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Mayhem at Jewish Federations conference in Tel Aviv as protesters and panelists fight over judiciary and immigration
TEL AVIV (JTA) — A panel at a major American Jewish conference here descended into pandemonium as protesters in the audience shouted down a leading far-right politician.
Panelists also sniped at each other over the government’s controversial attempt to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and its threat to tighten immigration rules.
Security personnel forcibly ejected multiple protesters from the event, which took an unplanned five-minute break to calm the tensions in the room. It was the first reprimand of protesters at a conference whose organizers had made clear they expected them and supported any that did not interfere with the proceedings.
“We wanted very much to include anyone who wanted to be here, to learn and to be part of the conversation. It’s unfortunate it was disrupted so we couldn’t engage in the kind of learning we had hoped for,” Jewish Federations of North America board chair Julie Platt told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the interrupted panel. “It was more than we expected.”
The drama at the event surrounded Simcha Rothman, an Orthodox lawmaker who is one of the architects of, and a vocal advocate for, the government’s proposal to sap power from the Supreme Court. Protests against him on Monday began before his speaking engagement and followed him throughout his remarks.
Rothman is the most prominent advocate for the judicial overhaul to speak at the General Assembly, a conference taking place in Tel Aviv and organized by the Jewish Federations of North America. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to speak at the conference’s opening on Sunday night but backed out hours earlier in the face of protests.
Monday morning’s events came about 12 hours after hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside the General Assembly’s opening event. Inside the conference kickoff on Sunday night, addressing the protesters, Platt said, “We see you, we hear you and we are inspired by your love of Israel.”
Rothman opted to come and met opposition in the conference’s halls almost immediately. While sitting with a reporter in the gathering’s breakfast area, a small gaggle of protesters arrived at his table and started chanting “shame” in Hebrew. One protester offered Rothman a bracelet bearing the word “democracy,” which has become the anti-government protests’ one-word slogan, and another yelled, “Rothman, go to hell.”
Some protesters were removed by security guards at the Jewish Federations of North America conference in Tel Aviv, April 24, 2023. (Ben Sales)
The protests intensified at the morning panel, which centered on proposals to change Israel’s Law of Return affording automatic citizenship to Jews, their children and grandchildren. Every time Rothman spoke, a group of protesters standing in a kind of informal ring around the room shouted him down with chants of “shame” and “liar,” in both Hebrew and English. Protesters on one side of the room held Israeli flags — another mainstay of the street protests — as well as an LGBTQ rainbow pride flag.
Multiple protesters were dragged out of the event by security — at least one of whom came back in and continued protesting. One yelled, “Rothman is destroying Israel, destroying our future! My kids! My kids!”
Rothman repeatedly had to pause his remarks and shot back at the protesters throughout his comments.
“What we see here is exactly the problem we need to address, a person that shouts ‘democracy’ while trying to shut up other people,” Rothman said after a protester shouted, “You’re an enemy of the Jewish people!” Rothman later said, “Some people are looking for consensus only when they’re in the opposition.”
The shouting was not limited to protesters in the audience. Rothman’s co-panelists were Yohanan Plesner, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute think tank, and Alex Rif, founder of the One Million Lobby, which advocates for Russian-speaking Israelis. Plesner objected in strong terms both to Rothman’s views on the Law of Return and to the judicial overhaul.
“The government came in with an agenda to fundamentally alter the fragile arrangements that existed for 75 years,” he said. “Somehow this balance was kept because the Supreme Court played a balancing role, and the Knesset and government respected that role.”
Rothman at one point suggested that Plesner join the protests and criticized him personally.
“The person that is the head of the Israeli Democratic Institution [sic] basically praises the idea that an undemocratic organization in Israel, powered in Israel, unelected… will make a decision that as we see are very tense,” Rothman said, referring to the Supreme Court. “Not the democratic body politic of the State of Israel, God forbid.”
Plesner responded by saying, “You’re misrepresenting what I said. Every democracy has an independent court that protects rights.”
Rothman responded, “They lied to you, they lied to the public in the U.S., they lied to the public in Israel.”
The panel’s stated topic, the Law of Return, also led to sharp disagreement. Rothman is in favor of making the law more restrictive by canceling the provision allowing the grandchild of a Jew to gain citizenship. The clause has allowed for a significant proportion of Israel’s Russian speakers to immigrate.
