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In Orban’s rule, Israelis saw a model for their own country. Will he also be one in defeat?
(JTA) — For years, critics and supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alike have seen Hungary’s Viktor Orban as a model for his politics.
Netanyahu long called Orban a “true friend” who consistently backed Israel against criticism in Europe, and his allies said Orban’s policies kept Hungarian Jews safe amid increasing danger. His critics say he followed Orban down a dangerous path of democratic backsliding.
Now, in the wake of Orban’s spectacular defeat in Hungary’s election earlier this month, the comparison has taken on a different cast.
“Israel, soon,” Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and member of Knesset from the liberal Democrats party wrote as he published a photo on his social media page of vast crowds gathering in Budapest to celebrate Orban’s defeat.
The election in Hungary comes as Israel looks ahead to an election in the next six months, with polls showing Netanyahu facing an uphill battle to retain power. For his many critics, the results are fueling optimism for an Orban-like upset in Israel.
“Congrats Hungary. A new chapter is on the horizon for Israel too. It’s time for everyone who believes in a Jewish and democratic Israel to stand together and commit to that shared vision,” wrote UnXeptable, the Israeli opposition movement that launched in response to Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the judiciary’s independence. “A brighter future is possible.”
On the right, too, the comparison was clear. In the hours after Orban’s defeat, one of the anti-Netanyahu protest movement’s most recognizable slogans, “Israel will not become Hungary,” was repurposed, ironically, by voices on the right as reassurance that Israel would not follow Hungary’s political trajectory.
Olga Deutsch, vice president of pro-Israel watchdog NGO Monitor and a researcher at the right-leaning Misgav Institute, said the discussion in Israel has been overwhelmingly inward-looking.
Israelis “view news from abroad through very local lenses,” she said. “There is much less debate on whether Orban had an amazing human rights track record inside of Hungary, or even about the Russia versus Ukraine discourse in the context of the EU. Rather, they debate his loss in the context of what that will mean for Israel.”
One strain of implications revolves around whether Magyar will be as supportive of Israel and its leader as Orban was. Early indications suggest that the answer is no. After Netanyahu suggested that Magyar had invited him back to Hungary this fall, Magyar announced that he would abide by the compact creating the International Criminal Court, meaning that Netanyahu cannot visit without facing arrest.
Tom Gross, a journalist with expertise on Middle East issues, said in an interview that he believed Israel was functioning as an “easy sacrificial lamb” for Magyar as the new Hungarian government seeks to unlock frozen EU funds.
“Even though Magyar may not personally have animosity towards the State of Israel, Israel — and in particular Bibi — will be the easiest sacrificial lamb to offer up to win over Brussels on other issues,” Gross said.
Yonatan Levi, a researcher at the London School of Economics and a fellow at Molad-The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, a Jerusalem-based policy group focused on democratic institutions, said the “intense public attention” to the Hungarian vote among Israelis was unusual for reasons going well beyond the Hungary-Israel relationship.
“I don’t remember any elections in a foreign country in recent years, except for the United States, that Israelis followed as closely as the Hungarian elections,” he said.
He attributed that focus to the widespread perception that Hungary has seemed like a blueprint for Netanyahu and his partners.
“Many of the laws and reforms that allowed Viktor Orban to take control of the courts, eliminate the free media, and completely politicize the public service have also been promoted in Israel in recent years,” Levi said. “So until now, Israelis have looked at Hungary to understand what might happen in Israel if it continues on its current path of democratic retreat.”
Suddenly, they have been given a glimpse of a different future, he said.
“Now, thanks to the dramatic developments of recent weeks, Israelis are examining Hungary closely precisely to understand how populist leaders such as Netanyahu and Orban, who are gradually eroding democracy in their own countries, can be defeated,” Levi said. “From a threatening model from which to learn what to be wary of, Hungary has become a source of hope.”
Exactly how Israel might replicate Hungary’s results is less clear. The two countries have different electoral systems, such that Orban and the man who defeated him, Peter Magyar, together garnered about 85% of the vote, with Magyar’s Tisza party drawing an absolute majority.
