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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 “Je​​ws 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.

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He went to a different Manhattan synagogue every week. Here’s what it taught him.

(JTA) — Reporting on the Jewish community is a lot like ornithology, except instead of birds the goal is to describe the dress, the habits and the particular behavior that distinguish, say, the Black-Hatted Monsey Orthodox from the Greater Philadelphia Jewish Renewalist. The careful shul-watcher notes their habitats, listens carefully to their songs and pays close attention to the things they eat.

Andrew Waxman is a banking and risk management consultant, not a journalist or an ornithologist. Yet he’s written what amounts to a field guide to the varieties of being and praying Jewish in New York City. For “My Year in New York Synagogues,” he spent his Friday evenings and Shabbat mornings in 2025 visiting nearly every synagogue within walking distance of his home on the Upper West Side.

That’s close to 50 synagogues, including most of Manhattan’s significant congregations. He also includes a few unclassifiable communities, such as a Jewish runners’ club and meetings of the Hostages Forum in Central Park.

The result is part sociological field trip to New York City’s Jewish landscape and part love letter to the city’s Jewish variety: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Moroccan, LGBTQ, Modern Orthodox, haredi Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and independent, to name a few.

Written at a time when the city’s Jews are on edge, buffeted by waves of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Waxman wants to remind them that the community’s diversity and creativity are its strength.

“The impetus for the book really was just the awe in which I find myself around the number of amazing communities, and the diversity that we have in New York that I really think is unparalleled in Jewish history,” he said in an interview.

His stops include familiar places like Central Synagogue, where Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s Asian-American background, a talented musical ensemble and distinct Moorish Revival architecture helped Waxman, who describes himself as liberal Orthodox, see a “community very comfortable in its approach to spirituality and Judaism, forging its own path, authentic in its own way, distinctive even amongst all the differences that characterize so many New York communities.”

At Or Zarua, the egalitarian Conservative synagogue on the Upper East Side, the intimate scale allowed a lively back-and-forth between rabbi and congregants during the Torah reading.

Meanwhile, the cavernous Young Israel of the Upper West Side offered a surprise: A synagogue he remembered as nearly empty and elderly had, decades later, become packed with young Orthodox Jews.

Less well known is the Koznitz. Behind an unmarked green door on the Upper West Side, Waxman found what a friend called the “speakeasy minyan.” There 70 or so men gather for “no frills, fast and lay-led” Shabbat prayers in a congregation named after the 18th-century Koznitzer Rebbe and his descendants.

“I realized that everybody feels that their community is special,” Waxman said. “And their community, whether it’s Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, they feel proud and they feel very connected.”

Waxman’s synagogue year included the bittersweet resolution of the Israeli hostage crisis, as well as the simmering aftermath of the campus protests and growing political tensions over Israel and antisemitism after Oct. 7. Many congregations added prayers or other rituals remembering the hostages, efforts that crossed political lines.

Other times, the ideological divides were stark. In Orthodox synagogues, Waxman heard rhetoric about Israel and the war that he described as “aggressive, jingoistic almost.” At the Orthodox Fifth Avenue Synagogue, one member of the “Kiddish Club” joked about Upper West Side liberals and another proudly mentioned his apartment in Trump Tower. At the liberal independent B’nai Jeshurun, the rabbis’ remarks included concern for Palestinians as well as Israeli Jews.

Few of those political discussions make it into his guidebook, however. If some congregations were seeing a growing contingent of anti-Zionists in the pews, for example, he doesn’t mention it. Waxman acknowledges that he sought to avoid labelling congregations by their politics. “It has been distressing to see political discord come between families and communities and I have no wish to put a pin on that,” he writes.

man and book cover
Andrew Waxman’s book, “My Year in New York Synagogues,” is a subjective guide to close to 50 different communities. (Courtesy)

Waxman tends to focus on the positive, ending each entry with a short description of the synagogues’ “strengths” and “distinctiveness.” In the admittedly very tiny genre of synagogue reviewing, others have been a little more pointed in their assessments. London’s Jewish Chronicle used to run reviews by Secret Shulgoer that awarded (and took away) stars based on “warmth,” “welcome,” “decorum” and “service.” In the 1990s, Kol Ha’Ir, an alternative Jerusalem weekly, dispatched the sharp-tongued Jacky Levy to review synagogues as he would a play or restaurant; he once compared a Reform synagogue to a church.

More recently, David A.M. Wilensky of J., the Northern California Jewish weekly, took  a journalistic approach in his “Jew in the Pew” column, offering his own observations and quoting congregants on their impressions, positive and sometimes negative, about their Bay Area synagogues.

Waxman’s goal appears more boosterish than critical or journalistic. He sees his ideal reader as someone who has just moved to the city and is looking for a spiritual home. Anticipating their criteria, he describes not only the prayers and sermons but the people, clothes, melodies, architecture and conversation.

And, yes, the kiddush.

