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Antisemitism speech sparks pushback from Jewish conservatives
(JTA) — When Orit Arfa read political theorist Yoram Hazony’s recent comments on antisemitism on the American right, she decided that her past admiration for him no longer justified staying silent about what she sees as a moral failure.
Arfa, who served until last month as a spokesperson for Hazony, responded Thursday with a deeply personal essay in Tablet magazine titled “Yoram Hazony’s 15 Minutes.” She wrote about her departure after four years from the Edmund Burke Foundation, the organization Hazony founded that is an institutional hub of the national conservatism movement. In her essay, she accused Hazony of erasing work she and others did under his leadership and of publicly faulting Jewish institutions for failures she says he knowingly helped create.
“I have known and admired Yoram for many years,” Arfa wrote, praising his scholarship and describing his 2015 book on the Book of Esther as one of the most influential works in her intellectual life. “It’s with a heavy heart, then, that I feel compelled to set the record straight.”
An Israeli conservative intellectual, Hazony is one of the architects of national conservatism, arguing for a politics grounded in nationalism, religion and tradition. His ideas have gained influence among Republican politicians, donors and movement strategists, particularly within the wing of the party associated with figures like Vice President JD Vance.
Hazony’s influence has placed him at the center of a growing dispute on the Jewish right, as the movement he helped shape confronts allegations of antisemitism in its orbit. Hazony has declined requests for an interview from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in recent months.
Because of Hazony’s prominence, Arfa’s break with him has resonated well beyond their personal history, highlighting a broader debate among Jewish conservatives over how to confront antisemitism when it comes not from political opponents, but from figures embedded in the American right.
That debate was thrust into the open after Hazony’s keynote speech earlier this week at the Second International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, where he forcefully condemned antisemitic rhetoric aired on the program of conservative media figure Tucker Carlson. Hazony described Carlson’s show as a “circus of aggressive anti-Jewish propaganda,” listing familiar antisemitic tropes aired by guests.
“These aren’t normal political messages, disagreeing with other members of the Trump coalition on legitimate policy issues,” Hazony said. “They’re abusive, wild slanders, and their repeated appearance on Tucker’s show has persuaded almost every Jew I know that the program’s purpose is to drive Jews—along with tens of millions of Zionist Christians—out of the Trump coalition and out of the Republican party.”
At the same time, Hazony argued that Jewish and Christian Zionist activists had failed to persuade Republican leaders to distance themselves from Carlson — not because Carlson was too powerful, but because critics had not presented their case professionally. He mocked the absence of a concise, evidence-based “15-minute explainer video” that could persuade conservatives unfamiliar with Carlson’s program, calling this a sign of “extreme incompetence” by what he labeled the “antisemitism-industrial complex.”
That claim became the focal point of Arfa’s response.
“The truth, as Yoram well knows, is that there is such a video,” she wrote. According to Arfa, she and other Edmund Burke Foundation staff members worked with Hazony to produce exactly such an explainer — a 14-minute, 57-second compilation of examples of antisemitic rhetoric aired on Carlson’s program.
Hazony, she said, chose not to make it public.
“He kept it unlisted in an obscure account,” Arfa wrote, adding that she was “flabbergasted” to hear Hazony publicly insist no such work existed. “It saddens me that he would diminish the work of his dedicated employees by erasing our efforts.”
A spokesperson for Hazony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The dispute over Hazony’s speech has become a proxy for a larger argument about responsibility and strategy. Hazony is urging Jews to focus on building alliances with what he describes as the dominant nationalist wing of the Republican Party, arguing that moralistic confrontations risk alienating potential allies and entrenching antisemitism.
“What would you find if you actually invested the time and effort, and opened those doors?” Hazony said in his speech. “Mostly, you’d discover that nationalist Republicans are not anti-Semites. That they are strongly committed to having Jews in their coalition. That they would like to have closer relations with the Jewish community. That many of them see Israel as an inspiration and wish America were more like Israel. In short, you’d discover that most of them are potential friends and allies.”
Critics counter that this approach shifts responsibility away from political leaders who tolerate antisemitism. Several commentators on the right have argued that treating antisemitism as a communications problem, rather than a moral red line, risks normalizing it.
