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What American Jews fight about when they fight about Israel
(JTA) — Eric Alterman, born in 1960, says the view of Israel he absorbed growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Scarsdale, New York, was decidedly one-sided.
“I went on this nerdy presidential classroom thing when I was in high school,” he recalls, “and some Christian kid from the South raised his hand and said to the rabbi, ‘I don’t get it, if the Jews could have a state, why can’t the Palestinians?’ And I was like, ‘How dare you?’”
Alterman would go on to attend Cornell University, where he wrote his honors thesis on Israel, Vietnam and neoconservatism; spend a semester abroad at Tel Aviv University; study Israeli military history while earning his master’s degree in international relations at Yale, and research a dissertation on American liberalism and the founding of Israel as a doctoral student at Stanford.
Although he frequently writes about Israel as a contributing writer at the Nation and the American Prospect, Alterman is best known for his liberal analysis of the media and U.S. politics. He’s written 11 previous books, including one on Bruce Springsteen.
Yet he never stopped thinking about the widening gap between the idealized Israel of his youth and the reality of its relations with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the West. Even when Israel’s revisionist historians were uncovering evidence of massacres and forced expulsions of Palestinians during the War of Independence, and Israeli politicians and intellectuals began asking why, indeed, the Palestinians didn’t deserve a state of their own, he saw that such discussions were considered blasphemous in most American Jewish circles.
Alterman, now a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, explores that gap in his latest book, “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.” The book surveys U.S.-Israel relations, but with a focus on the ways defending Israel have shaped public discourse. It’s a book about arguments: within the administrations of 14 presidents, between Washington and Jerusalem, and mostly among Jews themselves.
Earlier this month we spoke about how the pro-Isael lobby became a powerful political force, the Jewish organizations and pundits who fight to limit the range of debate over Israel, and what he thinks is the high price American Jews have paid for tying their identities so closely to Israel.
“I try to take on shibboleths that in the past have shut down conversation and take them apart and sympathetically show the complexity of the actual situation that lies beneath — so that [criticism and disagreement] over Israel can be understood rather than whisked away by changing the subject, or what-aboutism, or by demonizing the person who is raising them,” said Alterman.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me start by congratulating you: It’s the first book about U.S.-Israel relations with a chapter named after a Bruce Springsteen album: “Working on a Dream.”
Eric Alterman: Nobody else has caught that. But it’s not about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s the first book about the debate over Israel in the United States. There’s a million books on U.S.-Israel relations.
So let’s define that more narrowly. The title reminds me of the United Jewish Appeal slogan over the years, “We Are One,” which was about American Jewish solidarity. So who is the “we” in your title, “We Are Not One”?
There are three or four different meanings. The “we” in this book are obviously the United States and Israel. An awful lot of people argue that the United States and Israel have identical interests in the world and that’s crazy, because Israel is this tiny little country in the Middle East and we’re a global superpower thousands of miles away. So obviously, we’re going to have differences. Number two, American Jews and Israeli Jews are very different people. They have very different life experiences. And they see things quite differently as evidenced by the political split between them. The title also refers specifically just to Americans, because we can’t even discuss most things anymore. The pro-Israel community, such as it ever was, is enormously split and it’s split in angry ways.
Much of your book is about what happens to American Jews when the idealized portrait of Israel’s founding and its presumed blamelessness in its actions toward the Palestinians comes up against reality. In that context, tell me a little about your choice to devote a chapter to the Leon Uris novel “Exodus,” an extremely sanitized version of Israel’s founding, and the 1960 movie based on it.
The influence of “Exodus” is something I didn’t understand until I wrote the book. It’s crazy, because Leon Uris was this egomaniac who wrote kind of a shitty book and said that he wanted to add a new chapter to the Bible, and he kind of succeeded. I was born in 1960. When I was growing up in suburban New York, every single family had “Exodus” on their shelves. When the movie came out Israelis understood this. They said, “We can just shut down our public relations office now.” And from the standpoint of reality the movie is worse than the book because it has Nazis — the Arabs in the book are working with Nazism. Uris didn’t have the nerve to do that. So the book created this idealized Israel and this idea of [Palestinians as] evil, subhuman Nazis.
