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After weeks of silence, NY Rep. Ritchie Torres says he opposes Israeli judicial overhaul
(New York Jewish Week) — Rep. Ritchie Torres, the Bronx Democrat known for being an outspoken supporter of Israel, has issued his first statement on the country’s proposed judicial overhaul, writing that he is “pleased to see that the ‘judicial reforms’ have been put on pause.”
The statement, published last week as a letter in the Riverdale Press, a newspaper in his district, followed a meeting with a group of constituents led by an American Israeli. It was titled “Let cooler minds prevail here.”
For weeks, Torres was silent on the overhaul, even as other Democratic pro-Israel stalwarts in Congress made statements and signed letters opposing the legislation, which would sap much of the power and independence of the Israeli Supreme Court. Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended the legislation in the face of massive protests. It is due to return to the table next month, though what it will look like is unclear.
“No legislature should have the ability to override a supreme court by a mere majority,” Torres wrote in the letter, which came out on April 7, the second day of Passover. “Even as a legislator, I recognize that the raw political power of a legislature should never be left unchecked.”
He added, “I hope the present government will negotiate in good faith a compromise that preserves the independence of the judiciary.”
The letter was published days after Torres met with the group of constituents in his Bronx office on March 31. The meeting was organized by Ron Wegsman, a dual American and Israeli citizen who lives in Riverdale, a neighborhood in Torres’ district with a large Jewish and Israeli population.
“We came to him,” Wegsman said. “We got together and asked to meet with him. It was a very nice meeting. He was interested in what we had to say. We asked him to make a statement and he said that he would be happy to do so.”
Wegsman added that he hoped for a statement from Torres given the close ties many constituents in Riverdale have to Israel.
“What’s happening in Israel directly affects us,” Wegsman said. “It’s not something that’s happening on the other side of the world in some foreign country. Undermining of Israeli democracy would affect our families. We felt that this is something that is actually a concern of [Torres’] as a representative in the U.S. Congress, and that’s why we turned to him.”
Torres’ statement on the overhaul comes after weeks in which he refrained from opining on the legislation, even as other New York City Democrats with long pro-Israel records spoke out.
Roughly a month ago, two letters opposing the overhaul were put out by Democratic members of Congress – one of which urged President Joe Biden “to use all diplomatic tools available to prevent Israel’s current government from further damaging the nation’s democratic institutions.” Torres was not among the 92 Democrats to sign it. Another letter came solely from the chamber’s Jewish Democrats.
Wegsman said that despite his public silence, Torres told the group “that any time someone asked him, he made clear his support for an independent judiciary in Israel.”
The New York Jewish Week had reached out to Torres’ office multiple times in recent months for a comment on the judiciary reform, and did not receive a response. Torres likewise did not respond to a request for comment on his April 6 letter.
According to the campaign finance database Open Secrets, the American Israel Public Affairs Committe, the pro-Israel lobby, is a top contributor to Torres. While other major American Jewish groups have publicly criticized the judicial overhaul, AIPAC has stayed relatively quiet. In response to Netanyahu’s pause on the legislation, it praised Israel’s “showcasing its passionate engagement in the democratic process to determine the policies that will guide their country,” but it did not sign on to a collective statement by multiple groups praising the legislative pause.
In his letter, Torres also stuck to his pro-Israel bona fides praising Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system — and hinted at why he may have declined previous calls to join colleagues in criticizing the judicial reform. Support for Iron Dome “should, and must, remain unconditional,” he wrote.
“The usual detractors have been rushing to exploit the current controversy in Israel as an excuse for conditioning aid,” Torres said. “I reject these cynical attempts emphatically.”
Wegsman said Torres’ sentiments on the judicial reform appeared to be genuine.
“We said to him, ‘We think you need to be more proactive and actually come out with a statement,’” Wegsman said. “He was very welcoming to us. We didn’t have to convince him. He said that it was clear that the override clause was totally unacceptable. We didn’t feel we needed to pressure him. It might be that he just had to hear it from constituents.”
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The post After weeks of silence, NY Rep. Ritchie Torres says he opposes Israeli judicial overhaul appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel
(JTA) — Hezbollah appears to have rejected a ceasefire that the United States brokered between Israel and Lebanon, where the Iranian proxy is based.
The deal reportedly would have allowed Israel to remain in southern Lebanon, where it has established a buffer zone, but not permit any attacks in Beirut unless Hezbollah attacked Israel within its own borders. It would also have required Hezbollah fighters to leave the buffer zone.
