Uncategorized
As Slovenia takes a hard line against Israel, its tiny Jewish community feels increasingly isolated
(JTA) — LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — In June 2024, Slovenia’s parliament voted to recognize a Palestinian state only one week after Spain, Ireland and Norway had taken that dramatic step.
Half a year later, Slovenian public broadcaster RTV — citing the ongoing war in Gaza—became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. This past May, RTV warned it might boycott future editions of Eurovision if Israel isn’t expelled.
Over the summer, Slovenia banned imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, only a week after prohibiting all weapons trade with Israel — the first EU member to do so. That ruling followed on the heels of another one declaring two right-wing Israeli officials persona non grata. Last week, it became the first EU country to impose a travel ban on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“People are dying in Gaza because they are systematically denied humanitarian aid,” the government said in announcing the arms embargo. “In such circumstances, it is the duty of every responsible country to act, even if that means taking a step before others do.”
Some analysts have pegged the aggressive anti-Israel stance as a gambit ahead of the country’s upcoming elections, when the country’s pro-Israel right will try to retake control after losing power in 2022.
But for Slovenia’s roughly 100 Jews, the campaign against Israel is part of a pattern of hostility that transcends the vagaries of politics. Barely five years ago under a right-wing government, a Slovene court voided the 1946 treason conviction of executed Nazi collaborator Leon Rupnik, who nearly liquidated the country’s Jewish population.
“Slovenes always want to be on the side of the underdog, and the media perception over the last 40 years is of poor Palestinians and big, imperialist Israel who took their land,” said Robert Waltl, president of the Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia. “But now, because of the war, it’s worse here than any other former Yugoslav republic.”
Waltl spoke to JTA from his office at the Mini Theater, which since 2013 has also housed the Jewish Cultural Center and Slovenia’s only active synagogue. The 500-year-old building, which Waltl renovated with $1.6 million in donations, fronts Krizevniska Street in Ljubljana’s old city.
Its 6,500 square feet — crammed with prayer books, menorahs, historic photographs and an entire exhibit on the Holocaust — has become the focus of Jewish culture in Slovenia, with 2.1 million people the smallest and most prosperous of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia.
Unlike neighboring Croatia — whose center-right government has pursued a stridently pro-Israel policy despite a rising, homegrown fascist movement — Slovenia has veered sharply to the left in recent years.
“Christian antisemitism was very visible here before World War II,” Waltl, 60, explained as his dog, Umbra, repeatedly barked at passersby. “At the beginning of the 20th century, there was no university here, so people studied in Vienna — and the mayor of Vienna was very antisemitic. Students learned it there and brought it back home with them.”
The presence of Jews in Slovenia dates back to Roman times, with the first synagogue in Ljubljana built around 1213. During the Middle Ages, the most important community was in Maribor, though Jews were expelled from that town in 1496, and then from Ljubljana in 1515.
By the early 20th century, Slovenia’s Prekmurje region had become home to two-thirds of the country’s 1,400 Jews, mostly in the towns of Murska Sobota and Lendava. Yet antisemitism was pervasive; an outbreak of Jew-hatred during the 1929 economic crisis followed accusations that Jewish moneylenders were profiting from exorbitant interest rates. By the end of World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators had killed all but a handful of the country’s Jewish inhabitants.
During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Yugoslavia under Tito helped the fledgling Jewish state, but later, as head of the Non-Aligned Movement, he befriended Yasser Arafat and switched his allegiance. After Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s, the region was plunged into years of ethnic warfare that left an estimated 130,000 dead and millions homeless.
Only Slovenia escaped serious bloodshed, with only 62 deaths reported during its 10-day war of independence against the dominant republic, Serbia. Nevertheless, the Alpine republic — the same one that has just declared an arms embargo against Israel — became embroiled in a massive scandal involving weapons sales to Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, both of which were fighting Serbia, despite a 1991 United Nations arms embargo.