What most Americans don’t understand, or choose not to understand, is that before the 1940s most Jews were anti-Zionist, or non-Zionist. This changed in the 1940s, when, as a result in part of the Holocaust, and the reaction to that, and the triumph of Zionists, they became intensely pro-Zionist, leading up to the creation of Israel. But after that, they kind of forgot about Israel. One might have given their children JNF boxes to carry on Halloween instead of UNICEF boxes, or maybe they paid to plant trees. But Israel doesn’t show up in the American Jewish Committee’s 1966 annual report until page 35 or 36, and Nathan Glazer’s 1957 book “American Judaism” says that the creation of the Jewish state has had “remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”
With the events of 1967, Uris’ idealized notion of Israel came together with this terrible fear of a second Holocaust, and the terror and shame and frightening nature of that combined to transform American Judaism overnight to an enormous degree.
You are referring to Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War, which even non-religious Jews saw as a kind of miracle, and redemption two decades after the Holocaust. And that transformation, you argue, put defense of Israel, combined with Holocaust consciousness, at the center of Jewish identity.
More than just the center: It basically comprised almost all of it, for many secular Jews. I quote the neoconservative Irving Kristol in the book saying in 1976 that “the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel” was 100% of what Judaism means.
Which in turn led to a the tremendous pro-Israel lobbying efforts, political activism and punditry.
The budgets of American Jewish organizations overnight went from social services and liberal social justice causes to defense of Israel. And rabbis were replaced at the center of public discourse by the heads of these organizations — most of whom had no religious training or knowledge of history or Judaism.
Joe Biden, then vice president, speaks at the AIPAC 2016 Policy Conference in Washington, DC, March 20, 2016.
(Molly Riley/AFP via Getty Images)
One distinction you repeatedly make is between what most Jews believe compared to the Jewish organizations that claim to represent them. Surveys show the rank and file is consistently more liberal on Israel and less hawkish than the big organizations — a gap that showed up markedly around the Iraq War and the Iran nuclear deal.
Right. The big mistake that so many in the media make is that they go to the heads of these organizations who pretend to speak for American Jews when they don’t speak for American Jews. They speak for their boards and their donors.
The shift to Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel coincides with an era in which there is seldom daylight between what Israel wants and what the United States wants or agrees to — often to the frustration of presidents. You are critical of those who exaggerate the pro-Israel lobby’s influence — folks like Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer, authors of the 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” — but, at the same time, you write, referring to the Israel debate in America, about “the continued stranglehold that money, power, organizational structure, and clearly defined paths to personal career advancement continue to hold over the shape of foreign policy.” How will you respond to critics who will say your book is trafficking in the myth of Jewish power and its conspiracy-minded hold over American policy?
The short answer is, that’s why I wrote a 500-page book — basically, for two reasons: One, everything is incredibly complicated. And some of those complications are consistent with antisemitic myths, and therefore they have to be teased out and broken down in such a way that you’re telling the truth rather than portraying the myth.
If you say things without context, they sound antisemitic. I say that yes, Jews are very powerful in the media and many use that power on or about Israel. But I think if you lay out the examples that I use, if you look at them and examine them, I don’t see how you can conclude otherwise. The people I describe often say that about themselves — how much power and influence they yield.
Secondly, I’ve always found it just about impossible to discuss Israel with anyone, because you have to share exactly the same assumptions with that person. And if you don’t, then they take it personally, or you’re an antisemite, or, at best, you’re insufficiently sensitive to how important antisemitism is. And if you describe ways in which American Jews act in ways that are consistent with antisemitic myth, it has a way of shutting down the conversation.
Undoubtedly there’s some criticism of Israel that is motivated by antisemitism, but there’s an awful lot of reasons to be critical of Israel, particularly if you are a Palestinian or care about Palestinians. This accusation [antisemitism] has shut down the discourse and part of my hopes in demonstrating the complexities of this history is to open this up.
So let me ask about your own stake in this. Your educational background and relationship to Israel are similar in many ways to the writers and thinkers in your book who tolerate no criticism of Israel. I don’t know if you call yourself a Zionist, but you have some connection to Israel, and you’re also willing to tolerate critiques of Israel. What’s the difference between you and some of the other people who went on the same journey?
For the longest time I was comfortable with the words “liberal Zionist,” but I don’t think they have any meaning anymore. I don’t think it’s possible to be a liberal Zionist — you have to choose. Israel is the only putatively democratic country that prefers Trump to either Obama or Biden, and it’s not even close. And young Israelis are moving further in that direction and young American Jews are moving further in the opposite direction.
