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How schools are teaching about Israel now, and winning back Jewish donors
Silicon Valley philanthropists Eli and Jeanette Reinhard are known for their generosity to Jewish causes, from the local Jewish federation to the counterterrorism project at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. They are especially generous on the campus of their alma mater, Stanford University, where Eli Reinhard helped found the Jewish Studies department and the Hebraic book section at the university library.
But that was before the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the anti-Israel protests that followed on U.S. college campuses, including Stanford. When the couple was asked to help fund the university’s new Israel Program, they thought long and hard.
“We have had to answer the question internally within our family: Why are you doing this? Why here?” Jeanette Reinhard told the Forward.
“We like investing in meaningful change. We felt we could have it here.”
But they did have one condition: they wanted to shake hands with University President Jonathan Levin.
“We wanted to look in his eyes and say, ‘Are you behind this?’” Reinhard said.
At a time when private donors seem to have grown wary of endowing university professorships or programs in Jewish or Israel Studies, for fear their name will one day be attached to a problematic curriculum, universities are rethinking how to frame and where to house their courses of study about Israel.
“The splits are real and they go across the country,” said Indiana University Professor Alvin Rosenfeld. “A lot of donors giving good money to some of these universities are really very angry about the way the money is being spent and they are reassessing.”
Rosenfeld founded Indiana’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, the oldest such institute in the country and one of several models that schools have recently adopted either to assuage donors’ concerns, address an urgent gap after Oct. 7 or both. Schools including New York University, University of Michigan and Brandeis followed Indiana’s approach.
Other campuses have tried different models. This fall, the Harvard Kennedy School folded Israel into its Middle East Initiative, and Stanford University inaugurated the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program within its Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. The Stanford program was supported by an endowment from the family foundation of the founder of What’s App plus additional support from the Reinhards.
“I think our track record has convinced a number of donors and potential donors of our intellectual independence and seriousness of purpose,” said Larry Diamond, Stanford’s Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where the Israel program is housed. “The proof has been in what we have done and the credibility that we have built.”
Israel as one among many
Harvard has received only “modest” financial support for its Israel program, but its necessity prompted Middle East Initiative Director Tarek Masoud to launch it anyway.
Israel joins other country-specific programs at the Kennedy School dedicated to studies of Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Syria and fulfills Masoud’s longtime goal of expanding the initiative beyond Arab countries. Two major gifts financed the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science and the Emirates Leadership Initiative. The Syrian Transition Lab and Israel Program do not have the same kind of backing.c
But the Israel program also meets a demand, Masoud said. When he taught a course last spring titled “Arguing the Israel Palestinian Conflict,” he said students camped out in the hall to plead their case for admission.
The program grew out of Masoud’s Middle East Dialogues series, which over the years has welcomed a wide range of speakers, from President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who helped broker the Abraham Accords, to Arab American University associate professor Dalal Saeb Iriqat, whose social media posts calling the Oct. 7 Hamas attack a “normal struggle 4 #Freedom” sparked outrage.
“This is not going to be a place where Israel is protected,” Masoud said. “It’s a place where Israel and Israelis will be engaged, fully and openly, without bias or animus.”
In other words, the mission is scholarship and critical thinking, not advocacy. The only political stance the Harvard program takes is that it does not exclude or boycott any country, including Israel.
The addition of Israel to the initiative comes amid Harvard’s ongoing fight with the Trump administration over research grants, international student enrollment and a newly launched Department of Labor investigation into foreign visas. Other schools such as Columbia University have struck agreements with the Trump administration to review regional area programs, starting with the Middle East. Though a year later, there had been no reforms.
But the Harvard program is not a response to the conversations on campus or an effort to appease the administration, said Israel Program Director Barak Sella. It is a response to the critical role of Israel in the region, he said. A senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Sella focuses on U.S.-Israel relations and the evolving relationship between American Jews and Zionism.
