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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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Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus
(JTA) — Cornell University is condemning viral antisemitic remarks made by an undergraduate student who appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” earlier this week, but the school’s president says no further action is planned against the student.
During his appearance, the student, Austin Franco, defended his statement in June that he did not want to work with Jews, saying that he did not like most of the Jews he had met. The remark was made in a private message that the company that received it publicized.
“As a university built on the solid foundations of our nation’s democratic freedoms, Cornell has an obligation to fiercely defend freedom of speech — even when we find that speech abhorrent,” Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said in a statement issued late Wednesday, shortly after the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to the school for comment on Franco.
“The student’s public comments invoked hateful generalizations and uninformed tropes with a long, ugly history of harm,” Kotlikoff said, adding that “antisemitism generally” is “detestable, ignorant, and fully at odds with the values of the Cornell community.”
Kotlikoff, who is Jewish, did not mention Franco by name in his statement, citing federal privacy law, nor did he specify which of Franco’s comments about Jews the school found objectionable.
His comments once again place Cornell on the front line in tensions over antisemitism at colleges and universities. The school reached a $60 million settlement with the Trump administration last year to resolve antisemitism claims and regain $250 million in funding that had been frozen over campus unrest in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Cornell was one of the earliest schools to face antisemitism allegations after Oct. 7, 2023, when a professor spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally and said he had been “exhilarated” by the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
But the latest incident involving Franco had little to do with the subsequent war in Gaza until Tuesday, when the student told Morgan on his YouTube show that he objected to Jews in part because of Israel, which he deemed “a genocidal country.”
The controversy over Franco, a rising junior at the Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York, began in June when he wrote in an internship application that he was “not interested in working for a jew.”
His name and remarks were publicized by the Jewish co-owners of Handshake, the tech company to which Franco had applied for an internship, though Franco has claimed he’d already turned down an offer. His comments prompted online backlash — including from Leo Terrell, the Trump administration’s antisemitism czar, who posted dozens of times about the 19-year-old.
Franco has garnered significant support from the far right, including through a crowdfunding campaign initiated by a YouTuber who had previously drawn criticism for saying he hoped to see “another Hitler.” Franco’s comments to Morgan included positive references to “America First,” the Trump-led nativist movement embraced by the far right.
Cornell had announced it was opening an investigation into Franco when his comments were first publicized. He remained in the headlines after he was secretly filmed by an apparent sting operation led by Accuracy in Media, a right-wing activist group that has targeted pro-Palestinian students and university heads the group deems antisemitic on other campuses. Franco told a hidden camera interviewer connected to the group last week that the university’s investigation had amounted to little and that he would be returning to Cornell.
Asked by Morgan Tuesday to explain his beliefs, Franco said that a Jewish friend of his at Virginia Tech University, where he was enrolled before transferring to Cornell, “said we should genocide all Palestinians.” He named other “bad experiences with Jews” he claimed to have experienced in college, focusing on Jewish campus figures he said had “made things up about me,” and said Jews had “made my life a living hell.”
As Morgan pushed Franco to admit he was antisemitic, the student insisted he was not.
“Not wanting to be around Jewish people does not mean you don’t like them,” he said, adding that one of his exes “was half-Jewish.” He returned to Israel later in the conversation, chargingthat it is a Jewish-led “genocidal country” that insists upon “killing Palestinians and reporters and dragging America into wars abroad.” He concluded, “No, I am not going to want to associate with those people.”
“This is a common sentiment that is held,” Franco said. “If you think this is just me, you are completely wrong.”
Morgan, for his part, concluded, “You kind of made yourself unemployable.”
Franco is facing more immediate consequences, he announced on X on Wednesday. “My parents are kicking me out,” he tweeted, drawing offers of support from a handful of prominent far-right personalities.
Like many other schools that faced unrest after Oct. 7, Cornell has taken steps aimed at countering campus antisemitism while attempting to balance academic freedom concerns, in part as a result of its settlement with the Trump administration. The university commissioned an antisemitism task force and has undertaken several initiatives, including new campus climate surveys and stricter Title VI enforcement. It has also enforced a range of disciplinary actions against pro-Palestinian students.
