(JTA) — The United States announced it had launched defensive strikes on Monday in Southern Iran, targeting Iranian missile sites and boats it believed were placing mines.

The move threatens to derail an already fragile ceasefire between the United States, Iran and Israel aimed at giving the U.S. and Iran space to hammer out a deal to end the hostilities. It also comes as U.S. President Donald Trump told several Muslim allies participating in consultations over a deal that they should normalize relations with Israel in exchange for the U.S. inking the agreement.

U.S. Central Command Spokesperson Navy Capt. Tim Hawkin said in a statement issued Monday that strike targets “included missile launch sites and Iranian boats attempting to emplace mines.”

He added that U.S. forces “conducted self-defense strikes … to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces,” and that CENTCOM “continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire.”

The attacks were conducted in the port city of Bandar Abbas around the strait of Hormuz, according to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as cited by CNN.

The strikes came just 24 hours after President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had instructed his representatives to “not rush into a deal,” stressing that “time is on our side.” Trump emphasized in the message that Iran “cannot develop or procure a Nuclear Weapon,” a key aim of the American military effort but one the president had not referred to in comments over the weekend that a deal was close.

Trump noted in another post Sunday that the deal was not yet “fully negotiated,” but that if he makes a deal with Iran it “will be a good and proper one,” and that he does not “make bad deals.”

Trump’s comments came as several GOP voices have expressed concerns about a deal he said Saturday was “largely negotiated.” Trump’s posts Sunday came after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) posted on X that the reported terms of the agreement would be a “disastrous mistake.”  

Trump also stated on Truth Social Monday that Muslim countries should “mandatorily” sign on to the Abraham Accords as part of any agreement to end the war between Iran and Israel.

He named Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, though he said it might be possible for a couple to be exempted.

Following the U.S. strikes on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in India Tuesday that the Strait of ‌Hormuz has to be open, “one way or the other,” and that negotiations with Iran could “take a few days.”

Meanwhile, several media outlets reported that Iran announced Tuesday that it had executed Gholamreza Khani Shekerab for ​alleged espionage ⁠and ​intelligence cooperation ​with Israel.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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(JTA) — Yisrael HaBahiyir saved for more than a year to make his dream of moving to Israel come true.

But just weeks after leaving upstate New York, where he had been managing operations for a synagogue, he got a cruel reality check when he transferred his rent money from his American bank account to Western Union to pay his Tel Aviv landlord.

“I sent the same amount I normally transfer and went to pick it up. It was about 300 shekels short. I said something to the cashier, like, ‘I think you gave me the wrong rate,’” HaBahiyir recalled. “That’s when I realized the shekel was strengthening.”

It’s an experience that Americans in Israel — and Israelis who depend on American dollars — are increasingly facing, as the Israeli shekel has strengthened to near-record highs. While the currency’s strength has been good news to many Israelis who worried that years of war would harm the economy, it is having wide-ranging and often challenging ramifications for immigrants and Israeli nonprofits.

Many Americans who move to Israel have chosen to keep some or all of their assets in dollars, whether to hedge against shekel volatility, maintain financial ties to the United States or preserve flexibility should they ever return.

When the dollar is relatively strong compared to the shekel, as was the case for much of the past decade, that arrangement is advantageous. Assets held in dollars go further in an Israeli economy priced in shekels, giving American immigrants greater purchasing power for everyday expenses.

But now, with the shekel trading at less than three to a dollar, its most favorable rate in three decades, anyone trying to make a life in Israel using U.S. dollars is feeling the squeeze.

“Before, $1,500 would get me close to 6,000 shekels and cover my bills,” said Lauren Adilav, who works as a freelance editor for American authors. “I’m relying on money from the U.S. to cover my rent. If the shekel gets any stronger, I don’t know if I can.”

