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How Arnold Horween, an unsung Jewish Harvard hero, changed American sports
(JTA) — Decades before Sandy Koufax sat out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, and 18 years before Greenberg chased Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in the late 1930s, a college athlete made some overlooked Jewish sports history.
Arnold Horween, a burly Chicagoan, became the first Jewish captain of the Harvard University football team in 1920 — an achievement that sent ripples through American culture.
Horween, who would later play and coach in the early years of what would become the NFL, was born to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He became a star player at Harvard, helping the Crimson go undefeated in both 1919 and 1920 after returning from serving in World War I. (His brother Ralph also played at Harvard and in the NFL, and they were the first and only Jewish brothers to play in the NFL until Geoff and Mitchell Schwartz.)
But it was Horween’s unanimous selection as the team’s captain, and more importantly, his appointment in 1926 as the team’s coach, that would prove unprecedented.
“In American Jewish culture, the only thing greater than being the captain of the Harvard Crimson, the only higher station in American culture might have been the president, or the coach of Harvard, which he eventually becomes,” said Zev Eleff, the president of Gratz College and a scholar of American Jewish history.
Eleff explores Horween’s story and its impact in his recent book, “Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard’s America,” released earlier this year. He traces the history of Harvard athletics in the early 1900s, exploring how Horween, along with Harvard’s first athletic director, Bill Bingham, altered the landscape of America’s most prestigious college.
Horween’s ascendance came at a time when Harvard instituted quotas to limit the number of Jewish and other minority students it accepted — a practice the school would employ throughout the 1920s and 30s. His story also took place amid a political landscape that featured the rise of Father Charles Coughlin, the antisemitic “radio priest,” and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
As Eleff underscores in the book, Horween did not fit the model of a “Boston Brahmin,” the class of elite, Christian, aspirationally manly men whose supremacy was unquestioned at Harvard Yard. Horween broke that mold, instead instilling a team culture where a love of the sport was almost as important as winning — the Ted Lasso effect, if you will.
“Dyed in Crimson” also uses early 20th century Harvard as an allegory for the broader theme of how sports can change society.
“The theme of the book, something that’s uniquely American, is how the periphery can influence the mainstream,” said Eleff. “How people on the sidelines can really make an influence.”
Eleff spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about how Horween’s story fits into the pantheon of Jewish American sports legends and what it says about Jews’ ability to succeed in America.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s dig into Horween’s story. I liked the idea of him as like an earlier version of Koufax or a Greenberg, but to be honest, I had never heard of him. Why do you think his story isn’t as well known as other Jewish athletes?
I think it has everything to do with the emergence of Major League Baseball. College football was America’s sport in the 1910s and 1920s. It was a big money sport, when there was very little money outside of the New York Yankees. And I think that Horween’s star started to sort of decline with Harvard football, but also the emergence of other sports.
The other reason is because the idea of the Jewish ballplayer loomed large. The New York Giants, for decades, tried to identify a Jewish superstar. They actually passed on Greenberg. There was a thought after Greenberg that there was Jewish DNA for baseball, and the signing of Koufax was directly linked to this notion. It was this eugenics-like link that you need a Jewish ballplayer. For the Giants, it was ticket sales. So the commotion about Greenberg and Koufax is more about Jewish identity. And baseball is, as a professional sport in New York, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, different than college football, particularly in New England at this time. Frankly, Jews lived near the Polo Grounds, they didn’t live near Harvard Yard.
Arnold Horween shown in The Baltimore Sun on November 16, 1927. (Wikimedia Commons)
For Horween, obviously he’s not at the level of a Greenberg or Koufax talent-wise, but he also didn’t seem to care as much personally about his Jewish identity. You write in the book that there were some Jews who took issue with the fact that Horween was not practicing, but there were also many Jews who were simply proud he was Jewish. What do you think about that dynamic?
There becomes a sort of disconnect between lived religion and the perception and what they come to represent — the mantle that they wear almost towers above the practice. Horween eschewed the opportunity to claim the mantle of Jewish leadership, Jewish celebrity. But we do see in its moment that he is the topic of rabbinic sermons, that The American Hebrew and other Jewish press are reporting on him. They are elated. In American Jewish culture, the only thing greater than being the captain of the Harvard Crimson — it’s hard for people to realize, but in the moment when they were part of the big three [alongside Princeton and Yale] — the only higher station in American culture might have been the president, or the coach of Harvard, which he eventually becomes.
