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‘Two Israels’: What’s really behind the judicial reform protests
(JTA) — When Benjamin Netanyahu put his controversial calls for judicial reform on pause two weeks ago, many thought the protesters in Israel and abroad might declare victory and take a break. And yet a week ago Saturday some 200,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv, and pro-democracy protests continued among Diaspora Jews and Israeli expats, including those who gather each Sunday in New York’s Washington Square Park.
On its face, the weeks of protest have been about proposed legislation that critics said would sap power from the Israeli Supreme Court and give legislators — in this case, led by Netanyahu’s recently elected far-right coalition — unchecked and unprecedented power. Protesters said that, in the absence of an Israeli constitution establishing basic rights and norms, they were fighting for democracy. The government too says the changes are about democracy, claiming under the current system unelected judges too often overrule elected lawmakers and the will of Israel’s diverse electorate.
But the political dynamics in Israel are complex, and the proposals and the backlash are also about deeper cracks in Israeli society. Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently said in a podcast that the crisis in Israel represents “six linked but separate stories unfolding at the same time.” Beyond the judicial reform itself, these stories include the Palestinians and the occupation, a resurgent patriotism among the center and the left, chaos within Netanyahu’s camp, a Diaspora emboldened to weigh in on the future of Zionism and the rejection on the part of the public of a reform that failed the “reasonableness test.”
“If these protests are effective in the long run, it will be, I think, because they will have succeeded at reorganizing and mobilizing the Israeli electorate to think and behave differently than before,” said Kurtzer.
I recently asked observers, here and in Israel, what they feel is really mobilizing the electorate, and what kind of Israel will emerge as a result of the showdown. The respondents included organizers of the protests, supporters of their aims and those skeptical of the protesters’ motivations. They discussed a slew of issues just below the surface of the protest, including the simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, divisions over the increasing strength of Israel’s haredi Orthodox sector, and a lingering divide between Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Europe and Mizrahi Jews whose ancestry is Middle Eastern and North African.
Conservatives, meanwhile, insist that Israeli “elites” — the highly educated, the tech sector, the military leadership, for starters — don’t respect the will of the majority who brought Netanyahu and his coalition partners to power.
Here are the emerging themes of weeks of protest:
Defending democracy
Whatever their long-term concerns about Israel’s future, the protests are being held under the banner of “democracy.”
For Alon-Lee Green, one of the organizers of the protests, the issues are equality and fairness. “People in Israel,” said Green, national co-director of Standing Together, a grassroots movement in Israel, “hundreds of thousands of them, are going out to the streets for months now not only because of the judicial reform, but also — and mainly — because of the fundamental question of what is the society we want to live in: Will we keep living in a society that is unequal, unfair and that is moving away from our basic needs and desires, or will it be an equal society for everyone who lives in our land?”
Shany Granot-Lubaton, who has been organizing pro-democracy rallies among Israelis living in New York City, says Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the coalition’s haredi Orthodox parties “are waging a war against democracy and the freedoms of citizens.”
“They seek to exert control over the Knesset and the judicial system, appoint judges in their favor and legalize corruption,” she said. “If this legal coup is allowed to proceed, minorities will be in serious danger, and democracy itself will be threatened.”
Two researchers at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Herzliya’s Reichman University, psychology student Benjamin Amram and research associate Keren L.G. Snider, said Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform “undermines the integrity of Israel’s democracy by consolidating power.”
“How can citizens trust a government that ultimately has no limitations set upon them?” they asked in a joint email. “At a time when political trust and political representation are at the lowest points, this legislation can only create instability and call into question the intentions of the current ruling party. When one coalition holds all the power, laws and policies can be swiftly overturned, causing instability and volatility.”
A struggle between two Israels
Other commentators said the protests revealed fractures within Israeli society that long predated the conflict over judicial reform. “The split is between those that believe Israel should be a more religious country, with less democracy, and see democracy as only a system of elections and not a set of values, and those who want Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state,” Tzipi Livni, who served in the cabinets of right-wing prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert before tacking to the center in recent years, recently told Haaretz.
