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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?
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The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In Israel’s mixed cities, the future of coexistence is already being tested
Human ingenuity has equipped us with technology to connect individuals in a way once unimaginable. But, in the past two decades, we have used that power to find ever more things that we hate about each other.
Since modern society has become remarkably proficient at manufacturing polarization, we need to learn from places where people already live alongside those they have been taught to regard as fundamentally different. Not because those places have solved the problem, but because they have no choice but to confront it.
Israel’s so-called mixed cities are among those places.
In Split: Life in the Israeli Mixed Cities, filmmakers Shady Srour and Dina Zvi Riklis examine the fragile arrangements through which Jewish and Arab Israelis inhabit the same urban spaces. The documentary focuses on five cities — Acre (Akko), Ramla, Haifa, Lod (Lydda) and Jaffa — that are defined as “mixed” by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics because “a significant majority of Jewish residents lives alongside a significant minority of Arab residents.” Each of these cities, though, has a distinct history, demographics and political reality which resists the reassuring simplicity of the official designation.
Mixed implies that ingredients combine to produce something new. These cities are, however, more accurately described as shared, contested or, as the film’s title suggests, “split.” (The full title is in Arabic and Hebrew — Fasl Mukhtalat: Chatzuyot.) Their residents live along the same streets but do not necessarily inhabit the same understanding of what those streets mean. According to Adam Raz, one of many experts and residents interviewed in the film, families living a mere 100 meters apart often have an entirely different worldview because they consume completely opposing narratives — with a Jewish home watching Israel’s Channel 12 while an Arab neighbor watches Qatar’s Al Jazeera.
Artistic collaborators, Samira Saraya and Neta Weiner make music together in Jaffa to try to bridge the gap. Saraya sings a fragment of Hayim Nahman Bialik poem “To the Bird” about the beauty of Israel while on a car trip with Weiner. It lands poignantly and defamiliarized, given her Arab identity. She says “the word ‘mixed’ is taking two things and putting them together, but ‘blended’ means people live together and speak the language of both groups.” She describes Jaffa as “truly a mixed city.”
“It’s the only place,” she says, “where I can breathe and just be.”
In a country whose population is roughly four-fifths Jewish and one-fifth Arab, the question of how these communities live together is not incidental to Israeli democracy; it is fundamental to its survival. Srour and Riklis ask experts, including politicians, professors and theater directors, about the history of the conflict and the challenges facing the cities. Mostly they cut between historical footage of events and interviews they have shot with Arab and Jewish experts as well as locals of all genders and ages on their streets and homes. This constant weave of testimony across lived, cultural and political experience leads to a rich density of overlapping concern and anxieties, though it does mean that the cities blur into each other.
One interview takes place in a Ramla kitchen where Jalal Habit discusses the situation and his life with energy and passion all while sporting an “Ich bin hummussexuelle” t-shirt and preparing the food for his restaurant. He seems angry at the Jews, but in a chef’s businesslike way. He recounts how he was complaining to his friend that the Jews have taken everything from the Arabs, land, hummus, falafel, and how his friend demurred, no they haven’t taken anything, they are “building everything for us and soon they’ll leave and they’ll leave everything to us.”
The Hebrew word du-kiyum, coexistence, is invoked throughout the film. Beyond the Kulna Yachad school in Jaffa where children learn together, however, it mostly describes a hope or a transient memory rather than a concrete way of being. What makes Split compelling is its attention also to the conversations that coexistence often requires people not to have. Jewish and Arab neighbors may work together, maintain friendships and cooperate on municipal initiatives. They can agree about schools, garbage collection, traffic and the everyday business of keeping a city functioning. Yet the larger questions — of history, dispossession, national belonging and competing loyalties — remain unspoken. Split gives those questions a tentative voice.
The alternative to such imperfect arrangements has sometimes been catastrophic. Split does not draw the comparison, but when British India was partitioned in 1947, over 15 million people were displaced, and massacres killed hundreds of thousands. Neither in India nor the Middle East did partition eliminate competing identities. It converted them into borders, refugees and inherited grievances. Despite accepting the partition plan and taking billions of dollars in aid from America and the West, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has lurched from military coup to corrupt civilian governance without ever safeguarding the rights of women, LGBTQ individuals, or religious minorities.