But when it comes to Franco, one Jewish faculty member at Cornell theorized, the administration’s hands were tied.
“You sort of have to live with it,” Menachem Rosensaft, a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and former general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, told JTA. “He is engaging in obnoxious thought that is not harming anyone else.”
Rosensaft has been at the center of other antisemitism-related controversies at Cornell, including in 2024, when he prompted Kotlikoff to criticize another Jewish professor’s planned class on Gaza — an action that the school’s faculty union said was a violation of academic freedom.
In the case of Franco, Rosensaft argued that Cornell shouldn’t “turn him into a First Amendment martyr.”
But Rosensaft added that there could be grounds for discipline if Franco returned to campus and made harmful comments about Jews in the classroom or in other public spaces.
In 2025, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised Kotlikoff for what he called “a comprehensive approach to countering antisemitism.” An ADL spokesperson did not return a JTA request for comment on Cornell’s latest statement about Franco.
Franco himself has launched a second crowdfunding campaign to support his housing costs.
“I have reiterated that my parents do not share my views, and it seems they no longer wish to provide me with a home to live in,” he wrote in the description. “I know the road ahead will be difficult, but this is the path I chose. I could have lived a more conventional life, as my parents did, and perhaps in a different time I would have. However, that is not the world we live in today, and because of that, I chose a different path than most.”
This story has been corrected to reflect that the original comments Austin Franco made about not wanting to work with Jews were made in a private message rather than publicly.
The post Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu showcases diplomatic victories that have expiration dates
(JTA) — A rejuvenated Benjamin Netanyahu returned home to Israel Thursday from Washington, having crossed off everything on his diplomatic shopping list.
Grinning photo op with U.S. President Donald Trump? Check. Iran still a top priotiry? Check. Conciliation with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and conflict with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Check and check. Meetings with top-level senators and with salt-of-the-earth pro-Israel Americans? Check, check and Check!
Had he checked his pen, however, Netanyahu might have found that the ink was running out. To the degree that the Israeli prime minister scored public relations victories during his visit to the U.S. this week, they all have impending expiration dates.
Netanyahu, who faces a tough reelection campaign for the elections to be held on Oct. 27, needs to show the Israeli voters that his claimed superpower, influencing Americans to support the Jewish state, is still potent. His rivals are already making the case that his power is spent.
“Netanyahu’s expectation and hope is that Trump will establish, figuratively speaking, a re-elect Benjamin Netanyahu headquarters in Washington for the next three months,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East negotiator under Republican and Democratic administrations who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The prime minister seemed genuinely elated on Tuesday after he and the U.S. president met at the White House. Contrary to reports ahead of the meeting, Netanyahu said he was not seeking to pull the United States back into an all-out war. Instead, he wanted to see eye-to-eye with Trump on what happens if the talks to end the war fail.
He told ABC News in an interview he was in lock-step with Trump over the three options ahead: “One, to indeed succeed making a deal; two, to continue a blockade; three, to take military action,” Netanyahu said. “Anything that will produce the end of Iran’s nuclear program is what we want. That’s our common goal. We talked about it.”
The problem for Netanyahu is that the deal Trump seeks is anything but satisfying to Israel: The Memorandum of Understanding Vance reached in June, just weeks before the war resumed, allows Iran a stake in controlling – and even profiting from – the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s petroleum transits, a prerogative the Islamic Republic never before enjoyed.
Privately, Israeli officials have said they don’t expect the deal to happen, and that Trump will eventually turn to options two and three, which the Israelis favor. But Trump’s popularity is cratering ahead of critical midterm elections, inflation is not abating and even as Iran takes shots at ships in the Strait of Hormuz and its U.S.-allied neighbors, Trump keeps banking on a deal.
“There are very friendly negotiations going on,” he said Monday, the day Netanyahu arrived. “I think there’s a good chance that something could happen.”
