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A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them
(JTA) — As a kid I went to Sunday school at our Reform synagogue. I didn’t hate it as much as my peers did, but let’s just say there were literally dozens of other things I would have preferred to do on a weekend morning.
As a Jewish adult, I had a vague understanding that Sunday school was a post-World War II invention, part of the assimilation and suburbanization of American Jews (my synagogue was actually called Suburban Temple). With our parents committed to public schools and having moved away from the dense urban enclaves where they were raised, our Jewish education was relegated to Sunday mornings and perhaps a weekday afternoon. The Protestant and Catholic kids went to their own religious supplementary schools, and we Jewish kids went to ours.
In her new book “Jewish Sunday Schools,” Laura Yares backdates this story by over a century. Subtitled “Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” the book describes how Sunday schools were the invention of pioneering educators such as Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children in Philadelphia in 1838. As such, they were responses by a tiny minority to distinctly 19th-century challenges — namely, how to raise their children to be Jews in a country dominated by a Protestant majority, and how to express their Judaism in a way compatible with America’s idea of religious freedom.
Although Sunday schools would become the “principal educational organization” of the Reform movement, Yares shows that the model was adopted by traditionalists as well. And she also argues that 20th-century historians, in focusing on the failures of Sunday schools to promote Jewish “continuity,” discounted the contributions of the mostly volunteer corps of women educators who made them run. Meanwhile, the supplementary school remains the dominant model for Jewish education among non-Orthodox American Jews, despite recent research showing its precipitous decline.
I picked up “Jewish Sunday Schools” hoping to find out who gets the blame for ruining my Sunday mornings. I came away with a new appreciation for the women whose “important and influential work,” Yares writes, “extended far beyond the classrooms in which they worked.”
Yares is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the MSU Program for Jewish Studies. Raised in Birmingham, England, she has degrees from Oxford University and a doctorate from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how your book came to be about the 19th century as opposed to the common 20th-century story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American Jewish history when it comes to the 19th century, chiefly because so many American Jews today trace their origins back to the generation who arrived between 1881 and 1924, the mass migration of Jews from from Eastern Europe. So there’s a sense that that’s when American Jewish history began. Of course, that’s not true at all.
The American Jewish community dates back to the 17th century and there was much innovation that laid the foundations for what would become institutionalized in the 20th century.
Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism. If they’ve treated it at all, they tend to be dismissive — you know, there was no substance, they just taught kids the 10 Commandments, it was run by these unprofessional volunteer female teachers, so it was feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of celebration of Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children.
That’s the first indication I had that there might be more of a story here. Rebecca Gratz is lionized as being such a visionary and being so inventive in developing this incredible volunteer model for Jewish education for an immigrant generation that was mostly from Western Europe. And yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, [Jewish historians] say it has no value. So what’s the story there?
Two other things led me on the path to thinking that there was more of a story in this 19th-century moment. I did my Ph.D in Washington, D.C. And as I was searching through the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were tons and tons of Jewish catechisms.
“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism,” says Dr. Laura Yares, author of the new book, “Jewish Sunday Schools.” (Courtesy of the author)
A catechism is a kind of creed, right? It’s a statement of religious beliefs. “These are things we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had that, but they were also philosophical meditations in many ways. Typically, the first question of the catechism was, what is religion? And then the second question is, what is Jewish religion?
And then I started reading them. They were question-and-answer summaries of the whole of Judaism: belief, practices, holidays, Bible, you name it, that the children were expected to memorize. This idea that you’ve got to cram these kids with knowledge went against this historiographic dismissal of this period as being very thin and that kids were not really learning anything. The idea that children had a lot to learn is something that Sunday school educators actually really wrestle with during this period.
What was the other thing that led you to pursue this subject?
When I was beginning to research my dissertation, I was working as a Hebrew school teacher in a large Reform Hebrew school in Washington, D.C. And I remember very distinctively the rabbi coming in and addressing the teachers at the start of the school year. He said, “I don’t care if a student comes through this Hebrew school and they don’t remember anything that they learned. But I care that at the end of the year they feel like the temple is a place that they want to be, that they feel like they have relationships there and they have an (he didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ [emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there by day at the Library of Congress, reading these catechisms that are saying, “Cram their heads with knowledge.” What is the relationship between Jewish education as a place where one is supposed to acquire knowledge and a place where one is supposed to feel something and to develop affective relationships? The swing between those two poles was happening as far back as the 19th century.
