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Israeli tensions spill over into Berlin at summit of European Jewish leaders
BERLIN (JTA) — Novelist Ruby Namdar’s appearance at a major conference of European Jewish leaders wasn’t meant to include a speech to an empty chair. But there he was on Sunday night, addressing the chair he had thought would hold Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for Diaspora affairs.
Chikli had been scheduled to address the summit, organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the European Council of Jewish Communities, but arrived too late to speak and left early Monday, amid a political crisis in Israel.
“In Israel right now under this government… our house has become rotten and corrupt,” Namdar told cheering conference attendees. “We have lost all shame in Israeli politics. It must be restored.”
Namdar, an Israeli who lives in the United States, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he spoke out because he worried that others at the conference would not.
“A large part of the Jewish leaders of the world and of Europe are here, and I know that many of them, if not most, are very concerned, very worried, feel very alienated,” he said. “But they’re not able to voice it because they’re instinctively so used to supporting Israel, even though it has become harder and harder with every passing year.”
The episode reflected the degree to which Israel’s political crisis is affecting Jews abroad, even reshaping what is discussed during convenings meant to elevate Diaspora Jewish life. On Monday, the saga took a sharp turn, after a historically large protest movement forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay controversial proposed reforms to the country’s judicial system.
It was the fifth edition of the summit and the first one held in person since the pandemic hit three years ago. The gathering included leaders and Jewish professionals from 35 communities across Europe and covered a broad range of topics, from how to combat antisemitism to how European Jewish communities have responded to Russia’s war against Ukraine; from gender issues to the challenges of “creating Judaism with no synagogues.”
Rates of emigration to Israel from parts of Europe have been high in recent decades, in the wake of the Ukraine war, the rise of right-wing populism and several violent antisemitic attacks by Muslim extremists and neo-Nazis. But some attendees at the conference said the recent crisis there was shaking the sense of safety that many European Jews associate with Israel.
“Democracy is a very important part in our lives especially as young leaders because we have been preached that it is such an important dogma,” Joelle Abaew, a German-Jewish teenager and member of the youth group BBYO’s international board, told JTA. “When, especially as young Jews, most of us identify with our homeland in Israel and if we don’t see that [strong democracy] there, we might question: Is that even our homeland, can we even identify with what they are doing?”
Jonathan Marcus, who is active in several Jewish organizations in Berlin, said he had seen people moving back from Israel to Germany in recent months “because of the current climate,” reflecting a trend of liberal Israelis considering emigration in response to the crisis. He also said he was worried about the religious agenda that some in Israel’s right-wing government want to advance — doing so in the language most often used to describe concerns about religious law in Europe.
“I worry on a personal level: What can I do to make sure we don’t wake up in a Jewish mullah regime?” Marcus said. “Will Israel be where my family and friends live, and be a part of my life?”
Namdar was not the only one to speak out against Chikli. A protest like the ones that have taken place across Israel and the Diaspora took place outside the conference venue, the Hilton Berlin. Inside the hotel’s dining room where Chikli was due to speak, conference guests found fliers distributed clandestinely on each table announcing that hosting him was “a slap in the face of hundreds of thousands of Israelis defending democracy for us too.”
Alexander Oscar, president of Shalom, Bulgaria’s main Jewish umbrella group, said at previous conferences he has attended it would have been unheard of to aim such statements at Israeli government officials. He said that though many European leaders are not Israeli citizens, “we all have our families in Israel and consider the state of Israel our homeland.”
“This is the first time ever I have seen this in conferences with other, you know, other countries, but never for the State of Israel.” Oscar said. “And it makes me happy, because what it says is that Israel is a democracy, and that it has a strong civil society.”
The protesting dovetails with a widening gulf he says that he and other Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe are finding with Israel.
“Over the past several years, we are seeing how, in various ways, the State of Israel is actually more prone to supporting the individual states in Europe, sacrificing the interests of the local Jewish communities,” Oscar said. “I’m speaking, in particular, about countries like Poland, like Hungary and Bulgaria nowadays. The local Jewish community is fighting with different groups, and even with the authorities, in terms of preventing the Holocaust distortion, and also combating antisemitism.”
“So we are ending up when the State of Israel is not defending the Jewish communities, in areas where until five, six years ago, it would have been impossible even to think of,” he added.
