Uncategorized
A week into ceasefire, Israelis’ storied resilience is tested by questions about what was gained
(JTA) — A week into the ceasefire in the Iran war, Israelis have settled into their old normal — sort of.
“Is anyone else completely struggling with the expectation that now that there is the ceasefire we are supposed to go back to work like nothing happened?” one mother wrote in a popular working parents Facebook group.
She described weeks of sleep punctuated by sirens and working from home while caring for children — then being told to return to the office immediately.
Children, too, were sent back to school just hours after the ceasefire began, after weeks of canceled classes and scattershot online learning. Cafes and beaches filled once again with ostensibly carefree Israelis, sometimes in sight of damage from Iranian missiles.
Behind the veneer of Israel’s famed resilience, darker feelings are simmering.
“We all have the jitters. PTSD. We need time to process the insanity. Never knowing if we can shower or go to the bathroom isn’t normal,” one parent responded in the Facebook group. Another asked, “Are we just supposed to pretend the past six weeks never happened?”
Then an even more pessimistic note crept in. “Can we all just get a paid spa day while our kids are in school before we go back to our bomb shelters?” one parent wrote. Another added, reflecting a view widely held across the country, “I’m trying to do as much as I can now before the war starts up again.”
Such is the condition of Israelis during the ceasefire foisted upon them by the United States. They are relieved that — at least in the majority of the country where Hezbollah rockets, still flying from Lebanon, do not reach — they no longer have to plan their lives around proximity to bomb shelters, and that restrictions on gatherings have been lifted. Many are embracing a return to normalcy.
But their feelings also include little sense of victory or stability, as well as a great deal of dread about what’s to come.
For good reason. Even as U.S. President Donald Trump says he believes he will reach a deal with Iran to end the war permanently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is emphasizing that he is ready to resume the fighting.
Signs of confidence about continued calm are fraying. Plans for Independence Day celebrations next week were reinstated and then swiftly scrapped again in multiple cities, not only in the north, where Hezbollah fire has continued despite the ceasefire, but also in southern cities such as Ashkelon.
Three-quarters of Israelis expect fighting with Iran to resume within the next year, a poll by the Institute for National Security Studies found.
Many Israelis believe a return to conflict with Iran, whose Islamic Republic regime, which remains intact, has sworn to destroy Israel, is needed. The same poll found that 61% of Israelis oppose the current ceasefire deal, while 76% say they believe negotiations underway now will not achieve the war’s stated objectives, including dismantling Iran’s ballistic missile system, halting its nuclear program and ending the rule of the ayatollahs.
Another poll, by the Kan public broadcaster, found that only a quarter of Israelis believed the United States and Israel won the war, versus 58% who said they hadn’t. A third, by Agam Labs and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found that three-quarters of Israelis see the war so far as a failure — and that the ceasefire represents a U.S. concession to Iran.
For Israelis who bore the steep cost of the war in sleepless nights, lost work, terror and death, the tradeoff is hard to accept.
Merav Leviten, who works in high tech and who spent weeks running with her children to an outdoor bomb shelter, said that during the war she had believed the disruption would lead to a decisive outcome.
“It was one thing to be sitting in the shelters being like, oh my gosh, it’s going to be worth it, the Iranian people are going to be able to be free, I’m going to be able to visit Tehran, there’s going to be a whole new order in the Middle East,” she said. “Sure, yeah, I’ll sit in the shelters, I’ll do double time with childcare and work, but it’s all for a great purpose. And now you’re just kind of like, what?”
Paul Mirbach, a founder of Kibbutz Tuval in northern Israel, where he still lives, said that unlike earlier ceasefires that brought a sense of relief, this one left him feeling “less safe and more exposed” than before the war began, capturing a wider frustration among Israelis who endured weeks of disruption and casualties and are now asking what, exactly, was achieved.
Mirbach said he believes a confrontation with Iran was ultimately unavoidable, but argued that the timing was driven in part by political considerations by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the expectation that a military victory would translate into political capital ahead of an election. In doing so, he said, the government ignored the reality that Israeli society was already exhausted and the home front insufficiently prepared.
“We needed time to recover and recharge our batteries,” he said, pointing to worn-out reservists, declining morale and businesses still battered from more than two years of war.
“They have taken all we could throw at them and they’re still standing,” he said of Iran, adding that Tehran now appears less deterred and more capable of inflicting damage, with the added risk of retaliation for the killing of senior leadership including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He also pointed to Iran’s ability to disrupt global trade through the Strait of Hormuz as a sign that the strategic threat remains intact.
Others expressed a more conflicted view. Robert Strazynski, an American immigrant who runs a website about online poker, described the military campaign itself as both justified and necessary, arguing that Israel and the United States had achieved significant gains over the past six weeks and that the operation marked a long-overdue move from a reactive posture to a more proactive effort to change the trajectory of the region. He described the campaign as “critically necessary” to address a threat that had been allowed to fester.
