The debate is not just about language, but about controlling the narrative. Political speech can minimize or exaggerate events, put them in their proper context or distort them in ways that, per George Orwell, can “corrupt thought.” We asked historians, linguists and activists to consider the word pogrom, and asked them what politicians, journalists and everyday people should call what happened at Huwara. Their responses are below.
Sidestepping the real issue
Dr. Jeffrey Shandler Distinguished Professor, Department of Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
The meanings of the word “pogrom” in different languages are key here. In Russian, it means a massacre or raid, as it does in Yiddish; in neither language is it understood as specifically about violence against Jews. The Oxford English Dictionary concurs that pogrom means an “organized massacre… of any body or class,” but notes that, in the English-language press, it was first used mostly to refer to anti-Jewish attacks in Russia, citing examples from 1905-1906.
Therefore, though the association of pogrom with violence targeting Jews is widely familiar, its meaning is broader.
That said, because of English speakers’ widely familiar association of the term with Jews as victims, to use pogrom to describe violence perpetrated by Jews is provocative. As to whether it is appropriate to refer to recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians, it seems to me that this question sidesteps the more important question of whether the actions being called pogroms are appropriate.
Call it what it is: “settler terrorism”
Sara Yael Hirschhorn ’22-’23 Research Fellow at the Center for Antisemitism Research at the ADL, and author, “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement”
Let me say first with a loud and clear conscience: What happened in Huwara was abhorrent, immoral, and unconscionable and certainly was not committed in my name.
But to paraphrase Raymond Carver’s famous formulation: How do we talk about it when we talk about Huwara? What kind of descriptive and analytical framework can adequately and contextually interpret that horrific event?
The shorthand of choice seems to be “pogrom” — but it isn’t clear that all who deploy the term are signifying the same thing. For some, pogrom is a synonym for pillage, rampage, fire, property damage and violence in the streets — a one-word general summary of brutal acts. For others, pogrom refers to vigilante justice, an abbreviated story of the non-state or non-institutional actors and their motivations.
More specifically, however, pogrom is seemingly being mobilized as a metaphor to Jewish history, juxtaposing the Jewish victims of yesterday to the Jewish-Israeli perpetrators of today, an implicit analogy to the prelude to the Shoah, recasting Zionists as organized bands of genocidaires (with or without regime sponsorship) like the Cossacks, the Nationalist Fronts or even the Einsatzgruppen. Some would use the word to incorporate all three meanings (and more).
As a historian, I am troubled by the haphazard and harmful use of terms that are attached to a specific time and place — such as the thousand-year history of Jews in the Rhinelands and Eastern Europe, with many layers of imperial, national, local, economic and religious forces that precipitated these events — in such an ahistorical manner. Nor do I find the parallels between Zionists and Nazis to be historically careful (if deliberately offensive) — the State of Israel is committing crimes in the West Bank, but not a genocide. The equivalence also all too easily and incorrectly grafts tropes of racism and white supremacy drawn from American history into the West Bank’s soil.
So what to say about Huwara? Israel — for reasons both political and lexiconographical — has failed to consistently adopt a term for such attacks. (Often the euphemism of “errant weeds” who are “taking matters into their own hands” is the choice of Knesset politicians.) To my mind, the best term is “settler terrorism,” which puts Jewish-Israeli acts on par with Palestinian terrorism. It should also mean that these actions merit the same consequences under the occupation like trial, imprisonment, home demolition and other deterrents enforced against all those who choose the path of violence.
Last but not least, a pogrom was historically an unpunished crime against humanity that led only to war and annihilation. Don’t we aspire for more in Israel/Palestine?
Palestinians call it “ethnic cleansing”
Ibrahim Eid Dalalsha Director, Horizon Center for Political Studies and Media Outreach, Ramallah, and member of Israel Policy Forum’s Critical Neighbors task force
Palestinians generally view and describe what happened during Sunday’s Huwara attacks as “racist hate crimes seeking to destroy and dispossess the Palestinian people of their homes and properties.” While no specific term has been used to describe these attacks, it was likened to the barbaric and savage invasion of Baghdad by Hulagu, the 13th-century Mongol commander.
