(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s 26th Knesset, or parliament, was sworn in on Tuesday, even as national elections two weeks ago produced no clear winner or indication of who will be Israel’s next prime minister.

On Sunday, President Isaac Herzog officially tasked former IDF chief and political novice Gadi Eisenkot with forming the government after a majority of newly elected lawmakers said they would prefer him as prime minister.

Incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost his parliamentary majority in the vote, even though his party, Likud, remained the largest of those entering the Knesset with 27 seats in the 120-member parliament.

Netanyahu has called on Eisenkot to join him in forming a national unity government, but in his ceremonial toast in the Knesset on Tuesday he ended up pushing Eisenkot’s change bloc even further away from the idea of a unity government under his leadership by casting suspicions on all of their potential partners in a future government.

Eisenkot and his bloc of four parties – his own Yashar Party, B’Yachad headed by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, and the Democrats led by Yair Golan – have campaigned on a promise to change the current government and the prime minister. Following Netanyahu’s speech, Eisenkot said in a statement that now he was even more certain that change was needed.

Eisenkot’s bloc garnered 48 seats in the election, and since then has drawn additional support from the two Arab parties, which together hold 19, and an expression of support from United Torah Judaism, an ultra-Orthodox party previously aligned with Netanyahu. The extra support gives him a shaky majority in the Knesset.

Eisenkot has reiterated that any party, including Likud, is welcome to join him as long as they embrace his four conditions: Recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, acceptance of the values of the Declaration of Independence, mandatory military or civilian service for all, and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Ilana Shpaizman, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that even though a new government has not yet been formed, “the Knesset can act on everything.”

“The Knesset can do oversight, the same thing as it did before; it can also pass legislation… but only private legislation and not government legislation,” she said, adding that the current government under Netanyahu will continue to function until it is replaced, just without the majority it had previously.

Shpaizman added that even if Eisenkot does not succeed in forming a government, and the country goes to another election, the Knesset sworn in on Tuesday will have at least six months to legislate as it chooses.

“This is a lot of time to legislate, so this is very important, and especially things like the finance committee, which can control the budgetary transitions of the government,” she pointed out.

Opening the Knesset swearing-in ceremony, Herzog called on the new Knesset members to “do everything possible to avoid another round of elections.”

“The people who chose you long for routine, security and tranquility,” the president said, outlining many of the challenges that Israel has faced over the past three years.

“The people you represent here yearn to see an outstretched hand that will bring unity to the nation and hope,” Herzog said. “A people that carries within it pain, devotion, and sacrifice longs to see you translate those strengths into cooperation, into unifying dialogue, and into listening.”

He added: “I ask of you: be measured toward one another. Reach out a hand for compromise, even between rivals. Look upon one another with generosity. There is much work to be done here, and it requires the ability and experience found in every part of this House.”

Before the swearing-in ceremony, each of the 11 elected parties held its first faction meeting in the Knesset. Eisenkot took the opportunity to announce that his bloc had reached agreements on nominations for key Knesset positions.

Former minister and incoming MK Matan Kahana from Yashar is slated to be the next Knesset speaker, a powerful position that sets the Knesset plenum’s daily agenda. MK Roy Folkman, also from Yashar, will be nominated as chairman of the Arrangements Committee, which is responsible for organizing the Knesset’s work at the beginning of its term.

In addition, Liberman will take over as chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and MK Liran Avisar Ben-Horin from B’Yachad, will be nominated head of the Finance Committee, another powerful role.

As soon as the swearing-in ceremony concluded, Eisenkot’s party announced that it had submitted a series of bills that would reverse some of the more controversial laws passed by the previous government, including those relating to the judicial overhaul plan.

In addition, a bill was submitted calling for the establishment of a State Commission of Inquiry to investigate Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and how it was allowed to happen.

Of the 120 Knesset members sworn in on Tuesday, 46 are new to the parliament and roughly one in ten members has buried a loved one lost to terror or war, including Eisenkot whose son and two nephews were killed in combat.

According to statistics shared by Herzog in his speech, the most veteran Member of Knesset is Netanyahu, who has served in 15 Knessets since 1988, while MK Yonatan Shalev, a member of B’Yachad, is the youngest MK. At 24 years old, Shalev breaks a 66-year-old record.