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Facebook suspends radio broadcaster’s account over video of Holocaust survivor
Facebook has abruptly banned a Jewish broadcasting executive in Minnesota after he posted a link to a video of a 104 year-old Holocaust survivor in Texas sharing his story, prompting the Minnesota Attorney General to intervene.
Joel Glaser, CEO of AMPERS, a group of community radio stations across Minnesota, received an email from Facebook last month informing him that his personal account had been suspended because it violated the platform’s “child sexual exploitation” policies.
Because Glaser also administers the account for an AMPERS radio series titled MN90: Minnesota History in 90 Seconds, Facebook also took down that account, which has more than 10,000 followers.
The video produced by an NBC affiliate in Dallas and shared by an ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities, featured a talk by Walter Levy, a survivor who fled Germany in the late 1930s and still tells his story about how his family survived Kristallnacht and struggled with whether to flee to then-British mandated Palestine or America. His family eventually joined relatives in Arkansas.
“How it got flagged as being child sexual exploitation is absolutely beyond me,” said Glaser, who unsuccessfully appealed.. “It did not give me the opportunity to explain anything, ask any questions, provide any screenshots, do anything at all.”
Facebook has said the case has been “flagged for the team” and is “looking into this.”
Glaser initially speculated that an antisemite, Holocaust-denier, or a bot operating on their behalf had flagged his post. But then he started leaning toward the notion that it was probably just artificial intelligence run amok.
“I guess Meta’s AI isn’t smart enough to differentiate between child sexual exploitation and a legitimate news story,” he said.
Because Glaser also oversees AMPERS’ news coverage, losing access to Facebook has made his job more difficult.
“I’m being hindered from doing that,” Glaser said. “They need to fix it.”
Experts say Glaser’s experience is not unusual, underscoring a need for significant work on content moderation systems, as well as transparent correction mechanisms. Without seeing Meta’s internal enforcement signals, it’s impossible to know why the system acted to suspend Glaser’s accounts.
On the morning of June 25 Glaser received an email from Facebook saying that his personal account was being suspended and he had 180 days to appeal. While the platform attributed the suspension to a violation of child sexual exploitation standards, it did not specify what content of Glaser’s had violated those standards. The video of Levy just happened to be his most recent post.
Glaser appealed right away, taking the required nine photographs of his face to prove it was him. Facebook denied the appeal that afternoon and permanently banned him with no opportunity for additional appeals.
Glaser contacted Minnesota’s Attorney General, a standard recourse for Facebook subscribers in a number of states who have
unfairly had their accounts suspended. Brian Evans, press secretary for Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, told Glaser that the office has interceded with Meta previously regarding their “heavy-handed approach to account deactivation.”
The Attorney General’s Consumer Action team will work to get Glaser’s two accounts reactivated, he wrote.
“The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office has received numerous complaints from consumers about moderation decisions that appear to have been made in error by Facebook,” Evans said.
Minnesota State Rep. Ginny Klevorn, a Democrat who represents the suburbs northwest of Minneapolis, has also asked that the state party’s liaison to Meta look into the matter, noting that AMPERS is partially funded by the state of Minnesota.
“Why is a public service network that deals with factual historic events being banned?” she said. “I think they owe Joel some sort of explanation.”
The post Facebook suspends radio broadcaster’s account over video of Holocaust survivor appeared first on The Forward.
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Artists are boycotting a show about Israel. The run’s already sold out
In the third act of Jonathan Spector’s Birthright, the character Izzy delivers the closest thing the play has to a thesis.
“I can go up on the bimah at my parents’ shul and I can say I am married to a woman, I can say I don’t keep kosher, I can say I don’t believe in God,” the character, a former J Street employee played by Molly Bernard, says. “The one thing that would get me kicked off the bimah, kicked out of the shul, kicked out of my family is if I say I am an anti-Zionist.”
There is an unspoken flipside to this equation: Just as Jewish communal life has instituted litmus tests, the pro-Palestine movement also has its dogma.
Jewish organizations once accepted all comers — gay, bacon-eating, atheist — Spector told me in an interview the day the show, tracking six members of a Birthright group over 18 years, opened at MCC Theatre. Recently, though, when it comes to the Jewish state, “there’s been a similar kind of shift away from tolerance from people on both sides of that divide.”
As if one needed more proof of Spector’s assertion, the group Theater Workers for a Ceasefire announced on Tuesday a call to boycott the production for “normalization,” even though the show is, at press time, sold out.