One of the parts of this book that I enjoyed learning about is the extent to which college football in the early 20th century was all about honor, masculinity, gentlemanliness. And at the time, that kind of stands in contrast to how Jews were viewed — that Jews were not masculine, Jews couldn’t fit into that mold of the “Harvard man.”
Being on the sports team, that was probably far beyond Jewish expectations. Not to say that Jews could not be athletic, but very often the varsity players weren’t picked for their talent but rather their surnames. What the sea change at Harvard is, [within] gentlemanly culture — in which “gentlemanly” is a Protestant, Christian masculinity — Horween is not Protestant. What allows him a pathway into that elite group is that drive to win. And as a player, he’s good luck. He never loses. He becomes a signature player for victory who even wins the Rose Bowl.
But as a coach, he subverts that. What he and Bill Bingham do is their campaign isn’t necessarily for winning, it’s for having fun, it’s for enjoying the game.
In the 1910s and 20s, college football was the peak of American sports, but that’s certainly not the case anymore. What do you think would be the modern comparison for someone like Horween?
Is Becky Hammon with the Spurs, the first woman [to act as] head coach in basketball, something like that? Or the very important discussions about people of color as coaches in the NFL? Sports and education are, for some reason or another, where change is made in American life. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 ends, at least officially, segregation. Title IV, what is basically American law for anti-discrimination based on sex, is based on women’s college sports. You have the breaking down of color barriers and Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Vietnam. You have the first [openly] gay athletes, you have questions of breaking the glass ceiling for women and Serena Williams.
It’s absolutely 100% true that sports doesn’t matter. Who wins the World Series is of no great consequence to most people’s lives. Although it’s interesting, if you drive up I-95 on a Sunday, you will see that the bumper stickers and the flags change. There is some sort of passion, obviously, about sport. But it’s absolutely true that for some reason or another in the 20th century and 21st century in American sport, really important social and cultural decisions, and political decisions, are made in American sport.
Zev Eleff, president of Gratz College and author of “Dyed in Crimson.” (Courtesy)
Another main topic in the book is that the goal for immigrants, especially Jews, was Americanization, assimilation — that to become part of the mainstream was the marker of success. But that seems to be the case for Jews in a very different sense than it is for Catholics and for Blacks.
The major contribution of this book to American Jewish history beyond telling this story is to complicate notions of Americanization. Jews and Catholics in particular view Americanization very, very differently. The Catholic experience is to create parallel systems. If you’re a good Catholic boy with immense football talent, play for Notre Dame, play for Boston College. Don’t play for the Protestant mainstream. Cream them on the football field. Create parallel systems.
The Jewish experience is not so. Outside of Orthodox day schools in the early 20th century, it was anathema, it was considered almost heretical, for American Jews to [go] to private schools. To the contrary, the so-called golden citadels of the public schools — that is the agent of Americanization. Jews don’t establish their own educational systems. They somehow Americanize and acculturate into the mainstream. We don’t compete with Harvard, we get into Harvard.
Thinking about the antisemitism of that time — the quotas, Father Coughlin, all of that — how do you think that compares to what we’re seeing today?
Historians disagree about the 1920s. Was it a time of great prominence of American Jews? There was affluence in the roaring ’20s. There were institutions that were created, there was creativity, from the Orthodox and Mordecai Kaplan certainly, across the board, the Jewish Theological Seminary. American Judaism was at a certain high point in the 1920s. At the same time, there were quotas, and there was rising antisemitism. I think today we also have to deal with the tension of, on the one hand, there are great opportunities for Jews in the United States; at the same time, there is antisemitism. And so from the 1920s to the 2020s, 100 years later, you see a model for how to grapple with those tensions.
What do you hope, more than anything else, someone takes away or learns from your book?
It’s a book that begins like a punch line: a working class Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew walk into a football field. But it ends with something I think a lot more pronounced, which is, it’s a story about change. As a historian, I study change, particularly in American Judaism, broadly in American religion and Jewish Studies. Change is the best asset that a historian has to study. I wasn’t interested in just finding another Sandy Koufax story, replicating that story. This is a story that isn’t just about a Jew who happened for his moment to become quite successful and quite famous, or a Catholic or a former mill hand turned first athletic director in college history. It’s really about how people on the periphery influence the mainstream.
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This Jewish activist was arrested and deported for her book ‘Lesbian Love.’ 100 years later, will NYC apologize?
