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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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Iran Hits Ships and UAE Oil Port in Show of Force After Trump Orders Navy to Open Strait
Ships and boats in the Strait of Hormuz, Musandam, Oman, May 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Iran hit several ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday and set a UAE oil port ablaze, following President Donald Trump‘s announcement that he will use the US Navy to free up shipping.
The Iranian attacks marked the war’s biggest escalation since a ceasefire was declared four weeks ago.
Trump‘s new mission “Project Freedom,” which he announced on social media overnight to release ships stuck in the strait, was the first apparent attempt to make use of naval power to unblock the world’s most important energy shipping route.
But at least in the initial hours on Monday, the effort brought no surge of merchant shipping through the strait while provoking a show of force from Iran, which had long threatened to respond to any escalation with new attacks on its neighbors.
The US military said two US merchant ships had made it through the strait, without saying when. Iran denied any such crossings had taken place.
The commander of US forces in the region said his fleet had destroyed six small Iranian boats, which Iran also denied. Admiral Brad Cooper said he “strongly advised” Iranian forces to keep clear of US military assets carrying out the mission.
Iranian authorities, for their part, released a map of what they said was an expanded sea area now under their control, which went far beyond the strait to include swathes of international waters, including long stretches of the United Arab Emirates’ coastline on either side of the strait.
South Korea reported one of its merchant ships had been hit by an explosion and fire inside the strait. The British maritime security agency UKMTO reported two ships had been hit off the coast of the UAE, and the Emirati oil company ADNOC said one of its empty oil tankers was hit by Iranian drones while trying to cross.
“Iran has taken some shots at unrelated Nations with respect to the Ship Movement, PROJECT FREEDOM, including a South Korean Cargo Ship. Perhaps it’s time for South Korea to come and join the mission!” Trump posted on social media on Monday.
After reported drone and missile attacks inside the UAE throughout the day, including one that caused a fire at an important oil port, the UAE said Iranian attacks marked a serious escalation and it reserved the right to respond.
STRAIT STILL BLOCKED
Trump has struggled to find a solution to the disruption of international energy supplies caused by Iran‘s blockade of the strait, which carried a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas before the war.
In the more than two months since Trump launched an air war against Iran alongside Israel, Tehran has largely blocked the strait to ships apart from its own. Since last month, the United States has imposed its own blockade of ships leaving and entering Iranian ports, further crippling Iran’s already ailing economy.
The warring sides issued contradictory statements on Monday about the initial impact of the new US mission, and Reuters could not independently verify the full situation there.
But there was no immediate sign that large numbers of merchant ships were making new attempts to cross, and major shipping companies said they were likely to wait for an agreed end to hostilities before trying to sail through.
REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS SAY NO TRANSITS TOOK PLACE
In a post on X, US Central Command said some of its Navy guided-missile destroyers were inside the Gulf supporting the operation, and that two US-flagged merchant vessels had crossed the strait “and are safely headed on their journey.”
It did not identify either the warships or the merchant vessels or say when any of those crossings had taken place.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said no commercial vessels had crossed the strait in the past few hours, and that US claims to the contrary were false.
Earlier, Iran said it had fired on a US warship approaching the strait, forcing it to turn around. An initial Iranian report had said a US warship was struck, but Washington denied this and Iranian officials later described the fire as warning shots.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said there was a fire and an explosion onboard the Namu, a merchant ship operated by South Korean shipper HMM. Yonhap news agency reported that the government was checking intelligence indicating the vessel may have been attacked.
The UAE, meanwhile, reported a fire at an oil installation in its port of Fujairah following an Iranian drone attack. Fujairah lies beyond the strait, making it one of the few export routes for Middle East oil that does not require passing through it.
SHIPPING INDUSTRY AWAITS CLARITY ON SAFETY
Oil prices jumped more than 5% in volatile trade as news of the increased Iranian attacks emerged.
In his social media post announcing the new mission, Trump gave few details of what action the US Navy would take to get ships through the strait.
“We have told these Countries that we will guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business,” Trump wrote.
In response, Iran‘s unified command told commercial ships and oil tankers:
“We have repeatedly said the security of the Strait of Hormuz is in our hands and that the safe passage of vessels needs to be coordinated with the armed forces … We warn that any foreign armed forces, especially the aggressive US Army, will be attacked if they intend to approach and enter the Strait of Hormuz.”
The United States and Israel suspended their bombing campaign against Iran four weeks ago, and US and Iranian officials held one round of face-to-face talks. But attempts to set up further meetings have failed.