Tablet, where Arfa’s essay was published, issued an unusually scathing response on social media, accusing Hazony of effectively blaming Jews for their own marginalization.
In a post on X directly responding to a Hazony, Tablet wrote, “Tucker Carlson could goose-step down Pennsylvania Avenue butt-naked with a swastika carved into his forehead and it would be the fault of ‘the anti-semitism industrial complex’ for not making the case ‘clear enough’ to ‘Republican nationalists.’”
Tablet’s post added, “The fault doesn’t lie with the Jews for being targeted by political arsonists. It lies with those people themselves, and with those who have given them political and intellectual cover, yourself included.”
The post went on to accuse Hazony of importing European-style ethnonationalist ideas into an American context defined by constitutional liberalism and religious pluralism, warning that such thinking risked alienating both Jews and the broader electorate.
Others focused less on ideology than on political accountability. Max Abrahms, a political scientist who studies extremism and political violence, argued that Hazony’s framing functioned as a defense of powerful allies who have declined to distance themselves from Carlson.“I interpret this as a defense for your political allies, especially J.D. Vance and Kevin Roberts who won’t ditch Tucker,” Abrahms wrote.
A broader critique came from Saul Sadka, a conservative writer and analyst, who accused Hazony of minimizing antisemitism in service of what he considered a marginal political project. Writing on X, Sadka argued that Hazony mischaracterized the Republican Party, overstated the influence of nationalist conservatives, and pressured Jews to align themselves with forces that, he said, are both electorally weak and tolerant of antisemitic rhetoric.
For her part, Arfa,wrote in Tablet that she’d prefer to stay out of the conversation now that’s stopped working for Hazony. Her focus is on studying to become a rabbi at the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam, Germany, a seminary affiliated with Reform and liberal Judaism.
The post Antisemitism speech sparks pushback from Jewish conservatives appeared first on The Forward.
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Two women race to save Persian Jewish music before it fades
In the 1950s, Younes Dardashti, a Jewish man from Tehran’s Jewish ghetto, became one of Iran’s most celebrated singers. As the country underwent rapid secularization under the Shah, Jewish communities that had long been pushed to the margins found new opportunities. Dardashti’s piercing, unmistakable voice filled Iranian airwaves, exclusive concert halls and the Shah’s palace, earning him the title “Nightingale of Iran.”
Years after Younes Dardashti’s death, his granddaughter Galeet is still singing with him in New York.
Using archival recordings of her grandfather’s voice, Galeet Dardashti created her album Monajat — meaning an intimate conversation with God — layering her vocals over decades-old tapes of him singing Selihot, religious poetry chanted nightly before the Jewish New Year.
Across the country in Los Angeles, Cantor Jacqueline Rafii is also trying to preserve her Iranian grandfather’s traditional Jewish Persian music.
While in cantorial school, Rafii rediscovered cassette tapes made of her grandfather leading a Passover seder in Tehran. When her family was forced to flee the country following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, they brought that cassette tape with them.
“It was like a time capsule,” said Rafii.
She realized that those grainy and distorted recordings captured a Persian Jewish musical tradition that had only ever been passed down orally from generation to generation. In the diaspora, Rafii worried, they might disappear.
So Rafii sat at the piano with her father to turn what she heard on those old cassette tapes into sheet music so that others might replicate the music Iranian Jews have been singing for centuries.
“We were trying to take this distorted tape from the ’70s and plunk out the notes,” she said. “To write something that had never been written before.”
What began with a single tape became a larger project. Rafii set out to collect and notate as many Persian Jewish melodies as she could. She put out a call on social media to try to find people who remembered Jewish prayers from Iran. Eventually, she found Dardashti, who taught Rafii her grandfather’s Yom Kippur melody for “El Nora Alila.”
A transcription challenge
According to Dardashti, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and specializes in Mizrahi culture and music, Jews have played an important role in Persian musical life for centuries.