You write that owing to gaps in the archives, it was really hard to get an idea of the classroom experience. But to the degree that there’s a typical classroom experience in the 1860s, 1870s and you’re the daughter or grandchild of probably German-speaking Jewish immigrants, maybe working or lower middle class, what would Sunday school be like? I’m guessing the teacher would be a woman. Are you reading the Bible in English or Hebrew?
You are probably going for an hour or two on a Sunday morning. It’s a big room, and your particular class would have a corner of the room. It’s quite chaotic. Most of the teachers were female volunteers. They were either young and unmarried, or older women whose children had grown. Except for the students who are preparing for confirmation — the grand kind of graduation ritual for Sunday schools. Those classes were typically taught by the rabbi, if there was a rabbi associated with the school.
There would be a lot of reading out loud to the students with students being expected to repeat back what they had heard or write it down so they had a copy for themselves. Often the day would begin with prayers said in English, and often the reading of the Torah portion, typically in English, although in many Sunday schools, we do have children reporting they learned bits of Hebrew by rote memorization. Or they memorized the first chapters of the book of Genesis, for example, but I’m not sure that they quite understood what they memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” is a song that often children tell us [in archival materials] that they had memorized in Hebrew. They probably would have learned at least Hebrew script, and a little bit of Hebrew decoding. But it is fair to say that if they were reading the Bible, they were reading it mostly in English, because you have to remember that most of the women who were volunteering to teach in these schools came of age in a generation where Hebrew education wasn’t extended to women.
What’s the goal of these Sunday schools?
The Sunday school movement arose because there was a whole generation of immigrant children who did not have access to Jewish education, because their parents didn’t have either the economic capital or the social capital to become part of the established Jewish community. They couldn’t afford a seat in the synagogue, they couldn’t afford to send their children to congregational all-day or every-afternoon schools [which were among the few options for Jewish education when Gratz opened the Philadelphia Sunday school]. Sunday schools are really a very innovative solution to a problem of a lack of resources.
You also write that the founders of these supplementary schools want to defend children against “predatory evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz described her goal when she created the first Sunday school. She was very, very worried about the Jewish kids who were not receiving any kind of Hebrew school education. She talks about Protestant missionaries and teachers who would go out onto the street ringing the bell for Sunday school and offering various kinds of trinkets, and Jewish kids would get kind of swept into their Sunday schools. There was a very concrete need to give Jewish children somewhere else to go.
So Gratz and the people who created the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia looked at what the Protestants were doing and they saw that Protestant Sunday schools were providing very accessible places where kids could go and get a basic primer in their religious tradition.
The approach was to teach Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Judaism as a people or culture, to demonstrate that being Jewish was as compatible as Protestantism with being wholly American.
That is certainly part of it. It’s a demonstration that Judaism is compatible with American public life. But I think there’s actually a much bigger claim that the Sunday schools are making. The claim is not only that Judaism is as good as Protestantism, but that Judaism does religion better than Protestantism. These rabbis who were writing catechisms and teaching confirmation classes were saying that Judaism does liberal religion better than liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics and other kinds of liberal denominations. You see the same sentiment in the Pittsburgh Platform as well, which is the foundational platform of the Reform movement written in the 1880s. Sunday schools take that idea and bring it down to a grassroots level.
There are many, many fewer Jews in America in much of the 19th century, before the waves of Eastern European immigrants arrived beginning in the 1880s They didn’t really have strength in numbers, or the kind of self-confidence to have a system of day schools, yeshivas or heders, the elementary schools for all-day or every day Jewish instruction.
And this is also a community that has grown up at the same time as the birth of public education in America, independent of churches. That really emerged beginning on the East Coast in the 1840s.This generation of Americans really believes in the power of public education to craft an American public. It’s a project that 19th-century American Jews believe in and want to sustain. So Sunday schools don’t just become the preferred Jewish model because of lack of resources, but because American Jews really believe in the idea of public education.
