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Netanyahu ally wants to stop Diaspora donors from funding pluralistic education in Israeli schools
(JTA) — In 2019, Israel’s Noam party drafted an internal report about an alleged plot by foreign forces to take control of the country’s schools in order to teach pluralistic values. At the time the party’s far-right leader, Avi Maoz, was a fringe politician with no authority to carry out the “cleansing” of which he dreamed.
Among the forces allegedly seeking to corrupt Israeli children, Maoz’s report named the European Union and the liberal New Israel Fund, both of which are longtime nemeses of the Israeli right.
But the plot to deny children what Noam considers a proper Jewish education doesn’t stop with the EU and NIF, according to the report. It also blamed many of the mainstream institutions of British and American Jewry, including the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, the Shalom Hartman Institute think tank, and U.S. donors to Israeli civil society organizations such as the Slifka and Mandel foundations.
“We must protect our people and our state from the infiltration of the alien bodies that arrive from foreign countries, foreign bodies, foreign foundations,” Maoz once said, according to Haaretz. “I would be very happy to have sufficient power to be appointed minister of education, to cleanse the entire education system of all foreign influences and to add Judaism, tradition, heritage and Zionism to the education system.”
Maoz hasn’t been appointed minister of education, but his dream of banishing these groups came a little closer to reality in December when Benjamin Netanyahu cut a deal with Maoz to form his government. In negotiations, Maoz had secured an appointment as a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office under Netanyahu with control over extracurricular content in schools through a new department called the Jewish National Identity Authority. A few weeks later, Netanyahu’s cabinet took a critical step toward putting Maoz in charge.
Amid headlines about Maoz’s ascendance, someone leaked to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth the Noam party’s 2019 education memo along with other internal reports focused on perceived enemies in the Israeli military and Justice Ministry, and on LGBTQ individuals in general.
While the Israeli press referred to the reports as “blacklists,” the backlash to them has become subsumed in the general outcry over Israel’s new far-right government, including the anti-gay politics popular among many new members and the plan to strip Israel’s judicial branch of some of its powers.
Yet it’s in the area of education that the Noam party has the clearest path forward to accomplishing a specific political goal. And success for Noam could lead to a new type of rift between Israel and American Jews. The organizations he attacks are more than charities for Israeli school children — through their billions of dollars in donations, the institutions of American Jewry made themselves into partners in the very founding and development of the Jewish state.
In his new position, he would oversee funding and accreditation for external programs in Israeli schools. Each school can choose from thousands of approved programs, which range from sexual education and bar mitzvah preparation, to the types of pluralistic lesson plans — often meaning alternatives to the strictly religious or strictly secular options offered in Israeli schools — that Maoz has railed against.
For Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, whose Israeli branch was named in the Naom report, Maoz’s rhetoric betrays ignorance about the integral role of outside contributions in Israeli history.
“It’s not clear to me that these folks understand the depth of how Diaspora Jews have invested in the whole infrastructure of Israeli civil society since the founding of the State of Israel,” Kurtzer said. “So the portrayal of this as somehow Diaspora Jews are burrowing under the system — well, that is basically the whole story of how Zionism succeeded.”
Mark Charendoff, a longtime executive in Jewish philanthropy, also pushed back against Noam.
“There is a long and positive history of Diaspora Jewry’s involvement with education in Israel,” said Charendoff , who currently serves as the president of the Maimonides Fund, an increasingly influential New York-based charity. “The Israeli school system should certainly protect its integrity but even [the medieval sage] Maimonides found wisdom he could learn from among other cultures and used it to enrich our own.”
The Noam party memos, at least one of which Maoz has endorsed as a blueprint for his tenure, were obtained by Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal, and recently shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Here are the American Jewish charities named in the memo and which of their programs were targeted:
The Cleveland-based Mandel Foundation is singled out for the leadership training it offers education professionals. The report says Mandel has spent more than $58 million on this effort and is accused of harboring a liberal agenda. Mandel programs have included training for educators from across the denominational spectrum.
The Abraham Initiatives, which is based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel and promotes equal rights for Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens, is described as a Jewish-Arab left-wing group. The report also singles out the programs, schools and teacher trainings aimed at supporting reconciliation and coexistence between Jews and Arabs.
The Shalom Hartman Institute, with offices in Jerusalem and New York City, earns a mention in the memo thanks to its Be’eri Program for Pluralistic Jewish-Israeli Identity, which is dedicated to enhancing Jewish and democratic values among secondary school educators and their students in Israel.
American Judaism’s Conservative movement is implicated through the Schechter Institutes which it sponsors and the affiliated Tali Education Fund. Dozens of schools throughout Israel receive curriculum materials related to pluralistic Jewish culture and heritage from Tali.