In addition, the 5050 Initiative of the Centers for Social Justice, an Israeli non-profit, said in a statement that the new Knesset would set “an all-time record for the number of women serving in the Knesset: 33.”

“Today is a very good day for democracy because the new Knesset is being sworn in,” Shpaizman said. “It means that the election was fair and was peaceful.”

“I think the previous Knesset got to a point where the trust in it as an institution was the lowest ever, so it is a very good thing that new people are entering, new people who come in good faith from both sides who want to bring change and to make Israel better,” she added.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israel’s parliament sworn in as leaders scramble to form a government appeared first on The Forward.

This Cursed Beautiful Land
By Evan Gershkovich
Crown, 432 pages, $34

In Evan Gershkovich’s memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land, the Wall Street Journal reporter relives his ordeal to give readers a firsthand account of how Russia’s prisons and its repressive legal system operate under Putin’s wartime regime.

Gershkovich survived 491 days in the Russian prison system and was released as part of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. His story echoes the way in which Dostoevsky escaped death by firing squad at the last minute. Tsar Nicholas I had already commuted his death sentence to four years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by military service, but ordered the execution to be staged anyway, right up until the soldiers took aim (one of the men condemned along with Dostoevsky lost his mind as а result). In July 2024, after a closed trial, Gershkovich was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years, only to be freed less than two weeks later.

In February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine, Gershkovich was at a high point in his career. He had just joined The Wall Street Journal and, he writes, “was itching to get into the action.” Russia can be especially cruel to this kind of daring.

Gershkovich calls his work as a foreign correspondent a kind of “voyeurism” — and his time in captivity “the ultimate voyeurism” — and admits that he was addicted to the adrenaline. The notion that he was being tailed by Russia’s security service felt energizing. The more action happened around him, the more alive he felt.

In his memoir, he describes how the Russian authorities’ attitude toward reporters for foreign media outlets changed drastically. For years, he writes, the unspoken rule was that foreign reporters could cover topics Russian journalists couldn’t, and would be safe doing so. After Russia’s invasion, the government passed a whole raft of new laws against free speech; independent Russian journalists had three options: go underground and work anonymously (and many are still doing exactly that despite all the personal risks), leave the country, or go to prison.

An ‘undesirable’ journalist

For my part, I tried to stay in Russia for as long as I could. I worked anonymously as a reporter for the investigative outlet Proekt, the first Russian media outlet labeled an “undesirable organization” (this status means that anyone who takes part in its work can be prosecuted and face up to four years in prison). While all my colleagues had already been forced to leave the country, I stayed to report from the inside of Russia on the corruption inside Putin’s inner circle and among the elites that supported the bloodbath in Ukraine. I also reported on the human and economic cost of the war for other Russian banned media.

As a volunteer, I tried to help Ukrainian war refugees, collecting and driving donated clothes, medications, hygiene products and other essentials in the temporary shelters, where people were forced to live with no money and no way to rent housing or find proper work.

On Feb. 4, 2023, I found my name on a Moscow court’s website: An administrative case had been opened against me for “discrediting” the Russian army. The evidence, I learned later, was an interview I had given to TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV channel, which was banned by the authorities. I had gone on air to encourage more people to help refugees, and I talked about my anti-war tattoo, which I got as a reminder that “love and friendship are stronger than war” – those very words discredited the Russian army, according to the case files. A second such case led to a criminal charge that could have resulted in up to five years in prison. I knew I had done enough as a journalist to be charged under a whole range of other articles, including treason. By 5 a.m. the next day, I was in Tbilisi, Georgia. Less than two months later, Gershkovich was arrested.

‘How could I be so naive?’

Gershkovich writes that he believed he “had a responsibility to carry out since Russian citizens could no longer do the kind of reporting he could” and that the Russian authorities would more likely expel than arrest him: “The fact that I didn’t have a Russian passport gave me added confidence,” he says.

In early 2023, the WSJ reporter was working on several stories at once, including one on whether Russia’s war machine could sustain a long war, and another on Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin caterer-turned-warlord, whose Wagner Group had been recruiting prisoners into its ranks and posed a threat to the state’s monopoly on violence.

