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Why a liberal Zionist rabbi isn’t taking to the streets over Israel’s judicial reform plan 

(JTA) — Israel’s 75th anniversary was supposed to be a blowout birthday party for its supporters, but that was before the country was convulsed by street protests over the right-wing government’s proposal to overhaul its judiciary. Critics call it an unprecedented threat to Israel’s democracy, and supporters of Israel found themselves conflicted. In synagogues across North America, rabbis found themselves giving “yes, but” sermons: Yes, Israel’s existence is a miracle, but its democracy is fragile and in danger.

One of those sermons was given a week ago Saturday by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, expressing his “dismay” over the government’s actions. Hirsch is the former head of ARZA, the Reform movement’s Zionist organization, and the founder of a new organization, Amplify Israel, meant to promote Zionism among Reform Jews. He is often quoted as an example of a mainstream non-Orthodox rabbi who not only criticizes anti-Zionism on the far left but who insists that his liberal colleagues are not doing enough to defend the Jewish state from its critics.  

Many on the Jewish left, meanwhile, say Jewish establishment figures, even liberals like Hirsch, have been too reluctant to call out Israel on, for example, its treatment of the Palestinians — thereby enabling the country’s extremists.

In March, however, he warned that the “Israeli government is tearing Israeli society apart and bringing world Jewry along for the dangerous ride.” That is uncharacteristically strong language from a rabbi whose forthcoming book, “The Lilac Tree: A Rabbi’s Reflections on Love, Courage, and History,” includes a number of essays on the limits of criticizing Israel. When does such criticism give “comfort to left-wing hatred of Israel,” as he writes in his book, and when does failure to criticize Israel appear to condone extremism?  

Although the book includes essays on God, Torah, history and antisemitism, in a recent interview we focused on the Israel-Diaspora divide, the role of Israel in the lives of Diaspora Jews and why the synagogue remains the “central Jewish institution.”

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You gave a sermon earlier this month about the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding, which is usually a time of celebration in American synagogues, but you also said you were “dismayed” by the “political extremism” and “religious fundamentalism” of the current government. Was that difficult as a pulpit rabbi? 

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: The approach is more difficult now with the election of the new government than it has been in all the years of the past. Because we can’t sanitize supremacism, elitism, extremism, fundamentalism, and we’re not going to. Israel is in what’s probably the most serious domestic crisis in the 75-year history of the state. And what happens in Israel affects American Jewry directly. It’s Israeli citizens who elect their representatives, but that’s not the end of the discussion neither for Israelis or for American Jews. At the insistence of both parties, both parties say the relationship is fundamental and critical and it not only entitles but requires Israelis and world Jews to be involved in each other’s affairs. 

For American Jewry, in its relationship with Israel, our broadest objective is to sustain that relationship, deepen that relationship, and encourage people to be involved in the affairs in Israel and to go to Israel, spend time in Israel and so forth, and that’s a difficult thing to do and at the same time be critical.

American Jews have been demonstrating here in solidarity with the Israelis who have been protesting the recent judicial overhaul proposals in Israel. Is that a place for liberal American Jews to make their voices heard on what happens in Israel?

I would like to believe that if I were living in Israel, I would be at every single one of those demonstrations on Saturday night, but I don’t participate in demonstrations here because the context of our world and how we operate is different from in Israel when an Israeli citizen goes out and marches on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. It’s presumed that they’re Zionists and they’re speaking to their own government. I’m not critical of other people who reach a different perspective in the United States, but for me, our context is different. Even if we say the identical words in Tel Aviv or on West 68th Street, they’re perceived in a different way and they operate in a different context. 

What then is the appropriate way for American Jews to express themselves if they are critical of an action by the Israeli government?

My strongest guidance is don’t disengage, don’t turn your back, double down, be more supportive of those who support your worldview and are fighting for it in Israel. Polls seem to suggest that the large majority of Israelis are opposed to these reforms being proposed. Double down on those who are supportive of our worldview.

You lament in your book that the connections to Israel are weakening among world Jewry, especially among Jewish liberals. 

The liberal part of the Jewish world is where I am and where the people I serve are by and large, and where at least 80% of American Jewry resides. It’s a difficult process because we’re operating here in a context of weakening relationship: a rapidly increasing emphasis on universal values, what we sometimes call tikkun olam [social justice], and not as a reflection of Jewish particularism, but often at the expense of Jewish particularism. 