“With all due respect to the complicated conversations we’re having on campus, which deserve the highest level of respect, the real issues are the people in that world, these economies, these societies,” Sella said. “That is our focus. How do I support making the Middle East a more prosperous and safer place to all the people who inhabit it?”
As a student at the Kennedy School during Oct. 7, Sella witnessed firsthand the disinformation and discourse on campus. He admired Masoud’s courage to platform different points of view, “but opinions that have serious intellectual capacity behind them, not just driven by who is the loudest on social media.”
“The role of Middle East studies at universities it’s not to import the conflicts of the Middle East into American society,” Sella said. “Our role is to use the resources we have, the privileges, opportunities and platform to export solutions to the Middle East.”
To do that effectively, Israel can’t be isolated from the other countries. It must be treated as part of the region, he said.
“The issue is that when you look at the Middle Eastern studies centers, unfortunately in many cases, you see Israel excluded and not treated in the lens we want to treat it — another country in the Middle East that has its advantages, its setbacks, its good actors, its bad actors,” Sella said.
Israel as democracy
Stanford intentionally took a different approach when launching its Israel program. At the time its pilot was launched, there was no Middle East Studies department in which to integrate. But even if there had been, Diamond said, that was not an option.
“The record of Israel studies programs being located in that type of center at other campuses has raised a number of issues and problems,” Diamond told the Forward, though he didn’t specify where it has been an issue or how.
Though schools like University of Maryland and Boston University offer Israel Studies minors as part of their Jewish Studies departments, that didn’t seem to be a viable home at Stanford, as that department more often partners with religious studies, history and comparative literature. That gap sparked the Reinhards’ interest.
“After Oct. 7, Stanford was certainly not immune to some of the stuff we saw on various college campuses,” Jeanette Reinhard said. “And the question was raised in our heads, ‘Well, where is Jewish studies in all of this? Why is Jewish studies not there to be actively countering the misinformation?’ And that’s when we realized that’s not really what Jewish Studies is designed to do.”
Instead, Diamond proposed studying Israel among other democracies, which is why Stanford launched the pilot within its Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) in Fall 2022. During this period, the program hosted webinars and events, including a revival of the annual Daniel Pearl Memorial lecture, which it co-sponsored with the campus Hillel. The program also organized a conference comparing Israel and California’s responses to climate challenges.
“We went from strength to strength and more than proved proof of concept,” Diamond said. “As a result, we raised considerable money in the annual gifts, and we eventually attracted the confidence of two endowment donors,” referring to the Reinhards and the Koum Family Foundation.
Amichai Magen, director of the Jam Koum Israel Studies Program, said the program has broad appeal across campus. Classes include students from East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and more than three-quarters of those enrolled have no family or personal history in Israel. At least one of his courses, titled “Israel: Society, Politics, and Policy,” is cross-listed with political science, international relations and Jewish Studies.
“Israel has so much to offer in terms of its history, culture, society, legal field, politics, external relations, innovation, and security (to name just a few) that, in our courses and other programming, we mainly focus on the lived experience of Israelis,” Magen said.
While there are no courses reserved to study anti-Zionism and antisemitism, those topics naturally come up in class conversations as students discuss the Jewish historical experience.
“Inevitably, when you teach and program about Israel, you also wind up having to address the attempts to stigmatize and isolate the state of Israel, and the complex relations between antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” said Diamond, who also cofounded the Stanford Community Forum on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.
Anti-Zionism question
Addressing Israel through the lens of those who hate it is yet another approach universities have adopted. Indiana’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism has made anti-Zionism a central focus of research at the institute, which just secured a $6 million grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Over the next three years, five working groups of a dozen scholars each will study various aspects of what drives contemporary antisemitism – including religion, digital communication, political culture and rhetoric – how it manifests and how to curb it. Anti-Zionism will be a theme that runs through all five. The institute will work with the Wilson Center, a public policy think tank in Washington D.C., which will formulate public policies to address it.
“There’s no way to address today’s hostility toward today’s Jews without understanding hostility toward the Jewish state,” Rosenfeld told the Forward.
