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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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Is AIPAC a ‘monster’ that decides Congressional races? The data shows otherwise
At a rally for progressive candidates last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called AIPAC “monsters.” The pro-Israel lobby, he told the crowd, uses “millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another.”
This is not an insulated idea. Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, was proud to stress that he was a candidate AIPAC would never endorse starting with one of his very first online ads.
On the left — and, more quietly, the right — versions of the “monster” narrative are spreading, suggesting that AIPAC is an electoral force with bottomless pockets that decides who serves in Congress.
The truth is quite different. To find it, I pulled both primary and general election outcomes for every Congressional candidate that AIPAC’s traditional PAC backed in 2022 and 2024 — 788 candidates across the two cycles — from the Federal Electoral Commission. I ran the same exercise for 17 peer single-issue PACs, including the NRA and Planned Parenthood.
The data shows that while AIPAC has an impressive operation, its electoral results do not outperform those of any other major single-issue lobby. AIPAC itself cites a 95% win rate on endorsed candidates as evidence of its political muscle, but that high level of success is partially attributable to the fact that, according to my sample, some 86% percent of AIPAC’s endorsements go to sitting members of Congress. And incumbents win about 95% of general elections — regardless of who funds them.
What’s more remarkable than the number of elections AIPAC wins is how often it gets credit or blame — depending on your politics — for deciding races.
When former Rep. Cori Bush lost her 2024 primary against an AIPAC-backed challenger, AIPAC was widely cited as influencing the race — even though even though Bush spent much of 2024 fighting a federal investigation into her campaign-fund spending, and lost to Wesley Bell, a former St. Louis County prosecutor with the kind of district-wide name recognition no PAC can buy. That same year, Rep. Summer Lee, who had been at least as outspoken on Israel’s conduct in Gaza as Bush, beat AIPAC’s preferred candidate in the Pittsburgh primary by more than 20 points.
Somehow, the narrative that AIPAC rather than voters decides Congressional races wasn’t overturned by Lee’s win. It’s almost like people who want to believe that Jews control politics in the United States have a bias toward seeing instances that on the surface may appear to confirm that belief — and toward ignoring those that contest it.
When the group’s main PAC supported candidates who were not yet sitting members of Congress, their picks won about 91% of primaries. This sounds high, indeed, but other major lobbies do even better. For instance, lobbies including the NRA, Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood all boast success rates over the same period of more than 95%.
AIPAC is, in this context, indistinguishable in terms of its win rate than all other lobbies.
Perhaps an even more important test is tight races — primaries decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. Here, AIPAC wins about 79% of the time. This is comparable to the win rate of all other lobbies I saw, but not by far the largest. For instance, the NRA’s win rate in these tight races is 84%, the Sierra Club 88%, and Planned Parenthood 83%.
So it is true that AIPAC plays a real role in American politics. What gets missed amid the excess scrutiny on AIPAC: that role is, in effect, no different from that of any other lobby. In fact, AIPAC is in practice often slightly less effective than many of its peers.
That truth helps make clear how dangerous the disproportionate attention AIPAC receives from the media, and from candidates opposed to its priorities, can be. To single out a well-funded lobby with many Jewish members, and to cast it as the secret hand behind every contested race, isn’t just wrong on the data. It rhymes with the oldest antisemitic trope there is: that Jews quietly run the world.
The post Is AIPAC a ‘monster’ that decides Congressional races? The data shows otherwise appeared first on The Forward.
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Feds open antisemitism investigation into National Education Association
(JTA) — The Trump administration is launching an antisemitism investigation into the National Education Association, the influential public school teachers union, over purported employment discrimination.
The probe is based on allegations that Jewish members of the NEA were harassed and “physically intimidated” during the organization’s 2025 annual convention, including a reported case of NEA members appearing to cheer at mention of the 2005 attack on a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.
The complaint, based on the accounts of several Jewish NEA members, also spotlighted recent controversies, such as materials from the union that labeled a map of the state of Israel as “Palestine” for Indigenous People’s Day and a handbook that failed to identify Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. They further alleged that the union’s diversity hiring guidelines harmed its Jewish members.
The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal group that has brought several other such antisemitism cases to the Trump administration, filed the complaint that triggered the NEA investigation. The case is being handled through the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose authority to investigate employment discrimination also extends to union membership.
“We really appreciate the EEOC’s decision to open this investigation,” Marci Miller, director of legal investigations at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In a statement to JTA, the NEA said, “We take concerns like this seriously and are reviewing the matter through our established processes.” The union added that it “does not tolerate antisemitism in any form and is committed to ensuring that all members and students, including Jewish members and students, can work and learn in a safe and welcoming environment.”
The NEA has previously said its map labeled “Palestine” “does not meet our standards,” and updated its Holocaust handbook in response to the pushback.
Jews in public school education have expressed concern about tensions over the last few years. In 2021, many Jewish groups rallied against NEA proposals to oppose Israel; the measures did not pass. At its 2025 convention, the NEA had voted to boycott the Anti-Defamation League, though its executive committee rejected the vote following pushback from Jewish groups.
The GOP-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce is also investigating the union over antisemitism, citing several of the same instances later outlined in the Brandeis Center complaint.
The EEOC’s NEA case is part of an expansion of the Trump administration’s antisemitism investigations beyond college and K-12 campuses. Last week the U.S. Health and Human Services Department opened its own probe into the American Psychological Association, also based on a Brandeis Center complaint.
