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As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — On Friday afternoon, Squirrel Hill was suffused with spring breezes and pink dogwoods, and alive with the movement that typifies the coming of Shabbat.
Toddlers scrambled up the jungle gym in the JCC playground, while the chatter in cafes was about a looming storm that could soak the walk to synagogue on Saturday. Murray Avenue Kosher was emptying out of challahs.
Barely present, at least on the surface, was any indication that Monday morning would hold a turning point in the community’s greatest trauma. That’s when jury selection was to begin in the trial of the man accused of shattering Shabbat on Oct. 27, 2018, with gunfire. His massacre of 11 worshipers, in a synagogue building a 10-minute stroll from the downtown of this leafy, heavily Jewish neighborhood, was the deadliest-ever attack on U.S. Jews.
But behind the scenes, there are clear signs that the trial’s proximity is being felt. Maggie Feinstein, the director of the 10/27 Healing Partnership, which provides post-traumatic therapy for the community, said that as the trial nears, requests for treatment have spiked.
“The trauma cues that for a while bothered us right after the shooting — for some people it might be ambulances, for other people it might be media, for some people it might be the sound of multiple police cars — you get to a place where they don’t bother you as much,” she said. “But the increased media attention and the increased awareness of this upcoming trial for a number of people is bringing back for them that maybe they didn’t do their own healing the first time around.”
A Starbucks in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh is decorated with a memorial for the victims of the 2018 massacre at the city’s Tree of Life synagogue, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
There were three congregations in the building: Tree of Life and New Light, both affiliated with the Conservative movement, and Dor Hadash, which is Reconstructionist.
The 11 victims were brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, couple Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Rose Malinger, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. Seven were from Tree of Life, three were from New Light and one was from Dor Hadash.
For their families, their friends, their congregations and their broader Jewish community, the legacy of the massacre is a deep-seated longing for control, a longing to never have to think again of the gunman and of the anguish he left in his wake, while grappling with tender memories of the dead, of the decades spent in celebration and in prayer in the building.
Who narrates this story, the gunman or his victims? That struggle now looms as the alleged gunman goes to trial. The community is wrestling with questions such as where and whether to put the bullet-riddled artifacts, whether to worship at the site, whether to even speak of the massacre and how and whether the gunman lives or dies.
”We believe strongly that this antisemitic attack should not stop people from practicing and being Jewish,” Feinsten said. “For a lot of people, that’s an active choice that they have to work at. It doesn’t come easily after feeling unsafe in that environment to then work to find safety in it. But a lot of people have chosen to do that.”
On Friday, Feinstein was organizing support services for families who would, if they so choose, be sequestered in a separate room in the court where they could view the trial. (Family members may also ask to be seated in the courtroom.) She assigned six therapists to be present with the families.
Compounding the revisited trauma of the event, the families are divided over whether the gunman, should he be convicted, deserves the death penalty. The accused has a lawyer, Judy Clarke, known as “the attorney for the damned” for her determination to keep her clients from execution.
What’s clear is that the Jews of Squirrel Hill are taking the trial on with their characteristic spirit of collaboration. The community has hired public relations specialists to handle media inquiries ahead of the trial, in part to safeguard locals from being pressed to answer questions that could harm them or shatter the sense of unity. Congregants reached by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency dutifully deferred to the list of approved contacts on a list distributed by a PR agency.
On Friday afternoon, signs of unity that flooded the city in the immediate aftermath of the shooting were still visible. In a tobacconist’s window a sign with the slogan “No place for hate/Stronger than hate,” which had proliferated throughout the neighborhood after the attack, remained propped up next to a flag and an ad for the lottery. A Starbucks had on its window white paint drawings depicting “love,” “kindness” and “hope” in English and in Hebrew, alongside symbols: the Star of David, a heart and a dove.
A tobacconist window includes a poster of the “No Place for Hate” slogan that proliferated after the Tree of Life Massacre in 2018, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
Representatives of the community talk about “doing Jewish” as a means of coping, including redoubling the very activities — allying with the city’s Black minority and advocating for immigration, refugees and gun control — that fueled the rage of the alleged attacker.
The attacker allegedly was driven in part by the partnership between Dor Hadash and HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group, and the congregation’s sponsorship of refugee families.