In an open letter, the organization outlines its concerns. “Normalization includes any plays, festivals, and other kinds of cultural activities that are based on the false premise of symmetry between oppressors and oppressed or which assume colonizers and colonized are equally responsible for the ‘Israel/Palestine conflict.’”
Birthright, they argue, meets this definition in its third act, when Izzy and Chaya (Zoë Winters), a former Obama staffer, debate the Gaza War in the aftermath of Oct. 7. “Chaya and Izzy perpetuate the fallacy that genocide has two equally legitimate sides,” the Theater Workers wrote. “The play does not challenge Chaya’s beliefs — it privileges them.”
But does it? We learn Chaya resigns from her job at the domestic nonprofit she founded over a pressure campaign by her staffers, who share an offensive text she sent via Instagram. The text: “Maybe they should spend a week in Gaza, and then come back and tell us if the rapes are real or not.”
In an Instagram carousel, Artists For Ceasefire describes this as “a text accusing Palestinians of being rapists.” This is a distortion, but reveals a familiar taboo in certain pro-Palestinian activism: the acknowledgment that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad committed sexual violence.
“Birthright emphasizes Chaya’s victimhood, whereby her own personal and professional losses in the wake of October 7th are greater than that of any Palestinian,” the letter continues. “Izzy is depicted as immoral for caring more about Palestinian strangers than her friend.”
This smacks of a bad faith reading. Once again we are in the realm of depiction not equalling endorsement. Cherries are being picked. That the play doesn’t “challenge” every argument, or “encourag[es] audiences to empathize with” an Israeli character’s “subjectivity” is seen as morally deleterious, rather than what it is: a play, with characters, not a debate, op-ed or struggle session.
As Spector told me, “plays contain ideas, but plays are about people.”
We needn’t wonder what Theater Workers for a Ceasefire would recommend as counter-programming: on Instagram they argued for an example in Seven Jewish Children by Caryl Churchill, a non-Jewish playwright. That play is more polemic than drama and runs on an engine of Holocaust inversion, which makes sense when you look at their Instagram post.
“Conventional drama demands we present contrasting viewpoints in the name of conflict,” the group concedes, “But how we write the conflict is not an ideological [sic] benign matter.”
The overriding interest is not art, but ideology. Not the mirror up to life, but of the funhouse variety that warps reality to an endless, echo chamber tunnel.
Eli Gelb, an actor in the show, acknowledged the boycott in an Instagram story, wrote “I’ve been outspoken as an antizionist Jew and I remain so. I believe in the show and will be continuing to perform in the production.” Molly Bernard’s Instagram stories Wednesday are of devastation in Gaza.
The letter makes clear “this would not be a boycott of MCC, nor of Jonathan Spector, but of this specific cultural product.” How can you boycott a run that, at press time, has no seats left to buy? Yield your tickets while ye may, someone will gladly snap them up.
In the play, a character, whose identity I won’t reveal due to spoilers, discusses an episode recounted in the Talmud, where a Super Bowl-sized crowd witnesses one priest stab another for the privilege of cleaning up ashes from a ritual sacrifice.
Rabbi Tzadok says all present were responsible for creating the conditions for the attack. But then the father of the stabbed priest retrieves the knife from his son’s back, and tells the crowd that, as he is not yet dead, the knife is still ritually pure. The onlookers cheer.
In the show, the story is cryptic, but speaks to Israel, where the ideal of the state has given way — perhaps irreversibly — to a culture of violence.
“This is how far they had fallen in this period,” the character says, “how far they had strayed, that they valued the laws of ritual purity over human life.” It’s an argument that would seem to align with Artists for Ceasefire, for whom the suffering in Gaza supersedes any gestures at complexity.
In their demands for a purity test, they may have missed it.
The post Artists are boycotting a show about Israel. The run’s already sold out appeared first on The Forward.
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Haley Stevens takes aim at Netanyahu in Michigan Senate debate, as opponent Abdul El-Sayed calls Israel a ‘rogue state’
(JTA) — Viewers of Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary debate on Tuesday night could be forgiven for at times forgetting that one candidate comes with the heavy backing of pro-Israel donors.
“The prime minister of Israel has failed,” Rep. Haley Stevens said when asked about Iran, saying that both Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump had failed to achieve “long-term peace.”
Later, Stevens added that she supported “aid into Gaza” and reiterated that she believed Netanyahu has been bad for American Jews.
“It is very clear that Mr. Netanyahu has not made us safer, has not brought us closer to peace, and he is a danger to Jews in America and around the world,” she said.
