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How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis
WEIMAR, Thuringia, Germany — Walking through Weimar, Germany, the legacy of the Holocaust seems inescapable. Stolpersteine — German for “stumbling blocks” — are placed outside the homes of people killed during the Shoah, essential evidence of Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, a national commitment to memorializing, and learning from, the Nazis’ atrocities.
But this commitment is being challenged. Alan Bern, a Yiddish musician described to me as “the man who solved the Shoah,” had just returned from a press conference when I met him, where he spoke alongside local law enforcement officials about a 51-year-old man charged with the 33rd case of vandalism of the memorial stones in the Eastern German city this year.
Bern, 70, an American who came to Germany nearly 40 years ago and holds the nation’s highest civilian honor, said, “Attacks on Stolpersteine are not primarily attacks against Jews, but rather against society and, not least, against human dignity.”
Bern, a composer, founded a school called the Other Music Academy, where he and his colleagues are creating encounters critical to the fight against Jew-hatred in Germany.
They bring together Jews and the descendants of Nazis, Israelis and Palestinians, and Germans and Syrian migrants in an attempt to apply the lessons of the Holocaust forward to the issues facing Germany today. Democracy is in the center’s DNA both in ethos and architecture — the entrance to their dance hall is a 100 year-old door from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, where Germany’s first constitution was written and ratified.
“I believe that the encounter with otherness,” Bern said, “is essential to transforming yourself and transforming society.”
Bern’s work helps extend Germany’s memory culture, applying its lessons beyond the Holocaust to address threats against democracy posed by the far-right, which is gaining popularity around the country.
Although not all incidents of antisemitism in Germany are coming from the right, the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has forced a new debate over Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. AfD holds a plurality in Thuringia’s state parliament, and, after this year’s February elections, became the main opposition party in Germany’s federal parliament. The party’s most radical wing says that memory culture is a “guilt cult” and calls for a “180 degree turnaround” in the nation’s approach to remembering its history.
And while many Jews are deeply concerned about the right’s desire to abandon memory culture, some Jews in Germany, particularly those on the left, feel that the societal commitment to preventing another Holocaust has caused the state to police their ability to act and think freely, particularly when critiquing Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish activists have lost awards and speaking engagements, and have even been labeled extremists and put under surveillance by Germany’s state intelligence service.
Memory culture is not just essential to Germans, however; it’s a key for Jews around the world, who take heritage trips to concentration camps and ancestral homes there as part of memorializing the Holocaust. And worldwide, memory culture is essential to remembering global atrocities — yet its tenets are under attack. The Trump administration has criticized the Smithsonian’s approach to slavery, while Turkey refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Armenian genocide.
I went to Germany to speak with both Jews and non-Jewish Germans who are doing the work of bringing memory culture to life, to see how their work is being impacted by these political shifts, and to find out: What is lost if Germany loses its memory?
A brief history of memory culture
After the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, the newly reunited and democratic Germany defined its national identity as a state committed to learning from the atrocities it committed in the past, thus preventing them from ever happening again.
But this devotion to the Holocaust wasn’t always the case. At the end of World War II, fewer than 15,000 Jews remained in Germany, the majority of whom went to West Germany when the country was partitioned after World War II. West Germany largely avoided accepting responsibility for the Holocaust until 1970, when Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the Warsaw Ghetto, in Poland, and laid a wreath at its memorial.
Meanwhile, under East Germany’s Soviet-style system, Nazi crimes were stripped of their antisemitic motivations and recast as offenses to communism; the small Jewish community of less than 1,000 people who remained there continued to be persecuted by the Stasi for perceived opposition to socialist values.
After the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified the following year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl oversaw the immigration of some 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union. The majority of Germany’s new Jews moved to Berlin, but others repopulated Jewish communities in the former East.
With the formation of the new German republic, the government moved back to Berlin, and in 1999, voted to construct the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of the city — next to Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate. They expanded concentration camp memorials to include details about the Holocaust and built a world-renowned Jewish museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. Visits to these sites became a regular part of German school curricula. A centralized national Jewish council — The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, or the Central Council of Jews in Germany — today receives €22 million in government funding to serve as the official voice of Jewish people and to advocate against antisemitism across society.
Memory culture is palpable everywhere in Germany, whether in large memorials and historical sites like concentration camps, or the small plaques and reminders, like the stumbling blocks, about the Jews who once lived there.