The relative economic success, and demographic tolerance of Israel’s mixed cities has led to their own challenges. They contain communities with their own histories of war, displacement, and social transformation, particularly from the aftermath of World War II. The filmmakers catch a Jewish resident of Acre as she’s inspecting an abandoned bomb shelter. In a perfect distillation of traumatized Israeli Jewish identity she explains how she sees herself descended from the Shoah and from Ottoman Jews:
My personal story contains the story of my grandmother from Germany and that of my grandfather from the Jewish Quarter in ’48 and it’s a story that passes down, and it’s in my DNA. The experience of the surviving Jew, it’s an existential experience of a people and the desire to annihilate us. And we’re facing it again all over the world.
Meanwhile, different Arab families explain in affecting terms how their families were dispossessed by the State of Israel during the Nakba, from Haifa which became a battlefield, from Acre, and from Jaffa. Ghassan Mounir from Lod gives an extended account of the ongoing challenges placed in his way by the Jewish state: from the attacks on his family in 1948, to the refusal to give him the same building rights as the army veterans and Haredim who surround him. This is the historical context of a state that was nominally set up establishing rights “without distinction of religion or race” and “without domination or subjugation”
We have been in Lod since the 12th century. I grew up on this street, this is my home. [In 1948] the Jews … gathered [the whole village] in the square of the church and the mosque and expelled them to Abdullah. That march — thousands, thousands of people [were forced to make it] in the middle of July while fasting for Ramadan. They walked to Ramallah, some survived and some died.
Nothing of the present situation can be understood without those histories, however differently their residents describe them.
Edited down from a three-episode docuseries that premiered in Haifa, to a 90-minute documentary, Split is unhurried but urgent. It traces family histories as exemplars of different communities’ experiences and also the history of eruptions of urban violence throughout the history of the state. It calmly shows what it’s like to be in a minority where the majority is blasé about its ignorance of your culture.
At times, the movie veers close to despair — the heartfelt testimony of Ilham and Omar Siksik in Jaffa leaves it teetering on the edge. But their hope along with the testimony of Danny Rabinowitz (a Jewish anthropologist) and Mustafa Abbasi (an Arab-Israeli historian of Palestine) holds out the possibility that somehow rival national narratives might coexist in the same physical space. Rabinowitz says he still longs for hope, but without knowing exactly where to look for it. He is waiting for “leaders of vision and courage” from both sides. In the words of Abbasi:
There are those on both sides who believe that there is no shared future. I tell them, the future belongs to coexistence, and there is no solution other than mutual understanding.
When Hanna Safran and Nabila Espanioly — two veterans of the feminist struggle, one Jewish, one Arab — argue about political agency, Espanioly points out how obvious it is in the feminist context that freedom to be yourself is a sine qua non of being free politically. It’s a clear point and one given further depth and richness later by the testimony of Ayat Abu Shamis who is a mother, a resident of Jaffa, and an Arab who writes poetry in Hebrew. She reads her poem in Hebrew about coexistence as part of her interview.
Watching Split and some of the ways Arab-Israelis were treated — specifically how former soccer commentator and MK Zuheir Bahloul talked of his constituents’ rights — reminded me of Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre’s famous statement of emancipatory racism. The identity prescribed by the State of Israel for Arab-Israelis carries a philosophical contradiction as old as modern Jewish citizenship. In December 1789, during the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre articulated the bargain at the heart of Jewish emancipation: Jews should receive full rights as individuals but no separate political rights as a nation. The promise was equality. The price was the surrender of collective difference in the public sphere.
Israel reverses that historical equation in fascinating and uncomfortable ways. It was established to make Jewish collective identity politically sovereign. Yet within that Jewish state live Arab citizens who — until the passage of the 2018 Israeli Nation-State Law downgraded Arab identity in Israel from “equal” to “special” — had full rights as individuals, but whose own collective identity, history and national aspirations were, by and large, proscribed. The challenge is not merely to grant equal rights to individuals, essential though that is. It is to imagine a democracy capable of accommodating communities whose understandings of the state itself may be irreconcilable with each other.