“We aren’t warmongers, but if those who seek our annihilation won’t let us live in peace, then we take our destiny into our own hands, and will achieve peace the hard way,” he said.
But he warned that ending the fighting without a decisive victory risked rendering those gains temporary. Like Mirbach, he described the ceasefire as “kicking the can down the road.”
Whatever the prognosis for the current war and future threats from Iran, it’s clear that six weeks of fighting and disruption are complicating any effort to return to normalcy.
Cathy Lawi, a trauma specialist whose organization, EmotionAid, has been working with families, medical staff and first responders since the start of the war, said the effects are not primarily psychological but physiological. After weeks of disrupted sleep, repeated alarms and sustained threat, the body does not simply switch off, she said, leaving the nervous system in a state of heightened alert even as daily routines resume.
“Stress accumulates,” she said. “There is no way to reset after danger. We are constantly in a state of alertness. We’re getting used to not knowing what’s going to happen to us.”
At the same time, Lawi pointed to what she described as Israelis’ ability to hold opposing realities at once. Within hours of the ceasefire taking effect, cafes and bars in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were packed, as Israelis rushed back into public life — a capacity for rebound she described as remarkable.
“We find relative safety in a place of non-safety,” she said. She attributed that response in part to Israelis’ strong social ties, with people relying on one another for support.
Yet the threshold for coping has dropped sharply among those with pre-existing mental health conditions, a population that studies suggest has grown in the past three years, according to psychiatrist Yotam Ginati, who described a surge in acute cases at his clinic in Tel Aviv.
For much of the rest of the population, he said, the load is more likely to be suppressed than treated.
“We’re gaslighting our own distress,” Ginati said. “There’s sun outside, life goes on, and occasionally we run to the shelter. But we’re living with constant existential anxiety, and we keep pushing it away. That may be unavoidable, but it has a price.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A week into ceasefire, Israelis’ storied resilience is tested by questions about what was gained appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
The post Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
The post At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’
The first tragedy of the U.S.S. Liberty attack is that it happened at all. The second is that Israel’s critics have weaponized it to spread hate.
When Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the House floor on June 8, the 59th anniversary of the attack, and called for a Congressional probe into the incident, he wasn’t seriously trying to bring the truth of some long-buried historical secret to light. Massie, who in 14 years never once brought up the U.S.S. Liberty on the House floor, was using the latest cudgel in the Israel-haters’ arsenal to level one last official blow at a country he loathes.
“I’ve got a call to action for everybody here,” said Massie, speaking of attack survivors who were in the audience, “Honor these individuals. Quit ignoring that they exist. Let’s have an investigation. It’s long overdue.”
Let’s put aside the fact that there have been numerous official investigations into what exactly happened on June 8, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 American service members.
These investigations concluded that the tragedy was a friendly-fire incident. The Israelis initially mistook the Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel, for an Egyptian warship. After the smoke cleared, they accepted responsibility, apologized and paid $12 million in compensation to the victims.
Of all the explanations, it’s perhaps the least satisfying but the most logical. During the Vietnam War, happening at the same time, an estimated 11% to 15% of casualties were from friendly fire.
Massie’s call for a new investigation would be more believable if he then didn’t go on to recite the alternative one-sided narrative of the incident long pushed by some survivors and now taken up with gusto by Israel haters Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others.
To them the attack was deliberate: The Israelis ignored the large American flag the Liberty was flying and began shooting.
“It was intentional murder by the country of Israel,” said Massie on the House floor, “either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
What Massie and his fellow conspiracy theorists are alleging is a crime, but none of them has sufficiently proven a motive. Why would Israel attack the ship of its most important and powerful ally?
The false flag theory — the idea that Israel wanted to sink the Liberty, blame Egypt or the Soviet Union for it and draw America into the war — makes no sense.
The war was all but won by June 8. Moreover, as the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren relates in Six Days of War, the Israelis actually stopped firing initially when they suspected the ship was American.
The Israelis sent helicopters to investigate, but heavy smoke obscured the ship. Meanwhile, as Israeli torpedo boats closed in, a U.S. Navy crewman, perhaps not hearing his commander’s orders, opened fire.
The Israelis, now convinced it was an enemy ship, unleashed torpedoes, killing 25 Americans.
Massie left all this out of his narrative. He quoted then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who said at the time, “the attack was, quite literally incomprehensible,” implying that a murky conspiracy underlay it all.
But he didn’t include the rest of what Rusk said: That what happened was “an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.”
In other words, Rusk’s full quote doesn’t suggest intention, but gross carelessness, which is a far cry from premeditated murder. It was chaos, miscommunication, uncertainty, incompetence, fear — the fog of war.
But to Massie and others, there’s no need to establish a coherent motive for why Israel attacked its harmless friends, because in their minds that’s just who Israelis are.
If Massie wants another investigation, fine. But I find it hard to believe that any investigation that doesn’t find Israel guilty of murder in the first will ever satisfy him or the people for whom “Remember the Liberty” is shorthand for “Israel is evil.”
The post ‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’ appeared first on The Forward.
