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Diaspora alarm over Israel: Your guide to what the critics are saying
(JTA) — I started reporting on North American Jews and Israel in the last century, and for years covered the debate over whether Jews in the Diaspora had a right to criticize the Israeli government in public. The debate sort of petered out in the early-1990s, when Israel itself began talking about a Palestinian state, and when right-wing groups then decided criticizing Israel was a mitzvah.
Nevertheless, while left-wing groups like J Street and T’ruah have long been comfortable criticizing the Israeli government or defending Palestinian rights, many in the centrist “mainstream” — pulpit clergy, leaders of federations and Hillels, average Jews nervous about spoiling a family get-together — have preferred to keep their concerns to themselves. Partly this is tactical: Few rabbis want to alienate any of their members over so divisive a topic, and in the face of an aggressive left, organizational leaders did not want to give fuel to Israel’s ideological enemies. (The glaring exception has been about Israeli policy toward non-Orthodox Judaism, which is seen as very much the Disapora’s business.)
In recent weeks, there has been an emerging literature of what I have come to think of as “reluctant dissent.” What these essays and sermons have in common, despite the different political persuasions of the authors, is a deep concern over Israel’s “democratic character.” They cite judicial reforms that would weaken checks and balances at the top, expansion of Jewish settlements that would make it impossible to separate from the Palestinians, and the Orthodox parties that want to strengthen their hold on religious affairs. As Abe Foxman, who as former director of the Anti-Defamation League rarely criticized Israel, told an interviewer, “If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”
I read through the various ways Jewish leaders and writers here and in Israel are not just justifying Diaspora Jews who are protesting what is happening in Israel, but providing public permission for others to do the same. Here is what a few of them are saying (with a word from a defender of the government):
‘I didn’t sleep much last night’
Yehuda Kurtzer: Facebook, Feb. 8
Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, the New York-based branch of the Israeli think tank that promotes a diverse, engaged relationship with Israel. In a recent blog post, he neatly describes the dilemma of Diaspora Zionists who aren’t sure what to do with their deep concerns about the direction of the Israel government, especially the concentration of power in a far-right legislative branch.
Centrist American Jews who care about Israel are caught between “those to our right who would see any expression of even uncertainty about Israel’s democratic character as disloyalty, [and] those on the other side who think that a conversation about Israeli democracy is already past its prime,” he writes. He is also concerned about the “widespread disengagement that we can expect among American Jews, what I fear will become the absent majority — those who decide that however the current crisis is resolved, all of this is just ‘not for them.’”
Kurtzer likens Israel to a palace, and Diaspora Jews as “passersby” who live beyond its walls. Nonetheless, he feels responsible for what happens there. “The palace is burning and the best we can do is to tell you,” he writes. “It is also how we will show you we love you, and how much we cherish the palace.”
An open letter to Israel’s friends in North America
Matti Friedman, Yossi Klein Halevi and Daniel Gordis: Times of Israel, Feb. 7
Three high-profile writers who moved to Israel from North America and who often defend Israel against its critics in the United States — Gordis, for one, has written a book arguing that American Jewish liberalism is incompatible with Israel’s “ethnic democracy” — now urge Diaspora Jews to speak out against the current Israeli government. They don’t mention the territories or religious pluralism. Instead, their trigger is the proposed effort to reform the Supreme Court, which they say will “eviscerate the independence of our judiciary and remake the country’s democratic identity.” Such a move will “threaten Israeli-American relations, and it will do grave damage to our relations with you, our sisters and brothers in the Diaspora,” concluding, “We need your voice to help us preserve Israel as a state both Jewish and democratic.”
All Israel Is Responsible for Each Other
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: Sermon, Jan. 27
Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of New York City’s Reform Central Synagogue, isn’t looking to Israeli writers for permission to weigh in on Israel’s political scene. In a sermon that takes its name from a rabbinic statement of Jewish interdependence, she asserts without question that Jews everywhere have a stake in the future of Israel and have a right to speak up for “civil society and democracy and religious pluralism and human rights” there. She focuses on the religious parties who are convinced that “Reform Jews are ruining Israel,” as you might expect, but ends the sermon with a call to recognize the rights of all Israeli citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish, “and also those living under Israel’s military control.” Of those Palestinians, she says, “We can’t feel comfortable sitting in the light of sovereignty next to a community living in darkness and expect to have peace.”
And like Kurtzer, she worries that concerned American Jews will simply turn away from Israel in despair or embarrassment, and urges congregants to support the Israeli and American organizations that share their pluralistic vision for Israel.
