Uncategorized
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.
—
The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
He went to a different Manhattan synagogue every week. Here’s what it taught him.
(JTA) — Reporting on the Jewish community is a lot like ornithology, except instead of birds the goal is to describe the dress, the habits and the particular behavior that distinguish, say, the Black-Hatted Monsey Orthodox from the Greater Philadelphia Jewish Renewalist. The careful shul-watcher notes their habitats, listens carefully to their songs and pays close attention to the things they eat.
Andrew Waxman is a banking and risk management consultant, not a journalist or an ornithologist. Yet he’s written what amounts to a field guide to the varieties of being and praying Jewish in New York City. For “My Year in New York Synagogues,” he spent his Friday evenings and Shabbat mornings in 2025 visiting nearly every synagogue within walking distance of his home on the Upper West Side.
That’s close to 50 synagogues, including most of Manhattan’s significant congregations. He also includes a few unclassifiable communities, such as a Jewish runners’ club and meetings of the Hostages Forum in Central Park.
The result is part sociological field trip to New York City’s Jewish landscape and part love letter to the city’s Jewish variety: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Moroccan, LGBTQ, Modern Orthodox, haredi Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and independent, to name a few.
Written at a time when the city’s Jews are on edge, buffeted by waves of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Waxman wants to remind them that the community’s diversity and creativity are its strength.
“The impetus for the book really was just the awe in which I find myself around the number of amazing communities, and the diversity that we have in New York that I really think is unparalleled in Jewish history,” he said in an interview.
His stops include familiar places like Central Synagogue, where Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s Asian-American background, a talented musical ensemble and distinct Moorish Revival architecture helped Waxman, who describes himself as liberal Orthodox, see a “community very comfortable in its approach to spirituality and Judaism, forging its own path, authentic in its own way, distinctive even amongst all the differences that characterize so many New York communities.”
At Or Zarua, the egalitarian Conservative synagogue on the Upper East Side, the intimate scale allowed a lively back-and-forth between rabbi and congregants during the Torah reading.
Meanwhile, the cavernous Young Israel of the Upper West Side offered a surprise: A synagogue he remembered as nearly empty and elderly had, decades later, become packed with young Orthodox Jews.
Less well known is the Koznitz. Behind an unmarked green door on the Upper West Side, Waxman found what a friend called the “speakeasy minyan.” There 70 or so men gather for “no frills, fast and lay-led” Shabbat prayers in a congregation named after the 18th-century Koznitzer Rebbe and his descendants.
“I realized that everybody feels that their community is special,” Waxman said. “And their community, whether it’s Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, they feel proud and they feel very connected.”
Waxman’s synagogue year included the bittersweet resolution of the Israeli hostage crisis, as well as the simmering aftermath of the campus protests and growing political tensions over Israel and antisemitism after Oct. 7. Many congregations added prayers or other rituals remembering the hostages, efforts that crossed political lines.
Other times, the ideological divides were stark. In Orthodox synagogues, Waxman heard rhetoric about Israel and the war that he described as “aggressive, jingoistic almost.” At the Orthodox Fifth Avenue Synagogue, one member of the “Kiddish Club” joked about Upper West Side liberals and another proudly mentioned his apartment in Trump Tower. At the liberal independent B’nai Jeshurun, the rabbis’ remarks included concern for Palestinians as well as Israeli Jews.
Few of those political discussions make it into his guidebook, however. If some congregations were seeing a growing contingent of anti-Zionists in the pews, for example, he doesn’t mention it. Waxman acknowledges that he sought to avoid labelling congregations by their politics. “It has been distressing to see political discord come between families and communities and I have no wish to put a pin on that,” he writes.
Waxman tends to focus on the positive, ending each entry with a short description of the synagogues’ “strengths” and “distinctiveness.” In the admittedly very tiny genre of synagogue reviewing, others have been a little more pointed in their assessments. London’s Jewish Chronicle used to run reviews by Secret Shulgoer that awarded (and took away) stars based on “warmth,” “welcome,” “decorum” and “service.” In the 1990s, Kol Ha’Ir, an alternative Jerusalem weekly, dispatched the sharp-tongued Jacky Levy to review synagogues as he would a play or restaurant; he once compared a Reform synagogue to a church.
More recently, David A.M. Wilensky of J., the Northern California Jewish weekly, took a journalistic approach in his “Jew in the Pew” column, offering his own observations and quoting congregants on their impressions, positive and sometimes negative, about their Bay Area synagogues.
Waxman’s goal appears more boosterish than critical or journalistic. He sees his ideal reader as someone who has just moved to the city and is looking for a spiritual home. Anticipating their criteria, he describes not only the prayers and sermons but the people, clothes, melodies, architecture and conversation.
And, yes, the kiddush.
He had initially joked with a friend that the book might simply be about kiddushes, the receptions that follow most Saturday morning Shabbat services. Do they serve meat? Will it be enough food to count as lunch? Who showed up “JFK” — just for kiddush?
