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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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He saved dozens of kids in Auschwitz — he kept it a secret for nearly the rest of his life
Growing up in Israel as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Judith Richter was taught not to discuss the Shoah. While her mother was very open about her experiences, Richter’s father was more reserved, and Israeli society at the time looked down on European Jews for, as they wrongly assumed, not fighting back. It wasn’t until Richter was an adult that she learned her father had played a critical role in protecting children at Auschwitz-Birkenau — a secret she gleaned not from her father himself but from an article on Josef Mengele in a LIFE magazine that her husband happened to spot in a grocery store.
Erno “Zvi” Spiegel was 29 years old when he was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz along with other members of his family, including his twin sister Magda. As a twin, Spiegel was selected to be a subject for Mengele’s scientific experiments, where he injected subjects with diseases and cancer cells to study their effects on the human body; due to their shared genetics, one twin could serve as a control for the experiment. If one died from the procedure and the other didn’t, the surviving twin would still be killed and subject to an autopsy to understand why they lived.
Mengele also charged Spiegel with looking after the other kids he was experimenting on, whose lives Spiegel would end up saving multiple times. The PBS documentary The Last Twins, directed by Perri Peltz and Matt O’Neill, captures the deep and unexpected relationship Spiegel had with his charges through interviews with the surviving sets of twins from Mengele’s lab along with Spiegel’s family. Uncle Spiegel, as the twins called him, was the only adult that many of the kids trusted during their imprisonment.
When SS physician Heinz Thilo ordered the extermination of all sets of twins, Spiegel was able to intervene by telling Mengele that his subjects were at risk. Sometimes siblings were mistakenly brought in as twins, but Spiegel lied about their birth days so they wouldn’t be sent to the gas chambers. Many recounted how he would teach them math and geography to distract them from their horrific conditions.
When she heard these stories for the first time, Richter told me, she was not surprised her father had put such an emphasis on education, even in the camps.
“My father taught me since I was very young that while your material possessions, home, even your freedom can be taken away from you, the single asset that cannot be taken away from you is your knowledge,” she said.
After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel led the kids on an arduous journey through Eastern Europe helping them return to their homes — or at least, to what was left of them.
Although Spiegel, who died in 1993, never told his own children what he had done during the war, he spoke with LIFE Magazine for their 1981 article on Mengele’s experiments. The LIFE piece didn’t just cause revelations for Spiegel’s family; one of the survivors, Peter Somogyi, saw the issue, prompting him to contact Spiegel. The two reunited for the first time in almost four decades in Boston, and after that, Spiegel arranged meetings with a number of the other surviving twins.
Richter began researching her father’s story and the lives of those he had saved for an academic project. However, when director Peltz’s mom, who had known Richter for years, connected the two women, Richter realized the importance of turning her father’s story into a movie.
Directors O’Neill and Peltz, who had previously worked together on the documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media, knew the project was time sensitive given how few living survivors are left. Since they first started shooting the film almost a decade ago, all but one of their interview subjects has died. O’Neill added that today’s political climate contributed to the urgency of getting the film to the public.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, of misinformation of the Holocaust,” O’Neill said, “it’s an essential time for journalistic work based entirely on indisputable truths to come out.”
Peltz noted that Spiegel’s heroism wasn’t embodied in one grand act, but “in the step by step, day by day.” Although Mengele’s horrific experiments get a brief mention, the filmmakers chose to focus on the uplifting story of how people came together and protected each other in the midst of tragedy.
“Right now, many of us feel overwhelmed by world events, by things that feel out of control,” O’Neill added. “This is a story of hope in a time of horror and of a man who took the small space that he could control and did good within it.”
In 2017, Richter organized a reunion of the survivors in Israel, where they dedicated a plaque to Spiegel and the twins in Jerusalem. Richter said her father’s strong sense of social responsibility had a profound effect on her life. She noted that in the homes of some Holocaust survivors, the “children grow up with a very strong sense of revenge.” Instead, her father taught her that the best response to hatred was to ask herself how she could help other people.
“Erno was a fighter in his own way,” O’Neill said. “He fought the Nazis by teaching the kids to call each other by their names. He fought the Nazis by teaching them geography. He fought the Nazis by giving them humanity in darkness.”
The Last Twins will be available to stream on pbs.org on April 13 and have a broadcast premiere on Monday, June 15 at 10/9c.
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I’m probably going to be on the government’s list of Jews at UPenn
When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, tensions on campus about Israel and Gaza felt hotter than ever. Nearly every week of my senior year, another student or faculty member was being doxxed online for their politics. In the middle of spring finals, police forcibly disbanded the pro-Palestinian encampment in the center of campus. A week later, and four days before graduation, pro-Palestinian activists occupied a campus building, leading to another confrontation with law enforcement and arrests. At graduation, several students whipped out Palestinian flags and signs about justice for Palestine as they walked the stage.
