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Behind the scenes of Justin Jones’ viral ‘tikkun olam’ encounter with Jewish teens in DC
(JTA) — Sam Rosen and Noah Segal were sitting with their friends on the steps of the Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on Monday when they spotted one of America’s most talked-about politicians.
Justin Jones, a Democratic lawmaker in Tennessee whom Republicans kicked out of the state’s legislature in retaliation for a gun-violence protest, was walking by in his signature white suit.
“I remember me and my friend looking at him and being like, ‘Is that him? Is that really one of the Tennessee Three?’” Rosen recalled on Wednesday from his home in Dallas. “To me, he’s kind of the face of upholding democracy right now, so it was very cool to see that.”
Jones waved at their group, this year’s crop of Bronfman Fellows, a prestigious leadership program that aims to empower Jewish teens. That initiated an encounter steeped in Jewish lingo that went viral after a liberal news outlet in Tennessee shared a video on social media.
“Can I shake your hand?” Segal, a high school senior from Ardsley, New York, asked Jones. Several of the other teens introduced themselves, too, and one explained that they were all Jewish teens from across North America.
“This is a Jewish program?” Jones asked after giving a brief pep talk about getting more young people involved in politics, drawing an affirmative response.
“Tikkun olam,” Jones ventured, seemingly testing whether he had correctly named the Hebrew term meaning “repair the world” that has come to signify social justice in progressive circles.
“Yes,” the teens replied in unison, many of their faces lighting up with excitement. “We just talked about that!” Rosen said, with apparent delight. After chatting with the group for a few more minutes, Jones said he had to head off for a White House meeting with President Joe Biden — but he took the time first to pose for a picture with the group.
For many of the people who saw and shared the video, produced and posted Tuesday by the Tennessee Holler news site, the exchange offered an example of cross-cultural solidarity at a time of polarization. The video has been seen well over 2 million times on Twitter and more on other platforms.
“It seems like it resonated because it was a genuine, uplifting moment that showed how impactful it can be to have young leaders showing other young people the way forward — and because it crossed lines. Racial lines. Religious lines. Geographic lines. It shows how essential it is to come together,” Justin Kanew, Tennessee Holler’s founder and editor, told JTA. (The site was the first to report that a Tennessee school board had banned the Holocaust novel “Maus” last year.)
Kanew added: “Also: Justin Jones is the real deal. Sincere, and inspirational. So that helps.”
Jones burst onto the national scene last month when he and another Tennessee lawmaker were ejected from the state legislature after staging a protest over the Republican-led body’s inaction after a school shooting in Nashville. Both men are Black; a third lawmaker who protested is a white woman and she was not ejected. The racial disparity in the lawmakers’ treatment drew widespread criticism, even after local elected officials in Nashville and Memphis reversed the ejections.
The saga has made Jones into a folk hero among progressives, as well as an inspiration to those who want to see young adults — he is 27 – play an active role in shaping the country.
“Thank you for being a role model for the young,” Dan Libenson, the head of a Jewish education philanthropy who teaches in the Bronfman program, tells Jones in the video.
WATCH: “Thank you for being a role model for the young.”
As the #TennesseeThree arrived at the White House a group of Jewish students from across were there on a tour, and they were thrilled to meet @brotherjones_. #TikkunOlam pic.twitter.com/vii89sTsIp
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 25, 2023
Libenson told JTA that it had taken the group a moment to realize that the man in the white suit was in fact Jones, as the group had been sequestered at a Jewish retreat center in Maryland and had not heard about Jones’ visit, or about the backlash from some conservatives against it.
“As you can see from the video, as soon as it registered, we all rushed down to greet him,” Libenson told JTA in an email. “It’s clear that Gen Z has been traumatized by the mass shootings that seem to happen every day, and I think many of the fellows see Justin Jones as a hero for not taking no for an answer with regard to the safety of young people like them.”
Said Segal, “The whole seminar theme was vision and the future, so it was random and funky and cool to see someone who is right there making a change.” About Jones’ invocation of tikkun olam, he said, “I was impressed with him before that and impressed with him after that.”
The Bronfman Fellows program is not partisan, and participants hold a wide range of political views, according to Becky Voorwinde, the group’s CEO. But she noted that applicants for the fellowship must write about a contemporary issue that matters to them, and many choose gun violence. “It cuts across political viewpoints,” she said. “They grew up after Sandy Hook. This is their reality.”
Asked whether the issue was one he thought a lot about, Rosen answered, “How can it not be?”
He went on, “It’s not like it’s one awful shooting a year. It’s every day. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before it’s me. It’s not something that controls my entire life, but it’s always in the back of my mind.”
What the Bronfman Youth Fellows’ group photo with Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones looked like from the vantage point of where they’d been sitting before they spotted the prominent lawmaker. (Courtesy of Becky Voorwinde)
Segal said that he, too, viewed the threat of gun violence, alongside climate change, as one of the widest problems facing young people. In fact, he said, for part of a final project in the fellowship, he’d facilitated a discussion about what it means to fight antisemitism for a generation surrounded by mass shootings.
