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In Indiana, a vaunted Jewish studies program is upended by red-state politics over Israel and speech
A sudden change in leadership at Indiana University’s Jewish studies program has erupted into a bitter internal feud, pitting a new interim director against faculty and students who say he is undermining academic freedom and reshaping the program’s direction amid national tensions over Israel and campus speech.
The turmoil began with the abrupt replacement of the department’s longtime director, continued with a clash between the new director and an ardently pro-Palestinian graduate student, and culminated last week with a statement of support for the new director from the college’s dean.
The conflict, first reported by the student newspaper, began in August, when the longtime director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program, Mark Roseman, unexpectedly stepped down a year before his term ended. Roseman said he was told, without explanation, that IU’s newly installed chancellor, David Reingold, sought to replace him.
Günther Jikeli, a scholar of antisemitism and associate director of IU’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, stepped into the role.
Soon after taking over, Jikeli clashed with graduate student Sabina Ali, who identifies as Jewish and supports the Palestinian cause. He expelled her from a Zoom seminar for displaying a “Free Palestine” image and later denied her travel funding to present a paper critical of “Jewish indigeneity” claims related to Israel. Jikeli said her work was “political activism, not scholarship.”
Many of the Borns Jewish Studies faculty and graduate students have publicly sided against Jikeli, fearing that his actions will threaten academic freedom and damage the reputation of one of the oldest and most storied Jewish studies programs in the country.
“We used to have a Jewish studies program where we knew we had political differences, but we had really great academic working relationships,” said Sarah Imhoff, a tenured professor who has been at IU for 16 years. “And that has significantly deteriorated.”
At the same time, dozens of faculty at universities around the world, most of them in Jewish studies, have signed a letter to the dean supporting Jikeli. They wrote that he was “facing an entirely unwarranted political assault on his professional integrity and judgment.”
“What Professor Jikeli is trying to do is restore rigor and objectivity in the department,” Allon Friedman, a medical school professor on IU’s Indianapolis campus and leader of multiple pro-Israel advocacy groups in the state, told JTA.
Friedman continued, “We’ve seen over the last few decades a real deterioration — not only the quality of scholarship in Jewish Studies in particular, but also an injection of politics that is oftentimes anti-Israel, if not overtly antisemitic. That’s what we’re seeing here.”
Mark Roseman, former director of Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program, in a promotional video for the program, Oct. 28, 2015. (Screenshot via YouTube)
Jikeli, who is not Jewish, declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency for this story. Representatives for IU and the dean’s office did not return repeated requests for comment.
Jikeli’s appointment in August came as a surprise to Roseman, who directed Jewish Studies at IU from 2013 to 2020 before reassuming the position last year. Roseman, who unlike Jikeli is Jewish, told JTA he stepped down after Jikeli told him that Reingold, who was named chancellor in June, had privately offered the director role to him.
This was considered a highly unusual arrangement for an academic program, where directors are not typically forced out before the end of their term and any replacements would typically be vetted by committee.
“I was surprised by it, obviously. It didn’t make sense to me to continue not having the confidence of the campus leadership,” Roseman said. He added that, in his eyes, “the program operated very harmoniously.” He remains affiliated with the program as a tenured faculty.
Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that he, too, was given no reason for the leadership change. Seemingly no one in the program was. At a meeting with Rick Van Kooten, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Jewish studies faculty asked why their director was being replaced now.
“I can’t tell you that,” the dean responded, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.
This scene was part of a broader cultural shift at IU, where around 12% of the student body is Jewish — and where new personnel and new oversight have been installed at various levels in a broader effort to comply with the nationwide campus crackdown led by President Donald Trump.
Indiana’s Republican state legislature, following Trump’s model, has wrested control of public university governance and pressured IU to curb the power of faculty decision-making, leading to a broader revolt over free speech on campus. During last year’s pro-Palestinian encampments, state police dispatched snipers to campus rooftops as a peacekeeping measure in a much-criticized move.
After the encampments, IU, like other schools, convened an antisemitism advisory board. Roseman and Jikeli served on it together, along with Dean Van Kooten and others including an Indianapolis congregational rabbi. (Unlike similar antisemitism task forces at other schools, IU’s has not produced a formal report.)