Gershkovich’s arrest in March 2023 officially marked the end of the period when foreign reporters could consider themselves immune. In wartime, they are seen as enemy spies and potential pawns in hostage diplomacy. As FSB (Putin’s trusted security service and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB) investigator Dmitry Sapunkov told Gershkovich, if they hadn’t gathered enough evidence to arrest him, they would have simply “poisoned” him: “In every country there are enemies that need to be put in prison or be eliminated,” an FSB investigator said.

That was no idle threat: Putin’s regime has a long history of poisoning its enemies. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was poisoned twice — the second time fatally, in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle.

The FSB alleged that Gershkovich had been gathering classified information “on instructions from the CIA” about Uralvagonzavod, a major Russian defense plant that manufactures and repairs military equipment.

According to Gershkovich, union activist Pavel Sergienya had told him that he might be able to get information about the factory’s projects. They met at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals, and Sergienya showed Gershkovich notes about the increase in tank production. Moments later, a group of men in balaclavas descended on Gershkovich, handcuffed him, pulled a black sack over his head and forced him into a van. He tried to explain that he was a journalist, but one of them cut him off: “What would your government think if our journalists were working on this kind of article in your country?” they asked.

At the closed trial, as Gershkovich describes it, Sergienya, the prosecution’s key witness, testified that he had begun cooperating with the security service before meeting Gershkovich. In September 2025, the independent Russian media Mediazona identified Sergienya, a Uralvagonzavod employee and representative of the trade union Solidarity, as an FSB provocateur: He was also a key figure in the “terrorism” case against Andrei Vogel, a 65-year-old opposition activist from Nizhny Tagil.

Gershkovich berated himself for trusting Sergienya. “How did I not see it? How could I be so naive?” he asked himself. “‘’You can’t tell the story if you’re dead,’ a colleague had once told me,” he writes, “and now I thought of a coda: You can’t tell the story if you’re in prison either.”

Fortunately, he managed to tell it.

‘A valuable commodity’

Gershkovich is the son of Jewish immigrants who left the Soviet Union in the 1970s. His great-grandfather vanished after he was arrested in 1937, during Stalin’s Great Terror.

Among Russian journalists there is a shared understanding: In prison, you are of no use as a journalist; you become a burden and source of constant pain for your loved ones. Gershkovich shares similar thoughts from Lefortovo prison, where he is consumed with doubts about whether he’ll ever be swapped. He realizes that he might never again see his mother, who managed to provide him with kosher food (ahead of the start of Passover) even though he was “in a prison cell in the country she had chosen to leave.” “In that moment, I felt like I had done something unspeakably cruel,” he writes.

Gershkovich quotes Vasily Grossman on how an oppressive regime can dwarf a person: “Only people who never felt such force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it.” The WSJ reporter couldn’t be absolutely certain an exchange would ever happen or how many years he might have to spend in the prison cell; he was aware of the fate of Paul Whelan, a former US marine, convicted of espionage (charges he denied) and waiting for a swap since 2018.

In his small cell, the reporter is caught in the grip of a thousand-eyed Leviathan that keeps peering in at him: “With time, I would learn to recognize the eyes of each guard checking in on me, six times an hour, more than a hundred times a day.” Yet Gershkovich manages to reveal the human faces behind the function they play in the repressive system; he even makes conversation with his FSB investigator about the corruption of the Russian political system.

To protect the identities of his cellmates, he merges them into a composite character he calls “Seryoga,” who was accused of running an illegal weapons shop and had admitted his guilt. “On the outside, we would never have been friends,” Gershkovich writes. “But here, in these circumstances, we got along and he made me laugh.”

Seryoga, who considers himself an alpha male, tries to educate Gershkovich about the proper way to enter a cell (or khata in Russian prison jargon, which is also the Ukrainian word for a house): Never step over the threshold without wiping your feet on the rag by the door (hygiene is essential; as Seryoga put it, “we shit where we eat”), and be ready for the first questions: “What’s the trouble?” or “Is everything even in your life?” Both phrases mean “What are you in for?” That is, which article of the Russian Criminal Code were you charged under? The “uneven” articles, the so-called 130s, cover sex crimes such as rape and child sexual abuse. They automatically put a prisoner at the very bottom rung of the prison: Most likely, he will eat last and be subjected to sexual violence.

Seryoga also teaches his American cellmate the saying at the heart of the prison brotherhood in Russia: “From the soul, soulfully, into the soul. Hugged you, picked you up, and put you back down.” Gershkovich already knew the phrase “from the soul” when he was on the outside. It is shorthand for “thanks” — a vivid example of how prison slang has seeped into the Russian language and culture.

