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Israel’s Ethiopian asylum seekers fight deportation efforts
(JTA) — This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
TEL AVIV – When Endalkew Yemani Tesma fled Ethiopia in 2005, he did not know what awaited him on the way to Israel, nor that once he arrived, he would spend nearly two decades without permanent status.
He passed through Sudan, then Libya, then Sudan again, and reached Israel in 2008 by way of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. There, Yemani Tesma said, he was held captive and abused by Bedouin traffickers, treatment that refugee rights organizations in Israel have documented extensively among those who crossed the same route.
After claiming asylum due to civil unrest in his home country, Yemani Tesma was given a 2(a)5 visa, the renewable permit that lets asylum seekers stay while their claims are pending. He settled in Jerusalem, married a fellow Ethiopian asylum seeker and started a family. His children have grown up in Israeli schools and, by every measure that matters to them, as Israelis. Although they are not Jewish, their first language is Hebrew, and they learned Israeli history alongside Jewish traditions and holidays.
Yemani Tesma works at a hummus restaurant in Jerusalem, the kind of job he described as paying the bills and supporting his six children, but nothing beyond that. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ate there once, Yemani Tesma recounted, “And he didn’t even try to deport me.”
But Yemani Tesma and his family are still in danger. A High Court decision last December allowed their group protection to be revoked. After years of feeling that they had found an oasis of safety, the family now faces the possibility of deportation. To prevent that from happening, a Jewish organization originally founded to help Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms is taking the Israeli government to court.
Few given refugee status
Israel’s asylum approval rate is roughly 0.1%, or about five people a year, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
It’s so low that Sigal Rozen, the public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli NGO she helped found in 1998, can name those whose applications have been approved by first and last name. In the European Union, by comparison, 39% of asylum decisions in 2025 were approvals.
She claimed that the bureaucracy, and the deferral of decisions on some files for years, is deliberate. “They want to make life as difficult as possible, so that people give up and leave,” she asserted.
According to Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority, 1,334 asylum applications from Ethiopian citizens are currently pending. And Ethiopians are just a sliver of the asylum-seeking population. Roughly 30,000 asylum seekers live in Israel, a country of just over 10 million people. Most of those asylum seekers are Eritrean and Sudanese who crossed the Sinai before Israel completed its border fence with Egypt in 2013.
Eritreans still hold group protection that shields them from deportation, because Israel accepts that conditions in the country are too dangerous for them to return, and most Sudanese have obtained status through the courts, as Israel does not have official diplomatic relations with Khartoum and cannot deport them there. Ethiopians have no such shield.
Israel had granted group protection to Ethiopian nationals in light of the civil war between the Ethiopian armed forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front back in November of 2021. In January 2024, Israel’s then-Interior Minister Moshe Arbel withdrew it, citing advice that the security situation in Ethiopia was sufficiently stable for nationals to return. Arbel declined to be interviewed for this story.
In December 2025, the High Court upheld that decision, rejecting an appeal by the Hotline, HIAS Israel and the Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. The three-judge panel gave them four months to prepare to leave.
The Population and Immigration Authority has since begun pulling individual case files — some untouched for years — to the front of the queue in order to reject them, telling asylum seekers to leave the country or risk deportation.
Ethiopians whose claims have been rejected can now be detained if they come to a government office for any reason, Shahar Mandil, policy advocate at the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations in Israel, said. Some do not know they have been rejected, as notices were sent to email addresses they no longer use or to lawyers who no longer represent them.
“A decision on an asylum application is delivered through the contact channels provided by the asylum seeker,” the Population and Immigration Authority told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It is the asylum seeker’s responsibility to keep those contact details updated,” adding that every asylum seeker whose application is rejected is asked to leave the country.
The Population and Immigration Authority’s position is that conditions in Ethiopia no longer justify group protection, and that asylum seekers can return to the country’s capital of Addis Ababa even if other areas remain unstable.
Under international refugee law, a state can reject a claim of asylum by arguing that the applicant could move somewhere safer within their own country (known as an internal flight alternative). But that argument carries a requirement, said Nimrod Avigal, director of legal aid at HIAS Israel: “You need to show that this specific person can actually move within the country.”