“We have, if anything, doubled down on our commitment to immigrants and refugees,” said Dana Kellerman, the chair of the communications committee at Dor Hadash. “We are currently coming up on the end of our first year working with a new resettlement program to resettle a Congolese immigrant family in Pittsburgh, and we have every intention of when the year commitment is up of working with a second family.”
Kellerman said the shooting had “honestly become part of the background of our existence at this point.” In keeping with her congregation’s rules aimed at protecting their community, Kellerman declined to talk about the day of the massacre, the death penalty or about details of the trial. But she was open about the ways in which her congregation has leaned into the values it has long held, and that the gunman so reviled.
“We have become louder and more public about practicing our Judaism,” she said. Now, she said, the congregation incorporates advocacy for refugees into its service, with liturgical readings on immigration.
There are other changes. “We even have hats now! We have baseball caps!” Kellerman said with a smile, unearthing a photo of herself in a white cap with “Dor Hadash” and a stylized Magen David in blue, standing alongside gun control advocates.
“Previously we all would have shown up as our individual selves, and now we show up in our Dor Hadash baseball caps,” she said. “Mine kept blowing off.”
Steve Cohen, the co-president of New Light, said the congregation’s relationship with Black churches in the city has reached new intensity since the massacre. The congregation’s rabbi and congregants who know Hebrew partner with the churches to analyze sacred texts in the original.
“We would bring our Tanachs [Hebrew Bibles], and the Christian congregation would bring their Bible and then we would talk about the Proverbs and go through it, not just what the intention of the author was, but how different ways the same words can be translated in order to imply different things,” he said. “And so we went through the whole Book of Proverbs with the Rodman Street Baptist Church, and this past winter, we did the selected Psalms with the faith and Destiny Church on the north side.”
The interior of the new sanctuary of the New Light congregation, four and half years after a gunman massacred three of its congregants, in Pittsburgh, April 21, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
New Light took its cue from survivors of the 2015 attack on the Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, Cohen said. Leaders of New Light traveled to the church and heard from its elders that it was not enough to tend to the traumatized individuals, but to the community; they emphasized outreach, bringing congregants back in.
“That’s a lot of the reason why we have an outpouring of members who never attended shul now attending shul,” he said.
Feinstein, too, said she had an intensification of religious and ritual observance among her clients: more frequent attendance at Shabbat services, forming a daily minyan, finding a study partner for daily Talmud study.
Kellerman said the community has become closer; she sees it in congregants who linger. “It shows up in things like people showing up for Friday night services, and hanging out to chat or getting on a little early to chat,” she said.
A rendition of architect Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the interior of the new Tree of Life synagogue. (Tree of Life)
In the days leading up to the trial, the community bid farewell to the most salient relic of that painful day: the hulking synagogue building on the corner of Wilkins and Shady that has stood empty since then. All three congregations have decamped to nearby synagogues, leaving behind the chain-link fence draped with paintings from children across the country wishing for strength.
“Nobody has been meeting in the synagogue since the day of the shooting,” said Carole Zawatsky, the Tree of Life CEO who is overseeing the plans to replace the building. The only people to have been inside at all, she said, were survivors and “special friends” — donors to the rebuilding and politicians.
Zawatsky said it is wrenching to even contemplate returning for some. “You can walk through the building and see where the gunman was destructive,” she said. “You can see where the gunman was apprehended, where the gunman opened fire. It’s devastating to witness.”
But some intend to: Tree of Life lost seven congregants but plans on returning once the building is rebuilt as a museum and education center focused on the dangers of extremism.
On Sunday, the Tree of Life congregation had an outdoor ceremony to say “L’hitraot,” Hebrew for “until we meet again,” to the building as it has existed up to now.
“We are grateful to God for the thousands of blessings that have passed through these doors,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the rabbi who sheltered congregants and alerted police, said at the ceremony. “We cannot, we must not, permit one day … to define us, nor outweigh all the good.”
The new center is being designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect who designed the master plan for the World Trade Center site reconstruction in New York and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But Dor Hadash and New Light decided their moves were permanent in part because families of their victims swore never to return to the building.
New Light is now ensconced in what once was a secondary chapel at the Beth Shalom synagogue, as if it has been there for decades: Plaques honoring past donors and presidents adorn the walls of the sanctuary. The only signs of the massacre are the 1,000 paper cranes Pittsburgh’s Japanese community gave the congregation, reflecting a Japanese tradition that folding cranes will make a wish come true. They hang at the entrance to the sanctuary, unexplained by any plaque. There is a stained glass monument to the three victims at the cemetery where they are buried.