For years, however, shame over the Holocaust has muted national pride. Many Germans avoided flying their flag for fear of invoking the kind of nationalism that led to the rise of the Nazi party. (Though in the past two decades, flags have become more common at German sporting matches and events.)
That has led some, such as the far-right AfD party, to claim that memory culture has harmed Germany. Former party leader Alexander Gauland referred in 2018 to the Nazi era as a speck of “bird shit” in an otherwise grand national history, a speck that was given outsize importance.
And more recently, memory culture has become complicated by modern political concerns. In 2008, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that supporting Israel was Germany’s “reason of state,” and the government has consistently operated with an iron-clad support for Israel as a form of reparations for the Holocaust.
But as Israel’s actions have come under increasing international condemnation since Oct. 7, Germany’s memory culture too has come under broader criticism by Jews and non-Jews alike. Some Jews in Germany are concerned over what they see as Germany abandoning Israel after Chancellor Friedrich Merz halted weapons exports to the Jewish state in August to curb the supply that could be used in Gaza. Other Jews, meanwhile, feel unable to speak out against the war given the national devotion to Israel.
And the Central Council, the state Jewish voice, believes that AfD is taking advantage of the war to inflame tensions between a new wave of Muslim immigrants and Germany’s Jews — and, in turn, win Jewish support for their party, including their belief in dismantling memory culture. Before this year’s elections, the Council circulated a letter signed by the leaders of every Jewish state organization warning that the AfD “uses Jews as an excuse to spread its racist and anti-Muslim slogans.”
The right-wing critique of memory culture in Germany
The AfD was officially designated a ‘rightwing extremist’ force by Germany’s intelligence agency, a status the far-right party is contesting in court. Still, it is the largest party in Thuringia and is poised to take over at least one state in next year’s elections. This would give it control over the educational and cultural agencies that fund memory culture in Germany, agencies it hopes to defund. Clearly, the AfD is not a fringe group.
And it is gaining increasing influence nationally and visibility internationally. Prior to their strong showing in February’s elections, both vice president JD Vance and President Trump’s ally Elon Musk encouraged German voters to vote for AfD.
The official voice of the Jewish community in Germany unambiguously says that the AfD is a growing threat to German Jews, and Jews around the world. In their 2024 annual report, the Council called the AfD a “legitimizing bridge” between the political mainstream and extremist actors — like the man who livestreamed himself ranting about the Great Replacement Theory before trying and failing to break into the synagogue in Halle with a gun in 2019, killing two people outside its doors.
“There is a will in this party to change the remembrance and the memory of National Socialism in focusing on the positive parts of German history,” said Shila Erlbaum, the Council’s director of policy. “This is an attack on Jewish history and Jewish memory.”
But not all Jews agree the AfD is such a threat. In 2018, a group of Jewish party members founded the Federal Association of Jews in the AfD (JAfD), a small caucus within the party’s 70,000 members. Today, JAfD has only 25 members, along with another 80 supporters who are not full members.
Artur Abramovych, the JAfD’s 29-year-old chairman, told me that they established the caucus after anti-immigrant demonstrations broke out in the eastern city of Chemnitz, when two Kurdish immigrants stabbed and killed a man.
Like the party’s leaders, the JAfD believes, according to its website, that “the greatest threat to Europe in the 21st century is the growth of the Muslim population” and adds that “the rise of political Islam is also primarily a threat to Jews.” While party leaders’ statements contradict AfD’s official support for Israel, the JAfD is strongly and unequivocally pro-Israel.
In January 2024, the German investigative newsroom Correctiv reported that AfD members secretly met with neo-Nazis and wealthy businessmen to plan the mass deportation of immigrants from Germany in a plot called “remigration.” The news brought hundreds of thousands of Germans into the streets in protest.
AfD initially disputed what was discussed at the meeting, though eventually party leader Alice Weidel embraced remigration as the official party platform. Though the party is once again trying to distance itself from the controversial remigration concept to create a broader appeal among the mainstream electorate, JAfD still believes that the plan is essential. Abramovych himself is an immigrant — from Ukraine — but claimed that immigration is threatening German society due to Muslim fertility rates.
Like the party’s hardliners, JAfD is also critical of Germany’s memory culture. Abramovych said that it didn’t originally hurt Jewish people, but now does “because people are forcing German politics to keep the borders open and let millions of Jew haters into the country” due to the state’s Holocaust guilt.