Yordanos, who declined to give her last name for fear of deportation, said it was not possible to go elsewhere in Ethiopia. “We can’t move from one place to another,” she explained. “Any police checkpoint can stop you, depending on who you are and where you’re from.” When it comes to Addis Ababa, she continued, “Even if it were safe, it’s not possible. You can’t bring 130 million people to live in Addis,” referring to the entire population of Ethiopia.
Yordanos reached Israel in 2022 after securing a visa for a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, another route that many Ethiopian asylum seekers described taking to JTA. She and her husband hold advanced degrees and once ran a business that took them to more than 11 countries. In Israel, she cleans houses.
Israel historically backed refugee rights
On Sept. 22, the district court in Tel Aviv will hear a case seeking a new way to prevent the deportation of non-Jewish Ethiopians currently in Israel. A petition from HIAS Israel argues that the government has never created a mechanism for asylum seekers to claim protection from deportation under the principle of non-refoulement, which bars states from returning people to countries where they face danger.
HIAS was founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to help Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. It spent the following century assisting Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust. As Jewish migration slowed in the 2000s, the organization expanded its work to non-Jewish refugees, including Syrians, Afghans, Ukrainians and Somalis, dropping “Hebrew” from its name in 2014. Its Israel branch now represents non-Jewish asylum seekers, with the government of the Jewish state as the defendant.
Israel was among the first countries to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, and Israeli jurists helped write it, including Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian-born legal adviser to Israel’s UN delegation who was a central figure in its drafting. The treaty’s cardinal principle is non-refoulement, that no state may return a person to a country where they face serious danger. Israeli courts operate on what Anat Ben-Dor, a clinical instructor at Tel Aviv University’s Refugee Rights Clinic who is currently handling several Ethiopian cases, called an interpretive presumption: “Unless there is clear contradictory legislation, the government should be assumed to abide by international law.”
James Loeffler, the Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History at Johns Hopkins University, who studies the Jewish role in building the postwar human rights system, said the people who wrote those rules would not recognize what Israel is doing now. Robinson and his contemporaries “were committed to non-refoulement. They would have seen that as the cardinal principle above all and would be gravely disappointed by a situation in which Israel is sending thousands of people back to a country where they still face serious peril,” Loeffler said.
Not everyone sees the low asylum recognition rate as a failure, however. Yonatan Jakubowicz, founder and executive director of the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, which advocates for tighter immigration controls, argues that Israel has struck a deliberate balance between “maximum compliance with the principle of non-refoulement” and restricting long-term settlement and the “pull factor” it creates for mass migration.
Israel, he notes, is the only developed country with a land and sea border with Africa, apart from the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, into which roughly 70,000 people crossed from Morocco in a matter of days last month, prompting an emergency EU meeting.
Israel’s granting permanent residence to Ethiopians, Eritreans and Sudanese “could collapse its immigration policies, triggering a massive influx of illegal and mixed migration” over the Egyptian fence or by sea, “followed by a wave of family reunification requests.”
The route he described has been effectively closed for more than a decade; crossings from the Sinai all but stopped after the border fence went up. Most Ethiopians reached Israel by other means – on tourist or work visas or, like Yordanos, on visas for religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem – and applied for asylum after arriving.
Jakubowicz’s arguments are echoed elsewhere in the Western world. Earlier this month, a U.S. district judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians, after the Department of Homeland Security announced in December that conditions in Ethiopia “no longer pose a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Ethiopian nationals.” The language is nearly identical to the advice Israel’s former interior minister, Arbel, cited in Jerusalem two years earlier.
Mola, who asked to be identified by his first name only as he still has family in Ethiopia and also fears deportation, worries that Israel will follow the U.S. lead and step up deportations of Ethiopian asylum seekers ahead of the national elections scheduled for Oct. 27 as a campaign victory for the right-wing coalition now in power.
“Every time there’s an election, asylum seekers suddenly become a target,” said Mandil of the Forum of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Organizations. “Because there are many groups, in many parts of the Israeli public, and it’s both the coalition and the opposition that make promises, trying to convince people to vote for them if only they can take care of this situation.”
In addition to repeating common tropes in the developed world tying migrants to theft and violence, Israelis who support cracking down on immigration often invoke another argument: demography. They worry that letting asylum seekers stay permanently in Israel would erode the Jewish majority of the Jewish state.