While there is no Israel Studies program per se at Indiana, the Jewish Studies department does house the Olamot Center, which hosts Israeli scholars and teaches some classes about Israel.
Günther Jikeli, the associate director of the institute, who is known as one of Israel’s fiercest defenders on campus, has secured funding for a partnership with the business school focused on entrepreneurship and innovation in the Start-Up Nation. Students will explore how such a resource-scarce nation blossomed into a global hub for technological innovation.
Jikeli and Rosenfeld hope the partnership sparks curiosity among students to learn more. Jikeli recently stepped down from a controversial stint as interim director of Indiana’s Jewish Studies program. Shortly after his appointment, he stripped travel funding from an anti-Zionist graduate student in the program and declined to say whether he would allow the department to support any research that was critical of Zionism. Interim co-directors have taken his place after an unsuccessful yearlong search for a permanent replacement.
“Numbers of Jewish Studies programs have appointed faculty members who don’t line up with the donors when it comes to Jewish values, and especially when it comes to Zionism and anti-Zionism,” Rosenfeld said. “Is there unanimity of opinion among faculty? No. Is it hampering the work we need to do? No.”
Jeanette and Eli Reinhard understand the anger and wariness of their peers, but to them, it doesn’t make sense to withhold money from education that could help solve the problem.
“There are no guarantees in life,” Jeanette Reinhard said. “Fifty years from now, who knows? You have to say what’s here right now that we have reasonable hope in.”
The post How schools are teaching about Israel now, and winning back Jewish donors appeared first on The Forward.
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In a family divided over Israel, which side would Tevye choose?
Sixteen members of my family spent two terrifying years concealed in the attic of a peasant’s home in rural Poland during the Holocaust. Their lives depended on the extraordinary courage of the Polish couple and on the hope that the world outside would eventually become a place where they could live freely again. When liberation came, the 13 survivors emerged carrying memories that would shape generations to come.
My mother was among them. Like so many survivors, she rarely spoke of the past, but its presence was unmistakable in our childhood. We inherited our parents’ anxieties, their sense of vulnerability and their understanding of how suddenly the familiar world could become dangerous.
For the generation raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel represented an extraordinary transformation in Jewish history. After centuries of persecution, culminating in the systematic murder of six million Jews, the Jewish people possessed a sovereign state capable of providing refuge and defending its citizens. For families such as mine, whose survival had depended on the willingness of a stranger to risk her life on their behalf, the significance of Jewish self-determination carried an emotional weight far beyond the ordinary language of politics.
For many younger American Jews, their understanding of Israel has been shaped by the occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish settlements there, the suffering of Palestinians and now the Oct. 7 attacks and the devastating consequences of the war in Gaza.
The result is a profound generational divide in which people who share a historical inheritance increasingly struggle to recognize one another’s moral reasoning. For parents whose understanding of Israel emerged from the Holocaust and its aftermath, challenges to the legitimacy of the Jewish state can awaken deeply embedded fears about Jewish vulnerability. For their children, expressions of unconditional loyalty to Israel can seem incompatible with the moral responsibilities they associate with their Jewish upbringing.
As I began thinking about how to explore these divisions dramatically, I found myself returning to Sholem Aleichem and Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye the milkman struggles to reconcile his love for his daughters with their rejection of traditions he has spent his life upholding. His conversations with God, his humor and his anguish capture something timeless about Jewish family life: the painful realization that the next generation may not embrace the values and beliefs that have sustained its parents.
I wondered what Tevye’s dilemma might look like in an American Jewish family today. The questions have changed, but the underlying struggle remains remarkably familiar. Where Tevye wrestled with his daughters’ choices about marriage and religious tradition, today’s Jewish parents may find themselves confronting children whose views about Israel challenge their deepest understanding of Jewish history and survival. Like Tevye, they must ask themselves how far they can bend without betraying what they believe, and whether holding too tightly to those beliefs risks losing the people they love most.