Palestinian intellectuals tend to use “ethnic cleansing,” savage and barbaric ethnically motivated violence against innocent civilians, as another way of referring to these attacks. When such events include killing, Palestinian politicians and intellectuals tend to use the term massacre, or “majzara,” to underline the irrational and indiscriminate violence against defenseless civilians. I don’t think the term “pogrom” and its historic connotation are widely known to most people here. From a Palestinian perspective, using such terms, including “Holocaust,” is not considered a mistake. In fact, even using “Holocaust“ to describe violence against Palestinian civilians in and around 1948 was not considered a mistake until very recently when it caused such a saga for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Germany.
View of cars burned by Jewish settlers during riots in Huwara, in the West Bank, near Nablus, Feb. 27, 2023. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)
In the name of historical accuracy
Rukhl Schaechter Yiddish Editor, The Forward
The recent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in Huwara are abhorrent. I commend those in Israel calling them peulot teror, “actions of terror,” and I trust that the perpetrators will be brought to justice. But these riots were not pogroms.
The word pogrom refers to one of the many violent riots and subsequent massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe between the 17th and 20th centuries. These attacks were committed by local non-Jewish, often peasant populations. They were instigated by rabble-rousers like Bogdan Chmielnicki, who led a Cossack and peasant uprising against Polish rule in Ukraine in 1648 and ended up destroying hundreds of Jewish communities. According to eyewitnesses, the attackers also committed atrocities on pregnant women.
Note that the massacres of Jews carried out by the Nazis, and the murders of Armenians by the Turkish government at the turn of the 20th century — as horrific as they were — were never called pogroms because in both cases, there was a government behind it. In the name of historic accuracy, let’s continue to use the word pogrom solely for mob attacks on and massacres of Jews.
When the Poles banned “pogrom”
Samuel D. Kassow Professor of History, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
In Poland in the late 1930s, altercations between a Jew and a Pole sometimes ended with either the Jew or the Pole getting badly hurt or even killed. When the victim was a Pole, mobs of Poles rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods smashing windows, looting shops and often beating or even killing Jews. Poles often held Jews collectively responsible for the death of one of their own. This happened in Przytyk, Minsk-Mazowieck, Grodno and other places. Jews called these riots “pogroms,” which they were. But the Polish government banned use of the term in the press. After all, “pogrom” was a Russian word, and “pogroms” happened only in a place characterized by barbarism and ignorance. Since Poland was not Russia, and since Poles were eminently civilized, logically speaking, pogroms simply did not take place in Poland. What happened in these towns were to be called “excesses” (zajscia). But certainly not pogroms!
I take it that since we Jews are so civilized, we too are incapable of pogroms. So should we label what these settlers did “‘excesses”? Or perhaps we should take a deep breath and call them pogroms?
A Jewish, but not exclusive, history
Henry Abramson Historian
The word “pogrom” is rooted in time and place, although the type of violence it describes is as old as human history. It is a Russian word, but it entered the English language in the late 19th century through the medium of Yiddish-speakers, outraged at the wave of antisemitic disturbances that surged under rule of the last tsar of the Russian Empire, Nicholas II. Russians themselves used a variety of words for the ugly phenomenon, with translations like “riot” or “persecution,” but the term “pogrom” proved the most evocative: the Slavic prefix “po” suggests a directed attack, and the root “grom” is the word for “thunder.” A pogrom, therefore, meant a focused point where a great deal of energy was dissipated in a single dramatic act of violence.
The focused point, in the context of that dark history, was the civilian Jewish population in the tiny shtetls that dotted the Pale of Settlement. In this regard the word could be used to encompass attacks on Jewish populations from as long ago as the year 38 in Alexandria, Egypt. It does not, however, have any specific designation to indicate that Jews are the victims.
And each Yom Kippur, as worshippers attend the last prayers of the day, they might well ask: “Why is this closing service different from all other services?”
The Book of Life
Throughout the High Holidays, the 10-day period that begins with Rosh Hashanah and ends with Yom Kippur, Jews pray to be “inscribed” in the Book of Life – that God grant them life, livelihood, health and moral growth in the coming year.
