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If mollusks are kosher, the world can be your oyster
I’ve gone to work on an oyster farm on Block Island, a tiny dot of land midway between Long Island and Rhode Island, every May for the past few years.
If you are, like most people, unfamiliar with the mechanics of oyster farming, here’s what it looks like, at least on this farm. First, you toot around a saltwater pond in a glorified bathtub with a motor hanging off the back. From the boat, wearing chest waders, you hop in the water to unmoor dozens of giant floating mesh bags full of oysters from lines anchored in the pond. The bags are usually also bogged down with a mess of extraneous sea dwellers like kelp, mussels, green crabs and goopy creatures called sea squirts, so they’re heavy. You pile as many bags as you can into the boat, clamber back in — which is harder than it sounds, because your wader boots are probably stuck in the mud at the bottom of the pond — and bring those bags to a floating barge.
Finally, you dump the bag onto a muddy wooden table, pick out everything that isn’t an oyster, since all of those aforementioned sea critters will kill the prize bivalve, and chuck the extra stuff back into the pond. Then you hand-sort the oysters by size. You harvest ones that are big enough to eat — oysters take a few years to reach full size, and grow unevenly, so each bag always has a range of oysters — shovel the rest back in the bags, get back in the boat and tie them back onto the lines. Then you do it again. On a good day, you get through around 100 bags of oysters in a shift.
Bigger farms might have machinery to help sort the oysters; this farm does everything by hand. This may sound backbreaking, and it is, but it’s also a great break from desk work. A day spent out on the water doing repetitive physical labor is a kind of a reset. You can’t look at your phone with the wet, muddy oyster gloves on, and there’s barely service anyway. Plus you’d probably drop it in the pond, so it’s best not to try.
You may, at this point, notice that you’re reading a Jewish newspaper, that I’m a Jewish journalist, and that oysters are not kosher.
But what if I told you oysters were, in fact, kosher? That a rabbi once argued they are actually vegetables, by virtue of the fact that they “root” on rocks in the ocean? And that their shells are a form of scales, thus making them part of the kosher category of scaled and finned fish?
These are real arguments that were made around the turn of the 20th century by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the first American institution for Reform Jewish ordination.
The impetus for this Talmudic bit of logic was in large part a now-infamous feast that has come to be known as the “Trefa Banquet,” due to the amount of non-kosher food that was served. The menu included littleneck clams, shrimp salad, soft-shell crabs, a lobster bisque and frog legs in a cream sauce. Bordeaux wine and Champagne, also not kosher, were served alongside each course, and ice cream — real ice cream, made with dairy — followed with dessert, despite previous meat courses that included beef tenderloins and squab.
The occasion was a triple-header of religious Jewish events: HUC’s first ordination, a meeting of the Rabbinical Literary Association and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the previous name of today’s Union for Reform Judaism. And the discourse this meal set off about the place — or lack thereof — for kashrut in American Jewish life went on for years.
Despite the fact that oysters had not even been on the menu, in Jewish newspapers across the country, rabbis and laypeople wrote warring op-eds on the kosherness of oysters. Somehow, oysters became the symbol of what American Judaism would be. And, of course, what American Jews would eat.
The symbol of an oyster
I had never eaten an oyster until I lived in Seattle after college; for my first anniversary with a long-ago ex-boyfriend, we went to what was then the hottest restaurant in the city, an oyster bar. We were broke, but playing at a kind of sophisticated adulthood we hadn’t quite reached, and oysters seemed like the way to act out that sophistication.
Presented with a menu of oysters from across the country and not knowing where to begin, we got an array on the half shell, two each of a dozen types presented on a beautiful bed of ice with lemon and mignonette. Unsure how to slurp them out of the shell, I had to ask the waiter whether one chews oysters or just swallows. (You chew.)
The first one tasted like a stormy ocean, another buttery and mild, a third one sweet and meaty. They were evocative, like eating the memory of a day at the beach.
Oysters, if you haven’t had them, have terroir in the same way as wine does. Just as grapes take on the characteristics of the soil they grew in, oysters taste different depending on the water they came from; even though there are only a few different species of the bivalve, there are countless variations. East Coast oysters tend to be sharp and briny and refreshing, while West Coast oysters are usually creamy and sweet. But past that, each one is completely unlike the next.