“The logic is, if we allow groups of non-Jewish people to stay here, they could, God forbid, marry Israelis, and that threatens Jewishness, the Jewish majority,” Mandil said. Loeffler traces the same anxiety to Israel’s unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Non-Palestinian refugees, he said, have “absolutely gotten caught up in that struggle,” because Israeli leaders resist any move they fear “might open up more opportunities for Palestinians to make legal claims.”
Sivan Carmel, country director of HIAS Israel, calls the numbers argument a non-starter. “Israel has a population of about 10 million, this is 50,000, 60,000 people. It doesn’t make a dent in the demography of the country,” she said.
A clock that keeps ticking
The children of asylum seekers have long been a focus of civil society organizations working on their behalf. They argue that the state should treat them as cases separate from their parents and that even if Israel tries to deport the parents, the children are a different question. Mandil has spent years making that case in the Knesset.
“How can they be asylum seekers when 94% of them were born in Israel?” she said. Asked whether they speak Hebrew, she answered: “Completely. Better than I do.” Yet they are classified, she noted, not as asylum seekers but as infiltrators. “How can you be an infiltrator when you were born in Israel?”
Ethiopian asylum-seeking parents who spoke with JTA described a particular kind of parenting, shielding their children from what their lack of status would eventually cost them, while preparing them for the moment they turned 18 and found out.
Yemani Tesma likened it to a “a clock that keeps ticking. I know the alarm will ring, and I have to decide what to do by the time it does.”
Eventually, the time came.
When his son turned 16, his classmates began preparing for the military draft. His son, however, was left out. No call-up notice, no aptitude test, none of the photographs with families at the recruitment office. So he asked his father why.
“It is because you are not Israeli, and cannot become Israeli,” his father told him. His son shut his bedroom door, Yemani Tesma said, and did not open it for a day.
Israel, like most countries outside the Americas, does not grant citizenship on the basis of birth alone. A child’s status is derivative of a parent’s, said Ben-Dor of the Refugee Rights Clinic. Courts will occasionally make exceptions – for a child with a disability, or one whose integration into Israeli society is exceptional, say – but the government, she said, is wary of any principle suggesting that being born in Israel could confer legal status.
Ben-Dor is representing two Tigrayan mothers of children with special needs whose humanitarian applications cannot be considered at all because the Interior Ministry demands Ethiopian passports the women do not have in order to process their claims.
In early 2012, then-interior minister Eli Yishai lifted collective protection for South Sudanese nationals, clearing the way to deport 1,500 people. The first flight left Tel Aviv for Juba on June 17 of that year, in an operation the government called “Returning Home.” Civil war broke out the following year.
“Children who had studied in Israeli schools found themselves drawing water from wells in South Sudan,” HIAS Israel’s Avigal said. “These are Hebrew-speaking children.”
Why did we come here?
Most asylum seekers in Israel hold a 2(a)5 visa. “It’s a specific visa whose only function is to say you can’t be deported,” said Mandil. The visa is stamped “This permit is not a work permit.” Asylum seekers are able to work, however, because the state promised the High Court it would not fine their employers.
“Every right, every basic right, every social service, we have to fight for,” Mandil said. “They aren’t eligible for anything, not a driver’s license, not the ability to leave the country and come back, not health insurance, not higher education. Certain professions are closed to them because they have no status.”
That has left many Ethiopian asylum seekers in a cycle of poverty in the country where they sought refuge. Now, with a deportation deadline already behind them, 18 years after Yemani Tesma arrived and raised a family here, some are asking why they came at all.
Mola is a community leader and translator and spends his unpaid hours helping asylum seekers file petitions with the Interior Ministry.
“When I am not doing my backbreaking work,” he told JTA, “I do all I can to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork.” He once worked as a project coordinator and Amharic translator at the Canadian Embassy in Israel.
“Anyone who has had the option or ability to leave Israel for a third country has done so. Everyone who is left here has nowhere else to go,” he said.
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, it seemed there might be an opening for the Ethiopian asylum seekers to cement their place in Israel.
As Israel’s largely foreign agricultural workforce was evacuated and Palestinian work permits were suspended, some of the people the Interior Ministry is now preparing to deport went to farms along the Gaza border to pick fruit.
Members of the Ethiopian asylum-seeking community bought supplies at supermarkets and delivered them to Israeli soldiers, Mola said.
