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American rabbis, wrestling with Israel’s behavior, weigh different approaches from the pulpit
(JTA) — Rabbi Sharon Brous began a sermon at her Los Angeles synagogue last month with a content warning. “I have to say some things today that I know will upset some of you,” she began.
That same morning, across the country in New York City, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl was confessing something to her congregants, too: The sermon they were about to hear “kept me up at night.”
Both women — among the most prominent and influential Jewish clergy in the United States — went on to sharply criticize Israel’s new right-wing government, which includes far-right parties that aim to curb the rights of LGBTQ Israelis, Arabs and non-Orthodox Jews.
In taking aim at Israel’s government from the pulpit, the rabbis were veering close to what many in their field consider a third rail. “You have a wonderful community and you love them and they love you, until the moment you stand up and you give your Israel sermon,” Brous told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The phenomenon even has an informal name, she said: “Death by Israel sermon.”
Brous would know: A decade ago, she was the target of sharp criticism after she encouraged her congregants at IKAR, a nondenominational congregation, to pray for Palestinians as well as Jews during a period of conflict in Israel. The incident didn’t end her pulpit, but she has come to understand why many rabbis choose what she called “the path of silence” when it comes to Israel.
Now, she said, American Jews must depart from that path. “I want you to hear me,” she said in her sermon. “There is a revolution that is happening, and this moment demands an awakening on both sides of the sea, an honest reckoning.”
All over the country, non-Orthodox rabbis are making similar calculations in response to Israel’s new governing coalition, which has drawn widespread protests over its policy moves. (Orthodox communities, including their rabbis, tend to be more politically conservative and skew to the right of non-Orthodox communities on Israel issues.) Israel’s government is advancing an overhaul of the legal system that would sap the power of the Supreme Court, and is also contending with an escalating wave of violence.
Some rabbis feel more emboldened to speak aloud what they have long believed. Others are finding themselves reconsidering their own relationship to Israel — and bringing their congregants along on their journey. A few still feel that criticizing Israel from the pulpit is a misguided and even dangerous venture, one that could splinter American Jewish communities.
What cuts across the spectrum is a belief that Israel has been discussed too little from the synagogue pulpit. Brous said the tendency of liberal rabbis not to talk about Israel lest they anger their more conservative congregants has resulted in a painful reality: “American Jews have not developed the muscle that we now need to respond to this regime.”
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City launched a new program called Amplify Israel, which he hopes will encourage Reform movement leaders to embrace Zionism even as they navigate a “deeply problematic and even offensive” new Israeli government. (Shahar Azran/Stephen Wise Free Synagogue)
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, meanwhile, believes today’s rabbis must be vocal in fending off the influence of “competing values” about Zionism from “various organizations that are either cool on Israel or don’t like Israel or just downright anti-Zionist.”
Last year, angered by a letter signed by dozens of rabbinical students denouncing Israel’s actions during its 2021 conflict with Hamas in Gaza, Hirsch launched an initiative based at his New York City Reform synagogue to equip rabbis with tools to counter what he said was “the growing influence of an anti-Zionist element” in the next generation of Jewish clergy.
The initiative, Amplify Israel, is housed at his Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, and employs another rabbi, Tracy Kaplowitz, to work full-time to galvanize leaders from across the Reform movement to support Israel. Kaplowitz jokes that her new job won’t be complete “until every Reform Jew is a Zionist.”
Hirsch knows the new coalition is complicating his task. “The new government is going to make our promotion of Israel more difficult in the United States,” he said, noting that the government “has elements in it that are deeply problematic and even offensive to most American Jews.”
He and Kaplowitz contend that it is possible, in their view, for rabbis to criticize aspects of the Israeli government from the pulpit while still remaining broadly supportive of the Jewish state and encouraging their congregants to be the same. They also say the need to build Zionist sentiment within the American rabbinate transcends any particular moment, including this one.
“If we have to transform how we connect to Israel each time there’s an election, we’ll be driving ourselves a little bit batty,” Kaplowitz said.