Waltl said his country’s policy toward Israel, as well as domestic media, is riddled with hypocrisy and misinformation.
“In Croatia, the government strongly criticized what Hamas did on Oct. 7 and they stand with Israel. In Slovenia, it was the same for the first few days, but then all attention shifted to the plight of the Palestinians,” he said. “Today in Slovenia, 99% of the media isn’t just pro-Palestinian but anti-Israel. You will never hear that Israel was attacked by Hamas or Hezbollah, only that Israelis kill women and children.”
He added: “It’s also true, however, that the right-wing government in Israel has crossed all acceptable lines and limits of humanity, triggering a wave of hatred towards Jews worldwide.”
It doesn’t help that Israel has never established an embassy in Ljubljana — even though Slovenia has maintained one in Tel Aviv for the past 30 years.
Polona Vetrih, a prominent stage actress whose father survived World War II as a partisan, said she’s had several unpleasant encounters with local antisemites. Recently, she sang at a peace concert where she performed the Ladino song “Adios Querida.”
“One girl from Palestine was very loud. She was screaming, and they threatened me. I was scared to death,” she said. “I went to the police afterwards.”
Frequently, she hears Slovenes complain that Jews are mean and think only of themselves.
“They don’t have a clue. Even during the Middle Ages, they blamed Jews for the plague,” she said. “I think it’s up to us to show them it’s not true.”
During communism, Slovenia had virtually no organized Jewish life. In 1991, the Liberal Jewish Community was established, and in 2002, local Jews contracted with a Chabad rabbi from Trieste, Italy, to conduct High Holiday services. The following year, said Waltl, the community received a Torah scroll from a British donor, and turned a nearby cigarette factory into a small synagogue with the help of the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee.
Ten years ago, with the help of Lustig Branko — producer of the film “Schindler’s List” — the museum established a Festival of Tolerance. Last year, some 6,000 elementary school students came to see performances of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Currently, liberal rabbis Alexander Grodensky of Luxembourg and Tobias Moss of Vienna visit Slovenia for special occasions.
In April 2024, a 10-member delegation from the World Jewish Congress traveled to Slovenia to meet with government officials, but they were ignored, Waltl said. And when swastikas were discovered scrawled on the walls of the Jewish Cultural Center one night, he said, “no one from the government came, and no one called me — not even the mayor of the city.”
Maya Samakovlija, the organization’s executive director of community relations, went even further.
“We were not merely ignored. What happened to us is something no other government in the world has done ever in the long history of the WJC,” said Samakovlija, who is based in Zagreb, Croatia. “Neither the prime minister, the president, the speaker of parliament, nor the minister of foreign affairs made any effort to meet with us. Instead, they sent only deputies and lower-ranking officials.”
At that meeting, Blanka Jamnišek, deputy head of Slovenia’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, asked the visitors what they were doing “to promote a ceasefire and stop the killing of children, and the famine in Gaza,” according to Samakovlija and a statement that the AJC released at the time. The IHRA definition of antisemitism cites holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions as an example of antisemitism.
“Her colleagues were visibly shocked,” the WJC official said. “Once she had finished, I made the decision that we’d leave as a delegation. We stood up, ended the meeting and walked out.”
Ernest Herzog, the WJC’s executive director of operations, was also part of that delegation. He said Slovenia’s Jews “face an alarming rise in antisemitism, evident in acts of vandalism, threats and hostile rhetoric.”
“It is deeply troubling that certain officials have sought to justify this climate of intolerance through a distorted interpretation of the Middle East conflict — an excuse that is wholly unacceptable,” he added.
Politicians on the right more often support Israel. This past April, the Slovenia-Israel Allies Caucus was established by lawmaker Žan Mahnič of the Slovenian Democratic Party. Former Slovene Prime Minister Janez Janša, who supports the caucus, has said that if he returns to power, he will relocate his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and rescind Ljubljana’s recognition of Palestine.