What happens at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Eastern Europeans with different models for Jewish education?
A new generation tries to reform Jewish education, led by a young educator from Palestine named Samson Benderly, who leads the new New York Bureau of Jewish Education. He tries to change American Jewish education to make it more professionalized, but to bring more traditionally inclined Jews on board he has to convince them that he doesn’t want to make more Sunday schools, because Sunday schools by the end of the 20th century had become very much associated with the Reform movement in a way that they weren’t when they were founded and for much of the 19th century.
A painting of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish education activist Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully. (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia)
Benderly is surveying the scene of recent immigrants living in New York City [tenements] and other kinds of downtown environments, and his proposal is to create these community institutions for these dense communities, where children can be taught Hebrew in Hebrew. His disciples also created Jewish camps as a way to get children out of the inner cities and develop the muscular Zionist ideal of healthy bodies and a robust sense of Jewish collectivity.
You write that Benderly’s vision is a sort of masculine response to the “feminizing” perception of the Sunday schools.
These women teachers are recognizing that they’re being criticized for the kind of thinness of the Jewish education that they’re teaching in comparison to other models, but in periodicals like The American Jewess women are writing back and saying, “But you didn’t teach us Hebrew! I didn’t get that opportunity as a woman, so what do you expect?” It’s really important to note that the women did the best that they could in the time that they had available, and that they were the product of opportunities that were denied to them.
What lessons did you learn about Sunday school and Hebrew school education in the 20th century that relate to your research into the 19th century?
The move that is so decisive for shaping American Jewish education is suburbanization. Rather than having a large immigrant generation who are living in these tight ethnic enclaves, you have American Jewish children who are predominantly growing up in the suburbs, and socializing with children from all sorts of different backgrounds who are attending public schools. The place that you go to get your Jewish education is the synagogue supplemental school, which becomes the dominant model for American Jewish education up until today. Benderly might reflect that it looks a lot more like the Sunday school movement of the 19th century than his vision.
Today’s model is really a religious model. And by that I mean that students go to Hebrew school primarily to kind of check a religious box, to learn about the thing that makes them distinctive religiously, and to achieve a religious coming-of-age marker, which is the bar, bat or b mitzvah. Certainly the curriculum today is more diverse, embracing more aspects of traditional Judaism then you would have seen in a 19th-century Sunday school: more Hebrew, more of a sense of Jewish peoplehood, ethnic identity and Zionism of course. But the question that American Jews are increasingly asking themselves is, is this a model that they still want? So you may have seen that the Jewish Education Project published a report recently on supplemental schools, which saw that enrollment has really, really declined.
Sunday schools are based on a vision of Judaism as a set of a religious commitments that American Jews actualize through belonging to a synagogue and sending their children to a synagogue or a religious school, where they will learn primarily a set of religious skills: the ability to read from the Torah, the ability to decode Hebrew, the ability to navigate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that most American Jews have for what Judaism means to them? I think increasingly the answer seems to be no.
How else did experience in a Hebrew school classroom influence you? Did you access anything else when you were writing the book?
I think about the number of college kids and graduate students and empty nesters who are either volunteering or earning minimum wage, working at Hebrew schools, all over the country. That’s the labor force of American Judaism. These people also bring so much to the table. There are a lot of skills, dispositions and knowledge that don’t tend to get taken very seriously because this is a workforce that just gets kind of put into the category of “oh, they’re part time.” That made me look really closely in the historical archives to see if I could find anything out about the women who are volunteering to teach in Sunday schools. And what I found out was that [many] were public school teachers. And they brought a lot to the table. It was women in fact who were really pushing to make the Sunday school curriculum more experiential and to move away from rote memorization.
As a historian formed by feminist methods, I find it really important to recognize that these women were giving over what they had, as opposed to critiquing them for not teaching in a more traditional way. I think we need to pay attention when women are being scapegoated for problems that are described as problems of Jewish continuity. It blinds us to the role that women’s volunteerism has played in American Jewish life. This whole Sunday school movement was possible only because these women volunteered their time and largely were not paid.
