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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
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Netanyahu called for unity. His anti-Arab speech to the Knesset may have made it impossible.
Benjamin Netanyahu stood before Israel’s newly sworn-in Knesset this week and called for a national unity government. By the time he finished speaking, he may have made such a government under his leadership all but impossible.
At an occasion associated with festivity, democratic continuity and national purpose, Netanyahu denounced members of the Israeli Arab parties as “terror supporters, haters of Israel” and declared that Ra’am and the Joint List “both agree that the Jewish state must be destroyed.” He questioned his opponents for contemplating a government dependent on their support, asking whether they were prepared to entrust the country’s fate to people bent, in his mind, on its destruction.
Neither Arab party’s platform calls for the destruction of Israel, although the Joint List certainly does challenge elements of the Zionist consensus. Netanyahu’s speech portrayed them as existential enemies, which prompted heckling from former premier Naftali Bennett, part of the leadership team forming a coalition with Gadi Eisenkot. And then Netanyahu called for national unity – as if the one-fifth of Israelis who are Arab citizens are not part of the nation.
Whatever his intentions, the effect was to remind a substantial part of the Israeli electorate why it has become so difficult to contemplate another government headed by Netanyahu.
“I sat and listened to the outrageous, divisive, hateful and disgraceful speech by the outgoing prime minister,” said Eisenkot, the former military chief who was tapped by President Isaac Herzog to form a new government after winning the recommendation of 67 out of 120 Knesset members. “I am even more convinced that he is unfit to remain in office for even one more minute … His continued rule is dividing Israel and endangering its security.”
Political history is full of speeches and interviews that acquire a significance far beyond the circumstances in which they were delivered. Sometimes they capture a leader’s finest qualities. Sometimes they expose weaknesses that opponents had long suspected. And sometimes they become defining moments precisely because they reveal a politician’s lack of self-awareness.
Hillary Clinton’s reference to Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” became an enduring symbol, evidence of the liberal condescension critics suspected of her. Mitt Romney’s privately recorded remarks about the “47 percent” of Americans he regarded as dependent on government came to encapsulate perceptions of an out-of-touch plutocrat. George W. Bush’s appearance beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner became a monument to the premature triumphalism of the first Iraq War. Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “the lady’s not for turning” crystallized the determination that admirers celebrated and critics considered inflexibility.
A few words in a speech can come to define an entire political personality – and Netanyahu already has one such speech to his credit.
In March 2015, he addressed a joint session of the United States Congress to warn against the nuclear agreement the Obama administration was negotiating with Iran. It was a dramatic performance, greeted enthusiastically by Republicans and regarded by many Democrats as an extraordinary intervention in an American political dispute. The lasting significance was the deterioration of Israel’s relationship with Democrats – or at least Netanyahu’s.
Eleven years later, Netanyahu may have delivered another defining speech, this time with consequences much closer to home.
This week’s setting was the swearing-in of Israel’s 26th Knesset. Netanyahu had lost his parliamentary majority, backed by just 53 of 120 seats. Eisenkot had already begun coalition negotiations, and the possibility of a broad national unity arrangement remained part of the political conversation – until, it seems, the speech.
Netanyahu invoked Israel’s grave security challenges, particularly the threat from Iran, to argue that only a unity government could meet the moment. But he grounded that appeal with a vicious attack on the Arab parties and on those prepared to cooperate with them.
His rhetoric will undoubtedly resonate with some Israelis. Many Jewish Israelis, including some who voted for opposition parties, are uncomfortable with the prospect of a government dependent on Arab political support. That discomfort is not simply racism, it reflects a complicated history in which Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel share a country while often identifying differently with the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Arab Israelis share ethnic, cultural, religious and familial ties with Palestinians and with populations across a region whose states have, at various times, fought wars against Israel. In a country that has lived with existential fears since its founding, such ties have sometimes generated suspicions of divided loyalties. Objectively, they could be suspected of being a classic potential fifth column that works covertly with Israel’s surrounding enemies, who share their religion and ethnicity.