But the food turned out to be more than comic relief. Kiddush, Waxman said, is where community happens. People who may not see one another during the week reconnect. They talk about their children, their problems, who’s getting married, who might be ill.
And he suspects that kiddush has become competitive.
At Altneu, a new Orthodox synagogue that broke away from Park East Synagogue in 2022, Waxman found a bartender, tequila and an impressive selection of whisky. He notes that other Orthodox synagogues in the area now regularly offer meat kiddushes, suggesting that congregations are using food to lure and hold on to members.
As for clothes, Waxman grew up in an Orthodox synagogue in Manchester, England, where the congregation president and other leaders wore top hats. The custom persists at The Jewish Center on the Upper West Side, where the rabbis and officers wear top hats and morning suits between Sukkot and Shavuot. Elsewhere, especially but not exclusively at non-Orthodox synagogues, the codes have loosened: Reflecting a similar change in corporate life, men have doffed their jackets and ties; women often swap skirts and dresses for slacks.
Waxman hadn’t attended a Reform service before setting out on his grand tour, and he said that the experience changed him. Himself a member of Darchei Noam, a “partnership minyan” that combines Orthodox ritual with expanded roles for women, he appreciated how the Reform congregations included Hebrew selectively but intentionally in their prayers. He admired congregations like Romemu, which resists easy denominational categorization, for their willingness to bend the traditional service structure — to go “off piste,” as he put it — rather than treat the prayer book as a script that must be followed exactly.
Waxman may have set out to write a Yelp for synagogues, but the project came to mean more. In addition to a sense of abundance, he found a spirit of hospitality. Currently working on a project in Mexico City, he noted how synagogues there won’t admit strangers — even the author of a book on New York synagogues — unless they sign up in advance. He insisted that, despite heightened security, New York’s synagogues are still welcoming places for newcomers.
“I’m hopeful that New York can remain as open as it is to the stranger,” he said. “Judaism, at the end of the day, for me, is really about giving people a community, a sense of belonging.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post He went to a different Manhattan synagogue every week. Here’s what it taught him. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Miami-Dade county in Florida raises the limit on investments in Israel bonds
(JTA) — The Miami-Dade region in Florida can spend millions more tax dollars on Israel, after officials increased the share of county investments that can include Israeli bonds.
The Board of County Commissioners approved a resolution last week toward the start of a seven-hour meeting, in a unanimous, single vote that grouped together numerous ordinances. This action enables the county to invest up to 5%, rather than 3%, of its $9 billion in investments in these bonds — debt issued by the Israeli government sold by a U.S. underwriter.
Despite the previous cap of 3%, Israeli bonds only make up about 1.48% of Miami-Dade’s portfolio, or roughly $130 million, according to the county’s third-quarter investment report.
Known as “Israel Bonds,” these loans are deeply rooted in the Diaspora’s relationship with the country. Israel, like many countries, raises money by selling bonds to investors, who then receive repayments with interest after a specified time period. But for American Jews, these bonds are issued via the U.S.-based Development Corporation for Israel, which has served as the underwriter since 1951.
As for Miami-Dade, the county began purchasing Israeli bonds in 2016. But these investments increased substantially just after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. At the time, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced that the county would be boosting these investments from $51 million to $76 million.
Palm Beach County made a similar decision at the time, as did cities, counties and states around the country.
Nonetheless, activists nationwide have increasingly been pushing governments to stop investing in Israel bonds, citing the Jewish state’s military operations in Gaza.
An initiative called “Break the Bonds,” launched by the progressive Jewish Voice for Peace group, claims that “the Israeli military is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” and that community investments in such bonds are enabling the situation.
“At a time when so many people in our community are struggling, we believe our public dollars should be invested in our communities and in meeting the needs of the people who live here,” JVP South Florida said in a statement, prior to last Tuesday’s vote.
Israel Bonds representatives did not reply to repeated requests for comment.
Given the resolution’s swift passage, which occurred without a public hearing at the board meeting, detractors signed up to testify about an unrelated item in order to voice their concerns.
“My tax dollars should be kept safe and should be working to benefit my community,” Coconut Grove resident Jared Simon, who identified himself as Jewish, told the commissioners.
“You didn’t even allow public comment on it before voting,” he said. “Your constituents do not want their tax dollars funding the functions of the Israeli government.”
Addressing the lack of public hearing, the commissioners responded that residents already had the opportunity to speak about the resolution during a session earlier this summer.
That session occurred on July 15, when the Intergovernmental and Economic Impact Committee advanced the rule to the Board of County Commissioners with a favorable recommendation.
Among the most prominent speakers to take the podium — even though he had apparently not registered to do so — was James Fishback, a far-right former gubernatorial candidate and sharp critic of Israel. Alleging that the commissioners “unanimously voted to give up to $450 million of money to Israel,” Fishback said he’d rather not be “escorted out by these great men in uniform.”