Rothman said the idea of canceling the clause “is not new, it’s not [originally] from this government, it’s to deal with the problem that arose … in the 90s,” when large numbers of Jews immigrated from the former Soviet Union. Because he said the change would mostly affect immigrants from eastern Europe, he suggested it shouldn’t be as concerning to American Jews and added, “Sadly, some people are trying to make this issue a split between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry in an unjustified way. We need to have this conversation and find a solution.”
Rif responded by accusing Rothman of telling Russian-speaking Israelis, ”You’re here by mistake.” She called on Israel to ease immigration for Jews from Russia and Belarus. In an explicit allusion to last century’s American Jewish activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry, which employed the slogan “Let my people go,” she brandished a sign onstage reading “Let my people in.”
Both Rif and Plesner drew cheers from the audience when they spoke.
“When you change the law of Return, you close the door for them forever for the Jewish people,” she said of Russian speakers already living in Israel. “You’re telling them, ‘We don’t want you here.’ Now, they’re living here for 30 years feeling second-class.”
Following particularly intense protests and onstage argument, Jewish Federations personnel called for a five-minute break. Protests against Rothman continued following the break, though the panel’s discussion continued. After the break, Plesner offered an olive branch of sorts to Rothman.
“I want to say, to Simcha Rothman’s credit, that he is a staunch ideologue. I disagree, almost, with everything he says, but he’s a staunch ideologue,” Plesner said. “Before the elections he said exactly what he’s going to promote. We sat together, and he said so.”
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Turning Point USA Disaffiliates Woman Who Verbally Attacked Jewish Students: Reports
Kaylee Mahoney, a University of Miami student and conservative influencer who verbally attacked Jewish students on campus on Jan. 27, 2026. Photo: Screenshot.
The Turning Point USA chapter of Miami, Florida, has reportedly fired a right-wing influencer and University of Miami student who upbraided Jewish peers in a tirade in which she denounced them as “disgusting” while accusing rabbis of eating infants.
“Christianity, which says love everyone, meanwhile your Bible says eating someone who is a non-Jew is like eating with an animal. That’s what the Talmud says,” the social media influencer, Kaylee Mahony, yelled at members of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) who had a table at a campus fair held at the University of Miami. “That’s what these people follow.”
She continued, “They think that if you are not a Jew you are an animal. That’s the Talmud. That’s the Talmud.”
The Talmud, a key source of Jewish law, tradition, and theology, is often misrepresented by antisemitic agitators in an effort to malign the Jewish people and their religion.
Mahony can also be heard in video of the incident, which took place on Tuesday, responding to one of the SSI members, saying, “Because you’re disgusting. It’s disgusting.”
Students told The Miami Hurricane newspaper that she further charged that “rabbis eat babies” during the altercation.
Mahony, who has more than 125,000 followers on TikTok, was the head of public relations for the university’s College Republicans club and the head of social media for Turning Point USA’s Miami chapter, according to her LinkedIn.
However, The Miami Hurricane reported that College Republicans terminated Mahony’s membership in the club. And now it appears that Turning Point (TPUSA) has taken a similar step.
According to StopAntisemitism, a nonprofit which tracks antisemitic incidents across the world, Mahony is “no longer affiliated” with the organization and is now being investigated by the university to determine whether her comments violated its code of conduct.
Laura Loomer, a conservative activist and self-described investigative journalist also reported that Mahony was “fired” by TPUSA.
After Tuesday’s incident, Mahony took to social media, where she posted, “Of course the most evil (((country))) in the world is filled with (((people))) who hate Jesus [sic].”
The “((()))” is used by neo-Nazis as a substitute for calling out Jews by name, which, given the context in which they discuss the Jewish people, could draw the intervention of a content moderator.
The confrontation highlights a growing divide within TPUSA over Israel and antisemitism in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who started the political advocacy organization.
Kirk was avidly pro-Israel and counseled conservative youth to avoid neo-Nazis and antisemitism, but a core of TPUSA’s demographic has embraced figures such as Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, both of whom have reprised medieval conspiracy theories about Jewish influence, perfidy, and libertinism.
Far-right activists have attempted to distort Kirk’s legacy since his death, with figures such as Tucker Carlson implying that he was murdered by “guys sitting around eating hummus” in Jerusalem and Owens suggesting Israel was behind his death. Meanwhile, Owens has suggested that Kirk’s widow, Erika, was a co-conspirator in her husband’s killing.
There has been no evidence to support such claims. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged for murdering Kirk and potentially faces the death penalty. He was romantically involved with his transgender roommate, and prosecutors have reportedly argued that Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric was a key factor that allegedly led him to shoot the Turning Point USA founder.