Rabbi Tracy Kaplowitz is a full-time Israel Fellow at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City. She jokes that her job won’t be finished “until every Reform Jew is a Zionist.” (Ryen Greiss/Stephen Wise Free Synagogue)
Hirsch sits on the advisory board of another new pro-Israel initiative, the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition. Helmed by Stuart Weinblatt, senior rabbi at Conservative Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Maryland, the group is an interdenominational network of more than 200 rabbis who advocate to ”strengthen the ties between American Jewry and the State of Israel.”
Weinblatt hews to an early generation’s view of how rabbis should approach Israel from the pulpit. He told JTA that he believes his colleagues should always be supportive of Israel in public, even if they choose to pressure the Israeli government and advocate against certain policies in private — which, he says, is “the appropriate vehicle” for voicing concerns. “My position has always been that support for Israel should be unconditional,” he said.
“If we as rabbis are sharply critical of Israel, the result can often lead to a distancing from Israel, which ultimately may diminish the connection people feel to Judaism and the Jewish people,” he added. “People do not always distinguish and differentiate between opposition to a particular policy and broader criticisms of Israel which can do lasting damage.”
Asked whether the Israeli government could ever conceivably take a step that would necessitate a public response from American rabbis, Weinblatt ruminated for days. He ultimately told JTA that the current debate around proposed changes to the Law of Return, the Israeli policy that allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to claim citizenship, would be such an example, as that is a policy that would have a direct effect on Diaspora Jews.
Tightening who is eligible under the Law of Return is in fact a goal of some elements of Israel’s governing coalition, although the Diaspora minister assured an audience in the United States that, unlike with the proposed changes to the government’s judicial system — which have earned criticism across the political spectrum — there would be an effort to build consensus and no changes would happen overnight.
Still, the prospect of such a change so alarmed Rabbi Hillel Skolnick of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, Ohio, that he traveled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, Israel’s lawmaking body.
“The members of my congregation and my movement have a spiritual connection with Judaism and also a political connection because we live in a democracy, so they see a Jewish democracy as an ideal that they can look to as a light unto the nations,” he said, in a speech he delivered as a representative of the Conservative/Masorti movement.
“By even questioning the idea of the Law of Return,” he went on, Israel “takes away from both the Jewish connection and the democratic connection they have with this country.”
Skolnick suggested that he was unsure of how to speak to his congregation about the new government and its agenda. “My question to you is, what message can I go home with?” he asked.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, founder and chair of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition, shown with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Weinblatt believes American rabbis’ “support for Israel should be unconditional,” and that disagreements with its government should be hashed out in private. (Courtesy of Stuart Weinblatt)
This week, hundreds of American rabbis will be returning to their congregations with messages honed by a week in Israel. The Reform movement just concluded its biennial convention, which was held there for the first time since before the pandemic. Their visit coincided with major developments in the country’s twin crises: The Knesset advanced the judicial reform legislation, and three people were killed in a Palestinian shooting and subsequent settler riot in the West Bank.
In a sign of the balancing act that American rabbis are navigating, the Reform movement’s leader, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who has been among the earliest and most outspoken critics of the new Israeli government, will also be a featured speaker at Amplify Israel’s conference this May aiming to encourage Zionist sentiment among Reform Jews.
At the convention, the leader of the Central Conference of American Rabbis called for Reform clergy to move away from defining Israel in stark black-and-white terms — an apparent reference to Jews who speak of “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” forces.
“In order to connect better with those in our communities around Israel in a nuanced and meaningful way, we must be able to move beyond the pro/con dichotomy which only serves to divide us in ways that are a distraction to the actual issues at hand,” Rabbi Hara Person told the attendees. During the conference, the rabbis attended and voiced support for Israeli protests against their government.
“We are seeing a shift for the better, in my opinion, about how Jews are feeling comfortable critiquing Israel’s policies,” Rabbi Sarah Brammer-Shlay told JTA last fall, before the Israeli elections. Brammer-Shlay was a signer of the 2021 rabbinical students’ letter who graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and today is a rabbi and chaplain at Grinnell College.
That kind of shift has Weinblatt worried. “Sometimes, rabbis are actually out of sync and out of touch with their congregations, who do want to hear messages of support of Israel,” he said.