In Israel, there are 18 political parties, with most polls showing 11 currently polling at the level that they would achieve seats in parliament if the election were held today. No party comes close to a majority and while polling currently shows the opposition bloc likely to be able to form a majority coalition, it would do so only narrowly. The pool includes not just right, center and left but religious Jewish parties and an Arab party — a much wider span than in Hungary.
Various opposition leaders have taken the opportunity to suggest that they are Israel’s version of Magyar, a conservative who came up in Orban’s Fidesz party and broke with him only in recent years.
“I see that all the trumpeters and conspiracy enthusiasts are now explaining that Orbán lost in Hungary because of the ‘global left.’ They missed the fact that the election winner, Péter Magyar, is far from left-wing,” tweeted Yair Lapid, the head of the Yesh Atid party who was briefly prime minister after negotiating a deal to seize power from Netanyahu’s Likud party in 2021.
Lapid went on: “The man grew up in Orbán’s party and defines himself as a ‘conservative liberal’—which is the Hungarian version of center on democratic issues and economic right-wing (yes, like Yesh Atid).”
Yair Golan, who leads the liberal Democrats, which is heading toward its first election, said he, too, saw hope in Hungary.
“Orbán tried everything: he took over the media, weakened the judicial system, and tried to create a reality in which he couldn’t be replaced. But in the end, the Hungarian people had their say at the ballot box. The citizens proved that no poison machine and no cheap populism can defeat the simple human desire to live in a free society, clean of corruption and functioning,” he tweeted. “For us, this is a living reminder of what’s about to happen right here.”
For some Israeli observers, the lesson from Hungary is that Netanyahu’s opponents should look to his own camp for a candidate to unseat him. Gross said that when it comes to Orbán, Magyar “shares his political outlook and comes from inside the Fidesz party establishment.”
That, he said, points to a similar dynamic in Israel. Israelis may be tired of Netanyahu because of the longevity of his time in office, Gross said, but he has already “won the battle of ideas in the sense that the only likely successor to Netanyahu would be somebody who shares those ideas.”
For the opposition, he said, “their best bet of unseating Netanyahu is finding someone else such as Naftali Bennett and rallying around him,” rather than trying to challenge those ideas directly.
Perhaps the closest cognate to Magyar in Israel, Bennett was the other half of the power-sharing arrangement that briefly knocked Netanyahu out of power, but unlike Lapid, he started his career in politics in Netanyahu’s party — and while he left it sooner than Magyar left Fidesz, he remained in Netanyahu’s coalition until 2021.
Bennett is a center-right politician who aligns with Netanyahu’s outlook on some major policy issues but distances himself from Netanyahu’s politics, which he says are filled with “poison” and cronyism. He has been hiring technocrats who say they can build a government without the corruption that Netanyahu has been accused of fostering. And like Magyar, he has been stumping across his tiny country, working determinedly to build support for an election in which he is rising in the polls.
Bennett did not publicly comment on Orbán’s loss — but he sent a powerful signal the same day when he announced the recruitment of two prominent women who previously served as government ministry director-generals, Keren Terner and Liran Avisar Ben Horin, to his party.
The comparison has limits. Bennett has already served a term as prime minister, giving him a track record and public perception far more fixed than Magyar’s. Unlike with Magyar, Bennett’s break with his political mentor required allying himself with ideological enemies, making it far less likely that he can peel off votes from Netanyahu.
“Right now it seems like Bennett is able to take a lot of votes from the center left but not necessarily a lot from the right wing,” Ofir Gutzelson, a founder of UnXeptable, said during the group’s webinar last week unpacking the election results.
The Israeli journalist Yair Navot said on the webinar that Bennett could take a page from Magyar and negotiate with other parties to form an informal coalition ahead of the election, which is not yet scheduled but must take place before the end of October.
That way, Israelis would be able to vote for their own preferred parties, rather than have to compromise on their beliefs, even as it would be clear going into the election that Bennett would be the prime minister if the coalition prevailed. But he said he understood that such an arrangement would be challenging in Israel, with such a wide range of ideologies at play.
