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Israel at 75: How Israel’s political crisis took center stage at a major American Jewish conference
KIBBUTZ MAAGAN MICHAEL, Israel (JTA) — About a dozen Jewish leaders from North America and beyond clustered at the edges of a courtyard on this kibbutz by Israel’s northern coastline, standing silent as a two-minute siren rang out in memory of the country’s fallen.
Afterward, young Jews from around the world, some of whom will soon enter the Israeli military, read memorial passages and led the crowd in the singing of Israel’s national anthem. The scene, emblematic of Diaspora support for Israel, delivered the kind of feeling that the Jewish Federations of North America hoped to evoke when it held its marquee conference in Israel this week, and timed it for the country’s Memorial Day and 75th birthday.
It was also a stark contrast from the atmosphere at the conference a day earlier where — even as Jewish leaders emphasized unity in the face of adversity — it was hard to avoid the political strife over the Israeli government’s effort to significantly limit the Supreme Court’s power. A raucous session in the morning was filled with screaming, and other panels touched on hot-button issues such as Israel’s treatment of non-Orthodox Jews as well as human rights groups.
“We’re also living at a time of so many crises and so much painful brokenness,” Rabbi Marc Baker, CEO of the Boston area’s Jewish federation, said in a short address on Monday afternoon to the conference’s 2,000 attendees, while discussing the importance of Jewish learning. “It can feel like things are falling apart, like at best, as leaders, we’re just trying to hold things together.”
The drama did not exactly surprise organizers of the gathering, called the General Assembly, or GA, who had expected protesters to show up and even encouraged their cause. But it pointed to the challenge facing the Jewish Federations, which had hoped to put on a traditionally exuberant celebration of Israel despite the conflict rocking its streets.
Those traditional commemorations and festivities did happen, and sessions covered a range of issues, from racial diversity to philanthropy in Israel. But they were mixed in with anguish over the state of Israeli society, which some attendees and panelists portrayed in urgent terms.
“For the first time, at Israel’s 75th birthday, a government is trying to fundamentally alter the definition of a Jewish state,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute think tank, said at the tumultuous Monday morning panel, referring to efforts to restrict immigration to Israel and other proposals.
He added, “If this cluster of changes, the coalition agreements, would be implemented, I’m not sure that in the 80th year of our national birthday, the GA will decide again to conduct its event here.”
The departure from business-as-usual was evident from the get-go, when hundreds of protesters came to the gates of the conference to protest a planned speech on Sunday night by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who canceled in the face of the demonstrations. Israeli President Isaac Herzog did speak that night.
Julie Platt, the Jewish Federations’ board president, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she found out about the cancellation earlier on Sunday. Netanyahu’s office told the staff of the Jewish Federations that day of the cancellation, and the news became public shortly afterward. Netanyahu did not reach out personally to Platt or to Eric Fingerhut, the Jewish Federations’ CEO, to let them know he would not be coming.
“We were preparing for weeks and months for the opportunity to have here the duly elected prime minister,” Platt said on Monday. “We were disappointed that he wasn’t part of our celebration.”
Tensions peaked on Monday morning during a session where anti-government protesters repeatedly interrupted far-right lawmaker Simcha Rothman with shouts and chants, and in which Rothman and Plesner verbally sparred onstage. Multiple protesters were removed by security personnel, and the panel took an unplanned five-minute break to cool tempers.
“They’re our brothers, they support us,” said Erez Elach, who protested Rothman at the event, regarding Diaspora Jews. Elach is a member of Brothers and Sisters in Arms, a group made up of military reservists opposed to the judicial overhaul.
Elach said he was protesting in order to honor Diaspora Jews who were killed while serving in the Israel Defense Forces. “We lost friends who served with us, who came from those same places,” he said.
Fingerhut told JTA that the protests of Rothman were “a taste of what’s happening in Israel today,” though he added, “I don’t think anyone benefits from that kind of disruption.”
“As the GA grew closer, we knew that the judicial reform issues and the divisions it’s creating in Israel would necessarily be a significant topic,” he said. “By time we were finalizing our plans, we expected it to be a major issue, and it was.”
But he said that he still felt the conference conveyed the importance of celebrating Israel and its ties to global Jewry. “On Sunday night and Monday, we focused on Israel’s history and our contribution to that history. That was not overshadowed,” he said. The battle over the judicial overhaul, he said, “added an agenda item, but it didn’t detract in any way.”