Even with Tree of Life’s commitment to return, many questions remain about what that will look like. The congregation has yet to decide what objects will stay in the sanctuary, what will stay in storage and what will be part of a separate exhibit, Zawatsky said.
“The first work that’s had to be done for the synagogue is ‘What are the things that need to be saved and go into storage during construction?’” she said.
In some ways, she indicated, the work of rebuilding could bear some resemblance to the balancing act that the community will have to navigate during the alleged shooter’s trial.
“We are thinking deeply about how you exhibit some of these materials,” Zaslavsky said, “in ways that are both teachable moments and don’t retraumatize.”
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The post As trial begins in Tree of Life massacre, Pittsburgh’s Jews struggle with what to reveal and what to conceal appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In Israel’s mixed cities, the future of coexistence is already being tested
Human ingenuity has equipped us with technology to connect individuals in a way once unimaginable. But, in the past two decades, we have used that power to find ever more things that we hate about each other.
Since modern society has become remarkably proficient at manufacturing polarization, we need to learn from places where people already live alongside those they have been taught to regard as fundamentally different. Not because those places have solved the problem, but because they have no choice but to confront it.
Israel’s so-called mixed cities are among those places.
In Split: Life in the Israeli Mixed Cities, filmmakers Shady Srour and Dina Zvi Riklis examine the fragile arrangements through which Jewish and Arab Israelis inhabit the same urban spaces. The documentary focuses on five cities — Acre (Akko), Ramla, Haifa, Lod (Lydda) and Jaffa — that are defined as “mixed” by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics because “a significant majority of Jewish residents lives alongside a significant minority of Arab residents.” Each of these cities, though, has a distinct history, demographics and political reality which resists the reassuring simplicity of the official designation.
Mixed implies that ingredients combine to produce something new. These cities are, however, more accurately described as shared, contested or, as the film’s title suggests, “split.” (The full title is in Arabic and Hebrew — Fasl Mukhtalat: Chatzuyot.) Their residents live along the same streets but do not necessarily inhabit the same understanding of what those streets mean. According to Adam Raz, one of many experts and residents interviewed in the film, families living a mere 100 meters apart often have an entirely different worldview because they consume completely opposing narratives — with a Jewish home watching Israel’s Channel 12 while an Arab neighbor watches Qatar’s Al Jazeera.
Artistic collaborators, Samira Saraya and Neta Weiner make music together in Jaffa to try to bridge the gap. Saraya sings a fragment of Hayim Nahman Bialik poem “To the Bird” about the beauty of Israel while on a car trip with Weiner. It lands poignantly and defamiliarized, given her Arab identity. She says “the word ‘mixed’ is taking two things and putting them together, but ‘blended’ means people live together and speak the language of both groups.” She describes Jaffa as “truly a mixed city.”
“It’s the only place,” she says, “where I can breathe and just be.”
In a country whose population is roughly four-fifths Jewish and one-fifth Arab, the question of how these communities live together is not incidental to Israeli democracy; it is fundamental to its survival. Srour and Riklis ask experts, including politicians, professors and theater directors, about the history of the conflict and the challenges facing the cities. Mostly they cut between historical footage of events and interviews they have shot with Arab and Jewish experts as well as locals of all genders and ages on their streets and homes. This constant weave of testimony across lived, cultural and political experience leads to a rich density of overlapping concern and anxieties, though it does mean that the cities blur into each other.
One interview takes place in a Ramla kitchen where Jalal Habit discusses the situation and his life with energy and passion all while sporting an “Ich bin hummussexuelle” t-shirt and preparing the food for his restaurant. He seems angry at the Jews, but in a chef’s businesslike way. He recounts how he was complaining to his friend that the Jews have taken everything from the Arabs, land, hummus, falafel, and how his friend demurred, no they haven’t taken anything, they are “building everything for us and soon they’ll leave and they’ll leave everything to us.”
The Hebrew word du-kiyum, coexistence, is invoked throughout the film. Beyond the Kulna Yachad school in Jaffa where children learn together, however, it mostly describes a hope or a transient memory rather than a concrete way of being. What makes Split compelling is its attention also to the conversations that coexistence often requires people not to have. Jewish and Arab neighbors may work together, maintain friendships and cooperate on municipal initiatives. They can agree about schools, garbage collection, traffic and the everyday business of keeping a city functioning. Yet the larger questions — of history, dispossession, national belonging and competing loyalties — remain unspoken. Split gives those questions a tentative voice.