But the actual record of Arab citizens’ participation in Israeli society tells a very different story from the one Netanyahu presented or what fear and conspiratorial thinking could suggest.
Arab Israelis are deeply embedded in the country’s institutions, professions and daily life. They constitute roughly half of Israel’s pharmacists and about a quarter of its doctors and nurses. Arab citizens have served as judges, including on the Supreme Court. Justice Salim Joubran, an Arab Christian, chaired Israel’s Central Elections Committee in 2015.
They are integral to the functioning of the Israeli state. And despite decades of conflict, the overwhelming majority of Arab citizens have pursued their lives and political aspirations through civic institutions rather than violence or subversion. Cases of terrorism or disloyalty have been extremely rare.
I am a frequent guest, interviewee and host at events run by Bokra, an NGO and news website run by Ghada Zhoabi, a champion of peace, integration and coexistence. I thought of this fine Israeli Arab leader, presently celebrating a successful get-out-the-vote campaign, besmirched by her prime minister.
There is a crucial distinction between rejecting Zionism as a political ideology, advocating a state of equal citizenship, supporting Palestinian national aspirations and seeking Israel’s violent destruction. Netanyahu’s speech erased those distinctions.
Indeed, Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, has gone further than many Arab politicians before him in seeking practical accommodation with the Israeli political system. His party joined the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, an unprecedented step for an independent Arab party. Abbas has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to pursuing his constituents’ interests through Israeli politics. And he has accepted Israel as a Jewish state.
Responding to Netanyahu’s accusations, Abbas declared that his party was not seeking to establish either an Islamist or an Arab state in Israel. “We have defined ourselves within the State of Israel as citizens,” he said, reiterating his support for peace and a two-state solution. He also emphasized that his party condemns terrorism. He said the speech created danger to his life and to his family.
For a prime minister to respond to such overtures by portraying Arab political participation as a threat to the state’s very existence is to throw a grenade into a powder keg.
And that explains, in part, why the reaction to the speech was so swift and harsh.
Eisenkot’s Yashar party had scheduled a meeting with Likud representatives to explore coalition possibilities. Following Netanyahu’s speech, Eisenkot canceled it, describing the address as divisive and inappropriate for the ceremonial opening of the Knesset. Likud responded that Netanyahu stood by his remarks but remained committed to national unity.
Even Aviv Bushinsky, a former Netanyahu communications adviser, expressed bewilderment. He contrasted the performance with Netanyahu’s conciliatory appeal for unity in 2019 and recounted receiving calls from foreign ambassadors who had attended this week’s ceremony and wondered what they had just witnessed.
National unity requires something that cannot be measured in parliamentary seats: mutual legitimacy and a minimum of trust. Political adversaries must believe that cooperation will not become another instrument of their humiliation or marginalization.
For many Israelis who voted for parties opposed to Netanyahu, the central obstacle is not necessarily Likud, its voters or even its policy preferences. It is Netanyahu himself.
Years of political conflict, disputes over democratic institutions and the unresolved reckoning over Oct. 7 had already made his continued leadership unacceptable to many opposition voters. But the speech may have hardened that sentiment into something even less negotiable, offering a fresh illustration of the political behavior they had voted to end.
Netanyahu’s speech did not make a unity government under his leadership more plausible. It made it harder to imagine.
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Pope praises the bond uniting the Catholic Church with the people of Israel
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – Pope Leo XIV reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s spiritual bond with the people of Israel during an interfaith gathering in Buenos Aires, a statement that drew particular attention from Jewish leaders amid growing antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere.
“Following the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, I wish to reaffirm the spiritual bond that unites the Church with the people of Israel,” and “our sincere respect for what is holy and true in the different religious traditions,” the Pope said Nov. 9 during a meeting with representatives of various religious communities at San Martín Palace, Argentina’s Foreign Ministry headquarters. The Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, shaped the church’s strategies for dealing with the modern era.
“The statement was a pleasant surprise to us, especially at a time when antisemitism is resurfacing, as it is in Europe,” Isaac Sacca, chief rabbi of the Sephardic Community of Buenos Aires, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That is very meaningful to our people,” he said.