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The Jewish community accepts interfaith families in principle — but it doesn’t look that way in practice
There is a photograph from my wedding that I think about more than any other. My wife Donna and I are standing under a chuppah. But we are not in a synagogue. Or even on a beach. We are in the beautifully ornate St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C. — the same church where John F. Kennedy’s funeral Mass was held.
Donna is Catholic. I am Jewish. The ceremony, which took place a little more than 20 years ago, was co-officiated by a rabbi and a priest. Before we exchanged vows, we signed a ketubah — the Jewish marriage contract — on the altar, beneath the Cathedral’s great mosaic of St. Matthew, the apostle who was himself a tax collector before he was called to follow Jesus: a man of two worlds, presiding over our union with what I have chosen to interpret as equanimity.
We like to call it a “Ḥuppah in the Ḥurch.” The guttural Hebrew Ḥet — the sound that “chuppah” and “church” share when English speakers say them — makes the joke land differently out loud than it does on the page. But the feeling it captures is real: that the most Jewish act of my adult life happened inside a Catholic cathedral, and that this was not a contradiction; it was the whole point.
I did not fully understand, at the time, what that photograph meant. I understand it better now, with one child who stood on a bimah at our synagogue to become b’nei mitzvah in 2024, and a second who followed this October. The earlier wedding chuppah at St. Matthew’s was not a compromise. It was a declaration of intent of how we would define our family.
According to the 2025 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study — a comprehensive survey of Jewish communal life commissioned by Combined Jewish Philanthropies and released earlier this year — only 23% of children ages 14-17 from interfaith families have a bar or bat mitzvah, compared to 82% of children from families where both parents are Jewish. That gap — 59 points — is not a rounding error. It is a chasm. I believe it measures less a failure of Jewish identity than a failure of Jewish institutions.
The Boston study found that 65% of Jewish households with children in the greater Boston area are interfaith — a majority. Nationally, the 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 42% of married American Jews were married to a non-Jewish spouse, with that number rising among younger and non-Orthodox Jews. Interfaith families are not an edge case in American Jewish life. They are the center of it.
Jodi Bromberg, who led 18Doors — a nonprofit dedicated to supporting interfaith families in Jewish life — for a decade before stepping down in 2024, put it bluntly: Interfaith families “aren’t a drop in the ocean. We are the ocean.” The irony is that 18Doors itself has since become a casualty of the communal prioritization it was warning against. After Oct. 7, 2023, donors shifted their giving toward Israel and antisemitism-related causes; earlier this year, according to JTA, 18Doors slashed its staff from 15 to four. Bromberg left asking: “The question it left in the minds of families like mine: whose priority are mixed heritage and interfaith families in Jewish life?”
The Jewish community has largely supported welcoming interfaith families. The language has shifted — from “intermarriage” as problem to “interfaith family” as constituency. What has not yet shifted, in too many places, is what actually happens when those families show up.
My family showed up. What happened to us is a complicated story about what Jewish continuity actually costs — and who is being asked to pay for it.
The first wall we encountered was not unwelcoming people. It was doctrine.
Matrilineal descent — the principle that Jewish identity passes through the mother — is not stated plainly in the written Torah. The rule was codified by the early rabbis, likely in the first or second century CE, and yet it functions today, in Conservative and Orthodox congregations, as a theological absolute — a sorting mechanism that places children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers in a separate category, recognized as fully Jewish by Reform and Reconstructionist movements but not by much of the rest of the Jewish world.
I grew up in a Reform congregation, but in my twenties I spent time studying at Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem — an Orthodox yeshiva — and came home with a deeper appreciation for traditional observance. When Donna and I started a family, I was drawn toward a more traditional congregation. What I found, at more than one Conservative synagogue, was that my daughters — daughters of a Jewish father and a devoted, deeply engaged Catholic mother — would need to convert to be considered fully Jewish. The synagogue said it would accept our family. But our daughters would need to be processed.
This is not outright rejection. It is something subtler: the message that your children’s belonging is conditional, something to be granted rather than inherited. You are welcome, but the rest of your family is a question we haven’t resolved yet.
I almost let it win.
Our older child started Hebrew school at a large synagogue in northern Virginia and came home crying. The environment was harsh; she was behind and everyone knew it. After several months, she asked us if she could stop. The pandemic arrived, and we let it make the decision for us.