Former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid speaks at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly in Tel Aviv on April 24, 2023. (Courtesy of JFNA/Amnon Gutman)
Yizhar Hess, the vice chair of the World Zionist Organization, also said on Monday that things were going well — because of the arguments, not despite them. Hess pointed to the three large gatherings of establishment Jewish groups — the General Assembly, the Jewish Agency for Israel Board of Governors’ meeting and the World Zionist Congress — each of which saw fierce debates or disruption stemming from the judicial overhaul fight.
“This week has been dramatically successful particularly because it’s been so turbulent,” Hess said directly after the session with Rothman. “Zionism and the state of Israel are a subject that stirs up the Jewish people and is at the heart of the argument. That’s a good thing. … Zionism is more relevant than ever, particularly because Jews are fighting over its character.”
Bucking its usual practice of not commenting on internal Israeli politics, the Jewish Federations has made its position on the overhaul relatively clear. The group issued a statement objecting to one of the overhaul’s provisions, praised a decision to pause the legislation, said it was “awed” by the anti-overhaul protesters and organized a “fly-in” earlier this year, in which federation leaders traveled to Israel to share their concerns about the effort with Israeli officials.
Deborah Minkoff, an executive board member at the Madison, Wisconsin, Jewish federation, participated in the fly-in and said she had lobbied to exclude all politicians from the General Assembly stage. She attended sessions where anti-overhaul activists spoke and felt that being in Israel for the conference gave her an opportunity to stand with the protesters.
“I think it’s going to be easier to sell Israel to our community because of this fight for democracy,” she said. “As we articulate what it means to be a free, equitable, democratic society, I think it resonates with the community who has been critical of Israel in the past.”
Attendees gave a warm reception to Yair Lapid, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, whose easy manner suggested that he felt the crowd would be receptive to his words. “I’m happy to be here, unlike some others,” he said to laughter from the audience.
“Don’t give up on us,” Lapid told the crowd. “I know how many people here feel about this current government. I know it doesn’t represent your values. It doesn’t represent mine either. But this government isn’t all of Israel… Today, maybe more than ever, we need you to rally around us.”
But not everyone at the conference was keen to protest. Beto Guzman, a Jewish professional who came to the conference from Helsinki, said the Finnish Jewish community tends not to protest Israeli policies because, given its small size, its involved members value having a positive relationship with Israeli emissaries in the country and do not want to blame them for the government’s policies. He also objected to protesters disrupting conferences, though he said the issues at the heart of the debate should be discussed.
“In Helsinki we don’t really have any protests or anything like this, because the community is very small and everybody has their own relationship with Israel,” he said. “For us that connection is very different. We really like the people from the Jewish Agency, their emissaries, and the embassy, they are very nice to us. So for us to put what is going on in the government on them would be unfair.”
Sandi Seigel, the president of Naamat Canada, a branch of a global Jewish women’s rights organization, said she was troubled by raucous debate she saw at the World Zionist Congress, which had taken place at the end of the previous week. She particularly worries that young delegates to the congress, one of whom she recalled seeing crying, would leave disheartened by the fighting.
“It’s almost like people feel it’s an existential threat for Israel, and so you’re passionate,” she said. “But there used to be an ability to have healthy debate and say, ‘OK, we’re not going to agree on this, OK, but I respect your right to have your opinion. And I think some of that is gone.”
At the same time, Seigel does not feel that the General Assembly was too focused on the debate over the judicial overhaul, which she framed in existential terms.
“If you have something, and you don’t know, if this doesn’t get resolved, [whether] Israel will be Israel anymore, or it won’t be the Israel that I can live in — there are a lot of things to talk about, but if you don’t deal with that, you can’t talk about anything else,” she said. “Because there’s nothing left to talk about.”
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Israel’s culture minister called this documentary about IDF tactics ‘vile.’ It deserves to be seen.
VENICE — At its premiere here last week, towards the end of the 83th Venice International Film Festival, Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary about Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, received a 25-minute-long standing ovation, a record at the festival. Two nights later, the film won the festival’s Special Jury Prize. By Sunday, Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, was calling the film “vile,” describing it as treason and threatening to revoke its directors’ citizenship. Zohar invoked his reform of cinema funding, saying Israelis should no longer have to pay for work that harms the army and the state.
I left the press screening of Naza angry, depressed and utterly convinced of its importance. Its account of the procedures that govern the deaths of civilians is devastating precisely because so much of the testimony sounds like people describing an ordinary working day. The film will have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 26. It deserves to be seen, and debated with considerably more patience than some of its detractors have displayed.