Iranian state media said on Sunday that Washington had conveyed its response to a 14-point Iranian proposal via Pakistan, and that Tehran was now reviewing it. Neither side gave details of any US response.
The Iranian proposal would postpone discussion of Iran‘s nuclear program until after an agreement to end the war and resolve the standoff over shipping. Trump said over the weekend he was still studying it but would probably reject it.
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Australia Begins Hearings Into Bondi Beach Attack and Rising Antisemitism
Rabbi Levi Wolff lights a menorah at Bondi Pavilion to honor the victims of a shooting during a Jewish holiday celebration at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
Australia began public hearings on Monday in an inquiry into the Bondi Beach mass shooting in December, with Jewish Australians giving evidence of their experience of rising domestic antisemitism.
The attack on a Jewish Hanukkah celebration killed 15, fueling calls for tougher gun controls and more action to tackle hatred toward Jews, following a spate of antisemitic incidents.
The first block of public hearings will investigate the nature and prevalence of antisemitism, said Virginia Bell, the retired judge leading the wide-ranging national inquiry known as a Royal Commission.
“The sharp spike in antisemitism that we’ve witnessed in Australia has been mirrored in other Western countries and seems clearly linked to events in the Middle East,” Bell said.
“It’s important that people understand how quickly those events can prompt ugly displays of hostility toward Jewish Australians simply because they’re Jews.”
‘WE DON’T FEEL SAFE HERE’
Witnesses from the Jewish community told the inquiry they felt increasingly unsafe amid rising hostility since the October 2023 start of the war in Gaza.
“What is happening in Australia today is not a faint echo of a distant past,” said Peter Halasz, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who fled to Australia from Hungary.
“For those of us who lived through the 1930s and 1940s, it is something we recognize, and that recognition is frightening and cause for alarm.”
Sheina Gutnick, who lost her father Reuven Morrison in the Bondi attack, said antisemitism had damaged her family’s sense of safety and freedom of movement.
“As a mother, I’m constantly weighing up the risk of exposing my children to environments where they may be witness, or subject, to antisemitism,” she told the panel.
She recounted an incident in which a stranger at a shopping center called her an “effing terrorist” for wearing a Star of David necklace.
Another witness said her family was relocating to Israel because of safety concerns.
“We never expected synagogues to be burned down,” said the woman, who used the pseudonym “AAM.” “We never expected Jews to be hunted on Bondi Beach.
“My family and I no longer want to live in Australia. We don’t feel safe here. We don’t feel welcome.”
JEWISH SCHOOL LOOKS ‘MORE LIKE A PRISON’
Stefanie Schwartz, the president of Sydney Jewish primary school Mount Sinai College, spoke of holding drills to prepare young students to deal with terrorist attacks, and requiring an “extreme” security presence on campus.
“You walk past our school, and it looks a lot more like a prison than a primary school.”
Antisemitism has “run riot,” with Jewish Australians being held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, said Benjamin Elton, the chief minister of the Great Synagogue in Sydney.
The inquiry released an interim report of 14 recommendations last Thursday, urging greater security for Jewish public events and further counterterrorism and gun reforms.
A second block of hearings later in May will focus on the circumstances leading up to the Bondi Beach attack and issues raised in the interim report.
The commission is due to deliver its final report on Dec. 14, exactly a year after the attack.
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A new musical wonders: What happened to solidarity with English Jews?
The Battle of Cable Street, a 1936 street scuffle off an obscure stretch of road in London’s East End, holds a totemic importance to the Jews of England, and, given how few they are in number, a correspondingly small significance in the larger British imagination.
The musical Cable Street, dramatizing that showdown between Jewish and Irish East Enders against Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts, arrives Off-Broadway from London amid a spate of headlines about the safety of English Jews and a subsequent minimization of their fears. Only now, the political alignment of those defending or hectoring Jews has recalibrated from the days the play examines.
In his rhetoric and tactics, the anti-Islam “activist” Tommy Robinson, who antagonizes Muslim neighborhoods and marched through Central London in his “Unite the Kingdom” rallies, would appear to be the heir apparent to a Mosley, with the exception that he presents himself as a friend of the Jews. (Most Jews in the U.K. won’t have him; the Israeli far-right welcomed him to the Jewish state last October.)
On the left, the multicultural coalition has found a cause in Palestinian rights, which they march for like clockwork. Jews, who in the U.K. make up about .5% of the population but a whole 29% of recorded religious hate crimes, don’t count in their social justice calculus, comedian David Baddiel has argued. Evidence is mounting in that direction.