Germany’s immigration politics have moved to the right since Oct. 7, 2023. In an interview with Der Spiegel after the Hamas attack, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the magazine, “We have to deport people more often and faster.” Earlier this year, Merz’s government tightened border controls, and in October the Bundestag, analogous to the U.S. House of Representatives, voted to revoke a fast-track to citizenship law passed by Scholz.
While he smoked handrolled cigarettes and drank a cup of black coffee outside of a Ukrainian cafe in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood, I asked Abramovych if he was concerned that Jewish immigrants like himself could be deported from Germany in the future if the AfD gained power and remigration became government policy.
“What? Who would deport the Jews? That’s ridiculous,” Abramovych said.
An alternative critique of memory culture from the left
AfD had its first electoral win in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower parliamentary house, in 2017, becoming the third-largest party in the parliament. Shortly after, poet and political scientist Max Czollek published the best-selling De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century, a polemic about Jewish assimilation into German culture. As a result of his edgy take on memory culture in Germany, Czollek has become something of a celebrity, and a bit of a pariah.
For Czollek, AfD is the symptom of a greater problem in Germany where the nation’s guilt over the Holocaust creates a “theater of memory” — a term borrowed from the late sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann — in which Jews play out their dutiful role on the national stage, held up by the state as model minorities, but are subject to losing its protection if they deviate from accepted norms.
Thuringian AfD leader Bjorn Höcke gained infamy when he called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame,” but Czollek wrote that the idea was not new; in 1998, famed German left-wing intellectual Martin Walser called Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture “monumentalization of shame” in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Publishers’ Association.
To Czollek, AfD is just the latest step in a proud German tradition of tacitly accepting Nazism, albeit by a different name, in the East.
Behind Balenciaga sunglasses outside of a Kreuzberg cafe, Czollek described his family’s life in the former East Germany, part of a very small community of Jews who stayed after the war instead of departing for West Germany, America or Israel.
“The Jewish rituals I grew up with when my father started to reconnect to this tradition is more like the old, dark, empty synagogue singing of 20 people,” he explained. “And it’s like, ‘Why are there no people?’”
Czollek was born just before the Berlin wall came down, but for his family in East Germany, the Shoah was ever present in the absence of Jews. And it was magnified by what he described as a betrayal by the communist government that took over, which declared itself, its state and all of its citizens to be anti-Nazi — even if they had previously been active members of the Nazi party.
A report by the CIA in 1959 identified over 150 former high-ranking Nazi officials then working in positions of power within the communist East German government, and called it “doubtful” that they were sincere in the “change of political thinking.”
“You have this first generation of Jewish communists who came to Germany to build a better Germany and build up on this idea of anti-fascism as a proper fighting position,” he explained. “Suddenly, a lot of former Nazis were declared anti-fascist. So this is where the memory work fails.”
After the wall came down, Czollek argues that memory culture became a branding tool for Germany to prove itself as a democracy on the international stage — a tool that never offered anything meaningful to the few East German Jews like him, and that has proved ineffective at preventing the revival of a new ethno-nationalist right.
“Memory culture has become a tool in legitimizing and justifying the pride in Germany,” he said. But, he noted, memory culture is a relatively young part of German life; its widespread adoption came, ironically, during the “Years of the Baseball Bat” in the ‘90s, when neo-Nazi violence against migrants escalated severely.
After Oct. 7, Czollek believes that memory culture warped into something else entirely; today, anyone who speaks out against Israel’s response to the attacks in Gaza faces cancellation, disinvitation or even arrest.
“Memory culture used to be a pretty self-centered process of German self-improvement and reinvention,” Czollek said. “By now, it has become a tool of dominance and hegemony.”
“It’s almost like we have done the worst, and we have remembered the best,” he continued, opining that Holocaust and concentration camp memorials boost Germany’s national self-esteem and identity as a moral actor. Then, “you can start accusing migrants of not being as good as you are.”
And Jews who criticize the government’s version of memory culture risk losing state protection.
“There’s a tempting quality to playing along with the theater of memory, because being Jewish is rewarded if you do it in a specific way,” he continued. “Being a non-aligned Jew comes with a price.”
Although solidarity between Germany’s minorities — particularly Jews and Muslims — has become strained post-Oct. 7, exacerbated by the AfD, Czollek believes it’s the only way through the crisis brought about by memory culture and the rise of the far-right.
That’s why Czollek’s new book is called Alles auf Anfang — or, Everything Back to the Beginning. It’s a search for a new culture of remembrance in German life that includes not just Jews, but recognition of other migrant victims in German society.