Multiple busloads of asylum seekers traveled to farms in the envelope to harvest crops that would otherwise have rotted. None of them were paid. “After Oct. 7, we saw asylum seekers volunteering to assist people in the south, distributing food, volunteering in agriculture. I’ve seen it with my clients, and I’ve seen it with groups of asylum seekers,” Avigal, of HIAS, said.
Three months later, the Interior Ministry revoked their protection from deportation.
Asked whether any of this had left him bitter toward Israel, one Ethiopian asylum seeker, who asked not to be named for fear of deportation, rejected the premise. “I don’t hate,” he said. “Bless Israel.”
Told that someone else in his position might feel differently, he answered, “No. What we hate is the decision.”
Avigal added, “What we say at HIAS is, we used to help people because they’re Jewish, and now we’re helping people because we’re Jewish.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel’s Ethiopian asylum seekers fight deportation efforts appeared first on The Forward.
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The power of Sukkot to unite the Jewish people
אין דער גמרא שטייט אַז יעדער ייִד קען — טעאָרעטיש — נוצן די זעלבע סוכּה. דאָס שטרײַכט אונטער דעם פֿאַקט, אַז מיר זענען אַלע גלײַך, און אַלעמען באַגריסט מען גלײַך אין דער סוכּה.
אין דער אמתן, ווען מען וואָלט געבויט אַ גענוג לאַנגע און ברייטע סוכּה, וואָלט דאָס גאַנצע ייִדישע פֿאָלק — אָן אויסנאַם — געקענט אַרײַנגיין אין איר און עסן אין דער זעלבער צײַט.
דער דאָזיקער באַגריף פֿון אַחדות דריקט זיך אויך אויס אין אַ באַזונדערער מצווה פֿון סוכּות: די אַרבעה מינים. די תּורה באַפֿעלט אונדז, אַז דעם ערשטן טאָג סוכּות זאָלן מיר נעמען אַן אתרוג, אַ לולבֿ (אַ צווײַג פֿון אַ טייטל־פּאַלמע), דרײַ הדסים (מירטן־צווײַגן), און צוויי ערבֿות (הושענות), כּדי זיך צו פֿרייען פֿאַרן אויבערשטן.
וואָס שטעלן מיט זיך פֿאָר די אַרבעה מינים? דער אתרוג האָט סײַ אַ גוטן גערוך סײַ אַ גוטן טעם; דער לולבֿ האָט אַ טעם — טייטלען — אָבער קיין גערוך נישט; דער הדס האָט אַ גוטן גערוך אָבער קיין טעם נישט; און די ערבֿה (הושענא) האָט ניט קיין טעם און ניט קיין גערוך.
דער גערוך שטעלט פֿאָר מעשׂים טובֿים, גוטע מעשׂים, וואָס — אַזוי ווי אַ גערוך — האָבן אַן השפּעה אויפֿן אַרום; בשעת דער טעם שטעלט פֿאָר לימוד התּורה, וואָס דערנערט די נשמה אַזוי ווי פֿיזישע שפּײַז דערנערט דעם גוף.
יעדער איינער פֿון די אַרבעה מינים שטעלט פֿאָר אַן אַנדער סאָרט ייִד: עס זענען דאָ ייִדן וואָס צייכענען זיך אויס מיט זייער חכמת התּורה, אַנדערע מיט זייערע גוטע מעשׂים, אַנדערע מיט ביידע, און אַנדערע מיט קיינעם פֿון די צוויי. דער געדאַנק איז, אַז מיר זענען אַלע אָפּהענגיק איינער פֿונעם צווייטן, און יעדער איינער דערגאַנצט דעם אַנדערן. נאָר ווען מען האָט אַלע פֿיר צוזאַמען קען מען מאַכן די ברכה און מקיים זײַן די מצווה.
בכלל ווערט פֿאַרשטאַנען, אַז די לערנונג פֿון דער דאָזיקער מצווה איז, אַז דער וואָס געפֿינט זיך אין דער העכערער רוחניותדיקער מדרגה פֿונעם „אתרוג“, אויסגעצייכנט סײַ מיט חכמה סײַ מיט גוטע מעשׂים, דאַרף זיך — אַלטרויִסטיש — אָפּגעבן מיט דעם וואָס געפֿינט זיך אין דער קאַטעגאָריע פֿון „ערבֿה“, אָן קיין באַזונדערער רוחניותדיקער מעלה.
