Uncategorized
From Alfred Dreyfus to Josh Shapiro: How the ‘dual loyalty’ charge shadows Jewish public life
(JTA) — When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro wrote in his new memoir that Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential vetting team asked whether he had ever been a “double agent” for Israel, many Jewish leaders heard something painfully familiar.
“These questions were classic antisemitism,” Deborah Lipstadt, the former U.S. special envoy on antisemitism, wrote on X, a view shared by, among others, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League; Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s former leader, and Josh Gottheimer, the Democratic congressman from New Jersey.
These critics agreed that the question put to Shapiro echoed the “dual loyalty” charge: that Jews — especially those with visible ties to Israel — have divided allegiances, loyal first to their people and only conditionally to the countries they serve.
Other Jewish commentators insisted that the questions put to Shapiro by the Harris team were routine, similar to those asked of anyone being vetted for top security clearance. “So please,” Shaul Magid, visiting professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, wrote on Facebook. “Can we just calm down and stop looking like hysterical conspiracy theorists.”
But as the reactions rolled in, so did a quieter, more complicated debate — one that goes to the heart of American Jewish identity. Does the normative American Jewish attachment to Israel — Israeli flags in synagogues, Zionist education in day and Hebrew schools, pride in the young American Jews who serve in the Israeli military — invite accusations of dual loyalty? And if so, should Jews do a better job of explaining how their often fierce attachment to Israel does not compromise their loyalty to America? Should they even have to?
Shapiro, 52, has been open about his connections to Israel, which represent a not unusual arc for a day-school-educated Jew of his generation: a high-school volunteer program affiliated with the IDF, a six-month stint working at the Israeli Embassy in Washington after college, and outspoken views during the Gaza war that combined criticism of Israeli government policy with condemnation of some pro-Palestinian protests.
Those ties, Jewish leaders argue, are well within the American Jewish mainstream — and far from evidence of disloyalty. “No one ever accused Irish Americans of dual loyalty for caring deeply about Ireland,” Foxman wrote. “This reflects something very troubling about our political culture.”
In his memoir, “Where We Keep the Light,” Shapiro wonders whether he was singled out as “the only Jewish guy in the running,” and says he told Harris’ team the questions were offensive. After the New York Times reported the exchange this week, Harris’ team sought to control the damage, telling CNN that every finalist was asked whether they had ever acted as an agent of a foreign government — a standard question on federal vetting forms. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was ultimately chosen, was pressed about his multiple trips to China, where he lived for a year after college, these sources told CNN.
“The crux of vetting is asking uncomfortable and even farfetched questions,” one person close to the process said. “The point isn’t that you believe it — it’s that it’s on the record.”
Jeffrey Salkin, a rabbi and columnist for Religion News Service, rejects that equivalence. Writing about the episode, he contrasted Walz’s questioning about China with Shapiro’s experience. Walz, Salkin argued, was asked about what he did, writes Salkin. Shapiro was asked about who he is.
“For Jews, dual loyalty is the oldest antisemitic charge in the book,” Salkin wrote. “The crime is all within the imagination of the accuser.”
The charge predates the creation of Israel, going as far back as Exodus when the pharaoh warns that the growing number of Israelites in Egypt “may join our enemies in fighting against us.”
The charge was revived in the modern era, when Jews were gradually granted full citizenship in exchange for renouncing their ties to a Jewish national identity. In 1789, speaking on behalf of Jewish emancipation in the French National Assembly, the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre proclaimed famously that “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals,” warning: “The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.”
The promises of emancipation were nearly revoked in 19th-century France, when Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason amid mass cries of “Death to the Jews.” Later, Hitler rose to power behind the myth that Germany could have won the First World War if it had not been “stabbed in the back” by disloyal Jews and communists.
“You don’t need Israel to have the dual loyalty charge,” Pamela Nadell, the American University historian and author of “Antisemitism, an American Tradition,” said in an interview. “Think about the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and the idea that Jews are more loyal to their people than to any state, that they are a kind of fifth column.”
In that light, Nadell said, asking a Jewish governor who has sworn an oath to the U.S. Constitution and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania whether he had ever been an Israeli “double agent” suggested the vetter is either “utterly clueless” or something worse.
“It suggests the interviewer either didn’t understand the weight of what she was saying — or actually believes the dual loyalty charge,” said Nadell.
And yet despite the deep roots of the charge, Zionism and Israel have added new fuel to an old accusation. In the years before Israel’s founding, American Jewish leaders fiercely debated Zionism and whether a Jewish state in Palestine “would imperil our position here,” as the Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform put it in 1885.
