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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
The post Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israeli ministers unveil plans to encourage voluntary Palestinian emigration from Gaza
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — The Oct. 27 elections have brought the concept of Palestinian emigration from Gaza to the forefront of Israeli political discourse. The once-taboo topic has become an increasingly popular position among right-wing politicians, even as it repels many in the American Jewish community and elicits condemnation from world leaders.
Several prominent politicians on the Israeli right, including some who currently hold key government positions, have raised the idea in recent weeks and pledged to advance it if they sit in the next coalition. Most starkly, ultra-nationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir unveiled a seven-year plan Thursday to encourage Palestinians in Gaza “voluntarily” leave the embattled enclave where the IDF and Hamas have been fighting for almost three years.
“This is a free choice; we are not forcing anyone to leave, but there is encouragement for this,” Ben-Gvir said in a statement to the media after he announced his program during a virtual press conference in Lod, a working-class city southeast of Tel Aviv that was the scene of mass displacement of Arab residents during the 1948 War of Independence.
The American liberal pro-Israel group J Street was among those to condemn the proposal, stating on Friday that “It should horrify us to see a state, built in the aftermath of Jewish death and destruction, entertaining the ethnic cleansing of another people.”
The organization urged people not to dismiss Ben-Gvir’s plan as “fantasy or fringe,” adding, “this vision is now in the political mainstream, and that must be unequivocally rejected.”
Indeed, while few Israeli political observers expect such a plan to become government policy even if Israel continues to be ruled by a right-wing government, critics worry that the promotion of such measures throughout the election are already normalizing the concept in Israeli society and harming Israel’s international standing. Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing “Democratim” party, has previously described government calls to encourage the “voluntary emigration” of Gazans as “unacceptable.”
On Thursday, Ben-Gvir was careful to underscore that any departure of Palestinians from Gaza would be voluntary under his plan, which he has dubbed “Disengagement 710.” The name refers to the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 known as “disengagement” that included the forced evacuation of around 8,000 Israeli settlers and the demolition of their 21 settlements in the enclave. The number “710” refers to the day and month of the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage.
Under Ben-Gvir’s proposal, a government ministry with a dedicated minister would be established to oversee Palestinian emigration efforts. Incentives would be offered to Gazans who agreed to emigrate, and those countries that receive them would receive monetary benefits as well.
The program has a target goal of 250,000 Gazans leaving in the first year of the program and 1.86 million within seven years — nearly the entire 2.1 million population of the strip, Ben-Gvir said. There would be an absorption plan in another country for every Palestinian that left, according to Ben-Gvir, who maintained that there are countries willing to take in Palestinians in exchange for financial incentives.
Ben-Gvir sits on the far right of the Israeli political map, but earlier in the week, a leader in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mainstream Likud Party endorsed a plan for Palestinian relocation from the coastal strip as well. Defense Minister Israel Katz said that “there is no real solution for Gaza without emigration.”
Already in February 2025, Katz announced the establishment of an agency tasked with encouraging emigration from Gaza, and said this week that it was “fully prepared” for the moment when conditions would allow Israel to encourage Gazans to leave.
In a public interview at a conference on Wednesday sponsored by the Hebrew media group Ynet and the think tank the Israel Democracy Institute, Katz said that President Donald Trump had “frozen” the initiative under pressure from Arab countries. Katz stressed, however, that the initiative had not been canceled and that discussions on the issue were ongoing.
In response to Katz’s statement, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland on Wednesday called to end complicity with Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. ”After our trip to the Gaza-Egypt border last year, Senator Jeff Merkle & I released a report entitled, ‘The Netanyahu Government is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians’. Now the Israeli Min of Defense confirmed that’s the goal,” Van Hollen wrote on X.
But days later, on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told reporters that “nobody is suggesting that there will be forced displacement – the Israelis are not, the Americans are certainly not, I know of no one who supports that.”
In January 2025, just days after taking office, President Donald Trump himself first floated the idea of Palestinians emigrating from Gaza as a possible solution to the conflict between Israel and Hamas and a way for them to escape the devastation surrounding them in the wake of the war.
There were some signs at that time that the idea of a pathway to voluntary emigration was not anathema to Palestinians who live in Gaza. A poll by the British-based Gallup International in March of 2025 showed that 52% of those in Gaza would leave for another country if given the choice, out of which 38% wanted a temporary exit and another 14% wanted a permanent one.