לויטן זעקסטן ליובאַוויטשער רבין, רבי יוסף יצחק שניאורסאהן זצ״ל, איז פֿאַראַן אָבער נאָך אַן אַנדער דינאַמיק: דער וואָס געפֿינט זיך אין דער מדרגה פֿון „אתרוג“ קען און דאַרף אויך לערנען עפּעס ווערטפֿולס פֿון דעם וואָס געפֿינט זיך אין דער קאַטעגאָריע פֿון „ערבֿה“.
דער וואָס געפֿינט זיך אינעם מצבֿ פֿון „ערבֿה“, אָן קיין באַזונדערער רוחניותדיקער מעלה, און פֿונדעסטוועגן פֿילט ער זיך „זייער ייִדישלעך“, דריקט אויס אַ טיפֿן, אומברעכלעכן ייִדישן צושטאַנד, ניט געקוקט אויף דעם וואָס עס פֿעלט אים אין ייִדישן בילדונג און וויסן. דער וואָס האָט אַ סך געלערנט קען דורך זײַן פּערזענלעכער אַנטוויקלונג אַ סך פֿאַרשטיין און אַ סך פֿילן; פונדעסטוועגן איז אים אָפֿט שווער צו דערגרייכן און אויסדריקן דעם עסענץ פֿון זײַן נשמה. צו דער דאָזיקער בחינה פֿון זײַן אייגענעם מהות קען ער צוקומען דווקא דורך לערנען פֿונעם ייִד פֿון דעם „ערבֿה“־טיפּ, וואָס פֿילט זיך ייִדיש נישט צוליב זײַן ייִדישער בילדונג, נאָר טראָץ דעם וואָס עס פֿעלט אים. זײַן ייִדיש געפֿיל שטאַמט פֿון זײַן עצם הנשמה, דעם „פּינטעלע ייִד“ וואָס איז אינגאַנצן אומאָפּהענגיק פֿון קיין שום סיבה.
דער ליובאַוויטשער רבי זי״ע ווײַזט אָן, אַז די אַרבעה מינים שטעלן פֿאָר די אַחדות פֿונעם ייִדישן פֿאָלק, ניט נאָר ווײַל זיי רעפּרעזענטירן דעם צוזאַמען־פֿאַרבונד פֿון פֿיר פֿאַרשידענע קאַטעגאָריעס, נאָר אויך ווײַל יעדער מין פֿאַר זיך שטעלט פֿאָר אַחדות אין זײַן אייגענער קאַטעגאָריע.
דער אתרוג וואַקסט און ווערט דערנערט במשך פֿון אַלע פֿיר סעזאָנען פֿונעם יאָר. די בלעטער פֿונעם הדס וואַקסן אַזוי, אַז לענגאויס דעם שטאַם קומען אַרויס גרופּעס פֿון דרײַ בלעטער פֿון דער זעלבער הייך. בײַם לולבֿ דאַרפֿן די בלעטער ווערן פֿאַרמאַכט און צונויפֿגענומען און ניט צעשפּרייט איינער פֿונעם צווייטן — אַחוץ דעם וואָס יעדער בלעטל איז צונויפֿגעלייגט פֿון צוויי העלפֿטן — און די ערבֿות וואַקסן צוזאַמען אין אַ סאָרט אַחדות.
דאָס שטעלט פֿאָר נאָך אַן אַספּעקט פֿון אַחדות, ווײַל אַ מאָל איז גרינגער זיך צו פֿאַראייניקן מיט איינעם וואָס איז אַנדערש פֿון מיר, ווי מיט איינעם וואָס איז ענלעך צו מיר און קען אויסזען ווי אַ קאָנקורענט.
אַזוי אַז אויף סוכּות דריקן מיר אויס דרײַ מדרגות פֿון אַחדות אינעם ייִדישן פֿאָלק: איין מדרגה וואָס שטאַמט פֿון דעם געמיינזאמען עסענץ, וואָס איז העכער פֿון פֿאַרשידנאַרטיקייטן;איין מדרגה וואָס דריקט זיך אויס דווקא דורך די פֿאַרשידנאַרטיקייטן; און נאָך אַ מדרגה — די אַחדות צווישן די וואָס זענען ענלעך איינער צום צווייטן.
