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Fearless or foolish? Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s Jewish president, stands apart in opposing Trump’s campus policies
(JTA) — As he often does these days, Wesleyan University president Michael Roth recently delivered a lecture on another campus outlining all the reasons why academia should be more forcefully standing up to President Trump’s policies.
He peppered the lecture with Yiddish words. He laid thick on what he called his “Jewish accent.” A colleague came up to him afterwards.
“You’re doing Jew-speak,” they told him.
Roth laughed recalling his response: “No s–t, Sherlock. That’s part of what I’m doing.”
What he’s doing, Roth told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a recent interview, is constantly reminding his potential critics who he is. For one, he’s the only university president in the country who openly, repeatedly rejects Trump’s claims that the administration’s campus crackdowns — rescinding grants, limiting international student visas, dismantling “DEI” — are a means of fighting antisemitism after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
For another, when his own school dealt with pro-Palestinian encampments last year, he made no secret of handling the matter diplomatically instead of through discipline — an approach that landed other university presidents in hot water, but not him.
And above all that, he’s proudly Jewish.
“If you’re going to accuse Wesleyan’s administration of being antisemitic, start with me. But don’t call me on Saturday,” Roth quipped. “Because I’m going to be in Torah study.”
Roth isn’t quite sure how he, the leader of a small-town Connecticut liberal arts school with a mere 3,000 students, became so unusual among his profession by defending what he sees as the central principles of academic freedom.
“It’s a bit of a puzzle,” he told JTA. “I don’t think my view is very original. Any of the presidents I know at different schools probably have similar views.” His views also seem to align with most American Jews, at least according to polls, which show that nearly three-quarters of them also believe Trump is using antisemitism as an excuse to attack higher education.
In recent days, two other Jewish presidents, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University, have publicly rejected a Trump administration offer of “priority” funding that would have required them to bar some forms of speech, making them the only university leaders to do so. But Roth still stands out in the lengths he is going to rebuff Trump’s higher education policies — and to center his Jewish identity in doing so.
There he is, accepting a “courage award” from the literary free-speech group PEN America “for standing up to government assaults on higher education.” There he is, giving interviews in which he lambasts “prominent Jewish figures around the country who get comfortable with Trump, it seems to me, because they can say he’s fighting antisemitism: ‘He’s good for the Jews.’ It’s pathetic. It’s a travesty of Jewish values, in my view.”
There he is, signing an open letter declaring that antisemitism “is being used as a pretext to abrogate students’ rights to free speech, and to deport non-citizen students.” The leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group that has been suspended from multiple college campuses for disruptive protests, were on that letter. So was the leader of Wesleyan University.
And there he is, telling JTA that so-called institutional neutrality positions, adopted by a range of universities amid the Israel-Gaza war (and supported by the Jewish campus group Hillel International), are “bogus.”
A representative for the American Association of University Professors, a faculty union that has dropped its former opposition to boycotting Israel, praised Roth’s presence on the national stage.
“Michael Roth is criticizing the misuse of Title VI to define anti-semitism as criticism of Israel and its weaponization in the campaign to attack higher education. There is nothing startling about that position,” Joan W. Scott, a Jewish researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study who sits on the union’s academic freedom committee, told JTA.
Scott added, “I’d say Roth’s reasons for his courageous stance have to do with his integrity and perhaps his knowledge of history. He doesn’t want to be among those who, like Heidegger, thought that appeasing the regime in power was a safe position to take.” (A spokesperson for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus free-speech advocacy group that supports institutional neutrality, declined to comment on Roth.)
Roth’s profile has caught the attention of some Jewish families, including that of Mason Weisz of White Plains, New York, who said Roth was one reason that his son is a first-year at Wesleyan now. Weisz recalled hearing an NPR interview with Roth in April, after admissions decisions were out but before seniors had to pick their schools, as particularly pivotal.
The interview “in which he argues that Trump’s use of antisemitism to justify his strong-arming of universities actually is bad for the Jews, encapsulates everything I appreciated about Roth.” Weisz told JTA. “Here is a university president who is willing to risk going on record against the administration, again and again, to fight for academic integrity. He has a nuanced view of world events, an appreciation for true debate, and a fearlessness that I hope are an inspiration for Wesleyan’s faculty and students.”