The U.S.-based Reform movement makes the list thanks to the training offered to Jewish education teachers as part of a program run jointly by the Reform-affiliated Hebrew Union College and Hebrew University.
The New York City-based Alan B. Slifka Foundation is named in the memo as a supporter of the Abraham Initiatives and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
The Russell Berrie Foundation, which is headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey, is included because of its contributions to the New Israel Fund and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
With offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, Israel Venture Network makes the list over its support for an independent program that trains all administrators in the Israeli school system.
Headquartered in New York City, the New Israel Fund is described as one of the main organs in the alleged conspiracy. “The New Israel Fund and funds affiliated with it have set out to take control of the education system,” read the first line of the report.
The organizations are named as “examples” in the memo, suggesting that the list is not exhaustive. Guilt by association with any of these groups would implicate a wide swath of American Jewry. IVN, or Israel Venture Network, for example, receives funding from the Jewish federations of multiple American cities and the Weinberg Foundation. The Abraham Initiatives lists numerous mainstream Jewish donors including the Klarman Family Foundation and late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Kurtzer said the leaked memos didn’t come as much of a shock to him. Any organization that is “pro-democracy, pro-pluralism, and believes in strong relationships between Israel and the diaspora” is familiar with being targeted in this way, he said.
“Some of the elements of the far right have built a whole industry on classifying anybody who has commitments to any of these values and branding them as anti-democratic and anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist,” Kurtzer said. “It hasn’t really stopped our work in Israel, though, sometimes it makes it unpleasant and uncomfortable to have to fend off some of these accusations.”
One of the largest donors to Shalom Hartman Institute goes unmentioned in Noam’s report: the Claws Foundation, which has given the institute millions of dollars. It would be hard to condemn this particular foundation as a liberal interloper: Claws is run by Jeff Yass and Arthur Dantchik, a pair of American Wall Street billionaires and prominent libertarians who are reviled by the Israeli left. In 2021, Haaretz revealed that Yass and Dantchik are major donors to the Kohelet Policy Forum, an influential Israeli think tank behind many of the recent landmark initiatives of the right.
Maoz’s politics also fit awkwardly with those of his own political predecessors, said Eitan Cooper, executive vice president of the Schechter Institutes of Jewish Studies. Cooper helps run one of the programs targeted by Maoz, the Tali Education Fund, which provides a non-Orthodox Jewish curriculum to about 80 secular Israeli schools.
Cooper recalled how the Tali program got started in the 1980s with the help of Zevulun Hammer, who served as Israel’s education minister for many years while helping lead the National Religious Party. Noam is one of the offshoots to have emerged after the National Religious Party’s dissolution in 2008.
“Hammer was the one who adopted Tali as education minister,” Cooper said. “He thought it was great and in fact, he gave Tali its name.”
But Cooper also said that there had always been fringe members of Hammer’s circle who looked at Tali with skepticism because of its non-Orthodox orientation. Some even alleged that the program was run by covert Christian missionaries.
Prior experience has steeled Cooper for this moment, and he said he’s not particularly concerned that Maoz’s threats will pan out.
“This kind of negative response to what we do has always existed,” Cooper said. “The educational ministry continues on, it sets the criteria for the programs that are accepted. I really don’t know what he is positioned to do. He hasn’t done anything yet.”
He believes that the demand for Tali’s content ensures the program will carry on.
“Our target audience is still out there,” he said.
Nachum Blass, who chairs the education policy program at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, regards it as inevitable that Maoz will secure authority over external programs at schools. And Blass said that Maoz could proceed to cancel programs he didn’t like or block new programs.
“There are thousands of programs,” Blass said. “If Maoz wants to review every program and decide which to cancel, it’s a very long process, and he will face lawsuits and petition to the Supreme Court.”
But the bigger worry for Blass is the chilling effect of Maoz’s rhetoric.
“The real danger,” he said, “is that schools will censor themselves and not pick certain programs because they worry they doesn’t fit the spirit of the times.”
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The post Netanyahu ally wants to stop Diaspora donors from funding pluralistic education in Israeli schools appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Investing in Early Career Nonprofit Professionals Strengthens the Entire Jewish Community
Demonstrators at pro-Israel rally in Hamburg, Germany. Photo: Screenshot
The Jewish community and the nonprofit organizations that sustain it are facing major challenges today, including rising antisemitism and deep polarization around Israel. These are exacerbating already high rates of burnout and turnover among those who work at Jewish nonprofits, especially early-career professionals.
According to a 2025 Leading Edge report on the “state of Jewish nonprofit talent,” only half of employees under age 30 expect to remain at their organization two years from now. This poses a serious threat to the sector’s talent pipeline and raises an urgent question: How can Jewish organizations, foundational for communities and Jewish life, keep early-career professionals passionate and engaged for the long-run?
