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‘We’re listening,’ Israel’s new Diaspora minister says in first public comments in the US
AUSTIN, Texas (JTA) — The new Israeli government is listening to the concerns of more liberal Jews, Israel’s new minister of Diaspora affairs said on Thursday.
But Amichai Chikli said that while some proposed changes that worry Americans — including an overhaul to the country’s Law of Return — would happen slowly, any criticism is largely misplaced.
“There is a large alarm on the left, it’s obvious, and it affects dramatically most of the Jews who live here in America,” Chikli said at the summit of the Israeli American Council, which aims to keep Israelis in America connected to Israel, often through business.
“We had an election. The result was crystal clear. We were very honest with our agenda, and it is our responsibility to form this agenda,” he said. “And it does not mean that we are not listening. We do listen, and I spent hours today, yesterday, to listen to Jewish leaders and what they have to say about the Law of Return, about the judicial changes, and everything. We’re listening to the criticism. We’re listening to the concerns. We care about it.”
Chikli was making his first public comments outside of Israel since being appointed minister of Diaspora affairs late last month in Israel’s new right-wing government, helmed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s decision to ally with extremist parties, including ones that advocate for curbing rights to Arab Israelis, LGBTQ Israelis and non-Orthodox Jews, has drawn concern from across the Diaspora, as has the government’s effort to weaken Israel’s judiciary, which historically has acted to protect the country’s minorities.
Diaspora Jewish leaders have raised particular concern about the coalition’s agreement to amend Israel’s hallmark Law of Return, which permits anyone with a Jewish grandparent to claim citizenship. The eligibility rules were crafted to reflect the Nazis’ criteria for whom to kill during the Holocaust, but Israel’s religious parties say that has left the door open to immigrants who are not invested in building a strong Jewish state.
Speaking in a live interview with Israeli journalist and TV presenter Miri Michaeli, Chikli said he believed it was a problem for Israel’s identity that a decreasing percentage of immigrants from the former Soviet Union are connected to Judaism and many of them don’t stay in Israel for very long.
But the new minister said any changes to Israel’s Law of Return would happen slowly and through a process that includes consultation with others.
“No one, no one is going to cancel the Law of Return, which is fundamental for the state of Israel,” Chikli said.
“We’re not saying we’re about to cancel Chapter Four tomorrow morning,” he said, referring to a technical name for the law. “That’s not what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen is there’s going to be a committee to determine how can we deal with this serious challenge. And as you see when you go into the details, that’s a challenge. We need Israel to be a strong Jewish state, and we need to tackle this challenge, and we’re going to do it slow. We’re going to do it by listening to all.”
Chikli, who has previously made disparaging remarks about Reform Judaism and who has said the LGBTQ Pride flag is an antisemitic symbol, grew up and lives on a kibbutz founded by the Conservative movement of Judaism where three-quarters of voters backed left-wing parties in the most recent election. He said his government’s critics would do well to change how they form their opinions about the government.
“I think that maybe one tip is less Haaretz and New York Times, and more common sense and tachlis, what the government is actually doing,” Chikli said, referring to newspapers perceived as liberal and using the Hebrew word meaning details. “That’s it. We are proud to be Zionists. Me, myself, I’m proud to represent this government.”
Nearly 3,000 people, many of them Israelis living in America, are expected to attend the IAC’s summit in Austin this week. Chikli’s comments came during the opening day, when Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke to the summit via video message and acknowledged concerns around the new administration.
“It’s no secret that, since Israel’s most recent election, questions were raised by many of our friends around the world and in the United States,” Herzog said. “Our friends want to know that Israel will continue to carry the rich, ethical heritage on which our country was founded, that it will continue to stand for those values of democracy, liberty and equality, which are the animating force behind the United States and Israel alliance. So allow me to reassure you that Israeli democracy is strong.”
Many of the events during the conference’s first day did not address the month-old government, its turmoil or the concern ricocheting across the world, including among many of Israel’s allies.
Ofer Krichman, an Israeli expat who works in finance and lives in New Jersey, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he had expected the new Israeli administration to be a bigger topic of conversation.
Instead, he said, he had conversations about “ideology, but based not on politics, based on Jews all around the world, antisemitism, how to cope with that, which is not business, but that’s a valid topic to discuss, and it’s a concerning topic.”
One of Chikli’s first acts was to extend his title to include a mandate to fight antisemitism. He says the movement to boycott Israel, known as BDS, is of particular concern to him. Noa Tishby, Israel’s first special envoy for combating antisemitism and delegitimization of Israel, also spoke during the summit’s first day.
The turmoil was on the minds of some attendees. Grinstein, the founder of the Reut Group, a nonpartisan Israeli policy think tank, told JTA that the relationship between Israel and world Jewry is at a pivotal moment.
“The new government represents a massive challenge to world Jewry on a number of counts,” Grinstein said. “First of all, the government handed responsibility over key touchpoints to world Jewry in Israel to the most radical factions of the government. … These things really make it structurally challenging for world Jewry to be as involved in Israel as they used to be.”