On That Distant Day
Hillel Halkin: Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2023
In his 1977 book “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic,” the translator and author Hillel Halkin made a distinction similar to Kurtzer’s image of Israel as a palace and the Diaspora as passersby: Jews who don’t emigrate to Israel are dooming themselves to irrelevance, while immigrants like him are living on the stage where the Jewish future would play out. His mournful essay doesn’t address the Diaspora, per se, although it creates a permission structure for Zionists abroad to criticize the government. Halkin sees the new government as a coalition of two types of religious zealots: the haredi Orthodox who want to consolidate their control of religious life (and funding) in Israel, and a “knit-skullcap electorate [that] is hypernationalist and Jewish supremacist in its attitude toward Arabs.” (A knit skullcap is a symbol for what an American might call the “Modern Orthodox.”) Together, these growing and powerful constituents represent “the end of an Israeli consensus about what is and is not permissible in a democracy — and once the rules are no longer agreed on, political chaos is not far away. Israel has never been in such a place before.”
Halkin does talk about Israeli expansion in the West Bank, saying he long favored Jewish settlement in the territories, while believing that the “only feasible solution” would be a two-state solution with Arabs living in the Jewish state and Jews living in the Arab one. Instead, Israel has reached a point where there is “too much recrimination, too much distrust, too much hatred, too much blind conviction, too much disdain for the notion of a shared humanity, for such a solution to be possible… We’re over the cliff and falling, and no one knows how far down the ground is.”
Method to Our Madness: A Response to Hillel Halkin
Ze’ev Maghen: Jewish Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2023
Ze’ev Maghen, chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University, is hardly a dissenter; instead, his response to Halkin helpfully represents the views of those who voted for the current government. Maghen says the new coalition represents a more honest expression of Zionism than those who support a “liberal, democratic, egalitarian, inclusive, individualist, environmentally conscious, economically prosperous, globally connected, etc., etc., society.” The new government he writes, will defend Israel’s “Jewish nationalist raison d’être, and keep at bay those universalist, Western-based notions that are geared by definition to undermine nationalism in all its forms.” As for the Palestinian issue, he writes, “I’d rather have a fierce, hawkish Zionist in the cockpit than a progressive, Westernized wimp for whom this land, and the people who have returned to it after two millennia of incomparable suffering, don’t mean all that much.”
The Tears of Zion
Rabbi Sharon Brous: Sermon, Feb. 4, 2023
Brous, rabbi of the liberal Ikar community in Los Angeles, doesn’t just defend the right of Diaspora Jews to speak out in defense of Israeli democracy and Palestinian rights, but castigates Jewish leaders and communities who have been reluctant to criticize Israel in the past. “No, this government is not an electoral accident, and it is not an anomaly,” she says. “This moment of extremism has been a long time in the making and our silence has made us complicit.”
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The post Diaspora alarm over Israel: Your guide to what the critics are saying appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran Expands Child Soldier Recruitment, Cracks Down on Dissent Amid Escalating US-Israeli Strikes
A blaze after Israel’s Fire and Rescue Service said that an industrial building and a fuel tanker at Israel’s Oil Refineries were hit by debris from an intercepted Iranian missile, amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, in Haifa, Israel, March 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Rami Shlush
As US and Israeli strikes pound Iranian military sites, Iran is lowering the enlistment age for security roles to 12 and threating civilians with death for photographing war damage, fueling international outrage.
Last week, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced a campaign recruiting children as young as 12 to serve as “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” assisting with patrols, checkpoints, and logistics.
With the minimum age for war roles officially lowered to 12, human rights groups are now condemning the move, demanding that Iranian authorities immediately halt the campaign while imposing a complete ban on enlisting children under 18 in all military and paramilitary forces.
“There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds,” Bill Van Esveld, associate director for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.”
“The officials involved in this reprehensible policy are putting children at risk of serious and irreversible harm and themselves at risk of criminal liability,” Van Esveld continued. “Senior leaders who fail to put a stop to this can make no claim to care for Iran’s children.”
For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.
In the past, widely circulated social media images and videos have repeatedly shown children and teenagers in military-style uniforms cracking down on protests, including during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which erupted nationwide after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died in a Tehran police station following her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules.
Under international law, Iran’s latest initiative flagrantly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which explicitly prohibits the use of children in military activities, marking a dramatic breach of its global obligations.