The exchange rate isn’t just punishing Americans in Israel. It’s also putting extreme pressure on the many Israeli charities and organizations that depend on donations from Jews abroad. Aish Hatorah, the Orthodox outreach organization based in Jerusalem, announced last month that it had laid off several employees and twice delayed salary payments to staff amid funding shortfalls driven largely by the strengthening shekel.

Leket Israel, the food rescue organization, has also felt the pressure. Its founder, Joseph Gitler, said the shift had made clear that Israeli nonprofits can no longer rely solely on overseas support. Shmulie Russel, director of Makom LaLelev, told JTA that his nonprofit, which provides direct aid to those recovering from addiction, is facing a similar financial crunch and might soon be forced to find ways to cut expenses.

“This is the biggest conversation happening in the Israeli NGO sector right now — how to deal with the strength of the shekel,” said Leah Aharoni, executive director of the group Our People, which helps Russian-speaking Jews immigrate to Israel. The majority of donations to Our People are made in dollars.

So far, Aharoni said, the organization has delayed making new hires. She anticipates more challenges ahead.

“It has made it absolutely impossible to plan,” she said. “This is happening across the NGO sector. We haven’t been forced to cut programs yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”

Aharoni added that she hasn’t wanted to raise the issue with her donors. “Everyone is reluctant to speak out, as donors are already feeling the fatigue of three years of war. Israel just isn’t at the top of their priorities anymore, and now we’re coming back to ask them to make up the difference,” she said. “So we cut where we can.”

The strength of the shekel has come as a surprise to many Israelis, who expected the economy to be weakened by yet another war, this time with Iran, that cratered tourism and heightened instability in daily life. Yet much of the shekel’s gain against the dollar has actually stemmed from the war, as the dollar has weakened and investors have flocked to Israel’s high-tech sector, and particularly its defense industry, which has been buoyed by the conflict.

“The high-tech industry, which historically leads growth in Israel, has been minimally hurt by the war given its reliance on international connections — and it continued to grow even in 2024, the worst year of the war,” said Michel Strawczynski, professor of economics at Hebrew University.

High-tech exports reached $78 billion in 2024, and in the first half of 2025, high-tech accounted for 57% of all Israeli exports, the highest share ever recorded.

For Adilav, who moved from Jerusalem to the West Bank to manage her costs since moving to Israel from upstate New York more than two decades ago, spending in the tech sector is cold comfort.

“The shekel being strong might be good for the 10 billionaires who dream up some app and sell it to Google for $40 billion, but it really affects the rest of us,” she said.

Exporters, meanwhile, have counter-intuitively watched their profit margins dwindle as the shekel gains. They are paid for their products in dollars, so as the shekel strengthens and the dollar weakens, they end up with fewer and fewer shekels to fund their operations and pay workers’ salaries.

The pinch is also coming for Americans who are buying Israeli real estate — a transaction that often happens “on paper,” or with Americans entering a contract to buy an apartment or home that is still being built. Those contracts rarely account for a volatile exchange rate.

“When their upcoming payment might have been 400,000 shekels, now they’re getting hit harder in dollars,” said Nachi Paris, a Jerusalem-based real estate agent who specializes in high-end properties.

Paris said contracts for apartments in development typically prohibit transfers before a buyer takes possession, leaving buyers legally obligated to spend more than they expected when they signed.

He said he believed concerns about antisemitism in the United States could drive middle-class American Jews who cannot afford second properties to make Israel their primary residence instead. But the exchange rate could be an obstacle.

“There’s a point where they can’t afford it,” Paris said. “Right now, it’s still psychological. They can still afford it, and Zionism is involved, and they want to move here, but there comes a point when you can’t afford it.”

With economists warning a stronger shekel can lead to employment drops and other negative consequences, calls have been growing on the Bank of Israel to intervene. But its options are limited, according to Strawczynski, who noted that paused rate cuts and rising inflation from oil prices and flight costs constrain the bank’s ability to act at least until the war ends.