Venice has traditionally worn its politics more lightly than Berlin, where a filmmaker’s acceptance speech can cause an international incident. This year, however, festival director Alberto Barbera programmed a competition that invited controversy. Alongside Naza was Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, which drew Ukrainian objections over the production’s Russian connections (including to Sergei Adoniev, a businessman who has been sanctioned by Ukraine and the U.S.) In the run-up to the festival, Barbera defended DAU as a denunciation of totalitarianism. Both films are international productions by directors whose countries have become objects of international opprobrium. Both venture into their societies’ heart of darkness. Barbera deserves enormous credit for programming them both in the main section of the world’s oldest film festival despite the objections of many.
Berlin supplies a cautionary precedent. No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary Abraham and Szor made with Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, premiered there in 2024, where it won the festival’s documentary prize. After Abraham and Adra gave speeches condemning Israel’s policy of apartheid in the West Bank, the German culture minister Claudia Roth, caught on camera applauding at the ceremony, clarified that her applause had been intended for the Israeli director. I shudder to imagine the official response Naza might have elicited there. Venice at least offered an opportunity to discuss what was on screen.
The film, which presents testimonies from 24 serving and former military personnel, grew out of years of investigative reporting. Produced by the British newspaper the Guardian and JW Films, in collaboration with the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972 and its news website Local Call, it builds on Abraham’s investigations into Israeli intelligence and his work with Guardian journalist Harry Davies. Revelations about targeting systems had appeared in print while filming was underway and were subsequently reported on by both The New York Times and Washington Post. All this means that the disclosures made in Naza are not brand new. However, the stark, focused and lean approach that Abraham and Szor take in the documentary ensure that the information hits home with chilling force.
The film’s unusual title is the Hebrew term for collateral damage — specifically, the anticipated civilian toll of a military strike in Gaza. Speaking to Abraham from a series of Tel Aviv rooftops at night, the interviewees, whose appearances and voices are digitally disguised, explain with patient detachment how targets in Gaza are identified and eliminated. One of the tools used to identify suspected militants is an AI system called Lavender. The frightening efficiency of such technology is discussed alongside the human decisions that determine what constitutes an acceptable loss.
One of the most disturbing claims has prompted a specific military rebuttal. An interviewee says a strike was once approved with 500 civilian deaths anticipated; he does not know how many were actually killed. The IDF claims it has never planned, approved or conducted a strike expecting anything near that toll, and challenges the filmmakers’ ability to verify the account. It also maintains that humans authorize strikes and questions the witnesses’ competence to discuss broader strategy.
The film’s restraint gives incendiary testimony such as this time to register. For the majority of the film, we only glimpse the interviewees’ faces in silhouette and watch as they crudely draw diagrams to explain the logistics of a military strike, say, on a crowded building. Every so often the camera wanders off the roof, peering into the illuminated homes and high-rise office buildings of Tel Aviv at night. The point is precisely to convey an unsettling sense of normalcy.
I was particularly struck by the absence of the racist invective I had half expected. Some interviewees describe themselves as educated, liberal people. Their accounts nevertheless reveal a callous disregard for civilian causalities. One recalls the pleasure of a job well done. “It’s so much fun,” he says of reaching his targets and we hear in his voice how the remote killings he takes part in gives him an indescribable rush. After a pause, he tells Abraham that as someone raised in the Israeli context, someone who had got to visit the death camps in Poland, he always considered and asked himself how they could do what they did. “For me the Nazis are evil,” he says. “So what does that make me?” It is perhaps the film’s most damning exchange.
One of Naza’s strength as a documentary is that it does not demand agreement that Israel is committing war crimes, including genocide, before its investigation begins. That gives it a chance to reach people who have defended Israel and remain capable of reconsidering their position.
Some of the most vociferous criticism of Naza has not come from IDF spokesmen or other Israeli officials. Almost immediately after the premiere, footage from the film’s lengthy ovation (where Abraham and Szor stand looking intensely uncomfortable and withdrawn) went viral, with numerous commentators on X and other platforms making ugly accusations against the filmmakers, including for granting anonymity to the whistleblowers who feature in the film.
“A viscerally nauseating spectacle. Imagine SS officers, shielded and protected by anonymity, getting a 25-minute standing ovation for recounting their tortures and murders. Criminal perpetrators should only be heard at their trials not at gala celebrations,” read one tweet that has been viewed close to 150,000 times. Though the language of that post is particularly incendiary, the sentiment it expresses is surprisingly widespread on social media.