That may well be the case, particularly at synagogues with aging populations, but survey data suggests that American Jews are moving to the left on Israel at the same time that Israel itself has shifted to the right. The most recent Pew Research Center survey of American Jews, in 2021, found that most have a negative opinion of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; only one-third think Israel is making a sincere effort to achieve peace with Palestinians; and 10% support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel.
While rabbis typically consider what they think their congregants want to hear, they aren’t bound to say it. And some rabbis say this moment is a time to take a stand, even if there is blowback.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed, a Conservative congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, announced in December that his congregation would no longer recite the Prayer for the State of Israel, part of most congregations’ Shabbat morning liturgy since 1948. He said the extremism of Israel’s leadership meant the words no longer applied, and replaced the prayer with the more generally worded Prayer for Peace in Jerusalem.
”I couldn’t just say, ‘God, please guide our leaders well,’” Kalmanofsky said, pointing specifically to the fact that extremist politicians Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich were now government ministers who would be the beneficiaries of such prayer. “The things that they’re saying cannot possibly represent the Israel that I want to support.”
Kalmanofsky had not previously been outspoken as a critic of Israeli policy. He said he has faced some tough feedback from some in his community, including from those who believe this is a moment that demands more, not less, prayer for Israel — “not an unreasonable response,” he said. But a month into the liturgy change, he said he is confident he has made the right decision.
“Something really meaningful had changed in the public life of the state of Israel,” he said. “That deserved real recognition, and a real response.”
Continuing to focus on preserving a Jewish connection with Israel without “dealing like grown-ups” with its “very serious problems” would render the rabbinical voice irrelevant, Kalmanofsky said. “At best, we’re kind of like, ‘blind love, blind loyalty.’ And at worst, we’re totally obtuse, and have nothing meaningful to say about the real world.”
“If you’re going to have a pulpit,” Kalmanofsky added, “you’re going to have to use it once in a while.”
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Synagogue protests have shocked NYC and LA. This Michigan congregation has faced them for 22 years
Protests outside prominent synagogues in New York City and Los Angeles have roiled the Jewish community in recent weeks, prompting scrutiny of how authorities respond when demonstrators at a house of worship frame their actions as Israel-related political speech.
Rabbi Nadav Caine of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan has some experience with that: Every Shabbat for the past 22 years, protesters have shown up to Beth Israel holding signs with slogans like “Jewish Power Corrupts” and “No More Holocaust Movies.”
After years of legal battles that consistently sided with the protesters, Caine has been forced to accept that the courts view their actions as protected speech. More than two decades on, he has come to terms with the protesters’ enduring presence.
“There are long time members who come as little as possible, or who left the congregation, but for the most part, people have learned to ignore it,” Caine said.
‘Unseemly and distasteful’
The man behind the protests, Henry Herskovitz, was raised Jewish, had a bar mitzvah, and even attended Beth Israel for years. But he later adopted conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11, became a Holocaust denier, and openly expressed hatred for Jews.
Starting in 2003, Herskovitz and a small group began protesting at the synagogue weekly during Shabbat, brandishing signs like “Antisemitism is earned, never given.”
In 2019, fed up with passing the demonstrators, a congregant and local Holocaust survivor sued the protesters and the city, arguing that their First Amendment rights to safely practice their religion were being violated. The American Civil Liberties Union represented the protesters, acknowledging the speech was “unseemly and distasteful,” but legally protected nonetheless.
Ultimately, the courts sided with the ACLU: A lower court dismissed the case, the Supreme Court declined to hear it on appeal, and a district judge ordered the congregants to pay nearly $159,000 in legal fees to the protesters — prompting the congregants’ lawyer, Marc Susselman, to accuse the judge of antisemitism.
Now, while the number of protesters has dwindled — it’s typically two people nowadays, Caine said — they still show up, week after week.
Caine said the sustained protests have affected membership, particularly as newcomers weigh which synagogue to attend. Some longtime members avoid in-person events, and others have left entirely. The display can also shock unsuspecting visitors attending bar or bat mitzvahs.