One Jewish professor who had played a leading role in the encampments was disciplined over the summer after being found in violation of an “intellectual diversity” law recently passed by the state senate. That professor, Benjamin Robinson, has since been sanctioned by the school. The complaint said that by sharing his views on Israel and Gaza in one of his Germanic studies classes, he violated a state law that forbids faculty from discussing their views in the classroom if they are unrelated to the professor’s expertise.
Many saw the recent shutdown of the student newspaper as a further attempt to quash dissent. (IU walked back its decision last week, but not before having fired the student media director.)
At the same time, not all speech has been silenced on campus. Recently Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, spoke to 3,000 IU students as part of the Turning Point USA tour days before releasing a chummy interview with avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Roseman alluded to such pressures in the Jewish studies program’s most recent alumni newsletter, dated fall 2025. In a “director’s report” written before he stepped down, he warns of recent actions from the state legislature forcing public universities to close programs that enroll under a certain threshold of majors. Such actions, he told alums, could jeopardize the program’s future.
The same newsletter included an “editor’s note” stating that Roseman would no longer be serving as director — and a welcome note from Jikeli. His primary concerns were different.
Günther Jikeli, a professor of antisemitism, addresses an audience in Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 7, 2018. In 2025 Jikeli was installed as interim director of Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program over the wishes of some of his colleagues. (Screenshot via YouTube)
“Rising antisemitism is a challenge on campuses across the country,” Jikeli wrote. “While IU is not immune, we are fortunate to have strong partnerships and resources to address these concerns, and we will continue to work together to ensure that Jewish Studies remains a place of learning, resilience, and community.”
Roseman, a renowned British scholar of the Holocaust who most recently edited a comprehensive four-volume Cambridge history of the Shoah, had tried to keep a low profile on campus in the two years since the Hamas attacks and outbreak of war in Gaza. Even as IU, like many other schools, contended with encampments and accusations that Israel was committing genocide, the resident genocide scholar sought to keep his own views out of the spotlight, colleagues said.
That has not been the case with Jikeli, whose research specialties include monitoring antisemitism among pro-Palestinian supporters on Instagram and in European Muslim communities, including Syrian refugees. Last year he helped to organize a “Rally Against Hamas Propaganda” on campus, alongside the leaders of IU’s Hillel and Chabad centers and the president of Hoosiers for Israel. At the time, Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that the rally was not intended as a direct counter to the encampments.
Speaking to the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an activist group, over the summer prior to his appointment as director, Jikeli warned that tensions on campuses like his own were “entering a more dangerous phase.” He painted anti-Zionist activists in stark terms.
“We’re not just dealing with protests,” he said then. “We’re facing a hardened core of ideologically driven actors, empowered by digital amplification and real-world networks, who are reshaping campus discourse — and possibly campus safety — in deeply troubling ways.”
In the two months since Jikeli took over the Jewish studies director post, he has taken a harder line against a strain of pro-Palestinian activism that had been running through some aspects of the program. In his view, expressed in emails viewed by JTA, he is protecting the program from influence or activism that could harm its mission.
Indiana University graduate student Sabina Ali holds a sign with her name on it as members of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition and its supporters picket while striking for union recognition in Bloomington, Indiana, April 25, 2022. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
His efforts soon focused on a chief adversary: Sabina Ali, a sixth-year doctoral student pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies with a minor in Jewish studies and a former managing editor of the American Religion Journal, a scholarly publication based at IU.
Over email, Ali told JTA she identifies as “post-Soviet Jewish,” with a mixed family including Muslims. “My Jewish identity is inseparable from the struggle against all forms of oppression, including Israel’s ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide against Palestinians,” she wrote.
Last year Ali was one of dozens to sign an open letter from “Jewish Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni” protesting the university’s breaking up of a student encampment — a letter not signed by Roseman, Imhoff or any other current Jewish studies faculty save one. (An emeritus professor who is on the Jewish studies faculty advisory board also signed.) She supports a movement pressuring IU to divest from Israel, and her Zoom profile picture, visible when her camera is off, is a drawing of a woman wearing a keffiyeh accompanied by a Palestinian flag and the words “Free Palestine.”