Author and translator David Hazony called this “a struggle between two Israels” — one that sees Israel’s founding vision as a European-style, rights-based democracy, and the other that sees that vision as the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland.
“Those on the first side believe that the judiciary has always been Israel’s protector of rights and therefore of democracy, against the rapaciousness and lawlessness of politicians in general and especially those on the right. Therefore an assault on its supremacy is an assault on democracy itself. They accuse the other side of being barbaric, antidemocratic and violent,” said Hazony, editor of the forthcoming anthology “Jewish Priorities.”
As for the other side, he said, they see an activist judiciary as an attempt by Ashkenazi elites to force their minority view on the majority. Supporters of the government think it is entirely unreasonable “for judges to think they can choose their successors, strike down constitutional legislation and rule according to ‘that which is reasonable in the eyes of the enlightened community in Israel,’” said Hazony, quoting Aharon Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel and bane of Israel’s right.
(Naveh Dromi, a right-wing columnist for Yediot Achronot, puts this more bluntly: “The problem,” she writes, “lies in the fact that the left has no faith in its chance to win an election, so it relies on the high court to represent it.”)
Daniel Tauber, an attorney and Likud Central Committee member, agrees that those who voted for Netanyahu and his coalition have their own concerns about a democracy — one dominated by “elites,” which in the Israeli context means old-guard Ashkenazi Jews, powerful labor unions and highly educated secular Jews. “The more this process is subject to veto by non-democratic institutions, whether it be the Court chosen as it is, elite military units, the Histadrut [labor union], or others, the more people will lose faith in democracy,” said Tauber.
Green also said there is “a war waging now between two elites in Israel” — the “old and more established liberal elite, who consist of the financial, high-tech army and industry people,” and the “new emerging elite of the settlers and the political far-right parties.”
Israelis protest against the government’s planned judicial overhaul, outside the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, March 27, 2023. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
And yet, he said, “I think we will lose if one of these elites wins. The real victory of this historic political moment in Israel will be if we achieve true equality, both to the people who are not represented by the Jewish supremacists, such as the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to the people who are not represented by the ‘old Israel,’ such as the haredi and Mizrahi people on the peripheries.”
The crises behind the crisis
Although the protests were ignited by Netanyahu’s calls for judicial reform, they also represented pushback against the most right-wing government in Israeli history — which means at some level the protests were also about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role of religion in Israeli society. “The unspoken motivation driving the architects and supporters of the [judicial] ‘reform,’ as well as the protest leaders, is umbilically connected to the occupation,” writes Carolina Landsmann, a Haaretz columnist. If Netanyahu has his way, she writes, “There will be no more two-state solution, and there will be no territorial compromises. The new diplomatic horizon will be a single state, with the Palestinians as subjects deprived of citizenship.”
Nimrod Novik, the Israel Fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, said that “once awakened, the simmering resentment of those liberal Israelis about other issues was brought to the surface.” The Palestinian issue, for example, is at an “explosive moment,” said Novik: The Palestinian Authority is weakened and ineffective, Palestinian youth lack hope for a better future, and Israeli settlers feel emboldened by supporters in the ruling coalition. “The Israeli security establishment took this all into account when warning the government to change course before it is too late,” said Novik.
Kurtzer too noted that the Palestinians “also stand to be extremely victimized following the passage of judicial reform, both in Israel and in the West Bank.” And yet, he said, most Israelis aren’t ready to upend the current status quo between Israelis and Palestinians. “It can also be true that the Israeli public can only build the kind of coalition that it’s building right now because it is patently not a referendum on the issue of Palestinian rights,” he said.
Religion and state
Novik spoke about another barely subterranean theme of the protests: the growing power of the haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, parties. Secular Israelis especially resent that the haredim disproportionately seek exemption from military service and that non-haredi Israelis contribute some 90% of all taxes collected. One fear of those opposing the judicial reform legislation is that the religious parties will “forever secure state funding to the haredi Orthodox school system while exempting it from teaching the subjects required for ever joining the workforce. It is to secure for them an exemption from any military or other national service. And it is to expand the imposition of their lifestyle on non-Orthodox Israelis.”
