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A stronger shekel has become a pressing problem for Americans building lives in Israel
(JTA) — Yisrael HaBahiyir saved for more than a year to make his dream of moving to Israel come true.
But just weeks after leaving upstate New York, where he had been managing operations for a synagogue, he got a cruel reality check when he transferred his rent money from his American bank account to Western Union to pay his Tel Aviv landlord.
“I sent the same amount I normally transfer and went to pick it up. It was about 300 shekels short. I said something to the cashier, like, ‘I think you gave me the wrong rate,’” HaBahiyir recalled. “That’s when I realized the shekel was strengthening.”
It’s an experience that Americans in Israel — and Israelis who depend on American dollars — are increasingly facing, as the Israeli shekel has strengthened to near-record highs. While the currency’s strength has been good news to many Israelis who worried that years of war would harm the economy, it is having wide-ranging and often challenging ramifications for immigrants and Israeli nonprofits.
Many Americans who move to Israel have chosen to keep some or all of their assets in dollars, whether to hedge against shekel volatility, maintain financial ties to the United States or preserve flexibility should they ever return.
When the dollar is relatively strong compared to the shekel, as was the case for much of the past decade, that arrangement is advantageous. Assets held in dollars go further in an Israeli economy priced in shekels, giving American immigrants greater purchasing power for everyday expenses.
But now, with the shekel trading at less than three to a dollar, its most favorable rate in three decades, anyone trying to make a life in Israel using U.S. dollars is feeling the squeeze.
“Before, $1,500 would get me close to 6,000 shekels and cover my bills,” said Lauren Adilav, who works as a freelance editor for American authors. “I’m relying on money from the U.S. to cover my rent. If the shekel gets any stronger, I don’t know if I can.”
The exchange rate isn’t just punishing Americans in Israel. It’s also putting extreme pressure on the many Israeli charities and organizations that depend on donations from Jews abroad. Aish Hatorah, the Orthodox outreach organization based in Jerusalem, announced last month that it had laid off several employees and twice delayed salary payments to staff amid funding shortfalls driven largely by the strengthening shekel.
Leket Israel, the food rescue organization, has also felt the pressure. Its founder, Joseph Gitler, said the shift had made clear that Israeli nonprofits can no longer rely solely on overseas support. Shmulie Russel, director of Makom LaLelev, told JTA that his nonprofit, which provides direct aid to those recovering from addiction, is facing a similar financial crunch and might soon be forced to find ways to cut expenses.
“This is the biggest conversation happening in the Israeli NGO sector right now — how to deal with the strength of the shekel,” said Leah Aharoni, executive director of the group Our People, which helps Russian-speaking Jews immigrate to Israel. The majority of donations to Our People are made in dollars.
So far, Aharoni said, the organization has delayed making new hires. She anticipates more challenges ahead.
“It has made it absolutely impossible to plan,” she said. “This is happening across the NGO sector. We haven’t been forced to cut programs yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
Aharoni added that she hasn’t wanted to raise the issue with her donors. “Everyone is reluctant to speak out, as donors are already feeling the fatigue of three years of war. Israel just isn’t at the top of their priorities anymore, and now we’re coming back to ask them to make up the difference,” she said. “So we cut where we can.”
The strength of the shekel has come as a surprise to many Israelis, who expected the economy to be weakened by yet another war, this time with Iran, that cratered tourism and heightened instability in daily life. Yet much of the shekel’s gain against the dollar has actually stemmed from the war, as the dollar has weakened and investors have flocked to Israel’s high-tech sector, and particularly its defense industry, which has been buoyed by the conflict.
“The high-tech industry, which historically leads growth in Israel, has been minimally hurt by the war given its reliance on international connections — and it continued to grow even in 2024, the worst year of the war,” said Michel Strawczynski, professor of economics at Hebrew University.
High-tech exports reached $78 billion in 2024, and in the first half of 2025, high-tech accounted for 57% of all Israeli exports, the highest share ever recorded.
For Adilav, who moved from Jerusalem to the West Bank to manage her costs since moving to Israel from upstate New York more than two decades ago, spending in the tech sector is cold comfort.
“The shekel being strong might be good for the 10 billionaires who dream up some app and sell it to Google for $40 billion, but it really affects the rest of us,” she said.
Exporters, meanwhile, have counter-intuitively watched their profit margins dwindle as the shekel gains. They are paid for their products in dollars, so as the shekel strengthens and the dollar weakens, they end up with fewer and fewer shekels to fund their operations and pay workers’ salaries.