In 1926, New York City police arrested Eve Adams, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who ran a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, for the crime of being gay.
The formal charges were more euphemistic. Officially, Adams was charged with disorderly conduct — that is, flirting with an undercover police officer who had entrapped her, and obscenity, for writing and possessing the book Lesbian Love.
The following year, the U.S. government deported Adams to Poland, in what was effectively a death sentence: 16 years later, Adams would be murdered at Auschwitz.
Now, a century after Adam’s arrest, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal — the first openly gay person to hold the elected position — is urging New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to formally recognize the city’s role in Adams’ persecution.
He sent a letter to Mamdani requesting that the city issue a formal declaration acknowledging Adams’ conviction in 1926 “was unjust and rooted in discriminatory law enforcement and affirming that New York City failed her as a pioneer of LGBTQ+ life, as an immigrant, and as a Jewish woman who was ultimately deported to her death.”
“Adams’s story is among the most unjust in our city’s history,” the letter reads. “One hundred years after her arrest, we have the obligation and the opportunity to say plainly that she deserved better.”
In a statement to the Forward, the Mayor’s office said they are reviewing the request.
“The Mamdani Administration is deeply committed to uplifting the stories of New Yorkers that have gone unheard throughout history,” deputy press secretary Sam Raskin said.
A pioneer
Born with the name Chawa Zloczower in Poland in 1891, Adams immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island at age 20.
In America, she adopted the name Eve Adams — a playful nod to her androgyny, invoking the biblical Adam and Eve — and wore men’s clothing.
“She was a vibrant activist, who was daring. She had an androgynous appearance, which immediately identified her as a lesbian,” said Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. “Wearing pants for women was just unthinkable in the time period.”
Adams soon immersed herself in New York’s anarchist circles, befriending prominent Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. She worked as a traveling saleswoman for leftist publications including Mother Earth, activities that landed her on the Bureau of Investigation’s watch list during the First Red Scare.
In 1923, Adams published Lesbian Love, a collection of essays about the romantic lives of dozens of women in Greenwich Village. Katz described the book as far ahead of its time.
“The word “lesbian” was not used much. It was like a dirty word at the time, so you didn’t say it out loud,” Katz said. “Here she was, putting it on a book jacket.”
Two years later, Adams opened Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village. The underground tearoom became a rare refuge where lesbian women could socialize openly.
But the haven proved short-lived. In 1926, an undercover detective named Margaret Leonard visited Eve’s Hangout, where she met Adams. The following day, the two attended a play in Times Square together. Adams gave Leonard a copy of Lesbian Love — evidence of “obscenity” that prosecutors later used against her — and Leonard alleged Adams made sexual advances toward her during the taxi ride to the theater.
Adams was convicted and spent 18 months in jail before the United States deported her to Poland.
She settled in Paris, where she began a relationship with Jewish cabaret singer Hella Olstein Soldner. In 1943, the two women were arrested and sent to the Drancy internment camp. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz, where both were murdered.
Adams’ legacy
Over the years, Adams has come to be recognized as a Jewish LGBTQ icon. Her life inspired the play The Great Lesbian Love of Eve Adams, and she was the subject of a New York Times obituary published as part of the newspaper’s “Overlooked” series, which chronicles the lives of notable people throughout history whose deaths went unreported.
Hoylman-Sigal said he was inspired to commemorate Adams by the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, a nonprofit that documents local queer history, which asked him to send the letter to Mamdani. The Sites Project also offers historic walking tours of the city featuring Adams’ story.
“Their jaws drop when we tell them these stories, standing in front of the building where her tea room was,” said Ken Lustbader, co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.
On Wednesday, the centennial of Adams arrest, the Sites Project is hosting a performance and vigil in Adams’ honor at the former site of Eve’s Hangout — today, home to La Lanterna, an Italian cafe and pizzeria.
The site of Eve’s Hangout has also been recognized by the National Park Service as part of a roundup of Greenwich Village landmarks significant to LGBTQ history.
New York City, however, has never formally acknowledged the injustice of Adams’ arrest, conviction and deportation.
A posthumous apology would be unusual, though not without precedent: In 2019, the NYPD formally apologized for its 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn, describing the department’s actions as “discriminatory and oppressive.”
“I would love to see the mayor do it, but we could have one from the police department — an apology for sort of framing her,” Katz said. “They sent in a plainclothes policewoman to entrap her, and so that was really beyond a democratic process.”