After the 7th century, when Muslim forces conquered Persia, there were periods during which non-religious music was restricted under Islamic law. Because Jews were classified as najis, or “impure,” they faced limitations on the types of occupations they could legally pursue. Music, being a marginalized and often stigmatized profession, was typically avoided by Muslims. This made it a particularly viable livelihood for Jews who often performed the jobs that were restricted to Muslims.
Because of this, religious minorities, namely Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians, were responsible for sustaining Persian musical traditions when Muslims could not.
Classical Persian music often features singers interpreting the poetry of figures like Hafez or Rumi. One of its defining features is tahrir, a rapid oscillation in the voice that can sound like a controlled break or yodel, used to convey emotional intensity.
The music relies on modal systems and tonal structures distinct from Western scales. It also includes microtones — notes that fall between the pitches used in Western scales and cannot be easily represented on a standard musical staff. To make the melodies accessible, Rafii notates them “in a format that would be compatible with Western music,” eliminating some (but not all) of those microtones, adding chords to mimic their sound, and establishing a regular meter.
Persian Jewish music draws directly from this tradition, applying its musical forms to Jewish liturgy — Torah chanting, High Holiday prayers, and religious poetry — as well as to songs about daily life written in Judeo-Persian.
“It’s really about interpreting a text,” Dardashti said. “Just as a Persian classical singer would interpret a poem, in Persian Jewish music you’re interpreting Hebrew liturgy in a very similar way.”
For centuries, this music was transmitted entirely orally, passed down from generation to generation, with each singer adding their own interpretation and stylistic flair. During the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from the 1940s through 1979, Jews enjoyed a golden age in Iran. Jewish musicians, who often came from lineages of family members who had been making music for centuries, moved to the fore and became nationally recognized stars. Dardashti’s grandfather was perhaps the most prominent. Because Israel and Iran had good relations at the time, he frequently traveled between the two countries to share his talents.
Younes Dardashti became a cantor at synagogues across Tehran. Because his chanting was done in a musical style Iranians of all faiths were used to hearing on the radio, Galeet Dardashti says, non-Jews would press their ears to the doors of the synagogue to hear her grandfather’s voice.
A tradition passed down by men
Traditionally, Persian Jewish liturgical music was preserved and performed almost exclusively by men because of Jewish religious norms that limited women’s public singing. Now in the diaspora, that chain of transmission has begun to break down, with fewer and fewer Iranian Jews learning the songs their parents and grandparents once sang.
Rafii says she has faced obstacles in “expressing her cantorial pursuits” to more traditional members of the Persian community in the U.S., where women’s singing is still not embraced. And while she is unsure whether she will “ever in her lifetime … share these melodies personally in such communities,” she remains “hopeful that her work may be useful” to those seeking to transmit Persian Jewish music to the next generation.
For Dardashti, singing Persian Jewish music as a woman is just another layer of the reinvention that has been a feature of Persian Jewish music for generations. Though she too does not perform her music in Orthodox Iranian Jewish settings, she embraces the unique role she can play in leading services for Reform and Conservative Iranian Jews, for whom Ashkenazi-style music is often the default.
“I feel like right now this community needs me; there aren’t many people who can do this work and are willing to do it in an egalitarian setting,” said Dardashti. For the last few years, she has led high holiday services in the traditional Persian style at Kanisse, an egalitarian Jewish community for Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in New York City.
Though both Rafii and Dardashti are Iranian, neither grew up immersed in Persian Jewish musical traditions.
Like many Iranian Jews who came to the United States after the revolution, their families entered a Jewish landscape dominated by Ashkenazi practice. Dardashti’s father, himself a cantor, trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where the focus was almost entirely Ashkenazi. “I grew up the daughter of a Persian cantor who was singing Ashkenazi music,” Dardashti said.
“In order to learn Persian Jewish music, I had to start from scratch,” she added. “I knew nothing.”
She turned to her father, asking him to teach her the melodies he had grown up with in Iran but had not performed formally since coming to the U.S.
Her work, while rooted in a desire to preserve Persian Jewish music, is not without experimentation. Dardashti adds her own flair to her grandfather’s music, laying his vocals over her band and arrangement. “I’m also reinventing, because music isn’t static. Cultural transmission is messy — everyone changes things. So I lean into that messiness.”