Gershkovich understood that in state custody he was seen as a “valuable commodity,” and that he hadn’t faced any real FSB interrogations: no beatings, no electrocutions, no waterboarding, no stringing up, no harassment. “They want to present a humane face to the world. They took a journalist who they know will write about the experience, so in the meantime they will treat him well,” he remembers thinking.

Gershkovich was kept safe because he was seen as leverage to secure the release of Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin, convicted for life in Germany of shooting dead an exiled Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park in August 2019. In the last part of the memoir, Gershkovich that he felt “guilty” that because of him Krasikov was now free, and Putin was able to show the security services that if they committed to executing dangerous operations for him, he would have heir back.

Not every journalist swallowed up by Russia’s repressive machine is as lucky as Gershkovich. Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was tortured to death in Russian custody. When her body was returned to Ukraine, her eyeballs, brain and part of her larynx were missing.

Another brick in the wall

Gershkovich calls Russia both “cursed and beautiful” and the country undoubtedly means a great deal to him. It’s where he found love (his girlfriend, Maria, is a well-known Russian journalist), made close friends, and did some very good reporting.

A Russian journalist would never tell an FSB interrogator that “people will rally in their support,” as Gershkovich did, but fortunately, he turned out to be absolutely right.

His defense lawyers, Tanya, Maria and Andrei, went through every procedural step, even though they knew a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. “What’s the point?” Gershkovich once asked them.

“One day all of this will come crumbling down,” Andrei told him. “Right now, we’re trying to preserve some semblance of a foundation from which to rebuild.” The stubborn work of the lawyers was a powerful form of a protest — perhaps the only one possible, without being locked away, in a dictatorship.

Maybe Gershkovich’s book will be one of the bricks in that rebuilding, too.

The post Evan Gershkovich survived the terrors of prison in Putin’s Russia. Not every journalist was equally lucky. appeared first on The Forward.

Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David is nearly 600 pages long. To be fair, there’s a lot of ground to cover in the 79-year-old comic’s life: Larry’s upbringing in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, his fledgling career as a stand-up comedian, and the creation of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

But 576 pages was about as long as the book could reasonably get. So the bar mitzvah scene had to go.

According to author Blake Harris, whose other books include Console Wars and The History of the Future, the omitted story goes like this: Larry shared his service with another boy who was becoming a bar mitzvah at the same time. During practice sessions, every time Larry came to a certain Hebrew word in the Torah, which sounded to the 13-year-olds like the English word “fart,” the other boy would let out a laugh.

On the big day, Larry heard the other boy laughing at the word, which prompted him, in turn, to lose his cool and crack up too. This breakdown, right in the middle of his Torah portion, did not go over well with the adults in the room, including Larry’s parents.

In the grand scheme of all-things-Larry, the fart fiasco felt expendable. But it foreshadowed the comedian Larry would become — including his propensity to break character and laugh on the set of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Still, even without the bar mitzvah, Emperor of Nothing offers plenty of Jewish details about Larry’s life. There’s the time Larry was temporarily expelled from Hebrew school after, true to form, he burst into laughter in the middle of his rabbi’s spiel.

Then there’s the Yinglish term Larry’s father, Morty, used for “those who exhibited asshole behavior”: schmohawks — a combination of the word “schmo,” meaning a foolish or gullible person, with “mohawk,” the punk hairstyle. The term would become Larry’s signature insult on Curb for those who cross him.

Larry’s most Jewish qualities, however, are less explicit in the book and more related to his personality traits — chief among them, a remarkable stubbornness. (After all, God describes the Israelites in the Torah as a “stiff-necked people.”) The book recounts how, as a stand-up comedian, Larry would abruptly walk offstage whenever a crowd failed to respond to his jokes, earning him the title of “least likely to succeed” among his circle of comedian friends. As a screenwriter, he was similarly unwilling to bend, at times preferring to forfeit a writing credit rather than accept changes to his creative vision.

Harris, a Seinfeld superfan himself, spent six years conducting research for the book, FaceTiming Larry from his home in Colorado weekly at the onset of COVID and observing him on the set of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Harris landed a role as an extra in the show’s finale.