So you ask me if I am a liberal Zionist. I don’t think the word “Zionist” is useful at all anymore, because Israel is a country and it’s not going anywhere. I sometimes call myself an anti-anti-Zionist, because anti-Zionism is dumb. I’m very anti-BDS. If I thought [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] could end occupation, I would support it, even though the idea of boycotting Jews puts a bad taste in my mouth. But the theory behind BDS apparently, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this, is that the world will force Israel to give up its identity and turn the country over to its enemies. It’s inconceivable that Israel would do that and inconceivable the United States would pressure them to do that. So BDS is entirely performative. It’s more of a political fashion statement than anything else.
And to me, it speaks to the failure of Palestinian politics throughout history. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians and their bad politics because it’s based on two problems. One is that they have never been able to see the future very well. So they should have agreed in 1921 and 1937, or whenever they would have had the majority and they were being given a country by the British. They should have taken the lousy offer from Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000. I kind of get it because they have so many competing constituencies, and it’s impossible to satisfy all of them at the same time. I understand that. It’s hard to imagine a Palestinian politician who could say yes, and if you look at Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, in both cases, it’s hard to imagine making peace with them.
I read that in your book, and my first thought was, well, isn’t that basically just confirming what the pro-Israel right has always said — that Israel has no partner for peace? So maybe the best it can do is maintain a status quo that assures some security for Israel and a workable something for the Palestinians.
Well, number one I hold Israel significantly responsible for the conditions under which that has developed and that they can change those. And number two, that’s no excuse for the way Palestinians are treated, either in the occupation or in Israel. So yes, I agree. There’s no one to make peace with today, but there are many steps Israel could take that could vastly improve the lives of the Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel. And there are a lot of steps they could take that could build confidence for a future that could weaken Hamas, that could strengthen the Palestinian Authority, so that one day peace would be possible. But they do the opposite.
An Israel supporter at a New York rally to tell the United Nations “no more anti-Israel documents or resolutions,” Jan. 12, 2017. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
You talk about funding of Israel studies and Jewish studies departments as a reaction against fears of a pro-Palestinian takeover of academia. At the same time, you write how Palestinian supporters “succeeded in colonizing Middle East studies departments, student faculty organizations, and far-left political organizations.” Why does that matter in the long run if, as you also write, nothing’s really going to change American policy on Israel?
I gave a talk before the book came out at Tel Aviv University and someone asked me that question. I said, You care about these transformations for two reasons. One, you really will be all alone in the world. You’ll have the support of conservative [Evangelical] Christians who are in many respects antisemitic and are using you for their own purposes. So if you lose American Jews, you will be existentially alone in a way you’re not now and that strikes me as very unpleasant.
I do think that the quote-unquote pro-Israel community has a stranglehold on American politics that I can’t see changing anytime soon, and I think the change in the Democratic Party [that it will turn more pro-Palestinian] is very much exaggerated by both sides for their own reasons.
That being said, the people who are being trained now to be in the State Department and the National Security Council and the Defense Department and the think tanks and the places where the intellectual foundation of U.S. policy is made are learning something very different from what you and I learned in college. Right now, there’s no such thing as an influential Palestinian lobby in this country. There’s no pushing back. There’s no percentage for anyone opposing Israel who has a career interest in the future. That will change, and the whole shaping of the discourse will change and that will change the relationship between the United States and Israel. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but it’s definitely going to happen.
As Jews in this country have remained largely liberal, Israel appears to be getting more illiberal, as we’ve seen with a new government that is more right-wing than any previously. And Israel has become more of a divisive element among Jews than a unifying force. As this gap appears to be widening, do you have any real hope for changing the discourse?
No, I don’t have any hopes for that. I don’t have anything optimistic to say about Israel. I think, politically speaking, from the standpoint of American Jews, everything is going in the wrong direction. But by demonstrating just how different Israeli Jews are than American Jews, and how little Israeli Jews care what American Jews think, I do think that it presents an opportunity for American Jews to think about what it means to be an American Jew in the Diaspora. Roughly half of the Jews in the world live in the United States. And since 1967 American Jews have defined themselves vicariously through Israeli Jews and taking pride in Israel. They expressed their identities by defending Israel and attacking the media when the media didn’t defend Israel.