Currently, much of Germany’s memory culture, exemplified in memorials like the Buchenwald concentration camp, keep their focus firmly in the past. But Czollek believes that, to address the current era, Germany needs to also find ways to commemorate violence perpetrated against its other minority groups.
“If you want to have memory culture as a living, active and productive thing today, it has to be updated every generation,” he said. “Sadness or grief is not a limited resource. We can all grieve together.”
The weaponization of memory culture against Jews
Immediately after Oct. 7, Wieland Hoban, a Jewish German living in Frankfurt am Main, began demonstrating against Germany’s support for Israel, and was arrested multiple times — the first time for wearing a shirt displaying a revolutionary fist logo, which is associated with the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel organization Samidoun that was banned in Germany a few days following the attack.
The next month, Hoban gave a speech where he said, “Germany can’t wash away its Holocaust guilt with the blood of Palestinians.” Afterwards, he was taken aside by police and charged on suspicion of Volksverhetzung — “incitement to hatred” — a charge that has been used by the German government to prosecute neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, and carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.
In Hoban’s view, memory culture had extended past its logical limits to charge him, a Jew, with a violation of the German criminal code for invoking his own history.
“They explained to me that I had mentioned the Holocaust and that in Germany, they take the Holocaust very seriously,” Hoban said. “This was a bit surreal.”
Hoban, a composer and translator, has been chairman of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East) since 2021. He told me that, like many artists in Germany, the cause of Palestinian self-determination has been important to him.
“This occupation of Judaism, through Zionism, had just pushed me away from any identification with Jewishness,” Hoban said. But joining Jüdische Stimme helped him resolve “an inner contradiction” he felt in being Jewish and also supporting Palestinians.
This June, Hoban received a text from a journalist asking him if he’d seen the latest report from the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on extremist groups in Germany. He hadn’t, but when he looked it up, Hoban learned that his organization had been labeled as a “foreign-related extremist” group.
While AfD is using the courts in an attempt to clear their domestic extremist label, Jüdische Stimme is not pushing back. Hoban doesn’t dispute the reasons for the label — he does criticize Israel and Germany’s memory culture — so his group sees no way to clear its name.
“I wish more people would just have the balls to say, ‘I don’t care if you call me antisemitic, I’m sticking to my guns here,’” Hoban said.
With the BfV’s extremist designation, Jüdische Stimme is now vulnerable to surveillance by the intelligence agency, as well as infiltration by informants.
But while the state is adamantly opposed to their cause, Hoban believes that public opinion is changing. The week that we spoke in September, a poll showed that 62% of all German voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including a majority of both Christian Democratic Union and AfD voters. A report by the International Federation for Human Rights also found in October that Germany, among other nations, has weaponized the fight against antisemitism to suppress dissent.
And, over a year after Hoban was charged with incitement to hatred, he received a letter from the public prosecutor’s office informing him that the charge against him had been dropped.
A concentration camp gets political
The Buchenwald Memorial was established in 1958 on the site of the former concentration camp by the government of East Germany to commemorate communist resistance fighters; it did not memorialize the dead Jews. But after reunification, the Memorial’s focus expanded to include the more than 56,000 people killed and 280,000 who were imprisoned at the site, becoming a centerpiece in Germany’s tapestry of memory.
Today, Buchenwald — one of the centerpieces of Germany’s memory culture — finds itself caught in the middle of the debate over how to remember the Holocaust. It’s using its mission to confront its dark history in a new way: fighting back against politicians who distort the Holocaust.
When an AfD member ran for mayor of Nordhausen, a city in Thuringia, in 2023, the Memorial’s official social media pages called him out online for dog whistling to right-wing extremists, invoking a false Holocaust-distorting conspiracy theory. The post changed the course of the election; in the first round of elections, the candidate had more than 45% of the vote, but after the Memorial’s statement, he failed to win in the second round.
“Many older inhabitants of Nordhausen who had not voted for many years said, ‘No, we don’t want to have a Holocaust denier as a mayor,’” the memorial’s director, Jens-Christian Wagner, said in an interview.
Last year, Wagner pursued a more extensive outreach with 300,000 letters mailed to seniors in Thuringia ahead of the state’s elections. The letters warned of the ways in which AfD party leaders have used Nazi language and distorted history.
The AfD fought back, taking the Memorial to court and accusing the Memorial of interfering in “political decision-making.” They lost.
“The court says explicitly that we can’t be neutral against any kind of Holocaust distortion,” Wagner explained to me.