What’s next
Predictions for the future range from warnings of a civil war (by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, among others) to an eventual compromise on Netanyahu’s part to the emergence of a new center electorate that will reject extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.
David E. Bernstein, a law professor at the George Mason University School of Law who writes frequently about Israel, imagines a future without extremists. “One can definitely easily imagine the business, academic and legal elite using their newfound political voice to insist that future governments not align with extremists, that haredi authority over national life be limited, and, perhaps most important, that Israel create a formal constitution that protects certain basic rights,” he said. “Perhaps there will also be demand to counter such long-festering problems as corruption, disproportionate influence over export markets by a few influential families, burgeoning lawlessness in the Arab sector and a massive shortage of affordable housing.”
Elie Bennett, director of International Strategy at the Israel Democracy Institute, also sees an opportunity in the crisis.
In the aftermath of the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur war, he said, Israel “rebuilt its military and eventually laid the foundations for today’s ‘startup nation.’ In this current crisis, we do not need a call-up of our reserves forces, or a massive airlift of American weaponry to prevail. What we need is goodwill among fellow Israelis and a commitment to work together to strengthen our society and reach an agreed-upon constitutional framework. If we are able to achieve such an agreement, it will protect our rights, better define the relationships between the branches of government, and result in an Israel that is more stable and prosperous than ever as we celebrate 75 years of independence.”
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Who is Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli politician who could dethrone Netanyahu?
Until recently, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared to be the opposition figure best positioned to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s election this fall. But a new contender has emerged: Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, whose newly formed Yashar! (“Straight!”) party is rapidly gaining popularity.
According to Israel’s public broadcaster KAN, Eisenkot’s party currently projects to win 21 Knesset seats, trailing Netanyahu’s Likud at 23. Bennett and Yair Lapid’s joint slate, Together, the duo that managed to win the 2021 elections, is polling at 17 seats. Several other major Israeli polls reflect a similar or even stronger position for Eisenkot. As of this writing, Eisenkot and Netanyahu are neck and neck on Polymarket as the most likely politician to become the next prime minister.
Amid Trump’s Iran deal, which left Netanyahu in the lurch and has been widely unpopular among Israelis, Netanyahu’s appeal as a prime minister who can ensure Israel’s security is beginning to slip. Only 11% of Israelis feel Israel won the war, and 52% feel Netanyahu’s conduct harmed Israel’s interests in the U.S.-Iran deal. A recent Channel 12 survey found that 58% of Israelis believe the country’s next prime minister should not be Netanyahu.
After Bennett and Lapid joined forces to run together this April, their popularity has been steadily decreasing. Since they announced their joint run, Eisenkot has been gaining roughly one seat per week in Israeli polling.
This reflects an important theme in Israeli politics: combining politicians does not necessarily combine their voters. Bennett, a right-wing Orthodox nationalist who has long opposed a Palestinian state, appeals to a different constituency than Lapid, a secular centrist who has expressed support for a two-state solution.
Some right-wing voters who have supported Bennett now may view him as too left-leaning for their tastes because of his alliance with Lapid. For Bennett, who was seen as someone who could take right-wing voters from Netanyahu, this is a real problem.
Enter Eisenkot: a security-focused centrist with an untraditional background. He grew up in Eilat as the son of Moroccan immigrants. If elected, he would be the first ever Mizrahi Prime Minister in Israeli history.
He did not serve in Sayeret Matkal, the elite special reconnaissance unit in the IDF that cultivated many future Israeli politicians, including Bennett and Netanyahu. Rather, he got his start in Golani, the IDF’s oldest unit. He slowly climbed through the ranks, spending his career within the security establishment before eventually becoming the chief of staff of the IDF in 2015.
His political career is relatively new. Eisenkot entered politics in 2022 as part of Benny Gantz’s National Unity party before breaking away to launch Yashar! in 2025. His time in politics, though short, has been free of scandal or feuds — beyond, of course, his frequent disagreements with Netanyahu.
