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The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play
(New York Jewish Week) — Shortly after the State of Israel was founded, Shanit Keter-Schwartz was born on a dirt floor, in a hut made of aluminum siding outside the burgeoning town of Tel Aviv. She was the second of six children, the daughter of Yemenite Jews who had recently immigrated to the new country. They’d faced discrimination and violence in their country of origin, so when Jewish emissaries turned up in 1949 to bring 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel as a part of “Operation Flying Carpet,” they were all in.
Unfortunately, Keter-Schwartz’s upbringing in Israel was no magic carpet ride. “[Yemenite Jews] were seen as savages, primitive, inferior in the eyes of the Ashkenazi Jews,” Keter-Schwartz recalled in an interview with the New York Jewish Week. “They were not sophisticated or educated. It was a cultural domination, a collective trauma in Israel. They faced war, hunger, poverty, and living in very harsh conditions.”
The worst, though, wasn’t near-starvation due to rationing, or the harsh conditions of the shanty towns that these new immigrants were placed in, or the way European children wrinkled their nose at her and called her smelly. No, the worst was when the government stole her sister, Sarah, whom Keter-Schwartz never saw again.
In what has become known as the Yemenite Children Affair, more than 1,000 children of Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan descent were separated from their children during the first decade of Israel’s existence. The families and their advocates have long insisted, over denials by officials, that the children were taken from their families by the Ashkenazi government during the first decade of Israel’s existence. More often than not, parents were told their children had died when they had, in fact, been given to families of European descent for adoption, according to Amram Association, one of several organizations dedicated to documenting these abductions and advocating for victims’ families.
Now, Keter-Schwartz — a writer and performer who lives in Los Angeles, and a mother to two grown daughters — has brought to life her family’s story and her search for her missing sister in the form of a one-woman show. Premiering on Thursday at New York City Center, and running through May 15, “Daughter of the Wicked” chronicles her family’s journey from the Yemenite ma’abarot (refugee camps) to shikunim (government housing projects), where they lived in a tiny two-room apartment amid a melting pot of Jewish immigrants who were often at odds with one another.
“It is overcrowded, and the people who live here come from many different places. In their countries they were… respected by their communities,” she says in the show, which is named after one of the many Yemenite curses her mother would hurl at her when she’d done something wrong. “But here [in Israel] they are forced into stereotypes.”
“Israel had no choice but to bring the Jews from the Arab countries because the European Jews population had been greatly diminished after the Holocaust, but they didn’t want us,” Keter-Schwartz told the New York Jewish Week. “They took control of our lives, tried to assimilate us, wanted the whole country to be secular and uniform. They made all the decisions for us.”
One such “decision” made by the government, she said, was to remove her oldest brother, Yossi, from the family home to “re-educate” him at an Ashkenazi kibbutz. It worked: Yossi returned as a proud secular farmer, disdainful and ashamed of his spiritualist, religious family and their traditional ways.
The disappearance of her baby sister, Sarah, inspired Keter-Schwartz’s play, which is also informed by the kabbalistic teachings of her father. (Russ Rowland)
In the case of Keter-Schwartz’s sister, the abduction occurred directly after she was born. “When my father went to the hospital to pick up the twins, my siblings, he returned only with David. They told him that the girl, Sarah, was sick, and he should come back the following day. But when he came back, they told him that she had died,” Keter-Schwartz said. “Being naive, he didn’t question this. He didn’t ask to see a death certificate. He didn’t even know [a certificate] existed. He didn’t demand to see her body, didn’t think to bury her or give her funeral rites. He never suspected for a minute they could deceive him.”
This story, and others, is conveyed in “Daughter of the Wicked” through a series of monologues, each tied to an idea from Kabbalah,the Jewish mystical tradition. Keter-Schwartz defines each concept — like ahava (love), metsuka (hardship), busha (shame) — then tells a personal story that relates to the topic.
With this framework, Keter-Schwartz pays homage to her father, a spiritualist rabbi who spent his days poring over holy texts and divining the true meaning of the universe. She reads from his writings — which were collected and published towards the end of his life as a book, “Nachash HaNechoshet” — detailing her complex relationship to a man who was both an inspiration and, at times, inscrutable to all around him.