Experts have argued that far-right efforts to distort Kirk’s stance on Israel and antisemitism are part of an effort to undermine not only the US-Israel alliance but Washington’s leadership in the world more broadly.
“It’s antisemitism for the purpose of undermining Americans’ confidence in ourselves and in our post-World War II role in the world,” Hudson Institute scholar Rebeccah Heinrichs said during a conference on antisemitism held in Washington, DC in December. “That is very dangerous because we can’t come to consensus on anything else we need from a grand strategy perspective if Americans scapegoat our problems to the Jews and if they believe that Israel is no longer an ally but it never was, and in fact that we were on the wrong side of World War II, which is now the narrative being pushed.”
Meanwhile, antisemitism is surging across the US.
Earlier this month, a 19-year-old suspect, Stephen Pittman, was arrested for allegedly igniting a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. According to court filings, he told US federal investigators that he targeted the building over its “Jewish ties.” Prior to that, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published statistics showing an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly 50 years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979.
The FBI has disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decrease overall, those perpetrated against Jews continue to rise to record numbers. Jewish American groups have noted that this surge in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
Amid these convulsions in the US, as well as across the Western world, Jewish communities around the world continued to remember Kirk as a friend of both Israel and the Jewish people.
Last week, the State of Israel posthumously honored Kirk for his efforts to combat antisemitism at the 2026 International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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When Catherine O’Hara delivered the perfect Purim spiel
Catherine O’Hara, the SCTV star who rose to international fame in Home Alone and had a late career renaissance on Schitt’s Creek and on Apple TV+’s The Studio, has died at 71. The cause of death was not clear at press time.
O’Hara was an actor known for her versatility, convincing millions she could forget her son as she left for vacation (twice) and going on to play a series of eccentrics, like Moira Rose, the self-involved, delusional ex-soap opera star and mother of an interfaith on Schitt’s Creek, opposite her regular collaborator of decades, Eugene Levy.
While O’Hara may be best remembered for that show, for which she won a Golden Globe and an Emmy, or in the improvised mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, it was in a rare scripted film by Guest where she gave perhaps the most indelible Purimspiel in cinema history.
In 2006’s For Your Consideration, O’Hara plays veteran actress Marilyn Hack, cast in an awards-baity picture called Home for Purim. We get a glimpse of the film, a weepy melodrama set in the American South and starring Hack as a terminally ill matriarch.
Together the family joins with groggers to sing a tune that speaks of Achashverosh telling Esther “don’t farbrent” and rhymes it with “shep naches later in my tent.”
Of course the comedy here is that this film could have wide commercial appeal, and the premise that one would travel great distances to come home to observe Purim with the family as if it were Christmas (it’s later changed to Home for Thanksgiving).
After the family finishes singing the song, Hack in character, sounding like a Tennessee Williams matron, coughs ominously on cue into a napkin to signal her time is near.
“My time is short and I will not leave the Purim table,” Hack says as the hacking mother.
On request from her daughter — played by O’Hara’s frequent co-star Parker Posey — she then explains the significance of Purim to her brood.
“I’m an Esther, like the queen,” she says, wearing a glittering diadem. “She was a woman who came from the worst of times to the best. To a palace where she had everything she wanted. Comfort, riches, power. And she risked it all, including her life to serve a higher purpose, commit a selfless act to save a nation.”
O’Hara plays this to the just-believable-hilt, scored by an Itzhak Perlman-esque violin strain. When she asserts that “my selfless act was to protect my family from all the Hamans,” her kin spin their groggers and she loses it as only she could.
“I don’t have much time! Put your toys down!”
She then flips the story, realizing the irony that the Haman she was trying to protect her daughter from, turned out to be her. In what would have been the Oscar clip, the children dispute this: “You’re no Haman, Mama. You’re Queen Esther.”
Played for laughs, the scene — and indeed the premise of the film-within-a-film — was in some ways prescient, as Evangelicals increasingly look to Esther’s example.
A proof of O’Hara’s range is that, while making her mark in a Christmas film franchise, she could contribute perhaps the highest profile instance of Purim to the canon. That it wasn’t believable was the point, but the fact that she could so effortlessly embody an actor acting badly makes you think she could have sold the real thing.
The post When Catherine O’Hara delivered the perfect Purim spiel appeared first on The Forward.
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Iranian Jews caught between frustration and hope as US debates intervention
Over the past several weeks, Iranian American Jews have watched a historic uprising unfold in Iran. For many in the diaspora, the protests feel like a potential watershed moment for revolution in Iran. But alongside that hope is concern that the American conversation around Iran has been subsumed in domestic debates about American power abroad.