Steve Oberman, an attorney in Knoxville, Tennessee, and past president of that city’s Arnstein Jewish Community Center, visited Slovenia in 2024 to teach a law class at the University of Ljubljana. He has since become a passionate defender of Waltl’s efforts.
“I’m disappointed that the Slovenian government isn’t doing a better job of supporting the Jewish community of Slovenia, given the country’s history,” Oberman told JTA in a phone interview. “Poor Robert has carried this task, almost singlehandedly, to revive Jewish life there and create a synagogue. I’m trying to work through our local Jewish community here in Knoxville to raise awareness, and hopefully some money.”
Meanwhile, the situation for the few Jews remaining in Slovenia isn’t getting easier.
Sophia Huzbasic, a native of Kyrgyzstan who lived for a time in Israel but settled in Slovenia nine years ago, said she was born with Soviet citizenship but chose to retain her Israeli passport.
A graphic designer, she lives in Ljubljana with her husband Igor, who’s from Sarajevo, Bosnia.
“For local Jews, I truly believe the antisemitism is really terrible,” she said. “I was raised in Moscow in the 1990s, so for me this is nothing. I’m not scared but I’m angry.”
Huzbasic, 43, said her bank refused to approve a car lease when officials learned she was an Israeli citizen — just one example, she said, of the insidious antisemitism that seems to be prevalent.
“We feel very angry because of the official position of the Slovenian government. What they’re doing is propaganda from a very poorly educated point of view, and they don’t want to widen their knowledge about the conflict,” Huzbasic said. “I totally disagree with the Israeli political situation, and I chose to keep my Israeli citizenship and live here. But now I’m very close to changing my mind. I cannot stop being a Jew.”
The post As Slovenia takes a hard line against Israel, its tiny Jewish community feels increasingly isolated appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Tucker Carlson hosts Nick Fuentes for a friendly conversation about ‘these Zionist Jews’
Tucker Carlson wanted to know: What does Nick Fuentes actually believe?
“Everybody’s going to be like, ‘You’re a Nazi, you just like Fuentes,’” the former Fox News personality mused on his show Tuesday. “But then I’m like, ‘I don’t think Fuentes is going away. Ben Shapiro tried to strangle him in the crib in college, and now he’s bigger than ever.’”
So Carlson invited the avowed antisemite and white nationalist livestreamer onto his online talk show. There, the two had a friendly conversation about the Jews, and whether it was right to blame them for everything.
And Fuentes, whose own platform has only grown in the wake of the assassination of conservative archrival Charlie Kirk, made clear what he believes. Asked who in the conservative movement needed to be taken down, he responded, “These Zionist Jews.”
The sit-down, which had been rumored for weeks, carries implications for the growing popularity of antisemitism and anti-Israel voices on the right. Both men have followings in the millions, and Carlson has maintained close ties in President Donald Trump’s orbit even as he has become a vociferous critic of Israel and helped platform Holocaust revisionists.
Fuentes, meanwhile, has launched a far-right attack on mainstream conservatives using antisemitism as his chief plank — an ideology that an increasing number of young conservative operatives are also embracing. On YouTube, the top comments under the two-hour episode were rife with antisemitic memes.
Even as he signalled broad alignment with Fuentes’s views on Israel, Carlson gently sought to distinguish himself from his guest’s more overt antisemitism.
“I’m not that interested in ‘the Jews,’ but I am very interested in the foreign policy question,” Carlson said at one point, bringing up his fingers for air quotes. Later, he told Fuentes, “The second you’re like, ‘Well, actually, it’s the Jews,’ first of all, it’s against my Christian faith. Like, I just don’t believe that and I never will. Period. And second, then it becomes a way to discredit. That’s when I was like, ‘This guy’s a fed.’”
In response, the young man who opens his “America First” online shows with animated depictions of Jewish conspiracies outlined his own core belief: that “neoconservatism,” an ideology he opposes, is Jewish in nature because it prioritizes allegiance to Israel over traditional conservative principles.
