(JTA) — A slew of prominent voices, including the French foreign minister, have called for the resignation of United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese over her latest comments about Israel.

Albanese, the U.N.’s Palestinian rights envoy, is a vocal critic of Israel who has drawn sustained rebuke from multiple U.S. administrations over comments seen as veering sharply into antisemitic territory. Last year, the Trump administration formally sanctioned her, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio accusing her of “virulent antisemitism and support for terrorism.”

This time, speaking at the Al-Jazeera Forum in Doha last weekend, Albanese ignited rebuke from an array of world leaders when she suggested that Israel was “a common enemy” for all.

“Instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed, given Israel political excuses, political sheltering, economic and financial support,” he said. She continued, “We who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms and weapons — we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the comments inappropriately targeted all Israelis instead of the Israeli government.

“France unreservedly condemns the outrageous and reprehensible remarks made by Francesca Albanese, which are directed not at the Israeli government, whose policies may be criticized, but at Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable,” he told French lawmakers earlier this week.

The German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, added to the calls for resignation on Thursday. “I respect the system of independent rapporteurs of the UN. However, Ms. Albanese has already repeatedly failed in the past,” he tweeted. “I condemn her recent statements about Israel. She is untenable in her position.”

And Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, called Albanese “a dangerous figure who continues to use her position to promote discredited conspiracy theories, divisive and antisemitic narratives” and said he would use his appearance at the Munich Security Conference, which begins Friday, to petition for her removal.

“As I meet with leaders in Munich and in the weeks ahead, I will advocate for a clear moral line to be drawn,” he said in a statement. “Individuals such as Ms. Albanese must be removed from the UN before more damage can be done to the Jewish people — and the institution’s mission.”

Albanese has rejected the idea that her comments were antisemitic or inappropriate. On X, she said she had taken aim at “THE SYSTEM that has enabled the genocide in Palestine, including the financial capital that funds it, the algorithms that obscure it and the weapons that enable it,” not Israelis.

The post French, German, Jewish leaders call for resignation of UN’s Francesca Albanese over ‘common enemy’ comments appeared first on The Forward.

Schneur Zalman Newfield knows as well as anyone what it takes to leave Orthodoxy. In his new memoir, Brooklyn Odyssey, he likens his transformation from Hasidic to secular to a butterfly’s metamorphosis. “At one stage it is clearly a caterpillar; at another it is a butterfly. But when exactly did it shift from one organism to the other?” he asks. When exactly does a Hasidic Jew become someone who prays with egalitarian minyans and protests with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice?

Newfield, a 44-year-old sociology professor at Hunter College, has been asking that very question for years. For his first book, Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Newfield interviewed 74 ex-Lubavitch and ex-Satmar Hasidic Jews to analyze what it means to leave Orthodoxy. Brooklyn Odyssey brings that sociological scrutiny to Newfield’s own life.

But the memoir is much more readable than the academic book that preceded it. Newfield renders vividly what it’s like to be an 11-year-old boy running amok in Crown Heights, the nerve center of the Lubavitch Hasidic universe, while rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the lionized leader of that community, was still alive. He also captures the feelings of a twentysomething ex-Hasidic virgin at Brooklyn College. After his mom reacts coldly to the news that he has shaved his beard, Newfield writes that he “felt like a Lubavitch mitzvah tank, one of those converted Winnebagos, had just rolled over my chest.”

I spoke with Newfield to see how he views the risk factors for leaving Orthodoxy, and how the Haredi world’s treatment of these people might be changing. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Lauren Hakimi: There are already so many memoirs out there about people’s journeys off the derech [out of Orthodoxy]. What did you think was missing from the OTD genre?

Schneur Zalman Newfield: None of the memoirs that are out there really captured the experience of growing up in the Lubavitch community, especially the Lubavitch boys’ environment.

Also, OTD memoirs tend to describe growing up in a very geographically constrained area. My experience is very different from that. A big part of my experience in Lubavitch was traveling around the world doing outreach work. Being exposed to the world and grappling with an awareness of other people was a big part of my process of leaving the community. There’s whole chapters in the book on my experiences visiting Russia, living in Singapore, living in China, living in Argentina.

Most of the OTD memoirs describe very stark breaks with people’s families once people left the community. In my last book, Degrees of Separation, I found that many people who grew up Lubavitch and Satmar who left the Hasidic community still maintained ties with their family. Sometimes those are very painful ties, but still, they are ties. That’s very much my own experience. A big part of my process of deciding to leave the community was complicated by the fact that I had a very loving and warm relationship with my family.

Lubavitch is as strict as other ultra-Orthodox sects, but its emphasis on kiruv [missionary work to encourage non-Orthodox Jews to become Orthodox] exposes Hasidim to secular Jews at young ages. How did your international travels affect your exit journey?

I was profoundly influenced by the people that I encountered. Especially in my late teens, my early 20s, once I was already reading a lot of secular books secretly on my own, I was very interested to learn more about the outside world. I think that really opened up new vistas for me that had I stayed in Crown Heights would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, for me to access.

In the very beginning of the book, there’s a photo of you and your family at your daughter’s bat mitzvah. Why was it important for you to include that?

A part of what I’m trying to convey is the fact that there is life after people leave the community. The narrative within the ultra-Orthodox community is that ‘we have such a great life, and we know the truth, and if anyone is crazy enough to leave the community, their life is doomed, and they’ll all become drug addicts.’

This is a propaganda message that the community employs in order to scare people and prevent them from even thinking of trying to leave. Many people who leave the community, yes, they face challenges, but many, if not most of the people who decide to leave the community eventually find their way in the broader society and are able to establish healthy and meaningful lives on the outside.