“The play is set in a hotel room, while I’m waiting for my sister to show up,” Keter-Schwartz explains. “As I wait, I tell my life. Behind me, on three screens, there’s archival footage from the 1950s that I got from Steven Spielberg’s archive. That footage tells the story, too, and so does the music.” The accompanying music, which transitions the audience from segment to segment, was written by Israeli composer Lilo Fedida, using traditional Yemenite melodies and instruments.
“We lived with this [tragedy] all my childhood, and I’ve been wondering all these years about my missing sister,” said Keter-Schwartz. “If I see her on the street, will I recognize her? Where does she live? Is she happy? I felt guilty that I never really tried to find her, I was so busy with my own life. But now I need to know.”
As a young woman, Keter-Schwartz said she went to great lengths to distance herself from her family’s tragedies. She lived in Amsterdam, London and New York, finally finding her footing in Los Angeles. She changed her name — from Shoshana to Shanit — and declared herself a new person in a new land. It was only when she lost all but one of her siblings, as well as both parents, that she felt an urge to revisit the past. When her last surviving sibling got so ill he almost died, she swore to search for Sarah. Initially, the idea was just to hire a private investigator to try to locate her. During her search, though, she began to feel an urge to share her story.
“I’d never written a play, so it took me two years [working] with coaches,” says Keter-Schwartz. “I’ve been an actress all my life, I’ve edited other people’s scripts, I produced movies, but to actually write — ha! I had amazing coaches. I’m especially grateful to Yigal Chatzor, the Israeli playwright. He brought the Israeli spice and the humor, which is wonderful now because now the play is balanced. It’s heart-wrenching and it’s hysterical. It’s everything, you know.”
The Yemenite Children Affair has never been formally confirmed by the state of Israel, which maintains the position that most of the babies died of malaria or malnutrition and were not, as some have proposed, sold to Ashkenazi families in exchange for donations to the young country. Several government-led commissions have claimed that there was no official wrongdoing, but testimonies continue to emerge that suggest otherwise. According to a 2016 article in Yediot Ahronot, a prominent Israeli news source, the government has sealed the official records of these disappearances until 2071, despite ongoing demonstrations and demands for actions.
In 2021, the Israeli government authorized tens of millions of dollars in reparations to families whose children disappeared while in government care. Nonetheless, no official admission of guilt or apology has been issued, a fact which caused many affected families to reject the plan, calling it “hush money.” Only a fraction of the affected families are eligible for these payments and, according to recent reporting, very few have claimed the money. Less than 1% of the allocated funds have been distributed thus far.
For Keter-Schwartz, no amount of money could compensate for the loss of her sister. She’s more interested in creating connections with others who lost family members and bringing awareness to this chapter in Israeli history. “Going back to my roots, revisiting the past, is an act of forgiveness,” Keter-Schwartz said in a statement. “By writing this play, I was able to forgive and accept the past. I hope that when audiences see my play they come to terms with their own history, and that they feel a sense of what it means to be free, and the challenges that confront us in maintaining that freedom.”
That is a major throughline of “Daughter of the Wicked”: Keter-Schwartz does not forsake the country that gave her her identity and childhood; rather, she insists on loving it while demanding recognition of past wrongs. Towards the end of her show, Keter Ashkenazi raises both arms to the sky and screams at those who wronged her: “My country! I blame you, shame on you for forsaking us, shame on you!”
But then, she lowers her arms and says, voice cracking with heartbreak: “I love you, I blame you, I love you. My country, I love you.”
—
The post The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jews cared more about Israel and antisemitism this election – but it didn’t change their votes much, exit poll shows
Jewish voters overwhelmingly backed Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, even as concerns about Israel and antisemitism played a growing role in their political decisions, according to a new exit poll published on Thursday.
The GBAO Strategies survey of 800 Jewish voters found that 72% of Jewish respondents supported Democratic candidates for Congress, compared with 24% who voted Republican. The poll, sponsored by J Street, a progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group, was conducted via text message from Oct. 28 to Nov. 3 and had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The Democratic share was slightly lower than in previous midterm elections, when Democrats received 74% of the Jewish vote in 2022 and 76% in 2018. In the 2020 presidential election, 77% of Jewish voters backed Joe Biden, according to GBAO’s polling. These findings differ from a national NBC News exit poll, which found that 68% of Jewish voters supported Democrats this year and 31% backed Republicans, compared with 78% who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. (The national surveys used different methods, making it harder to say how preferences actually changed.)