A top Hezbollah leader said accepting a demand to leave southern Lebanon would amount to “surrender” for the group.
“What we are concerned about is an end to the aggression, ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal,” Secretary-General Naim Qassem said in a televised statement on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. “We did not make any commitment to any party to stop resisting as long as there is occupation.”
Dozens of Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, which Hezbollah is increasingly prosecuting with the use of drones.
The rejection comes as the U.S. House of Representatives voted to rebuke President Donald Trump and his war on Iran on Wednesday, narrowly passing a resolution that limits Trump’s power to continue the war without congressional approval.
Four Republicans voted with Democrats on the bill, in a sign of how opposition to the war, which Trump launched jointly with Israel in February, is crossing party lines ahead of high-stakes midterm elections in the United States.
The bill would not require presidential signoff but is seen as unlikely to substantively change Trump’s handling of the war, which he has insisted does not require congressional approval.
Trump called the vote “meaningless” in a post on Truth Social on Thursday morning.
“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing.”
The bill now goes to the Senate, where a similar measure has advanced in recent weeks, also with support from a handful of Republicans. It comes at a delicate time, as an uncertain ceasefire struck in early April has now stretched on without a resolution for longer than active hostilities unfolded. Trump has failed to achieve the terms for a deal to permanently end the war that he said he wanted, and this week said he thought the constant negotiations had grown “very boring.” Hezbollah’s apparent rejection of a ceasefire deal is another setback.
Iran has continued to battle during its ceasefire with the United States, though not against Israel: On Wednesday, it struck Kuwait’s main airport, killing one and injuring 60.
Also on Wednesday, Trump confirmed reports that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “f—ing crazy” during a call on Monday in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to strike a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Trump told a New York Post podcast that he was “a little perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon” but that he liked Netanyahu and worked well with him.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York
Each year around this time, the Social Security Administration releases a list of the most popular baby names for the past year. This year, New York state’s list includes the Yiddish name Gitty, as well as five other traditional Ashkenazi names: Chana, Chaya, Rivka, Chaim and Moshe.
According to this interactive list in the Times Union, 43 of every million babies in the U.S. were given the name Gitty in the past six years.
The vast majority of these babies were apparently born in either Yiddish-speaking Hasidic families or in non-Yiddish speaking Haredi families (often referred to as “Yeshivish”) who maintain the tradition of giving their children Biblical and other traditional Jewish names, often after a deceased relative.
Although some people may be surprised to hear a Yiddish name like Gitty making the list, it lines up with the most recent statistics on language use. According to this study, in households with children aged 5 and under, Yiddish ranks as the third most common home language in New York (spoken by roughly 3% of young children), trailing only English and Spanish.
It also makes sense in light of the most recent demographic breakdown of Jewish families in the New York area. According to this 2023 UJA study, Orthodox families represent about 19% of Jewish households (approx. 430,000 individuals, including children) — a group that’s growing rapidly due to higher birth rates and younger average ages, with about two-thirds identifying as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and the rest as Modern Orthodox.
The name Gitty is a variant of the name Gitl, which means “good” in Yiddish. Why then are these babies called Gitty instead of Gitl? This is part of a trend that began years ago, when Haredi children’s names adopted a “y” at the end, apparently mimicking the old American tradition of ending children’s names with a “y” (think Tommy instead of Thomas). As a result, Rivka became Rivky; Moshe (or Moishe) became Moishy and Gitl became Gitty.
The post A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump’s humiliation of Netanyahu marks a sea change in the US-Israel relationship
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s carefully cultivated image as a master of geopolitics is on life support after reports that President Donald Trump on Monday cursed and mocked him in a phone call, calling him “f- – – ing crazy” and ordering him to stand down in Lebanon.
In response, Netanyahu’s opponents and even some of his former allies are accusing him of mortgaging Israel’s sovereignty and reducing the country to strategic dependence on Washington. They’re right. Trump is treating Netanyahu less like the leader of a sovereign ally and more like a subordinate expected to obey instructions.
As a result, Israel suddenly looks less like an independent regional power and more like an American client state.
A rupture long in the making
The roots of this humiliation stretch back months, to the beginning of the Iran war itself. In early March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that the United States entered the war because Israel was preparing to strike Iran and the White House feared that Tehran would retaliate against American forces afterward.
