The National Council of Jewish Women has named Jody Rabhan, its longtime policy director, to lead the organization as it grapples with how to balance progressive advocacy with support for Israel.

The 133-year-old group has helped rally Jews in favor of reproductive rights, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade four years ago, but drifted closer to more conservative Jewish establishment organizations amid the Israel-Hamas war.

Some of the drive behind that shift appeared to come from Sheila Katz, before she announced she was stepping down as CEO in the fall. “We need those who claim to be our friends to passionately and unequivocally condemn antisemitism,” Katz posted shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. “Silence is not neutrality; it’s complicity.”

The organization joined with a coalition of Jewish groups that took an especially hard line on criticism of Israel, including the Conference of Presidents and the Brandeis Center, during a spat with former President Joe Biden’s Education Department.

“Oct. 7 really changed everything, and that trajectory for NCJW was very real,” Rabhan said in an interview with the Forward. “And in some ways that made a lot of sense for us.”

Rabhan referenced instances of sexual assault against women on Oct. 7, and against Israeli hostages in Gaza, and said that NCJW was well-positioned to address antisemitism on the left because it participated in many progressive coalitions. “It’s work that we are committed to continuing,” she added, noting that countering antisemitism and hate was a new addition to its current strategic plan.

Israel has “certainly always been part of our portfolio and that’s only going to grow,” said Laura Monn Ginsburg, the president of NCJW’s board of directors.

But Rabhan, who first joined NCJW over 25 years ago, also emphasized the importance of staying “in community” with non-Jewish organizations on the left. “Particularly in this moment, where we’re in an administration that is really testing the levers of our democracy, we need one another more than ever,” she said, referencing President Donald Trump.

Katz, who now works for the Jewish Federations of North America, praised Rabhan in a text message as a “powerful and deeply trusted choice” to lead the organization, and said she would continue “strengthening both our communal voice and our broader civil rights impact.”

NCJW has undergone several significant changes in recent years. Nancy Kaufman helped shift its focus from community service to advocacy during her time as CEO in the 2010s, including relocating its headquarters from New York to Washington, D.C.

Katz was hired shortly thereafter as a rising star in the Jewish world. She came from Hillel International, where she served as vice president for student engagement and participated in a New York Times investigation into sexual harassment allegations against financier and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt.

During her tenure, Katz helped mobilize Jews following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, including raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund abortions and providing educational materials and other resources for synagogues and Jewish organizations that wanted to get involved in promoting reproductive rights.

More than 2,000 clergy signed onto its “Rabbis for Repro” campaign, while synagogues across the country hosted their own “Repro Shabbat.” Yet NCJW has since had to navigate deep divisions in the reproductive rights world over Israel following Oct. 7 that have included allegations of antisemitism at major abortion advocacy nonprofits.

NCJW has not historically lobbied on behalf of Israel, even as it has long worked on gender equality issues there. Nevertheless, it has occasionally found itself targeted by progressive activists including the local D.C. chapter of the Sunrise Movement, which briefly sought to boycott the organization over its stance on Israel.

“Sometimes you have to change partners in certain moments — and we’re not afraid to do that when necessary,” said Ginsburg, the board president. “But overall we want to be in partnership and we want to find a way to make that work.”

The post NCJW names new leader as group steps up work on Israel, antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.

The members of Israel’s Olympic bobsled team: (from left, clockwise) Omer Katz, Ward Fawarseh, Uri Zisman, AJ Edelman, Menachem Chen, Itamar Shprinz. With the team’s mascot Lulu. Photo: Provided

Israel is competing for the first time ever in Olympic bobsledding next week, and its team captain spoke with The Algemeiner about the many obstacles the athletes faced even before racing in the Milan Cortina Winter Games — including having to create a new team after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel and being robbed.

“Making the Olympics in bobsled as a team that hasn’t made it before is nearly unheard of,” Adam “AJ” Edelman, captain of the Israeli bobsled team, told The Algemeiner over the phone from Italy. “It just doesn’t happen unless you have an ‘Olympics credit card,’ like China for the Beijing Games, where they have guaranteed spots because they hosted. It is just nearly impossible to do … It is a massive accomplishment.”