But diplomacy wasn’t the only concern during Netanyahu’s visit. Domestic politics dogged Netanyahu in the U.S. capital. Opposition leader Yair Lapid was also in town. Both were ostensibly there for the funeral of South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a pro-Israel stalwart who backed the Iran war. Lapid in a talk to The Atlantic Council took shots at Netanyahu’s public diplomacy, saying his attacks on Democrats who were critical of Israel were making the country more isolated.
Press releases from Netanyahu’s office sought to reinforce his status as the explainer in chief: He met with prominent senators, he met with Cabinet officials, he met, above all, with Trump.
Yet these releases undercut any claim Netanyahu might have had to the prominence he once enjoyed in the American mind.
The single Democratic senator he met with was John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, whose robust support for Israel makes him an outlier in his party – something Fetterman repeatedly emphasized in the chat Netanyahu’s office posted. “It’s been disappointing as a Democratic politician, how our party continues to behave,” Fetterman said.
Lapid, by contrast, posed for a photo with Democratic senators, including some who have recently criticized Israel stridently, like Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. “Boycotting those who oppose you is not the way,” Lapid said on X. ”Repair relations with both parties. It’s not always fun, but that’s what it takes. Not by whining and not by boycotts.”
Netanyahu’s failure to engage with the American left also was evident in video of his meeting with evangelicals. “I’m very grateful to you for your consistent support, for the constancy of your friendship, and now it’s time to fight, fight, fight,” he said, evoking Trump’s famous call when he escaped an assassin’s bullet in 2024.
That prompted Mike Evans, an author who is an outlier among evangelicals for his stridency in advocating for extreme right positions, to lash out at the left using apocalyptic language. “We are fighting right now against the dark side, the leftist, godless dark side, but by the grace of God, we’re going to win this battle,” he said.
Netanyahu also took on Mamdani, who has called for Netanyahu’s arrest, likening his administration of the city to the Nazi era in an interview on Fox News. Mamdani’s wish was never going to come through – he ultimately acknowledged he had no power to arrest Netanyahu – yet his sentiment had staying power: A poll showed 49% of Americans agree that Netanyahu should be arrested.
Linsey Davis, the ABC reporter who interviewed Netanyahu, pressed him on Israel’s plummeting popularity. Netanyahu blamed the rise of social media and said it concerned him – but notably he did not explain how he planned to counter what he described as a propaganda threat to American and Israeli interests.
“I think there’s been a change because of the proliferation of social media and the fact that sovereign countries have manipulated bot farms and other things, and we can see a direct relationship between the proliferation of the social media and the decline in support for Israel,” he said. “Does it concern me? Yes, yes it does. And I want bipartisan support for Israel because I think that’s the fundament of our national security.”
Netanyahu could point to one seeming public diplomacy success: He met with Vance, likely to be a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028, and the vanguard of the sector of the GOP that is growing disaffected with Israel. A U.S. official told Axios the meeting was “cordial and productive,” diplomatese for not warm.
As for the flurry of photo-ops the prime minister’s office sent out from the trip, the one on one with Vance was not among them.
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An Altadena synagogue’s mural was a symbol of community resilience after the LA fires. Antisemitic graffiti only proved the point.
ALTADENA, CALIF. – When Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center held services in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, Chann and Christina An, who lived across the street, sometimes sat on their front porch and listened to the songs.
And when the Eaton fire flattened the PJTC campus last January — and the An home, too — the synagogue helped its next-door neighbors with food donations and gift cards.
“Ever since the fire, they’ve included us like one of their members,” Chann An said.
So when a vandal earlier this week spray-painted swastikas on a mural the synagogue had painted on its only remaining wall, it felt like an attack on them, too. On Thursday, when PJTC organized a community-wide solidarity event at the site, the Ans were among many non-Jewish residents in attendance.
“They’re part of our community, and they’re always welcome, and I want them to feel that way,” said An. “And I want them to feel that all the neighbors support them.”
What typically happens when a Jewish institution is tagged — an increasingly common story these days — is a familiar chain of events: Photos are snapped and posted online; Jewish leaders and local officials issue statements; the tag is covered up and people move on.