Meanwhile, American Jews hardly ever go to synagogue. According to Pew, 20% of American Jews regularly attend synagogue and half of them are Orthodox, who are 10% of the community. What brought me back into Judaism was studying Torah. And hardly any American Jews are ever exposed to that.
So I think there’s an opportunity to reimagine Diaspora Jewry now that the Israel story doesn’t work, and it’s clear that it doesn’t work. Young American Jews are leaving or voting with their feet. They’re walking away. Israel-centric Judaism is in part responsible, although it’s not the whole story. Intermarriage is a big part of the story. The de-religionization of all groups is part of the story. But personally, I don’t see what a liberal American Jew would see in a Judaism that defines itself as it has for the past 50 years as defending Israel and remembering the Holocaust.
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Aptly titled ‘The Darkest Light’ documentary wrestles with Shlomo Carlebach’s contradictions
One of the most influential rabbis of the last century, someone who brought tens of thousands of disaffected Jews closer to Judaism, who helped create Jewish spirituality as we know it today, and who wrote tunes so familiar that most people think they are hundreds years of old, was also, according to overwhelming evidence, a serial child molester who preyed on teenage girls who idolized him.
This is the impossible truth: that the same human being was a holy soul and a monster, a pioneering feminist and an abuser of girls, a person overflowing with love even for people he met on the street and yet so devoid of empathy that he was able to cause profound harm to dozens of young women and girls.
I am speaking, of course, of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.
This weekend marked the premiere of The Darkest Light, an aptly titled new film about Carlebach’s life, and about the ways his family, followers and community have wrestled with his profoundly contradictory legacy. The moral center of the film is one of Carlebach’s two daughters, Neshama, who was his musical and spiritual heir. It is heartbreaking to watch the many scenes of the two of them together, prior to his death (sudden, of a heart attack, on a plane set to leave LaGuardia Airport in 1994). She is so obviously in love with him, and he with her. If we didn’t know what was coming next, the videos would be achingly sacred and beautiful.
But we do know.
The revelations about Carlebach were first made public in a 1998 article in Lilith magazine, which, as I remember, was like an earthquake in the Jewish spiritual world. There had been whisperings of misconduct for years, but as the film and article emphasize, Carlebach was regarded by many as a saint, possessed of the ruach hakodesh, the holy spirit. And everyone knew that Carlebach was a loving, physical man — he hugged everybody. (I was hugged by him at the Yakar synagogue in Jerusalem in 1993. Charisma is real.) So, maybe some women felt uncomfortable; maybe he even crossed a line now and then. But he did so much good…
Only after his death did several women come forward — not with borderline stories of discomfort but accounts of sexual molestation and abuse. And more women followed.
In the subsequent 30 years, there has been a range of responses to these revelations. Some faithful continue to deny or minimize what Carlebach did. Others have banned Carlebach’s music from performance at synagogue. Wisely, director Simon Mendes does not take a particular stance on these questions, giving airtime to many of them. He even allows Carlebach’s defenders to insist, on camera, that nothing inappropriate ever took place and that theƒ women must be either confused or opportunistic or… something.
But it is Neshama Carlebach who is the film’s protagonist. As she tearfully explains, she was only 19 when her father died. She idolized him, and lost him in an instant. And so when the allegations came out, she stayed silent. How could the man she loved more than anyone in the world — a man also beloved by tens of thousands of devotees — also be such a monster? It was impossible, she relates, to comprehend.
Until the MeToo movement gained prominence in 2017. It was at that time that she, then a 43-year-old woman, realized she had to speak out, which she did in a series of articles and online posts accepting the survivors’ testimony of her father’s abuse. Also inspired by MeToo, many more women came forward with their own stories, and unlike 1998, society in general and the Jewish world in particular were more able to hear them. (Neshama Carlebach has published an essay about the film, which she said “approached an extraordinarily difficult story with compassion, courage and nuance.”)
How to respond? In the film, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York’s Central Synagogue describes the painful process of introspection that the synagogue undertook, placing a one-year moratorium on using Carlebach tunes while they discussed internally what to do. (Perhaps surprisingly, the synagogue resumed singing them afterward.) I personally have been part of several such conversations.