Marc Chagall’s paintings provided another source of inspiration. His floating violinists, suspended above the rooftops of Eastern European villages, evoke a Jewish world that has largely vanished but whose traditions, memories and anxieties continue to shape succeeding generations. The image of a violinist hovering above a modern Manhattan street became a way for me to connect that lost world to the lives of an American Jewish family struggling with questions their ancestors could scarcely have imagined.
Such tensions form the central conflict of my new play, The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue, which unfolds during a gathering in the Upper West Side apartment of a Jewish family. The evening descends into confrontation when the youngest son arrives with his anti-Zionist girlfriend, whose convictions challenge the father’s understanding of Jewish history and survival.
As the argument deepens, the son insists that Jewish identity carries no automatic obligation of loyalty to a state, while his father, for whom Israel embodies the aspirations and sacrifices of generations, demands an affirmation of the Jewish state’s importance. Their disagreement becomes so painful that the father orders the young couple to leave, turning a family celebration into an occasion of rupture and exposing the fragility of relationships that had seemed secure.
The father’s anguish emerges from a history that has shaped his deepest convictions, while his son’s resistance reflects a different understanding of the responsibilities that accompany Jewish identity. Each approaches the argument with the conviction that something essential is at stake, and each experiences the other’s position as a challenge to values that have become inseparable from his sense of self. Their inability to recognize the emotional and historical foundations of each other’s beliefs transforms a political disagreement into a crisis of familial belonging.
I recognize in this conflict an echo of the questions that first led me to explore my history. In 1988, I made a documentary about my family’s experiences, returning to Poland with my aunt and cousins to meet the couple who had sheltered our relatives. The journey was an attempt to recover a history that had shaped our lives while remaining largely beyond the reach of ordinary family conversation.
My mother’s generation carried experiences whose enormity often exceeded the possibilities of language, while their children absorbed the consequences of those experiences through the atmosphere of family life. The silence surrounding the Holocaust became a form of communication in itself, shaping our understanding of danger, responsibility and the precariousness of Jewish existence.
Today, the challenge facing many Jewish families arises from the intensity of their disagreements and the difficulty of sustaining meaningful conversation across them. The language of political conviction can leave little room for complexities, and can seem to contradict inherited experience, particularly when arguments about Israel become measures of moral character or Jewish authenticity.
I have experienced some of these tensions within my own extended family, particularly in conversations with younger relatives whose understanding of Israel differs sharply from mine. One nephew has been intensely critical of Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza and deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians, while firmly rejecting Hamas. He accepted many of the accusations made against Israel during the war, including some that were subsequently disputed or discredited, such as an early account of a hospital bombing. Our disagreements reflected the different sources of information we trusted, as well as the different assumptions and experiences we brought to the conflict.
My nephew and I eventually recognized how quickly our conversations became heated and decided to try a different approach, exchanging articles, podcasts and other material that might help each of us understand the other’s perspective. Even that effort generated tension, and we gradually abandoned it, leaving Israel as a subject we largely avoid when we are together. I have often wondered whether the play might help us find a way back to those conversations, allowing us to recognize in the characters something of ourselves and perhaps understand why the same events can provoke such different reactions among people who love one another.
The fears of older generations deserve to be understood within the historical circumstances that produced them, just as the ethical concerns of younger Jews deserve serious consideration on their own terms. Acknowledging the suffering of Palestinians and the legitimate aspirations of their people can coexist with an understanding of Jewish historical vulnerability and the importance of Israel to Jewish collective life. Such recognition requires a willingness to engage with the experiences and convictions that give different perspectives their emotional force.
Families possess a particular responsibility in this regard because their bonds reach beyond the political positions of any given moment. Parents transmit values, memories and traditions to their children, but the meaning of that inheritance inevitably changes as children encounter the world through their own experiences. The continuity of a family depends in part on its capacity to accommodate that transformation while preserving the relationships through which its history is passed along.