The pinch is also coming for Americans who are buying Israeli real estate — a transaction that often happens “on paper,” or with Americans entering a contract to buy an apartment or home that is still being built. Those contracts rarely account for a volatile exchange rate.
“When their upcoming payment might have been 400,000 shekels, now they’re getting hit harder in dollars,” said Nachi Paris, a Jerusalem-based real estate agent who specializes in high-end properties.
Paris said contracts for apartments in development typically prohibit transfers before a buyer takes possession, leaving buyers legally obligated to spend more than they expected when they signed.
He said he believed concerns about antisemitism in the United States could drive middle-class American Jews who cannot afford second properties to make Israel their primary residence instead. But the exchange rate could be an obstacle.
“There’s a point where they can’t afford it,” Paris said. “Right now, it’s still psychological. They can still afford it, and Zionism is involved, and they want to move here, but there comes a point when you can’t afford it.”
With economists warning a stronger shekel can lead to employment drops and other negative consequences, calls have been growing on the Bank of Israel to intervene. But its options are limited, according to Strawczynski, who noted that paused rate cuts and rising inflation from oil prices and flight costs constrain the bank’s ability to act at least until the war ends.
For now, Americans in Israel are paying the price. Judy Diamond moved from New York four years ago with the goal of fully retiring from her career in finance. Not only has she set that aside as an immediate ambition, but she is trying to break her lease in the upscale Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem because she can see that her savings, in dollars, won’t stretch as far as she anticipated.
“I just can’t afford my rent anymore,” Diamond said. “It’s keeping me up at night. It worked for three and a half years, and now the financial aspect of it has fallen apart.”
For Joel Haber, a Jerusalem-based guide who moved to Israel in 2009, the shekel’s rise has come at an especially painful time, when yet another war stopped the flow of travelers who pay hundreds of dollars for his food tours of his adopted city and its famous market.
“The battered dollar has been more of an added insult to the injury of the war,” he said.
Haber always quotes his prices in dollars, even for visitors not from the United States. “It’s a lot less scary to see a price of $300 than 900 shekels, especially for unfamiliar tourists,” he said.
Now, due to the strength of the shekel, Haber has taken what amounts to a 20% pay cut over the last year. He would like to raise his prices, but with the cost of visiting Israel already so high and a 50% reduction in tourist visits compared to 2022, Haber can’t afford to lose any more customers.
“I want to raise my prices so I can still pay my bills,” he said. “But if I look at it from the tourists’ perspective, it’s getting even more difficult for them to afford Israel. It hurts us both.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A stronger shekel has become a pressing problem for Americans building lives in Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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The real anti-Zionists are at the highest levels of the Israeli government
The fact that about half of young American Jews favor replacing Israel with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state is indeed a result of anti-Zionism — but not necessarily their own.
Instead, it’s a consequence of the Israeli government’s drive to radically increase Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. By ensuring that some 5.5 million Arabs increasingly live under Israel authority, Israel’s leaders have created the demographic reality of a binational state.
We can’t blame young American Jews for just acknowledging reality. Instead, it’s time to acknowledge that a movement to undermine Zionism has taken hold within the Israeli government.
If Zionism is the movement for a secure homeland for the Jews, then any forces that reject or undermine that homeland’s legitimacy or security are anti-Zionist. That includes the people whose positions and policies actively undermine the existence of a Jewish homeland.
The democratic Jewish state enshrined in the country’s Declaration of Independence has given way to something that looks a lot more like a herrenvolk democracy, in which democratic rights apply only to the dominant ethnic group. History has many examples of such arrangements, and — spoiler alert — they don’t end well for the majority. French Algeria until 1962, Rhodesia until 1980, South Africa until 1994 — all eventually faced one of three fates: negotiated transition to full democracy, violent collapse or ongoing instability and international isolation. To date, none have stabilized permanently.
Just recently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel will soon control 70% of Gaza, well beyond the 53% allotted to the country in the Gaza ceasefire framework to which Israel is still supposed to adhere.
When an audience member at his talk shouted out that Israel should take 100% of Gaza, Netanyahu responded, “First 70%. We’ll start with that.”
Then there’s the West Bank, where settlers tried to expel 2,000 Palestinians from a village south of Nablus earlier this month, and where settlers and an IDF soldier wounded nine Palestinians on a June 5 rampage through Hawara.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has established at least 59 new illegal outposts in the West Bank — compared to an annual average of seven in the preceding three decades. It has appropriated a record amount of land, and displaced more than 8,700 Palestinians through demolitions and settler violence.