Jim Gerstein, GBAO’s pollster and a Democratic campaign consultant, cautioned against reading too much into the change over time. “You’d have to squint really hard to try and see that that is a shift or anything really meaningful,” Gerstein told the Forward during a press briefing. He noted that Republican support also fell, from 25% in the 2022 midterms to 24% this year. Gerstein suggested that strong opposition to President Donald Trump during his first term, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, may help explain the higher Democratic numbers in 2018 and 2020.
He also noted that campaigns and outside groups have spent significantly more money targeting Jewish voters in the past two election cycles. “These are really negligible, and we don’t look at this as much shifting,” he said.
Even as Democrats regained control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans did appear to make gains among Jewish voters in some closely watched races amid a divide over U.S. support for Israel. Several outspoken critics of Israel won seats in the House, including five members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine, two new senators who made criticism of Israel a major part of their campaigns, also won highly contested races.
The exit poll suggests that disagreements over Israel have not fundamentally changed how American Jews vote.
The future of American democracy remained the top concern for Jewish voters, with 44% naming it as one of the two most important issues influencing their vote, followed by 34% who said the cost of living was among their leading concerns. But Israel and antisemitism became more important than in previous elections. Twenty-one percent named antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel ranked sixth, cited by 14% of voters, compared with just 4% in 2022.
Compared to previous elections, Israel and antisemitism moved up the list of priorities — 21% identified antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel was ranked six with 14%, compared with just 4% in 2022.
Gerstein argued that rising antisemitism and the debates over support for Israel serve as a basic test for candidates rather than the deciding factor in most elections. “I think we see candidates in both parties passing that threshold quite easily,” Gerstein said.
Asked which positions expressed by candidates during the campaign they agreed with most, 30% chose unconditional support for Israel, while 39% favored support tied to Israel’s compliance with American interests and values. Another 31%, including 60% of voters between the ages of 18 and 34, agreed with the statement that Israel has committed genocide and should no longer receive U.S. aid.
Orthodox voters, representing 9% of the sample, voted Republican by a 63-34 margin.
A Jewish split on Israel
The survey also found a Jewish electorate that itself is becoming more divided over Israel.
Thirty-nine percent said their sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were primarily with Israelis, compared with 23% who sided with Palestinians. Another 38% sided with both. Among younger Jews, 49% said they sympathized more with Palestinians, compared with 20% who sided with Israelis.
A majority — 51% — said it supported continuing $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military assistance to Israel, while 49% opposed it. However, 44% also said arms sales should be conditioned on compliance with U.S. law.
Jewish voters showed greater agreement on how criticism of Israel should be treated and whether Israel’s policies directly impact them.
Sixty percent said Jewish organizations that label harsh criticism of Israel as antisemitic are using concerns about antisemitism to defend unpopular Israeli policies. About two-thirds said AIPAC’s spending against candidates critical of Israel increases antisemitism in the United States, while 80% said Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank contribute to antisemitism. An overwhelming majority of 76% support sanctions against violent Israeli settlers.
The survey also found that 39% of Jewish voters, including 63% of those under 35, said that spending by AIPAC to defeat Israel critics this election cycle made them less likely to support candidates backed by the pro-Israel group.
Mamdani scores high
One of the more striking findings was that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was more popular among Jewish voters nationwide than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his criticism of Israel and strained relationship with some Jewish organizations.
The poll found that 49% of respondents viewed Mamdani favorably, compared with 43% who viewed him unfavorably. Netanyahu received a favorable rating of just 20%, while 72% viewed him unfavorably. That marks a 12% decline in two years for the Israeli leader, who is struggling to form a government after the last Israeli election ended in deadlock.
In an interview with CNN Wednesday night, Mamdani pointed to his approach to governing as an example of how elected officials can represent Jewish voters even when they disagree with them on Israel.