The 31-year-old added that Israel’s bobsled team is the only one in this year’s Olympics whose members have not competed in the prior games.

“By making it into the [Winter] Games, Israel has done basically the impossible task of being within Olympic level, which is top 28,” he noted. “We’re very, very proud and content with knowing that in the four-man event especially we’re top 20, which is Olympic finals-worthy.”

On Saturday, Edelman revealed on X that the apartment where his teammates were staying during their final training for the 2026 Winter Games was robbed. Passports and “thousands of dollars” worth of personal belongings were stolen.

The team was training in the Czech Republic before heading to Italy when the incident took place, Edelman told The Algemeiner. He was in Italy at the time of the robbery and said his teammates have since replaced their passports but not their other belongings. The team has changed locations to continue training until their first Olympic competition on Feb. 16, which is a two-man event.

The team remains resilient despite the robbery and they are “just such a fine example of how we push forward in difficult circumstances,” Edelman, who is former Olympian in skeleton, wrote in a post on X.

“Such a gross violation — suitcases, shoes, equipment, passports stolen, and the boys headed right back to training today. I really believe this team exemplifies the Israeli Spirit [sic],” he added. He said in a separate post following the incident: “We are victors, never victims. Our journey is defined by moving forward, always. That’s the Israeli Spirit.”

The Israeli bobsled team is making history at the Olympics. Aside from Israel qualifying for the first time for Olympic bobsledding, Edelman is Israel’s first multi-sport Olympian, after competing previously in skeleton and now in bobsled. He said he is also the first Jewish bobsled pilot in the Olympic Games and one of his bobsled team members, 25-year-old Ward Fawarseh, is the first Druze Olympian.

Edelman — an American-Israeli from Brookline, Massachusetts — is the most decorated observant Jewish Olympian and is believed to be the first Orthodox Jew to ever compete in the Winter Games. The other members of his bobsled team are Menachem Chen, 25; Uri Zisman, 30; and Omer Katz, 25; with Itamar Shprinz as their coach. Their journey to the 2026 Winter Olympics — which has been dubbed “Shul Runnings,” a reference to the movie “Cool Runnings” that tells the story of the Jamaican national bobsled team making the 1988 Winter Olympics — faced obstacles from the start.

Edelman had handpicked members for a different bobsled team several years prior and in 2021 he talked to The Algemeiner about them hoping to secure a spot to compete in the 2022 Winter Olympics. But after the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, members of the team were called up to serve in the Israel Defense Forces as reservists and the team fell apart. Edelman was forced to create a new team and it was several years in the making.

“I just flew in different random people from Israel,” he explained. “People who were athletes who I thought, ‘Maybe let’s give them a try in the sled and if they’re good enough, they might come back.’ And I would tell them, ‘Hold the sled like a shopping cart and imagine that you’re running with a shopping cart.’ And they would do one race at a time and then fly back home. We kind of just pieced the seasons together in a pretty amazing fashion … It was a constant search for years of finding the right people to get into the sled. It was a six-year search.”

The team consists of a pole-vaulter, sprinter, shot-putter, and rugby player. Edelman said they bonded very quickly, despite their different sporting backgrounds.

“It’s been a long journey. It’s probably the most unique bobsled story ever,” Edelman said. “This is the sort of s–t that can only happen in Israel. I think that for Israel, making the [Olympic] Games for Israel in bobsled is far harder than for any other country because none of the things are set up that would give you any sort of help in bobsled. Bobsled requires such a complex infrastructure of logistic support, fundraising, publicity so people know that you exist, mechanics, coaches, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, a prior legacy with sleds and equipment and knowledge that could go down. All of that goes into making a bobsled program successful, and all of that just didn’t exist in the way that you want it to exist prior to now [in Israel].”

Edelman spoke to The Algemeiner during the team’s final training period in Europe before they make their Olympic debut. Aside from handpicking each member of the bobsled team, he also designed their bobsled. The theme for the design is “fire and ice,” and it is meant to represent “Israel is a hot country going down an icy track,” he told The Algemeiner.