There is a counter-argument, however, which you describe in your book: “some left-wing Jewish activists contend that alienation from Israel, especially among the younger generations, is a result of the failures of the American Jewish establishment” — that is, by not doing more to express their concerns about the dangers of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, for example, the establishment alienated young liberal Jews. You’re skeptical of that argument. Tell me why.

Fundamentally I believe that identification with Israel is a reflection of identity. If you have a strong Jewish identity, the tendency is to have a strong connection with the state of Israel and to believe that the Jewish state is an important component of your Jewish identity. I think that surveys bear that out. No doubt the Palestinian question will have an impact on the relationship between American Jews in Israel as long as it’s not resolved, it will be an outstanding irritant because it raises moral dilemmas that should disturb every thinking and caring Jew. And I’ve been active in trying to oppose ultra-Orthodox coercion in Israel. But fundamentally, while these certainly are components putting pressure on the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, in particular among the elites of the American Jewish leadership, for the majority of American Jews, the relationship with Israel is a reflection of their relationship with Judaism. And if that relationship is weak and weakening, as day follows night, the relationship with Israel will weaken as well.

But what about the criticism that has come from, let’s say, deep within the tent? I am thinking of the American rabbinical students who in 2021 issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for the “violent suppression of human rights.” They were certainly engaged Jews, and they might say that they were warning the establishment about the kinds of right-wing tendencies in Israel that you and others in the establishment are criticizing now. 

Almost every time I speak about Israel and those who are critical of Israel, I hold that the concept of criticism is central to Jewish tradition. Judaism unfolds through an ongoing process of disputation, disagreement, argumentation, and debate. I’m a pluralist, both politically as well as intellectually. 

In response to your question, I would say two things. First of all, I distinguish between those who are Zionist, pro-Israel, active Jews with a strong Jewish identity who criticize this or that policy of the Israeli government, and between those who are anti-Zionists, because anti-Zionism asserts that the Jewish people has no right to a Jewish state, at least in that part of the world. And that inevitably leads to anti-Jewish feelings and very often to antisemitism. 

When it came to the students, I didn’t respond at all because I was a student once too, and there are views that I hold today that I didn’t hold when I was a student. Their original article was published in the Forward, if I’m not mistaken, and it generated some debate in all the liberal seminaries. I didn’t respond at all until it became a huge, multi-thousand word piece in The New York Times. Once it left the internal Jewish scene, it seemed to me that I had an obligation to respond. Not that I believe that they’re anti-Zionist — I do not. I didn’t put them in the BDS camp [of those who support the boycott of Israel]. I just simply criticized them.

Hundreds of Jews protest the proposed Israeli court reform outside the Israeli consulate in New York City on Feb. 21, 2023. (Gili Getz)

You signed a letter with other rabbis noting that the students’ petition came during Israel’s war with Hamas that May, writing that “those who aspire to be future leaders of the Jewish people must possess and model empathy for their brothers and sisters in Israel, especially when they are attacked by a terrorist organization whose stated goal is to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State.”

My main point was that the essence of the Jewish condition is that all Jews feel responsible one for the another — Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. And that relationship starts with emotions. It starts with a feeling of belongingness to the Jewish people, and a feeling of concern for our people who are attacked in the Jewish state. My criticism was based, in the middle of a war, on expressing compassion, support for our people who are under indiscriminate and terrorist assault. I uphold that and even especially in retrospect two years later, why anyone would consider that to be offensive in any way is still beyond me. 

You were executive director of ARZA, the Reform Zionist organization, and you write in your book that Israel “is the primary source of our people’s collective energy — the engine for the recreation and restoration of the national home and the national spirit of the Jewish people.” A number of your essays put Israel at the center of the present-day Jewish story. You are a rabbi in New York City. So what’s the role or function of the Diaspora?

Our existence in the Diaspora needs no justification. For practically all of the last 2,000 years, Jewish life has existed in the Diaspora. It’s only for the last 75 years and if you count the beginning of the Zionist movement, the last 125 years or so that Jews have begun en masse to live in the land of Israel. Much of the values of what we call now Judaism was developed in the Diaspora. Moreover, the American Jewish community is the strongest, most influential, most glorious of all the Jewish Diasporas in Jewish history. 