“The meeting was moving on several levels,” added Sacca, who also is the president of Menora, a Jewish youth organization. “All the different religious communities that coexist in harmony and peace in Argentina came together and showed themselves as they truly are before the pope.”
Addressing around 100 religious leaders, Leo highlighted Argentina’s history of religious and cultural diversity, describing the country as a meeting point of different peoples and traditions.
“Hearing those words from Pope Leo himself, just a few meters away, was very comforting,” Rabbi Marcelo Polakoff, commissioner for interreligious dialogue of the World Jewish Congress in Latin America, told JTA. “Moreover, his use of language about honoring the People of Israel struck me as significant, since I don’t think that terminology is commonly used in Church documents. It gives his approach an even greater sense of closeness. He is clearly continuing the strong legacy of interreligious dialogue established by Pope Francis, Benedict XVI, and especially John Paul II.”
Leo praised Argentina’s tradition of welcoming immigrants. “Argentina’s national identity has taken shape as a melting pot of races, cultures and religions, formed by its Indigenous peoples and the many immigrants from different parts of the world who arrived in this land over the centuries, bringing with them their dreams and their faith,” Leo said.
“At first, they were Catholics, Protestants and Jews, and later many others. Despite their differences, they all learned to work together, to form families and communities, and to build settlements and villages, in an admirable blending of their traditions with local customs,” he added.
Rabbi Ariel Stofenmacher, rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary, drew a connection between Nostra Aetate, the historic 1965 Vatican recalibration of the church’s relations with other religions, and Leo’s speech.
“The pope emphasized the need to strengthen relations with the people of Israel and with Judaism. He revisited the ideas behind Nostra Aetate, particularly the relationship between the Church and Judaism. He also expressed his gratitude for the spirit of brotherhood,” Stofenmacher said.
“I think Pope Leo is showing that he is a leader on a global scale, someone who is not afraid to address difficult issues and who puts social and family issues at the forefront,” added Stofenmacher, who is also rector of the Isaac Abarbanel University Institute.
In addition to religious authorities and leaders of rabbinical institutions, the pope also invited prominent representatives of Argentina’s Jewish community. Among those present were representatives of AMIA, the main Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and DAIA, the political umbrella organization representing Argentina’s Jewish community.
“The pope emphasized at the meeting that religions are guardians of human integrity — that is, each person’s dignity in its spiritual, social, and communal dimensions,” AMIA chief rabbi Eliahu Hamra said. “We are united in defending that dignity and in upholding the value of every human being.” The interfaith gathering opened with a live orchestra playing a tango song from iconic composer Astor Piazzolla as religious leaders assembled and waited for the pope. It was a distinctly Argentine musical choice, rather than music associated with any particular religious tradition.
“There was a tango performance at the beginning, so there were no religious elements in the ceremony, precisely out of respect for all faiths, as I understand it. The whole event was a real pleasure, ” Rabbi Sacca told JTA.
“I believe we must remain engaged in this effort,” said Rabbi Polakoff. “At the World Jewish Congress, we presented the document Kishreinu, which was conceived as a Jewish response to Nostra Aetate. That was in November 2022. I believe we must continue working along those lines, and I think we have an exceptional partner in Leo XIV to do so.” The meeting concluded with a minute of silence for world peace and the victims of violence.
Monday’s meeting followed two earlier events in Buenos Aires. Pope Leo XIV first visited a residential care facility for people with disabilities on the outskirts of the city. He then celebrated Mass at Palermo Park, drawing an estimated crowd of more than 2 million people.
The pope’s four-day visit to Argentina began Sunday, Nov. 8, following his visit to Uruguay. It continued Tuesday in Córdoba province, where he celebrated Mass before returning to Buenos Aires. On Wednesday, he plans to visit the city of Luján for another Mass before departing for Lima, Peru, the final stop of his South American tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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3 years after Bedouin hero rescued 30 people on Oct. 7, Israel destroyed his family’s homes
(JTA) — Three years after Youssef Ziadna risked his life to rescue 30 Israelis from the Hamas massacre at the Nova music festival, Israeli authorities have demolished the homes of members of the Bedouin driver’s family in the unrecognized village of al-Ziadna.