Research from M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education’s recent Hope Study highlights two factors linked to sustained engagement among Jewish communal professionals: work energy, defined as feeling energized by one’s work, and Jewish belonging, a meaningful connection to the Jewish people and community. Professionals who experience both are more likely to remain in the field over time. For organizations focused on retention, cultivating these conditions early in a professional’s career should be a strategic priority.
Professional development (PD) has long been one of the primary tools that organizations use to build a sense of belonging and purpose among staff. However, traditional models often reserve this type of investment for mid-career or senior staff who have already demonstrated staying power. If a substantial portion of young professionals leave Jewish nonprofits within their first two years, waiting until mid-career to invest does not make sense.
Instead, we advocate for Jewish nonprofits to invest in early-career PD, starting from the onboarding process. Alongside tangible skill-building, PD should also draw on Jewish values and learning to help professionals think through the real responsibilities and tensions of communal work. When colleagues explore these questions together, they deepen their connection to the mission and build peer relationships that support them in their roles.
Over time, we believe that PD rooted in both tangible skill-building and Jewish purpose will create internal leadership pipelines for people who are actually invested in the community’s future. It strengthens organizational continuity, reduces turnover costs, and ultimately benefits the Jewish communities these institutions exist to serve. To realize these gains, however, organizations must approach early-career development intentionally.
Professional Development Begins With Onboarding
Professional development should begin on day one. Organizations have an opportunity to equip new employees during their first year with foundational skills in navigating the workplace, teamwork, and sector knowledge. This includes engagement with Jewish texts and ideas that offer language for working through tensions that arise in daily workplace dynamics as well as in broader communal conversations, including Israel and antisemitism. Understanding the language, history, and structure of the field strengthens an employee’s connection to mission and purpose, and helps them succeed, all fostering retention.
This is particularly important in a workforce where 38 percent of employees are not Jewish. Thoughtful onboarding helps ensure that talented professionals are not left to navigate cultural norms or communal rhythms on their own and increase belonging. New early career PD programs, including M²’s Aleh Summit and Leading Edge’s Onboarding Intensive, are responding to these needs by integrating Jewish learning into PD and making what is often implicit, explicit.
Articulate a Clear Growth Trajectory
Early-career professionals benefit from clear direction from upper management. Organizations should encourage supervisors to outline a six-to-twelve-month growth arc and identify the skills, responsibilities, and capacities the employee is expected to develop and ultimately own in that time. This may include naming particular leadership competencies or framing stretch assignments as deliberate developmental steps. Professional growth in Jewish nonprofits should also focus on ways to explore and deepen employees’ understanding of the Jewish values and organizational norms that drive the organization. This strengthens long-term commitment to service and can contribute to motivation at work.
Setting measurable goals also helps with retention. Research shows that employees who feel they are making progress, engaging in challenging work, and understand how their role contributes to organizational goals are significantly more likely to intend to stay.
Build an Implementation Plan
Professional development programs often focus on introducing new ideas and skills. However, without structured follow-through, what participants learn rarely makes it into their day-to-day work. Organizations can change that by encouraging supervisors to work with returning program participants to identify two or three concrete practices to integrate into their daily routine. A well-executed plan should anticipate obstacles and clarify what support will be needed to sustain and deepen the new practices.
This kind of intentional follow-through can be a game changer in the “engagement crater,” a period, often two to five years into a role, when initial enthusiasm can decline before stabilizing. Without continued growth and reinforcement, early-career professionals may experience that dip more acutely. But attention to growth and progress by both the employees and their managers can help avoid this decline.
For the employee, this practice strengthens competence and confidence. For the organization, it reduces the likelihood that initial enthusiasm dissipates.
Show Genuine Interest in Employee Growth
Managing early-career professionals requires ongoing communication. When organizations encourage supervisors to invest in these conversations, they can learn what motivates an employee and how to help them individually succeed. At the same time, a strong supervisor will affirm specific strengths they have observed, both before and after a professional development experience, and help the employee see their growth as part of a cohesive trajectory.
Opening a conversation about what early career professionals need, how they work best, and what support would enable them to thrive responds to patterns increasingly seen among Gen Z employees. They want clarity, feedback, and meaningful partnership at work. When managers co-create the work environment in this way, employees are more likely to feel heard and valued. These are the conditions that build and strengthen long-term retention.
A Long-Term Investment in Jewish Communal Leadership
In a sector where people are the primary asset, cultivating emerging professionals must become a strategic priority. Many early-career employees initially demonstrate strong alignment with mission and purpose. The question is whether organizations will maintain that alignment over time.
