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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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Michigan Democrats await Senate winner in party’s biggest test yet on Israel
The Democratic primary for the open Senate seat in Michigan appeared too close to call Tuesday night, with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens locked in a tight race that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and a referendum on Israel supporters’ influence in Democratic politics.
According to unofficial results, El-Sayed, a physician and the son of Egyptian immigrants, held a narrow lead over opponent Rep. Haley Stevens, the establishment favorite — 49.9% vs. 46.3% — with 65% of the vote counted for the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters.
The Michigan contest is AIPAC’s largest investment this election cycle. Its super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million on ads attacking El-Sayed and promoting Stevens, according to recent FEC filings. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens’ own campaign through its donors’ portal.
If El-Sayed prevails, it would deliver a blow to the establishment and to the U.S.-Israel fundraising group, AIPAC, its biggest setback since it started its direct political spending in 2021 and after years of helping defeat progressive critics of Israel who challenged congressional incumbents. The brand has become increasingly controversial among Democratic voters in the wake of the Gaza war. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC.
Supporters of El-Sayed remained optimistic that the candidate’s upset victory would be proof positive that the future of the Democratic Party lies in candidates who support cutting off U.S. aid to Israel and characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the progressive insurgent’s most prominent backer, said on CNN the race reflected a broader shift in Democratic politics. “What we are seeing, no matter what happens tonight in Michigan — and I hope very much that El-Sayed wins — is: you’re seeing the transformation of the Democratic Party, and what the debate within the Democratic Party is about,” he said. Sanders added that the campaign showed that progressive candidates are challenging the party establishment not only on ideology, but also on how campaigns are run.
Winning the primary may be the easier test. Michigan remains one of the nation’s top battleground states, and a close finish would suggest ongoing divisions within the Democratic coalition. El-Sayed will have to carry moderate Democrats who backed Stevens, while taking on former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in a race that could help determine control of the Senate. Recent polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
How we got here
The Michigan race became a culmination of several political currents that have been building for years.
It reflected lingering anger among Americans over the Gaza war, Democratic criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, frustration among progressives over AIPAC’s support for some Republicans who challenged the 2020 election results, and the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America, accelerated by the political rise of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race last year.
Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab-American communities and the birthplace of the “uncommitted” movement to protest the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war in the 2024 presidential primary, made it a natural testing ground for progressive forces.
El-Sayed highlighted the Gaza war and AIPAC’s involvement in Democratic primaries when he launched his campaign in April 2025 — months before AIPAC spent a dollar. He advocated for ending unconditional military aid to Israel and framed his candidacy as a fight against outside influence. Notably, El-Sayed supported the “uncommitted” movement, though he later endorsed Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out.
According to data compiled by Milan Singh, a fellow at The Argument, a liberal opinion-focused media publication, insurgent progressive candidates for Congress mentioned Israel in 48% of their fundraising emails.
With most major primaries already decided, this race became the biggest Democratic showdown yet over Israel.
Jewish divide
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race — with Jews both in fierce opposition to El-Sayed and fiery support.
For many Jews, El-Sayed’s questioning of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state and his decision to campaign alongside controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric, were cause for alarm. El-Sayed also came under fire for calling the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas.
Rep. Hillary Scholten, a second-term Michigan Democrat, said on CNN Tuesday night that El-Sayed reinforced concerns some voters had about him by campaigning again with Piker in the final days before the primary. “Elections are about choices,” she said. “What is the message that you want to send to your voters?”
At the same time, El-Sayed courted Jewish voters. He attended a Passover seder at Congregation T’chiyah, a progressive Reconstructionist synagogue outside Detroit. Many of its congregants volunteered for El-Sayed’s campaign with a group dubbed “Jews for Abdul.”
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin — who lost his House election against Stevens in 2022 after AIPAC poured millions into defeating him — endorsed El-Sayed.
In the final days of the campaign, Stevens had sharpened her concerns about El-Sayed, accusing him of blaming “all of your problems on Jewish Americans.”
El-Sayed rejected accusations of antisemitism and argued that his critics conflate the Israeli government with the Jewish people.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
The post Michigan Democrats await Senate winner in party’s biggest test yet on Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco
For all of us who don’t know much about geography, international political crises are always welcome. Since the start of Trump 2.0, we have been discovering places we never knew existed, but now present existential threats. From straits — think Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab — to islands — whether Greenland or Heard and McDonald — we now have, along with higher gas and food prices, a better appreciation of our world.
Late last week, yet another obscure part of the globe was suddenly brought, this time without our president’s assistance, to the attention of western media: Ceuta. A city of approximately 83,000 inhabitants, Ceuta is ensconced on a peninsula which, though attached to the Moroccan coastline, is nevertheless under Spanish rule, even while it enjoys a significant amount of autonomy.
As we now know, Ceuta was also the magnet that, starting on July 30, drew about 72,000 young Moroccans who sought, mostly by swimming, to reach its beaches and, from there, perhaps reach Europe. That nearly 100 young men and women drowned in the effort — one that moreover proved naught for those who reached Ceuta as nearly all of them were obliged to return to Morocco — adds a heartrending chapter to the complex history of a city where tragedy has long mixed with comity.