Service for all
For many Israelis, Eisenkot’s public image is inseparable from personal loss. His son, Gal, was killed fighting in Gaza in 2023, and two of his nephews also died during the war. Their deaths have given Eisenkot a unique standing in a country where military service has profoundly affected many Israeli families in the last few years, especially following the Oct. 7 attacks.
This experience also resonates amid one of the most contentious debates in Israeli politics: whether ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students should continue receiving exemptions from military service. As reservists have been called up repeatedly since Oct. 7 and the IDF has faced manpower shortages, many Israelis have argued that the burden of military service is being shared unequally. Roughly 80,000 men aged 18 to 24 who are currently exempt are eligible to serve in the IDF.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute, only 9% of the Israeli public supports exempting the ultra-Orthodox from mandatory military service. Netanyahu’s coalition, which depends on ultra-Orthodox parties, has sought to preserve some form of exemption system.
Eisenkot not only faced profound personal sacrifice for his family’s military service, but he also runs on the platform “service for all,” which hopes to reform broad military exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox.
In May 2025, he shared his thoughts for the first time on a two-state solution, telling Channel 12, “I always speak in favor of a Jewish, democratic, strong, and powerful state, and from that, we should derive our decisions. I think a Palestinian state is not relevant after October 7.” He added, “We need to be very measured, build it from the bottom up, and certainly not talk about a state and a prize after this murderous event,” he said, referring to the Oct. 7 attacks. “Instead, we should make our considerations from a position of strength, take our time, and not decide from one moment to the next, certainly not talk about it now.”
One of the most visible criticisms of Eisenkot has been his lack of command of the English language. Eisenkot speaks English, though certainly not to the level of fluent proficiency of MIT-educated Benjamin Netanyahu or Naftali Bennett. Last week, a top Netanyahu aide, Jonatan Urich, posted a viral video on X splicing clips of Einsenkot speaking heavily accented English with Nethayahu’s major speeches at the UN and Congress.
Eisenkot responded to the video on a popular Israeli podcast, stating, “Where was Netanyahu’s excellent English on October 7?” he asked. “Where is his excellent English in strengthening the relationship between Israel and the United States, which this morning is at rock bottom?”
While Eisenkot’s party continues to soar in the polls, he has a long way to go before he will be able to dethrone Netanyahu, who has won six Israeli elections since 1996.
Israel’s next prime minister will not simply be the person who secures the most votes for their party. To govern, a coalition must command at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. To do this, political parties – though often ideologically different – must come together in the hopes of securing a majority number of seats in the Knesset.
Eisenkot’s principal rival for leadership of the anti-Netanyahu camp is Bennett. Still, both Bennett and Eisenkot have emphasized that their primary goal is to take down Netanyahu. When asked whether he would step aside for Eisenkot if that were necessary to form a government, Bennett replied: “I will do anything in the world to replace this very bad government. I will not let ego be a factor.”
The post Who is Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli politician who could dethrone Netanyahu? appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
(JTA) — President Donald Trump’s pick for general counsel of the agency that oversees federal workers’ labor rights testified in Congress on Wednesday that he does not believe a cartoon he published in college that depicted a Jewish student with devil horns was antisemitic.
Charlton Allen appeared at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for his confirmation hearing Wednesday afternoon. There, Sen. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat, pressed him about the cartoon.
“If you look behind me, you’ll see the front cover of an edition of the Carolina Review depicting Aaron Nelson, a Jewish candidate for student body president. Your magazine altered Nelson’s photo depicting him with the horns and a pitchfork. Inside the article says, ‘The difference between Aaron Nelson is simple. He’s Jewish.’” Gallego said. “Yes or no, Mr. Nelson. Do you stand by this depiction?”
The cartoon ignited a firestorm when it was published in the Carolina Review, a campus conservative magazine that Allen founded as an undergraduate at UNC. The magazine’s faculty advisor said he resigned after it went to print against his advice, and nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members pressed UNC’s chancellor to denounce the cartoon and censure the magazine, which he did.