Ali was drawn to Jewish studies, she said, “because my research engages core questions within the field while also expanding the field’s boundaries through critical approaches.” She also admired the work of the faculty, particularly Imhoff. “It matters deeply to me to be part of Jewish Studies because it is a field where I feel I can make meaningful contributions and connect it to broader interdisciplinary conversations,” she said.
When on campus she routinely wore a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by protesters on the left, to Jewish studies events — something she said she did without incident before Jikeli’s appointment.
“I am fully aware that not everyone in the program shares my political views or my fundamental moral conviction that occupation, apartheid, and genocide are unacceptable,” Ali told JTA. “Academic freedom does not require that everyone is comfortable.”
Before the leadership change, Ali’s politics encountered little pushback within Jewish studies — although some faculty and students had expressed discomfort behind closed doors. But under Jikeli, it quickly became an issue.
Her Zoom picture became a sticking point in September when it was visible during a program event, as Imhoff prepared to present her own latest research to colleagues. According to those in attendance at the Zoom lecture, Jikeli ordered Ali to remove the pro-Palestinian image or he’d kick her off the call. When she refused, he booted her — prompting a mass exodus from nearly all of her colleagues, who reconvened in a separate Zoom meeting, sans Jikeli, to discuss the research.
The incident infuriated many on campus who viewed Jikeli’s actions as a violation of academic freedom, with one professor calling his behavior “autocratic.”
In an email obtained by JTA, Ali wrote, “The irony is not lost on me that I — a Jewish student — was excluded from a Jewish Studies event for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, while you, a ‘scholar’ of antisemitism, used your authority to decide what kinds of Jewish expression are acceptable.”
Some, however, supported Jikeli.
“I do not think it was wrong of Dr. Jikeli to ask, or to insist, that a Zoom profile with said imagery and said language be removed, given the program that we’re in, given the times that we’re in,” Joanna Martin, a second-year doctoral student with a Jewish studies minor, told JTA.
Things shortly escalated when Jikeli vetoed Ali’s request for funding to present her research paper, “Weaponizing Indigeneity,” at a conference on religious studies. According to the paper’s abstract, “claims about ‘Jewish indigeneity’ to Palestine…are appropriated to justify the existence and actions of the settler-colonial nation-state of Israel and deployed to legitimize the possession of Palestine.”
The funding request, typically pro forma, had already been approved by the faculty committee overseeing graduate studies. The program director’s decision to unilaterally override the committee was, observers said, unprecedented.
No one before Jikeli had raised a flag about her research proposal. “In fact,” Ali said, “my advisors and committee members have told me that my research is innovative for Jewish studies.”
Jikeli defended his decision to faculty in a September email, obtained by JTA, saying Ali’s research was too politicized. He suggested that the Department of Religious Studies, Ali’s primary doctoral home, could fund her travel instead.
Jikeli explained in a follow-up email that he had to act “in the best interest of Jewish Studies as a program,” and believed that funding Ali “could have harmed Jewish Studies.” He added, “I understand that reasonable people may disagree on where exactly to draw such lines.”
Many in the program weren’t persuaded.
“Many of us feel like this current arrangement is not one we would want to continue,” Imhoff said. “I would like to find a way forward where we can support all graduate students and faculty who are doing serious research, regardless of their politics.”
“She’s a graduate student. We’re all graduate students. Part of our job here is to learn how to fit within this discipline, fit within the field, and push boundaries of what that’s supposed to look like,” Daniel Reischler, a third-year doctoral student, told JTA.
Ali’s activism, long tolerated in the program, was now a flashpoint. “My sense is this is just what he was hired to do, to deny Sabina funding,” one member of the Jewish Studies faculty said of Jikeli. Some have argued it is, in fact, Jikeli who is imposing personal politics on Ali’s research.