In last month’s elections, Arab representation in the Knesset reached a record high, approximately one-sixth of its membership. Finally, Arab MKs are at a level approaching the proportion of Arab citizens in the electorate. That political presence matters. But parliamentary representation cannot by itself resolve the contradictions visible on a street in Lod or Jaffa. The novelist Amos Oz famously described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as a struggle between good and evil but as a tragedy of “right against right.” In that formulation he recognized that competing claims can possess equal moral force, even when they cannot both be satisfied completely.
Split brings that abstract proposition down to the municipal level, where coexistence is less a philosophical ideal than a daily negotiation. The film’s deeper question is not whether Jews and Arabs can learn to like one another. Some already do. Nor is it whether they can avoid discussing everything that divides them. Evidently, they sometimes must. It is whether a shared civic life can eventually become robust enough to accommodate the disagreements it currently suppresses.
The chef Habit is given the last word: “But I don’t want the Jews to leave. If the Jews leave, it won’t be the same place. Jews and Arabs have to live together, they can live together. If I weren’t optimistic, I would’ve stayed in Ramla.”
As the world perfects the technology and politics of polarization, Israel’s mixed cities offer neither an easy inspiration nor a comforting warning but something more useful: evidence that people can remain profoundly divided while still sharing responsibility for the places they call home. The future depends on learning how to live with our differences — especially when the people across the street have every intention of staying.
“Split: Life in the Israeli Mixed Cities” has its U.S. premiere as part of the Other Israel: New Perspectives Film Festival. It will show on Mon, Nov. 9 at 7:30 PM at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan and again on Wed, Nov 11, 7:30 PM at the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue.
The post In Israel’s mixed cities, the future of coexistence is already being tested appeared first on The Forward.
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A staunch supporter of Israel, Hakeem Jeffries would lead a Democratic majority pushing for change in U.S. policy
(JTA) — When the next Congress convenes in January with a Democratic majority, it will likely be Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the pro-Israel Democrat from Brooklyn, who leads the House of Representatives.
As House Speaker, Jeffries would play a key role in setting the House’s legislative agenda at a time when many Democrats have taken more critical stances on Israel and AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. Jeffries himself has asserted that a “change in direction is needed” for the U.S.-Israel relationship.
His support for Israel and ties to AIPAC have angered a number of progressives who want to see party leadership apply greater pressure on the Israeli government. Advocates have blasted Jeffries for opposing an amendment to end U.S. military assistance to Israel and pressured him to reject AIPAC’s support and criticize its election spending.
Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of the progressive group New Jewish Narrative, told JTA that Jeffries will have to navigate leading a caucus that includes “a much larger group of members who really care about this and feel like they need to deliver for their voters” on broader Israeli-Palestinian foreign policy.
Susskind pointed to the Stop the Settlements Act introduced by Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro as an example of where Jeffries will face more pressure than in past years to bring bills on the Israeli-Palestinian issue to a floor vote.
“He’s not the far left, he’s not rolling out a DSA agenda,” Susskind said. “But I think it is going to be a different agenda — not only than, of course, what we’ve seen from Republican Congress, but even than we’ve seen from past Democratic Congresses.”
But Jeffries, who would be the first Black House speaker in U.S. history, has retained AIPAC’s support and voted against an immediate cutoff of military aid to Israel. He has fostered close ties with a number of Jewish organizations and leaders.
The Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island’s executive director praised Jeffries’ role in securing $1 million for the organization in 2024. Jeffries also secured $850,000 for the Brighton Beach-based Shorefront Jewish Community Council.
Mark Treyger, CEO of New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, called Jeffries a “dear friend” in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is an individual who, in my opinion, has been an unwavering ally to the Jewish community from his first day in Congress when I got to know him as a City Council member,” Treyger said.
Rabbi David Niederman, president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, told Williamsburg 365 that his relationship with Jeffries “spans more than two decades, and throughout his rise to national leadership, he has remained firmly connected to his roots, his district, and the communities he serves.”
Jeffries grew up in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood known for the close proximity of Black and Orthodox Jewish residents. Motivated in part by the 1992 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, he decided to attend law school to fight for “liberty and justice for all, in the purest possible way.” He served three terms in the New York State Assembly representing Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and parts of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
When Jeffries ran for Congress in 2012, he courted Jewish voters and drew endorsements from a number of Jewish leaders — including Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is retiring at the end of his term next month, and ex-Mayor Ed Koch. At the time, those leaders expressed concerns about his opponent Charles Barron, who in 2009 compared conditions in Gaza to Nazi death camps. The following year, Barron called Israel’s government “the biggest terrorist in the world.” Nadler specifically referred to Barron’s Nazi comparison in his endorsement of Jeffries.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, now the party’s leader in the Senate, lauded Jeffries as a “true blue friend of Israel” in his 2012 endorsement. Koch, meanwhile, taped an ad for Jeffries that played on post-Shabbos Jewish radio, the New York Observer reported at the time.