With that mandate, Wagner now considers it his duty and the mission of the Memorial to combat Holocaust distortion, especially when it might affect elections. The Memorial has a particular interest; it’s located in Thuringia, where the AfD is gaining power, and it could lose its funding if the party wins control.
“With our interventions, we don’t think that we can change the positions of the AfD,” Wagner said. “We want to reach all these people who are not specifically voting for the AfD, who are in the gray zone, who can be rescued for democracy.”
Looking towards Germany’s future generations
The AfD has lately focused on reaching youth voters, spending heavily on digital outreach. As a result, young people in Germany are becoming increasingly anti-migrant, embracing far-right political ideas that were once verboten in Germany for being too close to Nazism.
Despite the Memorial’s successful interventions to deter adults from voting for AfD, Wagner is concerned about the rightward shift of younger generations, who are less likely to treat information from a Holocaust memorial with reverence — or even respect its history.
The director described young people who visit the Memorial on school trips displaying the Hitler salute, shouting “Sieg Heil” and photographing each other in front of crematory ovens.
“There were some right-wing young people in every school class for years, but these were only one or two, and the majority was against them, and this has completely changed,” Wagner said. “Now, spreading Holocaust distortion, being right-wing, is common sense in these school classes, and it’s very, very difficult for our educators to have a discourse with them.”
The Memorial has been attempting to revise their educational programming to make visits longer and more in-depth, and even built a youth hostel on the site so that school groups can stay and have extended experiences that they hope will make a lasting impact.
Alan Bern, of the Other Music Academy, also is also worried about the younger generations; he sees resonating with Germany’s youth as one of his most urgent and important challenges.
“Young people in Weimar have almost no real relationship to what it is that we’re doing,” Bern said. “So when they’re told ‘You shouldn’t be antisemitic,’ it’s just some adult telling them ‘Don’t do this.’”
Like at Buchenwald, where the education department has placed its hopes for the future into its youth hostel, Bern wants to transform the former youth prison next to Other Music Academy into a dormitory of sorts where young people can stay for several days. The dichotomy of the prison’s barbed wire courtyard and its painted exterior wall, which artists have covered with colorful Keith Haring murals, pose a striking question about the direction of Germany’s future: Which way?
Pointing towards the floor and then to the prison across the driveway, Bern said, jokingly: “It’s either this or that.”
Challenged from both the left and the right, it’s unclear what is next for Germany’s memory culture. For now, the younger generations are caught in the middle.
While waiting at the bus stop to head back from Buchenwald, I found myself unexpectedly sandwiched in the middle of a high school tour group as they posed for a class photo. After we all boarded the bus, about half of them sat quietly — maybe contemplating the horrors they’d just seen, maybe dozing off. But as we drove down the hill toward Weimar, the bus also filled with the sound of laughter.
The future of memory culture, ultimately, will be up to them.
The post How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Expands Child Soldier Recruitment, Cracks Down on Dissent Amid Escalating US-Israeli Strikes
A blaze after Israel’s Fire and Rescue Service said that an industrial building and a fuel tanker at Israel’s Oil Refineries were hit by debris from an intercepted Iranian missile, amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, in Haifa, Israel, March 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Rami Shlush
As US and Israeli strikes pound Iranian military sites, Iran is lowering the enlistment age for security roles to 12 and threating civilians with death for photographing war damage, fueling international outrage.
Last week, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced a campaign recruiting children as young as 12 to serve as “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” assisting with patrols, checkpoints, and logistics.
With the minimum age for war roles officially lowered to 12, human rights groups are now condemning the move, demanding that Iranian authorities immediately halt the campaign while imposing a complete ban on enlisting children under 18 in all military and paramilitary forces.
“There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds,” Bill Van Esveld, associate director for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.”
“The officials involved in this reprehensible policy are putting children at risk of serious and irreversible harm and themselves at risk of criminal liability,” Van Esveld continued. “Senior leaders who fail to put a stop to this can make no claim to care for Iran’s children.”
For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.
In the past, widely circulated social media images and videos have repeatedly shown children and teenagers in military-style uniforms cracking down on protests, including during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which erupted nationwide after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died in a Tehran police station following her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules.
Under international law, Iran’s latest initiative flagrantly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which explicitly prohibits the use of children in military activities, marking a dramatic breach of its global obligations.
Human Rights Watch also uncovered multiple other war crimes, including the Iranian government’s relentless use of cluster munitions delivered by ballistic missiles at Israel since the conflict erupted last month. At least four civilians have been killed in these strikes, which constitute clear violations of international humanitarian law.