Navot offered the example of Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief whose son was killed in Gaza, as another figure who could potentially play the same role — without the added baggage of a previous term.
But Navot said he thought Israelis should be focused on tactics as much as who is running. “If there is one important lesson to learn from Hungary for Israelis, for Israel, it is first of all the importance of the turnout,” he said.
Hungary’s turnout was historically high, near 80%. Turnout in Israel’s 2022 election, the most recent, was about 70%. Since then, emigration has spiked, particularly among young families and more liberal Israelis who have felt alienated by years of war and the country’s internal political fights. Unlike Hungary, Israel does not allow absentee voting, so those voters will need to fly back to Israel — buying historically expensive tickets in the process — if they want to participate in the coming election.
But some who want to see Israel pull a Hungary say there’s no need for left-wing voters to get involved.
In the Facebook group Right-Wing People Against the Conduct of this Government, the psychologist Chen Herman drew approval with a video in which she proclaimed that the Hungarian election results were “a celebration, not in a mystical sense but in the most practical sense.”
She said Hungarians had not gotten carried away in their vision for what the election could accomplish — and in doing so had been able to deflect the same criticism that anti-Netanyahu Israelis tend to face from his party acolytes.
“The voters in Hungary chose between right and right. They understood that to beat the system, they needed to step outside themselves and vote strategically. What were people trying to say about them? That they’re traitors to security? That they’re ungrateful? That their leader is Trump’s best buddy? … Sound familiar?” Herman said.
“But they decided to choose a government that isn’t corrupt, and that’s why it worked. They didn’t get scattered. They didn’t ask for too much. Simple,” she went on. “So if there’s anything to learn from the Hungarians, it’s to get grounded, to understand reality. If there’s a majority here holding right-wing views, and it might affect the elections, you just need to choose: corrupt right-wing or non-corrupt right wing.”
With at most six months to go before Israel’s election, it’s not clear how shaken Netanyahu himself is. He waited hours before congratulating Magyar, but some of his ministers embraced Magyar sooner.
“Netanyahu’s worst nightmare is not losing a friend in Budapest,” Jonathan Meta wrote on Substack. “It is watching Hungarian voters do something he has devoted considerable energy to making sure Israeli voters never quite manage to do themselves.”
Netanyahu and Orbán were more than just leading avatars of the global right, along with Trump. They also share staffers and even a pollster, the conservative American John McLaughlin.
The night before the election, the Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who is seen as close and friendly to Netanyahu, invoked past Israeli elections in which media polling — long criticized for being out of sync with voter behavior — failed spectacularly in capturing the final result.
He noted that McLaughlin had defied the consensus of mainstream Hungarian media by projecting a victory for Orbán’s Fidesz party. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Segal said during a broadcast in which he indicated both that he believed Orbán could prevail but that if the Hungarian leader did not, it could bode poorly for Netanyahu this fall.
As it became clear that McLaughlin had indeed misjudged, the clip circulated widely in Israel, with comments piling up. A typical one: “If it can happen there, it can happen here.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In Orban’s rule, Israelis saw a model for their own country. Will he also be one in defeat? appeared first on The Forward.
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Soccer helped my family survive the Nazis. Our community has lost sight of that story’s meaning
A new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum LA should be telling my great-grandfather’s story as part of its study of soccer, Jews and the Holocaust. But it won’t, because the museum failed to internalize the great moral lesson that my family learned from surviving the Holocaust: to never value the safety of one group over that of others.
The museum describes The Beautiful Game: The Untold Story, which opened this week, as an exploration of “the deep and often overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game.” It could have been curated specifically to tell my family’s story, because it was soccer that saved them from the Holocaust.
Pavel Mahrer, my great-grandfather, was a Jewish professional soccer player for Czechoslovakia. He played for teams in Teplitz and Prague, as well as at the 1924 Olympics. In the 1920s and 1930s he moved across the Atlantic to play for the Brooklyn Wanderers and for a Jewish team, New York Hakoah. His son Jerry was born during that time; eventually, the fact that Jerry held American citizenship would save much of the Mahrer family from the Holocaust.