And yet, the only place in the Jewish world where the Jewish community is growing is in Israel. More Jewish children now live in Israel than all the other places in the world combined. The central value that powers the sustainability, viability and continuity of the Jewish people is peoplehood. It’s not the values that have sustained the Jewish people in the Diaspora and over the last 2,000 years, which was Torah or God, what we would call religion. I’m a rabbi. I believe in the centrality of God, Torah and religion to sustain Jewish identity. But in the 21st century, Israel is the most eloquent concept of the value of Jewish peoplehood. And therefore, I do not believe that there is enough energy, enough power, enough sustainability in the classical concept of Judaism to sustain continuity in the Diaspora. The concept of Jewish peoplehood is the most powerful way that we can sustain Jewish continuity in the 21st century.

But doesn’t that negate the importance of American Jewry?

In my view, it augments the sustainability of American Jewry. If American Jews disengage from Israel, and from the concept of Jewish peoplehood, and also don’t consider religion to be at the center of their existence, then what’s left? Now there’s a lot of activity, for example, on tikkun olam, which is a part of Jewish tradition. But tikkun olam in Judaism always was a blend between Jewish particularism and universalism — concern for humanity at large but rooted in the concept of Jewish peoplehood. But very often now, tikkun olam in the Diaspora is practiced not as a part of the concept of Jewish particularism but, as I said before, at the expense of Jewish particularism. That will not be enough to sustain Jewish communities going into the 21st century.

I want to ask about the health of the American synagogue as an institution. Considering your concern about the waning centrality of Torah and God in people’s lives — especially among the non-Orthodox — do you feel optimistic about it as an institution? Does it have to change?

I’ve believed since the beginning of my career that there’s no substitute in the Diaspora for the synagogue as the central Jewish institution. We harm ourselves when we underemphasize the central role of the synagogue. Any issue that is being done by one of the hundreds of Jewish agencies that we’ve created rests on our ability as a community to produce Jews into the next generation. And what are those institutions that produce that are most responsible for the production of Jewish continuity? Synagogues, day schools and summer camps, and of the three synagogues are by far the most important for the following reasons: First, we’re the only institution that defines ourselves as and whose purpose is what we call cradle to grave. Second, for most American Jews, if they end up in any institution at all it will be a synagogue. Far fewer American Jews will receive a day school education and or go to Jewish summer camps. That should have ramifications across the board for American Jewish policy, including how we budget Jewish institutions. We should be focusing many, many more resources on these three institutions, and at the core of that is the institution of the synagogue.

 


The post Why a liberal Zionist rabbi isn’t taking to the streets over Israel’s judicial reform plan  appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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US-Israeli Attack Triggers Fear and Panic in Iran

Buildings stand, after Israel and the US launched strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, February 28, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Iranians fled cities in search of safety, and long queues formed at fuel stations as an attack on Iran by the United States and Israel spread fear and panic throughout the country.

When the strikes began on Saturday morning, explosions rocked Tehran and columns of smoke rose into the sky, shaking the city at the start of the Iranian working week.

Residents reached by phone described scenes of chaos and alarm as they rushed to collect their children from school or made preparations to leave home for now.

“We are going to our hometown in Yazd, Tehran is not safe anymore. They said roads are safe, but I am worried,” said Gholamreza, a Tehran shopkeeper and father of two. “I am leaving everything behind in Tehran.”

It marks the latest upheaval for Iranians weeks after thousands of people were killed in a government crackdown on nationwide unrest, and comes just eight months after last year’s 12-day war with Israel, during which the United States bombed Iranian nuclear sites.

Iran’s top security body said it expected attacks to continue on Tehran and some other cities, and urged people to “travel to other cities where possible so that you may remain safe from the harm of these two regimes’ acts of aggression.” Schools and universities would be closed until further notice.

“We are scared, we are terrified. My children are shaking, we have nowhere to go, we will die here,” said Minou, a 32-year-old mother of two from the northern city of Tabriz, one of many areas where explosions were reported.

“What is going to happen to my children?” she said, crying as she spoke by phone.

US President Donald Trump said the operation would end a security threat to the United States and offer Iranians a chance to topple their rulers. The Pentagon said that US strikes against Iran were named “OPERATION EPIC FURY.”

An Iranian from the central city of Yazd said he hoped the attack would topple the clerical establishment that has run the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “Let them bomb,” the resident of Yazd said.

Samira Mohebbi, speaking from the northern city of Rasht, disagreed.

“I am against this regime, to hell with them. But I don’t want my country to be attacked by foreign forces, I don’t want my Iran to turn into Iraq,” she said, referring to the neighboring country that suffered years of chaos and bloodshed following the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

‘THEY FOOLED US AGAIN’

Security forces blocked roads in the area of Tehran that is home to the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliament, witnesses said.