Founded two millennia earlier by the Phoenicians, Ceuta was successively ruled by the Romans, Ottomans, Portuguese and Spaniards. In 1492, when the kingdom expelled its Jewish population, a few thousand crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, where they managed to avoid the bloody reach of the Inquisition. Yet they were not the first Jews to make their home on this tip of North Africa; as early as the 11th century, the Spanish-Jewish poet Abraham Ibn Ezra refers to the Jews of Ceuta in one of his poems. For the next few centuries, the small community lived in relative peace alongside its Christian and Muslim neighbors, a continuation, argues the historian Veronica Viviana Reyes, of the medieval “al-Andalus,” that brilliant and brief moment of cultural convergence between the three “peoples of the Book.”
Come the mid-20th century, the steadily dwindling Jewish community received reinforcements with the arrival of a few hundred Sephardic Jews who left their native Morocco in the wake of its independence from France. Earlier that century, several hundred Indians, mostly Sindhi, who were subjects under the British Raj also arrived in Ceuta, drawn by the city’s busy trading and commercial opportunities. Though the statistics are approximate — Spain does not require citizens to list their religion — about 58% of Ceuta’s population is Christian, 40% is Muslim, and the remaining couple of percentage points comprise its Jewish and Hindi communities. [ As a result, this ancient city attached by a thread of rock and soil to North Africa has accomplished a remarkable feat: the braiding of four distinct faith communities into what the locals call convivencia, or peaceful coexistence.
Yet, as last week’s event revealed, convivencia is a fragile thing. The influx of Moroccan youths on the beaches and streets of Ceuta, though over as quickly as it began, has become the gift that does not stop giving for the extreme-right media and politicians in countries bordering Spain. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ethno-nationalist party the National Rally, demanded that the French government “reinforce its border controls.”
Not to be outdone, her second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, warned that these “invaders will soon be on our streets.” Going a step further, the extreme-right prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called for Spain’s suspension from the Schengen Accord—the guarantee of free movement of citizens across the borders of European Union nations — and resurrected immigration controls for Spanish citizens, although Spain does not share a border with Italy. (This geographical fact did not deter Mette Fredricksen, the prime minister of distant Denmark, from voicing her support for Meloni.)
Inevitably, the old chestnut of a Jewish conspiracy has also been resurrected. Public figures, ranging from antisemitic fantasist Candace Owens, through the former director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, to the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, have posted or reposted wink-wink, nudge-nudge claims that Israel orchestrated the mad rush of Moroccans towards Ceuta. The reason cited for this nefarious feat is Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to embarrass the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, who has been one of the harshest European critics of the war in Gaza and a proponent of a more liberal immigration policy than his European peers. The Moroccan government’s irritation over Spain’s support of Algerian claims to the western Sahara makes this baseless claim seem more reasonable.
The political and rhetorical theatrics have little to do with reality. Europe is not being overrun by what Marion Maréchal, a politician to the right of her aunt Marine Le Pen, described as a “veritable invasion” by “hordes of young Moroccans.” Or, for that matter, what her Spanish homologue, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the extreme-right party Vox, insisted was “an act of war” against Spain and, by extension, Europe.
This frenzied response deliberately ignores the fact that not a single Moroccan migrant entered Spain — a strait, after all, runs between Spain and Ceuta — and have nearly all been returned by Spanish soldiers and police to Morocco. Tellingly, residents of Ceuta have also used the word “invasion,” but with greater nuance. As a journalist for Le Monde reported, none of the locals she interviewed described the Moroccans as enemies. Though frightened by the sudden and massive influx, they also understood the migrants were not seeking “to rob them,” but instead to find a better future. Besides, as one Ceutan, Rachel Gomes, observed, she has Muslim in-laws. “This does not make for problems. Four cultures exist here — Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian — that live together remarkably well.” If only a similar convivencia reigned among the members of the European Union.
The post The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco appeared first on The Forward.
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Ad for Republican Colorado governor candidate depicts Jewish opponent with horns
An attack ad on the Jewish Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado has depicted him with red horns, drawing condemnation from the state Democratic party — and the apparent approval of the Republican nominee.
Invoking an ancient antisemitic canard that Jews have horns, the ad, created in support of Republican nominee Victor Marx and circulating on various social media platforms, called the Democratic nominee and Colorado’s current Attorney General Phil Weiser “the next threat to Colorado.”
The Colorado Democratic Party said on Facebook that the graphic was “antisemitic and disgusting” and called on Marx to disavow it.
Instead, Marx engaged with a post on X accompanied by the image, calling on Republicans to stop attacking each other, “unite, stay focused, and win.”
Throughout his campaign, controversy has followed Marx, a minister and author who some have categorized as a Christian fundamentalist. Others have called him a fabulist. On the campaign trail, Marx has claimed to be the first American into Gaza during the war with Israel, boasted about performing exorcisms by phone and said his stepfather forced him to kill a man at the age of 7.
A fellow Republican party member also formally accused him of accepting unlimited campaign contributions through his online merchandise store.
The Marx campaign did not respond to an inquiry by the Forward.
Weiser, who attends a Conservative synagogue in Denver, defeated U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet for the Democratic nomination in July. He also did not respond to an inquiry.
Polls show Weiser with a sizable lead over Marx. The Colorado governor’s seat has been held by a Democrat since 2008, and term-limited incumbent Gov. Jared Polis is also Jewish.
The post Ad for Republican Colorado governor candidate depicts Jewish opponent with horns appeared first on The Forward.