While these debates are important and interesting, ultimately The Darkest Light is about the unknowable questions set forth above: how someone could be a spiritual genius and sexual abuser, a saint and among the worst kind of sinner.
There are hints that Carlebach himself wrestled with this dilemma. The film’s title is taken from an improvised homily in which Carlebach says that sometimes evildoers are better than those who claim to be righteous, because darkness never claims to be something it isn’t; it never claims to be light. But imagine, Carlebach continues, when the good turns out to be evil — that is the darkest light, darker even than darkness itself. It’s hard not to hear this as a kind of veiled confession.
The film also sets forth many of the relevant circumstances of Carlebach’s life. His family fled Germany in 1939, right before Hitler stopped Jewish refugees from leaving. One can only imagine the trauma he experienced. Next, Carlebach spent nearly 30 years in Orthodox Jewish environments, especially the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, in which men and women are strictly segregated and men are forbidden from even touching women or hearing their voices in song.
And then came the 60s. Carlebach was right in the center of the Summer of Love, founding his House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco in 1967. The film sympathetically describes what that might have been like: Suddenly, all the rules were canceled, and people were making love with one another in public. Carlebach was 42 at the time. He had lived a repressed life for decades, and now all was permitted.
Bob Dylan once wrote, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.”Inside a fixed legal system like traditional Jewish law, the rules are clear — Orthodox sexual abusers still break them, of course, but the boundaries are firmly set. But outside, you’re on your own. And Carlebach seemed to lack the inner resources to draw boundaries and live within them. In Kabbalistic language, he was all hesed, all lovingkindness, without boundary or limit.
That is dangerous. No matter how high the spiritual high may be, it must be accompanied by ethics, empathy, and remembering the humanity of the other. There is no experience of holiness that justifies harming another person, especially in such a grievous way.
I mentioned hugging Carlebach in 1993. While the experience was electrifying, I also remember feeling off — much as I felt in the presence of another eros-drenched, consent-challenged charismatic rabbi in the Jewish Renewal movement of the 2000s. The eros was overflowing, spilling out onto all of us. It was spiritual and sexual and charismatic — and, to me, a little bit nauseating as well. I am all for fusing spirituality and sexuality, and as a gay man, I’m fortunate to have lived a very full sensual life. But in these encounters, part of me wanted to run away. It felt like there was no consent, no boundary, no space.
This is not a specifically Jewish problem. When charismatic spiritual leaders infuse their teaching with erotic energy, there is a risk, it seems to me, that the energy takes over. Ethical considerations, rules of consent, even basic empathy, get drowned in the sea of sacred-sexual flow which is experienced subjectively by the guru. I have no idea what Carlebach was thinking or feeling when he reached under a large Jewish book on his lap to fondle the teenage girl he was “teaching.” But I’m not sure it was so separate from the spiritual-sexual Torah he gave over to legions of adoring fans. Maybe the two sides of Carlebach are less a contradiction than a continuum.
And then there are his most devoted followers, still venerating the smashed idol of Carlebach’s sainthood. One thing The Darkest Light does not explore is that this group of spiritual quasi-hippies overlaps with some of the most extreme religious nationalists in Israel. These are the people whose kids are conducting pogroms in the West Bank. And to be honest, I see a connection. Israel, like Carlebach, offers these spiritual “mad ones” (in Kerouac’s term) the real deal: actual spiritual energy, infused with love and community and holiness. Yet Israel, like Carlebach, also harms a lot of people — often at the hands of Carlebach-singing, weed-smoking ‘hippies’ themselves. In both cases, I see a group of enthusiasts whose very real spiritual ecstasy has blinded them to ethics — or to anything that would destroy their good vibes.
I have felt these vibes myself. I have prayed ecstatically with Hasidim in Jerusalem and on Mount Meron. I have hiked and camped in the nature of the Land of Israel from the Eilat mountains to the finger of the Galilee. Whatever it is, even if it’s just in our imagination, the experience of spiritual ‘energy’ is real. I can appreciate the yearning to keep it pure, holy, and free from defilement.
But that urge, itself, leads to injustice. There is no responsible spirituality without ethics. There is no moral eros without boundary. And if anyone defiled anything, it was Carlebach himself who did so, not his victims or his critics or his family. That truth may be hard to accept, but it is the truth.