Roth also earns good marks from some Jewish students on campus.
“He does care about Jewish students. He’s someone who does take their concerns seriously. And compared to other university presidents, he’s been better,” said Blake Fox, a Jewish senior at Wesleyan who identifies as pro-Israel and serves on the campus Chabad board. “He wants to be the ‘cool’ president.”
Fox says he had a good experience as a Jew at Wesleyan, in part because the encampments there never felt threatening (he noted the protest movement was much smaller at Wesleyan than it was at other schools). That was due, at least in part, to Roth’s efforts to peacefully negotiate an end to the encampments.
Yet, Fox said, the president — whom he’s met several times — was also deeply concerned for the well-being of Jewish students. In meetings with Fox and other Jews on campus, Roth vowed to take action if any protesters ever threatened a Jewish student by name.
He also appreciated Roth standing up to Trump, particularly on issues of campus speech. “I’m pro-Israel, but I also support the First Amendment,” Fox said. “Even if there are individuals whose speech is bad, targeting them for deportation is a dangerous precedent, I think.”
Though a historically Methodist school, Wesleyan today has no religious affiliation and enrolls around 600 Jewish students — nearly 20% of the student body. There’s no Hillel, but the school’s Jewish community includes a full-time rabbi, student leadership, dedicated Jewish residential housing, and a unique, modern sukkah that has won architecture awards. The Wesleyan Jewish Community rabbi declined to comment for this story.
There’s also a Chabad outpost, which opened in 2011. Its director, Rabbi Levi Schectman, told JTA he was “grateful for the open door to the President’s office and for the strides that have been made so far,” adding, “There is still more work to be done so that all students feel heard and safe.”
Schectman also said the Wesleyan Jewish community he interacts with is “living and thriving”: A recent “Mega Shabbat” gathering drew what he said was a center record attendance of 175 students.
And then, of course, there’s Roth, the school’s first Jewish president, who has held the post since 2007. A free-speech scholar, he’s published books about the campus environment, including one called “Safe Enough Spaces.” He grew up in a Reform household on Long Island and has written essays on Jewish identity, but considered himself “only modestly observant” until his father died 25 years ago. After that point, he said, he “began saying Kaddish and subsequently attending Torah study.”
Nowadays Roth makes a point of involving himself in Jewish campus life — all forms of it. He spent Rosh Hashanah with the affiliated Jewish community, and, last year, caught a Shabbat service held at the pro-Palestinian student encampments.
The latter group wasn’t too thrilled to see him there, he recalled; they’d been targeting him by name, often in insulting language. But he wanted to learn more about the Jews who were participating in the protests right outside his office. When one of them, an Israeli, personally apologized to Roth for the aggressive behavior of other encampment participants, he invited the student to his office and they had a long chat. “There were so many interesting conversations,” he said.
Of course, many Jews in academia know that merely being Jewish cannot protect oneself from charges of enabling antisemitism. It didn’t save Northwestern University president Michael Schill, who — like Roth — is a free-speech scholar who tried to deal with his school’s encampments through negotiation instead of by force.
In so doing, Schill was hauled before Congress and lost the confidence of many of his Jewish faculty, staff and alums. The heads of the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America, both Northwestern alums, publicly aligned against him. Last month, Schill announced he was stepping down.
Roth doesn’t know Schill personally, but said he thought it was “just terrible” he had resigned. “I found it very sad that the board didn’t come to his defense in a way that allowed him to continue,” Roth said.
He acknowledges he’s in a better position to speak out than the heads of other universities, where hospitals and major research centers are more reliant on federal funding, and where instances of antisemitism had been more prevalent pre-Trump.
Schools like Columbia have made significant concessions to Trump, including on antisemitism issues, in exchange for having their funding restored. Harvard, after initially putting up resistance to Trump’s demands, has now reportedly entered a negotiation phase; the University of California system has also been targeted for a $1 billion payout to the government. Last week, the Trump administration unveiled what it said was a new “compact” that schools would be required to sign to secure their federal funding; the demands include one to protect conservative viewpoints on campus.
Is Roth worried that Trump could turn on Wesleyan next?