“Before you get used to it, it’s a little traumatizing and triggering,” he said.
‘A community issue’
Caine said he isn’t surprised by recent protests outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan and Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. At Park East, demonstrators were protesting a synagogue event promoting immigration to Israel, chanting “death to the IDF” and “globalize the intifada.” At Wilshire Boulevard Temple, protesters took issue with the synagogue hosting speakers from the Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems.
Protesting at a synagogue is “not meant to raise consciousness about a human rights issue,” Caine said. “It’s about harassing a group.”
His advice for synagogues facing persistent protests: don’t engage. Beth Israel does not organize counterprotests, and Caine avoids posting about the protests on social media.
“These kinds of activists, they thrive on publicity. It’s their oxygen,” he said.
Still, Caine said he understands the desire to respond. One idea he finds promising: In New York City, two Jewish lawmakers introduced a bill that would ban protests within 25 feet of houses of worship. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has reportedly been receptive to the legislation.
Caine also cautioned against turning the protests outside synagogues into a political debate.
“I wouldn’t make it about the Israel issue,” he said. “I would make it about the fact that it’s a community issue.”
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Israel has a crucial lesson to learn from apartheid South Africa. It isn’t what you think
Some years ago, I traveled to South Africa with a group of Israelis to study the anti-apartheid movement. On our first morning, our guide posed a question: Why did apartheid end?
We offered the standard answers: because internal resistance grew stronger, because international pressure mounted, because the regime lost legitimacy. The guide listened and then said: Apartheid didn’t end for any of those reasons. It ended when the Berlin Wall came down.
His point was not that South Africans were passive. It was that political change does not happen on timetables set by internal movements alone. Power shifts systemically and globally, and when it does, the outcome depends on whether societies are prepared to move when the moment comes. Movements cannot control when history accelerates, but they can determine whether they have built the moral clarity, political vision and organizational capacity to act when it does.
A few years later, I traveled with the same group to Serbia and met former student leaders of Otpor, the movement that helped unseat the dictator Slobodan Milošević. They described how they began as a marginal, improvisational group, driven more by urgency than structure.
What eventually changed their trajectory, they told us, was recognizing that mobilization only works if people can see not just what they are resisting, but what they are building toward. They developed a concrete vision of a democratic Serbia that people could recognize as an alternative—not just to the regime, but to permanent instability. When the political opening arrived, there was something ready to replace what had collapsed.
Political change begins with imagination — but that imagination must be taken seriously.
This past weekend in Israel, something shifted quietly, and if you blinked, you may have missed it.
At a meeting for its 10th anniversary Standing Together — the largest Jewish–Arab grassroots movement in Israel — formally adopted a framework for ending the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that proposes two states not as sealed national projects but as overlapping political realities.
That vision, put forward by the group A Land for All, would see Israelis and Palestinians both have freedom of movement and equal rights in the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, and shared sovereignty in Jerusalem. It establishes mutual recognition of autonomy between the two peoples as a premise for peace, rather than as a final-status issue to address, as it was in previous peace efforts like the Oslo Accords.
This was not an organizational merger or a policy announcement. It was the articulation of a political horizon.
For most of its history, Standing Together has focused on equality within Israel itself: advocating for labor rights and a reasonable cost of living, combatting racism, and promoting shared civic life. Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, it has been one of the only Israeli movements willing to organize sustained opposition to the war in Gaza, engage in civil disobedience, and try to deliver humanitarian aid in the face of increasing hostility.
Through this vote, the movement sought to expand its domain of responsibility — from Israel’s internal democracy, to the scope of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole.
It’s just one group; just one vote. But it’s also a reframing of what the future is allowed to look like, and a landmark moment of Israelis and Palestinians engaging in a joint political process. Its importance lies less in its technical details than in its structural ambition: replacing separation as the organizing principle, and establishing equality as the baseline.
In a context where imagination itself has been steadily eroded, this matters.
Israeli life has been governed for years by a doctrine of management — managing conflict, managing unrest, managing despair. The public has been trained to treat war as permanent; inequality as unavoidable; and a punishing power hierarchy as necessary for survival. This is not an accident. It is a governing logic that eliminates alternatives by framing them as incoherent, naïve or dangerous.