Those concerns offered an undercurrent during the first day of the conference. But the dominant vibe was simply on making business connections and meeting people.
Shani Gil, who works in real estate in the Los Angeles area, said she spent her first day at the conference going through the booths, mingling and handing out business cards.
“It’s an electric vibe in the air,” she said. “Everyone’s very excited.”
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The post ‘We’re listening,’ Israel’s new Diaspora minister says in first public comments in the US appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why is AIPAC targeting Trump’s ICE funding?
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, often a reliable ally of pro-Israel Republicans, is now echoing Democratic outrage over one of President Donald Trump’s most polarizing policies: immigration enforcement. It comes amid backlash sparked by the fatal shooting this month of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, began airing an attack ad over the weekend against former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who is running in a Feb. 5 primary for the House seat vacated by New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill. The ad highlights his 2019 vote for a bipartisan border funding bill, which included an increase in funds for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “We can’t trust Tom Malinowski” to stand up to President Donald Trump, the voiceover says in the 30-second video.
AIPAC has become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who questioned the 2020 election results. That opposition deepened during the Gaza war as Democratic voters became more polarized over U.S. policy on Israel. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC. The group has also drawn attacks from white nationalists and some leaders of the MAGA movement for their lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
The new ad is especially notable given that AIPAC has spent years cultivating ties to Trump-aligned Republicans, many of whom strongly support aggressive immigration enforcement. By attacking a Democrat over ICE funding while sidestepping Trump himself, the group is threading a narrow needle — aligning rhetorically with Democratic outrage while maintaining its broader bipartisan posture.
In the 2024 election cycle, the group spent $28 million in high-stakes Democratic primaries. That included more than $14 million, which contributed to the defeat of Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a strident critic of Israel. Malinowski, who served two terms in Congress from 2019 to 2023, holds a mainstream Democratic stance on Israel. During his first term, he traveled to Israel on a trip sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, AIPAC’s educational affiliate.
Israel has not been a key issue in the crowded special election in the northern New Jersey district, which includes a sizable Jewish electorate. The Jewish Democratic Council of America held a virtual candidate forum last week with eight candidates on issues important to Jewish voters.
A spokesperson for the United Democracy Project did not immediately respond to questions about why the group is targeting Malinowski, particularly on such a deeply contentious political issue. AIPAC spent at least $350,000 on the ad.
AIPAC ad is out https://t.co/f0cH6AIgja pic.twitter.com/udwL7nJgYf
— umichvoter (@umichvoter) January 17, 2026
Malinowski, 60, is a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in President Barack Obama’s second term and previously served as a foreign policy speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. He first ran for Congress in 2018 in New Jersey’s 7th District, saying he was motivated by Trump’s election.
“I am myself an immigrant from Poland. My family was not Jewish, but experienced life under the Nazi occupation,” Malinowski said in an interview at the time. “That’s where my commitment to defending human rights comes from. That’s where my belief in the importance of protecting Israel comes from.” He is a close friend of former Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Malinowski was defeated in the 2022 election.
Malinowski is competing for the open seat against at least two leading contenders: Outgoing Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill.
AIPAC typically focuses on U.S.-Israel relations and national security issues. However, its political arm has focused on domestic issues in close contests.
In 2024, they attacked Reps. Jammal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri — two of the first House members to advocate for a ceasefire after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 — over their votes against signature Biden-era bills, like infrastructure and healthcare.
In a statement to the New Jersey Globe, Malinowski called the attack “laughably preposterous” and suggested it would boomerang against AIPAC. “I have many pro-Israel supporters in the district, including AIPAC members, who believe you can be passionately pro-Israel while being critical of Netanyahu,” Malinowski said. “To say that they’re appalled by this ad would be an understatement. In fact, I’m reading a collective sense that AIPAC has lost its mind.”
The post Why is AIPAC targeting Trump’s ICE funding? appeared first on The Forward.
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The Jewish women who kept Confederate graves from disappearing
In June 1866, just over a year after the Civil War ended, young Jewish men in Richmond, Virginia, removed their coats and set to work among the graves of their fallen comrades. Some were “frail of limb,” a newspaper noted. They wheeled gravel and turf, filled the graves, and tamped the earth down “in a very substantial manner.” It was the last sad tribute they could offer.
The work that day was organized by Jewish women in the city. Their aim was permanence: to enclose the soldiers’ graves, to mark them, and to ensure they would not disappear “before the relentless finger of time.”
The Hebrew Cemetery in Richmond was established in 1816, decades before the Civil War reshaped the nation and long before the city became the capital of the Confederacy. It was the second burial ground for the Beth Shalome Congregation, Virginia’s first synagogue. Tucked within its grounds is the Soldiers’ Section, where 30 Jewish Confederate soldiers are buried, in what is believed to be one of only two Jewish military cemeteries in the world outside Israel.