The idea was strongly condemned by international figures, however, particularly America’s Arab allies. Ultimately it was abandoned by the president and superseded by his 20-point plan to end the war, which specifically stated that there would be no encouragement of Gazans to leave.
But many on Israel’s right took the statement by Trump as encouragement to publicly advocate for a measure that had long been considered off-limits. Netanyahu himself expressed support for the idea soon after Trump broached the topic in early 2025, saying: “The door has also been opened to the vision of President Trump for Gazans to leave Gaza of their own free will. I think this is a very important idea. We are working on it continuously with the Americans, and I tell you that it is possible.”
Weeks later, in March 2025, a poll by The Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem found that 52% of Jewish Israelis supported the relocation of Palestinians in Gaza along the outlines of Trump’s plan. The idea of voluntary emigration has also received support from some figures in Israel’s opposition. In 2025, opposition leader Yair Lapid said Israel should “develop a long-term plan to eliminate Hamas and encourage voluntary emigration.” The major parties in the opposition bloc, however, did not publicly endorse Ben Gvir’s proposal or put forward their own plans to encourage emigration.
More recently, some Israeli political figures have gone so far as to float scenarios in which the departure of Gazans would not be voluntary. A senior member of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionist Party, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has spoken of forced migration.
Last month, before joining the party, right-wing firebrand Moshe Feiglin said, “We need, in one way or another, to make sure that there will be no Gazan left there,” including forcing them to leave “by any means possible.”
Retired Brig.-Gen. Ofer Winter, a new political candidate whose right-wing party Amcha Yisrael has been gaining momentum, said at the party’s launch conference in August that “the solution for Gaza is one — emigration,” later stressing that “these are not just slogans.”
But despite the wave of support on the right, there is no indication that such a scenario is in the offing. A senior Israeli official told reporters this week that no countries have agreed to accept Gazans, while Defense Minister Katz said that potential receiving countries want U.S. support. In the past, countries including Somaliland, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have reportedly been floated in internal discussion in Israel as possible destinations for Gazans.
Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza first published in September 2025, to which Israel has committed itself, explicitly contradicts the possibility of encouraging emigration from the strip, however. Article 12 of the plan states: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza,” and that “We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”
Trump had originally raised the idea of relocating Gazans in part because of the dire circumstances they faced. “I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, and we get some people to put up the money to build it,” Trump said in the first weeks of his second presidential term, adding, “I don’t know how they could want to stay.”
The war’s devastation has left most of the Palestinian population internally displaced within Gaza, according to United Nations data, with 60% of homes destroyed. The U.N. has warned that reconstruction could cost $71.4 billion and take years.
But U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that plans to relocate Gazans were tantamount to ethnic cleansing, a charge repeated by Palestinians and critics of Israel in the international community.
International opposition has been particularly fierce from Palestinian officials, Arab countries and key American allies in the West. Germany’s foreign minister said in 2025 that “the Gaza Strip belongs to the Palestinians. Expelling them would be unacceptable and contrary to international law.”
The United Arab Emirates along with foreign ministers from seven other countries — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt — issued a statement Sunday condemning the proposals by Ben-Gvir and Katz. They urged the international community including the United Nations Security Council, to halt any attempt to change the demographic reality in the Palestinian territories including Gaza.
“Such inflammatory statements and proposals flagrantly violate principles of international law, including international humanitarian law, and pose a direct threat to the legitimate and inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” they stated.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli ministers unveil plans to encourage voluntary Palestinian emigration from Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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AfD is predicted to win 40% in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Should Jews be worried?
(JTA) — BERLIN – Why are so many Germans wringing their hands over Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt?
After all, what impact could 1.7 million registered voters in this former East German state have on a nation with 16 Laender (federal states) and some 60 million voters?
Here’s why Sunday’s election matters:
As it turns out, German voters in Saxony-Anhalt could give the right-wing extremist political party — the Alternative for Germany, or AfD — its most significant achievement since its founding in 2013.
Although the AfD is predicted to win only 40 percent of the vote, that would be enough to affect upcoming general local elections in Lower Saxony on Sept. 13, and elections in the state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania and the city-state of Berlin on Sept. 20.