“As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness: ethnicity, religion, identity,” Fuentes told Carlson. While some Jews do oppose Israel, he acknowledged, among his enemies in conservatism, “I see Jewishness as the common denominator.”
Fuentes continued, “They’re a stateless people. They’re unassimilable. They resist assimilation for thousands of years. And I think that’s a good thing. And now they have this territory in Israel. There’s a deep religious affection for the state. It’s bound up in their identity.” Modern neoconservatism, he said, stemmed from “Jewish leftists who were mugged by reality when they saw the surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War.”
Fuentes insisted he doesn’t hate all Jews: “Not to be that guy and say that thing, but my best friend is a Jewish person,” he said, also claiming his “assistant” is Jewish (it was unclear if he was referring to the same person). He then went on to blend his understanding of Jewish American anxieties, some of which have been articulated by leading Jewish communal figures, with the dual-loyalty trope.
“If you are a Jewish person in America, it’s sort of rational self-interest, politically, to say, ‘I am a minority. I am a religious, ethnic minority. This is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel,’” Fuentes said. “They have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.”
Even beyond Israel, Fuentes also sought to paint Judaism as incompatible with the European tradition to which America’s modern right aspires. “They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the Temple,” he said. “We don’t think that, as Americans and white people.”
To hear Fuentes tell it, his radicalization was a story of first being taken in by, before later rebelling against, influential Jewish conservatives. Israel was his breaking point, he insisted.
Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin and Dennis Prager were his right-wing heroes in high school, Fuentes said; he would parrot Shapiro talking points in debates and was a member of a Facebook group for young fans of PragerU. As a college freshman in 2017 he fell into the orbit of The Daily Wire, Shapiro’s media company, after a debate against his school’s progressive student body president went viral. Fuentes would soon drop out of college to pursue conservative media full-time.
Quickly, Fuentes claimed, he became suspicious of Shapiro’s pro-Israel views. When a staffer asked him if he had any interest in traveling to Israel, he responded, “No, I think I have everything I need right here in America…. And that was a little bit of foreshadowing.”
Later, he said, he would challenge Daily Wire staff: “I would say, ‘So, why do we give Israel all this money?’” he recalled. “They would say, ‘You’re asking it in an antisemitic way.’”
But Fuentes, in his recollection, “was genuinely inquisitive. I wanted to know. Is there an actual reason?… There’s a lot of these neocon Jewish types behind the Iraq War.” The Daily Wire’s rejection of his questions on Israel, he said, spurred his shunning across the broader mainstream conservative movement and led to him going independent with his preaching of more insidious forms of Jewish control.
Comparing himself to Shapiro, Fuentes reflected, “I didn’t come from some strange background. I come from a normal home. My parents are Catholic.” (In recent weeks, Shapiro and some other voices on the right have warned of a rise in antisemitic conspiracies among their ranks.)
Even as Fuentes became a Trump loyalist in the run-up to the 2016 election, he said, he broke with conservatives by supporting President Barack Obama’s decision to abstain from, rather than back, a National Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
“Fox News and all the pro-Israel conservatives are calling him an antisemite. They’re saying, ‘He hates Jews! He’s an antisemite! He hates Israel!’” Fuentes recalled. “It seemed hypocritical. It seemed like how, when conservatives would critique anything about race, we got called racist. Or anything about feminism, we got called sexist. All Obama did was uphold US policy on the West Bank that we’ve had since ’67, which is, we don’t support the settlements. I said, how is it antisemitic to just be consistent on our U.S. foreign policy?”
On Israel, Carlson said, they agreed.
“I always thought it’s great to criticize and question our relationship with Israel because it’s insane and it hurts us,” Carlson told him. “We get nothing out of it. I completely agree with you there.” He also blasted Christian Zionists on the right he used to support, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, whom he said have been “seized by this brain virus.”