One oyster I had from Maine tasted like pennies. (Maybe that doesn’t sound appetizing, but neither does petrol, yet aged rieslings are prized for their petrol notes.) I’ve had oysters that tasted delicately vegetal, like a cucumber, or deeply umami like a mushroom.
When the Trefa Banquet occurred, oysters were in vogue across the U.S. And the occasion was a lavish and sophisticated one, almost a coming-out party for American Jewry. It was, after all, the celebration of the first class of rabbis ordained in the U.S., proof to the country that Jews were here to stay, and a statement to the rabbis and Jews of Europe that these American Jews were just as good, just as learned, as their European counterparts. In fact, perhaps more so — they were creating a new model of Reform Judaism, leaving the Old Country’s ways behind for a modern, American image of what it meant to be a Jew. The menu had to be the pinnacle of refinement.
Plus, these Cincinnati Jews had a bunch of New Yorkers in from the big city to impress. In a 2005 paper published in The American Jewish Archives Journal, rabbi and historian Lance J. Sussman argued that the menu, which included numerous French misspellings, may have been the caterer’s attempt to appeal to what he imagined were the more elevated tastes of the event’s East Coast guests.
Of course they served shellfish.
In 1883, the year of the banquet, America’s Jews were largely German immigrants. (Though newer waves of immigration had begun to bring in more traditionally observant Russian Jews fleeing pogroms.) Some of them had been associated with the Haskalah in Europe, a progressive Jewish education movement that advocated for secular education, modern dress and assimilation into wider society. By and large, these Jews were urban, educated and middle-class, having left the shtetl Judaism of their elders behind when they left the village.
These Jews began to develop a modernized form of Judaism, largely based in Germany. They changed the liturgy, axing concepts they found backwards, such as the idea that, in a coming Messianic era, Jews would return to Zion and resume sacrificing animals in a restored temple. They recited prayers in German instead of Hebrew and lightened many of the restrictions involved in observing Shabbat, kashrut and festivals. They took on a Christian aesthetic, exchanging synagogue chanting for an organ and choir. Sermons emphasized universal ethical themes instead of Jewish rituals. Some rabbis even argued for allowing both intermarriage and eating pork, though these topics remained hotly debated.
Once imported to the U.S., this newfangled Judaism got more popular.
“Part of the Reform ideology is to get away from all of the laws, all the do’s and don’ts of Judaism, which are considered primitive and superstitions almost,” said Jane Ziegelman, a Jewish food historian and curator of food talks at the Tenement Museum.
Instead, these Reformers wanted to turn Judaism into a more introspective, morally and socially focused religion. And thanks to its roots in the Haskalah, science was core to this new, modern Judaism. Oysters made for a perfect example. At the time, bivalves were considered an aphrodisiac and a health food, and they were both plentiful and popular. (So popular, in fact, that they got over-harvested, which is one of the reasons they’re so expensive today; the mountains of shells from the oysters eaten by New Yorkers were so large they posed a sanitation challenge.) These modernizing Jews understood kashrut to be, fundamentally, about health and ethics, which meant that anything healthy should be kosher.
“The idea was that the unhealthy categorization of the oyster had been proven wrong by modern science,” said Ziegelman.
American Reform Jews saw kosher rules, which they dismissively referred to as “kitchen Judaism,” as a contrast to their more noble pursuit of an intellectual, moral and scientific Judaism. Embracing the oyster was a way to live out their ideals about assimilation, modernization and religious ethics.
“It was the oyster because of its prevalence in American food culture,” Ziegelman told me. “To adopt the oyster was seen as both acculturation — that you really were American — but also you really were a modern person. You weren’t relying on these old kashrut superstitions.”
The shellfish scandal
Not everyone waxes poetic about oysters’ subtle marine nuances so much as their textural similarities to mucus. Personally, I don’t get that — I find them silky, or buttery, or meaty — but I get that oysters can seem a bit gross, and not just because of their texture.
Though on the farm, the oysters float on the surface of the water in bags, they are, at least naturally, bottom dwellers. They’re also “filter feeders,” which means they filter water for their food. This makes them an excellent resource in cleaning up polluted waterways — the Billion Oyster Project in New York City works restoring oyster reefs to the rivers around the city to help clean them and encourage biodiversity. But that also means that oysters aren’t always safe to eat because they’re consuming whatever bad stuff there is in the water. They can purify themselves given enough time in clean water, but they get polluted easily by their environment, perhaps one of the reasons they were originally forbidden under the laws of kashrut.