The holidays culminate in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement: a day dedicated to reflection, fasting and repairing each person’s relationship with others – and through that, their relationship with God.
According to Jewish tradition, the Book of Life is sealed as Yom Kippur draws to a close, as is each person’s fate for the coming year. During the fifth and final service, one prays to be “sealed,” which on this Day of Judgment entails being forgiven. This last service is thus titled “Ne’ilah,” or “the closing,” reflecting the idea that the gates of heaven are closing. It also alludes to the gates of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, where the holiday was once celebrated.
Ne’ilah prayers are accordingly recited at the closing of the day – just at sunset, adding nature’s drama to the closing of the day. The ambience is enhanced by keeping open the ark of the Torah, the usually closed chamber at the front of the synagogue that protects the scrolls of scripture. Many congregants remain standing, using this final chance to plead their case as the day slips by.
Yom Kippur is a day reserved for repentance, expressed through confession – and, in many ways, it is a day of repetition. The confessional prayer is recited up to 10 times over the course of five services.
It begins with the congregation asking God for forgiveness “for the sin that I have committed before You.” Yet what follows is an extended list of ethical sins, with a focus on the sins of abusive speech, such as slandering, slurring, slighting and smearing the reputations of others. A foundational concept of Judaism is that humanity is made in the image of God, meaning that in wronging others, we offend God as well.
After reciting the confessional, the Ne’ilah service adds one more prayer, not used in other services. This addendum focuses not on the specifics of confession but the dynamics of repentance: underscoring that belief that each person’s relationship with God is correlated with their relationship with other people.
Ne’ilah thus focuses on the sin of fraud, echoing a passage from the biblical Book of Jonah read in the preceding afternoon service: “Let everyone repent of their evil way by giving back the stolen goods in their hands.” To return to God, then, it is important to return what is owed to other people: emotionally, spiritually and materially.
Whereas the oft-repeated confessional focuses on offenses of the lips, such as slander, here the focus is on offenses of the hands: taking what does not belong to us, such as by exploiting the vulnerable or committing fraud.
“You give space” – literally, you give a hand – “to the sinner, but You extend Your right hand to penitents,” it begins. “You have taught us … to confess to You every one of our sins so that we cease handling unlawful goods.”
Judaism holds that God won’t forgive you for a sin if you haven’t made amends with the person you wronged. During the Days of Awe leading up to Yom Kippur, Jews are taught to ask each other for forgiveness, apologizing for the ways we wronged one another in the past year.
Repent and repair
Rather than browbeating people into repentance, the Ne’ilah service’s strategy is to boost them up into it, playing upon the biblical idea of the grandeur of humanity. “You have distinguished humanity from the beginning, privileging it to stand before You,” the liturgy says.
Judaism sees sin as a rupture that can be healed, not an inherent condition. The liturgy’s message is this: Live up to your greatness, your divinely endowed potential, as a being made in God’s image.
For Ne’ilah, the eminence of humanity consists in the ability to repent and set things right before man and God. This is what Yom Kippur is all about.
At Dartmouth, Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies refuse to stay apart
Immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks and the start of the Israel-Gaza War, Dartmouth College student Jackson Weinstein was “extremely outspoken” on campus about his support for Israel.
But by his sophomore year, he had largely withdrawn from discussing the conflict with other students.
“It felt like I was losing friends and just making things harder for myself,” said Weinstein, now a senior at the Ivy League university in New Hampshire.
This past school year, he enrolled in a new course, Difficult Conversations on the Middle East, developed by the college in response to debates over Israel and Gaza that have divided campuses across the country.
For the first several weeks, the class, jointly offered by Dartmouth’s Middle East and Jewish Studies departments, avoided delving into the conflict. Instead, students started by studying topics like groupthink, mindfulness, emotional regulation and academic freedom.
Only by the fifth week did they plunge into subjects like Palestinian armed resistance, women’s rights in the Middle East, the accusation of genocide in Gaza and the role of colonialism in the region.
“In the first class, students come in with this idea of, ‘How do I win the debate? How do I show that I’m right?’’” said Jonathan Smolin, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies. “That’s categorically not what we’re doing in the class.”
Smolin teaches the course alongside Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who spent five years posted in Israel.