“Didn’t I say I was Jewish?” he responded, laughing. “Am I worried? Of course I’m worried. I’m a worrier… I would hate to put Wesleyan at risk.” But, he said, that wouldn’t stop him. “I have three grandchildren. I want them to grow up in a country where they don’t have to be brave to speak up.”
As Jews marked the recent two-year anniversary of Oct. 7, Roth’s name was also on some things other Jewish leaders wouldn’t touch.
He spoke to JTA while on the road to a literary festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, co-sponsored by the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents, which has emerged as one of the loudest voices in Judaism to oppose both Israel and communal American Jewish support for it. He would be appearing onstage with the journalist M. Gessen, who has compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to Nazi Germany.
Roth told JTA he hadn’t known that Jewish Currents was a co-sponsor when he agreed to take part in the festival. But, he added, it wouldn’t have changed anything about his appearance. He’ll talk to anybody Jewish. He’s appeared on their editor Peter Beinart’s podcast, and a while back he submitted a piece to the magazine that was rejected (“I guess it was insufficiently anti-Israel,” he mused) and wound up running in the Forward instead.
He sees his own views on Israel as moderate. While he called for a ceasefire in March 2024, far earlier than many others in the Jewish world, he still refuses to call the Gaza war a genocide and remains adamant he supports “Israel’s right to exist.” He only blames Israel for what he said were the security failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack, which he had condemned immediately as “sickening.”
He takes Israel’s wartime behavior to task for “paving a path for egregious war crimes and a level of brutality and inhumanity that I never would have associated with the country.” Yet he remains “stunned,” even today, by what he called “the lack of basic sympathy, empathy, for the victims of those horrific murders” of Oct. 7.
“I pride myself on being realistic about the persistence of antisemitism,” he said. “Still, the callousness with which some people greeted those horrors was very disturbing.”
Yet when the encampments came for Wesleyan last spring, and some of their participants accused him directly of being complicit in genocide, Roth — unlike nearly every other university president — opted to negotiate with them. He wrote a piece in the New Republic declaring that he would not call the police, even though he knew the protesters to be in violation of some campus policies.
Even in that piece, he offered an ominous prediction: “My fear is that such protests (especially when they turn violent) in the end will help the reactionary forces of populist authoritarianism.”
Roth didn’t like many of the phrases his own campus protesters used, including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Yet he forcefully defended their right to say it, angering some Jews on campus as a result.
“I try to have it both ways,” he said — weighing his principled views on both Israel and protest. This can sometimes lead to very intricate needle-threading. He recalled how, when an address he gave to prospective students was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters unfolding a banner, he let them continue and even acknowledged the banner before pressing ahead.
Fox does take issue with some of Roth’s stances, including his opposition to institutional neutrality.
“I think he fundamentally misunderstands what institutional neutrality is,” Fox said. “We don’t need to hear your views on Ukraine. We don’t need to hear your views on Israel.” Having the school president call for a ceasefire, he thought, is “alienating both sides of campus.”
More significantly for his job, Roth has long opposed the movement to boycott and divest from Israel. This has angered activists at Wesleyan, who, like those at other schools, have made divestment a central demand.
Last spring, in order to peacefully break up his school’s encampment movement, Roth had promised protest leaders they could make a case to the board for divestment that fall. When the board opted not to divest, a small number of protesters became angry and attempted to take over a university building.
“They were not very civil to my staff members,” Roth recalled, describing the protesters as basically daring him to take action.
That time, he did call the cops.
The post Fearless or foolish? Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s Jewish president, stands apart in opposing Trump’s campus policies appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump’s messy new deal with Saudi Arabia shows how far Israel has fallen
The American decision to sign a deal granting Saudi Arabia a pathway toward a civilian nuclear program is a terrible development for Israel — not just because Riyadh could one day turn nuclear infrastructure developed with the United States into a weapons capability.
The agreement reflects the collapse of Israeli strategy under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023; the erosion of Israel’s influence in the U.S.; and Israel’s descent toward the status of a pariah state.
A day after the deal was announced, Trump — seemingly rattled by the flood of criticism that ensued — said it was dependent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. But he did not clarify what aspect of the Accords he meant; there’s no indication that such a requirement is included in the already-signed deal; and Riyadh has made clear that it will do no such thing until there is concrete progress toward a Palestinian state, which is a fantastical notion under the current Israeli government.