The NYPD did not respond to the Forward‘s request for comment.
Whether or not the city issues an official acknowledgement, Hoylman-Sigal said he hopes the campaign will help keep Adams’ story alive.
“It’s an extremely poignant story, sorrowful, outrageous, sad — and one that most people don’t know about,” he said. “So I thought bringing attention to it was a righteous cause.”
Jacob Kornbluh contributed reporting.
The post This Jewish activist was arrested and deported for her book ‘Lesbian Love.’ 100 years later, will NYC apologize? appeared first on The Forward.
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Ever the restless spirit, Tel Aviv-born architect and designer Ron Arad is still reinventing himself and his art
When the announcement was made on June 12 that Ron Arad, 75, has been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), it marked another step in the Tel Aviv-born architect, artist and designer’s remarkably varied journey. Arad’s mother was the painter Esther Peretz-Arad and his father Grisha was a sculptor and photographer. After industrial design studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Arad traveled to London to become an architect, and has remained based there ever since. Yet although he won early fame with his piquant, witty concepts for chairs, Arad has proven anything but sedentary over the past half-century. Indeed, a 2010 retrospective at London’s Barbican Art Gallery was titled “Restless.”
Despite this seemingly permanent shpilkes (restless agitation), humane consideration for the pathways of others has been a constant in Arad’s public projects. His design for Beit Shulamit (2025), a cancer treatment center at the HaEmek Medical Center in Afula, northern Israel, intended to serve Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze communities in Israel and Palestine, deliberately freed patients and visitors from “horrible hospital corridors,” Arad told an architectural periodical. Patients walking around the site are given views of nature outdoors at every turn, in a facility that is the first to offer specialist cancer treatment for residents of West Bank conflict zones, including the cities of Jenin and Nablus. Named in honor of Dr. Shulamit Katzman, a pediatrician, the building’s gently curved lines embrace the public.
This awareness of social cohesion is also present in an Arad sculpture on the Tel Aviv University campus. “Kesher” is dedicated to the estimated 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died from adverse conditions in transition camps on the Sudanese border while trying to emigrate to Israel between 1979 and 1990. Composed of dynamically soaring, interwoven metal tubes, the artwork, wrapped around two live palm trees, a ubiquitous symbol of the Middle East, evokes an expedition. A repeated figure-eight symbolizes the endless continuity of the immigrants’ route and the resolve that it communicates.
In England, Arad assisted the National Health Service (NHS) in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. A flock of UK Jewish celebrities posed for photos wearing Arad-designed cotton masks, including actor Stephen Fry, comedian David Baddiel, and television host Natasha Kaplinsky. Despite lively colors, the masks, intended to be sold for fundraising, retained a somewhat tragic aura, like the grotesque permanent smile of Victor Hugo’s Gothic novel The Man Who Laughs.
Potential tragedy inherent in triumph likewise radiates from another Arad project, the Totzeret HaAretz (ToHA) tower, an office skyscraper in central Tel Aviv which was inspired by the shape of an iceberg. Its angular glass, built as the polar ice caps are rapidly melting and the fate of the passenger liner Titanic’s collision with an iceberg is particularly relevant, the ensemble when complete will include an 80-floor companion tower, Tel Aviv’s tallest building.
Similarly, Arad is aware of the agony of defeat as well as artistic victories he has experienced over the years. When his codesign for a National Holocaust Monument Ottawa in Canada failed to win a competition, Arad published the concept anyway. The result is a highly literary, theological rumination on the impact of the Shoah on modern Jewish history. Ever conscious of the pedestrian’s progress, Arad’s design featured concrete walls framing 22 narrow passageways, one for each country in which Jewish communities were decimated. These walls, spaced around a meter apart, would have allowed only one visitor to fit through at a time. The solitude would have been lessened by an architectural allusion to the covenant of the pieces (Brit Bein HaBetarim), the first of a series of covenants between God and the Patriarchs. In this narrative, God revealed himself to Abram (later Abraham), promising that his descendants would inherit the Land of Israel.