In my play, the father eventually encounters a form of ancestral wisdom through a dream in which his family’s long-departed relatives return, including the milkman who, according to family lore, inspired Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye. These ancestors urge him to apologize for the harm he has caused and to leave the door open for his son, an appeal that places the preservation of their relationship alongside the convictions that have divided them. Family can and must prevail, even when the questions at stake touch the deepest elements of identity.
When I think of the 16 members of my family who survived together in that attic in Poland, I think of the extraordinary value of the lives that were preserved and of the generations that followed because a courageous woman chose to shelter them. Their story belongs to a history of persecution and survival, but it also attaches to the human capacity for solidarity and the responsibility we bear toward one another.
The generations that followed inherited both the memory of that vulnerability and the opportunity to build lives enriched by freedoms their ancestors could hardly have imagined. Honoring that inheritance requires an understanding of the fears that shaped our parents, together with an openness to the different moral questions that confront our children.
The future of Jewish family life will depend in part on our ability to sustain those conversations with generosity, humility and a recognition of the profound bonds that connect us across generations. Our disagreements over Israel may remain intense, and the questions they raise will continue to demand serious engagement. Yet the preservation of our relationships is itself an expression of the continuity that our ancestors struggled so desperately to secure.
We can honor their memory by keeping our doors open to one another.
The post In a family divided over Israel, which side would Tevye choose? appeared first on The Forward.
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This 90-year-old Jewish performer and promoter is the Zelig of folk music
Harry Tuft was in a taxi with Judy Collins, who had her guitar with her. The cab driver looked back and asked if the two of them were folk singers. They replied in the affirmative.
“Folk music is dead,” the cab driver asserted.
“We kind of chuckled a little and said, ‘Oh, really, how come?’” Tuft recalled.
“Did you see Ed Sullivan last night?”
The passengers replied that they hadn’t.
“There was a group on there called The Beatles. Folk music is dead.”
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of folk music were an exaggeration.
“That was a time when, really, we didn’t know what was going to happen,” Tuft said during a recent Zoom interview from his home in Denver.
“I think it’s thanks to groups like Peter, Paul and Mary and maybe somebody like Joan Baez and Judy Collins and John Denver — people who were popular enough and smart enough to appeal to a larger segment of the population. They really kept folk music alive.”
The genre lived on, also, thanks to the efforts of the now-90-year-old Tuft, who was more than a bit player in the folk music revival during the 1960s. He founded the Denver Folklore Center in 1962 and, with others in 1979, founded the Swallow Hill Music Association, which presents concerts, teaches music classes for all ages and offers outreach programs. In 2012, Tuft was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.
Tuft was also a link in the chain that led to Bob Dylan meeting the Beatles. He also may be the only nonagenarian who released an album this year.
“Friends, Lovers & Other Strangers” includes songs by artists like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, as well as ones by some of Tuft’s friends. It also includes a cover of the Nat King Cole Trio’s “Nature Boy.”
“I grew up in Philadelphia listening to pop music of the day on radio stations WPEN and WIBG, and R&B stations at night,” Tuft writes in the album’s liner notes. “This song was popular across the board.”
Tuft’s paternal grandfather, Dr. Jacob L. Manasses, was the founder of Bushkill Farms Camp, a Jewish boys camp in the Pocono mountains. Tuft went to Indian Lake, another Jewish camp in the Poconos. A counselor at his camp played the ukulele. Tuft, who played piano and clarinet, soon acquired a ukulele. “I found out there was such a thing as a baritone uke and it turns out that the tuning of the baritone is the same as the four highest strings of the guitar, so I was already two-thirds of the way to a guitar,” he said. “It was very customary in those days for Jewish kids somewhere in their college years to go to Europe so I bought a Chimes guitar and carried it with me.”
Tuft intended to become a doctor like his father and paternal grandfather. But his grades weren’t good enough to get into medical school. Instead, he graduated from Dartmouth in 1957 with a degree in philosophy. He went to graduate school for architecture at the University of Pennsylvania with thoughts of being a city planner.