I will once again be a Penn student come fall, having been accepted to the school’s sociology Ph.D. program. Last month, when I returned to campus for the department’s open house, I was surprised that I didn’t notice even a trace of the conflict I had left behind. The fences that had been erected around College Green to prevent a second encampment were gone. There were no cardboard signs about Palestine or Israel on Locust Walk. Talking with my professors and friends still at Penn, they confirmed that pro-Palestinian activism on campus had died down, likely due to a mix of intimidation on the part of the school administration — which only got more intense after the federal government got involved — and a loss of energy in activist spaces.
It’s not that students became completely disconnected: The university still offers clubs for students with a wide range of political perspectives, and courses on Israel and Gaza. But it seemed like the Penn I would be returning to in August had established some semblance of calm, albeit in part due to the university restricting open expression.
Now, the recent ruling that Penn must comply with the federal government’s demand for a list of students and faculty affiliated with Jewish groups and organizations — a sweeping categorization that could include anyone involved in Jewish Studies or Jewish associations regardless of their actual identity — could threaten to bring back the campus wide anxieties when doxxing and harassment were at their highest.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s investigation began in December of 2023, with a stated goal of determining if the university was failing to properly protect Jewish employees from discrimination and harassment. In March 2025, the EEOC asked Penn for membership lists of Jewish campus groups and names of Jewish Studies employees. Penn refused, instead offering to inform all employees about the investigation and how to contact the EEOC if they felt like they had an incident to report. This didn’t satisfy the EEOC, leading to subpoenas, lawsuits and countersuits. And it’s not over yet: Penn has indicated the school plans to appeal the decision forcing the handover of student and faculty names.
Although the EEOC’s jurisdiction is workplace discrimination, some of the lists the EEOC are asking for include students. One such group is those who were involved in confidential listening sessions conducted by the university’s antisemitism task force where Jewish students shared their experiences on campus.
I’ll go ahead and get ahead of the EEOC and make it known that I attended one of these listening sessions. Their confidentiality made them one of the few places on campus where Jewish students could feel comfortable openly discussing their feelings about the situation in Israel and Gaza as well as events at Penn. It was the administration’s way of giving Jews room to be vulnerable — and now the government is weaponizing it against the university.
The irony is stark. Under the auspices of protecting the interests of Jewish students and faculty, the EEOC is threatening the sanctity of the spaces where Jewish students and faculty feel safe.
For me, it’s hard not to feel like part of how we got here is that different political camps of the Jewish community could never seem to figure out how to speak to one another after Oct. 7. There was never really a clear idea of what Jewish students wanted political activity on campus to look like, with some advocating for a complete ban of encampments and anti-Israel referendums and others fully supporting them. Ultimately, I think what most people wanted on campus was a sense of civility, the feeling that screaming matches between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students wouldn’t constantly erupt in the middle of campus, but different factions were too busy arguing with each other to make a well-thought-out plan for how to achieve that.
The faculty who originally complained to the EEOC clearly thought getting the federal government involved was the catch-all solution. But instead, after two of the four classes of undergraduate students who lived through the conflict have graduated, and students are talking to each other in organized dialogue, the EEOC wants to revisit old wounds. The EEOC has discretion when it comes to what steps they choose to take, including issuing a subpoena and determining how to gather information they believe is necessary to their investigation. They have decided to use that discretion to gather information in a way that resurfaces generational trauma for Jews.
After such a period of divisiveness at Penn, it’s telling that an unidentified professor told the student paper The Daily Pennsylvanian that “a remarkably ideologically, religiously, and politically diverse array of organizations and individuals have united” against the subpoena. I didn’t always see eye to eye with the Penn Hillel leadership while I was an undergraduate student, but I agree with their assertion, in the statement they released last week that, “accountability in the face of discrimination is essential, but it must not be achieved by compromising the security of any minority community.”
Despite all the anxiety and frustration this development has provoked, I am choosing to look on the bright side: It seems like Penn’s Jews have finally found something they can unite over.
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Iran’s regime is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein
In the hours leading up to the recent ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, pro-regime AI-generated videos flooded social media. In one widely circulated clip, a Lego version of Donald Trump is shown desperately pleading with Iran for a ceasefire. The response comes in the form of a ballistic missile with the words “in memory of the victims of Epstein’s Island” written on it, hurling toward U.S. allies in the region.
Another video shows a terrified Trump in bed with young girls, having a nightmare of an Iranian missile barrage before waking and agreeing to ceasefire terms while eating a taco — a reference to the acronym “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”).
These videos are just some of the dozens released by media organizations affiliated with the Iranian regime that invoke pedophile sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein in its anti-Western propaganda.
“The IRGC is very happy to use him in every venue they have—in media, newspapers, speeches,” said Saeid Golkar, an Iranian-born expert on the Iran regime’s propaganda, using the acronym for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Everything they are talking about, especially right now, goes back to the corruption of the West and Epstein.”
Golkar, who grew up exposed to regime messaging, said the fixation on Epstein reflects a broader ideological goal: convincing Iranians that the West is a place of moral decay.
“From the beginning, one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s ideology was anti-Westernism and portraying the West as a corrupt place,” he said. “There is no respect for families or values … no limitation for sexual interaction. I remember the phrase ‘living like pigs’ — that they are living together like animals. That was a big concept.”