“Jeffries is great on the issues: job creation, affordable housing, protection of Social Security, Medicare, and education,” Koch said in the ad. “Oh, did I mention Israel? He’s a fierce defender of Israel.”
Jeffries arrived in Congress at an uneasy time for Jews in New York City. In 2013, teens were targeting Orthodox Jews with “knockouts,” an effort to knock victims unconscious with a single blow. As a freshman representative, Jeffries joined a group of Black and Jewish leaders in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights to denounce the “game.”
The following year, Jeffries condemned the stabbing of a Chabad-Lubavitch man at the Hasidic movement’s Crown Heights headquarters, and urged people to “stand with” the Jewish community, which he called “an important part of the fabric of Crown Heights, where I grew up.”
Jeffries’ support for Israel has included a total of eight visits to the country, including at least once as an Assembly member with the JCRC, and six congressional delegations led by a nonprofit affiliate of AIPAC, the most recent of which took place in August 2023.
During the 2014 Gaza war, Jeffries spoke at a rally in support of Israel outside the United Nations, declaring, “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever!”
About five weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack, he did not mention a ceasefire but called for “a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people” at the pro-Israel rally held at the National Mall in Washington. On numerous occasions, he has affectionately called Jerusalem “the sixth borough” of New York City.
Progressives have taken issue with Jeffries’ pro-Israel stance over the years and with his endorsement from AIPAC, which got him the nickname “AIPAC Shakur” from radio host Charlamagne tha God.
Multiple pro-Palestinian protests have been held outside Jeffries’ offices, including one NYC-DSA demonstration in November 2023 in which protesters demanded that he “stop supporting genocide.”
Some of the democratic socialist candidates who will enter Congress in January indicated that they would need Jeffries to back certain policies — including pushing the Block the Bombs Act — to secure their support in the election for House Speaker. But those politicians’ leverage diminished after Democrats secured a large House majority last week, giving Jeffries room to lose some votes from DSA and DSA-aligned members and still secure the majority of votes cast for named candidates to become Speaker.
Still, Jeffries is facing pressure from the left on issues including Israel, as well as what critics perceive as insufficient resistance to the Trump administration. Some House Democrats have been “inundated” with calls from constituents urging them not to elect Jeffries, Axios reported, while a petition calling for a different Speaker — which was shared by actor Mark Ruffalo, who has been a vocal advocate for Palestinians — has garnered more than 1 million signatures.
California Rep. Ro Khanna said last week that he would press Jeffries to commit to holding votes on eliminating military aid to Israel, defunding the Iran war and advancing Medicare for All. (Jeffries told CNN on Wednesday that Democrats will seek to end the Iran war as part of a sweeping affordability agenda.)
Treyger said he is confident that Jeffries, who voted against the Massie amendment to cut military aid to Israel this summer, will not waver.
“The person that I know is never a person that bends to pressure,” Treyger said. He pointed out that Jeffries’ vote came less than a month after left-wing supporters chanted “You’re next!” when Jeffries’ face appeared on screens at Rep.-elect Claire Valdez’s victory party.
In September 2025, J Street, the liberal Middle East advocacy group, endorsed Jeffries, just two years after the group’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami challenged Jeffries over the congressman’s comments that U.S. military aid should “remain ironclad” and not be conditioned over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical judicial reform efforts.
“Our concern is that U.S. tax dollars shouldn’t be funding material and arms that facilitate the deepening of occupation and the permanent demise of a possible Palestinian state. That’s not in anyone’s security interest,” Ben-Ami said at the time.
Now, Jeffries is one of a dwindling group of Congress members supported by both AIPAC and J Street, two groups that went head-to-head in a number of races this year and have conflicting visions for military assistance and the U.S.-Israel relationship. He is also backed by Democratic Majority for Israel, whose CEO Brian Romick called Jeffries “a gifted consensus builder and a steadfast champion of the U.S.–Israel relationship” in an email to JTA.