When restrictions lifted, we found a congregation in Arlington that had built a hybrid model during the pandemic — Sunday morning religious school in person, Hebrew instruction via individual Zoom sessions during the week. What looked like an emergency accommodation turned out to be an unintended innovation: a model that removed the social pressure of being seen to struggle. Away from the eyes of their peers, our child learned and caught up. In February 2024, they led their own bat mitzvah service, then started a Jewish student cohort at their school.
What saved their Jewish education was not ideological commitment. It was an accident of pandemic logistics. That is a fragile kind of salvation. Most interfaith families do not find it. The data says so.
There is something the data does not capture: what the work actually looks like inside an interfaith home. Donna agreed, before the Ḥuppah at St. Matthew’s, to raise our children in the Jewish tradition, and she has kept that agreement with a fidelity that still catches me off guard. She runs our Jewish household calendar, ensures the girls study their Hebrew and Torah portions, has made raisin kugel and matzo ball soup from scratch, and has shown up for every bat mitzvah preparation meeting — all as a Catholic woman who continues to practice her own faith and has not surrendered anything of herself to make room for ours.
Meanwhile, I string the outdoor Christmas lights every year, drove the girls to Catholic Sunday school for years, gave Donna a diamond cross necklace early in our relationship that she still wears today. An interfaith marriage requires not one partner’s sacrifice and the other’s gratitude, but a genuine doubling of belonging.
When I asked Donna what the harder moments were, she said they were not in our own home. They were in other people’s institutional spaces — the moments when she felt regarded as a problem to be managed rather than a parent to be welcomed. The 23% is often read as a story about interfaith families failing to commit. It is at least as much a story about Jewish institutions failing to make the non-Jewish partner feel that her commitment matters.
My younger daughter stood on the bimah on Oct. 3. She is a different person than her older sibling— a social butterfly with her own questions, her own relationship to what this all means — and she was honest with me about those questions in ways that required me to listen rather than answer. She completed her bat mitzvah not because she had resolved those questions, but because she made a commitment and she was going to honor it. There is something deeply, if unintentionally, Jewish about that: a covenant is not a feeling, it is a promise kept because you said you would keep it.
She was in the 23%. She almost wasn’t.
The fear behind the continuity crisis narrative has been used to justify exclusion, to draw lines, to send signals to interfaith families about whether they truly belong. Those signals are self-fulfilling. The families who make it to the bimah found an institution that treated them as members rather than complications, had a non-Jewish partner committed enough to keep showing up anyway, and got lucky with a workaround that happened to be exactly what their child needed. That is too much to ask, and too random a path to count on.
The Jewish community has accepted interfaith families in principle. The 23% tells you what that acceptance looks like in practice. If the number is going to change, something structural has to change with it — not just the language of welcome, but the architecture of it. Not just the open door, but what’s waiting on the other side.
My daughter chanted her Torah portion with her Catholic mother who was on the bimah behind her, and her older sister in the front row, wearing a cross and a Star of David together because she has decided there is no reason she cannot wear both.
If we truly believe interfaith families are the future of American Judaism, what do we owe the 77% who never made it to the bimah?
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Trump’s empire is crumbling, much like the Berlin Wall in 1989
As a foreign correspondent during the Cold War, I witnessed and reported on the collapse of East Germany’s corrupt communist state. Nearly four decades later, I feel a sense of déjà vu as I watch Donald Trump’s corrupt MAGA regime crumble at an accelerating pace.
German social media influencers and national news platforms have been posting videos of American mid-term election scenes that remind me of the night the Berlin Wall cracked open in 1989 — dancing in the streets, strangers hugging, laughter spilling out of Democratic watch parties, tears of relief and disbelief.
In Austin, Texas, Sally Lisa Starken, a German journalist and influencer, stood amid a roaring crowd of James Talarico supporters when the Democrat was declared the victor over Ken Paxton. Lifting her phone to capture the eruption for her Instagram followers, Starken looked just as stunned and jubilant as the sea of people surrounding her,.
For a moment, Austin was Berlin.