“Iran’s use of cluster munitions in populated areas in Israel pose a foreseeable and long-lasting danger to civilians,” Patrick Thompson, a researcher in HRW’s Crisis, Conflict, and Arms Division, said in a statement. “Cluster munition bomblets are dispersed over a wide area, making them unlawfully indiscriminate in violation of the laws of war.”
Fired from rockets, missiles, or aircraft, cluster munitions spread dozens of explosive bomblets across large areas, leaving many unexploded and posing a long-term, landmine-like danger to civilians for years or even decades.
Amid relentless US and Israeli attacks and mounting international pressure, the regime is also intensifying its domestic crackdown, now warning that photographing war-damaged areas could carry the death penalty.
Under this newly enacted policy, people accused of spying or cooperating with “hostile states” could face the death penalty and have all their assets confiscated.
Anyone caught photographing damaged sites could be accused of espionage, potentially providing intelligence to coalition forces, and face execution.
“People who take photos or videos of damaged sites and share them are effectively confirming whether strikes hit their targets,” Iran’s judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Tuesday, describing the action as the equivalent of cooperating with and providing intelligence to the enemy.
According to Iranian media and watchdog groups, more than 1,000 people have been arrested this month for filming sensitive locations, sharing anti-government content online, or allegedly “cooperating with the enemy.”
Against the backdrop of large-scale US and Israeli strikes pounding key regime strongholds in Shiraz and Isfahan — where critical military infrastructure has been repeatedly hit — tensions have surged to a boiling point as the pressure campaign intensifies
On Tuesday, the Israeli Air Force launched another sustained wave of precision airstrikes against Iranian weapons production and research facilities around Tehran, seeking to disrupt and dismantle the missile supply and manufacturing networks that support Tehran’s military arsenal.
Meanwhile, the IRGC this week threatened 18 American multinational technology and industrial companies, accusing them of involvement in “terrorist operations” and labeling them as “legitimate targets.”
“We advise the employees of these institutions to immediately distance themselves from their workplaces to preserve their lives,” the statement published on Tuesday said. “These companies should expect the destruction of their respective units in exchange for each terror act in Iran, starting from 8 PM Tehran time on Wednesday, April 1st.”
Among the companies mentioned were major corporations such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, IBM, Tesla, and Boeing.
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Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
When Elly Cohen chose to terminate her pregnancy in 2022, it aligned with her understanding of Jewish law that life begins at birth, not conception.
Cohen and her husband were eager to give their then 4-year-old daughter a sibling. But her fetus had been diagnosed with Trisomy 18, a severe chromosomal disorder that, in most cases, leads to death before birth or within the first year of life. She decided to end the pregnancy.
Had she gotten pregnant just a few months later, she might not have had that choice. She lives in Indiana, one of 13 states that enacted near-total bans on abortion following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
Indiana’s law does allow abortion for for lethal fetal anomalies up to 22 weeks, but doctors bear legal risk in determining whether a particular diagnosis meets the statute’s definition — a gray area that can lead to delays or reluctance to provide care.
That reality stirred Cohen into action. She co-founded Hoosier Jews for Choice, a Jewish group that advocates for abortion access, which joined five anonymous women of multiple faiths in a lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Their argument relied on a religious freedom law — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA — signed by former Indiana governor Mike Pence in 2015. It was one of many such state laws passed amid calls from some evangelical Christians to establish their right not to do business that violated their beliefs, such as baking a wedding cake for a gay wedding.
Hoosier Jews for Choice saw an opening for Jews to exercise their religious freedom under the same law, but for a purpose at odds with evangelical Christianity: to gain access to abortion. Earlier this month, Judge Christina Klineman of Marion County Superior Court agreed, permanently blocking enforcement of the state’s abortion ban for plaintiffs with sincere religious objections.
Hoosier Jews for Choice is celebrating the ruling as the biggest legal win to date in support of the argument that abortion bans violate Jews’ religious freedom. The group is hopeful that similar cases can build on the Indiana case’s success nationwide.
The ruling could still be reversed: Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has appealed the decision, and the case is headed to the Indiana Supreme Court, where all five justices are Republican appointees. Meanwhile, Klineman, elected to the bench in 2014 after winning a Democratic primary, has faced calls for her impeachment over her decision, in what U.S. Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) called “one of the most ridiculous rulings I’ve seen in a long time.”