There is also an outside chance it could open the door to an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt, a first for the far right since the end of World War II. Although that is considered unlikely, the party’s state website proclaims: “Everything is possible.”
Voters in this economically depressed state are, pundits say, drawn to the AfD’s anti-immigrant and anti-European Union rhetoric; its promise to expel non-citizens; its focus on German national pride rather than on the dark side of its past; and its ambition to repair relations with Putin’s Russia. Their drumbeat resonates particularly in former east German states, which have suffered since unification with the closing of factories and flight of younger workers to western states.
The AfD has also done well in elections in other former east German states, and increasingly in western ones. Last March, for example, it earned 19% of the popular vote in elections in Baden-Wuerttemburg, nearly doubling its previous tally there. In the 2025 federal election, it leapt to second place next to the conservative Christian Democratic Union led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005-2021. Opinion polls show the AfD is the leading party, if there were to be federal elections today.
While some observers note that the party’s agenda on national issues could not be implemented, they are troubled by the party’s goals on the state level.
Stephan Kramer, president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency in the state of Thuringia, and former general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the JTA that the main concern is with the power the party could wield “over the interior ministry, police, the state intelligence service, education, appointments and the handling of sensitive information.”
“For the first time, the party could use the machinery of a state government and thereby gain substantially greater political and institutional influence at the federal level,” he said.
Banning the AfD would be a painstaking process, thanks to post-war protections of free speech. Former West Germany banned only two political parties: a neo-Nazi one in 1952, and a far-left Communist party in 1956. Later attempts to ban neo-Nazi parties stumbled on legal hurdles, and many politicians fear to try again, lest the AfD make hay of a failure.
Support for the AfD fits right in with trends on the European and UK level: According to the latest survey of European far-left, far-right and populist parties published by the PopuList research group, nearly a quarter of European and UK voters back far-right parties today, up from 5% in 1995. According to the Guardian newspaper, the biggest surge in support came in national elections in France and the UK in 2024, and Germany in 2025.
Here’s why AfD votes might not matter, yet:
A key difference from U.S. state elections is that “voters do not directly elect the equivalent of a governor,” Paulina Fröhlich, senior expert for democracy at the Gütersloh-based Bertelsmann Foundation, told the JTA. “Instead, the state parliament elects a state premier after the parties have built a coalition or secured enough support. So, the party that wins the most votes does not necessarily lead the government.”
In 1980, the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), won 44.5% of the vote, but the Social Democratic Party (SPD) with 42.9% and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) with 10.6% support built a coalition government.
Two years ago in the state of Thuringia, the AfD became the first far-right party to get the most votes in a state election since World War II, but was blocked from forming a coalition.
Similarly, the likely outcome of Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election will be a coalition of minority parties that together exceed 50% of the vote; the AfD, despite a significant electoral achievement, will not be able to pull together the needed majority to take power.
It can take days, weeks, even months before a state or federal government is formed, including appointment of the minister-president or chancellor, and ministers dealing with education, policing and culture (and foreign policy, on the federal level). After the CDU and CSU won Germany’s federal election in February 2025 with only 28.5 percent of the vote, it took until early April for them to form a government with the SPD, as they argued over policy differences. But neither party would work with the AfD, which actually came in second
Most Germans still reject the AfD’s message. Several states have classified the party as right-wing extremist, a designation that its leaders have opposed in court. And there are calls to ban the party, including by prominent Jews such as Charlotte Knobloch, 93-year-old former chairwoman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria.
There has been much media buzz over an interview that Knobloch, who survived the Holocaust in hiding with a German Christian family, gave to Stern magazine. “Even the Nazi Party started small and tried out what was possible,” and now AfD politicians “are testing the limits of what is acceptable,” said Knobloch, arguing for a ban: “Everything that could help should be tried.”
Unlike in the United States, German elections include many political parties – from the large, mainstream ones to those on the fringes, which usually fail to meet the 5% vote threshold required to have seats in the parliament.
Even if the AfD receives a plurality this time, it is highly unlikely that it will rule the state. That’s because virtually no one else will work with them. Mainstream democratic parties have set up a “firewall” to that end. So the probable outcome will be a government built through a coalition of the remaining parties.
But this year, even some of the previous top parties are teetering on the edge of the 5% threshold, polls say.