Dozens more buildings in their village, which has about 5,000 residents and is located near the southern Arab-Israeli city of Rahat, face demolition orders.
Israel has celebrated Ziadna as a national hero. He was awarded Israel’s highest civilian honor for bravery by President Isaac Herzog, and selected to light a torch at Israel’s 2024 Independence Day ceremony. But he said the government’s crackdown on illegal construction made that recognition feel hollow.
“After everything we did on Oct. 7, running around and risking our lives, doing whatever we could, none of it has any meaning,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “In the end, you’re still an Arab.”
The plight of Ziadna highlights long-simmering tensions over Bedouin housing in the Negev.
An estimated 90,000 Bedouins live in dozens of unrecognized villages across the Negev, many without reliable running water, electricity, paved roads or sewage systems, while their homes remain vulnerable to demolition because they are deemed by the state to be illegal.
Many of them pre-date the creation of Israel in 1948, and were never granted official recognition; more recent construction has also taken place without planning approval, sometimes on land designated for other uses.
A bureaucratic maze of Israeli agencies and decades of disputes over land ownership have inhibited a solution that would allow for their legalization, a necessary step for authorized construction. In recent years, the problem has been exacerbated by government figures with a history of anti-Arab animus. Israeli courts have previously upheld demolition orders against individual buildings in al-Ziadna, including while efforts to legalize the community were underway.
The demolitions affected branches of Ziadna’s family that suffered devastating losses following the Oct. 7 attack. His cousin, also named Youssef al-Ziadna, was abducted to Gaza with three of his children. Two were released after 55 days, but the father and another son, Hamza, were killed in captivity. The late hostage’s brother and sister have since had homes and other structures demolished.
On Sunday, authorities posted eviction notices on five more homes in al-Ziadna, including that of Aatef al-Ziadna, whose son Abed al-Rahman was murdered by Hamas at Zikim beach on Oct. 7. Youssef Ziadna said the family had previously appealed to Herzog’s office over an earlier demolition order, which was subsequently canceled.
The president’s office confirmed receiving requests from the family concerning demolition orders and described the Ziadnas as “a bereaved family who suffered grievous losses on October 7th and thereafter,” and further highlighted Youssef Ziadna’s contribution, noting that Herzog had recognized his “life-saving actions” that day.
The president “has maintained contact and supported the family throughout this difficult time,” his spokesperson told JTA, adding that he and his office “have sought to assist the family within the limits of the law on this matter.”
The eviction notice, a copy of which JTA obtained, gives the occupants 30 days to vacate. Ziadna said even those deadlines were not always respected. In one case, he said, officers from the Yoav Unit, a special police force involved in land enforcement in the Negev, arrived just a week after a notice was posted and demolished a relative’s home.
Anger over home demolitions helped drive a surge in voter turnout in the Oct. 27 parliamentary election, with participation in Rahat soaring from 60% in 2022 to 85%, part of a dramatic increase in Arab voting across Israel. Ra’am, the Arab party led by Mansour Abbas, won approximately 85% of the city’s votes. That support helped the party secure eight Knesset seats.
“We are desperate. Everyone I know is going to vote,” Ziadna said on the eve of the election.
Rahat Mayor Talal al-Krenawi also attributed the high turnout to anger over demolitions.
“People who previously didn’t vote went to the ballot box to change the government’s policy,” he told JTA, expressing hope that the next government would be “one that listens, consults and coordinates” with Bedouin communities.
In October, demolition crews arrived in the al-Ziadna neighborhood, north of Rahat, where around 65 homes and other structures faced demolition orders. Ziadna’s cousin tore down a house built for his son, who had married just two weeks earlier. Other relatives, including his brother and nephew, have received demolition orders. One displaced family has been sleeping together in a single room at another relative’s house, he said.