Human Rights Watch also uncovered multiple other war crimes, including the Iranian government’s relentless use of cluster munitions delivered by ballistic missiles at Israel since the conflict erupted last month. At least four civilians have been killed in these strikes, which constitute clear violations of international humanitarian law.
“Iran’s use of cluster munitions in populated areas in Israel pose a foreseeable and long-lasting danger to civilians,” Patrick Thompson, a researcher in HRW’s Crisis, Conflict, and Arms Division, said in a statement. “Cluster munition bomblets are dispersed over a wide area, making them unlawfully indiscriminate in violation of the laws of war.”
Fired from rockets, missiles, or aircraft, cluster munitions spread dozens of explosive bomblets across large areas, leaving many unexploded and posing a long-term, landmine-like danger to civilians for years or even decades.
Amid relentless US and Israeli attacks and mounting international pressure, the regime is also intensifying its domestic crackdown, now warning that photographing war-damaged areas could carry the death penalty.
Under this newly enacted policy, people accused of spying or cooperating with “hostile states” could face the death penalty and have all their assets confiscated.
Anyone caught photographing damaged sites could be accused of espionage, potentially providing intelligence to coalition forces, and face execution.
“People who take photos or videos of damaged sites and share them are effectively confirming whether strikes hit their targets,” Iran’s judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Tuesday, describing the action as the equivalent of cooperating with and providing intelligence to the enemy.
According to Iranian media and watchdog groups, more than 1,000 people have been arrested this month for filming sensitive locations, sharing anti-government content online, or allegedly “cooperating with the enemy.”
Against the backdrop of large-scale US and Israeli strikes pounding key regime strongholds in Shiraz and Isfahan — where critical military infrastructure has been repeatedly hit — tensions have surged to a boiling point as the pressure campaign intensifies
On Tuesday, the Israeli Air Force launched another sustained wave of precision airstrikes against Iranian weapons production and research facilities around Tehran, seeking to disrupt and dismantle the missile supply and manufacturing networks that support Tehran’s military arsenal.
Meanwhile, the IRGC this week threatened 18 American multinational technology and industrial companies, accusing them of involvement in “terrorist operations” and labeling them as “legitimate targets.”
“We advise the employees of these institutions to immediately distance themselves from their workplaces to preserve their lives,” the statement published on Tuesday said. “These companies should expect the destruction of their respective units in exchange for each terror act in Iran, starting from 8 PM Tehran time on Wednesday, April 1st.”
Among the companies mentioned were major corporations such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, IBM, Tesla, and Boeing.
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Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
When Elly Cohen chose to terminate her pregnancy in 2022, it aligned with her understanding of Jewish law that life begins at birth, not conception.
Cohen and her husband were eager to give their then 4-year-old daughter a sibling. But her fetus had been diagnosed with Trisomy 18, a severe chromosomal disorder that, in most cases, leads to death before birth or within the first year of life. She decided to end the pregnancy.
Had she gotten pregnant just a few months later, she might not have had that choice. She lives in Indiana, one of 13 states that enacted near-total bans on abortion following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
Indiana’s law does allow abortion for for lethal fetal anomalies up to 22 weeks, but doctors bear legal risk in determining whether a particular diagnosis meets the statute’s definition — a gray area that can lead to delays or reluctance to provide care.
That reality stirred Cohen into action. She co-founded Hoosier Jews for Choice, a Jewish group that advocates for abortion access, which joined five anonymous women of multiple faiths in a lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Their argument relied on a religious freedom law — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA — signed by former Indiana governor Mike Pence in 2015. It was one of many such state laws passed amid calls from some evangelical Christians to establish their right not to do business that violated their beliefs, such as baking a wedding cake for a gay wedding.
Hoosier Jews for Choice saw an opening for Jews to exercise their religious freedom under the same law, but for a purpose at odds with evangelical Christianity: to gain access to abortion. Earlier this month, Judge Christina Klineman of Marion County Superior Court agreed, permanently blocking enforcement of the state’s abortion ban for plaintiffs with sincere religious objections.
Hoosier Jews for Choice is celebrating the ruling as the biggest legal win to date in support of the argument that abortion bans violate Jews’ religious freedom. The group is hopeful that similar cases can build on the Indiana case’s success nationwide.
The ruling could still be reversed: Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has appealed the decision, and the case is headed to the Indiana Supreme Court, where all five justices are Republican appointees. Meanwhile, Klineman, elected to the bench in 2014 after winning a Democratic primary, has faced calls for her impeachment over her decision, in what U.S. Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) called “one of the most ridiculous rulings I’ve seen in a long time.”