There’s also East Jerusalem, where some Israeli Jews are actively trying to remove 20,000 Palestinians from the Silwan neighborhood.
Each act of seizure, harassment and expulsion is anti-Zionist. These Palestinians will not fade into Egypt or Amman or Los Angeles. Mass expulsion isn’t happening, and neither is mass immigration. A Jewish state is giving way to a state that is effectively equal parts Arab and Jewish — except the Jews have all the rights. As the anti-Zionists in the Israeli government seize control of more Palestinian land, they undo all of Zionism’s hard-fought gains. A nondemocratic Jewish state will be neither safe nor secure.
If this sounds like diasporic Jewish garment-rending over morality and Jewish values, it’s not. The people who live in a fantasy world are not those who point out the necessity of finding a way toward coexistence, but those who think Israel can survive and flourish if it trashes its founding principles and its democracy.
Logic and history are not on Israel’s side. No minority- or bare-majority-rule system over a large disenfranchised population has proved durable. I know from my many conversations with my fellow Jews who support a “Greater Israel” incorporating Gaza and the West Bank — or just want to ignore or get rid of Palestinians — that they think time, power or God will bend the iron laws of demography in Israel’s favor. History would beg to differ.
But what about the Palestinians, you might ask: don’t they bear responsibility? For decades of rejectionism and terror? For elevating kleptocratic and ineffective leaders? For glorifying violence and cheering on Hamas in its slaughter, kidnapping and rape of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023? For wanting, as many of them do, an end to Jewish sovereignty in the land?
Yes. Palestinian rejectionism and embrace of violence has been a disaster for Jews, as well as for generations of Palestinians. But those facts don’t change the demographic reality.
Of Americans Jews under 35, 51% support a binational state, according to a recent Jewish Voters Research Center poll. What they see is that there are 15 million people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. About half of them are not Jews, much less Zionists, and one government is not just intent on holding and controlling all that territory, but well on its way to doing so. If a binational state already exists in practice, the best hope for the region, these young people are saying, is to accept that fact, and direct all our efforts toward making that state just.
They may be completely mistaken about the chances of that happening peacefully or even in their lifetimes, but they’re not the ones who got us to this point. The ongoing settlement of territories with a vast non-Jewish majority was the most anti-Zionist thing Israel could have done, and continues to do, and yet here we are.
The Jewish communal obsession with policing who is and isn’t a Zionist misses the larger point. The State of Israel exists. What’s in question is its character — whether it will be democratic and secure, or calcify into something modern history has repeatedly shown the world rejects.
Land comes with people, and demographics is destiny. A government intent on holding and controlling all the territory between the river and the sea is undermining Zionism from within.
The post The real anti-Zionists are at the highest levels of the Israeli government appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Odessa’ wants to use your empathy against you
The short film Odessa begins with what its director Harald Swinkels calls an “empathy trap.”
The film opens with a German couple and their young son hiking across the Dolomites; the woman seems anxious, the man much more energetic. They approach a church, where they are greeted suspiciously by the twins who take care of it, until they say the passcode: “Odessa.” They later try the codeword again with an innkeeper — but this time they are sent running as she calls on the village to attack them. It’s a heart-pounding scene as the family the viewer has been so closely tied to runs for their lives from a loud, angry mob.
Interspersed through the scenes of the family’s flight are blurry white and black clips of a hazy figure approaching a camera. Even with the obscured shot, the viewer can make out train tracks and recognize the setting as a concentration camp, a flashback to the world they’re leaving. It feels like your typical Holocaust film, showing the risks Jewish refugees faced at every turn and the way the trauma of the camps haunted them.
At the end of the film’s 20-minute run, however, the shadowy figure finally comes into focus. It’s the husband, but not in the striped clothes of a camp prisoner: He’s wearing an SS uniform and ordering twins to be placed in a separate line. He’s Josef Mengele.
“People take first impressions as character,” Swinkels told me in an interview. “That’s not character. You should look behind that.”
Contemporary politics inspired Swinkels, the founder of the Dutch production company Exosphere, to make the film.
“One of my most conservative friends started arguing that ‘these people’ should be kept in their own region, as he called it, and certainly not taken in by us,” Swinkels said, of debates over Syrian immigrants in the Netherlands. “And then we had this discussion about if you would feel the same about these refugees, if they look like him and me.”