Golkar says the Epstein files released by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year have been a “gift” to the regime, offering a concrete example of the Western immorality it hopes to present to its people. When Iranians express a desire for a “normal life” without Sharia law or morality police, the regime invokes Epstein.
“They say, ‘You don’t want a normal life — you want a corrupted life…. These people don’t care about your freedom. They are a group of pedophiles.’” This, despite the fact that girls can be legally married in Iran at the age of 13, and even younger with the approval of a male guardian and judge.
The Baal game
One of the most prominent features of pro-regime rallies in Iran is the burning of Baal statues. The figure of Baal — meaning “lord” in ancient Semitic languages — is referenced in the Old Testament as a rival to the God of the Israelites. Historically, Baal was a fertility deity associated with rain and agricultural prosperity. Later interpretations and conspiracy theorists came to portray the worship of Baal as tied to sexual deviance and child sacrifice.
A popular online conspiracy theory ties Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators to Baal, pointing to a viral document from the Epstein files that appears to show bank transfer details with the name “Baal.name” listed where a financial institution would typically appear. They interpret this as evidence that Epstein maintained an account connected to the deity, suggesting he may have worshiped Baal or been involved in ritual abuse. Popular right-wing influencer Candace Owens weighed in with a video titled, “BAAL SO HARD: The Epstein Files,” where she referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies.” It has almost 3 million views.
Fact-checkers have disputed the interpretation of the bank document, noting that “Baal.name” is likely a misreading or formatting artifact of “Bank Name,” and that the actual account name — Clearlake Centre, LLC — is clearly identified elsewhere in the record.
On numerous occasions, the Iranian regime has staged the burning of Baal statues in major cities during pro-regime rallies, sometimes even coordinating multiple burnings across the country. Mehr News Agency, a state-owned Iranian news network, reported on one such rally in early February, writing: “Participants set fire to the symbolic Baal idol, describing the act as a representation of condemnation over crimes linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, where children were abused.”
These events are often accompanied by chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” or “God is Great.” In some cases, the statues have been marked with a painted Star of David.
The Baal figure has also appeared in many of the AI-generated videos circulating online amidst the war. In one, created by pro-regime media organization Explosive Media, Lego versions of a drunken Pete Hegseth and Trump are paired with a rap track: “We hitting the Baal-worshipping Epstein Island crew, the ones who hurt the kids. Revenge for every American soul you and Trump’s dirty crew oppressed and did. We taking payback for the girls you broke.”
Though Explosive Media claims it is not directly affiliated with the Iranian government, Golkar said he has seen evidence suggesting it operates as part of the IRGC’s media apparatus. The regime has also acknowledged granting tiered internet access to select individuals tasked with amplifying official messaging. In early March, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said full internet access had been given to those “who can carry the voice of the government further.” Explosive Media, which says it has 2.5 million followers across Iranian messaging platforms, has cited its status as a media organization to explain its continued access. This has prompted experts like Moustafa Ayad, a researcher with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, to raise questions about how closely it is connected with the state.
Another video, played on Iranian state TV, depicts figures the regime frames as victims of the West — a Native American man, a Gazan child, an Epstein victim, and former Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US strike in 2019 — gazing skyward as an Iranian missile strikes the Statue of Liberty. In this version, the statue is reimagined as Baal holding a Talmud. Upon impact, both sink into the Hudson River.
The Epstein fixation extends beyond rallies and social media. Golkar said Epstein is frequently referenced in official Basij (a plainclothes paramilitary volunteer militia in Iran) and IRGC materials, as well as in speeches by Iranian officials. Just two days before his assassination, Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official, posted on X, “It has been reported that what remains of Epstein’s network is working to prepare a conspiracy aimed at fabricating an incident similar to the September 11 attacks, in preparation for accusing Iran of being behind it.”
In another post in response to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Laranjani posted on X, “Mr. Hegseth! Our leaders have been, and still are, among the people. But your leaders? On Epstein’s island!”
The Epstein War?
These propaganda videos are largely made in English. With Iran still in a media blackout, the Iranian people may not be their intended audience.
Shaping global perception through media is a key part of the Iranian war strategy. In a meeting with a group of Iranian poets in 2024, Ayatollah Khamenei, who was assassinated on the first day of the war, stated, “All war is a media war. Whichever actor has greater media influence will achieve their goals.”
The IRGC has spent years building a media apparatus designed to do just that. IRGC-affiliated production studios, media-focused university programs, and cultural centers are dedicated to training and refining propaganda content. Iran also outsources some of its media production to countries more attuned to Western cultural cues, particularly Pakistan.
A key element of the regime’s narrative is the claim that the Trump administration initiated the war to distract from the Epstein files. This theory has also circulated on both the left and the right in the United States.
In Washington D.C., posters cover the streets referring to the War in Iran, formally titled Operation Epic Fury, as Operation Epstein Fury.
U.S. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted on X shortly after the war began, garnering over 250 thousand likes, “Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will.”
The popular podcaster Joe Rogan espoused the theory on a recent episode, stating, “Look, the Epstein files comes out — we go to war with Iran. It’s a good way to get people to stop talking about certain things.”
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