Allen fended off allegations of antisemitism at the time and again during a 2014 hearing to confirm him for a position in North Carolina. He did so again on Tuesday.
“I would not say that it’s antisemitic,” he said. “We were the group that was calling for the equal treatment of all student religions.”
“If I were 30 years ago advocating for The Review, I would say, ‘don’t run that cover,’” he testified. “I think it was a mistake.”
According to reports from the time, Nelson had been accused by the Carolina Review of discriminating against a Christian campus group by voting not to fund it. He had voted in favor of funding a “majority” of other campus Christian groups while he was a representative in the student congress.
Facing backlash, Allen denied at the time that the depiction of Nelson with horns was meant to channel longstanding antisemitic stereotypes.
“Our cartoonist lampooned [Nelson] as such because her perception was that Aaron was evil,” Allen told the Duke Chronicle in April 1996. “Newspapers in the past few weeks have run cartoons lampooning public figures such as Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and even myself as ‘devils’ with horns and pitchforks. Where’s the public outcry over these cartoons?”
On Wednesday, Allen offered a slightly different explanation. He said the picture was meant to channel UNC’s historic and enduring rivalry with nearby Duke University, whose mascot is the “Blue Devil.”
“The cartoonist’s intention was to make an analogy to that,” he said.
In 2014, during his confirmation hearing ahead of his appointment for commissioner of the state Industrial Commission of North Carolina, Allen addressed criticisms of the cartoon by saying his grandfather had helped to liberate Jews in Europe from concentration camps during World War II, the Indy Week reported at the time.
Trump nominated Allen to the Office of the Special Council — the agency that protects whistleblowers from unlawful conduct — in May 2025 but withdrew the nomination less than a week later. In September, he nominated Allen to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Nelson, meanwhile, won the election handily to become UNC’s student body president. Now president of The Chamber, Chapel Hill’s chamber of commerce, Nelson did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment.
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Former antisemitic activist Lucas Gage explains to Jewish podcast why he left the movement
(JTA) — In July 2024, X suspended antisemitic influencer Lucas Gage for six months for making “repeated and clear calls for violence.”
This month, Gage was in Lakewood, New Jersey, explaining to two Jewish interviewers why he no longer considers himself an antisemite.
“It’s like a disease. I’m serious. It was like this compulsion and look, it comes from a justified place in some, but then it’s like what have I become honestly and it’s like I was sick of myself,” Gage told Yaakov Langer and Jake Turx on the podcast “Inspiration for the Nation.” “Looking back at the videos that got me knocked off of Twitter … I was out of my mind.”
Gage, a longtime white nationalist activist from New Jersey formerly known as Angelo John Gage, spent more than a decade promoting conspiracy theories and hate towards Jews online before publicly renouncing antisemitism earlier this year.
He told Langer and Turx that a pivotal moment for him was seeing antisemitic theories proliferate about the September murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. From there, his conversations changed.
“The more I sit down and talk to Jewish people, the more I realize how maligned they are,” Gage wrote in a post on X announcing the interview. “The lies the JQ crowd now tell about me are similar to those they tell about Jews. I was part of that crowd, but now I’m glad to say I’m no longer an antisemite.”
Gage announced in a March post on Substack that he was “abandoning” antisemitism, explaining that while his declaration was “not an apology,” his “focus on Jewish supremacy alone has become a self-destructive and futile endeavor, which does not even solve the problem.”
“The problem, however, is that I got sucked into the mob—the very mob I identified as ‘my people,’ who are just as problematic as the Jewish mob,” Gage wrote. “With that being said, I do not denounce my beliefs about Jewish supremacy and criminality in certain areas of society nor Jewish overrepresentation, which are all well substantiated.”
When asked by Langer, the founder of Living Lchaim and host of the podcast, why he had the “strength” to publicly renounce antisemitism and meet with Jews, Gage said he felt an obligation to engage with the Jewish community after spending years attacking it online.