Thirty years later, Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice and Zionist leader, sought to quash such doubts by asserting, “Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent.… Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.”
That proposition was deeply tested in the 1980s, when Jonathan Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, received a life sentence for passing classified information to Israel. Richard Cohen, then a columnist for the Washington Post, called the Pollard case a “nightmare-come-true for American Jews. In Pollard, the Israelis created an anti-Semitic stereotype — an American Jew of confused loyalties who sold out his country.”
In his 1996 book “Jewish Power,” J.J. Goldberg cites sources saying that the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged a life sentence for Pollard — the first for an American convicted of espionage — as a warning to the thousands of American Jews working in the federal government.
But despite a vocal “Free Pollard” movement that preceded his release in 2015, most Jews see Pollard as an outlier, and recoil at the idea that ordinary expressions of Jewish peoplehood invite suspicion.
That idea has gained renewed urgency in the post-Oct. 7 climate. A June 2024 ADL study found that 51% of Americans agree with the statement that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their home countries. College students report being accused of caring more about Israel than the United States simply for identifying as Zionists.
In a fact sheet on the dual loyalty charge, the ADL acknowledges that many Jews have an emotional attachment to Israel, citing a 2013 Pew study showing that 87% of American Jews said that caring about Israel is either “essential” or “important” to “what being Jewish means to them.”
“But the observation that Israel is important to many American Jews becomes anti-Semitic when it is used to impugn Jewish loyalty or trustworthiness,” according to the ADL.
Magid has written how Jews sometimes leave themselves vulnerable to the dual loyalty charge, either by claiming that Israel is their true “home” — perhaps a religious assertion that can be heard as a statement of allegiances — or when American Jewish families signal that they’d rather their children serve in the IDF than the U.S. military. “If Jews reflexively claim that the accusation of ‘dual loyalty’ is anti-Semitic, we too easily ignore that it was, and remains, one of the great challenges of Jews in modernity,” writes Magid.
For Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz, the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, the answer is not to deny dual loyalty — but to redefine it. In his recent book, “The Case for Dual Loyalty: Healing the Divided Soul of American Jews,” Lebowitz argues for embracing Jewish peoplehood alongside American patriotism, calling it a “double helix” binding Jews in Israel and the diaspora. Once Jews accept the notion that they are part of a global people, he writes, there is no contradiction in being loyal to what both America and Israel represent.
“The State of Israel stands as the strongest symbol of Jewish Peoplehood,” Lebowitz wrote in an email exchange. “While the presence of the flag of Israel in our congregation and schools represents the ideal that we are connected to our Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel, the flag also represents the bond that we share with our brothers and sisters in places such as Australia’s Bondi Beach. All American Jews should maintain a loyalty to our country, the United States, and loyalty to our people across the world.”
The historian Gil Troy, who was raised in Queens and now lives in Israel, also insists that loyalty to America and the Jewish people is not contradictory — and that Jews face suspicions not placed on other groups.
“The accusation says much more about the accuser than the accused,” Troy said in an interview. “Which is the oldest story in the book with antisemitism.”
Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, recalls growing up with the hypothetical question, “If the U.S. and Israel were to go to war, which side would you be on?” His answer, then and now, is “it’s inconceivable.”
“Again and again, although I had to ultimately choose an address, my liberalism, my Americanism, my Zionism, have converged much more than they’ve clashed, and if anything, one has reinforced the other,” said Troy, who moved to Israel in 2010.
Troy’s assertion is similar to that of Ruth Wisse, the Yiddishist and conservative thinker, who in a video last year for the Tikvah think tank said she “never could understand this concept of dual loyalty.”
“It becomes a conflict when the two countries … that you stand for are in conflict,” she said. “But in the case of Israel and America, which share the same basic values, and in fact, stem from very much the same traditions, it’s really a doubled loyalty. The people who feel most loyal to America should be those who feel most protective of Israel, which is the greatest ally that America has, certainly in the Middle East, and possibly … the entire world.”
For now, anyway. For many Jews, cracks are showing in that vaunted relationship, whether it is liberal Jews who warn that Israel is drifting toward the illiberal, undemocratic right, or conservative Jews warning that the Democratic party is being coopted by an increasingly anti-Israel left. (Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of the conservative Jewish News Syndicate, suggested that Shapiro may have told the vetting story in order to distance himself from Israel’s critics and “to save the soul of a party that has been badly compromised by Jew-hatred since Oct. 7.”)
Both sides have looked on anxiously as President Donald Trump has threatened or shredded alliances with other allies around the world.