In the end, Carlebach was not a god or a demon; he was a deeply beautiful and even more deeply broken human being with capacities for good and evil within him. He only had a lot more of each than most of us. And as another Jewish teacher of mine once told me, the greater the light… the greater the shadow.
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Mamdani orders review of whether New York can arrest Netanyahu when he visits this fall
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has revived one of his most controversial election promises, raising once again the prospect of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he comes to New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly. It’s a move that legal experts say Mamdani is unlikely to be able to carry out.
In a video interview with The New York Times published Saturday, Mamdani said he ordered a review by the city’s Law Department to consider his options to comply with an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do. But we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mamdani said, remarks that drew a strong online reaction.
In a post to social media on Sunday, Netanyahu’s office dismissed concerns of a possible arrest, calling the ICC a “kangaroo court” and saying that “Mamdani should focus on fixing the damage his policies have caused New York.” In an interview last week, Netanyahu said Mamdani “hates America.”
The United States does not recognize the court’s authority over American citizens or foreign nationals on U.S. soil, and the federal government could likely challenge the legitimacy of such an order.
Mamdani’s statement reflects the tension that has defined his first months in office: balancing the activist politics that propelled him to City Hall with the legal constraints and governing responsibilities of the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
A political gift to Netanyahu
Mamdani’s actions could have unintended consequences abroad.
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, who has frequently criticized Netanyahu, warned that even a failed attempt to arrest the prime minister would likely strengthen Netanyahu politically in a tough reelection bid, set for Oct. 27.
“Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out,” Shapiro wrote on X. “The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home. That would be an own goal.”
Recent polls show that Netanyahu, seeking a seventh term in office, is trailing an opposition bloc led by two contenders — former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot.
A confrontation with New York’s outspoken anti-Zionist mayor could allow Netanyahu to cast himself once again as Israel’s defender against international efforts to isolate and punish the country. Netanyahu already labeled Mamdani as someone who “champions” Hamas and “apologizes” for Iran.
That message could resonate even with Israelis who oppose him. American Jewish opinion illustrates the same complexity. While recent polling shows many American Jews view Netanyahu unfavorably, and that Mamdani is more popular with that group, that has not translated into support for an attempt to arrest Israel’s elected leader.
A Honan Strategy Group poll in December found that although 40% of New York City voters believed Mamdani had a moral obligation to uphold international human rights standards by ordering Netanyahu’s arrest, seven in 10 of the 131 Jewish respondents said doing so would damage New York’s global standing.
In the end, Mamdani may be able to avoid acting at all by pointing to the legal opinion that New York City lacks the authority to arrest Netanyahu.
The law is not on Mamdani’s side
The ICC, based in The Hague, issued arrest warrants in Nov. 2024 for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas confirmed in Jan. 2025 that Deif was assassinated in July 2024 by an Israeli strike on Gaza.
But even if Mamdani wanted to enforce the warrant, New York City has little authority to do so.
Because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, the NYPD has no legal authority to arrest Netanyahu based on an ICC warrant. Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched a sweeping campaign of sanctions, visa bans and diplomatic pressure to “systematically disable” the ICC “brick by brick.”
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, in a post on X, also pointed to the 1947 U.N. Headquarters Agreement, which requires the United States to allow accredited foreign representatives to attend U.N. meetings, as well as the customary international law doctrine that grants immunity to sitting heads of government traveling on official business. Netanyahu would also arrive in New York under Secret Service protection afforded to foreign leaders.
Even carrying out such an order would appear unlikely.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, has repeatedly kept a distance from the mayor on Israel-related issues. Her public statements on Israel have been unequivocal. In June, Tisch served as grand marshal of the annual Celebrate Israel Parade, which Mamdani skipped. “I understand that for many of you, having a Jewish police commissioner is deeply comforting,” she told Jewish leaders in May.
Mamdani’s foreign policy reach has already been limited. Last month, the U.S. State Department blocked a planned meeting between Mamdani and Colombian President Gustavo Petro in New York, a fierce Israel critic, who had his visa revoked last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan and was attending a UN Security Council session under strict terms. Earlier this month, the Trump administration stopped a meeting between Ana María Archila, Mamdani’s commissioner for international affairs, and Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Why does Mamdani keep talking about it?
While the legal answer is largely settled, the political one is not.