During the Shoah, Pavel became the star player in the league at the Theresienstadt ghetto. He once wrote to his wife, as they were imprisoned separately, “tell our boys that I played soccer again and even played well and was successful.” Soccer brought him joy during those years of total despair. He avoided transport to Auschwitz — possibly because he was a famous athlete — and eventually reunited with his family in New York after the war.
The Holocaust Museum LA exhibit doesn’t tell that story, but it wanted to. My family pulled out of the exhibit because we didn’t want our story told by an institution that we think has faltered in holding true to the back half of its stated mission of inspiring “a more dignified and humane world.”
‘Never Again’ for whom?
We had already been in contact with the exhibit curators when the museum became entangled in a public relations crisis last fall over an Instagram carousel featuring a cover image of six interlocking arms of different colors with the text: “’Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.”
Further slides added: “Jews must not let the trauma of our past silence our conscience” and “To be Jewish is to remember and act.”
Finally, I thought, a Jewish institution that will stand against genocide and violence, full stop. Not just genocide and violence against Jews.
Over the past few years, I’d watched the Jewish institutions I grew up respecting make excuses for or ignore Israel’s assault on Gaza. At best, they remained silent as Israel killed innocent civilians in the name of the Jewish people. At worst, they supported Israel’s actions unreservedly.
But here was one Jewish institution that was sending the right, albeit subtle, message.
My family agreed that this was a museum that was teaching the history and lessons of the Holocaust in a way we wanted to support. We had told the museum of our interest in loaning them Pavel’s 1924 Paris Olympics jersey and photos of his soccer career for the exhibit, and grew more excited for the collaboration.
But not everyone had the same reaction to the post that we did. Comments flooded the museum’s page claiming that the phrase “Never Again” was only for Jews, and criticizing the museum for generalizing the Holocaust — as if Jews have a monopoly on being victims of genocide. I figured the museum must have been prepared for some backlash, but had decided it was worth upsetting some to show that they cared for all.
I was wrong.
The museum deleted the post, then issued an apology, calling the post “easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East.” To us, it read as if they were apologizing for giving the appearance of caring about Palestinian lives. The apology post drew outrage as well — although not in the comments section, which was disabled.
A humane world for everyone
The apology felt like cowardice to me and my family. So we asked to meet with Beth Kean, the museum’s CEO. By the time we connected with her over Zoom in October, the apology post had been deleted as well. We wanted to understand what was behind their decision to post, remove, apologize and then act like none of it ever happened.
After the meeting, we understood that the museum hadn’t expected the response to the first post; some museum staff, horrifyingly, had received death threats. But we didn’t get a good answer as to how capitulating to hateful comments and violent threats aligned with the stated mission of the museum. We were promised an updated public statement that would specifically state the museum’s humanitarian goals; but if one was ever published, I didn’t see it.
We decided that we no longer felt comfortable lending the material that told Pavel’s story to the museum. I take pride in being the descendant of Holocaust survivors, and I’m especially proud that my family has always told our story in a way that emphasizes that the safety of all peoples is and has always been intertwined. I don’t think Pavel would be proud to see his story used to help suggest in any way that Jewish lives should be valued over others.
I didn’t expect the museum to change its mind because of a thirty minute Zoom call with my family, but its willingness to, in my eyes, bend on its principles left me disheartened. If we can’t take stories of Jewish suffering and strength — like that of my family — and apply their lessons to the suffering that is occurring to this day around the world, what is the point of telling them?
I’m a soccer player myself. Every time I score a goal or make a tackle I think of how I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for this beautiful game. I feel a kinship with other players, other soccer fans, because we share that love of the game. It brings us joy, it brings us hope.
I find my family’s story compelling not just because it is a story about Jews during the Holocaust, but because it is a story about survival — a story about luck, talent and both good and terrible timing. The drive to survive, and the need to ensure others’ survival, should be universal. If the message that our Jewish institutions send is that Jewish survival matters most, who is that message for? How can we expect the rest of the world to care about our safety if we don’t do anything to prove that we care about theirs?