The Washington trip was a closing activity for the cohort of Bronfman Fellows, who first spent five weeks together last summer before getting together throughout the year virtually and in person. Before running into Jones, the group had been meeting with four Jewish White House staffers; afterward, they broke into small teams to meet with past fellows working in a wide array of jobs in the area.
The day before the viral encounter, the group visited a haredi Orthodox yeshiva in Baltimore. There, too, tikkun olam came up in discussion — but the head of the yeshiva seemed to dismiss it as a meaningful framework for Jewish life compared to the commandments of traditional Jewish law.
Rosen, who belongs to a Reform synagogue in Dallas and is headed to Brandeis University in the fall, pushed back.
“I said, ‘Rabbi, this is an obligation that we all uphold in our community. It’s a core value of Judaism and who I am,’” he recounted. “To me, that’s why it was so cool that Justin Jones said that.”
The entire encounter with Jones, Rosen said, felt authentic and empowering. And that feeling, Kanew said, could be contagious.
“Everything we need to save this country from descending into a dark place was right there in that exchange,” Kanew said. “And the beauty of it is everything that moment represents will inevitably come to fruition if people stay engaged and keep fighting for it. So it’s an incredibly hopeful moment, and hope is what people are looking for right now.”
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Klimt Portrait That Helped Save Jewish Subject From Nazi Persecution Sells for Record $236 Million at Auction
Painting by Gustav Klimt ‘Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer’ (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer) on display at Sotheby’s auction house new global headquarters on Madison Avenue in the Marcel Breuer building in New York, NY on Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: Lev Radin/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A Gustav Klimt portrait that helped safe its Jewish subject from Nazi persecution during the Holocaust sold on Tuesday for a record-breaking $236.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.
Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” is a 6-foot-tall painting that the artist worked on for two years between 1914 and 1916. It depicts the 2o-year-old only daughter of August and Szerena Lederer, wrapped in an East Asian emperor’s cloak adorned with dragons. The Lederers, who were Jewish, were Klimt’s greatest patrons and also the second wealthiest family in Vienna, Austria, only behind the Rothschilds. Klimt painted portraits of other Lederer family members as well and their art collection included many Klimt paintings.
The painting is one of only two full-length Klimt portraits that remain privately owned, while the majority of the rest are in museums. The portrait sold for $205 million plus premium to a buyer over the phone. It marks a record for a piece of modern art and doubled the previous record for a Klimt painting, according to Reuters. Sotheby’s declined to share the identity of the portrait’s buyer.
Following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, which took place two years after August Lederer died, Nazis looted the Lederer art collection but left behind the family portraits because they were considered “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” was on loan for three years.
In an attempt to save herself from Nazi persecution, Elisabeth fabricated a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her real father. The fact that Klimt had a reputation as a philanderer and spend years obsessing over Elisabeth’s portrait helped support her story. Szerena even signed an affidavit supporting the false claim about Klimt’s paternity in an effort to save her daughter, according to the National Gallery of Canada. The Nazi regime ultimately gave Elisabeth a document stating that she was descended from Klimt and along with help from a former brother-in-law, who was a high-ranking Nazi official, she lived safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944.
The painting was then looted by the Nazis and nearly destroyed in a fire during World War II, but miraculously survived. It was returned to a Lederer family member in 1948, who kept the piece until selling it in 1983. “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” joined the art collection of Estée Lauder heir and Jewish billionaire Leonard Lauder in 1985. He died in June at 92 and five Klimt pieces from his collection have sold at Sotheby’s for a total of $392 million.
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Iran Seeks Saudi Leverage to Revive Stalled Nuclear Talks With US
Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman speaks during a meeting with US President Donald Trump, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Nov. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Iran has asked Saudi Arabia to persuade the US to revive stalled nuclear talks, underlining Tehran’s anxiety over a possible repeat of Israeli airstrikes and its deepening economic woes, two regional sources with knowledge of the matter said.
A day before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the White House earlier this week, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian sent a letter to the de facto Saudi leader, Iranian and Saudi media reported on Monday.
In the letter, Pezeshkian said Iran “does not seek confrontation,” wants deeper regional cooperation, and remains “open to resolving the nuclear dispute through diplomacy, provided its rights are guaranteed”, the sources told Reuters.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said on Wednesday that Pezeshkian’s message to the Saudi crown prince was “purely bilateral.” The Saudi government media office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
IRAN‘S NUCLEAR SITES BOMBED IN JUNE
Prior to the 12-day war in June triggered by Israeli airstrikes, during which US forces struck three Iranian nuclear sites, Iran and the US held five rounds of talks on the Islamic Republic’s contentious uranium enrichment program.
Since the war, the negotiations have hit an impasse, even as both sides insist they remain open to a deal.
One of the sources in the Gulf said Iran is seeking a channel to reopen talks with Washington, and that the Saudi leader also favors a peaceful solution and conveyed that message to US President Donald Trump during his visit.
“MbS [the Saudi crown prince] also wants this conflict to be over peacefully. This is important to him, and he relayed this to Trump and said he is ready to help,” the Arab Gulf source said.