But for Amalia Shifriss, who testified on behalf of Hoosier Jews for Choice in the lawsuit, the latest ruling is a positive sign that the law will be applied consistently. If religious freedom applies to Christians objecting to baking a same-sex wedding cake, she said, then it must apply to liberal Jews, too.
“RFRA should not just be for what some lawmakers see as the religious right,” Shifriss told the Forward. “It should be for all religions.”
‘Perversion of the law’s intent’
In winning the right to an abortion, Hoosier Jews for Choice relied on a law passed by Pence, who would become Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate on the strength of his reputation as a stalwart advocate for evangelical Christians. Pence rose to national prominence based on his unwavering opposition to abortion — and his conservative leadership as Indiana governor.
Anti-abortion advocacy organizations — including Indiana Right to Life and SBA Pro-Life America — supported the law.
Back in 2015, the debate over RFRA centered on small-business owners that sought to refuse service to LGBTQ+ people. Eric Miller, a conservative activist who was in the room when Pence signed the law, wrote then that “Christian bakers, florists and photographers should not be punished for refusing to participate in a homosexual marriage!”
Massive backlash against the law — notably by the NCAA the weekend before the Final Four basketball game was slated to occur in Indianapolis — led Pence to sign into law a clarification that businesses could not use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to deny services to people on the basis of their sexual orientation.
But the law itself remained on the books — ripe for abortion-rights groups to wield a decade later.
Now, a little over a decade after Indiana first passed RFRA, organizations that once supported the law’s broad application have changed their tune.
“For the court to rule that taking the life of an unborn child is an exercise of religious freedom is deeply distressing — and a perversion of the law’s intent,” Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter said in an online statement following Klineman’s March 5 ruling. Indiana Right to Life did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
That shift has been part of a larger legal trend: Conservative Christian groups like Alliance Defending Freedom have long argued that the government must have a compelling reason to force someone to act against their religious beliefs — whether mandating vaccines, serving LGBTQ clients, or covering contraception in employee health care plans.
But when it came to religious plaintiffs who support abortion access, some on the Christian right didn’t think the same expansive view of religious freedom applied.
“Indiana’s religious freedom laws were passed for the purpose of protecting religious practice, not to protect the ending of a human life,”Indiana’s religious freedom laws were passed for the purpose of protecting religious practice, not to protect the ending of a human life,” Alexander Mingus, executive director of the Indiana Catholic Conference, said in an online statement after Klineman’s ruling. “Religions that preach violence are not protected by religious freedom claims.”
Mingus did not respond to the Forward’s request for an interview.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit that has made its name arguing religious freedom cases in front of the Supreme Court, also objected to the Jewish plaintiffs’ interpretation of RFRA. In 2014, Becket successfully argued in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. that employers could refuse to cover contraception on religious grounds. Meanwhile, in the Indiana case, Becket filed a brief questioning the sincerity of the Jewish plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.
“The case fails RFRA’s test for multiple reasons, including allowing people to join Hoosier Jews for Choice by filling out an anonymous Google form with zero requirement to actually agree with Jewish religious teachings,” Lori Windham, senior counsel for Becket, said in a statement to the Forward.
Cohen disputed that characterization. She said that all members of Hoosier Jews for Choice were required to share their name and contact information, which it did not make public in order to protect members’ confidentiality. She added that group members who joined the lawsuit were asked to indicate whether they could connect their view on the abortion ban to their Jewish values and beliefs, and the vast majority of members did.
David Schraub, an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School who has written about the Indiana case, said that courts do assess whether a religious belief seems genuine. But according to Schraub, the bar for establishing sincerity is low — typically an issue only in cases clearly brought in bad faith. For instance, Schraub recalled a case in which a defendant, trying to avoid paying taxes, cycled through various legal arguments before ultimately inventing “the Church of Ayn Rand.”
The Indiana case is fundamentally different, Schraub said, given the long-standing religious grounding for more permissive Jewish views on abortion.
“They tried to argue that this was not a sincerely held religious belief, which I think was really quite disrespectful, because it flies in the face of a lot of evidence about what we know about how Jews conceptualize the relationship to reproductive freedom,” Schraub said. “They’re just not willing to accept that there is such a thing as a sincere and genuine liberal religious tradition.”
Jewish beliefs, Jewish practices
A 2014 Pew Research poll found an estimated 83% of American Jews believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That’s likely because Jews across denominations largely agree that life begins at birth, not conception. Sources in the Talmud say that in the first 40 days of pregnancy, the fetus is considered “mere water.” Jews value the fetus as “potential life,” gaining the legal status of nefesh, or personhood, at birth.