By keeping the question open, Mamdani signals support to the pro-Palestinian movement that fueled his rise, while acknowledging the institutional limits of his office.
Targeting Netanyahu was central to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. After leading chants of “Netanyahu, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” during a protest in Oct. 2023, Mamdani first pledged to arrest Netanyahu shortly after he declared his candidacy. He later repeated the pledge, including in front of Jewish audiences, arguing that he did not want New York to be a place where leaders accused of war crimes felt welcome.
The approach follows a similar pattern Mamdani confronted with a politically charged issue earlier this year. As anti-Jewish incidents continue to make up a majority of reported hate crimes, the city considered placing buffer zones around houses of worship, spurred in part by a November protest outside the Park East Synagogue that included antisemitic slogans.
After expressing reservations about the legislation, Mamdani referred the bill to the city’s Law Department before ultimately allowing it to become law without his signature, only after the City Council passed it with a veto-proof majority.
Mamdani vetoed a companion bill that would potentially limit pro-Palestinian demonstrations, particularly on campuses. (The council later passed a modified version, and the state passed a 50-foot buffer zone bill that equally applies to all community centers and schools being used for services, education and religious observance across the state.)
Mamdani’s real test
Whether Mamdani’s careful balancing act satisfies either side may become clear when Netanyahu arrives in New York this September.
While the mayor cannot dictate U.S. foreign policy or enforce ICC warrants, City Hall still plays an important role in coordinating logistics, demonstrations and municipal services during the annual gathering of world leaders.
Mamdani can influence how unwelcoming New York feels to the Israeli leader.
The Israeli prime minister’s appearance at the United Nations is expected to draw massive demonstrations, putting City Hall’s handling of protests and policing under intense scrutiny.
History suggests that symbolism matters.
In 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani triggered a diplomatic dispute after ejecting Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat from a United Nations anniversary concert at Lincoln Center. President Bill Clinton, protesting the move, invited the Palestinian leader to a White House reception.
For all the attention given to Netanyahu’s return to New York, he may not arrive alone. During a White House meeting last year, Netanyahu laughed off the threat as “silly” and quipped that he might travel to New York “with President Trump.” Trump responded: “I’ll get him out.”
Now, that exchange may prove to have been less a joke than a preview of where the real power lies.
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A Jewish couple fell in love with rural Oklahoma. Then they built a cemetery there.
Linda Fitzerman did not want her children making burial decisions through tears.
For years, she and her husband, Todd Boone Fitzerman, told each other they needed to settle the question. They were not interested in cremation. They wanted a traditional Jewish burial. And they did not want their children, someday, to face the cost and pressure of deciding where that burial should take place.
“They just need to show up and cry,” Linda said. “They don’t need the additional pain of having to make financial decisions.”
The answer, when it came, was not one they had expected. They created a small Jewish burial ground in Sulphur, Oklahoma, a city of about 5,000 people in the Bible Belt, near the ranch the Fitzermans bought during the pandemic and had come to love.
At Oak Lawn Cemetery, a city-owned burial ground with green grass, rolling terrain and ponds, the Fitzermans purchased a group of plots to create a circular family burial section. Four corner pillars crowned with Stars of David mark the site. Beneath the grass, the pillars are connected by buried rebar, creating a distinct boundary around the section. Linda designed the stainless steel Stars of David, which a friend welded into place.
Nearby, five young trees are taking root: two Chinese pistache trees and three Autumn Blaze maples. The Fitzermans planted them with the city’s permission and have been carefully tending them for the past year, using large water barrels to help them through the early seasons.
“We are babysitting them for at least two years,” Linda said.
The burial section was dedicated in 2025. Todd’s brother, Rabbi Marc Boone Fitzerman of Tulsa, advised them on how to create a designated Jewish space within a public cemetery. Psalms and other prayers were recited at the site. There was no minyan, Todd said, but “spiritually we are there.”
To the Fitzermans’ knowledge, no other Jew is buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery.
A pandemic, and a plan
The cemetery project grew out of a life they did not plan to build in Oklahoma. Todd, 67, and Linda, 65, are both from the Detroit area and were raised in Conservative families. They met in Dallas when their children were young and have been married for 24 years. Dallas remains home. The couple still runs a business there, Local Oven, a gluten-free baking company.
But during the long uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, they began thinking about land.
“We felt so bottled up, and we wanted to get out,” Linda said.
