Uncategorized
How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
—
The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
How a 19th century murder introduced Americans to a Jewish funeral
In June 1857, newspapers from Philadelphia to St. Louis carried reports of a shocking crime in western Massachusetts. Isaac Jackson, a 17- or 18-year-old German Jewish peddler from Westfield, was shot and robbed while traveling his route between the towns of Westfield and Russell. His body was dragged to the bank of a river, concealed beneath stones and debris, and not discovered until the following day. Contemporary newspaper stories described it as one of western Massachusetts’ most notorious murders in half a century.
The crime quickly attracted national attention as accounts proliferated, sometimes differing on details such as Jackson’s age. Reporters described the search for his body, the arrest of Charles Jones, known to readers as the “ministerial burglar,” and the growing public anger that led some spectators to openly discuss lynching the accused before he could stand trial.
The attention came decades before mass migration from Eastern Europe transformed American Jewish life. The country’s Jewish population numbered no more than 200,000. Yet Jackson’s murder became national news, and newspapers far beyond Massachusetts used the story of his funeral to explain Jewish burial and mourning customs to their readers.
After Jackson’s body was recovered, it was taken to Hartford, Connecticut, for burial, “there being no synagogue at Westfield.” His funeral was held at Touro Hall, home of Congregation Beth Israel, which had only recently converted the former North Baptist Church into a synagogue with the help of a bequest from the Jewish philanthropist Judah Touro.
According to an account first published in the Hartford Times and widely reprinted in newspapers across the country, the body was washed and clothed in white linen garments “expressly made by Jewish women,” who considered it a final act of kindness toward a fellow Jew. Earth was placed beneath the head “to indicate that all cometh from the earth and returneth thither again.” The head was turned toward the east, symbolizing, the newspaper explained, “the great reverence of the Israelite towards the land of his nationality,” and the hope that “as the sun rises to revivify all creation so will the dead finally rise to everlasting life.”
As the coffin was lowered, those gathered prayed, “May the soul of the departed come to its resting place in peace.” Each mourner then placed earth upon the grave before reciting the words, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”
The funeral itself was not the only moment that revealed how Isaac’s family mourned.
When word reached Westfield that a peddler had been murdered along the road to Russell, “there was a great rush in that direction, and at least one hundred persons were promptly there. Among them were Coroner Abbott, Justice Lewis, and other prominent citizens.” Isaac’s brother Joseph also hurried to the scene. At first, according to one newspaper account, he refused to believe the victim could be his younger sibling. But when he saw the wagon, he recognized it immediately and “burst into tears.”
As the body was recovered from the stream, Joseph, the newspaper reported, performed what it described as his “first duty as a Jew,” removing from Isaac’s pockets the tefillin he carried “to bind around his forehead and arm each morning upon rising.”
The newspapers also offered small glimpses of the life that had ended so suddenly. Isaac was the youngest of four brothers, whose family operated a store in Westfield and maintained traveling peddler wagons throughout the surrounding countryside. On the morning of the murder, he left carrying dry goods, jewelry and ready-made clothing. Among the possessions later identified by his brother was his watch.
The burial rites did not end with the funeral.
Several weeks later, the Springfield Daily Republican published a brief account, later reprinted in the Boston Evening Transcript, about one of Isaac’s brothers while he was again traveling as a peddler with the same wagon. As he unfolded a piece of cloth for a customer, he noticed a single drop of blood. Overcome with emotion, the newspaper reported, he “cried for a few moments like a child,” then folded the cloth and declared that he must return to Hartford so the bloodstained cloth could be buried with his brother. According to the account, everything bearing Isaac’s blood that had been found after the murder had already been interred with him, per Jewish tradition.
Isaac Jackson still rests in Hartford’s Zion Hill Cemetery. Much of his life has been lost to history. But the newspapers that reported his murder preserved something that endures: a careful record of the customs through which his family and community buried him.
The post How a 19th century murder introduced Americans to a Jewish funeral appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
How an obscure centrist politician could be key to defeating Netanyahu in October
(JTA) —
TEL AVIV — At a barbecue on a Netanya rooftop earlier this month, MK Yoav Segalovitz, a politician most people outside Israel have never heard of, told his fellow members of the leading opposition party Yesh Atid that he would not be running with them in the upcoming October election.
It’s a decision that could reshape Israel’s political landscape and determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lose the October 27 election.
That’s because Segalovitz, 67, who formerly headed the Israel Police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division, is planning to join Ra’am, an Arab party that was the kingmaker in the 2021 elections, pollster Yousef Makladeh told Jewish Telegraphic Agency, describing his conversation with Segalovitz prior to leaving the party. Makladeh added that the move had been under discussion for months.
In an official statement last week, Ra’am’s chairman Mansour Abbas and Segalovitz said they had met and held a “cordial and positive” discussion about the possibility of Segalovitz joining Ra’am’s slate in the upcoming Knesset elections. The two agreed to continue direct talks in an effort to advance the matter.