In a statement to JTA on Thursday, Ben-Ami said that Jeffries “has been clear that, for the good of both Israelis and Palestinians, it is time for U.S. policy toward the Middle East to change.”
“We look forward to working with him to make that change a reality, including by passing the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, ending Trump’s war of choice with Iran, and ending unconditional military aid to Israel to ensure it is consistent with American laws and values,” Ben-Ami said.
Though Jeffries voted against the Massie amendment, he said that he would not be telling his colleagues how to vote, and wrote in a letter that “there are good faith reasons that will result in Members voting in a variety of different ways with respect to the amendment.” His letter also suggested that a new security arrangement after the current Memorandum of Understanding expires in 2028 could end direct military subsidies. Trump last week said he would wind down defense assistance to Israel, and Netanyahu has indicated he is on board with transitioning to a relationship where the two countries’ militaries remain closely aligned, but in which Israel does not depend on U.S. money.
When reached for comment, AIPAC pointed to its statement on X congratulating both Jeffries and Schumer “on the resounding victories for their caucuses.” It did not respond to a question about his support from J Street or view on military aid.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A staunch supporter of Israel, Hakeem Jeffries would lead a Democratic majority pushing for change in U.S. policy appeared first on The Forward.
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Illinois voters pass proposals objecting to state anti-BDS law
(JTA) — Voters in eight municipalities in Illinois approved ballot measures last week registering formal objections to the state’s law barring state pension investments in companies that boycott Israel.
The ballot measures will have no effect on state policy. But pro-Palestinian groups are celebrating the wins as demonstrations of shifting public opinion against the law, first signed in 2015 to oppose the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
The village of Oak Park and the townships of Champaign, Cunningham, DuPage, Kickapoo, Medina, Normal and Peoria all approved similarly worded ballot measures that urge the state to repeal its anti-BDS law or support specific state legislation that would do so. According to unofficial tallies, 65% of voters in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb whose local Jewish population mounted a sustained objection to the referendum, approved the measure there.
Jewish groups including the Jewish United Fund, Chicago’s federation arm, had campaigned against the ballot measure. The Illinois law, championed by JUF when it was first passed, was the first of what has become dozens of state anti-BDS laws in the country. First Amendment groups have challenged the laws.
“We would have much preferred a victory,” Dan Goldwin, chief public affairs officer for JUF, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday. Yet Goldwin pointed out that Oak Park voters had approved the measure by smaller margins than their votes for top Democratic candidates including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
“Once people began to be exposed to the meaning of what the referendum was about, they moved against it. We just didn’t have enough time,” he said.
Some members of the Oak Park opposition had engaged in a drawn-out fight over the eligibility of the signatures the ballot measure activists had gathered. That time, Goldwin theorized, “was probably time better spent convincing people to vote against it.”
Separately, voters in Bloomington Township approved a measure stating that the federal government should “ban the transfer of weapons to any country that is a dictatorship, apartheid state or major violator of human rights.” The ballot language did not mention Israel, but pro-Palestinian activists have long maintained that Israel commits apartheid and that the U.S. should halt weapons sales to the country.
Local Jewish figures have said the campaign troubled them.
“It felt like it was a local chapter of a global movement to destroy the world’s only Jewish state, and I felt it personally and acutely,” Rabbi Adir Glick of Conservative Temple Har Zion in River Forest, which borders Oak Park, told the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest about the campaign. “I know people who lost friendships in the last few months, and difficult moments with neighbors and colleagues, but it also galvanized our Jewish community.”
Goldwin said the measures’ passage wouldn’t change JUF’s own strategy opposing the repeal of the anti-BDS law at the state level. He noted that ballot measure activists, with the exception of Oak Park, largely didn’t target municipalities with large Jewish communities. In his view, those seeking the repeal of the law “are still a significant minority.”
The BDS movement had a more significant policy victory on election night with the passage of a binding ballot referendum in Providence, Rhode Island, to divest that city from “foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide.” Proponents and opponents of the measure alike have said they believe the language and parameters of the question will include Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Illinois voters pass proposals objecting to state anti-BDS law appeared first on The Forward.