Later discussing the war in Gaza, Carlson added, “One of the reasons I’m mad about Gaza is because the Israeli position is, everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children. That’s not a Western view. That’s an Eastern view. That’s non-Christian. That’s totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization. They say, ‘Oh, we’re the defenders of Western civilization.’ Not with that attitude, you’re not.”
The two did agree on some Jews they both respect, including Glenn Greenwald, an iconoclastic Israel critic formerly on the left who himself hosted Fuentes recently on his own podcast, and Paul the Apostle.
Elsewhere, the men discussed whom Fuentes wants to see be president next (he picked Ye, the superstar rapper who has embraced Nazism) and his 2022 dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and Trump, where Fuentes said the once and future president said, “This guy’s hardcore. I like this guy.” (Trump has since claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was when they dined together.)
When asked to share his unfettered core beliefs with Carlson, Fuentes obliged, painting a vision of a future America that Jews did not have the right to inherit.
“We do need to be right-wing. We do need to be Christian. We do, on some level, need to be pro-white,” he said. “Not to the exclusion of everybody else, but recognizing that white people have a special heritage here, as Americans.”
—
The post Tucker Carlson hosts Nick Fuentes for a friendly conversation about ‘these Zionist Jews’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
It’s so cool that Sandy Koufax was there for that
Sometime around the 16th inning of last night’s marathon World Series game, Dodger manager Dave Roberts admitted to a Fox sideline reporter he was on his last relief pitcher.
But some viewers, perhaps growing delirious as the clock approached midnight in Los Angeles, had an idea for who Roberts should call on next: a retired 89-year-old southpaw sitting behind home plate.
“If this game goes any longer,” one fan wrote on X, “Dodgers are gonna have to put in Koufax.”
It was one of the most improbable and most interminable baseball games ever played, a cosmic struggle between two powerhouses on the game’s biggest stage—cinema, if movies could run for six hours and 39 minutes. The Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays combined to use 44 players, 220 baseballs and throw 609 pitches. The game went so long there was a 14th-inning stretch — and then four more frames, before the Dodgers finally won 6-5 in the 18th inning.
Sandy Koufax, the Jewish sports hero and four-time World Series winner, was there for all of it. As the Dodgers and Blue Jays stayed deadlocked at 5 runs apiece for nearly 10 innings, Fox kept cutting to him, holding out for a breakthrough like every other diehard. More than a few marveled that he was still awake.
Sticking around meant Koufax witnessed not only one of the greatest baseball games ever played, but an incredible full-circle moment involving his heir apparent, Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw and Koufax, both of whom played their entire careers with the Dodgers, are said to be close; Kershaw, the only lefty to rival Koufax’s pitching dominance since the latter’s retirement in 1966, will retire after this World Series.
But comparisons between the two fall apart in the playoffs, where Kershaw has historically crumbled. Now 37, Kershaw was kept on the Dodgers’ World Series roster in case of emergency — an injury to a starting pitcher, for example, or other long-relief duties. Anything other than a Sisyphean set-up.
Instead, Dodger fans everywhere held their breath as Roberts called on Kershaw with the bases loaded and two outs in the 12th inning of a tie game. It was Kershaw’s first All he needed was to get one out. This time, he did. As he walked off the mound, the broadcast cut first to Koufax applauding his old friend.
Nobody deserved this more than Clayton Kershaw. pic.twitter.com/Ja1Y2gCyTy
— Michael Bier (@MichaelJBier) October 28, 2025
One person wrote the scene was “as good as it gets for baseball history nerds.”
It must have pained Koufax to see his friend — Koufax-like in so many ways — fall short in the postseason so many times in the last 18 years. How cool is it that he was there to see Kershaw come through at the end? It must have meant a lot to Kershaw, too.
That was it for Kershaw, but not Koufax. Kershaw was replaced by Edgardo Henriquez, who was then replaced by journeyman right-hander Will Klein. Klein (not Jewish, to save you a search, though a few friends joked an unkempt red beard recalled a Chabad rabbi) had never thrown more than 30 pitches in a single appearance as a pro. On Monday, with no relief pitchers waiting behind him, Klein threw seventy-one, in a four-inning shutout performance that kept the Dodgers alive long enough for Freddie Freeman’s 18th-inning walkoff home run to deliver victory.