The alternative to such imperfect arrangements has sometimes been catastrophic. Split does not draw the comparison, but when British India was partitioned in 1947, over 15 million people were displaced, and massacres killed hundreds of thousands. Neither in India nor the Middle East did partition eliminate competing identities. It converted them into borders, refugees and inherited grievances. Despite accepting the partition plan and taking billions of dollars in aid from America and the West, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has lurched from military coup to corrupt civilian governance without ever safeguarding the rights of women, LGBTQ individuals, or religious minorities.
The relative economic success, and demographic tolerance of Israel’s mixed cities has led to their own challenges. They contain communities with their own histories of war, displacement, and social transformation, particularly from the aftermath of World War II. The filmmakers catch a Jewish resident of Acre as she’s inspecting an abandoned bomb shelter. In a perfect distillation of traumatized Israeli Jewish identity she explains how she sees herself descended from the Shoah and from Ottoman Jews:
My personal story contains the story of my grandmother from Germany and that of my grandfather from the Jewish Quarter in ’48 and it’s a story that passes down, and it’s in my DNA. The experience of the surviving Jew, it’s an existential experience of a people and the desire to annihilate us. And we’re facing it again all over the world.
Meanwhile, different Arab families explain in affecting terms how their families were dispossessed by the State of Israel during the Nakba, from Haifa which became a battlefield, from Acre, and from Jaffa. Ghassan Mounir from Lod gives an extended account of the ongoing challenges placed in his way by the Jewish state: from the attacks on his family in 1948, to the refusal to give him the same building rights as the army veterans and Haredim who surround him. This is the historical context of a state that was nominally set up establishing rights “without distinction of religion or race” and “without domination or subjugation”
We have been in Lod since the 12th century. I grew up on this street, this is my home. [In 1948] the Jews … gathered [the whole village] in the square of the church and the mosque and expelled them to Abdullah. That march — thousands, thousands of people [were forced to make it] in the middle of July while fasting for Ramadan. They walked to Ramallah, some survived and some died.
Nothing of the present situation can be understood without those histories, however differently their residents describe them.
Edited down from a three-episode docuseries that premiered in Haifa, to a 90-minute documentary, Split is unhurried but urgent. It traces family histories as exemplars of different communities’ experiences and also the history of eruptions of urban violence throughout the history of the state. It calmly shows what it’s like to be in a minority where the majority is blasé about its ignorance of your culture.
At times, the movie veers close to despair — the heartfelt testimony of Ilham and Omar Siksik in Jaffa leaves it teetering on the edge. But their hope along with the testimony of Danny Rabinowitz (a Jewish anthropologist) and Mustafa Abbasi (an Arab-Israeli historian of Palestine) holds out the possibility that somehow rival national narratives might coexist in the same physical space. Rabinowitz says he still longs for hope, but without knowing exactly where to look for it. He is waiting for “leaders of vision and courage” from both sides. In the words of Abbasi:
There are those on both sides who believe that there is no shared future. I tell them, the future belongs to coexistence, and there is no solution other than mutual understanding.
When Hanna Safran and Nabila Espanioly — two veterans of the feminist struggle, one Jewish, one Arab — argue about political agency, Espanioly points out how obvious it is in the feminist context that freedom to be yourself is a sine qua non of being free politically. It’s a clear point and one given further depth and richness later by the testimony of Ayat Abu Shamis who is a mother, a resident of Jaffa, and an Arab who writes poetry in Hebrew. She reads her poem in Hebrew about coexistence as part of her interview.
Watching Split and some of the ways Arab-Israelis were treated — specifically how former soccer commentator and MK Zuheir Bahloul talked of his constituents’ rights — reminded me of Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre’s famous statement of emancipatory racism. The identity prescribed by the State of Israel for Arab-Israelis carries a philosophical contradiction as old as modern Jewish citizenship. In December 1789, during the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre articulated the bargain at the heart of Jewish emancipation: Jews should receive full rights as individuals but no separate political rights as a nation. The promise was equality. The price was the surrender of collective difference in the public sphere.