The hope is that students learn to take an argument seriously enough to understand it before deciding whether they reject it.
The unusual course, offered again this school year, is the product of an experiment Dartmouth began long before Oct. 7. For roughly a decade, its Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies programs have deliberately intertwined themselves: professors co-teach and cross-list courses, serve on each other’s steering committees, co-sponsor visiting professors and even occupy neighboring offices in the same building. It’s just as much for the faculty as it is for the students.
“I want to understand why some people hold positions that I may find horrific,” said Susannah Heschel, chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth. “I’m not here to just condemn something; I want to understand the complexity of it.”
An unusual partnership
For Darcy Rochkind, a Middle Eastern Studies major modifying her degree to include Jewish Studies, the partnership is what drew her to Dartmouth.
Rochkind was applying to college in the fall of 2023, as campuses across the country were convulsed by protests and arguments over universities’ responses to Oct. 7. Her dream school was Columbia, but after watching congressional hearings on antisemitism in person and videos her mom sent her of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies professors discussing the conflict side by side, she changed her plans and enrolled at Dartmouth.
“You’d have a very hard time being a Middle Eastern Studies or Jewish Studies major without taking a class from the opposite department,” she said.
The experiment also extends beyond the classroom. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, Heschel and her colleagues in Middle Eastern Studies organized two public forums to discuss what had happened and opened it to students. The room was so packed that Dartmouth needed an overflow space, and Heschel said another 1,600 people watched via livestream.
After those initial forums, Dartmouth launched Middle East Dialogues, a series of events organized by faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies to explore challenging topics related to the region. Rather than foster safe spaces, Dartmouth leaders aspired to create what they call “brave spaces,” where students are encouraged to actively engage with disagreement.
To make it work, Smolin, who has organized many of the program’s events, deliberately avoids inviting speakers who are political activists on either side.
“We’re not interested in people declaring who’s right and who’s wrong,” he said. “That’s not what we do in higher education.”
Instead, they have hosted Israeli and Palestinian political commentators, think tank experts, and public-opinion researchers.
Professors have also facilitated meetings between students to expose them to different viewpoints. Weinstein and several other Jewish students went to dinner with a group of Muslim students, including two Palestinians and a student who had grown up in Gaza. His professor, Fishere, facilitated the gathering.
The students sat together at Pine, a Dartmouth restaurant, and talked for hours about the war, the accusation of genocide in Gaza and the experiences of Gazan civilians.
Weinstein had never before met someone who had spent his entire life in Gaza. He described the dinner as “one of the most human experiences I’ve had at Dartmouth.”
A national flashpoint
Dartmouth’s approach has become increasingly distinctive as Middle East studies programs have become flashpoints in campus battles over Israel, antisemitism and academic freedom.
Since Oct. 7, critics — including Jewish students, alumni, and watchdogs — have accused some Middle East studies programs across the country of teaching about Israel through a hostile ideological lens and creating an inhospitable environment for Jewish and pro-Israel students.
Some professors in the field, meanwhile, have argued that accusations of antisemitism in higher education are being used to police scholarship that could be critical of Israel.
Under similar pressure, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies removed the center’s director and associate director from their leadership posts, though they kept their jobs. The Trump administration later demanded that the school’s Middle East Studies Department, among others, be audited by a third party to ensure a diversity of viewpoints.
The interventions prompted outrage from professors, students, and academic-freedom advocates arguing that the government was seeking to exert control over how universities teach about Israel and the Middle East.
According to Heschel, the climate has contributed to driving a wedge between Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies departments on some college campuses.
“I know that at some universities, faculty in Middle East and Jewish Studies don’t even talk to each other; they don’t respond to each other’s emails, for example,” she said. “That I find appalling. That’s unacceptable.”
Not everything is about conflict
For Heschel, the intellectual case for faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies to collaborate goes beyond teaching students how to talk about the current conflict.
“We want our students to know not just about the conflict that they read about in the newspapers today,” Heschel said. “We want them to know about a period where there was religious tolerance and respect for one another, to see that it’s possible we don’t have to live in a condition of anger and enmity.”