On Tuesday, the Saudi ruler told reporters: “We will do our best to help reach a deal between the United States and Iran.”
Riyadh and Tehran have been long-time strategic rivals in the Middle East, often backing opposing sides in regional proxy wars, until a China-brokered rapprochement in 2023 eased hostilities and restored diplomatic relations.
Saudi Arabia’s growing political weight has made it an increasingly decisive actor in regional diplomacy. Its deep security ties with Washington – and particularly the leadership’s close relationship with Trump – endow Riyadh with leverage few others in the Middle East possess.
Meanwhile, Iran‘s regional standing has weakened over the past two years from devastating military blows inflicted by Israel on its allies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the fall of its close ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“Shifting mediation channels from countries such as Oman and Qatar to Saudi Arabia – a country with structural power, direct influence in the US and a practical resolve to reduce tensions – is the best strategic decision under current circumstances,” said Hamid Aboutalebi, a former senior Iranian diplomat.
“These characteristics make Saudi Arabia an effective mediator and a genuine channel for conveying messages, a position that neither Oman nor Qatar nor the Europeans possess,” Aboutalebi wrote on X.
Given that it is seeking to establish its own uranium enrichment programme, Saudi Arabia has an interest in promoting a US-Iranian nuclear deal, said Firas Maksad, Washington-based managing director at consulting firm Eurasia Group.
During MbS’s Washington visit, he and Trump signed a declaration to complete talks on a civilian energy program, without saying whether Riyadh would be able to enrich.
“The Saudi quest for enrichment is related to US-Iran nuclear diplomacy,” Maksad said. “Saudi has an interest in promoting the US-Iran nuclear talks via a quiet back channel.”
IRAN, US SAY THEY BACK DIPLOMACY, BUT DEMANDS CLASH
The stakes for reviving nuclear diplomacy are high.
Conditions set by Tehran’s clerical establishment and the Trump administration remain sharply at odds, and a failure to narrow differences risks igniting a new regional war.
Gulf states, wary of being dragged into a broader conflict if Israel strikes Iran again, have previously acted as intermediaries – particularly Qatar and Oman.
Iran accuses Washington of “betraying diplomacy” by joining its close ally Israel in the June war, and insists that any deal must lift US sanctions that have crippled its oil-based economy. Washington, meanwhile, demands that Tehran halt uranium enrichment on its soil, curb its ballistic missile program and stop backing regional militia proxies – terms Iran has rejected.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have warned they will not hesitate to strike Iran again if it resumes enrichment, a potential pathway to developing nuclear bombs.
Western powers and Israel accuse Tehran of using its declared civilian nuclear program as a cover for developing bomb material. Iran says it seeks only peaceful atomic energy and vows a “crushing response” to any more Israeli aggression.
ECONOMIC ISOLATION, PUBLIC ANGER PUSH RULERS TO SHIFT COURSE
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a hardliner who has the final say on foreign policy and the nuclear program, has ruled out negotiations under threat.
“They want to impose their demands and advance their goals through military and economic pressure. This approach is unacceptable, and Iranians will not submit to it,” he said.
But that line-in-the-sand approach does not cut it for many ordinary Iranians struggling with the privations of daily life.
The economy is buckling under a collapsing currency, soaring inflation and chronic shortages of domestic energy and water – chiefly driven by years of mismanagement and sanctions.
Hemmed in by mounting public anger and the risk of further Israeli attack if nuclear diplomacy fails, Iran’s clerical elite is scrambling for a breakthrough with Washington to ease its crushing economic isolation, two senior Iranian officials, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
Kamal Kharrazi, a senior adviser to Khamenei, last week appealed to Trump to pursue “genuine talks with Iran grounded in mutual respect and equality,” according to Iranian state media.
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Israel Expects to Keep Regional Military Edge Despite Planned Sale of F-35s to Saudi
An F-35 jet performs at the Dubai Airshow in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
Israel expects to maintain access to more advanced US weaponry, a government spokesperson said on Thursday when asked about Washington’s plan to sell F-35 warplanes to Saudi Arabia.
Israel is the only Middle East country operating the F-35, one of the most advanced warplanes ever built. US law guarantees Israel a “qualitative military edge” in the region.
“The United States and Israel have a long-standing understanding, which is that Israel maintains the qualitative edge when it comes to its defense,” spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian told reporters.
“That has been true yesterday, that has been true today, and the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] believes that will be true tomorrow and in the future,” she said.
The spokesperson’s remarks were the first official comment from the Israeli government on the Saudi sale, announced earlier this week by President Donald Trump.
Saudi Arabia does not officially recognize the state of Israel. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, said during a visit to Washington this week that the kingdom wanted official ties with Israel but also wanted to ensure a clear path for a two-state solution with Palestinian independence.
Israel‘s Netanyahu opposes Palestinian statehood.
US officials have said the Saudi jets will not have superior features found in Israel F-35 fighters, which include advanced weapons systems and electronic warfare equipment.