Confidentiality was a condition of obtaining these accounts, a standard journalistic arrangement that confers no clemency. At the press conference, Abraham described that his sources were motivated variously by remorse and professional pride. He affirmed that his goal was to keep the victims of Gaza at the film’s center — and not to congratulate its witnesses.
The tenor of this debate recalls Nadav Lapid’s withdrawal from the Marseille film festival in June after boycott calls. His Yes, an infernal satire of post-Oct. 7 society, is a ferocious attack on Israeli complacency. It would take considerable ingenuity or imagination to claim that either it or Naza is an apology for Israel.
Accepting his award in Venice, Abraham said that he made Naza because “the denial of a crime is what helps it persist.” He later pledged to distribute the film as widely as possible in Israel. The interviewees, he explained, “spoke in Hebrew because they wanted to reach out to the Israeli public.” Not surprisingly, the film, sight unseen, has already been widely condemned within Israel. Former defense minister and opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman called the directors “haters of Israel” and accused them of turning Oct. 7 into a blood libel. Such accusations should make the necessity to reach Israeli viewers even more urgent.
Days after the film’s victory in Venice, Haaretz ran an editorial with the blunt headline, “Israelis Must Finally Confront What Israel Has Done in Gaza.” After years of trying to “air dirty laundry at home” with limited success, Abraham and Szor now had found in the Venice Film Festival a major platform where the conclusions of their investigations were impossible to ignore. The editorial’s key sentence is also its shortest: “Israel’s problem is not public relations, but reality.”
Naza only leaves the rooftops of Tel Aviv for two brief occasions. In the first of these, we see archival footage of a young Benjamin Netanyahu promoting his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism, In the clip, a much-younger Netanyahu defines terrorism as a policy of deliberately killing and maiming civilians to advance political goals. Bibi’s words hang uncomfortably over the rest of the film, inviting and daring viewers to draw their own conclusions.
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Macklemore dropped from Ed Sheeran tour after ‘Free Palestine’ backlash
Macklemore has been dropped from the remainder of Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour following backlash to pro-Palestinian comments the social justice rapper made onstage.
The promoter of Sheeran’s U.S. tour said several stadiums refused to allow Macklemore to perform after his headline-grabbing “Free Palestine” plea during a Sept. 4 show at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Ensuing backlash to the comments included a petition by the Israeli-American Council to get him canceled from the tour.
Macklemore was set to open for Sheeran at eight of the remaining 10 tour dates. Seven of the eight host venues said the concerts could not go on with Macklemore, according to Rolling Stone: Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia; Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts; Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta; Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis; Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina; AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas; and Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida.
Macklemore’s long record of pro-Palestinian remarks predates the tour, including a song, “Hind’s Hall,” about the 2024 takeover of a Columbia University building by student protesters. During his controversial Sept.4 speech, he said his ambition on the Sheeran tour was to promote the Palestinian cause.
In a statement on Instagram, Macklemore claimed Robert Kraft — the Jewish owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, and arguably the NFL’s most powerful figure — pressured Sheeran to drop him.
“Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium,” Macklemore wrote. “Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”
The post had received 1.6 million likes on the platform within four hours of its posting.
The controversy over Macklemore’s comments also embroiled the Jewish pop star Pink, who faced backlash for sharing a post by the pro-Israel organization StopAntisemitism. Pink later said she did not agree with all of the post’s contents, but felt alarmed as a Jewish person who had grieved both sides of the conflict and didn’t like being told she supported genocide.
She also brought up a 2014 incident in which Macklemore wore a fake nose, beard and black hair onstage in a costume some criticized as playing on antisemitic stereotypes. (He later apologized, saying that he had no antisemitic intent and linking to the Anti-Defamation League website.)
“Every Jew I know knew exactly what it was,” Pink wrote on Instagram. “But he apologized, and I let it go, because that’s what we do. We let it go. Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them. You don’t get to decide that for us.”
The ADL was part of the 2026 anti-Macklemore movement, calling his speech “performative, biased and hateful anti-Israel ‘activism.’”
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Jewish sleepaway camp made them comedians, so they made a movie about it
Jewish sleepaway camp is where parents send their children to forge a lasting connection with their ancient peoplehood. Perhaps regrettably, many also leave having developed something else: shtick.
“It’s a breeding ground for comedy bits,” said filmmaker Michael Lewen, 36, a proud alumnus of Camp Modin in Belgrade, Maine. “Everyone learned how to be a comedian at summer camp. This is where you first try out your stuff.”