I interviewed Harris to learn what spending time with Larry was really like — and whether the real-life Larry is just as much of a curmudgeon as his TV counterpart.

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

How does Larry see his Jewishness? Was that something you talked about with him?

It was not something that Larry and I talked about a lot, but I blame myself. If anything, it was me just not asking enough questions about his Judaism. I’m Jewish, but other than High Holy Days, I don’t really practice very much, and I think Larry’s the same way. So we didn’t talk about it that much, except for certain episodes.

We did talk about his bar mitzvah [and his] little laughing incident when he was on the bima. I felt like that was a good indication that that was the kind of man Larry was going to be — that he’s a man who laughed a lot. He thought that was very juvenile, and I agreed.

You write in the book about how NBC executives initially worried that Seinfeld was ‘too Jewish.’ Do you know if that bothered Larry at all, that people saw it that way?

The first time Larry really became aware of that criticism of his material being “too Jewish” was with Prognosis: Negative. [Larry’s 1983 movie script about a noncommittal man who decides to reignite a relationship with his terminally ill ex-girlfriend.] That was the first time that he probably heard a lot of what he would later hear with Seinfeld or with Curb, but in a much smaller way.

At that time, Larry said he’d be willing to change the character’s name from Leo Bloom to Jesus Christ if it would help get the thing made. But other than that superficial change, you can see even back then, in 1983, when Larry had nothing, he was pretty unwilling to change very much that he felt like was important to the script. It’s fitting with Larry’s personality that he doesn’t see those things in terms of Jewish or not. He sees them in terms of funny or not.

One of the major themes of the book is Larry’s total unwillingness to compromise on his vision, even when it comes at the expense of his career. Where do you think that chutzpah comes from? 

I think that it comes from just the way that he views the artwork. Clearly, throughout his career, it is never about the money, and I think that’s what’s so romantic about Larry.

I guess the shortest way to put it is that success for Larry means success completely on his own terms, and to succeed otherwise isn’t a full success to him. So he’s unwilling to bend.

Did Larry have any objections to the contents of the book?

He sent me back the physical pages, like he would do for the writers at Seinfeld, with handwritten notes. Early on, during his standup days, there was a joke about the kangaroo — how male kangaroos suffered from pouch envy. Larry crossed it out and wrote “terrible joke.”

I thought two things. One, I actually don’t think that’s a terrible joke at all. It’s kind of funny that males suffer from pouch envy.

And then second, I said that it would be good for readers to know that you weren’t as funny as you were today when you first started off. So even if you think that’s a terrible joke, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in the book. And he understood that, and he actually agreed with it.

I also did go to the Denver Zoo, and I asked the person at the kangaroo encampment what she thought of the joke. She thought it was pretty funny.

You’ve said that the real-life Larry is sweeter than the Larry on Curb. How much does Larry recognize that difference himself? Is that something he acknowledges, or something you gleaned through observation and talking to people who know him?

If you ask me, or if you ask his wife, or [Seinfeld and Curb producers] Jeff Schaffer or David Mandel, the number one difference between the character on the show and the person in real life is his level of kindness. Mary Steenburgen [who plays herself on Curb] calls him a sweetheart.

It’s not like he’s going around giving out compliments to people. But he’s a compassionate guy. He cares a lot about his daughters. He cares about how a person feels in a conversation with him.

But it is amazing to me that Larry, in real life, sees himself as so incredibly different from the character on Curb. Most people who know him pretty well will say that there’s a 75 to 90% overlap between the character and the person, whereas the Larry in real life acts as if they’re completely different entities. He often calls the character on the show his hero. That was one of the more interesting things to me, because it seems so obvious that there’s a lot more overlap than Larry acknowledges.

I remember talking to Larry one time, and he had just gotten back from a get-together with friends. I asked him how it went, and he said it was good, but it went on too long. He should have left earlier.

And I said, “Well, why didn’t you leave earlier?” And he said, “Well, it would have been kind of rude.” And I was like, “Yeah, but you’re Larry David.”

And the gist of his response was that he didn’t want to allow himself that license to do that, because once he leaned into the ‘I’m Larry David’ aspect, he saw a point of no return.

I think that shows a lot about him — that he knows that he probably could get away with more than he does, but he doesn’t want to give himself that license to act carte blanche like the character Larry David.

The post The Larry David bar mitzvah story that his biographer left out appeared first on The Forward.