He said he views himself as a “shliach” (messenger) for Israel, and that his efforts to help the Jewish state reach the Olympics in bobsled was always more for the country than for any personal gain for himself.

“For the longest period of time, I didn’t care much about being an Olympian or the Olympics itself. It was just about what I could accomplish for the country,” Edelman said. “The journey has always been so centered on what it can do for Israel and so there’s no pressure to represent Israel because that’s what it’s been since day one. And without representing Israel the journey means nothing.”

“There was a lot of pressure that I had post-10/7 to switch to the US team,” he revealed. “It would have been so much simpler and easier to make it on the US team … But there was only one reason to ever do this and it was to get Israel to the games in bobsled. And Israel truly deserves this.”

“I’m doing my part to do something that I think will be good for the people and the country,” Edelman explained. “I’ve always had a dream that the team would make it [to the Olympics] and it would necessitate or catalyze a change in the perception of how Israel and Jews perceive their place in sports in general and what we can accomplish. I just always believe that four-man bobsled being the premier event in the Winter Games … and Israel doing what is just essentially impossible for a country like Israel to do, to make it into the games in bobsled, is just such a phenomenal accomplishment … I truly believe that this is something that could have a hugely positive impact.”

Israel’s participation in the Olympics is taking place amid efforts to boycott or ban its presence in international sports, because of its military actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war. Edelman was asked what he thought about the boycott efforts.

“I view Israeli athletes as ambassadors of the state; we carry the hopes and dreams of the state forward,” he replied. “As for other people who want to kick us out … I just don’t pay much attention to it. Who has time to go through all the haters?”

“I do hope and know that this is just going to continue to move [Israel] forward,” he added, referring to the Israeli bobsled team’s presence at the Winter Games. “Someone is going to take over from me, who is better than I was, and in the future Israel is going to be a force in the sport … The [bobsled] team stands for breaking ceilings, and when we break ceilings, we want to be the first but not the last. And I really hope that’s what we take from it; that’s what everyone takes from it.”

The Milan Cortina Winter Games kicked off on Friday night with an opening ceremony at San Siro Stadium. Israel’s delegation was booed during the procession. International Olympic Committee (IOC) spokesperson Mark Adams said during a press conference on Saturday that he does not “like to see booing,” regardless of “whatever background” or “whatever country” an athlete or team represents.

“We want to see sportsperson-like behavior from everyone. It’s important that we support our athletes,” he added. “The whole idea, or one of the ideas of the Olympic movement, is that the athletes shouldn’t be punished for whatever their governments have done, and I think that’s really important, that we see the athletes and athletic performance for what that says about humanity.”

A new Jewish Federations of North America survey contained a shocking and confusing statistic: While just one-third of American Jews call themselves Zionists, almost 90% say they believe in Israel’s right to exist as a democratic Jewish state.

How could that be?

That finding has been widely read as evidence of a generational collapse in Jewish attachment to Israel. It is nothing of the sort. What it reveals instead is the collapse of confidence in a specific political ideal that, to many, no longer means what it once did.

For much of the 20th century, the term “Zionism” referred to a fairly straightforward and surprisingly normal proposition: that Jews constituted a people, not merely a religion, and therefore had a plausible claim to national self-determination.

The arguments around Zionism were not uniquely Jewish. They echoed similar ideas advanced about Poles, Greeks and Czechs. If Romania could be a Romanian country, the thinking went, Israel could be a Jewish one. Whether Israel should exist was not a particularly hard question. Where its borders should lie, how minorities within those borers should be treated, and how Palestinians displaced by war and state-building should be compensated were.

Even the word itself began modestly. It is widely believed to have been coined in 1890 by Nathan Birnbaum, a Jewish intellectual and activist, to give a name to an emerging political current associated with the Hovevei Zion movement: Jews who believed emancipation would be achieved through collective action.