“Do you serve the people of Hialeah or of Haifa? Do you serve the people of Aventura or of Tel Aviv?” he asked the commissioners. “Do you serve the people of South Miami or of Jerusalem? This money should be invested here in this community.”
As the sergeants escorted Fishback out of the auditorium, another individual screamed “America First!” from the audience.
Oliver Gilbert, one of the commissioners, responded that the “board today didn’t vote to give any money to anyone,” stressing that they just “set investment criteria.”
Before Tuesday’s meeting reached its most heated point, Keon Hardemon, another commissioner, told the audience that he and his colleagues “don’t care what you’re talking about, what subject it is that you don’t like, what you care for, what you don’t care for, what your politics are.”
“What we are not going to stand for are people who want to make anyone in this room feel uncomfortable,” Hardemon added.
Yet immediately after this intervention, public outcry over the resolution, known as 11A2, continued.
Miami resident Mina Trachtenberg argued that county investment policies require the prioritization “of public funds and liquidity of public funds above all else.”
“The resolution passed today achieves the opposite of that, opening the door to the purchase of high-risk, even junk-quality bonds of a foreign entity,” Trachtenberg said. “Please divest from apartheid.”
Anthony Rodriguez, the chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, eventually instructed the sergeants in the room to eject anyone who refused to comply with the rules.
Just after those instructions, Miami resident Mohammed Mohammed came to the podium, voicing his alarm that he was “going to be escorted out just for being Palestinian.”
“That’s not the case. Let’s not put words in anybody’s mouth,” a visibly frustrated Rodriguez responded. “You just have to follow the order and speak on the item.”
Mohammed then declared “that 11A2 is an absolute disgrace,” leading Rodriguez to summon the sergeants and declare that the speakers just “want their minute of fame.”
The rule’s sponsor, commissioner René García, explained that the county invests about $9 billion, with the intention of generating “a greater return of money” to fund public needs. García, a former Republican state senator, explained that the rule simply ensures “more flexibility and more liquidity” for certain investments.
In addition to raising the investment cap from 3% to 5%, the resolution would also reduce the maturity of “bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the state of Israel” from five to three years.
Within that text, the authors also deleted a clause that previously had required Israel to have an “A” credit rating from at least two agencies. That revision stemmed from a recent Florida statute allowing investments in Israel bonds regardless of the country’s rating. This change was particularly noteworthy because credit ratings of Israel have fluctuated in the past few years.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Miami-Dade county in Florida raises the limit on investments in Israel bonds appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israeli expats voting case dismissed by Israel’s High Court
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – Israel’s High Court on Wednesday dismissed a petition by Israeli expatriates seeking to vote in the Oct. 27 election after discovering that they had been excluded from the voter rolls under a little-known Interior Ministry classification that records certain citizens as nonresidents.
The petition was filed by some 100 expatriate Israelis challenging their exclusion from the voter rolls under an Interior Ministry classification known as “Code 51,” which records them as having ceased to be Israeli residents.
The petitioners said they had never asked to give up their status as Israeli residents and questioned the legal authority, criteria and process by which the classification was imposed. Some only discovered the designation when they checked their eligibility ahead of the election.
The court did not resolve that factual dispute, instead dismissing the petition on procedural grounds. Justice Yechiel Kasher said the case was filed too late, a week before the voter registry was due to be finalized, and that the petitioners had not first used the statutory appeals process available to challenge their registration status. The court also said the petition lacked a detailed factual record showing how each of the petitioners came to receive Code 51.
The case arose as tens of thousands of Israeli citizens living abroad are making plans to return to Israel to cast ballots in the country’s first national election since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. More than 30,000 expatriates had registered with Fly&Vote, an initiative helping Israelis arrange election travel, which has already secured seven dedicated flights to Israel.
The Interior Ministry told the court that Code 51 is given to citizens who informed a population registry official that they were leaving Israel and asked not to remain registered as residents. The petitioners disputed that account, saying they had never asked for their registration as Israeli residents to be canceled.
Ilana Mittman, a retired social scientist living in Baltimore and a petitioner in the case, discovered this summer that her residency status had been changed under Code 51 on March 7, 1986, the same date she visited the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco to register her newborn son.
Mittman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that consular staff took away her Israeli ID card during the 1986 appointment without explanation. “I remember how bad of a feeling it was to give that document away,” she said. “I felt I gave a part of myself away when that happened. But I didn’t know that my biggest right as a citizen – the right to vote – was just robbed from me.”
The petition also challenged the law tying voting eligibility to residency, arguing that it conflicts with Israel’s Basic Law governing the Knesset, which guarantees every Israeli citizen aged 18 or older the right to vote unless a court has deprived them of that right. The court did not decide that question, and Kasher said the petitioners could raise it again after the election.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli expats voting case dismissed by Israel’s High Court appeared first on The Forward.