Israel reverses that historical equation in fascinating and uncomfortable ways. It was established to make Jewish collective identity politically sovereign. Yet within that Jewish state live Arab citizens who — until the passage of the 2018 Israeli Nation-State Law downgraded Arab identity in Israel from “equal” to “special” — had full rights as individuals, but whose own collective identity, history and national aspirations were, by and large, proscribed. The challenge is not merely to grant equal rights to individuals, essential though that is. It is to imagine a democracy capable of accommodating communities whose understandings of the state itself may be irreconcilable with each other.
In last month’s elections, Arab representation in the Knesset reached a record high, approximately one-sixth of its membership. Finally, Arab MKs are at a level approaching the proportion of Arab citizens in the electorate. That political presence matters. But parliamentary representation cannot by itself resolve the contradictions visible on a street in Lod or Jaffa. The novelist Amos Oz famously described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as a struggle between good and evil but as a tragedy of “right against right.” In that formulation he recognized that competing claims can possess equal moral force, even when they cannot both be satisfied completely.
Split brings that abstract proposition down to the municipal level, where coexistence is less a philosophical ideal than a daily negotiation. The film’s deeper question is not whether Jews and Arabs can learn to like one another. Some already do. Nor is it whether they can avoid discussing everything that divides them. Evidently, they sometimes must. It is whether a shared civic life can eventually become robust enough to accommodate the disagreements it currently suppresses.
The chef Habit is given the last word: “But I don’t want the Jews to leave. If the Jews leave, it won’t be the same place. Jews and Arabs have to live together, they can live together. If I weren’t optimistic, I would’ve stayed in Ramla.”
As the world perfects the technology and politics of polarization, Israel’s mixed cities offer neither an easy inspiration nor a comforting warning but something more useful: evidence that people can remain profoundly divided while still sharing responsibility for the places they call home. The future depends on learning how to live with our differences — especially when the people across the street have every intention of staying.
“Split: Life in the Israeli Mixed Cities” has its U.S. premiere as part of the Other Israel: New Perspectives Film Festival. It will show on Mon, Nov. 9 at 7:30 PM at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan and again on Wed, Nov 11, 7:30 PM at the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue.
The post In Israel’s mixed cities, the future of coexistence is already being tested appeared first on The Forward.
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A staunch supporter of Israel, Hakeem Jeffries would lead a Democratic majority pushing for change in U.S. policy
(JTA) — When the next Congress convenes in January with a Democratic majority, it will likely be Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the pro-Israel Democrat from Brooklyn, who leads the House of Representatives.
As House Speaker, Jeffries would play a key role in setting the House’s legislative agenda at a time when many Democrats have taken more critical stances on Israel and AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. Jeffries himself has asserted that a “change in direction is needed” for the U.S.-Israel relationship.
His support for Israel and ties to AIPAC have angered a number of progressives who want to see party leadership apply greater pressure on the Israeli government. Advocates have blasted Jeffries for opposing an amendment to end U.S. military assistance to Israel and pressured him to reject AIPAC’s support and criticize its election spending.
Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of the progressive group New Jewish Narrative, told JTA that Jeffries will have to navigate leading a caucus that includes “a much larger group of members who really care about this and feel like they need to deliver for their voters” on broader Israeli-Palestinian foreign policy.
Susskind pointed to the Stop the Settlements Act introduced by Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro as an example of where Jeffries will face more pressure than in past years to bring bills on the Israeli-Palestinian issue to a floor vote.
“He’s not the far left, he’s not rolling out a DSA agenda,” Susskind said. “But I think it is going to be a different agenda — not only than, of course, what we’ve seen from Republican Congress, but even than we’ve seen from past Democratic Congresses.”
But Jeffries, who would be the first Black House speaker in U.S. history, has retained AIPAC’s support and voted against an immediate cutoff of military aid to Israel. He has fostered close ties with a number of Jewish organizations and leaders.
The Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island’s executive director praised Jeffries’ role in securing $1 million for the organization in 2024. Jeffries also secured $850,000 for the Brighton Beach-based Shorefront Jewish Community Council.
Mark Treyger, CEO of New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, called Jeffries a “dear friend” in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is an individual who, in my opinion, has been an unwavering ally to the Jewish community from his first day in Congress when I got to know him as a City Council member,” Treyger said.
Rabbi David Niederman, president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, told Williamsburg 365 that his relationship with Jeffries “spans more than two decades, and throughout his rise to national leadership, he has remained firmly connected to his roots, his district, and the communities he serves.”
