democrat. Johnny has been endorsed by the more conservative Blue Dogs. But we can all agree that he’s the candidate who can win this race,” Casar told the outlet.
Rabbi Mara Nathan, the senior rabbi of Temple Beth El, a Reform congregation in San Antonio, told JTA that she did not think Galindo had drummed up support heading into her campaign from voters over her antisemitic rhetoric, adding that “if that had been the case, we would have heard about it much earlier on.”
She explained, “An alarm would have been sounded pretty early, and not necessarily from Jewish people, but from other people in the San Antonio community who are our friends and allies.”
Looking to Tuesday’s primary, Taylor said he believed the public spotlight on Galindo’s remarks had changed the race by making voters more aware of her record.
“With this animus now out there and highly visible, people are really alerted to the danger of this woman and what her rhetoric could mean,” Taylor said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Texas candidate’s antisemitic rhetoric sparks outrage ahead of Tuesday runoff. Did it fuel her rise? appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening appeared first on The Forward.