“But music won out,” said Tuft.
While at Dartmouth, Tuft met Pete Seeger at a folk club. Seeger met with the club members in the afternoon and performed that night.
“He was really intent on getting us as a group to go out into the community and see if we could find people who had songs to offer. He arrived in a blue Plymouth station wagon with his kids on a mattress in the back. His wife, Toshi, set up a display in the hall and sold Pete’s Folkways Records after the concert. Here was this icon, this important person in my musical life in the moment, and he was just getting along,” he said.
“He requested a large log, and did a song called ‘Didn’t Old John (Cross the Water).’ It included a place to swing the axe. Unfortunately, the podium was very slick and Seeger ended up chasing the log all over the ‘stage.’”
After graduating from Dartmouth, Tuft joined the growing folk music scene that was centered around the Gilded Cage in Philadelphia. There, he met his lifelong friend Dick Weissman, a banjoist and guitarist who was in the Journeymen with John Phillips, who would go on to found the Mamas and the Papas.
Tuft eventually ventured out to Colorado, where he auditioned at The Exodus, a Denver folk club.
Tuft was told about the owner: “If he was going to hire you he would be critical and if he was not he would be nice to you. And he was nice to me, so I knew that I wasn’t going to get a job there.
“I had a repertoire that was out of the ordinary, and I was never really attracted to the ‘quote’ popular folk songs,” Tuft said. “As a matter of fact, when it came to trying to make a living playing in the bars what they wanted to hear were the popular songs by the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary or the Brothers Four, and I didn’t know those songs.”
“I’m a sucker for a story, I’m a balladeer. I love ballads. Quite often, I do ballads of 10, 12, 14 verses because I like the form so much.”
The Exodus owner said that he thought someone could make a part-time living opening a folklore center like Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in Greenwich Village. “I sometimes joke and say that he was right. I opened a full-time folklore center in order to make a part-time living.”
Tuft also sold records, instruments, strings and accessories and it was the strings and accessories that paid the rent.
The shop became a way station for up-and-coming folk musicians traveling between Chicago and the West Coast. When Bob Dylan made his first cross-country tour and played in Denver, he had his mail forwarded to Tuft’s store.
“Even then, he had an attitude about him,” Tuft recalled. “The following summer I saw him at the Kettle of Fish in the Village, and he grudgingly acknowledged that we had met.”
After a visit to Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, he started a school for Denver musicians and soon branched out into promotion. His first job was for Joan Baez who sold out a 2,400 seat house in March 1964.
Baez was involved with Dylan at that time and wanted to get him to meet The Beatles, who were playing Red Rocks on August 26. Baez was scheduled to play at the venue a couple days earlier, so a plan was hatched for her to come out a few days early so that she could meet the lads and arrange for them to meet Dylan in New York, where The Beatles were going after Denver.
The day before The Beatles’ show, Tuft and Baez went to see A Hard Day’s Night. The musicians met before The Beatles show and Tuft recalled that Baez and the band members were deferential to one another. Except for Ringo, who wasn’t interested and was reading a comic book.
Tuft also brought the Mamas and the Papas to Denver’s Municipal Auditorium Theater with 7,600 seats in 1966. Richard “Dick” Lamm, a friend and lawyer, fronted him $5,000 for the guarantee. Lamm later admitted that he had absolutely no idea who the Mamas and the Papas were. “That showed the amount of trust he had in me,” Tuft said. “And he said he was nervous until a week before the concert until they were on the cover of Life magazine.” Lamm used his profits to fund his first run for the Denver statehouse.
Later, John Denver offered his services for a benefit Tuft organized and helped raise more than $40,000 for Lamm’s successful run for governor.
Folk music endures, Tuft said, “because the best of folk music involves music. And the best of music is melodic. And whatever it is in our physical makeup that involves not just the heartbeat, which is our basic rhythm, but something about our voice, maybe, and the way we speak and our desire to communicate that all put together leads to somebody creating a song about something that happened, and if the kernel of it, either the music or the words, or both are such that people like it and repeat it and you get musical history, and history of countries and our country in particular, of the songs.”