Ziadna, who is a father of seven, dismantled a warehouse on his property after receiving a demolition order rather than face the fines of having the authorities demolish it. His home is not currently under an order, but he said that offered little comfort in a community where extended families live alongside one another.
“What’s the difference between my house, my brother’s house or my nephew’s house?” he said. “For us, it’s the same home. We’re Bedouin, we live together.”
The demolitions in al-Ziadna are part of a wider enforcement campaign that has intensified across the Negev under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, championed by outgoing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Told that Bedouin families whose homes had been demolished were sleeping in a school, Ben-Gvir declared: “They should prepare many more schools across the Negev, because I’m going to demolish more and more and more.”
Between 2023 and 2025, some 14,280 unauthorized structures were demolished in the Negev, an 81% increase over the previous three-year period, according to figures presented to the Knesset by Ben-Gvir’s ministry.
Al-Krenawi, Rahat’s mayor, slammed the government for embarking on a demolition blitz across the Negev, leaving families “with no roof over their heads and with no solutions.”
The al-Ziadna neighborhood was included in a government-approved plan in 2021 to incorporate it into Rahat and provide for approximately 1,900 housing units, as well as public buildings, roads, commercial areas and livestock facilities.
Yet the Bedouin Settlement Authority, the government body responsible for regularizing Bedouin communities in the Negev, told JTA that not a single residential plot has been allocated under the plan.
According to a spokesperson, implementation of the plan was delayed “partly because residents of the neighborhood have prevented it from being carried out.” The spokesperson cited interference with surveyors, soil drilling and archaeological work but did not provide details of specific incidents or identify those responsible.
Al-Krenawi said agreements had been signed to develop al-Ziadna, which was already within the city’s planning boundaries, but that “unresolved land ownership claims” were holding up the allocation of plots. He said he was unaware of any obstruction of planning work but added that the municipality was not involved in that process, which was handled by the Bedouin Settlement Authority.
Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and former Knesset member who has advocated greater integration of Bedouin citizens, criticized the state’s failure to enforce its laws in the Negev, which covers roughly 60% of Israel’s territory.
“They’re either under Israeli law or they’re not under Israeli law,” he told JTA, criticizing the “lack of application of laws against polygamy, illegal building, tax evasion” in Bedouin communities.
Oren said he supported reaching agreements to legalize unauthorized construction, but argued that Bedouin residents should pay for the land allocated to them, just as Jewish Israelis are required to do. “Why should they charge Jewish residents and Bedouin get it for free?” he said.
But he also acknowledged Bedouin contributions to the military and blamed successive governments for failing to provide adequate economic and educational opportunities, calling the state of education “appalling.”
“Everything that’s happened down there is entirely our fault,” he said.
Haggai Reznik, head of the Rifman Institute for the Development of the Negev and a former Housing Ministry director-general, issued dire warnings about the region’s security, saying in a television interview that “the next Oct. 7 will come from the Negev.”
Reznik pointed to widespread illegal weapons, weak law enforcement and the failure to regularize Bedouin communities, or bring them into the formal planning system, warning that without a national emergency plan, the Negev could become “a Palestinian state whose capital is Beersheba.”
The Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages in the Negev (RCUV), a Bedouin advocacy group, condemned Reznik for spreading a “blood libel,” arguing that crime and the proliferation of illegal weapons were consequences of longstanding neglect, dispossession and other policies that had pushed Bedouin communities into deep poverty.
Reznik’s remarks came as the Shin Bet security agency said it had arrested 72 residents of the Negev and southern Israel since the beginning of 2026 on suspicion of security-related offenses, with roughly 50 indicted.
Around the same time as the demolitions in al-Ziadna, authorities demolished around 80 homes and a mosque in the nearby Abu Wadi community of al-Dahiya, leaving 380 people homeless, according to al-Krenawi, who told JTA that the displaced families were now living in tents.
The Bedouin Settlement Authority said residents had rejected alternative housing. Residents countered that the proposed site was not ready for construction and negotiations over another location were still underway.