Whether the questions put to Shapiro were normal vetting, clumsy phrasing or something darker, the reaction to them reveals how fragile the boundary remains between Jewish peoplehood and American belonging. More than 200 years after emancipation promised Jews full acceptance as individuals, the old suspicion still flickers — ready to be rekindled whenever Jewish identity and power become visible at the same time.
The post From Alfred Dreyfus to Josh Shapiro: How the ‘dual loyalty’ charge shadows Jewish public life appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran Urges Citizens to Spy on One Another as US-Israeli Strikes Cripple Regime
Smoke rises following an explosion, after Israel and the US launched strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Amid relentless US and Israeli airstrikes that have decimated Iran’s military capabilities and key energy facilities, Iran has called on citizens to report on each other in a new push to crush domestic dissent, as talks of a possible ceasefire remain uncertain.
On Thursday, the semi-official Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), called on all Iranian citizens to help “identify those who have turned their backs on the homeland and threaten national security,” warning that “the country is facing external threats and internal betrayals.”
“Iranians will not allow this betrayal to be forgotten,” Fars wrote in a post on X, linking to a website called “Our Memory” to offer a platform for citizens to snoop and inform on each other.
“The efforts of ‘Our Memory’ also carry a clear message to those who might be contemplating betrayal or collaboration with the country’s enemies: The society is vigilant and awake, and actions that pose a threat to national security will be identified and exposed,” Fars posted.
The regime’s latest propaganda campaign of intimidation comes as Israel’s offensive increasingly focuses on dismantling Iran’s internal repression systems, aiming to create a leadership vacuum and logistical breakdown that could hinder Tehran’s ability to respond if mass protests erupt again.
Even amid Israel’s major battlefield advances, however, a senior Israeli security official said Wednesday that Iran still retains the ability to launch missiles at its current rate for the next several weeks, according to Israel’s N12 media outlet.
“Iran can maintain its current rate of missile fire for weeks,” the Israeli official reportedly said in a closed-door briefing. “It has sufficient launchers and reinforced squads to sustain and stagger the attacks over time.”
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced he was extending, “at the request of the Iranian government,” the deadline to strike the country’s energy grid by 10 days, as Washington works to bring a possible ceasefire deal to the table.
Should diplomatic efforts falter, the Pentagon and US Central Command are reportedly preparing military plans for a “finishing blow” on Iran, potentially involving some level of ground forces and massive airstrikes.
According to multiple media reports, Washington is considering several options against Iran, including invading or blockading Kharg Island, the country’s main oil export hub, or even seizing Arak Island to secure control over the Strait of Hormuz, a critical passage through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.
Other potential measures include taking Abu Musa and two close islands near the western entrance of the strait or blockading or seizing ships exporting Iranian oil on the eastern side, threatening a vital route for global energy shipments.
Since the start of the war last month, combined US and Israeli strikes have dropped more than 25,000 munitions on targets in Iran, with nearly 15,000 of those carried out by the Israeli Air Force alone, according to updated Israeli intelligence data.
“These numbers are large and significant by any measure,” a senior Israeli military officer told the Hebrew-language news site Walla.
“We are concentrating strikes on the regime’s centers of gravity in Tehran, Isfahan, and other key sites. Iran may be a large country, but hitting the very heart of its infrastructure has a profound strategic impact,” he continued.
He also said the operation, which began with “leadership decapitation” and quickly shifted to paralyzing surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missile arrays, has effectively reduced Iran’s missile firing to low single- or double-digit daily levels, far below its plan of over 100 launches per day.
So far, Israel has destroyed more than 200 launchers, even as mobile units hidden in deep tunnels continue to pose serious obstacles, which are being bombed and blocked since missiles cannot always reach their depths.
Israeli forces have also systematically targeted Iran’s weapons manufacturing, attacking over 1,000 sites to degrade production, development, and research capabilities.
According to a Reuters report, US intelligence can only confirm the destruction of about a third of Iran’s missile arsenal, while another third has likely been damaged, destroyed, or buried in underground bunkers, with a similar situation affecting the regime’s drone capabilities.
While most of Iran’s missiles have been destroyed or rendered inaccessible, Tehran still may retain a significant stockpile and, as of now, could potentially recover some buried or damaged missiles after the current fighting ends.
As the war continues to escalate, Israel has shifted its strategy, with its Air Force last week striking a major natural gas processing facility in southwestern Iran — a move that damaged roughly 40 percent of the country’s gas production capacity.