“People are paranoid,” Claire Richters, a sixth-year Ph.D. student, told JTA. She was one of three members of the Jewish Studies graduate student executive committee, including Reischler, who signed an open letter to Jikeli protesting his decision to withhold funding to Ali. “There’s just a worry that this will start extending to any issue that the director has a political disagreement with.”
Those concerns aren’t shared by everyone. “There’s a lot of, like, ‘Will my research be denied?’ And it’s like, you’re doing Holocaust studies. I doubt it,” Martin said. Declining to share her thoughts on Ali’s research and its appropriateness for Jewish Studies, she added, “The majority don’t have reason to be worried.”
The letter from outside faculty supporting Jikeli also defends the actions he took against Ali.
“First, there was good reason, we believe, to turn down a request for travel support to deliver a programmatic indictment of Israel as a colonialist power. Nothing in the abstract demonstrates any original arguments,” the letter states. “Second, the decision to disallow a student in an online seminar to replace her face with a political slogan and an anonymized portrait in a keffiyeh was responsible and appropriate.”
Among the letter’s signatories: Alvin Rosenfeld, who founded Jewish studies at IU.
A police officer with a gun stands on a Palestinian flag during the arrest of an activist on the third day of a pro-Palestinian protest camp at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, April 27, 2024. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Dean Van Kooten weighed in on the disputes with Ali in an internal email on Oct. 29.
He tried to walk a fine line. “I concur with the director’s decision to not use Borns Jewish Studies Program funding, particularly an IU foundation account[,] to fund the travel of the graduate student,” Van Kooten wrote in an email viewed by JTA. However, he added, Ali’s travel to the conference would still be funded, just from a different IU piggy bank. This would be done, he wrote, in the name of “respecting academic freedom.”
When it came to Zoomgate, Van Kooten was more circumspect. “Regarding the governance of the use of Zoom in department/program seminars, colloquia, etc., the college does not have a policy on this, and we don’t recommend one,” he wrote. Any Zoom policy going forward, he added, “should be voted on by the entire core faculty, and in consultation with Indiana University’s general counsel.”
The dean added that, in absence of any clear policy, “the convenor of an event must exercise sound judgment in balancing the importance of freedom of speech and expression [following university policies] with the obligation to maintain an inclusive learning environment, and limit disruptions when they occur.”
One graduate student told JTA the email felt like a “stalemate.” The work of the program goes on: This week its contemporary antisemitism center hosted a symposium on campus antisemitism, with many of its featured speakers having also signed the letter supporting Jikeli.
Unusually, the conference was supported with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under Trump the NEH has defunded virtually every other Jewish humanities program, with the exception of the conservative Tikvah Fund. The current acting chair of the NEH was expected to attend IU’s conference.
For some broader observers of the Jewish studies space, who’d long seen Indiana as a beacon for the field, the situation is deeply troubling.
“Indiana is more than a red state. It has an incredible history of white supremacy,” said Riv-Ellen Prell, an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the history of Jews on campus. “And here is IU, in the middle of this world, as this incredible magnet for Jewish students — because the Jewish studies program was so great, because they had a big Hillel.”
But with the forced changes, Prell said, the forces that shape higher education were sending a message: “‘We like these kinds of Jewish studies people. We don’t like those kinds of Jewish studies people.’”
Prell said that concerns about the appropriateness of Ali’s graduate studies were missing the point: that there were other ways the program’s director could have addressed them.
“This is where she is housed as a student, admitted as a student, and there is academic freedom, and there are faculty who wish to supervise and work with her,” Prell said. “If we are to begin saying, ‘Well, the faculty who work with these students aren’t allowed to teach or supervise people with this kind of work,’ then that is the death of academic freedom.”
Friedman sees things differently.
“It’s insane that we would even consider to pay for something like this,” he said, of Ali’s research. “What’s the point of a Jewish studies department if the students in the department are demonstrating that, not only do they know nothing about the history of the Jewish people, but they’re actively trying to undermine it? No one else would tolerate this.”
Jewish studies has increasingly been a growing lightning rod for Jewish campus politics, even before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s assault in Gaza; the spike in campus antisemitism, and Trump’s college crackdown.