Connecting cantors across cultures
Rafii is also continuing to transmit Persian Jewish music in an unconventional way by bringing it to Ashkenazi audiences.
When she entered cantorial school, she said, there were no formal pathways to train in non-European musical traditions. Now, she says cantors from across the country — “in particular, Ashkenazic cantors” — have reached out to her for Persian Jewish sheet music and guidance on incorporating these melodies into their services.
“They want to share how diverse the Jewish family is,” she said. “Now that there’s sheet music for Persian Jewish music, it’s accessible, and they can offer it to their community.”
Dozens of non-Persian cantors have already begun including these melodies in their services.
At Valley Beth Shalom, a largely Ashkenazi congregation in Los Angeles, Rafii regularly weaves her grandfather’s Persian tunes into worship and teaches them to the synagogue’s youth choir.
“I like to include them as part of an everyday service,” she said. “Why don’t we just combine the melodies and make this part of the American Jewish experience?”
The post Two women race to save Persian Jewish music before it fades appeared first on The Forward.
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Passover liberation and US liberty both summon us to remember and renew
At our campus Seder this week, I found myself talking to a student about Passover as a holiday of memory. She seemed puzzled and asked me to explain. The Seder plate, the ritual of reclining, and the talk of freedom, I told her, were all meant as reminders of enslavement in Egypt. Of course, she knew that. But I told her that even before the Jews cross the Red Sea to escape bondage, the Torah says something like “you better remember this!” Just after the final plagues — the killing of the first born — are visited upon the Egyptians, but before the Israelites escape from slavery, God tells Moses how the Passover holiday will be a commemoration of the events about to take place!
This day shall be to you one of remembrance: you shall celebrate it as a festival to GOD throughout the ages; you shall celebrate it as an institution for all time. Ex 12:14
You shall observe the [Feast of] Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your ranks out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day throughout the ages as an institution for all time. Ex 12:17
The commemoration of liberation, and the memory of bondage, are given sacred status — and even prior to the liberation itself. The festive meal, the Passover Seder, is a communal insistence on memory. And this insistence is not restricted to what happened to other people in the distant past. The Torah’s word for remembering here is zakhor, which means something closer to “reliving” than to what we usually think of historical recollection. We are slaves in Egypt, just as we are at the foot of Mount Sinai to receive the Commandments.
As it so happens, during Pesach this year I am also working at Wesleyan University on a national program to encourage college students to protect our democracy by participating in it. Inspired by the students who went to Mississippi in 1964 to register Black voters in the face of violent suppression, we launched Democracy Summer 2026, a nonpartisan call to young people to strengthen their democratic muscles by using them. We are mindful of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence as we build programs along with colleges and universities across the country that aim to remind our fellow citizens of the importance of exercising our powers as constituents of this constitutional republic. The mission statements of educational institutions — from small private religious schools to large public universities — express an obligation to contribute to the public sphere. When we do contribute, we are participating in history, learning about ourselves and the world around us; we contribute to our institutions and to the country whose freedoms allow them to fulfill their purposes.
As part of this work, I’ve been rereading Danielle Allen’s wonderful Our Declaration (2015), a book that helps us through a slow reading of a core founding document. Allen describes teaching the Declaration of Independence to a group of working adults in a night class in Chicago and how by doing so she came to appreciate its famous words more profoundly than ever: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” She came to see these words (and the Declaration as a whole) as aimed at her and her students — that they were part of that “WE,” members of the political community that recognized the power of these truths. This realization didn’t happen right away. At first her students thought that the Declaration represented “institutions and power, everything that solidified a world that had, as life turned out, delivered them so much grief, so much to overcome.” They had to make the document their own to see themselves as participants in its legacy.
These students “regifted” the Declaration to Allen by helping her see its argument for political equality as her own political patrimony. The founding fathers would not have seen it this way: Allen is a Black woman whom they would not have recognized as a citizen. But by reading the text slowly and carefully with her students, she and they claimed it as their rightful inheritance: “an understanding of freedom and equality, and of the value of finding the right words.”