For Iranian Jews, this moment is sharpened by history. Most fled Iran during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when social and political instability became widespread, Sharia law was imposed, and life for religious minorities fundamentally changed. The Jewish population, once estimated at around 100,000, has since dwindled to between 8,000 and 10,000. As Iranian Jewish human rights activist Marjan Keypour told the Forward, “the Jews in Iran were given a one-way ticket right out of the country.”
These protests have unlocked long dormant possibility that Jews might one day return to Iran — if not to live, then at least to visit on their own terms.
“Every Persian kid is asking their parents, ‘Where would you go first? If we go back to Iran, where will you take me?’” said Moji Pourmoradi, former assistant director of the High School at Temple Israel of Great Neck, a community that is home to one of the largest Persian Jewish populations in the country. “People haven’t asked those questions since they left. They were not allowed that hope.”
America First?
That newfound optimism makes the stakes of the uprising profound for Iranian Jews. “When I’m with my family, we talk about Iran every day,” said Tyler Moshfegh, a 21-year-old Iranian Jew from Los Angeles who still has relatives in the country. Recently, he said, those conversations have been marked by frustration over how many other anti-regime protest movements in Iran since 1979 have been crushed.
“Every time, the U.S. government says they’re going to support the people of Iran,” Moshfegh said, “and then it just gets thrown under the rug after a week.”
Iranian Jews had initially been buoyed by comments from President Donald Trump, who said in a Jan. 14 Truth Social post addressed to Iranian protesters, “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” The U.S. moved major military assets to the Middle East this week, and threatened the use of force unless Iran agreed to a nuclear deal.
But in the time between the message and the military movement, thousands of protesters were reportedly killed by Iranian regime forces, giving some the impression that Trump’s shifting rhetoric had left the protesters defenseless. For them, allowing the regime to evade accountability for the mass killing of demonstrators in exchange for a nuclear deal does not go far enough.
“There are many people who are like, ‘Trump, you better not back down,’” said Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh, a vice president at American Jewish University and the daughter of Iranian immigrants. “We believed in you. If you do this, we’re never going to believe in you again. And you’re going to have blood on your hands.”
At the same time, some Iranian American Jews described feeling pressure to defend their concerns as calls grow on the American right to avoid foreign intervention altogether. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X that “President Trump threatening war and sending in troops to Iran is everything we voted against in ’24.”
Anna Hakakian, a community leader and president of the Babylonian Jewish Center Sisterhood in Great Neck, said, “The ‘staying out’ rhetoric feels like abandonment, especially when it translates into silence on human rights or appeasement of the regime.”
Rabizadeh said she struggles to understand how critics ignore the Iranian regime’s broader threat to the U.S. because it is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, funding groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
“Forget about Israel,” she said. “What about the Houthis and all of the American ships they keep bombing?”
A deafening silence
Yet even more resistance to the idea of U.S. military action in Iran comes from Democrats — 79% of whom oppose intervention even if protesters are killed while demonstrating, compared to 53% of Republicans.
For Hakakian, the paucity of activism supporting the protesters revealed a double standard.
“Where are all the celebrities who speak loudly about human rights?” Hakakian said. “Where are the feminists? Where are the campus activists? It’s not west versus east, it’s not colonizer versus oppressed, so the suffering is ignored.”
That frustration has been compounded by antisemitic conspiracy theories circulating in some progressive spaces – including one shared by a Columbia University professor – claiming the protests in Iran were instigated by the Mossad to distract from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“In Great Neck, where many families have direct memories of persecution and exile, this framing seems dehumanizing, and it has an antisemitic undertone,” Hakakian said, adding, “It’s very much in line with what the regime narrates and what they want people to believe.”
On social media, some on the left have criticized the Iranian diaspora’s support for opposition figure Reza Pahlavi, who has been widely attacked for being pro-Israel. Pourmoradi said that Iranian Jews are frustrated by the refusal of those on the left who refuse to back U.S. intervention because they believe it is connected to promoting Israeli interests.
“Their ignorance isn’t just ignorance anymore. It’s detrimental. How many of those people that can’t back it have spoken to anybody who lived through it?” she said. “I think that most of my community feels the same way.”
Keypour said involving Israel in the conversation was a cheap way to dismiss the thousands of lives that had already been sacrificed in the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom.
“If we are mixing the conversation about Iran with Israel, Zionism, and Mossad,” said Keypour, “we discredit the agency of the Iranian people that they have exhibited so bravely.”
The post Iranian Jews caught between frustration and hope as US debates intervention appeared first on The Forward.