She co-teaches a course with a Middle East Studies professor examining how Jews in Europe and Arabs in the Middle East responded to modernity during the 19th century.
In one lesson, students learn about the Lebanese intellectual Butrus al-Bustani, who founded a school in Beirut in 1863 for Christian, Muslim and Jewish boys — and hired a cook to prepare kosher food for his Jewish students.
Engineering major Oguz Kurt, a rising junior who was born and raised in Turkey, took the course last semester.
“Building trust week over week” with classmates and professors, he said, brings people like him into the room who might otherwise be “intimidated” by the prospect of tense encounters in a class focused explicitly on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.
Kurt wants to be there, which points to one obvious limitation to Dartmouth’s experiment: Students have to want to participate.
A 2025 survey of graduating seniors by the university’s campus newspaper, The Dartmouth, found that nearly 70% described themselves as liberal or very liberal, compared with roughly 12% who identified as conservative or very conservative. More than 70% said most of their closest friends shared their political beliefs.
Additionally, a 2025 Gallup poll conducted on the Dartmouth student body in 2025, found only 38% reported feeling comfortable sharing unorthodox ideas in class.
Weinstein wonders whether this degree of homogeneity is why courses like Difficult Conversations succeed – the people least willing to engage with opposing points of view don’t take the class.
“Everyone was there to learn. Everyone could be persuaded,” he said. “In some ways that’s a problem,” adding that the class might benefit from “a wider range of ideologues.”
“Not all of Dartmouth is like this,” Smolin acknowledged. “No doubt there are professors in other units that think it’s up to faculty to lead liberation and that this approach is stifling.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Heschel said some right-wing Jewish faculty members outside the Jewish Studies program have criticized the approach she and her colleagues take.
“I understand the anxiety that Jews feel today about university campuses, but I think they’re underestimating their own students,” she said. “Kids will encounter viewpoints that they will find disturbing and offensive, not just about Israel… they need to learn how to handle such a situation, how to respond.”
Heschel said faculty and administrators at other universities have approached Dartmouth to ask how to replicate what they did.
“I was surprised that we received so many requests from deans and presidents of colleges and universities to come and talk about what we had done,” she said.
From Dartmouth to Damascus
One of the people thinking about what could be replicated outside Hanover comes from much farther away.
Before flying to New Hampshire this May, Ibrahim Imre El-Khalid Bethlen asked ChatGPT a question he had never needed answered before: What is proper Shabbat etiquette?
Heschel and Bethlen at Dartmouth Courtesy of Ibrahim Imre El-Khalid Bethlen
Bethlen, a Syrian political scientist who teaches at Damascus University, met Heschel when she traveled to Damascus with a delegation of Jewish Americans in December 2025. She invited him to come to Dartmouth for 10 days and packed his schedule with jointly taught courses like Difficult Conversations, and a seminar about Jews in Algeria. Bethlen also lectured about the current political situation in Syria and attended his first ever Shabbat at the campus’ Chabad.
Just as new to him was seeing Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies professors teaching together.
“With every professor we had some brainstorming about how we could bring the people closer,” he said. “How could we demystify” Jews to Syrians. Most of them have never met a Jewish person since the millennia-old Syrian Jewish community left en masse in the mid-20th Century.
Now, Bethlen hopes to connect faculty at Damascus University to their counterparts at Dartmouth. He is realistic about political sensitivities. Bringing an Israeli or Jewish Studies professor into a Syrian classroom to discuss the contemporary conflict, he says, could be a nonstarter. But having an Arab professor in the classroom as well could help.
“We don’t want to jump too high,” he said.
He imagines beginning somewhere Dartmouth itself often begins: with classes focused on shared history and culture rather than contemporary politics. Perhaps a jointly taught course that introduces students to the literature and poetry of Jews and Arabs once shared across the Middle East. Classes like Difficult Conversations can come later.
As a part of that Dartmouth class’s final assignment, students are asked to have a conversation with someone on campus they disagree with about the region, applying what they have learned.
Weinstein chose a friend and fraternity brother whose views on Israel differed sharply from his own. They talked for several hours.
“I ended by congratulating Eli on being ‘the only close friend I’ve ever had that wasn’t pro-Israel,’” Weinstein wrote in his reflection afterward. “I sure hope he isn’t the last.”