“Texas is turning blue! This is insane!” Starken said in her live post. A follower back in Germany wrote: “Yeah! Fantastic! Thank you for this wonderful news this morning!” Another added: “The USA has woken up!!! Hopefully that will soon happen here.”
Since Trump’s second inauguration, his autocratic style of governing has carried echoes of the Third Reich. And now, as the politically wounded American president enters the last half of his second term, his crumbling MAGA machine is looking like the corrupt Stalinist regime that ruled East Germany for four decades.
The opening of the Berlin Wall released East Germans from repression. While Trump has another two years to go as president, American voters rescued democracy by restoring Congress to its role as a check on overreaching executive power by rejecting Republican officeholders and candidates who had turned themselves into Trumpian marionettes.
Responding to citizen demands for accountability, German authorities after reunification pursued hundreds of cases against former East German officials, charging them with offenses that spanned the system’s spectrum of abuse — from the misuse of state resources to the killing of East Germans trying to flee to the West.
Corruption was endemic within the East German leadership. Senior officials, including Erich Honecker, lived in comfort inside a walled enclave at Wandlitz outside East Berlin and vacationed on the Baltic Sea in exclusive manor homes on Vilm, an island off limits to ordinary Germans. Luxury goods for the communist elite flowed through a secretive government agency called Commercial Coordination, which trafficked in Western technology, arms deals, and hard-currency diversions to Swiss accounts.
Few of the senior officials ended up paying for their misdeeds. Many were spared because of illness or frailty. Erich Honecker initially found refuge in Moscow but in 1992 was sent back to Germany to stand trial on charges of abuse of power and manslaughter for the killing of East Germans who tried to escape to the West. The case was abandoned because Honecker was seriously ill. He died of cancer in 1994 in Chile, where he had moved to reunite with his wife and his daughter.
As sensational as the proceedings against Honecker and his comrades were, they may well pale next to the scrutiny Donald Trump, his two oldest sons, his son-in-law, and their associates could face with Democrats now in control of Congress. After the GOP’s shellacking, Rep. Robert Garcia had two words for Trump administration officials linked to corruption and abuses of power: “Lawyer up.”
Garcia, a California Democrat who is in line to become the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has outlined an aggressive agenda for investigating the Trumps and their political and business circles.
“If we’re really going to take on the affordability crisis, we’ve got to take on the corruption of the Trumps because they’re stealing people’s money, their labor,” Garcia told Punchbowl News.
Garcia said his top areas of focus include Trump family corruption, alleged abuses by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, corporate misconduct, and cover-ups in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Although Trump and his allies have done little to conceal their conflicts of interest, compelling testimony under oath would force them to confront conduct they have evaded accountability for throughout Trump’s second term. We can expect hearings on the $2.2 billion in wealth Trump has accumulated as president, Eric and Donald Trump Jr.’s shady business dealings and Jared Kushner’s financial relationships with Middle Eastern governments.
Congressional hearings on Trump’s massive immigration crackdown would have the potential to become a sort of American analog to the post-unification trials of senior East German officials, mid-level commanders, and border guards in the killing of East Germans who tried to flee to the West — scaling the Berlin Wall, sprinting across the death strip along the border, or attempting other desperate escapes.
Democrats will likely try to shine a light on decision-making processes that led up to foreign university students being swept off the streets by federal agents, traffic stops in which immigrants were violently pulled from their cars, masked agents terrorizing families during raids on immigrants’ homes, the warehousing of Latinos and others in detention centers with allegedly inhumane conditions, the spiriting away of detainees to African countries with which they have no connection, and brutal tactics of the kind that resulted in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Among those likely to face subpoenas are top Trump aide Stephen Miller, the former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and possibly Trump himself. Oversight hearings would force senior officials to explain, under oath, how these policies were conceived, approved and carried out — a public accounting that echoes, in form if not in historical circumstance, the post-reunification scrutiny faced by East German officials responsible for the lethal border regime.
What happens if all of this ends the way East Germany’s reckoning did — with months of public testimony, thousands of pages of evidence, and almost no real accountability? Trump retains broad pardon powers, and the Supreme Court has already granted him sweeping presidential immunity. As long as he remains in office, his Justice Department is unlikely to pursue anything Congress uncovers. The result could resemble the East German experience: a great airing-out of abuses, and perhaps a sense of moral clarity, but the central figures keeping the riches and advantages they have reaped during Donald Trump’s reign and escaping any real punishment.