Years after retiring his color-war uniform, Lewen, a regular collaborator of Judd Apatow, is returning to the cradle of his comedy career. His sophomore feature Tiny Fugitives, hitting theaters Sept. 18, takes us to Camp Fineman, where 12-year-old Jacob Udell (Benjamin Pajek) commands a cool-kid cachet apart from his public-school tormentors.
Jacob’s goals for the summer start off simple — a bunk-wide record for “ask outs” to the social and telling his longtime crush how he feels. But when his parents show up on visiting day to announce their divorce, and that they may not have the money to send him for another season, Jacob and his best friend Charnis (Aaron Harris) hatch a plan: When the buses leave camp, they won’t be on them. They will live at camp year-round.
It’s a notion not completely foreign to Lewen’s co-writer, Jacob Kaplan, 28.
While Kaplan spent less time than Lewen at his own camp (Young Judea in Amherst, New Hampshire), he keeps finding fresh material in the experience. He toured a standup show, Kings of Camp, about those halcyon days of canteen privileges and Capture the Flag. Lewen connected with Kaplan after reading a cartoon pilot he wrote about an alien child who sends dispatches back to his home planet from a Jewish summer camp, mistakenly believing his idiosyncratic environs to be representative of human civilization.
Kaplan remembers camp as his first brush with independence. The divorce plot is drawn from his life and he remembers it as a merciful break from parental logistics.
The jokes are an amalgam of his and Lewen’s field notes from back in the day and ideas from their capable cast of 12-year-olds, one of whom does a credible impression of Barack Obama saying kiddush. The foil to Jacob and Charnis’ great escape is a “lifer” named Bob, played by Johnny Knoxville, who gives chase and is often grievously injured in the pursuit. Thank Hashem for the infirmary.
“There was definitely some push and pull with the stunt coordinator,” Lewen said of Knoxville’s presence on set. Coming off of the later Jackass films, he wanted to drive his ATV without his glasses and urged people to hit him harder.
But for all the slapstick, Bob, based on a familiar archetype of a fanatical counselor is, along with Charnis and Jacob’s friendship, the heart of the film. His message, and one I’ve heard from many a counselor of my own: camp is special because it ends.
If it didn’t quite end for Lewen and Kaplan, who got to relive those days on the set of a couple different Toronto camps, and recreate some of the magic for their actors, they insist they’ve now had enough.
Tiny Fugitives Lewen said, is indebted to Stand By Me, includes visual nods to Francis Ford Coppola films like Apocalypse Now and The Conversation and seems to have no anxiety about the influence of another raunchy two-hander like Superbad (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg produced). It owes a less obvious debt to Michael Mann’s Heat, Lewen said, only “instead of De Niro and Pacino, it’s Johnny Knoxville and a 12-year-old who both want the same exact thing out of life, and only one of them is going to get it.”
Among the comedy’s most understated features is its ambient Jewishness, in no way essential to the plot, as it is in another recent camp film The Floaters, but key to its sensibility.
The kids find ancient Manischewitz in a dining hall. Jacob pads his elbow with a loose kippah to break the frame to a map of the old camp grounds. In a fanciful moment, he suggests laundering petty cash in $18 sums to skirt suspicion. A line, delivered out of context and without elaboration: “Charnis, what do you mean a three-state solution?”
Asked if the film might have been more marketable with a generic sleepaway camp, Kaplan and Lewen seemed to have heard that note a lot.
“For the comedy you want to go from what felt the most true to your life and the situations and what actually happened and painting as vivid a picture as possible,” Kaplan said, invoking Wet Hot American Summer, which presented a Jewish summer camp without ever quite announcing that it was one.
Lewen said they focused on the bigger idea when they went out to pitch: “When you’re young, there are places where you feel like you make sense. For some people, it’s the baseball team. For some people, it’s debate camp. For some people, it’s your cousin’s house. And for us, it was Jewish summer camp.”
The producers are betting big on Tiny Fugitives’ cross-quadrant appeal, making it a rare R-rated comedy to play theatrically. Among the hoped-for viewers are some actual 12-year-olds, who will need a parent or guardian owing to the film’s coarse language, which is likely not very scandalous to the tween set it’s depicting.
“I actually think it’s a totally good movie for young people to see,” Lewen said. “I just remember being that age and watching stuff that felt a little bit real, and like I actually saw myself in it, and it’s so satisfying and cathartic.”
To that end, he said, Knoxville is chartering a bus to take camper-aged kids to the theater.
“I think it’s cool for there to be a cool movie that’s also Jewish,” Lewen said. “It’s the same reason I like Jewish summer camp and want my kid to go there.”
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