In a sea of kippot and black skirts, more than 200 Orthodox middle school and high school students gathered outside Gracie Mansion on Friday, conducting morning prayers and giving speeches.
“I like protesting against Mamdani,” Rami Fishman, a 16-year-old student, told the Forward. “He’s not a great guy. I’ll take an opportunity to speak out against him.”
Prominent Modern Orthodox preparatory schools Ramaz and SAR organized the gathering with Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, the synagogue that sponsors the institutions. Organizers said that comments Mayor Zohran Mamdani made over the summer attacking AIPAC and Israel drove their efforts. Rabbi Bini Kraus, principal of SAR, said the experience was also intended to teach students about “their civic responsibilities.”
“It’s fun,” Fishman said. “We’re praying and we’re saying ‘no’ to Mamdani.”
Fishman, a junior at SAR, said he liked waking up late and he was enjoying meeting students from another school. Kraus told the Forward students were missing three periods by participating, but noted prayer is part of the school’s curriculum and the gathering wasn’t taking away from their studies.
Students and parents could opt out, with Kraus noting some declined to participate. Nearly 400 alumni and members of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun signed a petition against the gathering.
Photo by Molly Myers
In their speeches, students touched on fears of antisemitism, being proud Jews and supporting Israel openly. One 8th grader called on Mamdani to prioritize the safety of the Jewish community.
Neturei Karta, a Haredi group that opposes Zionism, protested against the student group by waving Palestinian flags, chanting and holding signs in support of Mamdani. The NK group chanted “Antizionism is not antisemitism,” and called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested during his visit to New York next week. Mamdani, who campaigned on arresting Netanyahu, recently acknowledged he does not have the authority to do so.
Michael Rapaport, an actor and staunch supporter of Israel, came to support the students saying it was “moving,” and “not a political statement.”
“These are kids,” Rapaport told the Forward, “they can’t even vote. This is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful prideful thing.”
Organizers did not describe the gathering as a form of protest, instead referring to it as a vigil or communal prayer. However, the event involved classic hallmarks of a protest. A handful of participants waved or wore Israeli flags, and organizers acquired a permit for noise amplification.
“Our students have been going out for decades, really, when things matter,” Kraus said.
He noted he demonstrated for Soviet Jewry when he was a student at the school.
A reporter asked Mamdani about the demonstration at a press conference Wednesday.
“I welcome them,” he said. “They can have a vigil, or I’ve heard some describe it even as a ‘protest.’ Whatever it is intended to be, they have the room and space to do so outside of Gracie Mansion. I think that at the time that they are there, I will probably be somewhere else across the city.”
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, senior rabbi at Kehilath Jeshurun, said Thursday, “That’s the right response.”
Kraus, however, said he hoped the mayor would change his mind and attend. If he did, he would hear singing, praying and concerns “expressed respectfully.”
“Maybe that will move him,” Kraus said.
Some alumni and parents opposed the demonstration
The petition against the demonstration stated, “This gathering needlessly inflames tensions between the mayor and the Modern Orthodox Jewish community, as opposed to inviting him into conversation as a potential ally working for the shared safety of all New Yorkers.”
Much of the signatures are anonymous, with only school and class year listed.
The petition also said the schools risked portraying the Modern Orthodox community “as a political monolith opposed to the mayor.”
“They don’t want it to look like the Modern Orthodox community is a monolith, but the Modern Orthodox community really is a monolith on this,” Steinmetz said. “The Modern Orthodox community is, by and large, quite Zionist and really takes the security and safety of the state of Israel very seriously.”
A 2024 poll conducted by Nishma Research found 94% of the Modern Orthodox community identifies as Zionist, compared to 51% of Haredi Jews.
Halachic Left, an observant organization that says its members have “deep connections” to institutions in the Modern Orthodox community, helped circulate the petition. In a statement to the Forward, the organization insisted there is a “full range of views in the Modern Orthodox community on Israel, Zionism, and Mayor Mamdani.”
“The mayor has shown a willingness to respect and speak with our community,” read the statement. “We should be partnering with and engaging the mayor rather than castigating or insulting him.”