The idea of a return to Zion was ancient, embedded in Jewish liturgy and longing. The term “Zionism,” by contrast, was new, and political.

That practical spirit carried into the work of Theodor Herzl, who used the term sparingly and without reverence. In his vision, Zionism was not an identity to be worn or a moral credential to be displayed. It was a solution to a political problem: the chronic vulnerability of a stateless people.

“I consider the Jewish question neither a social nor a religious one, even though it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question,“ he wrote in Der Judenstaat, his foundational text. “We are a people — one people.” Herzl laid out certain principles for answering that national question: international legitimacy mattered, minority rights within a future Jewish state were essential, and sovereignty imposed obligations rather than erased them. Zionism, he believed, could coexist with liberal norms and civic equality.

Today, that framework has eroded.

The moral mire of occupation

The occupation of the West Bank beginning after the 1967 Six-Day War fundamentally altered the moral landscape in which Zionism is understood.

Settler violence, seemingly permanent military rule over another people without the rights of citizens, a system of legal inequality and terrible violence resulted. What was once a movement for national self-determination increasingly came, in the public eye, to signify territorial entitlement and moral indifference.

For many Jews, especially younger ones, the word “Zionism” began to feel less like a description of a political belief like any other than a demand for complicity in a reality they never chose.

The rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accelerated this corrosion. Because of his omnipresence in Israeli politics for the last three decades, it is his face many think of now when the term comes up. Over time, the idea of Zionism became rhetorically fused with Netanyahu’s political survival strategy, and, with it, with contempt for liberal institutions, and a narrowing of Jewish identity into a blunt instrument of power.

In the past, one could be a Zionist and still oppose specific Israeli governments, criticize military actions, or argue for far-reaching compromises with the Palestinians. Zionism was not an oath of loyalty to power; it was a framework for arguing about how Jewish sovereignty should be exercised and constrained.

In an era defined by occupation and Netanyahu’s political scheming, the term “Zionism” became welded to a politician known for corruption, cynicism, and conflict. So for liberals — which most American Jews are — it became radioactive.

From specific ideal to vague slur

Then came the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

The scale of Israeli suffering on that day might have created sympathy for Israel — but the disastrous war in Gaza that followed put an end to any such compassion. Israeli security officials do not dispute the estimate that the war killed 70,000 people in Gaza, of which half or more are likely to have been civilians. The images coming out of the strip for more than two years showed scenes of utter devastation.

Layered onto this awful reality was an online ecosystem that rewards distortion. In activist spaces and on social media, the word “Zionist” became a slur, deployed with deliberate vagueness. It could mean “supporter of occupation,” “apologist for civilian deaths,” or simply “Jew with opinions about Israel.”

Bots and bad-faith actors amplified the worst definitions and drowned out the rest. In that climate, identifying as a Zionist began to feel like inviting a moral indictment.

The result is an increasingly familiar absurdity. I find myself appearing on leftist podcasts, listening to earnest but ill-informed commentators say they “suspect” I might be a Zionist, as though they were uncovering a hidden vice.

The irony is that I am a complete and total Zionist — under the original definition. Does it still apply?

I believe Jews are a people; that they have a right to a state; and that Israel’s legitimacy does not depend on being liked; only on existing within moral and legal constraints.

What I do not accept is the mutated version of Zionism that equates Jewish self-determination with permanent and non-democratic domination over another people.

Why does this definitional change matter?

When Jews stop identifying as Zionists, they abandon the clear, shared language that explains why Israel exists at all. That vacuum can be quickly filled with definitions supplied by Israel’s most illiberal defenders and most hostile critics. Without “Zionism” as an acceptable term, it becomes easier to portray Israel as illegitimate by definition. And it becomes easier for people who hate Jews to pretend that they hate “Zionists” instead.

Can the term be reclaimed? That would require an Israel that behaves better. Even then, undoing the damage will be an uphill battle. And of course, many of Zionism’s critics will never be pacified. The strange durability of the phenomenon known as antisemitism makes that crystal clear.

The post Why do so many Jews support Israel — but reject ‘Zionism’? appeared first on The Forward.