Wanting to make a film about Northwestern Europeans fleeing led Swinkels to think about World War II. After an election in Denmark resulted in a right-wing shift in politics, he also became interested in exposing how charisma can hide someone’s darker nature.
Swinkels had long been interested in Josef Mengele, but when he discovered the Nazi’s duplicitous relationship with the kids in Auschwitz — survivors have testified that Mengele would bring them candy in order to gain their trust — that solidified him as the main character. The film features a quote from a Jewish prisoner forced to work for Mengele, Miklós Nyiszli, stating that the doctor “was capable of being so kind to the children” as he prepared to torture them and send them to their deaths.
“Arendt once called it the banality of evil,” Swinkels said. “But with Mengele, it’s even more dangerous because it’s the charm of evil.”
The bread crumbs leading to the family’s true identity are there for history buffs. Over the course of the film, we slowly learn their names — Josef, Irene, and Reif. “Odessa” was the American name for Nazi’s underground escape networks, although there is no historical consensus that this term was used by the Nazis or was an actual organization.
But the clues are easy enough to miss — by the time the audience learns these details, we have already formed assumptions that the protagonists of the story are likely Jews or members of another group persecuted by the Nazis.
The fact that Mengele had darker features and his wife had fairer ones adds another misleading layer. At one point, the wife abandons the journey and insists that it’ll be safer for the son to stay with her while the husband flees. It seems as though this is because she is Aryan and the husband isn’t. But, as it turns out, it’s because he is a wanted war criminal.
The short film also nods to a few other historical figures. One of the brothers at the church is named Alois, in reference to Alois Hudal, an Austrian Catholic Bishop who was a Nazi sympathizer and aided in the escape of several Nazi leaders, including Adolf Eichmann. He did not have a twin brother in real life, but this detail alludes to Mengele’s fascination with twins.
The inn-keeper who sets the village after the family, Frau Scholl, is named after Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose Nazi-resistance group, hinted at by white roses outside of her house in the film. They even shot the film in the Dolomites, the same mountain range Mengele crossed during his escape.
Swinkels noted that details like this can be easy to miss. “But I think you can still feel it, that we put so much detail in the film to make all these kinds of historical references,” he said.
He hopes that the film makes viewers think more carefully about charismatic figures.
“History has taught us that monsters don’t come dressed as monsters,” Swinkels said. “They come as protectors, visionaries, or loving fathers. And by the time we find that truth, it’s most often too late.”
“If a viewer walks out of Odessa and looks a little bit harder at the next person who charms them, and even better at the next person they’re about to vote for, then the film will have fulfilled its purpose.”
The short film Odessa is showing at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 13.
The post ‘Odessa’ wants to use your empathy against you appeared first on The Forward.
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Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine
(JTA) — Graham Platner, the anti-Israel progressive who took Maine’s political establishment by storm this spring, has officially prevailed in his state’s Democratic Senate primary.
Multiple news outlets called the race within 90 minutes of the polls closing, with only a fraction of the votes counted.
The victory was seen as a foregone conclusion after Platner’s primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Still, the final tally suggested that not all Mainers had embraced the political neophyte whose campaign was dogged by controversies, including the revelation that Platner had a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades until he drew criticism for it on the campaign trail. He denied knowing it was a Nazi symbol.
Mills, who remained on the ballot, drew about one in five votes in the first 10% of ballots counted, according to the tally published by The New York Times.
The result sets Platner up to face off in November against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has received substantial support from pro-Israel donors. The latest polls suggest a tight race.
“I’m humbled and proud to officially be your Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate to take on Susan Collins and the billionaire class she represents. Together, we will win this seat back for working Mainers,” Platner tweeted on Tuesday night. “Thank you, Maine.”
While Democratic leaders officially threw their support behind Platner after Mills halted her campaign, many of them remained circumspect about him. Their balancing act grew more delicate in the final days of the primary race, as Platner drew allegations of antisemitism over his characterization of donations channeled to Collins by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and as he faced new allegations of misconduct toward women. (He said he had been a “far from perfect boyfriend” during some periods of his life but denied engaging in misconduct.)
Now, top Democrats will have to decide how hard to gun for Platner, who has become a standard-bearer in the party’s anti-Israel shift at a time when the chamber is narrowly divided.
They are already facing pressure to disavow him. “Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America, and every Senate Democrat propping up Platner’s campaign, should be ashamed,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement after the polls closed. “Their continued support of Graham Platner, who wore the symbol of Hitler’s SS on his chest for 18 years is an outrage. Schumer must withdraw his support immediately.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine appeared first on The Forward.