For years, nuclear cooperation represented one of Washington’s greatest sources of leverage over Saudi Arabia. It was long believed that prospect would be used to anchor some kind of pact involving normalization with Israel, binding nuclear safeguards, a regional defense architecture and a united front against Iran. Under such an arrangement, Israel would have established formal relations with the Arab world’s most influential power, and gained both a central role in a new regional security system and enforceable Saudi commitments against pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Washington has now at least begun giving Riyadh the prize — no matter what Trump says, amending the deal post-facto will be at best extraordinarily difficult — without Israel receiving any of the benefits.
That dire truth is the outcome of nearly three years in which Israel has confused military brilliance with strategy, and abandoned almost all public diplomacy as its status in the world plummeted.
No one can deny the extraordinary capabilities displayed by Israel’s armed forces and intelligence services since the Oct. 7 massacre. Hezbollah absorbed devastating blows. Iranian military assets suffered setbacks. Hamas lost thousands of fighters and much of its military infrastructure.
But a sense of true strategy is needed to convert military achievement to political outcomes. Strategy can strengthen alliances, expand legitimacy and leave a country in a stronger geopolitical position than the one in which it entered a conflict.
That seems to be completely beyond Netanyahu’s ability.
In the months immediately following Oct. 7, Israel possessed something extraordinarily rare: overwhelming international legitimacy. Hamas had committed an atrocity that horrified much of the democratic world. Moderate Arab governments viewed Hamas as a dangerous extension of the same Islamist forces that threatened their own stability. Former President Joe Biden’s administration recognized that extraordinary alignment, and sought to build upon it, working toward an ambitious regional framework.
In the early months of war, Hamas faced near-unanimous global pressure to hand over Gaza to a reformed Palestinian Authority, backed by moderate Arab governments. Arab states appeared ready to help marginalize Hamas politically and financially, and make life uncomfortable for its leaders.
For a moment, it was easy to see a path forward in which Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel, with other countries following. A U.S.-led regional alliance facing Iran might integrate Israel into the Middle East more deeply than was ever previously imaginable.
That framework offered Israel the chance to translate the trauma of Oct. 7 into a strategic transformation of the region. Instead, Netanyahu chose an open-ended war whose nebulously defined goals were not achievable by military means alone, amid a reasonable and growing suspicion in the public and around the world that he was doing so to preserve his hold on power.
Every few weeks Israelis heard that Hamas stood on the verge of collapse. Each extension of the war was presented as the last before “complete victory” — which Netanyahu kept claiming was “a step” away. Victory remained perpetually on the horizon as Israel’s international standing collapsed.
Now, Netanyahu is wanted at the Hague. Diplomatic isolation has deepened and economic pressure mounted as boycott movements — including many informal ones — expanded.
And critically, American public opinion has shifted sharply, particularly among younger Americans, threatening the bipartisan foundation upon which Israel’s relationship with Washington has rested for generations.
Recent credible polls show that more Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis.
Israelis think this happened because of a propaganda campaign against them on social media, because of antisemitism in Europe, or because of hostile journalists. That is partly true but mostly wrong. These shifts are mostly a result of the posture of the Israeli government.
The reality is that Israel killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, accepted that toll with remarkably little public reflection or regret, and relied on the trauma of Oct. 7 to justify it. Around the world, that proved politically devastating. It is especially absurd considering that Israel paid this extraordinary price without achieving its central objective of removing Hamas from Gaza — which was foreseeable and infuriating.
Things might change if the opposition comes to power in October. The idiotic demonization of the Palestinian Authority might end. Jewish terrorism in the West Bank might be stamped out. Settlement construction beyond the fence line, and certainly illegal outposts, might stop.
Israel might again at least be trying to find a solution to the festering Palestinian issue — or at least prefer to lower the flames. That might, in the long term, bring Saudi Arabia back to the table.
But the U.S, has stopped waiting. That the Saudi deal was signed at all, no matter what Trump says now, suggests that Washington is now basically indifferent to the loss of leverage for a deal favoring Israel.