And even when they’re from clean water, there’s a lot to manage to make them safe. My partner and I run an oyster shucking side hustle with some friends, popping up at bars and events and turning out trays of raw oysters on the half shell. Preparing for each event takes many hours. You have to scrub the mud off each shell with a stiff-bristled brush. Then, since you want your oysters alive until you eat them lest they spoil, you pack them in coolers on ice — but you can’t bury them in too much ice lest they freeze to death. And since they’re salt-water dwellers, you have to drain the coolers regularly to prevent them from drowning in the freshwater ice melt.
On top of that, as a saying goes, oysters are best in the months that contain the letter R — September through April. Some of that is because they are plumpest during colder months when they build up their fat stores. But some of it is because colder waters reduce the risk that a raw oyster will carry a virus or bacteria like Vibrio or norovirus.
Today, farms take the temperature of their water daily and regularly test it for bacteria, so raw oysters aren’t particularly dangerous, but you can still easily get food poisoning from a mishandled oyster. As much as I love them, they’re work. I understand that, to some people, they’re not worth the risk — spiritually or physically.
Perhaps the subversive and literal danger of the oyster is what led to the legend that rabbis at the banquet threw down their napkins and stormed out. The public flouting of kashrut, at a religious event, could symbolize the end of Judaism. The Highland House Affair, as the feast is also known, has become infamous among Jewish historians and rabbis in the century since it occurred as a moment of schism. But in fact, most contemporaneous descriptions of the event make no note of any drama around the menu.
An account of the feast in The New York Herald briefly mentions the non-kosher menu, but does not say that any of the attendees were upset — in fact, to the author’s palpable distaste, quite the contrary. “Instead of rising in a body and leaving the hall, they sat down and participated,” they wrote of the rabbis in attendance.
Only one account at the time, written in New York’s Jewish Messenger by Henrietta Szold (who would go on to found the Jewish women’s society Hadassah) observed that some attendees hadn’t partaken of the food, though, she noted, it was only “a surprisingly small minority.”
“There was no regard paid to our dietary laws,” she wrote of the catering, “and consequently two rabbis left the table without having touched the dishes, and I am happy to state that I know of at least three more who ate nothing and were indignant but signified their disapproval in a less demonstrative manner.”
Wise, the Hebrew Union College founder who had organized the meal, at first defended it, saying he had hired a Jewish caterer who regularly served a Jewish association and had no idea the meal served would not be kosher. Eventually, however, Wise and his supporters changed their strategy and began to defend the non-kosher components. They railed against the idea of kashrut; one rabbi argued that it was the perfect occasion to put “kitchen Judaism to the antique cabinet where it belongs.”
When the 500 members of the Free Sons of Israel, a Jewish fraternal order that Wise belonged to, gathered and supped on oysters, the rabbi reprinted the menu in the newspaper he ran, The American Israelite. He repeated the tactic when another Jewish fraternal order put oysters on a meeting menu. Jews were not accidentally consuming oysters, he pointed out. This was how Jews were eating, and why should they pretend otherwise?
Yet ironically, given his vociferous rejection of tradition, Wise also provided Talmudic arguments as to why the meal may have in fact been kosher; even as he chose assimilation he used Jewish wisdom to justify his choice. In the pages of The American Israelite, he argued “that the oyster shell is the same to all intents and purposes as the scales to the clean fish” and referenced both Moses’ and Maimonides’ statements on the topic. Elsewhere, he called the oyster an “ocean vegetable” to explain why it might be kosher. (Today many vegans take a similar stance; oysters have no nervous system and some vegans are more willing to consume the bivalves than they are honey.)
Others wrote back, citing their own raft of Jewish sages. One B. Younker wrote in to The Jewish Voice to reference Talmudic debates over what constitutes a scale, concluding that the oyster’s shell does not count.
But amid the debate, everyone else kept eating oysters. Sussman’s article in The American Jewish Archives Journal notes oyster-filled menus from the double wedding of two rabbis, a synagogue dedication and a banquet for a Jewish fraternal order; the last even used the same caterer as the Trefa Banquet. Apparently, there was something to that luxurious menu they planned — it was impressive enough to earn them repeat customers.