For now, Americans in Israel are paying the price. Judy Diamond moved from New York four years ago with the goal of fully retiring from her career in finance. Not only has she set that aside as an immediate ambition, but she is trying to break her lease in the upscale Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem because she can see that her savings, in dollars, won’t stretch as far as she anticipated.

“I just can’t afford my rent anymore,” Diamond said. “It’s keeping me up at night. It worked for three and a half years, and now the financial aspect of it has fallen apart.”

For Joel Haber, a Jerusalem-based guide who moved to Israel in 2009, the shekel’s rise has come at an especially painful time, when yet another war stopped the flow of travelers who pay hundreds of dollars for his food tours of his adopted city and its famous market.

“The battered dollar has been more of an added insult to the injury of the war,” he said.

Haber always quotes his prices in dollars, even for visitors not from the United States. “It’s a lot less scary to see a price of $300 than 900 shekels, especially for unfamiliar tourists,” he said.

Now, due to the strength of the shekel, Haber has taken what amounts to a 20% pay cut over the last year. He would like to raise his prices, but with the cost of visiting Israel already so high and a 50% reduction in tourist visits compared to 2022, Haber can’t afford to lose any more customers.

“I want to raise my prices so I can still pay my bills,” he said. “But if I look at it from the tourists’ perspective, it’s getting even more difficult for them to afford Israel. It hurts us both.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post A stronger shekel has become a pressing problem for Americans building lives in Israel appeared first on The Forward.

Doonesbury made its debut in Oct. 1970, appearing in 28 newspapers across the nation, including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe. Just a few weeks later, its creator, the 22-year-old Garry Trudeau, who had received his Yale sheepskin the previous spring, introduced mainstream America to Mark Slackmeyer — the campus radical who happened to be a Jew.

At the beginning of the 20th century, whole strips had sometimes focused on the Jewish experience. Harry Hirschfield’s Abie the Agent chronicled the life of a Jewish car salesman and ran in numerous papers in major metropolitan areas from 1914 to 1940. Likewise, the characters in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, which flourished during roughly the same period, occasionally lapsed into Yiddish.

But by the 1950s, Jews and Jewish references had all but disappeared. As cartoonist and cartoon historian Brian Walker told me, “Once the power of syndicates such as King Features increased dramatically after World War II, the comics pages became much more homogenized. These national players began fearing that characters that were too specific — say, Jews or Blacks — might alienate readers in one part of the country — namely, the South.”

While the influence of Jews on the cartoon world could still be seen in the 1950s and 60s — consider the popularity of the Superman strip created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster during the Depression — Jewish creators were often forced to operate behind the scenes.

Trudeau’s “Megaphone Mark” — who sported long hair and a bushy beard —was modeled on Mark Zanger, the leader of the Yale chapter of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Mark’s first act in the strip is to take over the office of President King, the WASPy president of Walden College, who was based on the actual Yale president, Kingman Brewster. Over the next few months, Trudeau increasingly used Mark’s clashes with his father Phil, a New Jersey stockbroker desperate for his son to “succeed,” to dramatize tensions within postwar Jewish life.

Phil represents a generation of upwardly mobile Jews who believed acceptance in corporate and suburban America required conformity, restraint and the concealing of ethnicity. Mark, by contrast, is openly confrontational, culturally self-aware, and seems uninterested in assimilationist respectability.

Mark’s Jewish identity was not made explicit until the middle of 1971, when he and his college buddy Mike Doonesbury attend a talk by a famous religious crusader. Asked why he has not yet chosen to join the fold and lead a proper Christian life, Mark deadpans, “I’m Jewish.”

At Yale, Trudeau hardly knew Zanger and had much less in common with him than he had with Kingman Brewster, whose ancestors sailed to America on the Mayflower. Trudeau was descended from three generations of Ivy-League-educated physicians. Like his father, the hardworking family doctor Frank Trudeau, the cartoonist attended St. Paul’s — one of the most blueblood of all New England prep schools. And though the young Yalie, like the genteel Brewster, opposed the war in Vietnam, he wanted nothing to do with radical politics.