Less loftily or weighty with destiny, Arad’s chief promise as an artist is to his own creativity. He was so inspired by a melody by the American Jewish songwriter Jonathan Richman about shedding personal inhibition and pretension by accepting new, unfamiliar surroundings and contexts, that in all seriousness he informed an interviewer in 2005 that he wanted Richman’s tune, “I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar” to be played at his funeral. Another impeded project where dancing might have been at least delayed was a London Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre design, initially approved in 2017, but later bogged down by objections about its proposed site, Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament. However, in January, a Holocaust Memorial Act 2026 received Royal Assent, officially clearing a legal hurdle blocking the construction of Arad’s UK Holocaust Memorial; the recent conferral of a CBE by Charles III, known to take particular interest in Jews and Holocaust victims, represents further establishment endorsement of Arad and his work.
Despite this authorized approval, Arad looks likely to remain an offbeat spirit, drawing inspiration from a wide range of predecessors, including the Czernowitz-born Austrian Jewish creator Friedrich Jacob Kiesler who innovated with 1965’s “Shrine of the Book” in Jerusalem to house the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, among other texts. Kiesler was also responsible for an unbuilt architectural concept, the Endless House, a biomorphic, continuous form with no beginning, end, or even boundaries between floor, wall, and ceiling. Some Arad projects resemble completed versions of things Kiesler and his fellow Jewish surrealists might have only dreamed of.
When it is built, Arad’s Holocaust Memorial will pay tribute to several minority groups targeted by the Nazis, in addition to the Jews. The Learning Centre is intended to explore antisemitism, but also extremism, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia and other forms of prejudice in today’s society. Much of it will be underground, drawing visitors down narrow stairs into the exhibition space and learning center, in yet another example of Arad’s obsession with peregrinations, like a modern-day architectural Benjamin of Tudela, a medieval Jewish traveler. Ever shedding past identities, Arad told the 2005 interviewer that the living person he most admired was Bob Dylan, for “reinventing himself and for reinventing us.” In a comparable way, Ron Arad has also reworked his own optic to express modern Jewish identity in a variety of forms, as an excursion hampered by tragedy and ominous echoes at times, but also with the possibility of quick-witted celebration.
At last year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Arad presented a bronze sculpture titled “I doubt therefore I think” (Dubito Ergo Cogito). Inviting museumgoers to sit on it, the artwork likely referred to a time-honored Jewish tradition of doubt as the mitzvah of questioning. This mitzvah has accompanied Arad’s career-long odyssey in the arts.
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New Jewish-Arab political party debuts in Israel, aiming to topple Netanyahu
A newly established Jewish-Arab political party debuted Tuesday and is joining the crowded field vying to take down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in Israel’s next election, slated for October.
Makom Lekulanu, which translates to A Place for Us All, ( is led by Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green, co-founders of the Israeli-Palestinian coexistence organizing group. Other Standing Together leaders will also join the party, including Haifa City Council member Sally Abed; Ghadir Hani, a Palestinian peace and women’s rights activist; Itamar Avneri, a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council member; and Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother, well-known peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri.
According to Daood and others who spoke at a press conference in Nazareth publicly launching the new party, Makom Lekulanu’s platform will focus on many of the same issues that Standing Together has organized around for years: peace, social justice, soaring violence and crime in Arab communities, the cost of living and climate justice.
Party leaders say they are running not only to oppose Netanyahu and his coalition, which currently includes far-right extremists National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but to offer a fundamentally different vision.
“We are doing this because this is the last moment to save our society,” Daood told the modest crowd, many of whom were clad in the telltale purple that has become synonymous with Standing Together. “We are being abandoned, murdered; our future is going up in flames. And I know that in order to repair things, it is not enough to say only what we oppose. We also have to say what we support.”
“So today I am saying: no to Netanyahu, to Ben-Gvir, to Smotrich,” she continued, to enthusiastic applause. “But I am also saying yes. Yes to Israeli-Palestinian peace, yes to national and civil equality, yes to social justice.”The press conference took place at the scenic Rose Cafe in Nazareth, a choice that underscored the message its founders are trying to send. This is not, they insisted, a Jewish party with token Palestinian representation or an Arab party with a couple of Jewish allies, but what Daood called “a truly shared party, one of genuine partnership between Jews and Arabs.”
According to Abed, this means tearing down the arbitrary dividers that have been built around Jewish and Arab leadership.
“I have always been told, ‘You will be responsible for Arab society, and we will be responsible for Jewish society,’” she said. “But I want to lead and take responsibility for all of society, together with my Jewish partners.”
“That’s what A Place for Us All will be: taking responsibility for all of society, together, on the path to ending the occupation, to peace and to real equality.”