Today, many Jewish historians look to the Trefa Banquet as the beginnings of the Conservative movement in Judaism, as some of those horrified Jews rejected the idea of kosher oysters and decided they needed to develop a middle ground between the Reform and Orthodox movements. The debate the banquet set off over kashrut, as well as Wise’s liberal interpretations of Jewish law, concerned some Jews who wanted to protect tradition. Soon after the great oyster debate began, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship institution of the Conservative movement, opened its doors as a place to retain some amount of tradition in text and theology.
Fishy Jewish cooking
In my time manning the pop-up, I’ve come to believe that shucking an oyster is an art form. First, there’s the basic problem of opening the oyster. Usually that means inserting an oyster knife at the narrow hinge of the shell — though some people shuck from the side — and wiggling until you feel the point of the knife settle in deeper. Then you lever the knife down to pop the shell, slice along the flat top shell to separate the oyster, and then scoop the knife underneath the oyster to sever the adductor muscle. Personally, I prefer a Duxbury-style knife, which comes to a sharper point, but many people prefer the more classic New Haven-style knife, which curves slightly at the tip, providing a bit more leverage and a bit less likelihood of stabbing yourself in the palm.
Every oyster is different, not only in taste, but in shape, so finding the right spot to pop open the oyster is difficult; it takes practice. And that’s just the first challenge. A well-shucked oyster must be clean, free of shattered shell or sand. Just as importantly, it cannot be pierced by the knife (“scrambled”) and should retain all the liquor inside the shell. Ideally, it’s served on pebble ice, not just cubes, so that it doesn’t tip over and spill.
There’s something meditative to running the oyster pop-ups, trying for the perfect shuck with every oyster. They’re rushed and busy and stressful — there’s always a line and shucking a dozen without scrambling or shattering is hard to do when you’re working fast. You have to reach a sort of zen state to fly through them, finding the right point on each shell to insert the knife, cleanly severing them from the shell and cleaning out any sand inside. No one wants that grinding sensation you get when you have a snack at the beach and feel the grit between your teeth. And you can’t appreciate the unique texture and taste of each varietal if they’re a scrambled mess inside.
The oyster should be a plump, pearly arc in the shell, with lacy frilled edges. It should be beautiful.
Apparently everyday Jews saw the beauty in the bivalve. They largely left the debates over kashrut to the pages of The American Israelite and continued to eat oysters by the bushel.
A 1911 blurb in the J. Jewish News of Northern California excitedly announced the beginning of oyster season, listing several of the area’s best “oyster houses,” as did Jewish newspapers across the country over the next few decades.
Jews even ran their own oyster stands. An 1892 article in the B’nai Brith Messenger wrote a brief piece marveling at the success of one Al Levy, whose Southern California oyster cart did so well he was able to open cafes and “cocktail rooms.” Despite Levy’s obvious disregard for kashrut, the piece notes that he “has been one of the most progressive, honored and beloved Jews in this community, popular alike among Jews and gentiles.”
Some of the most popular Jewish cookbooks from the era are full of oyster recipes, literally writing the bivalves into Jewish food history alongside kugel and latkes.
Aunt Babbette’s Cookbook, a Jewish cookbook that remained in print for 25 years, featured 11 oyster recipes in its fish section; the rest of the fish, all kosher, are given one preparation apiece. A dish that sounds an awful lot like kugel — though the cookbook doesn’t use that term — includes an option to add oysters. (Notably, other seafood like clams and shrimp are omitted from most Jewish cookbooks of the era.)
For all the enthusiastic embrace of oysters, though, there was still one line that wasn’t crossed: pork, which even the Trefa Banquet did not serve.
“The debate over selective kashrut centered on two issues: pork and oysters,” wrote Sussman, the rabbi and historian, and the line was drawn, for the most part, between the two. Pigs have long been a metonym for kashrut and Judaism, and centuries of antisemitic caricatures pictured Jews riding pigs. Eating pork, apparently, was instinctively understood by most American Jews as a step too far, a symbolic denial of identity.
The power of ‘kitchen Judaism’
The oyster has always been the perfect metaphor for American Jewish life.