Jeffries grew up in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood known for the close proximity of Black and Orthodox Jewish residents. Motivated in part by the 1992 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, he decided to attend law school to fight for “liberty and justice for all, in the purest possible way.” He served three terms in the New York State Assembly representing Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and parts of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
When Jeffries ran for Congress in 2012, he courted Jewish voters and drew endorsements from a number of Jewish leaders — including Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is retiring at the end of his term next month, and ex-Mayor Ed Koch. At the time, those leaders expressed concerns about his opponent Charles Barron, who in 2009 compared conditions in Gaza to Nazi death camps. The following year, Barron called Israel’s government “the biggest terrorist in the world.” Nadler specifically referred to Barron’s Nazi comparison in his endorsement of Jeffries.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, now the party’s leader in the Senate, lauded Jeffries as a “true blue friend of Israel” in his 2012 endorsement. Koch, meanwhile, taped an ad for Jeffries that played on post-Shabbos Jewish radio, the New York Observer reported at the time.
“Jeffries is great on the issues: job creation, affordable housing, protection of Social Security, Medicare, and education,” Koch said in the ad. “Oh, did I mention Israel? He’s a fierce defender of Israel.”
Jeffries arrived in Congress at an uneasy time for Jews in New York City. In 2013, teens were targeting Orthodox Jews with “knockouts,” an effort to knock victims unconscious with a single blow. As a freshman representative, Jeffries joined a group of Black and Jewish leaders in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights to denounce the “game.”
The following year, Jeffries condemned the stabbing of a Chabad-Lubavitch man at the Hasidic movement’s Crown Heights headquarters, and urged people to “stand with” the Jewish community, which he called “an important part of the fabric of Crown Heights, where I grew up.”
Jeffries’ support for Israel has included a total of eight visits to the country, including at least once as an Assembly member with the JCRC, and six congressional delegations led by a nonprofit affiliate of AIPAC, the most recent of which took place in August 2023.
During the 2014 Gaza war, Jeffries spoke at a rally in support of Israel outside the United Nations, declaring, “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever!”
About five weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack, he did not mention a ceasefire but called for “a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people” at the pro-Israel rally held at the National Mall in Washington. On numerous occasions, he has affectionately called Jerusalem “the sixth borough” of New York City.
Progressives have taken issue with Jeffries’ pro-Israel stance over the years and with his endorsement from AIPAC, which got him the nickname “AIPAC Shakur” from radio host Charlamagne tha God.
Multiple pro-Palestinian protests have been held outside Jeffries’ offices, including one NYC-DSA demonstration in November 2023 in which protesters demanded that he “stop supporting genocide.”
Some of the democratic socialist candidates who will enter Congress in January indicated that they would need Jeffries to back certain policies — including pushing the Block the Bombs Act — to secure their support in the election for House Speaker. But those politicians’ leverage diminished after Democrats secured a large House majority last week, giving Jeffries room to lose some votes from DSA and DSA-aligned members and still secure the majority of votes cast for named candidates to become Speaker.
Still, Jeffries is facing pressure from the left on issues including Israel, as well as what critics perceive as insufficient resistance to the Trump administration. Some House Democrats have been “inundated” with calls from constituents urging them not to elect Jeffries, Axios reported, while a petition calling for a different Speaker — which was shared by actor Mark Ruffalo, who has been a vocal advocate for Palestinians — has garnered more than 1 million signatures.
California Rep. Ro Khanna said last week that he would press Jeffries to commit to holding votes on eliminating military aid to Israel, defunding the Iran war and advancing Medicare for All. (Jeffries told CNN on Wednesday that Democrats will seek to end the Iran war as part of a sweeping affordability agenda.)
Treyger said he is confident that Jeffries, who voted against the Massie amendment to cut military aid to Israel this summer, will not waver.
“The person that I know is never a person that bends to pressure,” Treyger said. He pointed out that Jeffries’ vote came less than a month after left-wing supporters chanted “You’re next!” when Jeffries’ face appeared on screens at Rep.-elect Claire Valdez’s victory party.
In September 2025, J Street, the liberal Middle East advocacy group, endorsed Jeffries, just two years after the group’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami challenged Jeffries over the congressman’s comments that U.S. military aid should “remain ironclad” and not be conditioned over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical judicial reform efforts.
“Our concern is that U.S. tax dollars shouldn’t be funding material and arms that facilitate the deepening of occupation and the permanent demise of a possible Palestinian state. That’s not in anyone’s security interest,” Ben-Ami said at the time.