Dani Mahrer is a former Jewish educator who now works in renewable energy in Los Angeles.
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Eliya Smith says plot is what happens when you’re busy doing nothing
Eliya Smith’s dad has seen her play Dad Don’t Read This. He’s kvelled at its every iteration.
“He’s always like, ‘Are people gonna know that I’m Dad?’” Smith, 28, said on the day of the Knicks Victory Parade. The streets of the West Village, where we met for coffee, were teeming with orange and blue; she was wearing a baseball cap with some sort of bird, a heron or maybe a penguin, swallowing a fish.
“I always think it’s funny that he’s like, ‘I’m here and I have no complicated feelings.’”
Smith’s father isn’t the title character of the piece, which is about four high school friends, the computer game The Sims and the existential angst of adolescence, but technically he is. Smith started writing the show about a decade ago, during Thanksgiving break from Harvard. She needed the pages printed and emailed them to her father with the injunction as a kind of title page. (The following page read, “If you’re reading this page, it means you started to read. Stop reading.”)
The play is a work of fiction, as are all its characters. But the real-life command became a guiding principle — and the first lines — of the show.
“There is like a sort of frame of, ‘This play isn’t for you,’” said Smith, a former Forward editorial fellow who, last year made her Off-Broadway debut with the play Grief Camp. “I think the audience should reckon with the experience of watching it. Not that I’m like, ‘Fuck you for coming to my play,’ I’ll always be grateful, but I think my favorite parts of the play are when it really feels like they’re like doing the play for each other.”
Dad Don’t Read This is what Smith calls her first real, full play. Unsatisfied with her earlier attempts, she took a crack at writing what she knew: boredom and Ohio (in her mind synonymous) and the endless hours she spent in her basement chatting with friends. That and The Sims, the life simulator where players construct the world and circumstances of flailing, gibberish-spewing suburbanites.
“When I was in high school, I feel like I would sometimes play The Sims and be like, ‘If only it were this easy,’” Smith said. She had a cheat code that could defy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: When a Sim had to pee, you could drag the need away. She found herself thinking, “’I wish I could do that for myself, that I could just like drag away the sadness.”
In the show, this sentiment is embodied by Mal (Amalia Yoo, hot off her turn as another high schooler in the midst of a best friend breakup in John Proctor is the Villain), who tries to manipulate her friends the way she does her pixilated people.
Smith isn’t Mal, but the character’s Ohio ennui (Smith’s from Columbus) and some of her feelings are true to her high school self. OK, Smith’s like her in one way: She, like Mal, had a cousin who gave her a Sims cheat code for unlimited money.
The connection between the world of The Sims, and the control it signifies, has a natural extension in playwriting.
“You become a playwright because you have control issues,” Smith conceded. “When I’m writing it on the page, I can manipulate the characters how I want, and then we start rehearsing it, and I lose a little more control, and then it’s like the more the play becomes its own thing.
“I think it is actually the reason I became a playwright, because I love the moment where my desire to control everything is sort of overruled,” Smith said. Still, it’s often painful for her to be present as her words are performed.
About the hat — the one with the bird — she often feels the need to wear one when she sits in the audience, not to be incognito (she’s been told it makes her more conspicuous) but to block some of her field of vision so she doesn’t have to see some patron sigh or look at their phone.
Smith and I move from the coffee shop — whose vibe she compares, no shade, to the fast fashion brand Brandy Melville — over to the Greenwich House Theatre, where Dad Don’t Read This just transferred from St. Luke’s Theatre in midtown, earning a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
We plop into swivel chairs in the dressing room and catch up. Eliya left the Forward in 2021 to go to grad school at UT Austin. She’s only really been living in New York full time for about a year, calling Park Slope home. Life in Austin, she said, felt almost like an extension of high school in Ohio. She’d drive around bored with her friends. She misses the heat.