Still, Jews do not have monolithic views on abortion. Orthodox groups are divided, though couples generally consult rabbis on the matter and believe the choice to get an abortion should be governed by Jewish law, not personal choice.
The Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly supports the right to choose abortion in cases where “continuation of a pregnancy might cause severe physical or psychological harm, or where the fetus is judged by competent medical opinion as severely defective.”
Reform Judaism emphasizes bodily autonomy, with the view that “the decision to terminate a pregnancy is one that, in all circumstances, should ultimately be made by the individual within whose body the fetus is growing.”
Rabbi Sandy Sasso — one of three rabbis the ACLU asked to give expert testimony in the Indiana case, and the first woman ordained a rabbi in Reconstructionist Judaism — told the Forward that the diversity of opinion within Judaism underscores the argument for challenging abortion bans.
“That actually is just the point — there are different religious views,” Sasso said. “The Constitution does not allow you, since there is separation of church and state, to enshrine one religious view over the other.”
Can religion and abortion coexist?
Shira Zemel, abortion access campaign director at the National Council of Jewish Women, is helping lead a national push to reframe “reproductive freedom as religious freedom.”
Each year since 2021, the Council has organized “Repro Shabbat,” which aligns with the Torah portion from Exodus Parashat Misphatim. The portion says that if a man pushes a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry, he should pay a fine. But if any other damage results, the punishment should be according to the principle of “eye for an eye.” The portion is often interpreted as evidence that Judaism does not view a fetus as having the same legal status as a person.
The group has also backed that argument in court, filing a brief with 21 other organizations of faith in support of the plaintiffs challenging Indiana’s abortion ban — and hoping similar lawsuits will build on that case’s success nationwide.
The legal pathway exists in many places: 29 states have their own versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, including at least 11 that severely restricted abortion after the Dobbs decision. According to Ken Falk, legal director of the ACLU of Indiana, the same legal reasoning used in Indiana could feasibly be applied in any of those states.
Some legal challenges are already underway, including in Kentucky and South Carolina, where litigation is ongoing. Others have faltered: In Missouri, a judge upheld the state’s abortion ban after a group of interfaith clergy sued on religious grounds. In Florida, a Jewish-led challenge to a ban after six weeks of pregnancy fizzled out after Rabbi Barry Silver, who brought the case on behalf of his synagogue, died of colon cancer in 2024.
Zemel said she hopes the Indiana case can serve as not only a legal blueprint, but also as a sign of a broader cultural shift in how religion is understood in the abortion debate.
“It’s incredible to me to see how this legal argument is bolstering what I like to think is a huge narrative shift,” Zemel said. “For far too long, it’s been weaponized that religion and abortion can’t coexist, but we know that that’s not the case.”
The post Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right appeared first on The Forward.
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Syria Will Stay Out of Iran conflict Unless It Faces Aggression, President Says
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa attends the Ministry of Awqaf conference titled “Unity of Islamic Discourse” at the Conference Palace in Damascus, Syria, Feb. 16, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said on Tuesday that his country will stay out of the US-Israeli war against Iran unless Syria is subject to aggression and has no diplomatic solutions.
“Unless Syria is targeted by any party, Syria will remain outside any conflict,” the Syrian president said at an event hosted by think tank Chatham House in London.
“We do not want Syria to be an arena of war. But unfortunately, today, things are not governed by wise minds. The situation is volatile and random,” the president said.
The month-long conflict has spread across the region, killing thousands, disrupting energy supplies, and threatening to send the global economy into a tailspin.
“We want Syria to have ideal relationships with the entire region, with Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and world powers like the UK, France, Germany, and the US. I think that Syria is qualified to start a strategic relationship network,” he said, responding to a question on whether Syria would stay neutral while the conflict goes on.
Syria has been keen to stay on the sidelines of the regional conflict that has pulled in neighboring countries, including Lebanon, where armed group Hezbollah is locked in fighting with Israeli ground troops, and Iraq, where Iran-aligned factions have launched drone and rocket attacks.
Syria sent thousands of troops to its western border with Lebanon and its eastern border with Iraq earlier this month. Syria‘s defense ministry said the deployment was part of efforts to “protect and control the borders amid the escalating regional conflict.”
“We had enough war. We paid a large bill. We are not ready for another war experience,” Syria‘s president said.