The latest round of negotiations between the United States and Iran in Geneva on Thursday failed to secure a breakthrough over Tehran’s nuclear programme, though Omani mediators reported progress.

“They said the nuclear talks are going well. They fooled us again,” said a resident of Tehran.

Zohreh, 28, said she would leave the port city of Bushehr with her three-year-old daughter and go to her parents’ home in a village in northern Iran.

“Why are we paying this price? I want my daughter to grow up safe and in peace,” she said.

Western governments have long suspected Iran aims to build a nuclear bomb. Tehran has always denied this.

Witnesses said people were rushing to buy hard currency.

In Isfahan, another area where attacks were reported, some said they were unable to withdraw cash from ATMs.

Reza Saadati, 45, said he was taking his family to the city of Urumieh near the Turkish border. “If the border is open, we will cross and then fly to Istanbul,” he said.

Mohammad Esmaili, 63, speaking from the town of Ilam, some 500 km (300 miles) from Tehran, said he would leave the town with his family. “God knows what will happen to us. Pray for us,” he said.

“People are shocked, scared. What is going to happen to us? Save us please,” said a woman from Tehran.

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Prior to Iran attacks, CIA assessed Khamenei Would Be Replaced by IRCG Elements if Killed

Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attend an IRGC ground forces military drill in the Aras area, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, Oct. 17, 2022. Photo: IRGC/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

In the run-up to the US and Israeli attacks on Saturday, the US Central Intelligence Agency assessed that even if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the operation, he would likely be replaced by hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), two sources briefed on the intelligence said.

The assessments, which were produced over the past two weeks, looked broadly at what could occur in Iran following a US intervention and the extent to which a military operation could trigger regime change in the Islamic Republic — now a pronounced objective for Washington.

The IRGC is an elite military force whose purpose is to protect Shi’ite Muslim clerical rule in Iran.

The intelligence agency reports did not conclude any scenario with certainty, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

President Donald Trump has for weeks signaled the US was interested in seeing regime change in Iran, but has not given in any detail Washington’s thinking on who could lead the country.

In an early morning video address on Saturday, Trump described Tehran as a “terrorist regime” and encouraged the Iranian people to take over the government, saying the US military strikes would set the stage for an uprising.

The US and Israeli assault comes after weeks of deliberation inside the US government about whether to strike Iran following the deadly protests that broke out there in December.

US officials in recent weeks have tried to strike a nuclear deal with Tehran in an attempt to stave off intervention.

In a briefing last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told top congressional lawmakers known as the Gang of Eight that a US operation would likely move forward, but that Trump could change his mind, particularly if nuclear negotiations were successful. Those talks in Geneva did not result in an agreement.

Rubio notified the Gang of Eight on Friday night that the operation to attack Iran was likely to commence in the following hours but said Trump could still change his mind, two sources familiar with the matter said.

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US and Israel Launched Military Operation Against Islamic Republic: This Is What We Know So Far

Iranian mourners wave the country’s flags while participating in a memorial ceremony for IRGC commanders, nuclear scientists, and civilians killed in the Iran-Israel war at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque in downtown Tehran, Iran, on July 2, 2025. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl via Reuters Connect.

i24 NewsIt’s been just over ten hours since the US and Israel launched operations “Epic Fury” and “Roaring Lion” against the Islamic Republic. And while this is still a developing story, here is what we know.

Just after 8 am local time the US and Israel launched a series of strikes on Iranian military targets across Iran. The main targets were Iran’s leaders and IRGC senior commanders in Iran and some targets in Iraq.

The IDF says it struck hundreds of targets, including ready-to-fire ballistic missile launchers. While there is no official confirmation of any specific eliminations, Iran’s foreign minister confirmed that some senior commanders were eliminated.

As Israeli and US strikes continued, Iran launched numerous ballistic missile barrages across Israel, and against six Arab countries, namely Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain, who all condemned the Iranian strikes on their territory. Iran claims it targeted US military bases in the region.

The escalation also saw a rare sign of unity between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, who have suffered from tense relations in recent weeks.

Iran has vowed to continue its strikes across the region, with Israeli officials saying they expect the strikes against Iran to continue for at least a few days.

While Iran has already turned this into a regional conflict, it still has potential to expand further. So far, neither Hezbollah in Lebanon nor Pro-Iranian militias in Iraq have joined the fray.

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam sent a warning message to Hezbollah not to drag the country into, quote, “adventures that threaten its security and unity.”

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