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A conveniently timed conference offers Israel educators a safe space to explore complex feelings
CHICAGO (JTA) – At one point ahead of an international conference on Israel education, as raucous anti-government protests filled the streets of Israeli cities, conference organizers considered leaning into the tension created by the news: What if they focused one day of the gathering on conflict, and the next day on hope?
Ultimately, they decided “you can’t divorce the two,” in the words of Aliza Goodman, one of the organizers.
“If you separate them, then it means one is devoid of the other and vice versa,” said Goodman, director of strategy and research and development for the iCenter, the Israel education organization that hosted the conference in Chicago in March.
Israel educators, Goodman said, need to hold “the complexities together with the hopes for us to be able to move forward as human beings.”
That emotional challenge lay at the center of the conference, the iCenter’s fifth, called iCON 2023. The conference covered standard topics in Israel education, ranging from Hebrew literature and language to representations of Jews and Israel in popular culture to a bevy of subtopics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But the turmoil that has rocked Israel this year felt no less prominent. In sessions and on the sidelines, the more than 500 participants discussed the Israeli government’s proposed judicial overhaul, its far-right cabinet ministers and the preservation of Israel’s democratic character.
Conference attendees said they faced dual challenges: understanding the political issues at play and reckoning with what they mean for teaching about Israel. Their thoughts on the current historical moment suggested that those challenges would persist even though Israel’s government announced a pause on the judicial overhaul shortly after the conference concluded.
“We are responsible for doing something, don’t get me wrong, but my immediate responsibility is trying to really get a handle on understanding it for myself and for my students,” said Rebecca Good, the assistant director of education at The Temple, a Reform synagogue in Atlanta.
Good has found herself fielding new questions about Israel, mostly from adult congregants, “but we know that the questions and the feelings that are coming from the adults naturally play out in the home,” she said. In response to the perceived need she has recognized from her students, her synagogue planned a town hall-style meeting that took place in late March.
“It’s almost like you do triage, right? When things like this happen, it’s like, ‘OK, how are you?’” Good said. “You have to address that first and then you figure out what is needed and try to make that happen for people.”
Conference attendees included Hebrew school and day school teachers, executives from communal organizations, summer camp professionals, campus activists, young adult Israeli emissaries and more. iCON Program Director Ari Berkowicz estimated that 75% of the conference participants came from North America and 24% from Israel. Others joined from places like Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Educator Noam Weissman addresses the audience at a session of ICON 2023 at the Marriott Marquis in Chicago, Illinois, March 15, 2023. (Rachel Kohn)
“One of The iCenter’s approaches to education is to make all that we teach and all that we learn about both timely and timeless, but the current moment obviously has an impact on who we are as educators and who we are as learners,” said Berkowicz. While the sessions scheduled for iCON 2023 remained mostly unchanged, the facilitators, speakers, and educators were “different people” from what they had been three or six months ago due to the upheaval in Israel, he said.
“They aren’t the same people that they were even yesterday or two days ago,” Goodman added in an interview at the conference. “All of this is impacting them at the core.”
Questions and anguish about the judicial overhaul — and other Israeli government policies – filtered into the conference programming. A campus professional, who asked not to be identified because she wasn’t authorized by her employer to speak to the press, shared a practical concern during a breakout group: If the government follows through on its call to limit the Law of Return, which currently affords automatic Israeli citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent, what should she say to a student who wants to go to Israel but no longer falls under the government’s revised definition of who is a Jew?
In a nearby group, an Israeli expat from Dallas named Meirav said she likes that Israel doesn’t separate between religion and state. But she fears for women’s rights under a religiously conservative regime.
Another group endeavored to understand the specifics of the proposed judicial overhaul, comparing newspaper articles with Wikipedia text as they struggled to confirm how judges are appointed in Israel.
“It’s not only in America or everywhere else – I’m not sure everyone in Israel understands exactly what’s going on and the ramifications,” said Etty Dolgin, the Israeli-American principal of a Chicago-area Hebrew-immersion preschool and after-school program, in a different session. “I don’t know that anybody really knows what the ramifications are going to be.”
Former Jewish day school principal Noam Weissman, whose lecture at the conference drew a standing-room-only crowd of some 150 people, said in an interview that the current moment is an important one for Israel educators to be able to contextualize.
“Part of why cultural literacy is important is because history informs the present,” Weissman said. “People like to jump to judicial reforms, but if people don’t know about Israel’s lack of a constitution, it’s hard to be conversant in that.”