Should the past winners – the CDU, and possibly the center-left Social Democratic Party, the center-right Free Democratic Party, and the progressive Green Party – make it past the threshold, they are expected to build that minority coalition, even holding their noses to do so: The CDU is even expected to seek informal support from the communist Left Party.
Thus the procedure in Saxony-Anhalt is likely to echo what happened in the neighboring state of Thuringia two years ago. While the AfD got the biggest piece of the electoral pie, it did not gain a majority of seats in the parliament. So the mainstream democratic parties were able to form a coalition government.
What do the AfD stand for? Why are they so popular?
Its appeal “comes from a mixture of protest, distrust of established parties, concerns about migration and social change, and a sense among some voters that [AfD] articulates grievances others avoid,” said Kramer of Thuringia’s domestic intelligence agency.
“The AfD officially presents itself as supportive of Jewish life and Israel,” he added. But the platform “explicitly demands a complete ban on ritual slaughter without exception, which would directly affect Jewish religious practice. AfD leaders also use world conspiracy arguments and antisemitic language, we should not forget.”
It’s illegal in Germany to celebrate the crimes of National Socialism, to repeat Nazi slogans and other propaganda. But AfD leaders “do not always stay on the safe side of the law,” Kramer added. For example, Björn Höcke, who heads the party’s parliamentary faction in the neighboring state of Thuringia, “was convicted for repeating the banned Nazi stormtrooper slogan ‘Alles für Deutschland’ [everything for Germany], and the Federal Court of Justice rejected his appeal in August 2025, making that conviction final.”
Höcke “is a certified history teacher, so he knows what he is doing,” Kramer added. “I would not describe the AfD simply as a party that carefully stays legal. Rather, parts of it repeatedly test those boundaries, and in some cases demonstrably cross them, [moving the] boundaries of what is acceptable to say in public and what is not.”
In Saxony-Anhalt, the party is “classified as definitely right-wing extremist” and is under observation by the domestic intelligence service, Maik Reichel, director of Saxony-Anhalt’s State Agency for Civic Education, told JTA. “And I think we also have the most extreme AfD state branch.”
The party wants to “restrict state-sponsored [school] trips to memorial sites, which they say turn young people into ‘memorial zombies,’ ” Reichel added.
“Our mission is to provide pluralistic civic education” and the AfD is against diversity, Reichel said. The AfD also takes a nationalist perspective, “which means we leave out important dictatorial, anti-democratic periods that were truly terrible in Germany,” he explained.
The main architect of the AfD’s platform in Saxony-Anhalt, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, is known for wanting “more Bismarck, less Hitler.” Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), who served as Germany’s first chancellor from 1871-1890, is seen as a hero by some German nationalists.
Despite such concerns, the AfD gained in the polls. At the EU parliament level, the AfD has 15 members, the largest contingent in the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations group.
Should the AfD win an absolute majority on Sunday, they would most certainly appoint their state party leader Ulrich Siegmund, age 35, as minister president. He is described as personable, even affable.
But his messages are not so friendly, critics say. Siegmund says his “100-day immediate action plan” includes a promise to “deport from minute one” many foreign nationals, including professional specialists; to cut funding to pro-democracy NGOs; to crack down on diversity programs in the state; and to cut taxes that support such programs.
Whatever the final tally, the lead-up to tomorrow’s election has made it clear: A ballot cast for the AfD is no longer dismissible as a “protest vote.” Other mainstream parties are taking a plunge, while the AfD’s star continues to rise.
Ultimately, the other parties have to regain the people’s trust, said Reichel. In Saxony-Anhalt that means “solving the problems that concern people in a way that they actually notice a difference.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post AfD is predicted to win 40% in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Should Jews be worried? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hollywood’s Jews take sides in Mark Ruffalo-Paramount antisemitism row
(JTA) — Some 170 notable Jewish personalities have released an open letter defending actor and producer Mark Ruffalo, who has been accused of antisemitism for his comments on Paramount Skydance’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Entertainers, rabbis and a physician who is featured in a new documentary about doctors treating Palestinians in Gaza signed the letter released Wednesday, which called the attacks against Ruffalo a “false and dangerous weaponization of charges of antisemitism.” George Clooney also defended Ruffalo on Thursday.
Signatories of the pro-Ruffalo petition include “Broad City” creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer; celebrated filmmakers Joel Coen, Jonathan Glazer and Todd Haynes; Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner; and actors including Hannah Einbinder, Joaquin Phoenix and Debra Winger.