A decade organizing
The party grew directly out of Standing Together, the Jewish-Arab grassroots movement founded in 2015. Since the Oct. 7 attack, and the ensuing wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, Standing Together has become one of Israel’s most visible anti-war and anti-occupation organizations, growing its membership more than tenfold and emerging as a prominent voice on the international stage as well.
Inside Israel, the movement has organized ceasefire protests and rallies calling for a hostage deal, protected aid convoys headed for Gaza from right-wing attacks, raised funds for bomb shelters in Bedouin communities and provided protective presence for Palestinians facing settler violence in the West Bank.
For Zeigen, the decision to join the slate is rooted in personal loss as well as political conviction.
“For years, I worked with people battling poverty, marginalization and trauma — the overwhelming majority of them as a result of institutional abandonment,” he said at the press conference. “On Oct. 7, I experienced that abandonment firsthand. My mother, Vivian Silver, did not survive the massacre at her kibbutz.”
“Out of the devastation of losing her, I made a decision,” he continued. “I left my job as a social worker, and since then I have dedicated my life to one thing: Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Zeigen described his grief now intermingling with another emotion: fear for the future his children will inherit.
“That is why I insist on turning despair into action,” he said. “Because I refuse to accept bereavement as fate — not for Jews and not for Arabs, not for Israelis and not for Palestinians.”
The new party’s leaders have been careful to stress that Standing Together is a separate entity from A Place for Us All. In a joint statement issued ahead of the launch, Daood and Green said the movement would remain active and independent, with a “full and substantive separation — organizational, legal, financial and political” between Standing Together and A Place for Us All. Both Daood and Green said they will take unpaid leave from their leadership roles in the movement in order to run.
Daood said the move into electoral politics is a natural progression of what she and Green have helped create over the last decade.
“For 10 years now, we have been effecting change right where it was needed most. We know how to build this kind of power on the ground,” Daood told the Forward. “Now we want to take that power and translate it into votes so that we can effect change from within the Knesset.”
While rumors of a political run have swirled around Standing Together for months, Green said he and Daood felt they had finally reached a now-or-never moment.
“I truly believe we are at a critical juncture,” Green explained. “This is the point where the Israeli people either keep going down this path of ethnic cleansing and endless war and occupation and terrible quality of life, for both Palestinians and Jews living here — or we can turn around, right now, and go in the other direction, in the direction of life and peace and security for all.”
“The right wing in Israel very much understands we are at this juncture,” he added. “And they have been very clear about what they are offering. I could not live with myself if I didn’t offer an alternative to Israeli voters.”
Seeking an edge
A Place for Us All will face an uphill battle from the start.
Any party led by Standing Together’s founders is likely to intensify the criticism the movement already faces from right-wing Israelis who have branded them as traitors for speaking out against the occupation and the suffering in Gaza. Posters featuring images of Gazan children have been torn down, and activists, Green included, have been harassed by right-wing agitators, in some cases outside their own homes.
A Place for Us All is also already drawing criticism from within the Israeli left, where some fear that the addition of a new party could split an already fragile anti-Netanyahu camp. In Israel’s electoral system, any party that fails to cross the electoral threshold — currently set at just over 3% of the vote — receives no seats, meaning it cannot take part in the post-election negotiations that determine who will build the 61-seat coalition needed to form the next government.
Green strongly rejects this concern.
“Every poll makes clear that winning without Jewish-Arab partnership is impossible,” he argued. “The only path to replacing Netanyahu is to maximize turnout among Jewish and Palestinian citizens and ensure that they vote for the same political bloc.”
According to Green, only one in four Palestinian citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 is currently planning to vote. “But with our party running, that statistic jumps up to two out of four,” he said.
If the scene outside the cafe was any indication, the party’s message may already be resonating with at least some of the young people it hopes to bring into politics. As the press conference unfolded, groups of teenagers passing by stopped to cheer on the speakers.
Inside, excitement was also running high. At one point, activist Galit Mass-Ader openly wept as she embraced Ghadir Hani who is joining the party’s list.
“For me, this is a decision that has been years in the making. I’ve been working for peace and coexistence nearly my whole life,” Hani told the Forward. “But since October 7, there have been so many difficult moments of pain and despair.”
“This party is the exact opposite of that,” she said. “It is the embodiment of hope — hope that belongs to both Jews and Palestinians, and to all those who are ready to reject the old, stale politics in favor of a new, shared political system.”
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