There’s a Judaism of purity, hewing to the safety found in tradition: keeping kashrut, retaining a degree of separation from the rest of society. But most American Jews opted for a Judaism of experimentation, in which the rules get bent, reinterpreted and altered to adapt to the ways of a new culture and new country. It’s more dangerous; one might eat a bad oyster. But in the meantime one also gets to enjoy the good ones. Yet even as Jews debated how far Judaism could stretch and remain Jewish, they did so Jewishly. Even the Jews who, over a century ago, rejected Jewish tradition and embraced shellfish justified their choices with Talmudic citations and biblical exegesis. They used Jewish law to justify why Jewish law was wrong about the oyster. What debate could be more Jewish?
Food, since then, has become both more and less central to Jewish identity. Plenty of Jews now will eat bacon or ham, and a celebration of the Trefa Banquet’s centennial in 2018 served a menu of mostly pork, connecting to Judaism specifically through a rejection of its strictures. Kitchen Judaism has become aspirational instead of pejorative as food traditions have become a rich and beloved way to connect with Jewish identity. Meanwhile, the Reform tradition has actually tipped back toward kashrut observance; in 2001, at the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform movement added in a recommendation that Jews follow “some element of Jewish dietary discipline.”
Through it all, the oyster has remained the perfect symbol of the decision confronting American Jews: How much should they assimilate to their new country, and how much tradition must they retain to stay Jewish?
This summer, I think I might have to miss the oyster farm; life has gotten in the way and I just don’t have the time. Still, I’m sure I’ll be shucking up trays for friends and customers somewhere (including at my Jewish wedding).
And most importantly, I’ll be carrying on the proud tradition of the oyster debate. I’ll admit that I don’t really buy the idea that shells are the same as scales, though I’m sympathetic to the idea that they should be categorized as vegetables. But the discussion I’m more interested in is how to eat them. The right answer is raw and plain. Maybe a drop of lemon. Maybe.
Cocktail sauce or horseradish or hot sauce, though? That’s heresy.
The post If mollusks are kosher, the world can be your oyster appeared first on The Forward.
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Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine
(JTA) — Graham Platner, the anti-Israel progressive who took Maine’s political establishment by storm this spring, has officially prevailed in his state’s Democratic Senate primary.
Multiple news outlets called the race within 90 minutes of the polls closing, with only a fraction of the votes counted.
The victory was seen as a foregone conclusion after Platner’s primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Still, the final tally suggested that not all Mainers had embraced the political neophyte whose campaign was dogged by controversies, including the revelation that Platner had a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades until he drew criticism for it on the campaign trail. He denied knowing it was a Nazi symbol.
Mills, who remained on the ballot, drew about one in five votes in the first 10% of ballots counted, according to the tally published by The New York Times.
The result sets Platner up to face off in November against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has received substantial support from pro-Israel donors. The latest polls suggest a tight race.
“I’m humbled and proud to officially be your Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate to take on Susan Collins and the billionaire class she represents. Together, we will win this seat back for working Mainers,” Platner tweeted on Tuesday night. “Thank you, Maine.”
While Democratic leaders officially threw their support behind Platner after Mills halted her campaign, many of them remained circumspect about him. Their balancing act grew more delicate in the final days of the primary race, as Platner drew allegations of antisemitism over his characterization of donations channeled to Collins by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and as he faced new allegations of misconduct toward women. (He said he had been a “far from perfect boyfriend” during some periods of his life but denied engaging in misconduct.)
Now, top Democrats will have to decide how hard to gun for Platner, who has become a standard-bearer in the party’s anti-Israel shift at a time when the chamber is narrowly divided.
They are already facing pressure to disavow him. “Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America, and every Senate Democrat propping up Platner’s campaign, should be ashamed,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement after the polls closed. “Their continued support of Graham Platner, who wore the symbol of Hitler’s SS on his chest for 18 years is an outrage. Schumer must withdraw his support immediately.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine appeared first on The Forward.
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A new proposal to radically destabilize Israel
Given the jackhammer pace of outrageous developments, one might almost think Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is trying to give the opposition ammunition in the coming election — most recently by promoting a bill rendering full-time Torah study as a national service equivalent to military service.
The proposed “Basic Law: Torah Study,” which will undergo its first of four Knesset votes on Wednesday, seeks to elevate full-time Torah study within Israel’s Basic Laws framework, a de facto constitution. Under its logic, sustained Torah study will not be merely a protected cultural or religious activity, but a state-recognized form of “meaningful service” to the nation. In effect, it would place long-term yeshiva study on a comparable footing to military service, including in terms of tangible financial benefits and how the state defines civic contribution.