He had initially joked with a friend that the book might simply be about kiddushes, the receptions that follow most Saturday morning Shabbat services. Do they serve meat? Will it be enough food to count as lunch? Who showed up “JFK” — just for kiddush?

But the food turned out to be more than comic relief. Kiddush, Waxman said, is where community happens. People who may not see one another during the week reconnect. They talk about their children, their problems, who’s getting married, who might be ill.

And he suspects that kiddush has become competitive.

At Altneu, a new Orthodox synagogue that broke away from Park East Synagogue in 2022, Waxman found a bartender, tequila and an impressive selection of whisky. He notes that other Orthodox synagogues in the area now regularly offer meat kiddushes, suggesting that congregations are using food to lure and hold on to members.

As for clothes, Waxman grew up in an Orthodox synagogue in Manchester, England, where the congregation president and other leaders wore top hats. The custom persists at The Jewish Center on the Upper West Side, where the rabbis and officers wear top hats and morning suits between Sukkot and Shavuot. Elsewhere, especially but not exclusively at non-Orthodox synagogues, the codes have loosened: Reflecting a similar change in corporate life, men have doffed their jackets and ties; women often swap skirts and dresses for slacks.

Waxman hadn’t attended a Reform service before setting out on his grand tour, and he said that the experience changed him. Himself a member of Darchei Noam, a “partnership minyan” that combines Orthodox ritual with expanded roles for women, he appreciated how the Reform congregations included Hebrew selectively but intentionally in their prayers. He admired congregations like Romemu, which resists easy denominational categorization, for their willingness to bend the traditional service structure — to go “off piste,” as he put it — rather than treat the prayer book as a script that must be followed exactly.

Waxman may have set out to write a Yelp for synagogues, but the project came to mean more. In addition to a sense of abundance, he found a spirit of hospitality. Currently working on a project in Mexico City, he noted how synagogues there won’t admit strangers — even the author of a book on New York synagogues — unless they sign up in advance. He insisted that, despite heightened security, New York’s synagogues are still welcoming places for newcomers.

“I’m hopeful that New York can remain as open as it is to the stranger,” he said. “Judaism, at the end of the day, for me, is really about giving people a community, a sense of belonging.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post He went to a different Manhattan synagogue every week. Here’s what it taught him. appeared first on The Forward.

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Miami-Dade county in Florida raises the limit on investments in Israel bonds

(JTA) — The Miami-Dade region in Florida can spend millions more tax dollars on Israel, after officials increased the share of county investments that can include Israeli bonds.

The Board of County Commissioners approved a resolution last week toward the start of a seven-hour meeting, in a unanimous, single vote that grouped together numerous ordinances. This action enables the county to invest up to 5%, rather than 3%, of its $9 billion in investments in these bonds — debt issued by the Israeli government sold by a U.S. underwriter.

Despite the previous cap of 3%, Israeli bonds only make up about 1.48% of Miami-Dade’s portfolio, or roughly $130 million, according to the county’s third-quarter investment report.

Known as “Israel Bonds,” these loans are deeply rooted in the Diaspora’s relationship with the country. Israel, like many countries, raises money by selling bonds to investors, who then receive repayments with interest after a specified time period. But for American Jews, these bonds are issued via the U.S.-based Development Corporation for Israel, which has served as the underwriter since 1951.

As for Miami-Dade, the county began purchasing Israeli bonds in 2016. But these investments increased substantially just after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. At the time, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced that the county would be boosting these investments from $51 million to $76 million.

Palm Beach County made a similar decision at the time, as did cities, counties and states around the country.

Nonetheless, activists nationwide have increasingly been pushing governments to stop investing in Israel bonds, citing the Jewish state’s military operations in Gaza.

An initiative called “Break the Bonds,” launched by the progressive Jewish Voice for Peace group, claims that “the Israeli military is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” and that community investments in such bonds are enabling the situation.

“At a time when so many people in our community are struggling, we believe our public dollars should be invested in our communities and in meeting the needs of the people who live here,” JVP South Florida said in a statement, prior to last Tuesday’s vote.

Israel Bonds representatives did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

Given the resolution’s swift passage, which occurred without a public hearing at the board meeting, detractors signed up to testify about an unrelated item in order to voice their concerns.

“My tax dollars should be kept safe and should be working to benefit my community,” Coconut Grove resident Jared Simon, who identified himself as Jewish, told the commissioners.

“You didn’t even allow public comment on it before voting,” he said. “Your constituents do not want their tax dollars funding the functions of the Israeli government.”

Addressing the lack of public hearing, the commissioners responded that residents already had the opportunity to speak about the resolution during a session earlier this summer.

That session occurred on July 15, when the Intergovernmental and Economic Impact Committee advanced the rule to the Board of County Commissioners with a favorable recommendation.

Among the most prominent speakers to take the podium — even though he had apparently not registered to do so — was James Fishback, a far-right former gubernatorial candidate and sharp critic of Israel. Alleging that the commissioners “unanimously voted to give up to $450 million of money to Israel,” Fishback said he’d rather not be “escorted out by these great men in uniform.”