The lines represented sharp criticism of Israel’s leadership for a candidate who, according to federal campaign records, has received more than $10 million in support from donors affiliated with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that her progressive opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, has excoriated on the campaign trail and during Tuesday’s debate. Regarded as one of Congress’ more reliable pro-Israel Democrats, Stevens made the comments as Democratic voters have largely shed their sympathies for Israel.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, said during the debate that the United States’ foreign policy “has been handed to us” by Israel and AIPAC and called Israel a “rogue state.”
The former Wayne County health director, whose grassroots campaign has gained momentum as it has increasingly centered anti-Israel rhetoric, did not hold back in his criticism.
Citing “the impact of AIPAC in our politics” as the reason for the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, El-Sayed asserted that the lobbyist’s goals were “to annex Lebanon or to do genocide in Gaza.” He added that Israel was committing “human rights abuses, genocide and apartheid” and called for the United States to “stop funding the Israeli military unilateral blank checks.”
He also tied voters’ economic woes to Israel. “Ask yourself why it is that we are paying $5 gas, why it is that we can’t get out of this quagmire,” he said. “It’s because for too long, our foreign policy has been handed to us by the likes of the state of Israel and AIPAC, who has made sure that both Democrats and Republicans are doing their bidding.”
He further claimed there was no difference between his Democratic opponent and the presumptive Republican nominee, former congressman Mike Rogers, on Israel.
“If Congresswoman Stevens makes it, or if Mike Rogers wins, either way, Israel will win,” El-Sayed said. “AIPAC is perfectly fine with either of my two opponents because they know they will have a comfortable, reliable vote in the U.S. Senate.”
Stevens, who noted that she supports a two-state solution, rejected the line of attack. “No one owns my vote and no one owns my policies,” she said. “Anyone who’s contributing to my Senate campaign is doing so because of my proven record of fighting for Michigan.”
El-Sayed also suggested that Stevens’ sparring with Netanyahu, who is deeply unpopular with American voters, was ingenuine. Earlier in the day, Netanyahu told CNN that he believed Stevens’ previous comments accusing him of making American Jews less safe represented her “probably trying to excuse antisemitism.”
Sayed said he wasn’t convinced the remark was authentic. “I don’t think Benjamin Netanyahu is attacking her to actually attack her,” he said at the debate. “I think he’s attacking her to try and steer away the stink of how staunchly she stands for their policy.”
El-Sayed also attacked Stevens over a June 2025 vote she made in the House to “thank” Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers. The appreciation was embedded in a resolution condemning the firebombing of a peaceful march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. Stevens accused Republicans of having “put in a cynical point” about thanking ICE and El-Sayed of falling into a trap laid by the GOP.
Israel has grown increasingly central ahead of the Michigan primary, set for Aug. 4, in a crucial battleground state with large populations of both Jewish and Arab/Muslim voters. A third candidate who sought to tread a middle ground between Stevens and El-Sayed suspended her campaign earlier this week, ratcheting up anxiety among American Jews around the race.
Stevens’ bid for the Senate comes four years after she ousted Andy Levin, a Jewish progressive congressman who expressed criticism of Israel, in a race that drew more than $4 million in AIPAC-affiliated spending. In the years since, she has remained in a dwindling minority of House Democrats who have voted against all measures that would block or condition military aid to Israel.
El-Sayed’s bid comes as other anti-Israel progressives have prevailed in congressional primaries, shifting campaign discourse about Israel to the left. In an interview with CNN also published Tuesday, El-Sayed took aim at the very idea of a Jewish state.
“Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one,” he told CNN. Asked if support for Israel could ever be about more than money, he responded, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.”
Other Michigan races are also turning into referendums on the Democratic stance on Israel. El-Sayed has cross-endorsed two left-wing congressional candidates, state Rep. Donavan McKinney and activist William Lawrence, who have both said Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Stevens, meanwhile, has endorsed pro-Israel Jewish state Sen. Jeremy Moss for her House seat.
Further down the ballot in Michigan, Democratic activist Abbas Alawieh, a key architect of the 2024 “Uncommitted” movement designed to pressure national Democrats on Gaza, on Tuesday picked up the endorsement of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in his bid for a state senate seat on the party ticket. Alawieh has also met with former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost Michigan to Donald Trump in the general election after the state’s large Arab and Muslim population expressed strong dissatisfaction with her stance on Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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