Ever since, American officials, including Trump himself, have disseminated the narrative of the war as a preventive intervention designed partly to manage the consequences of expected Israeli escalation. But as the war has dragged on, becoming exactly the kind of open-ended Middle Eastern entanglement Trump once promised to avoid, the public narrative has instead increasingly become that Netanyahu had talked Trump into a war that backfired, making Trump look foolish.
This week came the payback.
On Monday, Netanyahu publicly threatened major strikes on the Shiite neighborhoods of Beirut if Hezbollah attacks continued. Iran responded by suspending ceasefire talks, apparently gambling that Trump wanted an exit ramp badly enough to restrain Israel rather than risk a wider regional explosion. The gamble worked.
In the Monday call, Trump reportedly ordered Israel to cease fire immediately, demanding to know “what the f – – -” Netanyahu was doing, accusing Israel of causing escalation, and declaring — incorrectly — that he had “kept Netanyahu out of jail,” a reference to his efforts to persuade President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu in his ongoing corruption trial.
Intentional humiliation
American presidents have pressured Israeli leaders before. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion withdrew from the Sinai peninsula in 1957 under heavy pressure from then-President Dwight Eisenhower after the Suez Crisis. Washington pressured Israel to stop military operations during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and again during the 1982 Lebanon War.
Yet previous confrontations unfolded differently. American presidents pressured Israeli leaders privately while preserving the appearance of mutual respect between allies. Even when Washington prevailed, both governments generally tried to avoid publicly humiliating each other.
This time the humiliation was part of the strategy — a change that bodes ill for Israel’s standing as an independent regional power.
Trump wants Tehran, Beirut, Riyadh, Doha, Cairo, and every other Middle Eastern capital to understand that he controls the pace of escalation, and that Netanyahu obeyed when ordered to stand down.
That public spectacle explains the intensity of the Israeli backlash.
“There has never been an Israeli prime minister who accepted such a humiliating demand,” former military chief and current prime ministerial candidate Gadi Eisenkot wrote on social media. Former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, whose coalition poses a major threat to Netanyahu’s control in upcoming elections, effectively slammed Netanyahu as allowing the U.S. to dictate Israeli military policy, with Bennett accusing Netanyahu of running “a government that has lost control of Israeli sovereignty.”
Even the conservative Jerusalem Post sounded the alarm. Israel had “found itself in the humiliating position of having to seek American approval to defend its own citizens,” the paper argued in an editorial. “The United States is now actively restraining Israel from taking decisive military action.”
Netanyahu’s image in tatters
For years, Netanyahu cultivated an image of himself as uniquely capable of managing Israel’s relationship with the U.S. while preserving Israeli strategic independence. His supporters portrayed him as a geopolitical virtuoso who understood American politics better than any rival and who could navigate complex power dynamics while defending Israeli interests.
Now that image lies in ruins.
Over the last decade, Netanyahu systematically alienated nearly every pillar of Israel’s traditional support structure aside from the American right.
He offended European governments through relentless settlement expansion, confrontations with the European Union, and contempt in response to liberal Western criticism. Europe remains Israel’s largest trading partner, yet Israel now faces the growing possibility of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and even challenges to its associated nation status with the European Union.
Then came the rupture with the American Democrats.
In 2015, Netanyahu traveled to Washington to campaign openly against then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran before a joint session of Congress. Strategically, that marked a turning point. Netanyahu transformed support for Israel from a matter of bipartisan American consensus into an increasingly polarized issue.
Afterward, he tied himself even more tightly to the Republican right, and especially Trump. He cultivated the impression that he exercised unusual influence over Trump himself, encouraging supporters to believe that he had effectively turned the White House into an extension of his own political operation.
That illusion has now collapsed spectacularly.
The final and perhaps most reckless step came when reports emerged that Netanyahu sought Trump’s intervention regarding his corruption trial. Even without confirming those reports’ accuracy, the perception that an Israeli prime minister already dependent on Washington for military and diplomatic backing was now personally dependent on an American president for political survival was devastating.
This week confirmed that dependence now defines the U.S.-Israel relationship. Netanyahu, the supposed master statesman, has maneuvered himself — and Israel — into a strategic cul-de-sac. Now the question is: Is there any way out?
The post Trump’s humiliation of Netanyahu marks a sea change in the US-Israel relationship appeared first on The Forward.