“I represent the most Jewish city in the United States of America, and I know that there are some Jewish New Yorkers, for example, that may have a different set of opinions on Israel and Palestine as I do, and that doesn’t mean that I work any less hard to deliver for them across the board,” Mamdani said. “I think that’s the same truth for anyone who was elected last night.”
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Now that the election is over, can we stop dismissing everyone we disagree with by calling them ‘wrong’ or a ‘liar?’
I was walking to get a coffee on Election Day when a man screamed at me as he nearly ran me over with his bicycle. “Democratic Socialists aren’t Democrats!” he yelled.
After I regained my balance, I looked up. He turned back and called out to me a second time.
“It’s true, you know!” he said.
I scurried away. But his words — “true” and the assured “you know” — made me think about how language around American politics has come down to “truth” or “lies,” which leaves out a lot.
Maybe the simplicity of that thinking helped create a landslide.
Once it became clear that Democrats had triumphed, opinion writers frequently relied on the word “lie” to explain voters’ sudden seismic shift.
“Trump claims he kept more promises to American voters than he made. Like so many things he has said, that’s a lie, and voters punished him and his party for it,” Josh Barro wrote in The New York Times.
The problem with the theory that voters punished Trump for lying is that the man has been lying for decades, most famously about winning the 2020 election — which, of course, he lost.
He entered politics by lying about Barack Obama. So the real question is why Trump’s lies bothered people now.
Maybe a clue was in the language during the leadup to this election, and how it changed as the watershed results came in.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t help noticing that Israel was a hot topic that somehow disappeared on election night as journalists marveled that Mississippi was in play for a Senate seat while every kind of Democrat won — moderate, far-left, young, old.
But it didn’t seem that would happen a mere five days ago, in that other lifetime when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, during a discussion with podcaster Donny Deutsch, categorized debate over Israel as a fight between ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
Back then, Michigan felt crucial, not one in a pile of Democratic wins. It was news that the elegant former speaker used the word ‘wrong.’
“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” Deutsch said, in reference to statements made by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and then-Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
“It’s more than concerning,” Pelosi responded. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States.”
I flashed back to that one-syllable word — “wrong” — early Wednesday morning when, with El-Sayed’s victory, it seemed that, contrary to what Pelosi said, objecting to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was apparently no longer viewed as categorically “wrong.”
Wrong vs. right
If objecting to Israel’s existence was “wrong,” then what was “right”?
Some Jewish politicians — like Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — told Jews to put their own concerns aside for the “needs of the world.”
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” Nessel said, acknowledging that Jews faced a “stark choice” due to some of the comments made by Democrats.
After the election, anti-Israel commentators mocked Jewish politicians — and journalists.
Mehdi Hassan, founder of media company Zeteo, taunted Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with CNN anchor Dana Bash, all Jewish. “He won,” Hasan said, calling El-Sayed a “left-wing Muslim anti-Zionist.”
“And so for all of you, I have two words — two words — cry more.”
The dismissiveness is the point
What got me about Hasan’s comments wasn’t just the hatred; it was the dismissiveness — as if all the existential worry within the Jewish community didn’t matter at all.
As if Nessel, who tried to find the “right” thing to do in a time when lies from the leader of the free world — not to mention violence against immigrants, humiliating comments toward and threats against brave Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and fleecing the United States in one of the biggest cons in history — meant asking her fellow Jewish Democrats who worried about Israel and attacks on their own local synagogues to ignore their own inner voice.
In its post-midterms statement, the Anti-Defamation League used the word “dismissed” with regard to Jewish Americans’ concerns — on a night when some candidates proved that ignoring Jews’ worries is not a barrier to electoral victory.
“Antisemitic rhetoric and scapegoating fuels hatred and can lead to harassment, threats and violence. In too many places, Jewish Americans’ concerns about this were overshadowed by competing priorities or dismissed outright,” the statement read.
Hmmm, I thought thinking about what that bicyclist had yelled at me: “You know it’s true.”
But I can’t help thinking that I don’t know what’s true; none of us know yet why so many voters finally dumped Trump.
I do, however, think that the framing given by the bicyclist, so convinced he knew what was and wasn’t true, and the dismissiveness problem, are related. That’s because the easiest way to dismiss another person’s thought process is to say “that’s a lie.”