How to resolve the muddle Trump has made? The key: the agreement appears to not include the possibility of enrichment on Saudi soil, but just general assistance to create a program for nuclear energy. So Trump will be able to say that enrichment must await Saudi normalization with Israel. But Saudi Arabia will still be able to claim the symbolic victory of entering into nuclear collaboration with the U.S.
And so, the regional architecture envisioned in the first months after Oct. 7 has vanished because of the forever-wars Netanyahu has pursued — which also resulted in the deaths of dozens of hostages and more than 1,000 soldiers, badly damaged Israel’s economy, and left the country’s international standing in shambles.
And the strategic alliance between Israel and the U.S. — without which Israel’s very existence will be in danger — is falling apart in front of our eyes, not because of Trump but because we are losing the American people.
This is what you get when you are all brawn and no brain, and all tactics and no strategy.
That realization should define Israel’s coming election far more even than arguments over judicial reform or the Haredi draft. Those who have led Israel into this disaster deserve to be punished. Not just removed from power, but decisively repudiated. They have become a danger to the Zionist project itself.
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Harvard students have questions after Hillel withdraws its brief against Trump
Jewish Harvard students are still trying to make sense of a baffling turn of events, after Hillel International weighed in on the university’s lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking restoration of federal funding withheld over alleged campus antisemitism — and then just as suddenly withdrew its brief from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Hillel International had filed an amicus brief Wednesday supporting Harvard’s suit against the federal government, which seeks to restore roughly $2.7 billion in federal research funding. In its brief, Hillel International acknowledged that antisemitism is an issue at Harvard and other universities, but that “campus life for Jewish students has meaningfully improved” following actions taken by the school.
Less than 24 hours later, Hillel International confirmed that it was withdrawing the brief, citing an error in its internal review process, according to the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.
What’s more, Hillel International filed the brief without the knowledge of Harvard Hillel, a campus organization that operates independently, the paper reported.
Hillel’s reversal followed sharp criticism of the brief on social media from some Jewish public figures. Among them was Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard Divinity School graduate who filed a Title VI lawsuit against the university for ignoring antisemitism. He wrote on X that he was “shocked” by the decision.
“Rather than take responsibility for their failure to respond to the explosion of antisemitism on American campuses post October 7th, Hillel has instead decided to support the perpetrators,” Kestenbaum wrote. He encouraged donors to stop giving to Hillel and choose organizations like Chabad or Jewish day schools instead.
Kestenbaum told the Harvard Crimson that Hillel International President Adam Lehman had not seen the brief before the organization filed it. Hillel International did not respond to an inquiry from the Forward to confirm this.
Hillel’s withdrawal of the brief disappointed Tova Kaplan, a recent graduate who testified at a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearing on campus antisemitism. The brief cited her testimony.
“While I’m not sure what factors led to this decision, it feels like a prioritization of politics over Jewish students,” Kaplan wrote in a statement to the Forward.
“The Trump administration’s attacks aren’t even designed to help Jewish students — instead, they’re designed to instrumentalize our voices and pain to achieve their own political goals,” she wrote.
Siding with Harvard along with numerous other groups, including civil liberties organizations across the ideological spectrum and 18 other American universities, the withdrawn brief argued that cutting research funding is not a productive way to halt university antisemitism. Harvard’s improvement measures, following recommendations from its own Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias, have been more effective than what the brief called the “draconian one-size-fits-all approaches of the sort the government here pursues.”
These measures, the withdrawn brief said, “do not help Jewish students or improve the campus climate” but instead, “they disproportionately impact the very Jewish students and Jewish researchers the government purportedly seeks to help.”
But another recent graduate who said he did not want to be identified, sees Hillel’s opposition to the Trump administration’s actions as taking the wrong side of the fight. He believes the federal defunding of Harvard pushes the university to protect Jewish students.
“I think a major reason Harvard’s been making changes is because they’re under threat,” he said.
He also contends Hillel International’s evidence to back its claim that Harvard’s efforts have improved antisemitism are weak — lacking measurable results.
Dani Kobrick, a rising senior, said she is perplexed by Hillel International’s actions.
“I don’t think Hillel needed to submit anything to begin with,” she said. “But I do think that withdrawing it makes a very big statement.”