This comes in the context of a conscription crisis, which has seen the country come to a boiling point over a long-standing institutional arrangement by which Haredi yeshiva students are exempted from military service.
Yet even as the rage mounts, the governing coalition is trying to find legislative ways to formalize the draft exemptions to appease Netanyahu’s Haredi coalition partners, without whom he would lose his tenuous majority.
The result may be a disastrous dual-track citizenship model: one in which military service obligations are heavily concentrated among secular and national-religious Israelis, while Haredi communities are structurally insulated both from conscription and from the economic consequences that typically accompany non-participation in the labor force or military.
There are plenty of cultural disagreements between Haredi and secular Israelis, but the central criticism of the proposed law is about how the legislation threatens the structure of the country. It incentivizes behavior that will undermine Israel’s ability to defend itself from its very real enemies by diminishing the number of people serving, and demoralizing those who do.
Torah study as national defense
The draft exemption has contributed to a severe manpower shortfall in the Israel Defense Forces, as tens of thousands of reservists are repeatedly mobilized for extended periods of duty: sometimes hundreds of days per year, even after completing compulsory service. Ordinary Israelis are chafing under this burden, while many thousands of conscription-age Haredim enjoy danger-free and often taxpayer-subsidized lives.
With the Haredim set to make up a third of Israel’s citizenry by 2050, many see the long-term implications of this inequality as dire for Israel.
By classifying Torah study as a form of recognized national service, the Basic Law proposal would provide a legal foundation for aligning the rights of yeshiva students with those of IDF veterans and active soldiers. That would influence their eligibility for a range of state-linked benefits and entitlements that are tied — directly or indirectly — to military service, including housing assistance, childcare subsidies, and other welfare mechanisms that privilege or differentiate based on service status.
In parallel, it strengthens the political and legal argument that full-time Torah learners should not be treated as draft evaders but as a distinct category of service-recognized citizens, thereby reinforcing the broader exemption framework. It would function as a bulwark anchoring existing and future exemption arrangements against judicial or legislative rollback.
Words can hardly express the agitation this prospect has caused in mainstream Israel.
A coherent worldview
Haredi politicians have settled on justifying the draft exemption by arguing that their prayers are more important than the actions of pilots or tank commanders in aiding Israel. Supporters of the exemption frame the arrangement as a necessary accommodation to preserve large-scale Torah study as a core national and religious value.
These arguments are, in my view, wrong but not trivial. They reflect a coherent worldview about identity, community and the meaning of national service.
Actual supporters of this approach outside the Haredi parties — and they are few — argue that Torah study is not merely a private religious activity but a foundational element of Jewish national identity. In their view, it represents a continuous spiritual contribution to the survival and cohesion of the Jewish people — one that cannot be measured in military or economic terms. They also warn that broad coercive conscription risks destabilizing Haredi society, undermining its institutions, and producing a deep cultural rupture.
The law “will be a historic confirmation of the supreme value of the Torah and students of the Torah to the people of Israel and their security,” said Aryeh Deri, head of the Haredi Party Shas, adding “the People of Israel need greater virtues for the success of its campaign against enemies.”
That argument is unlikely to convince anyone not already sold on this worldview. Which raises the question: What is Netanyahu thinking in letting this move forward?
It is all but certain this move will harm him in upcoming elections, and the opposition, should it win, will cancel most of the laws that resulted from the current legislative blitzkrieg — most of which involve weakening of the state’s institutions, primarily those with oversight over the government.
Perhaps the Haredim have conditioned future support for Netanyahu on the effort; but this would be an empty threat, because the center-left opposition is not a viable alternative for them, any more than the MAGA movement might join the U.S. Democratic Party.
The whole thing is a mystery. But one thing is clear, and alarming: Israel’s government is now openly advocating against a single shared system of civic duty, and for a tiered structure in which one group bears the full burden of military service, and another is exempt, on the strength of arguments that most Israelis reject.
The post A new proposal to radically destabilize Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Milei praises ‘Judeo-Christian values’ at Chabad event as Argentina courts European Jews
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — Argentine President Javier Milei exalted “Judeo-Christian values” on Monday as he spoke to a crowd of 1,800 people celebrating the 32nd anniversary of the death of the last Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi.