Police have surrendered to community leaders pushing to cancel an Israeli soccer club match, fabricating evidence with A.I. post facto to make it seem like the Israel fans will be the violent faction. A Panorama documentary from last month makes an earnest case for Jewish anxiety, but aired only after the BBC was made to review their standards over stories on Gaza following the network running a documentary that failed to disclose its narrator was the son of a Hamas minister. (This to my mind is nowhere near as egregious as the channel’s reluctance some years before to back down from blaming Orthodox children for their own abuse by mistranslating a word of Hebrew into an anti-Arab slur.)
Jews being gunned down outside shuls on Yom Kippur or stabbed in the streets – as they were just last week, two days before I saw this musical — don’t mobilize the masses. They do get the odd pundit condemning the violence, only to then to whatabout with the humanitarian disaster in Gaza or blame Jewish institutions’ efforts to conflate Jews and Israel, as if only when uncoupled will their targeting be truly horrendous.
British Jews are so much a rounding error they could hardly sway a council election. That fact scarcely moves the needle on the old libels of governmental control, as Labour responds to violence with crack downs on pro-Palestinian protests.
The development of Cable Street goes back years before the current bloodletting, yet it has hit on a rhyme in history.
The story provides a framing device of a present-day walking tour before jumping back in time to follow three youths and their families: Irish immigrant Mairead (Lizzy-Rose Essin-Kelly), who dreams of a writer’s life during her day job rolling bagels; Sammy Scheinberg (a dynamic Isaac Gryn), who wants to be a boxer against the wishes of his shmata business father; and Ron (Barney Wilkinson) a recent Lancashire transplant, underemployed, with hair the color of threshed wheat, ripe for recruitment by a band of populist nativists.
The show finds hope in an unlikely coalition of Irish dockworkers, Jews and Communists rallying to stop a police-escorted British Union of Fascists (BUF) march through London’s Jewish Quarter. The parable is so near to today’s headlines that it can make one’s head spin, and, in the particular case of a Jew, scan for allies. Better luck in New York, with the Brits Off Broadway festival, than across the pond, where this may be taken as a more general parable, with Jews as allegorical victims standing in for other marginalized groups. To read into the story the excesses of today’s protests, and what the authorities allow under the pretext of free speech, would surely be sacrilege, depending on which marchers it’s applied to and where your loyalties lie.
The music by Tim Gilvin has shades of what I’ll call Hebraic Hamilton (“Dream of making the dough, making the bread, baking the challah,” Sammy spits bars over a backbeat). There’s an Irish jig and a ballad that sounds like Coldplay, and “Only Words,” an elegiac plea from a Jewish father to his hothead son. (Jez Unwin plays the Scheinberg patriarch, a modern-day descendant and the leader of the Stepney BUF.) A ragtime number of chattering broadsheets sellers feeds us intermittent exposition.
The introduction of the BUF imagines them as a ‘90s boy band, making fun before they prove their menace. It works better downtown, when the Nazis in another British import, Operation Mincemeat, do their K-Pop number, as that show is an all-out farce.
Better by far is the play’s treatment of Jewish scenes, scripted by book writer Alex Kanefsky with deft direction by Adam Lenson. We hear a hamotzi, see a synagogue (with an implied women’s balcony) and hear a refrain of Sholem Aleichem and Sim Shalom integrated into musically layered sequences.
The indefatigable cast of 13 plays countless characters, switching allegiances from Mosleyites to Jews at the donning of an armband. This can lead to odd stage imagery, as when musician-actor Max Alexander-Taylor is togged up like a blackshirt while riffing on an electric guitar. (The rest of the band is on a top level, shielded in by the corrugated metal and chainlink of Yoav Segal’s set design.)
But there are moments of sublime stage work, après Les Miz, as the story’s action rises and the street mounts a defense with slogans borrowed from Spanish Republicans. The play, in its chilling wisdom, doesn’t stop at this high point. It allows room for what followed: The BUF’s membership only grew after the battle. Regrouping, they retaliated with a pogrom against the Jews. This time, no one showed up to defend them.
The cringey lyric of the battle song — “we’re not like the others, we won’t let you demonize our sisters and brothers” — is replaced with a more sober conclusion from Sammy’s sister in the wreckage of the attack.
After noting how “the rich blame the poor, the poor blame the rich and everybody hates the Jews,” Rosa Scheinberg (Romona Lewis-Malley) laments that “when the common enemy’s defeated, old wounds flare up, and old mistakes get repeated.” Solidarity was but a brief and shining moment.
As a concession to hope, the show doesn’t end there, but it very well might.
The musical Cable Street plays at 59E59 in New York through May 24. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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