But Trudeau identified closely with some of the personal struggles of Megaphone Mark. After all, he was also bucking family tradition by becoming an artist rather than a doctor. As Trudeau told me, some of Mark’s quarrels with his father hit close to home. Consider the line that Phil tells Mark in the fall of 1973: “Life is not to be enjoyed, it’s to be gotten on with!” Those words came verbatim from the mouth of Frank Trudeau, though, the younger Trudeau said, “my father and I ended up getting along pretty well and later came to laugh about such harsh comments.”

A key reason why Trudeau saw a part of himself in his Jewish cartoon character is that this ultimate insider also knew what it felt like to be an outsider. For many American Jews of the postwar era, especially those attending elite institutions historically dominated by WASP norms and values, Jewishness came with a sense of conditional acceptance, of not fully belonging. Trudeau had an emotionally similar experience at St. Paul’s, where he felt deeply estranged from the school’s rigid social hierarchy and its obsessive emphasis on athletic status. As the cartoonist later stressed, his four years there were “a tortured time for me.” He hated the school’s culture and never felt fully at home within it.

At Yale, Trudeau tended to surround himself with other St. Paul’s alums who had felt just as alienated during high school, such as his roommate Charles Pillsbury. Pillsbury, whose family name inspired that of the strip’s protagonist, Mike Doonesbury, told me, “Like Garry, I constantly felt as if I was being ranked by my fellow students on where I stood in athletics or popularity.”

Another aspect of St. Paul’s that completely horrified both Trudeau and Pillsbury was the virulent harassment directed toward its token Jews. “I once saw a classmate approach a Jewish kid and throw some coins in his direction, shouting, ‘Go pick up your shekels.’ I was glad to get out of there,” Pillsbury said.

The emergence in the comic pages of “Megaphone Mark” also reflected the demographic changes that most Ivy League schools underwent in the late 1960s. In Yale’s class of 1968 — which included future president George W. Bush — 40% of students came from public schools and 60% from prep schools. In Trudeau’s class of 1970, the percentages were reversed. And with the elimination of the quota system that had long restricted the admission of minority students, Trudeau’s class contained nearly 250 Jews — more than twice as many as the previous class.

A graduate of a public high school in Queens, biographer Ron Chernow, like Trudeau, started Yale in the fall of 1966. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author told me that, early in his first semester at Yale, he went to an orientation meeting at Yale’s Hillel where the school’s rabbi proudly proclaimed, “’My brethren, it is wonderful to see many of you here! You will hear it said that for the last fifty years, there were quotas on Jewish students. But this is a malicious lie. It’s purely coincidental that between 108 and 110 Jewish students attended Yale every year.’”

Mark’s battles with his father in Trudeau’s 1970s strips also reflect the society-wide divide between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers that defined the decade. Phil can’t seem to understand why his son wouldn’t want to become part of the establishment — say, land a well-paying job and join his suburban golf club. Unfortunately, like many Jews who came of age during the 1950s, Phil feels he needs to pretend not to be Jewish in order to make his way in the world. As Trudeau stressed, Phil is so disconnected from his own identity that he doesn’t even consider himself a Jew.

In a Sunday strip from late 1973, Phil — who, like Frank Trudeau had graduated during World War II from the same college that his son now attended — encourages Mark to join his old fraternity because “those people can help you later on in life.” Mark protests, arguing that “the guys in it are all snobby jerks.” Phil then berates Mark, exclaiming that “you always reject people from your own background,” before adding, “I’ll bet you’re even dating some Jewish girl!” After Mark reminds Phil that they are Jewish, his father is forced to concede, “Oh, that’s right.”

But in the end, it took a preppy WASP to broach the tension between assimilationist anxiety and a self-assured, unapologetic Jewish sense of identity to mainstream America in the funny papers.

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