In late August, Ruffalo, the award-winning actor and progressive activist, went on social media to link Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, the chief driver of the looming Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, to tech giant Oracle, which Ruffalo claimed is responsible for “an apartheid system of oppression” in Gaza.
Oracle is owned by Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men; both Ellisons are Jewish and prominent Israel supporters. Oracle also owns a stake in the social media network TikTok’s U.S. operations, and has long been a target of progressives who point to the company’s links to, and public support for, Israel.
“Larry Ellison will own most of ‘Para Bros,’” Ruffalo wrote in the post, which is no longer available, according to a screenshot reproduced by the Hollywood Reporter. The “Spotlight” and Marvel star also called Larry Ellison a “classic oligarch” who is “crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.”
The $110 billion merger is under adjudication in federal court in California following an antitrust lawsuit filed by 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America. As backlash to the merger has steadily grown across Hollywood and in political and media spaces, Paramount at least since June has been pushing the idea that opposition to the merger has had an antisemitic element.
The company seized on Ruffalo’s comments, immediately releasing a lengthy statement to media after his controversial social media post that accused the actor of invoking “antisemitic tropes,” adding, “This simply exposes the true motivation of some who have advocated opposition to this transaction.”
Several leading Jewish groups have also said his post stepped beyond legitimate criticism of the merger and into classic antisemitic rhetoric about Jewish wealth and power.
In an August statement, the head of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles said the actor’s comments “combined Jewish wealth, media control, secret technology and sinister global power,” drawing on “recognizable antisemitic tropes with a long and dangerous history.” Other LA-based Jewish activist groups, including Creative Community For Peace and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, have also condemned his comments.
Speaking amid the unfolding controversy about Ruffalo and his use of the word genocide to describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza, “Fauda” co-creator Avi Isaacharoff called him “a rare combination” of “ignorant” and “stupid.”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has reached out to Shani Rosenzweig, Ruffalo’s agent and a prominent Jewish entertainment figure in her own right, for comment and a Ruffalo interview request. Rosenzweig did not respond to either request.
Ruffalo has found support from several progressive Jewish figures beyond the entertainment industry, including IfNotNow co-founder Simone Zimmerman, Israeli Holocaust historian Raz Segal and Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart.
In their open letter defending Ruffalo, the progressive Jewish cohort argued the actor was right to draw links between Israel’s behavior and the merger.
“Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism,” the letter reads. “It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty.” The letter points to specific statements from Larry Ellison, and Oracle executives, describing their surveillance and artificial-intelligence technological ventures and their positive relationship with Israel.
Other entertainment figures have tried to thread a more careful needle. Oscar-winning filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, who has directed Ruffalo in two movies and was at one point developing an American remake of the hit Israeli TV series “Shtisel,” defended the actor from antisemitism charges this week while also noting, “I disagree profoundly with many of his positions on the Middle East, Israel, Gaza, and Iran’s constellation of fanatical Islamist fundamentalist proxies.”
“But Mark and I have been friends for over 30 years,” Lonergan continued in his letter to the Hollywood Reporter. “The notion that he is antisemitic is overtly preposterous, and the accusation itself a cynical and disgusting lie.”
Ruffalo is soon scheduled to attend the Toronto International Film Festival for the Sept. 10 premiere of the biopic “Being Heumann,” about Jewish-American disability rights activist Judy Heumann, in which he co-stars.
Opposition to David Ellison’s bid to combine two historic media giants, each having recently weathered smaller mergers of their own, has grown considerably in recent months. Those objections have come both from Hollywood rank-and-file concerned about further industry consolidation, as well as from political and media figures voicing objections to Ellison’s close ties to President Donald Trump and his intentions with Warner’s flagship news property, CNN.
The merger was initially thought to be on track to be finalized this fall with Trump’s blessing. The president has publicly championed the merger, and his Justice Department approved the deal in June. But talks have ground to a halt following the antitrust lawsuit. The fate of the merger is now in question, with Paramount having agreed to a trial in March 2027 and on the hook for a $7-million-per-day “ticking fee” it had previously agreed to pay out to shareholders if the deal failed to close by this October.
Prior to Ruffalo’s post, Ellison himself published a New York Times op-ed defending his merger plans.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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