Facing a gas shortage, the Iranian government was reportedly forced to prioritize fuel for electricity production, sharply cutting civilian fuel allocations and causing major disruptions to transportation and deliveries to Turkey.
“This is just a sample of our ability to crush Iran’s energy backbone,” an Israeli security official told N12.
With the US also threatening strikes on key Iranian energy infrastructure, the Islamist regime is now facing pressure to consider a ceasefire agreement to bring the war to a close.
“The Iranians are in panic,” the Israeli official said. “They understand that further damage [to its energy facilities] will make governing the country impossible.”
In one of the latest blows to the regime, the Israeli Air Force on Friday attacked the heavy water reactor in Arak, central Iran, after Israeli intelligence detected repeated attempts to restore the site — a facility considered key for producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Israeli officials also confirmed an attack on Iran’s only facility in Yazd that processes raw materials into starting components for uranium enrichment, as well as multiple steel plants in a major blow to an already devastated Iranain economy.
After these attacks, the IRGC threatened to target six steel plants in retaliation, including sites in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.
Uncategorized
Man arrested over alleged firebomb plot targeting pro-Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani
(JTA) — A New Jersey man was arrested on Thursday for allegedly plotting to firebomb the home of the prominent pro-Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani.
Alexander Heifler, 26, was arrested by authorities in Hoboken after a weeks-long undercover operation led by the New York City Police Department revealed that he allegedly planned to throw a dozen Molotov cocktails at Kiswani’s residence.
The investigation into Heifler began in early February when Heifler discussed using Molotov cocktails on a group video call that included an undercover law enforcement officer, according to a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey.
He later told the undercover officer that he had planned to flee the country following the attack. (The criminal complaint did not specify the name of the group or the country he planned to flee to.)
During a search of Heifler’s home Thursday night, detectives and FBI agents uncovered eight Molotov cocktails. He has been charged with unlawful possession of firearms and making of destructive devices.
In a statement Friday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that Heifler was an alleged member of the Jewish Defense League, a far-right pro-Israel group that the has FBI labeled as a terrorist organization since 2001, and that the country he had planned to flee to was Israel.
“Last night, an alleged member of the Jewish Defense League — designated by the FBI as a ‘known violent extremist organization’ — attempted to blow up the home of Nerdeen Kiswani in a chilling act of political violence and an apparent assassination plot,” the statement read. “The defendant allegedly planned to flee to Israel following the attack. This comes amidst an alarming rise in threats and violence across the country targeting Palestinian human rights advocates.”
“Let me be clear: We will not tolerate violent extremism in our city. No one should face violence for their political beliefs or their advocacy. I am relieved that Nerdeen is safe,” the statement continued.
A police official confirmed that Heifler was a member of a branch of the Jewish Defense League on Friday, according to The New York Times.
Last month, Kiswani, who has long drawn accusations of antisemitism for her rhetoric on Zionists, sued Betar USA, a far-right militant pro-Israel group, accusing the group of violating her civil rights by putting out social media “bounties” on her and repeatedly harassing her. (In January, Betar USA agreed to dissolve its New York operations following a settlement with the state attorney general.)
The activist has also been singled out by far-right Florida Jewish Rep. Randy Fine, who reposted a tweet of Kiswani’s last month to make disparaging remarks about Muslims which sparked calls for his censure.
In a post on X, Kiswani, a Palestinian-American who co-founded the hardline pro-Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime, wrote that she had been informed by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force on Thursday night that “a plot against my life that was ‘about to’ take place.”
“For months, Zionist organizations like Betar and politicians like Randy Fine have encouraged violence against my family and me,” Kiswani continued. “I will have more to say as additional details come to light. I will not stop speaking up for the people of Palestine. Thank you for your support.”
In response to The New York Times’ post about the arrest, Betar USA wrote that it was “not surprising if other terrorists targeted her.”
“Violent terrorist Nerdeen Kiswani wants to globalize the intifada not surprising if other terrorists targeted her. Palestinians have always targeted one another,” the group posted on X alongside a video of Kiswani’s rhetoric. “Not surprising given the violent nature of these people who have globalized the intifada.”
The announcement of the arrest drew praise from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which wrote in a post on X that there is “absolutely no place in our city for violence, threats, or attempts to take someone’s life—ever.”
“While we adamantly disagree with Nerdeen Kiswani’s inflammatory rhetoric and her organization’s tactics, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the reported plot against her,” the group said.
Brad Hoylman Sigal, the Jewish Manhattan borough president, also praised the NYPD for the arrest in a post on X.