If that indeed happens, it would send a seismic shock though the Israeli political system on two fronts: Segalovitz would be the first lawmaker in decades to leave a Zionist party for an Arab-led party; and that party would be in a position to join other opposition groups to pry control of the next Israeli government away from Netanyahu.
The willingness of Ra’am and two Zionist slates — Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party and Naftali Bennett’s New Right party — to join a coalition in 2021 led by Bennett and Lapid provided the needed seats to push Netanyahu out of power after 12 consecutive years as prime minister. The first coalition in Israeli history to take office with the support of an Arab party was unprecedented –and viewed by many as a historic breakthrough in Jewish-Arab political cooperation.
The question in 2026 is: Could it happen again?
This time around, the prospect of an Arab party in the coalition prompts more wariness among many Israelis, and Bennett and Lapid have both ruled out forming a coalition with one.
Israeli polls have consistently shown that neither Netanyahu’s coalition nor the bloc of opposition Jewish parties led by his chief rival, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, is on track to secure the 61 seats needed to form a government. The opposition’s Jewish parties have consistently polled at approximately 58 to 60 seats, while Netanyahu’s bloc trails with roughly 50.
That deadlock has thrust Ra’am, led by MK Mansour Abbas, back into the spotlight. Most recent polls give the party between five and seven seats, potentially making it the kingmaker once again.
Founded in 1996, Ra’am, whose name is an Arabic acronym meaning United Arab List, has roots in the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement and had until recently been a religious Arab party. It had been part of the traditional bloc of Arab parties in the Knesset until Abbas split away, as part of his strategy to shift the party’s focus from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to practical achievements for Israel’s Arab society.
Makladeh, who has conducted surveys for Channel 13 and political parties across Israel’s political spectrum, describes Ra’am as “the missing piece of the puzzle” that could lift the opposition bloc “to 62 or 63 seats.”
In 2021, however, there was a shedding of some of the longstanding reluctance to consider an Arab party in the coalition, for those who saw the political necessity of doing so in order to remove Netanyahu from office. Netanyahu himself had reportedly spoken with Abbas about some form of a political partnership. This time around, the prospect of an Arab party in the coalition prompts more wariness among many Israelis, particularly this early in the election cycle when it is unclear if it will be absolutely necessary to do so.
Political commentator Nadav Perry, host of one of Israel’s most influential political podcasts, says that the party’s ties to conservative Muslim religious leadership, together with the rapid collapse of the 2021 government and the trauma of Oct. 7, 2023, had effectively pushed the idea of Ra’am joining another coalition with Jewish parties back to “square one.”
The addition of Segalovitz to Ra’am could change that by making the party more palatable to the Israeli public and could expand its voting base.
Ameer Bisharat, the former director-general of the National Committee of Arab Local Council Heads, added that Arab Israelis are “hungry for change.”
“Change can come through political power, and Abbas understands that very well. He is trying to create that political power,” Bisharat said
JTA reached out to both Ra’am and Segalovitz for comment. Segalovitz’s spokesperson declined to comment, while Ra’am did not respond to a request for comment.
Segalovitz has been a member of the Lapid-led Yesh Atid party, a centrist bloc which emphasizes secular rights and opposition to draft exemptions for haredi Orthodox yeshiva students, since 2016. He later served as Deputy Minister of Internal Security in the Bennett-Lapid government. In that role, Segalovitz was the public face of the government’s efforts to combat violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities. During his tenure, the number of murders in Arab communities declined sharply before rising dramatically again after the government fell.
Bisharat, who worked with Segalovitz and now advises the public policy department at the Accord Institute on Arab voting patterns, said the Bennett-Lapid government was “successful” for Arab society. It helped build trust between the government and Arab citizens and it presided during a decline in violent crime in the Arab communities in Israel.
Under Segalovitz’s leadership, a special plan was developed to combat crime in Arab communities, focusing on the main drivers of crime, improving case clearance rates and strengthening cooperation among the various authorities, which was not continued under far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In Segalovitz’s only full year in government, the number of Arab citizens killed in crimes fell from 126 to 116, according to data from the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that tracks violence and crime in Arab communities. The figure surged to 244 the following year, after he was replaced.
“Segalovitz was the point person in the previous government on crime in the Arab community,” said Perry, the political commentator. “He worked on it, and he delivered results. That made him a very popular figure on the Arab street. Not because he was pro-Palestinian, not because he was against the IDF, but because he reduced crime among Arab citizens.”
Former Yesh Atid MK Inbar Bezek, who served alongside Segalovitz in both the party and the coalition that relied on Ra’am, told JTA: “I saw with my own eyes that Yoav is an extremely respected and well-liked figure throughout Arab society, especially among local government leaders.”
Segalovitz’s possible move is far more than symbolic.
Bezek believes Segalovitz could both increase Arab voter turnout and attract Jewish left-wing voters to Ra’am. “I truly think he’s someone who brings voters to the ballot box,” she said. But she emphasized that the addition of Jewish voters would not change the overall balance between the opposing blocs, because those voters would otherwise support the Democrats, the most left-wing Zionist party.