Tuft is already putting together his next album — a double album of cowboy and western songs, traditional on one side and contemporary on the other.
“I’m a song addict,” Tuft said. “And I like to think that I have pretty decent taste in songs. Nothing pleases me more than to be able to find a new song, make it my own, and pass it on and open it up to whatever audience I’m able to bring together.”
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Israel has a lot riding on Nvidia, whose CEO resigned today
Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and has run it for 33 years, resigned as chief executive on Thursday, ending a tenure that turned a maker of video-game chips into the engine of the artificial intelligence boom. The decision followed revelations of an affair with a businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials suspect of being a Chinese spy, and allegations of a second relationship, with an executive who reports to him.
Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, will serve as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor.
The turmoil is a Silicon Valley story with a significantIsraeli subplot. Nvidia employs roughly 6,000 people in Israel, including on 18 floors of office space in a Tel Aviv skyscraper. Israel is home to the company’s largest R&D hub outside of the U.S. As well, Huang has been the driving force behind a plan to build a giant new campus in the country’s north. Huang has courted Israel for years, and the open question now is what happens to that commitment without him.
Nvidia’s Israeli business traces back to 2019, when it agreed to buy Mellanox, an Israeli chip company, for $6.9 billion. Mellanox made the technology that lets thousands of chips in a data center work together as one machine. That technology is now central to how AI data centers are built.
Huang kept Mellanox in Israel, along with its patents and its sales. The Israeli teams’ work is now woven into Nvidia’s newest products, and includes building a chip meant to rein in AI tools that act on their own.
In the second quarter of 2026 alone, Nvidia’s Israeli operation booked $17.5 billion in sales, nearly a fifth of the company’s worldwide revenue and more than four times the sales of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the multinational Israeli drugmaker. Analysts credit Nvidia with largely driving a 13% jump in Israeli tax revenue, and its workforce there has roughly doubled since Oct. 7, 2023.
A personal stake
Huang’s attachment to Israel is not purely commercial. On Oct. 7, Avinatan Or, a chip engineer at Nvidia’s Israeli operation, was captured at the Nova music festival along with his then-girlfriend, Noa Argamani, in a video seen around the world. She was rescued eight months later. Or remained a hostage for 738 days.
Nvidia colleagues held vigils with his mother, Ditza, and Huang stayed in touch with the family throughout. When Or was freed in Oct. 2025, Huang wrote to employees that “Avinatan has come home.” Huang later hosted Or and Argamani at the company’s headquarters in California. This March, as the war with Iran broke out, Huang told Israeli employees that he was “very worried” about them.
Huang has called Israel a “second home” for Nvidia.
That attachment is intended to last. In December, Nvidia announced plans for a campus in Kiryat Tivon, near Haifa, reportedly second in size only to its Silicon Valley headquarters. Construction is set to begin next year, and the offices are expected to open by 2031, with room for up to 10,000 employees.
What lies ahead
The next CEO has become a question in Israel, too. Kress, 59, has been Nvidia’s finance chief since 2013. The board says it will look both inside and outside the company for a permanent chief executive.
Haaretz speculated Thursday that two Israeli executives could be potential candidates. Both men studied at the Technion in Haifa. Michael Kagan, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and moved to Israel with his family after high school, co-founded Mellanox in 1999 and has been Nvidia’s chief technology officer for six years. Johny Srouji, born in Haifa to an Arab Christian family, joined Apple in 2008 and now leads its hardware work, including the chips inside its products.
Nothing so far suggests Nvidia’s plans in Israel will change. The Israeli teams work on products the company depends on, and the new campus has long been in the works.
Nvidia’s stock has fallen by about a third since early October, a loss of more than $1.5 trillion in market value, and the company is due to report earnings on Nov. 17. The numbers will matter in Israel. So will something they can’t show: whether Nvidia’s affection for the country outlasts its last CEO.
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