The most lasting damage done by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Israel may turn out not be the ways in which he’s degraded the country’s electoral system and democratic institutions. It may be psychological.
On his watch, Israel’s political culture has been systematically emptied of credible futures. What remains is a society fluent in fear, and increasingly unable to articulate what it is trying to become.
Comprehensive political visions change the conditions of organizing. When people can describe a wished-for future in concrete, realizable terms, political engagement stops being purely reactive and starts becoming constructive. It reshapes alliances, alters the language of debate, and changes the kinds of risks individuals and movements are willing to take.
South Africa understood this. Serbia understood it. Even New York City saw a version of this dynamic recently, when Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani went from polling at around 1% in the early days of the primary to winning the general election on a platform of affordability and thriving that did not dilute its goals in exchange for political safety.
Israel’s ruling order will not last forever. Regimes built on a premise of permanent emergency aren’t sustainable. What matters is whether there will be anything ready to replace it when it cracks.
Standing Together did not change reality with its vote in favor of a different kind of future — but it clarified what that future could practically look like, and in a country trained to believe that no future exists. And that, on its own, is a political marvel.
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Lithuanian government party leader convicted of inciting hatred towards Jews
(JTA) — The leader of a Lithuanian party in the ruling coalition government was convicted on Thursday for inciting hatred towards Jews and grossly minimizing the Holocaust in a series of public statements and social media posts in 2023.
Remigijus Žemaitaitis, the head of the populist Nemuno Aušra party, was fined 5,000 euros, or $5,835, by the Vilnius Regional Court.
In her decision, Judge Nida Vigelienė said that Žemaitaitis had “publicly mocked, demeaned and encouraged hatred” toward Jews as well as “grossly minimised the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany on Lithuania’s territory in an offensive and insulting manner,” according to the Lithuanian public service broadcaster LRT.
Žemaitaitis’ conviction was related to statements he had issued in May and June of 2023, including social media posts, a speech delivered in Parliament and an exchange with a journalist, in which he falsely accused Jews of killing Lithuanians.
“How long will our politicians continue to kneel to the Jews who killed our countrymen, contributed to the persecution, torture and destruction of Lithuanians,” wrote Žemaitaitis in all-caps, according to the country’s constitutional court. “There was a Holocaust of the Jews, but an even greater Holocaust of Lithuanians was in Lithuania!”
In other posts, Žemaitaitis also baselessly blamed Jews for the 1944 Nazi massacres in the Lithuanian villages of Pirčiupiai and Kaniukai.
The ruling Thursday was not the first time that a Lithuanian lawmaker has come under fire for Holocaust distortion. In 2021, Valdas Rakutis, a member of Lithuania’s parliament, was criticized by the U.S. ambassador to Lithuania for claiming in a speech that there was “no shortage of Holocaust perpetrators among the Jews themselves.”
In another post about the demolition of a school building in the West Bank, Žemaitaitis quoted an antisemitic nursery rhyme that encourages children to kill a wounded Jew.
“I want to give you a chance, dear Jews of Israel, to apologize to Palestine and the EU for your disgusting actions in a foreign country,” he wrote. “And I will repeat, ‘After such events, it is no wonder why such sayings are born: A Jew climbed a ladder and fell by accident. Take a stick, children, and kill that Jew.’”
The lawmaker, who frequently posts about the war in Gaza on social media, resigned from Lithuania’s parliament in April 2024 after the country’s constitutional court found his rhetoric had violated his oath and its constitution.
But he was reelected in October 2024 and his party joined the country’s new coalition government led by the Social Democrats.
Žemaitaitis and his lawyer were not present during the ruling Thursday in Vilnius and are expected to seek an appeal. He told reporters after the ruling that “everybody understands that this is a politicized decision,” according to the Associated Press.
“Any form of antisemitism, hate speech, or Holocaust belittling is unacceptable to us and incompatible with our values,” wrote the Social Democrats party in a post on Facebook following the ruling. “We respect the decision of the court. Together we point out that this decision is not yet final.”
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