Weissman, the former head of Los Angeles’ Shalhevet High School who is now executive vice president of OpenDor Media, where he develops educational content on Judaism and Israel, said in his session that the goal of Israel educators shouldn’t be defending the country but “understanding and connecting.” He’s grateful, he said, that “the Israel education world has really, from a professional perspective, moved on from hasbara,” a Hebrew term for public relations or advocacy on Israel’s behalf.
“When someone recently said to me, ‘I don’t envy Israel educators at this moment’ … I actually said I feel zero pressure,” Weissman told his audience. “You feel pressure when you’re trying to defend everything Israel does. That’s the world of Israel advocacy, where you train young people to defend Israel. … If my job is to defend something that I have no interest in defending, this doesn’t work.”
Good said she appreciated the “brain trust” of fellow Israel educators she gets to interact with at the conference. At the same time, she likened the sense of uncertainty she is feeling these days to the concerns many Americans have felt in recent years when looking at their own fraught political landscape.
“That kind of feeling we all get, like, ‘Where could this go?’” she said. “That’s as best as I can put it.”
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‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’
Adam Brody, the Jewish actor who plays a “hot rabbi” on the hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This, called the war in Gaza a genocide in a new interview, making him one of just a few Jewish celebrities to speak out publicly against the Israeli campaign.
The comments came in an interview with GQ about Brody’s efforts canvassing for Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms.
“Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine,” he said. “It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”
The claim of genocide in Gaza is heavily disputed. Several international bodies, human rights organizations and academic institutions have concluded Israel’s actions in Gaza since Oct. 7 fit the description, including a United Nations Commission of Inquiry. Other similar groups, like the International Court of Justice, have not applied the term.
Brody’s comments were surprising in part because he had previously kept his feelings about the war private, even as other leading Hollywood figures openly criticized it. He does not maintain a public social media presence, and he did not participate in pin-wearing campaigns or sign various petitions related to the war — an approach he indicated he might change going forward.
“I’m not wearing a pin, so I’m not inviting a certain question, and perhaps I should,” he said. “I really admire people who do. But 99% of what I’m asked about is about the show. I’m not trying to plead ignorance—here we are doing a political interview, so it makes sense that we wade into this territory—but I’ve never ducked a question, really, not a political question anyway.”
Brody — who came to fame in the 2000s as the teenager Seth Cohen on The O.C. — joins Hacks star Hannah Einbinder and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) as perhaps the most high-profile Jewish actors to publicly call the war a genocide. Other Jewish entertainment figures, like Mandy Patinkin and The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer, have criticized the war but stopped short of calling it a genocide.
Yet Brody’s comments are perhaps especially notable because of the character he plays on TV. In Nobody Wants This, Brody plays a rabbi dating a non-Jewish woman — introducing her to the beauty and foibles of Jewish faith and culture. Israel has been conspicuously absent from the show, with its creator, Erin Foster, saying she deliberately avoided geopolitics.
Season 3 of Nobody Wants This releases to Netflix October 22.
The post ‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Why Mamdani remains focused on Israel as NYC mayor
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the UN this week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was there — not in body, but in spirit, having condemned the Israeli prime minister and previously encouraged protests against him.
As a leader in the Jewish community, I know that many American Jews oppose Netanyahu’s government. But many also believe strongly that Israel’s survival as a Jewish homeland is critically important. They, therefore, feel boxed in by the mayor: compelled by conscience to oppose Israel’s leader and to condemn Mamdani’s repeated attacks on Israel’s existence, many of which they find offensive and dangerous.
Because of my previous work for Mayor Bloomberg, I am often asked by Jewish community members why this mayor so frequently puts them in this painful bind. The answer, I believe, lies in motivations worth understanding more clearly.
Of course, Mamdani’s focus on Israel seems partially motivated by principle. He clearly thinks Israel is illegitimate and opposes how it defends itself. I take him at his word that these convictions are sincere. But sincerity still does not explain his single-mindedness. A mayor willing to absorb this much political friction must see some benefit. But what?
To understand, let’s reexamine the 2025 election, often described as a “political tsunami.” The facts, however, are more complicated. Mamdani did defeat his closest opponent by nearly 10%, but in so doing he secured under 51% of the total vote – against a flawed and divided opposition. Viewed this way, his impressive margin seems less sweeping and much narrower.