Milei was the keynote speaker at the Hasidic Orthodox movement’s event marking the yahrzeit of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, becoming what appears to be the first sitting non-Jewish head of state to make an official tribute to the Lubavitcher Rebbe at a major Chabad event.
“The conclusion I have reached is simple in its formulation and profound in its consequences: When one embraces Judeo-Christian values, spiritual and material life become aligned and resonate on the same wavelength,” Milei said Monday night at the Palacio Libertad cultural center.
It was the latest in a long list of expressions of admiration for Judaism for Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who was elected in 2023 and since has made support for Israel a cornerstone of his agenda. He has previously visited Schneerson’s grave in New York City, made pilgrimages to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and presented a picture of Schneerson to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a gift. He was also honored at a Chabad synagogue in Miami in 2024, where he revealed that he believed he has Jewish heritage.
Milei has long studied Judaism and has said he wants to convert after leaving office but sees Jewish practice, including the observance of Shabbat, as incompatible with the presidency.
His 40-minute speech at the Chabad event focused almost entirely on Jewish religious texts and thought, quoting passages from the Torah as the basis of his economic view.
Milei also revealed that his address was drawn from the epilogue of his upcoming book, “Morality as State Policy,” in which he argues that capitalism is a system invented by “the Creator” — whom he also referred to as “the One” — to bring paradise to earth through work.
Jews in Argentina have a range of perspectives on Milei’s philosemitism.
“I appreciate that the president chose to attend and speak at the Tribute to the Rebbe,” Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt, the head of Chabad in Argentina, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He is doing so from a deeply personal place. I also think it is healthy for him to have this spiritual side.”
But Alicia Osipovich, a sign-language interpreter assisting a deaf attendee at the event, told JTA that Milei’s forceful support for Israel and Judaism made her uneasy, even as she personally appreciated it.
“I’m proud and deeply moved to have a president like him,” Osipovich said. “At the same time, I have some concerns. He speaks extensively about Israel, and you know how support for Israel is sometimes portrayed. He says he is a Zionist, but nowadays the word ‘Zionist’ is often used as a negative label. I have mixed emotions. As a Jew, I am proud, but I also feel some concern about the increased public exposure of Judaism these days.”
Under Milei’s leadership, Argentina has invited European Jews worried about rising antisemitism to consider the country as a destination. Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno recently emphasized Argentina’s attractiveness in a message aimed at Jews in Britain and other European countries who are grappling with surging incidents targeting Jewish communities.
“A country on the up with great opportunities. Sunny, with many natural attributes, and home to the largest Jewish community in Latin America. Strong stand against antisemitism. British and European Jews should seriously consider Argentina. You are welcome,” Quirno wrote on X in reply to author Saul Sadka, who had urged British Jews to consider leaving amid growing hostility.
Argentina’s leading Jewish organization, DAIA, has recorded more antisemitic incidents in recent years, mostly taking place online. But the rate of antisemitic incidents reported in the country last year was significantly lower than in many other countries with sizable Jewish populations, according to the 2025 worldwide antisemitism report published in April by Tel Aviv University.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s global director, praised Quirno’s invitation, saying it reflected a significant shift.
“Sign of the times? A country formerly ruled by a Nazi-supporting dictator has morphed over decades into a strong democracy whose president is a philo-Semite,” Cooper wrote in reply to Milei’s foreign minister. “Argentina currently serves as chair of IHRA [the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance]. Foreign minister now beckons embattled British Jews. Incredible.”
Israel’s ambassador to Argentina Eyal Sela told JTA at the Chabad event that he had no difficulty recognizing that Argentina is currently a very good place for Jewish life.
“Yes, I agree with the Argentine foreign minister,” Sela told JTA. “Of course, Israel will always be the best place for Jewish life. But today, Argentina is a much better place for Jews than Europe.”
Monday’s event opened with the testimony of Yosef Chaim Ohana, a survivor of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, who expressed deep gratitude for the support shown by Jews around the world, followed by remarks from his father, Avi Ohana. Milei hosted the Ohanas and Grunblatt on Tuesday morning at Argentina’s presidential palace, the Casa Rosada.
Dozens of Argentine nationals were murdered or taken hostage on Oct. 7. This week, an Israeli who had worked in Buenos Aires at the Israeli embassy in Argentina was killed in an attack on a moshav in central Israel.
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