In addition to alleged harassment of Jewish members at the convention, Miller said the center’s NEA complaint also involved diversity-based hiring practices at the union: “Jewish members in particular have been harmed by this policy because they have not been recognized as a racial or ethnic group worth counting for purposes of this policy.”
The EEOC has tackled antisemitism cases against other institutions, but its role in such investigations is controversial. The agency’s chair, Andrea Lucas, is currently demanding that the University of Pennsylvania turn over a list of Jews affiliated with the university as part of the commission’s antisemitism investigation into the Ivy League school. Several Jewish groups, as well as the university itself, have argued that such a demand will make Jews less safe.
Some Jewish groups have alleged that the administration has used antisemitism allegations as a pretext to undermine institutions it considers ideologically unfriendly.
One of Lucas’s defenders in the Jewish community is Kenneth Marcus, the Brandeis Center’s founder. Lucas herself is not Jewish but recently defended her legal strategy to Jewish leaders at a campus antisemitism conference.
Asked about this, Miller said the Brandeis Center was providing “dozens” of Jewish witnesses to the EEOC for consensual interviews.
“There’s no demand for anybody else,” she said. “We have plenty of information.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Feds open antisemitism investigation into National Education Association appeared first on The Forward.
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New York primary tests Mamdani’s pull and Israel as a campaign issue
New York City Democratic voters are going to the polls today in congressional primaries that are doubling as a referendum on U.S.-Israel relations, as candidates allied with Mayor Zohran Mamdani test whether his brand of democratic socialism and criticism of hardline pro-Israel money in politics will translate into broader electoral success.
Mamdani has endorsed Columbia Gaza war encampment leader Darializa Avila-Chevalier and former City Comptroller Brad Lander in challenging sitting members of Congress, and Assemblymember Claire Valdez for an open seat.
All have campaigned using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and Mamdani himself has singled out Israel and its champions as adversaries.
At a Brooklyn campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”
The statement drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some of Mamdani’s supporters. And it comes as Democratic infighting over Israel nationally has intensified, with candidates across the political spectrum increasingly treating support from AIPAC as politically toxic.
All three of the Mamdani-endorsed congressional candidates have made Israel or AIPAC a central part of their campaigns, though each in different ways. AIPAC backs candidates aligned with continued U.S. support for Israel military aid and has spent upwards of $38 million nationally this election cycle, a Politico analysis found — though exact AIPAC contributions are difficult to track due to its use of shell PACs and tactic of funneling money directly to campaigns.
In the 10th Congressional District in lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn, Lander is challenging incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, zeroing in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to AIPAC. Lander opted not to take part in New York City’s annual Israel Parade, while Goldman used his participation to appeal to Jewish voters.
Earlier this month, Israel and Gaza consumed roughly 15 minutes of a one-hour debate between the candidates. Goldman expressed a desire to move on, arguing that “Israel is not the most important issue in this district,” while Lander countered that Gaza represents “one of the significant moral and humanity challenges of our time.”
Goldman has defended his support for Israel as consistent with his values. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in February that there is “an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified.”
The heat boiled over on Sunday when a Brooklyn coffee bar chain, Poetica Coffee, declared on social media after Goldman and his young daughter stopped by that it would have turned Goldman away from the cafe had staff known who he was, posting to Instagram that they don’t serve “genocide enablers.”
Next to a picture of Goldman taken outside the shop after he had ordered a coffee, and another image showing $9.82 refunded, the post added: “Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice? Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference?” (The account has since been disabled.)
Lander, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, had acknowledged the potential for anti-Israel passions in the race to get out of hand — telling an interviewer that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
Goldman has not commented on the incident, other than to reply on Instagram: “The barista could not have been nicer to my 7-yr-old daughter and me.” Lander criticized the coffee shop’s response, telling the Forward, “There are plenty of ways to lobby elected officials and express outrage at the votes they’ve taken without turning coffee shops into places people don’t feel welcome.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Avila Chevalier attended a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 widely condemned for condoning Hamas’ violence. She has said she attended in anticipation of an Israeli military response, citing “a pattern in which whenever there is an incident, the state of Israel engages in a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.”
And she told the New York Editorial Board last week that Zionism “is an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”
She faces AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY-13, which covers Upper Manhattan and portions of the Bronx.
“To know that my opponent takes AIPAC money is something that, for a lot of people, is just disqualifying. It is [about] Palestine at the heart of it, but it’s also what it says about someone’s inability to stand up against something that is so blatantly horrific, someone who refuses to name a genocide,” Avila Chevalier told the Nation. “Can you trust someone who won’t even say that word to fight for you on the most basic of issues?”
Addressing AIPAC’s support for him in a primary debate, Espaillat said “no one dictates or tells me how to vote, my constituents do that.”
Meanwhile, in NY-7, which includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, Valdez has sought to make Israel and AIPAC a campaign issue in a race where AIPAC is not involved and the candidates have broad agreement on Gaza.
Valdez faces Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, whom she has critiqued for not using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions until after he announced his candidacy. She also accused Reynoso of benefiting from secretive pro-Israel money, despite no evidence that AIPAC has supported his campaign.
The post New York primary tests Mamdani’s pull and Israel as a campaign issue appeared first on The Forward.