Gage told the Jewish hosts that he thought it would be wrong for him “to walk away and not speak to a community I’ve been at war with for 14 years, and to see why I was at war with you guys in the first place.”
Turx, the senior White House correspondent for Mishpacha Magazine, an Orthodox publication, said the meeting took place after he reached out to Langer multiple times.
Langer did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment, and efforts to reach Gage were unsuccessful.
During the nearly two-hour interview, Gage recounted his journey from an Iraq war veteran to antisemitic activist and, more recently, to a public critic of the online movement he once helped build.
Gage, who is Roman Catholic, said his descent into antisemitic conspiracy theories began after serving in Kuwait and Iraq, when he became obsessed with identifying who was responsible for sending him to a war he described as “a lie.”
“I went through all the conspiracy theories until I ran into the Jews and that was in 2012 when I read ‘Mein Kampf’ and I was like ‘whoa,’” Gage said.
That year, Gage began posting on the racist Web forum Stormfront that he had recently found out about “the real Jewish question” and that “EVERYTHING connects and leads back to the jews — the evil jews,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Stormfront played a role in one of the best-known recent conversion-from-white supremacy stories, in which the child of the site’s founder renounced extremism and antisemitism after being invited to Shabbat dinners in college.
For Gage, Stormfront was a site of his radicalization. After beginning to post there, he became a regular fixture in white nationalist circles, appearing on far-right podcasts, organizing activists and eventually taking a shot at elected office.
In 2014, Gage ran unsuccessfully for the House in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District under the far-right white supremacist American Freedom Party but was disqualified before the campaign season began because of incorrectly filed paperwork. Following that bid, he served as the chairman of the National Youth Front, the youth wing of the party.
Gage’s online presence and influence within white nationalist circles grew rapidly, appearing alongside former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and Stormfront founder Andrew Anglin on their platforms. He also frequently promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which is widely considered antisemitic and claims that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people in Western countries with nonwhite immigrants.
Following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Gage said that he shifted the focus of his online accounts to railing against Israel, posting on X over the ensuing months that “every supporter of Israel is a terrorist” and that “Zionists are worse than pedophiles,” according to screenshots of his account posted by the Anti-Defamation League.
Gage said his departure from the movement was driven in part by frustration with what he called “low-IQ antisemitism,” or conspiracy theories that reflexively blame Jews for unrelated events.
“What was the final straw? Charlie Kirk. Okay. Why? Because I keep talking about low IQ antisemitism. What is that? It’s when you blame Jews for things they haven’t even done,” Gage said, explaining that he couldn’t agree with conspiratorial claims swirling on the far-right that Israel had been behind the Turning Point USA leader’s murder.
Gage said that he believed even if it was proven that the man accused of Kirk’s killing, Tyler Robinson, had committed the crime, the far-right crowd he had surrounded himself with would have still blamed the Jews.
“There’s no hope for these people, and then they’re turning on me just for disagreeing,” Gage said.
Gage’s shift quickly earned him the ire of antisemitic influencers he had once aligned himself with, including far-right antisemitic media personalities Jake Shields and Stew Peters.
“Imagine if Lucas Gage had never existed. What a beautiful world it would be. The world would be a much better place if Lucas Gage did not exist in it,” Peters said during a podcast appearance with Shields last month. “I mean, that guy singlehandedly destroyed the most cohesive movement in modern history.”
Looking ahead, Gage stressed the importance of engaging with figures who hold antisemitic views, citing the deadly terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia in December.
“I want to talk to different groups of people and say, look, yeah, we have to sit down and have these conversations, because if we don’t, if we isolate the antisemites, ‘oh, they’re just maniacs, they’re jealous, we don’t care,’ they’re going to go crazy,” Gage said. “I didn’t, but someone else did. Remember the guy who shot up the beach in Australia?”
Since announcing the interview, Langer said that his inbox had been “flooded” with messages asking him if he believed Gage was sincere, to which he responded “100%.”
“I wish more people were as authentic and honest as he is,” Langer said. “While it wasn’t easy to make change in his life, he did it.”
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