But for Amalia Shifriss, who testified on behalf of Hoosier Jews for Choice in the lawsuit, the latest ruling is a positive sign that the law will be applied consistently. If religious freedom applies to Christians objecting to baking a same-sex wedding cake, she said, then it must apply to liberal Jews, too.
“RFRA should not just be for what some lawmakers see as the religious right,” Shifriss told the Forward. “It should be for all religions.”
‘Perversion of the law’s intent’
In winning the right to an abortion, Hoosier Jews for Choice relied on a law passed by Pence, who would become Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate on the strength of his reputation as a stalwart advocate for evangelical Christians. Pence rose to national prominence based on his unwavering opposition to abortion — and his conservative leadership as Indiana governor.
Anti-abortion advocacy organizations — including Indiana Right to Life and SBA Pro-Life America — supported the law.
Back in 2015, the debate over RFRA centered on small-business owners that sought to refuse service to LGBTQ+ people. Eric Miller, a conservative activist who was in the room when Pence signed the law, wrote then that “Christian bakers, florists and photographers should not be punished for refusing to participate in a homosexual marriage!”
Massive backlash against the law — notably by the NCAA the weekend before the Final Four basketball game was slated to occur in Indianapolis — led Pence to sign into law a clarification that businesses could not use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to deny services to people on the basis of their sexual orientation.
But the law itself remained on the books — ripe for abortion-rights groups to wield a decade later.
Now, a little over a decade after Indiana first passed RFRA, organizations that once supported the law’s broad application have changed their tune.
“For the court to rule that taking the life of an unborn child is an exercise of religious freedom is deeply distressing — and a perversion of the law’s intent,” Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter said in an online statement following Klineman’s March 5 ruling. Indiana Right to Life did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
That shift has been part of a larger legal trend: Conservative Christian groups like Alliance Defending Freedom have long argued that the government must have a compelling reason to force someone to act against their religious beliefs — whether mandating vaccines, serving LGBTQ clients, or covering contraception in employee health care plans.
But when it came to religious plaintiffs who support abortion access, some on the Christian right didn’t think the same expansive view of religious freedom applied.
“Indiana’s religious freedom laws were passed for the purpose of protecting religious practice, not to protect the ending of a human life,”Indiana’s religious freedom laws were passed for the purpose of protecting religious practice, not to protect the ending of a human life,” Alexander Mingus, executive director of the Indiana Catholic Conference, said in an online statement after Klineman’s ruling. “Religions that preach violence are not protected by religious freedom claims.”
Mingus did not respond to the Forward’s request for an interview.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit that has made its name arguing religious freedom cases in front of the Supreme Court, also objected to the Jewish plaintiffs’ interpretation of RFRA. In 2014, Becket successfully argued in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. that employers could refuse to cover contraception on religious grounds. Meanwhile, in the Indiana case, Becket filed a brief questioning the sincerity of the Jewish plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.
“The case fails RFRA’s test for multiple reasons, including allowing people to join Hoosier Jews for Choice by filling out an anonymous Google form with zero requirement to actually agree with Jewish religious teachings,” Lori Windham, senior counsel for Becket, said in a statement to the Forward.
Cohen disputed that characterization. She said that all members of Hoosier Jews for Choice were required to share their name and contact information, which it did not make public in order to protect members’ confidentiality. She added that group members who joined the lawsuit were asked to indicate whether they could connect their view on the abortion ban to their Jewish values and beliefs, and the vast majority of members did.
David Schraub, an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School who has written about the Indiana case, said that courts do assess whether a religious belief seems genuine. But according to Schraub, the bar for establishing sincerity is low — typically an issue only in cases clearly brought in bad faith. For instance, Schraub recalled a case in which a defendant, trying to avoid paying taxes, cycled through various legal arguments before ultimately inventing “the Church of Ayn Rand.”
The Indiana case is fundamentally different, Schraub said, given the long-standing religious grounding for more permissive Jewish views on abortion.
“They tried to argue that this was not a sincerely held religious belief, which I think was really quite disrespectful, because it flies in the face of a lot of evidence about what we know about how Jews conceptualize the relationship to reproductive freedom,” Schraub said. “They’re just not willing to accept that there is such a thing as a sincere and genuine liberal religious tradition.”
Jewish beliefs, Jewish practices
A 2014 Pew Research poll found an estimated 83% of American Jews believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That’s likely because Jews across denominations largely agree that life begins at birth, not conception. Sources in the Talmud say that in the first 40 days of pregnancy, the fetus is considered “mere water.” Jews value the fetus as “potential life,” gaining the legal status of nefesh, or personhood, at birth.