Even so, such an airing-out would not be meaningless. It would stand as a warning that the vast corruption of Trump’s second term will never again be tolerated — and as a record of how close America came to losing the checks that make democracy possible.
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Eisenkot moves closer to ousting Netanyahu. Here’s what could come next.
(JTA) — Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot leaped ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week in the effort to secure enough support from the rest of the parliament to form Israel’s next governing coalition. But that doesn’t mean he’ll succeed in his quest to become prime minister.
Yashar won the most seats – 21 – of any party not aligned with Netanyahu in last month’s vote. But neither the prime minister’s bloc nor the opposition garnered the 61-seat minimum needed to form a governing majority.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Sunday will announce who is being given the first shot at forming a coalition. By the end of this week, Eisenkot was able to announce that 67 parliamentarians had endorsed giving him the first chance to do so, compared to 46 for Netanyahu.
That means Herzog is all but certain to tap Eisenkot on Sunday to form a government – but Eisenkot’s path forward remains far from clear.
Eisenkot leads a bloc of four Zionist parties that make up Israel’s so-called change bloc, united by their stated goal of replacing Netanyahu. Together, they hold 48 seats in the incoming parliament, or Knesset, which means they need to enlist the support of parties whose seats total at least 13 to reach the magic number of 61 out of 120 Knesset seats. Or, they could gain a plurality if enough other parties abstain from voting in the new coalition.
Eisenkot has 28 days to negotiate that arrangement once given the opportunity, or mandate, to do so by Herzog, plus a 14-day extension if the president allows it. If Eisenkot fails, another candidate could get a shot at forming a coalition, or another round of elections might loom.
Sixty-seven lawmakers supported Herzog giving Eisenkot the mandate. But that’s different from voting for him to actually take power. Here are the paths he could take, and why each one is fraught.
An unlikely alliance?
The first option, which has gained traction in the days since the election, is to cooperate with the ultra-Orthodox parties. These parties have a longstanding alliance with Netanyahu but have served in governments with leaders in the center and left in the past.
There are several indications that such an arrangement may already be taking shape. For starters, United Torah Judaism, one of the two haredi Orthodox parties in the Knesset, told Herzog that it would not endorse either candidate for prime minister – seemingly breaking from the alliance with Netanyahu.
During the consultations with Herzog, the party’s leaders made clear that their support would go to whichever bloc was willing to make concessions on Haredi conscription, including abandoning sanctions against those who refuse to enlist.
If United Torah Judaism with its 7 seats shifts its support from Netanyahu’s coalition to the change bloc, Eisenkot could secure a plurality, provided the Arab parties at least abstain.
Another indication that such an arrangement may be in the works came from Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu party and a member of the change bloc. For years, Lieberman has been best known in Israeli politics for his fierce opposition to the haredi parties.
In a stunning change of course, Lieberman signaled in a Friday post on X that he was open to cooperating with the haredi parties to replace Netanyahu — an arrangement that would have been almost unimaginable until recently.
“The election results require all of us to rethink our approach and recognize that there are no good alternatives or magic solutions before us,” Lieberman wrote. He said politicians would need to “show flexibility and make compromises,” including on the issue of haredi military conscription.
“Our national responsibility requires us to make difficult decisions and be prepared for painful compromises,” he added.
The other leaders of the change bloc have been considerably more vague, focusing on the need to replace Netanyahu without specifying how they intend to do so.
“In recent days, I have been advancing a plan with my partners to establish a national emergency government,” Eisenkot wrote on Friday of the four parties that comprise the opposition bloc coming out of the election.
“The logic behind it is to quickly swear in a government based on the four Zionist parties of change and renewal, with any party or Knesset member who agrees to my four basic principles joining immediately or gradually,” he explained. These principles include recognizing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, accepting the values enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, mandatory military or civilian service, and recognizing Hamas as a terrorist organization.
But in the same post in which he announced his willingness to compromise with the haredi parties, Lieberman also introduced a potential obstacle that could derail the entire effort. The veteran politician ruled out supporting any minority government, raising the number of seats the change bloc needs to secure to 61. That would require the support of both haredi parties, United Torah Judaism and Shas, rather than just the former.