After the game, Koufax reportedly made his way to the Dodger clubhouse to congratulate Klein on his effort. It was well-past midnight by the time he got there.
“Nice going, kid,” Koufax told Klein, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
You’d have to think Koufax had a moment in the clubhouse with Kershaw, too. Those words have not yet been revealed to us. What they shared on the field — and what fans watching got to share with them — is cool enough to suffice.
Sandy Koufax at the beginning of last night’s game. https://t.co/V6CAR3ldTI
— JonathanLightman (@JonathanLightm1) October 28, 2025
The post It’s so cool that Sandy Koufax was there for that appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
No Arrest Yet in Antisemitic Attack, Kippah Desecration Against Israeli Educator Visiting Manhattan
A view of lower Manhattan, from The Green-Wood Cemetery, during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, May 27, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Brendan McDermid
Police in New York City have opened a hate crime investigation in response to reports of a violent assault in Midtown Manhattan on Monday afternoon against an Israeli man following the theft and desecration of his kippah.
Near the Mr. Broadway kosher restaurant, an unknown man reportedly saw Rami Glickstein, pointed to his head covering, and instructed him to “tell me what your religion is.”
The 58-year-old from Ofra — north of Jerusalem in the West Bank — ignored the provocation, which in turn led to further escalation. The man — described as in his 20s or 30s — grabbed Glickstein’s kippah, threw it on the ground, and spat on it. When Glickstein knelt to retrieve the violated symbol of his Jewish identity, his attacker punched him in the face and ran, according to multiple reports.
Witnesses on the scene around 6:30 pm on West 38th Street called an ambulance for Glickstein which then took him to the Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital, where he was treated for injuries to his face.
“My pride as an Israeli was wounded more than my body,” Glickstein said of the incident, according to local news outlet 5TownsCentral. “I froze — I’ve never encountered hatred like this in my life.”
Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, released a statement following the hate crime.
“The attack is a direct result of the daily incitement worldwide, including in the United States, against Jews and Israel,” Akunis said. “Lies, verbal violence, calls to carry out another Oct. 7 massacre, and blood libels that are spread without any restraint — such as the false blood libel about Gaza — influence many, some of whom do not hesitate to attack physically.”
New York City has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. The US as a whole and several other countries around the world have reported similar spikes in antisemitic activity, with many incidents against Jews or Jewish institutions invoking Israel and the Gaza conflict.
Akunis called for “all US public leaders” to “immediately and forcefully condemn the attack and the calls for violence such as to ‘globalize the intifada.’”
Glickstein, an educator who works as a lecturer for the Israel Defense Forces speaking on the topics of Jewish history and resilience, declared that “my Israeli pride was hurt,” adding that “it pains me that I couldn’t fight back, and I regret that deeply.”
Responding to the attack, the Combat Antisemitism Movement posted on X that “the rise in antisemitism in New York has become unbearable.”
On Wednesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released research about antisemitic crime in New York City in 2024, recording 976 incidents. Of New York’s boroughs, the ADL identified Manhattan as possessing the highest number with a count of 587, followed by Brooklyn with 253 and Queens at 85. The researchers reported 24 in Staten Island and 27 in the Bronx.
The ADL described the figures as “the highest count in any US city last year and the highest count in any US city since ADL has been tracking such incidents.”
According to the ADL’s researchers, last year over 50 percent of the anti-Jewish physical attacks in the city “targeted Orthodox Jewish victims (36 out of 69 total), though this group makes up only about one-fifth of New York City’s total Jewish population. Observant Jewish people often wear visible markers of their Judaism, such as [kippahs], making them vulnerable to random antisemitic attacks in public, which we fear have become increasingly normalized.”