In Torah study, I strive for something similar to this claiming of an inheritance. Such a claim, I find, is also what we are meant to feel when we read the Haggadah at our Seders. I study not to acquire expertise about holy texts but to participate in an ongoing conversation about enduring questions. Through the teaching that we were slaves in Egypt, we are meant to feel how it is to be oppressed and to consider our obligation to claim our freedoms, an essential step in developing a people. And we are also meant to help other groups escape oppression, make good on claims for liberation that resonate with our story. This is not only for the week of Passover. Rashi teaches that we must make mention of the exodus from Egypt every day. Every day we must claim our freedom and, we might add, find the right words for others to do so.
This is also the message of our summer call to action this year. As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, let us claim our political patrimony, our rightful inheritance. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: it is our republic so let us keep it!
The post Passover liberation and US liberty both summon us to remember and renew appeared first on The Forward.
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Downed Planes Raise New Perils for Trump as Tehran Hunts for Missing US Pilot
Traces of an Iranian missile attack in Tehran’s sky, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Two US warplanes were downed over Iran and the Gulf, Iranian and US officials said on Friday, with two pilots rescued and a third still missing and being hunted by Tehran’s forces.
The incidents show the risks still faced by US and Israeli aircraft over Iran despite assertions from US President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that their forces had total control of the skies.
The first plane, a two-seat US F-15E jet, was shot down by Iranian fire, officials in both countries said.
The second plane, an A-10 Warthog fighter aircraft, was hit by Iranian fire and crashed over Kuwait, with the pilot ejecting, two US officials said.
Two Blackhawk helicopters involved in the search effort for the missing pilot were hit by Iranian fire but made it out of Iranian airspace, the two US officials told Reuters.
The degree of injuries among the crew of the aircraft remained unclear. The status and whereabouts of the missing F-15E crew member was not publicly known.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it was combing an area near where the pilot’s plane came down in southwestern Iran and the regional governor promised a commendation for anyone who captured or killed “forces of the hostile enemy.”
Iranians, who have been pummeled by American air power for weeks, posted gleeful messages celebrating the plane downings. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that the U.S. and Israel’s war had been “downgraded from regime change” to a hunt for their pilots.
Trump has been in the White House receiving updates on the search-and-rescue operation, a senior administration official told Reuters. The Pentagon and US Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
NO SIGN OF END TO WAR
The prospect of a US service person being alive and on the run inside Iran raises the stakes for Washington in a conflict with low public support and no sign of an imminent end.
Iran has officially told mediators it is not prepared to meet with US officials in Islamabad in coming days and that efforts to produce a ceasefire, led by Pakistan, have reached a dead end, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The US and Israel opened the campaign with a wave of strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28. The war has killed thousands and threatened lasting damage to the global economy.
So far, 13 US military service members have been killed in the conflict and more than 300 have been wounded, according to the US Central Command.
Iran has rained down drones and missiles on Israel. It has also taken aim at Gulf countries allied to the US, which have so far held back from joining the war directly for fear of further escalation.
In a security alert on Friday, the US embassy in Beirut said Iran and its aligned armed groups may target universities in Lebanon and urged US citizens in the country to leave while commercial flights are still available.
Israel has been waging a parallel campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon after the militant group fired at Israel in support of Iran.
TRUMP THREAT TO STRIKE BRIDGES, POWER PLANTS
On Friday, as Trump threatened to hit its bridges and power plants, Iran struck a power and water plant in Kuwait, underlining the vulnerability of Gulf states that rely heavily on desalination plants for drinking water.
On Thursday, Trump posted footage on social media showing dust and smoke billowing up as US strikes hit the newly constructed B1 bridge between Tehran and nearby Karaj, which was due to open this year, and said more attacks would follow.
“Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) anywhere in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” he wrote in a subsequent post.
On Friday, a drone hit a Red Crescent relief warehouse in the Choghadak area of Iran’s southern Bushehr province.
Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery had been hit by drones. Other attacks were also reported to have been intercepted in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Missile debris landed near the Israeli port of Haifa, site of a major oil refinery.
Oil markets were closed after benchmark U.S. crude prices gained 11% on Thursday following a speech by Trump that offered no clear sign of an imminent end to the war.