RCUV, the Bedouin advocacy group, estimated that demolitions had caused NIS 290 million in cumulative losses to families whose homes were destroyed, including legal fees, demolition costs, alternative accommodation and related expenses.
Marwan Abu Frieh, a Rahat resident and lawyer with the legal rights group Adalah, who has spent nearly 15 years accompanying families through eviction and demolition proceedings, said government housing plans frequently fail to account for Bedouin communities’ traditional way of life, requiring families accustomed to living on agricultural land to move to densely built urban neighborhoods.
“They’re not offering solutions suited to Bedouin society, to traditional or agricultural life,” he told JTA. “They’re offering modern solutions because they want us to become modern.”
Ziadna echoed that concern, saying there was “no way” his family would abandon its rural way of life for apartment blocks.
Most members of the extended family work in agriculture on nearby kibbutzim. Former Rahat Mayor Atta Abu Madegham described the Ziadnas as a noble family with “zero unemployment,” according to a report published soon after Oct. 7 in Makor Rishon.
In August, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a bid to delay the eviction of some 500 residents of Ras Jrabah, near Dimona. An earlier ruling had found that suitable alternatives had been offered and refused, but Adalah, which represents the residents, rejected that finding, saying that none of the options was viable. Even suggestions of temporary housing or rental assistance left basic questions unanswered: where families would live, under what conditions and for how long. Abu Frieh described the ruling as “very simple and very extreme.”
“They were saying that there is no connection between providing an alternative housing solution and carrying out an eviction. This is unprecedented,” he said.
He emphasized the difficulty of transforming an established community, where homes have stood for decades, into a formally planned neighborhood. Recognition, he said, is only the first stage. Completing the planning and infrastructure work can take many years, particularly when the community is already inhabited.
“You can’t demolish people’s homes when they have nowhere else to go and the regularization process hasn’t been completed,” he said.
The Bedouin Settlement Authority confirmed that the buildings facing demolition in the al-Ziadna neighborhood are within the boundaries of the approved 2021 plan, but described them as “new and illegal construction.”
Although the Bedouin Settlement Authority said demolitions were handled by separate enforcement agencies, al-Krenawi said those agencies operated only in coordination with it. JTA contacted the National Land Enforcement Authority, which identified the Israel Land Authority as responsible for the October operation. That authority, in turn, referred JTA back to the Bedouin Settlement Authority.
“The sooner residents take steps to advance regularization, the less need there will be for enforcement action and carrying out demolition orders,” the spokesperson said.
Ziadna objected to his family being treated as trespassers on land they had occupied for generations. “We’ve been here since the British ruled, before Israel was established. We never moved.”
“They call us invaders. Fine, come and sit with us. Talk to us,” he said. “Give us infrastructure, water, electricity. Give us a way to live like human beings. We’re citizens of this country.”
Abu Frieh criticized the Bedouin Settlement Authority’s origins, saying it was created to address what successive governments regarded as the “Bedouin problem,” rather than involving Bedouin communities in decisions about their own future.
“This authority controls every aspect of Bedouin life,” he said, describing its approach as “unilateral” and noting that all government funding for Bedouin communities must pass through it.
Established by the government in 2007, the Bedouin Settlement Authority replaced an earlier body founded in 1986. It has since operated under seven government ministries, with a May 2026 State Comptroller report finding that the repeated transfers had significantly disrupted its operations. Bedouin representation in the authority is also almost non-existent. The authority told JTA that it now employs more than 80 people, only one of whom is Bedouin.
“We’re not refusing a solution,” Abu Frieh said. “We’re just not part of the process.”
Ziadna, now 50, said his health has deteriorated sharply since JTA first interviewed him in October 2023. He has lost substantial weight, has been unable to work for seven months and receives just NIS 1,800 ($570) a month in disability benefits for post-traumatic stress and other health problems.
“I look like an 80-year-old man,” he said.
When JTA interviewed him just days after the Hamas massacre, Ziadna had expressed hope that his actions might change the relationship between Bedouin citizens and the state.
Three years later, asked whether those hopes had materialized, his answer was brief.
“The opposite happened.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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