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A Jerusalem cafe became a symbol of secular defiance — until Israelis learned it was run by Jews for Jesus
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Jerusalem’s premier soccer team made an unusual announcement last week: It would give a new cafe free advertising on players’ uniforms for the coming season.
Cafe Basimta was facing harassment from haredi Orthodox protesters who wanted it to close on Shabbat, and Hapoel Jerusalem said it wanted to send the message that Jerusalem is “an open and diverse city, where there is room for everyone.”
But on Tuesday, Hapoel Jerusalem reversed course and retracted the offer, after learning via an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Cafe Basimta is an official project of Jews for Jesus.
“Our original intention was simply to support a small business that was being denied its freedom of operation, and we still believe in that principle,” club spokesperson Matan Avrina told JTA. “However, we also realized that this specific story is more complex than we initially knew.”
For the secular Israelis who have flocked to Cafe Basimta in response to the protests, too, the revelation of the cafe’s ties to a Christian missionary organization is complicating what had seemed like a simple skirmish in the city’s culture war over businesses open on the Jewish day of rest.
“I don’t know if it changes my desire to drink their coffee, but it definitely complicates things,” Gabriel, an American studying in Jerusalem for the year, told JTA on Saturday from the cafe’s long line after learning about the Jews for Jesus connection, as protesters yelled. “It’s one layer deeper than I thought.”
Others say the cafe’s Christian character is irrelevant to their defense of Cafe Basimta.
“I understand they hate Jews for Jesus, and I understand what they hate them for,” said Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Adir Schwartz, who is a prominent defender of the city’s secular sector, in an interview. “My father was a rabbi abroad, and I get that they feel they are protecting Jewish continuity.But this is about belonging in our shared city.”
Yoel Ben David, the cafe’s operator as well as Jews for Jesus’ top official in Jerusalem, says the twin culture wars have been good for business.
“Even though financially, it’s great, me and the staff, we don’t love it,” he told JTA from his cafe on Saturday. “We’d all love it to just chill out.”
At first, the tensions over Cafe Basimta seemed straightforward: In a city where 46% of Jews are haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, and only 13% identify as secular, the inverse of Israel as a whole, here was a rare cafe willing to flout religious authorities and open on Shabbat. A handful of such cafes dot the city, but others have given up on Shabbat hours in the past over pressure from religious authorities.
Cafe Basimta, which means “cafe in the alley,” opened at the end of May in the Nahlaot neighborhood of central Jerusalem. The name refers to the neighborhood’s 19th century stone dwellings toppling into one another along tiny streets. Decades ago a center of the city’s bohemian culture, Nahlaot is now increasingly haredi and there are few if any establishments open on Shabbat.
On July 4, the first Saturday it drew protesters, dozens of haredi demonstrators, many of them reportedly minors, descended on the cafe in four separate waves, surrounding it, banging on its windows and overturning tables, according to cafe staff and footage circulated online.
At the time, the cafe’s ties to Jews for Jesus were not public. That changed in early July, when Or LeAchim, a haredi anti-missionary organization that helps Jews leave missionary groups and cults, exposed the connections and began organizing protests against Cafe Basimta.
The group has placed pashkevils, or public billboards, denouncing the cafe in the neighborhood. “The missionary-messianic influence operates all the more forcefully by winning over hearts through food and drink,” the placards say in Hebrew. “And as if that were not enough, they added sin upon crime and began operating the place on the holy Sabbath, with disgraceful Sabbath desecration in the heart of the holy city.”
The revelations surprised and deterred some who had been inclined to support the cafe. But they did not change the tenor of the demonstrations, which remain focused on Basimta’s Shabbat operations.
“People went to demonstrate because it was open on Shabbos. They did not know that it was a missionary place. The demonstration was not useful for us,” said Binyamin Klugger, who works with Or LeAchim as well as other anti-missionary groups, and who was concerned the aggression of the Haredi protesters would undercut his message about the cafe’s evangelizing mission. “People that continue to demonstrate are really not knowing that it is a missionary place,” he said,
During Saturday’s demonstration, cries of “Shabbos!” echoed off the stone alleyways as the line of Israelis waiting for cold coffees stretched into the courtyard.