More important than his electoral margin, though, is the coalition that produced it. His victory rested heavily on three blocs: self-identified very liberal voters; and Muslim and South Asian voters, who turned out in historic numbers. South Asian and Indo-Caribbean turnout, for example, rose 350% between 2021 and 2025, with 87% of South Asian votes going to Mamdani. Analyzing available data, I believe that, taken together, these three blocs accounted for well over 50% of all Mamdani votes.
What makes this coalition intriguing is that it consists of such strange bedfellows. The blocs differ sharply on many key local issues. On same-sex marriage, PRRI’s American Values Atlas found 33% support among Muslim-Americans in 2024, with support among very liberal Americans substantially higher. The divergence is similarly stark on policing, education, and many other policies.
In fact, it is hard to identify many things uniting these blocs besides this candidate: a skilled politician speaking the language of the left, while activating Muslim and South Asian voters just as Mayors Bloomberg and Koch activated Jewish voters and Mayors Adams and Dinkins activated Black voters.
Which brings us back to Israel.
When one barely ekes out a majority against flawed opponents, and one’s coalition is fundamentally misaligned, one must find ways to hold it together. To this end, Mamdani seems to be taking a page from Donald Trump. When Trump’s coalition buckles, he reaches for a “shiny distraction” — attacks on the press; trade wars; threatened invasions of Greenland. For Trump, the specifics are almost irrelevant; what matters is the theater of conflict and the distraction it produces.
For Mamdani, his Greenland is Israel.
Yes, it is a subject on which he holds sincere convictions. But, more importantly, it is one of few issues on which his coalition agrees. His relentless focus on Israel — to the exclusion of other worthy targets, including grave human rights offenders across South Asia and the Muslim world — is no accident. It is a political calculation allowing him to don the mantle of moral crusader while keeping his coalition on-side and united.
For those who believe Mamdani’s politics pose a danger to the Jewish community and want to slow his political momentum, this analysis yields two insights.
First, trying to persuade the mayor to soften his Israel attacks is unlikely to succeed. Doing so is not his inclination or in his political interests.
Second, and maybe more interestingly, Mamdani has a vulnerability that he seems to recognize – a fragile coalition. Allowing Mamdani to
make Israel his “shiny distraction” and engaging him on it plays his game. A different approach would be to defend Israel as-needed, but focusing efforts on pressing Mamdani to do his job – for example, elevating important issues, such as specialized high school admissions practices, on which his coalition happens to be divided.
The upshot? When smart politicians do things that seem politically risky, they usually see something others do not. Mamdani’s Israel focus offers a case-in-point. Those looking to respond should consider resisting the temptation to take the bait when possible. The wiser strategy is to engage under different rules: defending Israel when necessary, then pivoting to the difficult local issues from which Israel is meant to distract.
The post Why Mamdani remains focused on Israel as NYC mayor appeared first on The Forward.
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New voices in Yiddish: A prose and poetry contest
לכּבֿוד דעם 85סטן יאָר זינט מע האָט פֿאַרלייגט דעם ייִדישן זשורנאַל „אױפֿן שװעל“, וועט די אָרגאַניזאַציע וואָס שטיצט דעם זשורנאַל, די „ייִדיש־ליגע“, דורכפֿירן אַ קאָנקורס פֿון נײַע ייִדיש־שפּראַכיקע לידער און פּראָזע.
אַ זשורי פֿון אָפּגעקליבענע מומחים וועט אָפּשאַצן די אַרבעטן, און די דרײַ בעסטע פֿון ביידע קאַטעגאָריעס וועלן באַלוינט ווערן מיט געלטפּרעמיעס.
די פּראָזע־שאַפֿונגען קענען זײַן ביז 2,500 װערטער, און אַלע אַרײַנגעשיקטע מאַטעריאַלן מוזן זײַן נאָך נישט קיין געדרוקטע. דער טערמין אַרײַנצושיקן די שריפֿטן איז דער 31סטער אָקטאָבער 2026.
די געווינער-ווערק, און בכלל אַן אָפּקלײַב פֿון די אַרײַנגעשיקטע שאַפֿונגען, וועט מען אויך דרוקן אין דעם יובֿל-נומער. „זאָלן אונדזערע לייענערס געניסן פֿון נײַע ליטעראַרישע שאַפֿונגען אויף מאַמע-לשון!“ האָט די שעף־רעדאַקטאָרין פֿון „אויפֿן שוועל“, מרים טרין, געזאָגט.
די שריפֿטן שיקן מען דורך בליצפּאָסט צו info@leagueforyiddish.org.
The post New voices in Yiddish: A prose and poetry contest appeared first on The Forward.