In Altadena, all of that happened. But so did something else: The synagogue was inundated with messages of support from surrounding faith institutions and Altadena residents, according to the temple’s executive director Melissa Levy. A few of those neighbors had offered to sand down the graffiti themselves.
“That kind of support has been really beautiful in the wake of all of this,” Levy said.
The Eaton fire devastated Altadena, killing 19 people and leveling cherished community institutions, including the temple’s 75-year-old campus and several other houses of worship. Dozens of congregants lost their homes in the blaze. Where PJTC’s sanctuary, chapel and religious school once stood, weeds now rise five feet off the ground.
The mural had been painted in May in response to graffiti on the same wall earlier this year. At the mural’s center was a fire poppy — a native flower known to rise from ashes — adorned with a message intended to be universal: We are all responsible for each other.
“When we look at the mural,” Christina An said, it reminds them: “We’re all going to be back.”
But this week, those inspiring words were painted over with another. Vandals painted more swastikas alongside the message: “Zionism is not welcome.” No arrests have been made in either instance, and it is unclear whether the same person was responsible for both incidents. LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger has called on the county to offer a $20,000 reward for information on the culprit.
“There’s an increased feeling of vulnerability after the fire destroyed our home,” said Rabbi Josh Ratner, the synagogue’s senior leader. “To have any stuff happen after that compounds our vulnerability.”
Rising from the ashes
The stone wall abutting Altadena Boulevard was the only one on the complex that remained fully intact after the fire. But it didn’t become a symbol until after it was vandalized earlier this year, when passersby noticed on Jan. 13 that the charred stone wall had been tagged.
That graffiti read “F— Zionism” and “RIP Renee,” the latter message an apparent reference to Renee Nicole Good, an anti-ICE protester who had been killed the previous week in Minneapolis.
In response, synagogue leadership decided to cover it with art. Working with a local group called Art Against Hate, PJTC commissioned a muralist who invited synagogue members to contribute ideas — and recruited their children to help paint it.
The mural was sectioned like stained glass, with Stars of David in the corners and a border containing the animal symbols for the tribes of Israel. A peacock adorned one side — the birds have thrived in the area for more than a century — and while the children were painting it, one approached the scene, seemingly to admire it.
“It was for Altadena as much as the synagogue, and the neighbors appreciated it,” said Judy Callahan, a longtime PJTC member. “I think looking out and seeing it — they still see this vacant lot, but it just made things cheerier.”
Coming together
Many of those neighbors — and a phalanx of local officials — were on hand Thursday to condemn the latest graffiti and watch Miriam Hellmann, the muralist, apply the final touches for a second time.
Barger spoke, as did Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo, U.S. Rep. Judy Chu and others. But just as important to the temple members in attendance were the locals who braved the scorching heat to embrace them.
After Ratner spoke, he invited the Rev. Amy Aitken to the podium. Aitken leads the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena, where PJTC has been holding their services for the last year.
After joking that most other Methodist churches don’t have a “campus rabbi” — that is, Ratner — she asked other clergy in attendance to stand up. Nearly a dozen did.
One of them was the Rev. Michael David Lewis of Altadena Community Church, who said he wanted to assure Jewish community members that he considered them family.
“When they are attacked, I want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them,” he said. “I want to stand against the hate that was expressed here and stand against the fear that was expressed here.”
Hellmann, who is not Jewish, said every muralist knows their work might get tagged — murals tend to be in prominent places, and vandals want their message to be seen.
But this target had broader resonance than other walls, or even other synagogues. “It’s not just about the Jewish community,” Hellmann said. “It was supposed to be a symbol of hope for a lot of people.”
When Hellmann first painted the mural, she applied a layer of anti-graffiti coating that prevents spray paint from bonding to the surface. But the graffiti was not cleaned off immediately, allowing it to set.
“I’ll keep repainting it every day if I need to,” Hellmann said.
This time, she added an olive branch, that ancient symbol of peace.
“I think that it’s important for non-Jewish people to stand with the Jewish community when there’s antisemitism,” she said. “So I’m happy to be a part of it. I think it’s a beautiful religion.”
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