“Grateful to @NYPDnews for their swift work in preventing this horrific plot against Nerdeen Kiswani,” Sigal wrote. “Political violence, against anyone, for any reason, has no place in our city.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Man arrested over alleged firebomb plot targeting pro-Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The moral degradation of Israel’s far-right is even worse than you think
This week, an Israeli Knesset member said something that should have been shocking, horrifying and unanimously condemned.
“I stand behind IDF soldiers in every situation,” said Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of the ultranationalist Otzmah Yehudit Party. Even if the “collateral damage is children or women — it does not matter to me.”
“In Jenin, there are no innocent civilians,” he added. “In Jenin, there are no innocent children.”
Kroizer was referring to a genuine tragedy: The killing of almost an entire Palestinian family by Israel undercover forces on March 15, near the village of Tammun. The forces opened fire on the family’s car as they returned from a shopping trip. Waed Bani Ohde, her husband Ali, and two of their young children Othman, 7, and Mohammed, 5, were killed. Two sons survived. The army says the car accelerated toward the forces; Palestinian witnesses say the IDF gave no warning before attacking.
It is tempting to dismiss statements like Kroizer’s as the rhetoric of the extreme. Indeed, I often find myself making that point when talking to people inclined to think the worst of Israel: They do not represent the majority, and not even the immoral government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But that, while true, is becoming a little too pat.
For it is also true that as time goes, as the wars continue and hearts harden, what Kroizer articulated is a moral framework that is steadily taking hold in the Israeli right.
That’s why the statements were not condemned by anyone associated with the government. And, indeed, Israeli far-right activists responded to the deaths with social media posts rejoicing in the death of the unarmed “terrorists.”
No senior Israeli official apologized for the shooting. No one said publicly that even if the soldiers believed they were acting under threat, the killing of two children demands something more than a routine internal review.
No official has even conceded that this type of event might contribute to agitation and instability in the West Bank, and perhaps spark another uprising. Set empathy aside; even enlightened self-interest is beyond the current Israeli government.
Yes, an investigation has been opened. But military investigations almost never lead to concrete action against the troops. A Guardian report this week revealed that no Israeli citizen has been prosecuted for a killing in the West Bank since 2020, despite a radical uptick in violence; settlers and police have already killed 10 Palestinian civilians this month alone.
The undercover soldiers, especially, are something like the real life version of the international hit Fauda, widely admired for their counter-terrorism activity. There is little appetite for throwing the book at them.
So while it’s tempting to chalk this up as just another tragedy in a long list of tragedies on both sides, it is actually much more: a devastating manifestation of something fundamental — not just a personal tragedy but a national one.
That’s a tragedy I’ve seen unfolding slowly, since even before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
I’ve seen it in the rhetoric of far-right leaders like cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. But I’ve also seen it firsthand, as when I found myself on wartime television panels where I was besieged by right-wingers enraged at my assertion that innocents have been killed during the war in Gaza. I challenged one of them about whether this idea would include a two-week old baby.
“OK, maybe not the baby!” he conceded, unhappily.
The descent of part of Israeli society into this unforgivable lack of compassion is, some have argued, an inevitable outcome of indefinite control over the Palestinian territories. For years, warnings that rule over millions of disenfranchised Arabs would mutate Israel’s character were treated as excessive, even hysterical.
Israel was not a colonial power in the classic sense, its defenders argued; it was a democracy under siege, navigating impossible dilemmas. The West Bank may be “occupied” but that was justifiable because of the threat its near proximity posed. Israel’s actions might be harsh, but they were necessary, the argument went. It was said that the country’s moral core, despite pressures, would remain intact.
The initial signs after this latest tragedy are not exactly reassuring. Far from condemning Kroizer, as they rightly should have, the cabinet convened this week to offer his party a great gift: the legalization of 30 illegal settlement outposts, including some in “Area A,” which is supposed to be under full Palestinian control.
Israel did not begin this way. Its founding story was deeply bound up with an acute awareness of the need to maintain morality. The early Zionists envisioned a country that would be a “light unto the nations.”
As occupation has become an entrenched reality, most Israelis have wanted to look away; the problem is too complicated. This position may not be possible for much longer. The moral rot is too extreme. But the good news is that it has not infected everything and everyone. Israel’s public broadcaster devoted a segment to the Palestinian family’s tragedy, characterizing Kroizer’s statements as a disgrace.
The humanistic ideas through which Israel once judged itself have eroded. We must now hope that they won’t entirely vanish.
The post The moral degradation of Israel’s far-right is even worse than you think appeared first on The Forward.