They came from across the South, including Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and beyond. A bronze plaque at the entrance reads: “To the glory of God and in memory of the Hebrew Confederate soldiers resting in this hallowed spot.”
What matters here is not only who is buried — but who remembered them, and how.
The work the war left behind
In 1866, just a year after the war’s end, Jewish women in Richmond organized the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association. That same year, the group issued an appeal “to the Israelites of the South” for aid to enable the society to care for the graves of Jewish Confederate soldiers from all over the South who lie buried in the cemeteries of Richmond.
It was a duty, an act of chesed shel emet, Hebrew for the truest form of kindness, performed for those who could not repay it.
Newspaper accounts from the period are striking for their clarity and urgency. These women understood that the work of memory is laborious — physical, ongoing, and vulnerable to neglect. Graves, they warned, could vanish unless someone acted.
So they took responsibility.
By the late 1860s and 1870s, the Association’s work had grown to include an annual memorial service. Reports describe flowers laid carefully on each grave, marble slabs placed at the head of each burial, names and regiments inscribed so those resting there would not slip into anonymity.
An 1868 account observed that “each grave has been marked in a manner that ensures that the names of the still tenants of this beautiful spot will be preserved from oblivion; and handed down to be further cherished by the generations yet to come.”
That language echoes a Jewish concept. Zachor. Remember.
Memory, they understood, does not preserve itself.
Importantly, these memorial services were not closed affairs. One report from 1868 noted that the crowd gathered in the cemetery “was not confined to any one denomination.” Jewish lives were honored in the public view, but still held apart from Richmond’s larger Confederate cemeteries, Hollywood and Oakwood, which were not consecrated for Jewish burial and could not accommodate Jewish ritual requirements, including separate sacred ground.
Tending the dead
The care itself remained constant, but the language surrounding it did not.
What is striking in early accounts of the Soldiers’ Section of the Hebrew Cemetery is not the absence of politics, but how its weight changes over time.
In the earliest years, memory and the war were still closely bound. The 1866 appeal issued by the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association spoke openly of a “glorious cause” and framed the soldiers’ deaths within the language of Confederate sacrifice. Like other women’s memorial groups in the postwar South, these Jewish women used care for the dead to assert dignity and a claim to sacrifice in a defeated society.
Yet even then, the work itself was grounded in restraint. The focus was on names, tending, and preservation — on preventing the graves from vanishing. The labor was physical, repetitive, and unglamorous. Whatever meanings surrounded it, the work remained the same.
As decades passed, the emphasis shifted. By the 1930s, memorial services featured a cadet, Walter McDonald of the Catholic Benedictine College, sounding taps and the ceremonial laying of wreaths. Confederate organizations were invited to attend. In 1940 and 1941, the public was welcomed to observe the 74th and 75th annual memorials. After 1941, the Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association continued to participate alongside other organizations in Memorial Day observances, but it appears that by 1947 the local observance of “Hebrew Memorial Day” or “Jewish Confederate Memorial Day” faded as a distinct commemoration.
Across generations, the observance persisted, a refusal to abandon the dead to neglect. Memory grew larger than any one explanation. The women’s work became less about what the war had meant, and more about what the living still owed to their dead.
A refusal to forget
This is a complex story that shows how history so often complicates memory. It sits at the intersection of some of America’s most divisive episodes and a small minority faith community declaring its presence and its sacrifices over decades.
When the Civil War ended, Jews needed to be buried. What followed was a choice.
The Hebrew Ladies’ Memorial Association chose to take responsibility. To remember “many a loved brother, son, and husband.” To insist that whatever judgment history would render, oblivion was not acceptable for “Israelitish soldiers of the Confederate army.”
Today, the Soldiers’ Section in Richmond’s Hebrew Cemetery remains. Names are still remembered. The work begun in 1866 was not temporary.
The post The Jewish women who kept Confederate graves from disappearing appeared first on The Forward.
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Spanish PM Sanchez Says US Invasion of Greenland ‘Would Make Putin Happiest Man on Earth’
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said a US invasion of Greenland “would make Putin the happiest man on earth” in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.
Sanchez said any military action by the US against Denmark’s vast Arctic island would damage NATO and legitimize the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“If we focus on Greenland, I have to say that a US invasion of that territory would make Vladimir Putin the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimize his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” he said in an interview in La Vanguardia newspaper.
“If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for NATO. Putin would be doubly happy.”
President Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to change tack over Greenland by vowing to implement a wave of increasing tariffs on European allies until the United States is allowed to buy Greenland.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said additional 10 percent import tariffs would take effect on February 1 on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Great Britain — all already subject to tariffs imposed by Trump.
Those tariffs would increase to 25 percent on June 1 and would continue until a deal was reached for the US to purchase Greenland, Trump wrote.
Trump has repeatedly insisted he will settle for nothing less than ownership of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. Leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have insisted the island is not for sale and does not want to be part of the United States.