That is a considerably greater challenge. Shas is considered more right-wing than United Torah Judaism, and its leader, Aryeh Deri, has maintained an especially close relationship with Netanyahu for years. The party also endorsed Netanyahu for prime minister during the consultations. So far, there has been no indication that Shas intends to abandon him, casting serious doubt on the viability of a change-bloc government backed by the haredi parties.
And that is far from the only obstacle facing such an arrangement. One of the central themes of the change bloc’s election campaign was the need to enlist haredi men in the military and change the state’s longstanding approach to their exemption from service. One of the bloc’s strongest campaign arguments was Netanyahu’s unpopular alliance with the two haredi parties. Every leader in the bloc, without exception, pledged before the election not to sit with them in government.
Forming a government with the haredi parties, likely involving significant compromises on military conscription, would be seen by many change-bloc voters as a stunning betrayal.
The first signs of a revolt have already emerged within the bloc. Dan Illouz, an elected Knesset member from Lieberman’s party, wrote on Friday that “we cannot give up on a conscription law,” making clear that he would oppose compromises on the issue.
An unprecedented partnership?
Another scenario that could theoretically allow Eisenkot to form a government would be to rely on cooperation with another minority, the Arab parties — an arrangement that has long been controversial in Israeli politics. The 19 seats won by Ra’am and the Joint List, the two Arab parties in the bloc, could provide the additional support needed for a change bloc government.
Eisenkot would need active support from Ra’am, the more moderate of the two Arab parties, which previously joined the coalition that replaced Netanyahu in 2021 and has made integration into Israeli society a central part of its platform, alongside an abstention or support from outside the coalition, i.e. not actively joining the coalition, by the Joint List. The more hard-line Arab party has signaled its willingness to engage in unprecedented cooperation with the change bloc to bring down Netanyahu’s coalition.
But here, too, cooperation is far from straightforward, and the obstacles again come from within the change bloc itself.
In addition to ruling out support for a minority government, including one backed by Ra’am, Lieberman made clear that he would oppose any government relying on the Arab parties. “We must not establish a government that relies on the abstention of the Joint List and Ra’am,” he emphasized in his Friday post.
Without Lieberman’s support, cooperation between the change bloc and the Arab parties appears unlikely. It would require the active support of both Arab parties, rather than just Ra’am, a prospect likely to create significant difficulties for members of the change bloc who may be reluctant to cooperate with a party that many Jewish Israelis view as hostile to the Jewish state and the Zionist project. Israeli media have reported that some lawmakers in the bloc have already conveyed that they would struggle to sit in a government with the Arab parties.
Here, too, such an arrangement would represent a clear breach of a campaign promise made by every leader in the change bloc. Eisenkot himself said in a late September interview with Channel 12 News that the Arab parties, including Ra’am, did not meet his conditions for joining a government. Among those conditions, he said, was recognizing Hamas as a terrorist organization.
A unity government after all?
The third possible route to forming a government would be a national unity coalition between Netanyahu and the change bloc, or at least some of its constituent parties.
So far, all the leaders of the change bloc appear to have categorically ruled out such an arrangement after the election.
In his Friday post, Eisenkot said there was an “urgent need to replace” Netanyahu’s leadership. Lieberman declared that “the Netanyahu era must come to an end.” Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, said the bloc had a “historic responsibility” to send Netanyahu home, while Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who leads B’Yachad, also emphasized the urgency of replacing the current government.
The underlying assumption is that Netanyahu, who will remain prime minister if neither bloc succeeds in forming a new government and new elections are called, would prefer another election to giving up the office.
That would mean any unity arrangement would likely require Netanyahu to remain prime minister, at least initially, under a rotation agreement. Some have speculated that the change bloc’s overtures to the ultra-Orthodox parties are intended to lower Netanyahu’s bargaining power ahead of potential negotiations over a unity government.
For all the momentum behind Eisenkot’s bid to replace Netanyahu, none of the available paths to a governing majority looks straightforward. Securing the mandate may have been the easy part – forming a government could prove much harder.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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