Still, Jews do not have monolithic views on abortion. Orthodox groups are divided, though couples generally consult rabbis on the matter and believe the choice to get an abortion should be governed by Jewish law, not personal choice.
The Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly supports the right to choose abortion in cases where “continuation of a pregnancy might cause severe physical or psychological harm, or where the fetus is judged by competent medical opinion as severely defective.”
Reform Judaism emphasizes bodily autonomy, with the view that “the decision to terminate a pregnancy is one that, in all circumstances, should ultimately be made by the individual within whose body the fetus is growing.”
Rabbi Sandy Sasso — one of three rabbis the ACLU asked to give expert testimony in the Indiana case, and the first woman ordained a rabbi in Reconstructionist Judaism — told the Forward that the diversity of opinion within Judaism underscores the argument for challenging abortion bans.
“That actually is just the point — there are different religious views,” Sasso said. “The Constitution does not allow you, since there is separation of church and state, to enshrine one religious view over the other.”
Can religion and abortion coexist?
Shira Zemel, abortion access campaign director at the National Council of Jewish Women, is helping lead a national push to reframe “reproductive freedom as religious freedom.”
Each year since 2021, the Council has organized “Repro Shabbat,” which aligns with the Torah portion from Exodus Parashat Misphatim. The portion says that if a man pushes a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry, he should pay a fine. But if any other damage results, the punishment should be according to the principle of “eye for an eye.” The portion is often interpreted as evidence that Judaism does not view a fetus as having the same legal status as a person.
The group has also backed that argument in court, filing a brief with 21 other organizations of faith in support of the plaintiffs challenging Indiana’s abortion ban — and hoping similar lawsuits will build on that case’s success nationwide.
The legal pathway exists in many places: 29 states have their own versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, including at least 11 that severely restricted abortion after the Dobbs decision. According to Ken Falk, legal director of the ACLU of Indiana, the same legal reasoning used in Indiana could feasibly be applied in any of those states.
Some legal challenges are already underway, including in Kentucky and South Carolina, where litigation is ongoing. Others have faltered: In Missouri, a judge upheld the state’s abortion ban after a group of interfaith clergy sued on religious grounds. In Florida, a Jewish-led challenge to a ban after six weeks of pregnancy fizzled out after Rabbi Barry Silver, who brought the case on behalf of his synagogue, died of colon cancer in 2024.
Zemel said she hopes the Indiana case can serve as not only a legal blueprint, but also as a sign of a broader cultural shift in how religion is understood in the abortion debate.
“It’s incredible to me to see how this legal argument is bolstering what I like to think is a huge narrative shift,” Zemel said. “For far too long, it’s been weaponized that religion and abortion can’t coexist, but we know that that’s not the case.”
The post Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right appeared first on The Forward.
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Syria Will Stay Out of Iran conflict Unless It Faces Aggression, President Says
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa attends the Ministry of Awqaf conference titled “Unity of Islamic Discourse” at the Conference Palace in Damascus, Syria, Feb. 16, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said on Tuesday that his country will stay out of the US-Israeli war against Iran unless Syria is subject to aggression and has no diplomatic solutions.
“Unless Syria is targeted by any party, Syria will remain outside any conflict,” the Syrian president said at an event hosted by think tank Chatham House in London.
“We do not want Syria to be an arena of war. But unfortunately, today, things are not governed by wise minds. The situation is volatile and random,” the president said.
The month-long conflict has spread across the region, killing thousands, disrupting energy supplies, and threatening to send the global economy into a tailspin.
“We want Syria to have ideal relationships with the entire region, with Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and world powers like the UK, France, Germany, and the US. I think that Syria is qualified to start a strategic relationship network,” he said, responding to a question on whether Syria would stay neutral while the conflict goes on.
Syria has been keen to stay on the sidelines of the regional conflict that has pulled in neighboring countries, including Lebanon, where armed group Hezbollah is locked in fighting with Israeli ground troops, and Iraq, where Iran-aligned factions have launched drone and rocket attacks.
Syria sent thousands of troops to its western border with Lebanon and its eastern border with Iraq earlier this month. Syria‘s defense ministry said the deployment was part of efforts to “protect and control the borders amid the escalating regional conflict.”
“We had enough war. We paid a large bill. We are not ready for another war experience,” Syria‘s president said.