“Do you serve the people of Hialeah or of Haifa? Do you serve the people of Aventura or of Tel Aviv?” he asked the commissioners. “Do you serve the people of South Miami or of Jerusalem? This money should be invested here in this community.”

As the sergeants escorted Fishback out of the auditorium, another individual screamed “America First!” from the audience.

Oliver Gilbert, one of the commissioners, responded that the “board today didn’t vote to give any money to anyone,” stressing that they just “set investment criteria.”

Before Tuesday’s meeting reached its most heated point, Keon Hardemon, another commissioner, told the audience that he and his colleagues “don’t care what you’re talking about, what subject it is that you don’t like, what you care for, what you don’t care for, what your politics are.”

“What we are not going to stand for are people who want to make anyone in this room feel uncomfortable,” Hardemon added.

Yet immediately after this intervention, public outcry over the resolution, known as 11A2, continued.

Miami resident Mina Trachtenberg argued that county investment policies require the prioritization “of public funds and liquidity of public funds above all else.”

“The resolution passed today achieves the opposite of that, opening the door to the purchase of high-risk, even junk-quality bonds of a foreign entity,” Trachtenberg said. “Please divest from apartheid.”

Anthony Rodriguez, the chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, eventually instructed the sergeants in the room to eject anyone who refused to comply with the rules.

Just after those instructions, Miami resident Mohammed Mohammed came to the podium, voicing his alarm that he was “going to be escorted out just for being Palestinian.”

“That’s not the case. Let’s not put words in anybody’s mouth,” a visibly frustrated Rodriguez responded. “You just have to follow the order and speak on the item.”

Mohammed then declared “that 11A2 is an absolute disgrace,” leading Rodriguez to summon the sergeants and declare that the speakers just “want their minute of fame.”

The rule’s sponsor, commissioner René García, explained that the county invests about $9 billion, with the intention of generating “a greater return of money” to fund public needs. García, a former Republican state senator, explained that the rule simply ensures “more flexibility and more liquidity” for certain investments.

In addition to raising the investment cap from 3% to 5%, the resolution would also reduce the maturity of “bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the state of Israel” from five to three years.

Within that text, the authors also deleted a clause that previously had required Israel to have an “A” credit rating from at least two agencies. That revision stemmed from a recent Florida statute allowing investments in Israel bonds regardless of the country’s rating. This change was particularly noteworthy because credit ratings of Israel have fluctuated in the past few years.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Miami-Dade county in Florida raises the limit on investments in Israel bonds appeared first on The Forward.

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Israeli expats voting case dismissed by Israel’s High Court

(JTA) — TEL AVIV – Israel’s High Court on Wednesday dismissed a petition by Israeli expatriates seeking to vote in the Oct. 27 election after discovering that they had been excluded from the voter rolls under a little-known Interior Ministry classification that records certain citizens as nonresidents.

The petition was filed by some 100 expatriate Israelis challenging their exclusion from the voter rolls under an Interior Ministry classification known as “Code 51,” which records them as having ceased to be Israeli residents.

The petitioners said they had never asked to give up their status as Israeli residents and questioned the legal authority, criteria and process by which the classification was imposed. Some only discovered the designation when they checked their eligibility ahead of the election.

The court did not resolve that factual dispute, instead dismissing the petition on procedural grounds. Justice Yechiel Kasher said the case was filed too late, a week before the voter registry was due to be finalized, and that the petitioners had not first used the statutory appeals process available to challenge their registration status. The court also said the petition lacked a detailed factual record showing how each of the petitioners came to receive Code 51.

The case arose as tens of thousands of Israeli citizens living abroad are making plans to return to Israel to cast ballots in the country’s first national election since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. More than 30,000 expatriates had registered with Fly&Vote, an initiative helping Israelis arrange election travel, which has already secured seven dedicated flights to Israel.

The Interior Ministry told the court that Code 51 is given to citizens who informed a population registry official that they were leaving Israel and asked not to remain registered as residents. The petitioners disputed that account, saying they had never asked for their registration as Israeli residents to be canceled.

Ilana Mittman, a retired social scientist living in Baltimore and a petitioner in the case, discovered this summer that her residency status had been changed under Code 51 on March 7, 1986, the same date she visited the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco to register her newborn son.

Mittman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that consular staff took away her Israeli ID card during the 1986 appointment without explanation. “I remember how bad of a feeling it was to give that document away,” she said. “I felt I gave a part of myself away when that happened. But I didn’t know that my biggest right as a citizen – the right to vote – was just robbed from me.”

The petition also challenged the law tying voting eligibility to residency, arguing that it conflicts with Israel’s Basic Law governing the Knesset, which guarantees every Israeli citizen aged 18 or older the right to vote unless a court has deprived them of that right. The court did not decide that question, and Kasher said the petitioners could raise it again after the election.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israeli expats voting case dismissed by Israel’s High Court appeared first on The Forward.

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