I wanted to highlight that about my own experience. Yes, there were real challenges, and that’s certainly part of what I talk about: the mental health issues I struggled with, the challenges related to maintaining a loving relationship with my family. At the same time, I was able to establish a healthy and meaningful life on the outside.

In Degrees of Separation, you draw a distinction between intellectual and emotional reasons for leaving Orthodoxy, but in your memoir, the intellectual and emotional seem to come together, like when your sadness over your younger brother Shimmy’s death makes you question God. I’m wondering how you view those two factors in the context of your own path. 

To be clear, even in Degrees of Separation, I argue that everyone who leaves the community has both intellectual and social-emotional reasons for doing so. It’s simply a question of which of these aspects of their experience they tend to focus on. Most people tended to focus on one versus the other. This is not the full picture. The people who were talking about their intellectual disagreements with the community also experienced some kind of disenchantment or social-emotional issues related to their community. Same thing for people who talked about their social-emotional reasons for leaving.

When I thought about leaving, and then even after I left, when I thought about my experience of leaving, I did tend to describe it in intellectualist terms. In fact, early on when we were dating, my now wife asked me if Shimmy’s death played a role in my experience of leaving. I said, ‘No, I don’t think that that had anything to do with it.’

Only years later, after I was doing my academic work and thinking much more rigorously about all of these issues, did I realize that Shimmy’s death had a profound influence on my religious evolution. That, and the death of the Lubavitcher rebbe, who we were taught to believe was the messiah.

After you shave your beard, your mom sends you and your brother to a rabbi who tries to convince you to become more religious again. As someone who researches journeys out of Orthodoxy, what do you make of that intervention?

It is very common for parents, relatives, neighbors, to try to connect the person who’s thinking of leaving with some rabbi whose mission is to quote-unquote straighten the person out. In a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that there was only one intervention in my case.

Sometimes, these interventions are carried out under the guise of mental health. There’s a therapist, a psychologist, a social worker, or someone who doesn’t have any mental health training but purports to be a mental health professional. They often basically argue that for your own mental health, it would be best if you would come back to Orthodoxy.

The rabbi I was sent to had been my teacher for several years. When I had him as a teacher, I thought that he was this brilliant guy, charming and charismatic. But when it came to this interaction, where he was basically trying to convince me to remain Orthodox, he was very plebeian in terms of the arguments that he was making, and his general attitude of disdain for me, for non-Orthodox forms of Judaism, and for secular knowledge in general.

Do you think that if you were going OTD today, as opposed to 20 years ago, the Orthodox net might have done a better job trying to catch you? 

I think the ultra-Orthodox community has become more aware of the fact that large numbers of their members are leaving and that they need to do a better job of trying to respond to it.

Each individual religious community responds in a somewhat different way. So it’s hard to make generalizations, but it definitely seems that the ultra-Orthodox community is trying to respond to this issue in a more sensitive and thoughtful and humane way than they were doing, let’s say, 20 or 30 years ago.

Me and other scholars have also noted a rise of quote-unquote ‘modern’ ultra-Orthodox people.

I sometimes stay in Crown Heights for Shabbos with my family and go to shul with one of my brothers in law. I go to this one particular shul, and there’s a bunch of people who have trim beards, or something’s going on with their beards, not quite the way nature intended. They’re going to shul every Shabbos, they send their children to Lubavitch schools. In a lot of significant ways, they’re enmeshed in the community, and they’re recognized as being full-fledged members of the community, yet they’re living a kind of Lubavitch lite.

So yes, I think if I was leaving today, or if I was living in the community today, it’s hard to say exactly how things would end up. But I didn’t grow up in the community today. I grew up in the community 30 years ago, and my story is my story.

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(JTA) — The Department of Homeland Security has hired a new digital communications director whose social media content for the Labor Department reportedly raised alarm bells inside the department and beyond for promoting white supremacist rhetoric.

Peyton Rollins began his new role at Homeland Security this month, The New York Times was the first to report this week. Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, did not confirm the move to the newspaper, but Rollins’ LinkedIn profile shows that he began working at the department this month.

Rollins, 21, has been identified as the staffer responsible for posts at the Labor Department that have been decried as making veiled antisemitic and racist allusions. He also claimed credit for a large banner of President Donald Trump’s face that was hung from the Labor Department’s headquarters, which its critics said echoed fascist stylings.

During Rollins’ time at the Labor Department, its social media pages have featured a range of slogans including “the globalist status quo is OVER,” “PATRIOTISM, NOT GLOBALISM” and “Patriotism will Prevail. America First. Always,” which featured an image of an American flag with 11 stars, the number that appeared on some Confederate flags.

One post on X in November, which featured the phrase “Americanism Will Prevail,” spurred hundreds of negative comments because it appeared to use the same typeface used on the original cover of “Mein Kampf.”

Staffers at the department were alarmed, according to the New York Times. “We’re used to seeing posts about things like apprenticeships, benefits and unions,” a former employee, Helen Luryi, told the newspaper. “All of a sudden, we get white-nationalist rhetoric.”

In his new role, Rollins will oversee the Homeland Security social media accounts, including its X account which has been accused of tweeting antisemitic dog whistles.

Rollins joins a growing list of hires under the Trump administration who have faced allegations of promoting extremist rhetoric.

In March, DHS hired speechwriter Eric Lendrum, who has previously promoted the “Great Replacement” theory and likened conservatives in the United States to Jews in Nazi Germany. In May, the Pentagon also appointed Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly echoed antisemitic rhetoric online, as its press secretary.

Last year, the appointments of Darren Beattie as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in February and Paul Ingrassia in May to a senior legal role drew criticism for the pair’s relationships with white supremacists.

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