At other schools, donors have pulled funding for Jewish and Israel studies programs over political disagreements with faculty on Israel. Some Jewish studies faculty have been targeted or muscled out of campus antisemitism task forces because of their perceived views on Israel, while others have led protests against their own task forces. At Columbia, which reached a settlement with the Trump administration to protect its funding after becoming the epicenter of student protests, some angry Jewish donors have opted to support Jewish Studies, but not the rest of the university.
Yet Jikeli’s fear that the IU controversy “could harm Jewish Studies” seems to some a self-fulfilling prophecy. On social media, current and former IU Jewish Studies faculty were bemoaning the spiritual end of the program. And citing the interim director’s actions, some prospective graduate students have told faculty they are no longer interested in enrolling.
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‘Mensch of Manhattan’ Lasher wins over Bores in fight for Nadler’s seat, media projects
(New York Jewish Week) — Micah Lasher has defeated Alex Bores in the battle for retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler’s Manhattan congressional seat, according to media projections Tuesday night.
In the race for the 12th Congressional District, the most Jewish in the country, Lasher had 40,106 votes, or 39.1 percent, and Bores collected 35,822 votes, or 35 percent, with 87 percent of the ballots counted.
The crowded field in the Democratic primary also included John F. Kennedy grandson Jack Kennedy Shlossberg, public health expert Nina Schwalbe, and George Conway, a Republican-turned-Democrat and Trump antagonist. All three were trailing well behind Lasher.
During his victory speech, Lasher pointed to both his and the district’s Jewish identity.
“It is an enormous point of pride that I will be representing the most Jewish congressional district in the country,” Lasher said. “I will always stand up for our community with pride.”
He also received a loud ovation after he thanked “the rabbis and Jewish community leaders” who helped the campaign.
A number of Lasher’s political allies and former bosses spoke, including Nadler, who’s represented the upper West Side since 1992, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Comptroller Mark Levine, and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who told the JTA that Lasher would be a bridge between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Jewish community.
Holyman-Sigal called Lasher the “mensch of Manhattan.”
Lasher thanked Nadler for his decades of service and mentorship, saying he taught Lasher things like “vision, compassion, and how to canvass voters outside Zabar’s.”
Nadler is “as much an institution in Manhattan as Central Park and pastrami on rye,” Lasher said.
The House seat — which covers the Upper West and Upper East sides and midtown Manhattan, and is seen as a crown jewel in New York politics — opened up after Nadler announced last fall that he would retire at the end of this term.
Nadler’s preferred heir was Lasher, a Jewish State Assembly member who has worked for the progressive stalwart and other prominent politicians such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Lasher has the support of those former bosses, plus much of the West Side political establishment.
Fellow Assembly member Bores, meanwhile, has built a coalition that includes both pro-Israel moderates and progressive groups critical of the Jewish state by emphasizing that he will be tough on artificial intelligence companies. Former congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who represented much of Manhattan’s East Side from 1993 until 2023, is among Bores’ supporters.
On the subject of Israel, the makeup of the NY-12 race has been unlike other contested New York City races: Elsewhere, at least one of the two leading candidates has accmused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and supports placing conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel.
But Lasher and Bores both describe themselves as pro-Israel and anti-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and neither one supports blocking weapons sales to the Jewish state.
Mamdani is himself a voter in the district as a resident of Gracie Mansion and who cast his ballot a few days ago, during the early voting period, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has declined to weigh in publicly on the race. The mayor endorsed two democratic socialist candidates and Brad Lander — his Jewish ally who accuses Israel of genocide, and has positioned himself against both offensive and defensive military aid to Israel — in other races.
Lasher and Bores have both consistently advocated for universally applying the existing Leahy Law, which bars the U.S. from providing military assistance to foreign military units that violate human rights with impunity.
Schlossberg has criticized Lasher and Bores for their stance, calling it an “insufficient answer,” and advocates for blocking offensive weapons sales to Israel while still funding the Iron Dome defensive missile system. He is the only of the top-four candidates to call for conditions on aid to Israel and halting any weapons sales. After initially leading in early polls, Schlossberg’s support appears to have fallen amid questions over his lack of experience.