I don’t know what’s worse — to be called a liar, or to be ignored — but amid all the celebration, I fear many in the Jewish community may soon find out.
In the months ahead, I’ll be listening for dismissiveness. I’ll be watching the distance between truth, lies, right, wrong, and “cry more.”
And I’ll notice when anyone — whether they’re a screaming bicyclist, journalist, or a politician — tells me I should already know what the truth is.
The post Now that the election is over, can we stop dismissing everyone we disagree with by calling them ‘wrong’ or a ‘liar?’ appeared first on The Forward.
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I’m glad El-Sayed won – but I wish he’d lost
The election of Abdul El-Sayed is my least favorite dream to come true.
I’m glad he won the race for senator because, along with a clear majority of Americans, I believed it was time to elect a Congress and Senate that would serve as a check on the presidency and put forth policies to repair our struggling country.
If I lived in Michigan, I would have voted for him for that reason. But as Election Night wore on and it became clear Democrats and independents had won a comfortable majority in the Senate, I hoped El-Sayed would lose.
Judging by the post-election surveys, I’m not the only Jew who felt this way. El-Sayed won about 60% of the Jewish vote. But he ran about 20 points behind Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for governor, with those same voters.
They didn’t flee the Democratic party, but they did show less enthusiasm for El-Sayed. In my case it had nothing to do with the fearmongering over his religion or family. (The Republican Jewish Coalition called El-Sayed, “the most antisemitic U.S. Senate candidate in America.”).
My problem was that El-Sayed too often mirrored the toxic politics of his opponents. He aligned himself with Hasan Piker then offered tepid, tardy disavowals of the popular streamer’s extremism. I criticized President Donald Trump for doing the same with the Proud Boys, David Duke, QAnon and the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
And, like Trump, El-Sayed lied, constantly telling Michiganders that their schools and hospitals were underfunded because the government sent the money to Israel instead. He’s a smart man who knows that aid money amounts to .05% of the federal budget, is mostly spent in America and is hardly the reason for underfunded education.
But he repeated the lie in his victory speech Tuesday night. “We want our taxes spent here,” he said, “for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here. We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war.”
Sound familiar? “This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last year.
How is a Democratic candidate who scapegoats the Jewish state for the ills of Flint any different than a Republican who blames crime on Haitians, fraud on Somalis and bad schools on Mexican immigrants? Both invite hate and divert attention from real solutions. When El-Sayed points at Israel as the cause of Michigan’s problems, the blame falls on American Jews, Haile Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, pointed out during the race.
The least surprising twist in the dramatic campaign was when Tucker Carlson endorsed El-Sayed — both men push a simple theory of who’s to blame for America’s ills.
But as much as I would have preferred to win without El-Sayed, his election is far from the nightmare many American Jews fear.
He is one senator out of 100, and one Democratic senator out of 54, or 56, depending on the Mississippi and Alaska races.
El-Sayed will soon learn that accomplishing the things that are most important to Democratic voters — universal health care, campaign finance reform and affordability — has nothing to do with Israel.
Trump, on Election Day morning, helped politicians in both parties by announcing an end to U.S. aid to Israel. It’s unclear how that putative end will look in fact, but what’s certain is that as the U.S. and Israel redefine their relationship, El-Sayed and others in both parties who have been fervent critics of that aid will have to say what they’re for, not just what they oppose.
In a pre-election interview with the New Yorker, and elsewhere since his victory, El-Sayed said he wants a process that offers peace and self-determination to Palestinians and the “Jewish Israeli people.”
That’s a promise that the 40% of Jewish voters who didn’t back him — and the majority who did — should hold him to, and work beside him to help make happen. The Jews who stuck with El-Sayed have especially earned that right.
“Political coalitions that grow and endure can only be built when we join with those with whom we have real – even profound – disagreements,” wrote Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, following the election.
On the campaign trail, El-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric clearly resonated with some core constituencies. Inside the Senate, where moderate Democrats are a majority, El-Sayed will find a constituency for pragmatic steps to moving Israelis and Palestinians in that direction.
And that would indeed be a dream come true.
The post I’m glad El-Sayed won – but I wish he’d lost appeared first on The Forward.