Sustaining professional commitment requires consistent attention. Early-career development should include an arc with multiple touchpoints, beginning with structured onboarding and continuing through the next several years as responsibilities deepen. The foundation built in the first months supports later growth.
In summary, when Jewish nonprofits invest early and consistently in their staff, professionals are equipped to develop confidence and deepen their understanding of the community they serve. Over time, this will foster pride in working on behalf of the Jewish community and encourage long term commitment to the field.
Kiva Rabinsky is the Deputy CEO and Chief Program Officer at M²: The Institute for Experiential Jewish Education. He holds an MPA in Nonprofit Management and an undergraduate degree in Education and Archeology.
Dana Childress is a Vice President, Program at Leading Edge. She focuses on programming designed to strengthen workplaces so all employees can thrive. She is based in Washington, DC.
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JD Vance praises Tucker Carlson-Mike Huckabee interview as ‘a really good conversation’
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance has weighed in on the Tucker Carlson-Mike Huckabee interview that has ignited widespread antisemitism allegations as well as a diplomatic row with Arab states, calling it “a really good conversation that’s going to be necessary for the right.”
Vance made the comments to the Washington Post, which published them Friday morning. He said he had not seen the entire interview, which was more than two hours long, but had viewed “clips here and there.”
Vance is a longtime ally of Carlson, a leading far-right figure who has stirred a rift among conservatives by platforming antisemites, at times promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories himself and increasingly campaigning against Israel. (Carlson says he is not antisemitic.)
Vance’s refusal to criticize Carlson or seek to end the rift has increasingly alarmed Jewish conservatives. To the Washington Post, he reiterated what he said before when asked about Carlson and the antisemitism rift — that he believes the Republican Party should be an open marketplace of ideas.
He said he was pleased that the right has stoked “a real exchange of ideas,” even when it includes “the people that I find annoying on our side,” whom he did not specify. That exchange, he said, was also essential for electoral success.
“If you think of the Trump coalition in 2024 — and the way that I put it is, you had Joe Rogan, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance and a coalition of people — but to do that, you have to be willing to tolerate debate and disagreement,” Vance said. “And I just think that it’s a good thing.”
Vance is seen as likely to run for president in 2028.
The post JD Vance praises Tucker Carlson-Mike Huckabee interview as ‘a really good conversation’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Amid Iran tensions, Huckabee tells US embassy staff in Israel they should leave ‘TODAY’ if they wish
(JTA) — Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has told U.S. government employees and their families that they may leave the country and should do so expediently, amid mounting signs of a possible U.S. attack on Iran.
Huckabee emailed embassy staff on Friday morning saying that if they want to leave, they should do so “TODAY,” according to a letter first reported by The New York Times. He noted that commercial flights could become scarce and urged them to accept passage to any country before returning to Washington, D.C.
“There is no need to panic, but for those desiring to leave, it’s important to make plans to depart sooner rather than later,” he wrote.
The letter comes a day after U.S.-Iran talks in Geneva ended without public breakthroughs. Iranian officials, as well as the Omani mediators, said additional conversations were planned for next week; the United States did not comment. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kusher, two Jewish advisors to President Donald Trump who successfully brokered a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war last year, are leading the U.S. delegation.
Trump has been threatening to attack Iran for weeks over its nuclear program and has built up U.S. military forces in the Middle East to levels not seen in decades. In recent days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance have both said military intervention could be needed while saying the president continued to prefer diplomacy.
Vance’s comments were particularly notable because he typically opposes U.S. intervention overseas. He told the Washington Post in comments published Friday morning that there was “no chance” that the United States would get involved in an extended Middle East campaign.
Iran has said it would consider Israel a valid target in the event of a U.S. attack. Last year, Iranian missiles killed more than two dozen people in Israel during a 12-day war initiated by Israeli strikes on Iran’s military program. Now, Israelis have been living in limbo for weeks while waiting to learn whether a new war, expected to be more destructive, will begin.
In the past, when expecting Iranian retaliation, the embassy has warned staff against leaving population centers in Israel. Now, the Department of State has updated its Jerusalem embassy website to reflect “the authorized departure of non-emergency U.S. government personnel and family members of U.S. government personnel to leave Israel,” setting a status that means flights will be paid for by the U.S. government.
While El Al, Israel’s national carrier, does not fly during Shabbat, other airlines typically do run some flights to and from Ben Gurion Airport on Friday nights and Saturdays. Many of those are budget European airlines that have only recently resumed flying to Israel after last year’s Iran war; some airlines, including KLM, have already suspended Israel flights in anticipation of another conflict.
The post Amid Iran tensions, Huckabee tells US embassy staff in Israel they should leave ‘TODAY’ if they wish appeared first on The Forward.