They first responded to an advertisement for 10 acres near water in Texas. The search widened. Todd’s son suggested that 50 acres would be enough room to shoot on the property. Eventually, Todd found 158 acres outside Davis, Oklahoma, about two hours north of Dallas. They began building a working ranch. Todd’s son keeps cattle there. The Fitzermans now divide their time between Dallas and Oklahoma, spending roughly half the week in each place.
“It is a beautiful ranch,” Linda said. “It’s very calming to be out here, really beautiful, nothing like the city.”
Todd described hearing coyotes at night, watching the cattle roam, and the pleasure of “playing cowboy” for part of the week. Linda said she had not known, when they bought the land in 2021, “how important Oklahoma was going to be.”
“It was never a plan,” she said. “It just sort of evolved.”
Their relationship with the area deepened through the people they met there. Todd and Linda said one local friend, who lives across from Oak Lawn Cemetery and owns a large construction company, helped introduce them around Sulphur when they were new. He had also acquired plots in the cemetery through a trade arrangement for excavation work. Seeing what he had done opened a possibility they had not considered.
For years, Linda said, they had found “nothing intriguing” in Dallas cemeteries. Many Jewish plots cost $7,000 or $8,000. One cemetery with a Jewish section had plots priced around $36,000.
“Why would I spend money like that?” Linda said.
In Sulphur, plots were $300 each. For $4,500 total, they could create a family burial place tailored to them.
“We finally had an opportunity that just presented itself,” Linda said.
The circle layout itself came from her memory. In Michigan, she said, part of her family is buried in an older Jewish cemetery arranged not in straight rows, but in a circular shape.
“I thought that was really nice,” she said. “I liked it.”
So Linda and Todd approached the city and asked whether they could create a Jewish cemetery section in Oak Lawn. The response, they said, was strikingly easy.
“We shared that with the city and they said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Linda said. “I’ve never seen any place give me the green light on every question.”
The city’s one practical concern was that everything remain level enough for its crews to mow. It allowed the Fitzermans to select the location, a corner where two cemetery roads meet. It also permitted them to plant the trees on easement land beside the plots.
“The city is 100% accepting,” Linda said.
Todd put it similarly. “The city could not have been more accommodating,” he said.
The Fitzermans say their religion has never been a problem. “It is the Baptist Bible Belt,” Linda said. “Everyone here has been so willing to accept us. They are inquisitive and curious. Our religion has not been an issue for anyone.”
Todd said that not everyone in Sulphur knows they are Jewish, “but lots of people know we are Jews.” When Todd’s son held his Jewish wedding on the ranch, he said, many non-Jewish guests had never attended one before. Friends asked questions. Guests wore kippot or cowboy hats. Tallitot belonging to Todd, his father and his son’s other grandfather formed the wedding canopy.
“There were more Jews in Sulphur for my son’s wedding than ever before,” Todd said.
Peace of mind
For Linda, the cemetery’s Jewish symbols were important. She wanted the pillars to be easy to find. More than that, she wanted them to say plainly what the site was.
“When we see the pillars, they reflect what we are doing, which is our religion,” she said. “Nothing is more stately than the Jewish star.”
“Our little decor, to me, sends a really beautiful statement,” she added. “I’ve always been proud to be Jewish. I wouldn’t want to be buried any other way.”
The Fitzermans have tried to spare their children as much uncertainty as possible. They have assigned the burial titles to their children and their children’s partners, while making clear that use of the plots will remain their choice. They have also documented the practical steps to follow when the time comes, including where a body could be prepared for Jewish burial in Dallas or Oklahoma City.
“You don’t think about it until a family member is going through it,” Linda said.
She views the cemetery as a natural extension of family care. “You are always, always part of your family,” she said. “If you want these, they are there for you.”
Todd described the burial ground in similar terms. It offers “peace of mind,” he said: a final resting place in a community they love and want to be part of.
The trees, Linda noted, will eventually grow large. The Chinese pistache trees can grow to over 25 feet with age. The maples, she said, will be especially beautiful in the fall.
They hope it will be many years before the cemetery is needed.
But the question that had lingered for so long has now been answered. Their children will not have to find a plot, compare prices, choose a cemetery, or wonder whether their parents’ burial wishes were honored.
They will only have to come.
And cry.
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