That assessment appears to be supported by a recent Channel 13 poll, which was conducted in part by Makladeh. The survey found that Ra’am would rise to seven seats if Segalovitz joined the party, compared with five seats in most recent polls. Makladeh said six of those seats would come from Arab voters, while one would come from Jewish voters.
The move’s real significance, argued Perry, lies not in winning additional votes before Election Day but in what happens afterward. He says that bringing Segalovitz into the party is intended “to create renewed legitimacy for Ra’am’s participation in a governing coalition.”
“I don’t think this would dramatically reshape the electoral map,” Perry said. “But it could dramatically reshape the question of legitimacy. It could complete Mansour Abbas’ metamorphosis from the leader of a non-Zionist Islamist party into the leader of a Jewish-Arab party that puts the integration of Israel’s Arab citizens first, while setting aside issues related to the Palestinian national struggle.”
Perry’s comments come as leaders of the opposition bloc send mixed and sometimes contradictory signals about whether they would govern with Ra’am.
Eisenkot has said he “doesn’t rule out” a coalition partnership with Abbas. Another strong contender for the premiership, Bennett, whose Together (Beyachad) party is polling second within the opposing bloc, said in February that “after October 7, there is no mandate in Israel for a government that relies on Arab parties.” Bennett recently declined to answer directly when asked whether he would rely on Abbas to form a government. Speculation is high, however, that he would agree to sit with Ra’am, given his past record of including the party in the coalition after running a campaign in which he promised not to do so.
Opposition Leader Lapid joined forces in this election cycle with Bennett after his own party struggled in the polls and the two now run together on the same slate. Lapid has also ruled out forming a government that relies on Arab parties — a notable position given that Lapid was the architect of the move to bring Ra’am into the coalition in 2021. Another opposition leader, Avigdor Liberman who heads Yisrael Beiteinu, sat with Ra’am in the 2021-2022 government. Last week, however, he said that “Ra’am cannot be a coalition partner.”
Segalovitz’s membership in Ra’am could soften that resistance.
“It will be very difficult to delegitimize a party whose number two is a Zionist and a former Israel Police major general,” Makladeh said. He believes that Segalovitz’s addition could effectively “legitimize” Ra’am’s votes in the eyes of the Israeli public, making it easier for opposition leaders to cooperate with the party after the election.
The hesitation among opposition leaders also reflects Netanyahu’s campaign strategy, which identifies the bloc’s dependence on Arab support as its main political vulnerability.
In a video posted this month on X, Netanyahu juxtaposed his political rivals with Abbas under the slogan, “It’s them or us.”
Segalovitz’s potential move has also drawn backlash from the right. Ben-Gvir called Segalovitz’s departure from Yesh Atid “a joint conspiracy by the left to pave the way for a future government with the Muslim Brotherhood.” Coalition lawmaker Tally Gotliv of the Likud called Segalovitz Abbas’ “pet Jew” and warned that his move could lead to “the imposition of Sharia law on Israel.”
Perry said, “Almost the only political asset Netanyahu has left to take into the election is negative campaigning, because it’s very difficult to build a positive campaign around the last term.” He argued that Netanyahu has relatively few lines of attack against Eisenkot beyond the possibility that he could form a government with Arab parties. “That’s basically the Likud’s one-trick pony in 2026,” Perry added. “And it’s a message that has political effectiveness.”
This is why the addition of Segalovitz who comes from the Israeli center and not the far left is significant, Perry explained. The political commentator added: “If Ra’am enters the realm of legitimacy — because it is no longer Ra’am, it is no longer Islamist, and it is no longer only Abbas but Abbas and Segalovitz — then that could create a more realistic possibility of removing Netanyahu after the election.”
The post How an obscure centrist politician could be key to defeating Netanyahu in October appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Man charged in Central Synagogue attack linked to posts about Israel, Judaism, and Mamdani
The man accused of attacking a woman and a security guard at Central Synagogue, a prominent New York City congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during Friday night services, had filled his Facebook page with posts about Israel and Judaism in the months leading up to the attack — and, according to his aunt, had expressed a desire to convert to the Jewish faith.
“He’s mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism] — that’s what he’s said,” Myriam Montes, the aunt of Larry Montes, 46, told the New York Post.
“Given what happened, he might not have been in his right mind,” she said. However, she added that she had not spoken with her nephew in three months.
On a Facebook page that appears to belong to Montes, he reposted a video comparing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Other videos reposted on the page focused on Jewish and Israeli topics. One featured a Jewish man disputing claims that the Talmud contains disparaging remarks about Jesus. In 2024, he posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” Another reposted video featured Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.
The page also reposted several videos from Ruhama’s Food, a popular Israeli social media account.
The Facebook page’s recent posts are more disjointed. They include screenshots showing attempts to translate seemingly incoherent Spanish text into Hebrew.
Police said Montes had three prior arrests before the Central Synagogue attack, all of which were for robbery.
Montes was charged with two counts of assault as a hate crime and one count of criminal mischief as a hate crime. He is expected to appear in court on August 20.
The post Man charged in Central Synagogue attack linked to posts about Israel, Judaism, and Mamdani appeared first on The Forward.