Conway, an anti-Trumper and longtime attorney who was married to former Donald Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway, rounds out the top four in the polling.
Throughout the election, candidates convened for forums at numerous synagogues in the heavily Jewish district — 23.3% of constituents are Jewish, according to a 2024 study — and answered questions related to antisemitism, Israel and other Jewish-related issues.
Lasher has said at multiple forums that he doesn’t see anti-Zionism as being precisely the same thing as antisemitism, but that “often when you see one you see the other.”
He and Bores have both touted their support for a statewide “buffer zone” bill — which Lasher introduced in response to pro-Palestinian demonstrations outside synagogues — that would curb protests outside houses of worship. Meanwhile, Schlossberg has pointed out at Jewish forums that the first policy his campaign released was “Jack’s Fast-Track Plan,” which would fast-track a doubling of funds for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program that funds security at houses of worship and community centers.
During a June forum at Upper West Side synagogue B’nai Jeshurun, Lasher said he felt “exhausted” by how much the political dialogue — both in the NY-12 race and more broadly — is “obsessed” with Israel.
Lasher is sure to win in November’s general election in the heavily Democratic district where he will face only token Republican opposition.
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I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation.
(JTA) — Neoconservatives have some ‘splainin’ to do, as Lucy’s television husband, Ricky Ricardo used to say.
The war on Iran has turned out to be a debacle of historic proportions.
After months of military escalation, tens of billions of dollars expended, critical weapons stockpiles depleted, and a region once again thrown into crisis, the United States now finds itself humiliated. The memorandum of understanding reportedly concluded last week does not represent the culmination of victory. It represents the codification of failure.
Many understood that nuclear disarmament and regime change in Iran could not be achieved through force. As I wrote in these pages a few months ago, more than a decade ago, we reached a solution designed to avert precisely the calamity that has unfolded. It was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or, in layman’s parlance, the Iran nuclear deal.
As a certified denizen of the Swamp — I served in the Clinton White House’s communications shop and later founded a Washington, DC strategic communications firm — I was at the forefront of selling the Obama administration’s agreement to the American public.
I remember those days well — and I do not miss them.
JCPOA defenders, particularly those of us in the Jewish community, were attacked in the ugliest terms imaginable. We were called appeasers, sellouts, self-hating Jews and worse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington and outrageously warned Congress that the deal might pave the way to a second Holocaust.
JCPOA advocates never argued that the agreement signed in Vienna was perfect.
Its critics pointed to the sunset provisions. They objected that the deal did not address every malign activity undertaken by the Islamic Republic throughout the Middle East. These were legitimate concerns. Politics, however, is the art of the possible; geopolitics doubly so.
That agreement nevertheless achieved something extraordinary. Iran shipped out the overwhelming majority of its enriched uranium. International inspectors gained unprecedented access. A mechanism existed to monitor and constrain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The prospect of military confrontation receded.
The regime’s hardliners hated the agreement. The Revolutionary Guard fought it tooth and nail. Integration into the global economy threatened entrenched interests within the Islamic Republic. A growing middle class and increasing international engagement carried risks for those whose power depended on its isolation and perpetual confrontation.
Unfortunately, hardliners were not confined to Tehran.
The maximal-pressure advocates in Washington ultimately prevailed. During the first Trump administration, the United States withdrew from the agreement. Tore it up, as the president bragged. Despite the best efforts of our European partners, who had also signed the accord, the framework collapsed beneath the weight of renewed sanctions and diplomatic abandonment.
What followed, we were promised, was supposed to vindicate the critics.
Instead, it vindicated the critics’ critics.
The maximal-pressure advocates have spent years moving the goalposts. First, we were told, sanctions would bring the regime to its knees. They did not. Then economic isolation would force Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. It did not. Then military pressure would succeed where sanctions had failed. It did not. Then leadership decapitation, covert action, and military escalation would produce regime change. They did not.
Each promised but failed breakthrough gave way to another promised breakthrough.
And now comes the final indignity: the so-called memorandum of understanding.