Israeli police stepped in to cordon off the protesters, preventing them from approaching the cafe. Some secular Israelis yelled back, with a handful at one point breaking into “Shalom Aleichem,” the hymn traditionally sung at the Shabbat table.
Residents stared down at the altercations from their balconies, the screams shattering an otherwise quiet Shabbat morning. Yael Levy, who moved to Israel from California and lives in the building directly beside Cafe Basimta, was handing out cookies to build goodwill.
“It’s very sad, especially during the Three Weeks,” she said, referring to the mourning period between the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha B’Av, when Jews commemorate the destruction of both Temples, a destruction rabbinic tradition attributes to baseless hatred among Jews. “This is just bad energy during a time that calls for positive energy.”
Outside, a long line of coffee fiends waited their turn to choose from an extensive drinks menu, as Ben David greeted customers and monitored the demonstration.
There were no visible signs of the cafe’s affiliation with Jews for Jesus. But Ben David confirmed that the organization owns the building and the cafe, which joins a growing network of similar outposts across the country. He said he is aiming to strike a balance between missionary work and just offering a pleasant place to work or meet.
“Everyone accuses us of that,” Ben David said about proselytizing. “The Jesus goal is not completely out, but it’s not front and center.”
Jews for Jesus is a flagship organization of the diffuse movement of Messianic Judaism, which believes in the divinity of Jesus while claiming to practice Judaism — an overlap that no denomination across the Jewish world accepts as compatible. While hard numbers about how many Israelis hold Messianic beliefs are scarce, both Messianic leaders and their critics believe the number is growing. Last year, one of the two Israeli embassy workers killed in an attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., came from an Israeli Messianic family.
In 2024, Jews for Jesus appointed a member with an Israeli background as its CEO for the first time, and the Israeli branch of the global organization took in roughly $6 million in revenue that year, supporting a local staff of 60. On its website, it solicits donations for its Israel work, including, in one December 2025 appeal, $225,000 to launch a coffee shop and ministry center in Haifa, which it called a “welcoming space where Israelis can encounter the hope of Yeshua,” the Hebrew name for Jesus.
Ben David has worked with Jews for Jesus for more than two decades. He was born in Israel and came to believe in the divinity of Jesus as a young adult, together with his wife, around the time of his stint in the army, where he served as an Orthodox rabbi. He has a master’s degree from a Messianic seminary and once helmed training for missionary staff in Israel, according to Jews for Jesus’ website, which says he “now leads our work in Jerusalem, bringing the gospel back to the city where he first believed.”
Missionary activity is not illegal in Israel, with the exception of proselytizing to minors without their parents’ consent and offering religious conversions in exchange for a material gift. But many Israelis believe that it is, in a reflection of the deep cultural norms in Jewish communities.
Or LeAchim says it is planning a future protest that will focus more squarely on Cafe Basimta’s missionary ambitions.
“We are planning to hold a massive protest there soon — involving thousands of people — on a weekday,” said Rabbi Binyamin Vulcan, the group’s head of counter-missionary activities. “In the meantime, we are trying to get the place shut down through the municipality.”
Ben David said Jews for Jesus, anticipating such a response, bought Basimta’s building instead of renting it from a landlord who could be susceptible to a pressure campaign. At the same time, he insisted he didn’t understand the uproar.
“If Jesus is the Jewish Messiah,” Ben David said, “what could be more Jewish than believing in Jesus?” As for the missionary label, he insists the cafe is about more than just theology: “We don’t put crosses in our espresso,” he said.
Klugger said he is mystified about why the same secular Jerusalemites who are uncomfortable with the growing haredi character of the city are willing to buy coffee from someone who wants them to stop being Jewish altogether.
“If you don’t want haredim influencing your children,” he said, “you also can’t want missionaries influencing your children.”
Some Shabbat customers, meanwhile, say they have heard the warnings and aren’t swayed — for them, who owns the cafe is beside the point.
“I’m not going to convert because of the coffee, unless it’s really good coffee, then maybe,” said Lior Stern, who drove from the Tel Aviv area to support the cafe after hearing about the protests. “It could be Buddhist, it could be Muslim, it could be Jewish, it could be Christian. That’s not the point. The point is freedom.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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