“I feel like there’s a sort of leveling thing that happens,” she said between sips of her iced coffee. “I feel like in New York you like get off the subway and you somehow are supposed to not be sweaty from being like packed in with hundreds of other people underground, and I feel like in Texas it’s so hot that it’s just totally fine, everyone is kind of disheveled and gross, and it’s just like what the vibe is, and I feel like it’s really equalizing, like ‘We’re all like looking not our best,’ and I liked that.”
She has yet to write her Texas play — or her New York one.
“I feel like everything I write is on a five-year delay,” said Smith, whose produced plays often circle the Buckeye State. (Last season’s Grief Camp took place in Virginia, but also followed young people; another play, about Holocaust memory, was called Deadclass, Ohio and, aptly, played at the New Ohio Theatre in Manhattan.) “Until I was like 23 I was like I can only write about being 17.”
Her new projects, Two Girls, a metatheatrical work about a shock porn video, and Biography (her least autobiographical piece to date), are departures.
It’s hard to explain the exact vibe of Dad Don’t Read This. Some have likened Smith’s work to Annie Baker, who she knows from UT Austin. I propose, in moments, it approaches Chekhov at a sleepover. Smith says she would never compare herself to the Russian master, but is happy to sing his praises. Though I meant this as a compliment, it could be seen as critique: On the surface, there isn’t much of a plot.
“I often joke that I don’t like plot,” Smith said. “But that actually isn’t true. I rigorously plot all my plays, it’s just the plot is like: This character is deeply wounded because of the perceived subtext from a line about a soda, and to me, that is plot.”
She also believes Top Gun: Maverick is the best movie ever in part because of how much happens. You can tell she is sincere, while knowing this is somewhat absurd to discuss in the same breath as The Cherry Orchard.
“You can have great art like Top Gun: Maverick, that is very sort of like there’s a story and these are all the beats, and you can also have Chekhov where the plot is like a wound that you couldn’t even name.”
Ineffable feelings are the engine of Dad Don’t Read This. Mal and her friends try and fail to articulate just what is going on in their little lives, where the inconsequential is the only thing that matters.
While firmly of a generation — it’s set in 2014, the actors are a few years younger than Smith — the play has found older admirers. Helen Shaw of The New York Times ranked it one of her top shows of the season. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik will participate in a “Dad Affinity Night” on June 28.
The key to its connection may well be what’s absent from the stage — smart phones and social media are nowhere to be seen. It’s intentional.
“We like don’t have boredom anymore, because we have phones, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how do I put characters in a situation where they can be extremely bored and where that can be dramatically intriguing,” Smith said. “And also, like, how do I make boredom resonate with an audience that doesn’t experience boredom because we look at our phones, and I do feel like being bored in Ohio is like something that I knew so intimately.”
Onstage at the Greenwich House Theatre, boredom lives. And it’s riveting.
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Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal
(JTA) — Montreal police said an alleged shooter in a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population had been “neutralized” after killing one police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian Monday.
“A suspect has been neutralized,” the official police account posted on X after advising residents Côte-des-Neiges to stay indoors. “Two police officers and one citizen have been injured. The police operation is still underway. Continue to avoid the area. Further details to follow.”
The Montreal Gazette later reported that the suspect and the civilian also were dead.
It was not clear if the intended targets were Jewish, but a Chabad emissary in the neighborhood told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that a nearby building was targeted and that he was sheltering about 100 people.
The Yeshiva World News news site posted a video of a SWAT team swarming around a home belonging to a family affiliated with Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish movement.
Côte-des-Neiges was the scene of postwar Jewish settlement as Jewish families ascending from the working to the middle class moved west from the area of St. Laurent Boulevard. The area, with treelined streets studded with duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, had a friendly neighborhood ambience and lacked the anti-Jewish restrictions some of the wealthier enclaves maintained at the time.
There are a number of Jewish schools and synagogues in the area, including the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest congregation in the country, established in 1768 and which moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The neighborhood is now the site of a large Chabad community and a number of Jewish restaurants and delis.
This is a developing story.
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