After years of threats, sanctions, covert action, military escalation and open warfare, the United States has agreed to resume negotiations with the very regime it set out to break. The Islamic Republic remains in power. Its leadership and political system remain intact.
Nor is that all.
The agreement reportedly provides waivers for Iranian oil exports and opens the door to sanctions relief and renewed access to many billions in frozen assets. It establishes yet another negotiating process on the nuclear question rather than resolving it. It leaves unresolved many of the issues that maximal-pressure advocates once described as non-negotiable, including Iran’s missile capabilities, its regional proxy network, or the many canisters of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium — what the president calls nuclear dust.
Even the future status of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical passage for oil open before the war, and now established as a lever for Iran to exert pressure, appears destined for further negotiation rather than decisive resolution.
The advocates of maximal pressure promised a better deal than the JCPOA. They promised that Iran would be forced to make concessions unavailable through diplomacy.
Instead, after years of confrontation, Washington finds itself lifting pressure, restoring economic benefits, negotiating with a surviving regime and postponing the most difficult questions to future talks.
Hell, in Paris last week, Trump actually made the case for Iran to retain, build or buy missiles and maintain at least some nuclear power.
So, what, precisely, was achieved?
The tragedy is not merely that the war failed to accomplish its objectives. It is that we already possessed a framework that constrained Iran’s nuclear program without requiring military confrontation. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was imperfect, to be sure. Its supporters never claimed otherwise. But it reduced risk, established verification mechanisms and avoided precisely the cycle of escalation that has consumed the past decade.
Its opponents insisted there was a better way.
History has now rendered its verdict.
The United States ultimately abandoned a functioning diplomatic framework in pursuit of fantasies that proved unattainable. Having exhausted sanctions, threats and military force, it has arrived back at the negotiating table poorer, weaker and in possession of less leverage than before.
I’m afraid I told you so.
The defenders of the JCPOA were mocked as appeasers. Yet the memorandum of understanding now before us amounts to an admission of the very proposition we advanced all along: However distasteful it may be, the Islamic Republic is not a problem that can be bombed or sanctioned out of existence.
Diplomacy could have spared us the war.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation. appeared first on The Forward.
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Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani
Former City Comptroller Brad Lander handily defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the New York Democratic primary Tuesday night, while lesser-known Assemblymember Claire Valdez secured the nomination for another House seat — both after campaigning as sharp critics of Israel and with the endorsement of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Preliminary results showed Lander with about 66% of the vote to Goldman’s 34%. Valdez won with 56% of the vote for the open seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Both are virtually assured of winning the general election in November in their heavily Democratic districts.
A third candidate whom Mamdani had endorsed, former Columbia Gaza war encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, held a slight lead over Rep. Adriano Espaillat on Tuesday night.
Representing a spectrum ranging from liberal Zionist critic (Lander) to longtime activist for the Palestinian cause (Avila Chevalier), the strong results for Mamdani’s chosen candidates is being closely watched nationally in a Democratic Party where many voters say they want the U.S. to distance itself from Israel. All three candidates say they will support cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the Iron Dome defense system.
At a campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.” The remarks drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some Mamdani supporters.
Lander is a high-profile Jewish politician allied with Mamdani, who this election cycle threw his weight behind a slate of progressive candidates who have critiqued hardline pro-Israel money and use the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting out to challenge the incumbent, Lander zeroed in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC during the campaign.
Lander told the New York Times that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
In NY-7, another candidate backed by Mamdani defeated the incumbent’s handpicked successor. democratic socialist Valdez won against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who had the endorsement of outgoing Rep. Velázquez.
But Mamdani’s brand of Israel politics didn’t succeed everywhere: In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s most staunch supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who allied with Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — won over Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who argued that the state should divest from Israel bonds because they help “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who retired after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores had broad agreement in their support of Israel.
The other candidate in the race, Kennedy political scion Jack Schlossberg, had called for conditioning aid to Israel and attempted to draw contrast with Bores and Lasher on the issue. But Schlossberg’s campaign struggled to gain traction amid questions about his lack of political experience.
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