Now, Jeffries is one of a dwindling group of Congress members supported by both AIPAC and J Street, two groups that went head-to-head in a number of races this year and have conflicting visions for military assistance and the U.S.-Israel relationship. He is also backed by Democratic Majority for Israel, whose CEO Brian Romick called Jeffries “a gifted consensus builder and a steadfast champion of the U.S.–Israel relationship” in an email to JTA.
In a statement to JTA on Thursday, Ben-Ami said that Jeffries “has been clear that, for the good of both Israelis and Palestinians, it is time for U.S. policy toward the Middle East to change.”
“We look forward to working with him to make that change a reality, including by passing the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, ending Trump’s war of choice with Iran, and ending unconditional military aid to Israel to ensure it is consistent with American laws and values,” Ben-Ami said.
Though Jeffries voted against the Massie amendment, he said that he would not be telling his colleagues how to vote, and wrote in a letter that “there are good faith reasons that will result in Members voting in a variety of different ways with respect to the amendment.” His letter also suggested that a new security arrangement after the current Memorandum of Understanding expires in 2028 could end direct military subsidies. Trump last week said he would wind down defense assistance to Israel, and Netanyahu has indicated he is on board with transitioning to a relationship where the two countries’ militaries remain closely aligned, but in which Israel does not depend on U.S. money.
When reached for comment, AIPAC pointed to its statement on X congratulating both Jeffries and Schumer “on the resounding victories for their caucuses.” It did not respond to a question about his support from J Street or view on military aid.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A staunch supporter of Israel, Hakeem Jeffries would lead a Democratic majority pushing for change in U.S. policy appeared first on The Forward.
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Illinois voters pass proposals objecting to state anti-BDS law
(JTA) — Voters in eight municipalities in Illinois approved ballot measures last week registering formal objections to the state’s law barring state pension investments in companies that boycott Israel.
The ballot measures will have no effect on state policy. But pro-Palestinian groups are celebrating the wins as demonstrations of shifting public opinion against the law, first signed in 2015 to oppose the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
The village of Oak Park and the townships of Champaign, Cunningham, DuPage, Kickapoo, Medina, Normal and Peoria all approved similarly worded ballot measures that urge the state to repeal its anti-BDS law or support specific state legislation that would do so. According to unofficial tallies, 65% of voters in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb whose local Jewish population mounted a sustained objection to the referendum, approved the measure there.
Jewish groups including the Jewish United Fund, Chicago’s federation arm, had campaigned against the ballot measure. The Illinois law, championed by JUF when it was first passed, was the first of what has become dozens of state anti-BDS laws in the country. First Amendment groups have challenged the laws.
“We would have much preferred a victory,” Dan Goldwin, chief public affairs officer for JUF, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday. Yet Goldwin pointed out that Oak Park voters had approved the measure by smaller margins than their votes for top Democratic candidates including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
“Once people began to be exposed to the meaning of what the referendum was about, they moved against it. We just didn’t have enough time,” he said.
Some members of the Oak Park opposition had engaged in a drawn-out fight over the eligibility of the signatures the ballot measure activists had gathered. That time, Goldwin theorized, “was probably time better spent convincing people to vote against it.”
Separately, voters in Bloomington Township approved a measure stating that the federal government should “ban the transfer of weapons to any country that is a dictatorship, apartheid state or major violator of human rights.” The ballot language did not mention Israel, but pro-Palestinian activists have long maintained that Israel commits apartheid and that the U.S. should halt weapons sales to the country.
Local Jewish figures have said the campaign troubled them.
“It felt like it was a local chapter of a global movement to destroy the world’s only Jewish state, and I felt it personally and acutely,” Rabbi Adir Glick of Conservative Temple Har Zion in River Forest, which borders Oak Park, told the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest about the campaign. “I know people who lost friendships in the last few months, and difficult moments with neighbors and colleagues, but it also galvanized our Jewish community.”
Goldwin said the measures’ passage wouldn’t change JUF’s own strategy opposing the repeal of the anti-BDS law at the state level. He noted that ballot measure activists, with the exception of Oak Park, largely didn’t target municipalities with large Jewish communities. In his view, those seeking the repeal of the law “are still a significant minority.”
The BDS movement had a more significant policy victory on election night with the passage of a binding ballot referendum in Providence, Rhode Island, to divest that city from “foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide.” Proponents and opponents of the measure alike have said they believe the language and parameters of the question will include Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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