אין דער אמתן, קומט איינס אַרויס פֿון צווייטן. אויב אַ מענטשנס אַמביציע איז עגאָצענטריש, איז זייער שווער זיך צו פֿאַראייניקן מיט אַנדערע. אויב אָבער זײַן אַמביציע איז אויסצופֿירן דעם ג־טלעכן ציל, וועט ער אָפּשאַצן און שעצן די הצלחה פֿון יעדן וואָס שטעלט זיך צו אויסצופֿירן דעם בשותּפֿותדיקן שליחות.
עס איז די אַחדות וואָס דריקט זיך אויס אין די מצוות פון סוכּות וואָס דערמעגלעכט די אמתע שׂימחה פון „ושמחת בחגך“.
די שוואַכע, צאַרטע סטרוקטור פֿון דער סוכּה האָט איבערגעלעבט טויזנטער יאָרן פֿון געשיכטע און רדיפֿות — אין די גולאָגן און אין די קאָנצענטראַציע־לאַגערן. הײַנט־צו־טאָג קען מען אין אַ סך קהילות איבער דער וועלט זען ווי ליובאַוויטשער ישיבֿה־בחורים פֿאָרן איבער די גאַסן פֿון שטאָט מיט אַ מאָבילער סוכּה, כּדי צו פֿאַרבעטן ייִדישע דורכגייער מקיים צו זײַן די מצוות פֿון עסן אין דער סוכּה און צו מאַכן די ברכה אויף די אַרבעה מינים.
אז איר וועט זיך אָנטרעפֿן אין איינעם פֿון זיי, ביטע גיט זיי איבער א גרוס!
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The Jewish soul and Hasidic inspirations of Annie Dillard
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard, who died Sept, 15 at age 81, drew on Jewish inspiration past and present for her meditative books on humans and the deity, including the nature-imbued narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Raised a Presbyterian, in young adulthood Dillard discovered Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, in which she found a kindred spirit among Hasidic rabbis who, according to legend, would turn somersaults and do cartwheels and flips in the synagogue before ritual acts such as reciting Kiddush, the blessing uttered to sanctify Shabbat and Jewish holidays; lighting Hanukkah candles; and weddings. As Dillard put it at Michigan’s Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing in 1996, her introduction to Hasidism was through Buber’s books and she “really, really, really liked them.”
Herself exultant by temperament, fond of energetic dancing and sports, Dillard saw no contradiction between exuberance and serious consideration of moral and ethical questions. Indeed, she followed the Hasidic spiritual concept of Bitul ha-yesh (ego effacement) to become receptive to the divine by reading from a range of sources to find inspiration for her own books.
These included Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whom she described to an interviewer in 1992 as “the great religious thinker” of the 20th century, and Simone Weil, the French philosopher. The latter two, “especially Heschel,” added Dillard, “have everything I need.”
What she needed as a writer was to fulfill her self-definition as a “Christian Hasid,” as she informed a reporter in the year 2000. The English literature maven Lori Kanitz has observed tyhat Dillard drew on Hasidic notions to better mull over nature and creation. Dillard agreed with the concept that humans assist God in redemption by making everyday physical objects and moments into something sacred or consecrated.
She favored the argument by the 16th century rabbi Isaac Luria that divine sparks trapped in the material world might be liberated through intense spiritual awareness. Especially in books such as 1999’s For the Time Being, she blended Yiddishkeit with heterodox Christian philosophers such as the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to address questions about faith, suffering and individual existence.
The result was an emotionally fraught style, rich with biblical allusions. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek likens a combative domestic feline’s ensanguined paws to the “mark of Cain” and “blood sign of the Passover.” In this exalted, highly artful prose with Judaism as part of its vocabulary, the Quran is mentioned in the distressing context of animals devouring one another in nature, followed by the French Catholic thinker Blaise Pascal’s implication that after creation, God more or less abandoned humanity. Yet this existential doubt is calmed by two further citations from Albert Einstein to remind the reader that “subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not” and “Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.” Bringing in Einstein, another example for Dillard alongside Abraham Joshua Heschel of the quasi-omniscient good grey Jew, shows her acute admiration for Jewish wisdom.
Characteristically, Dillard published in a 1998-99 issue of a University of Notre Dame publication for Catholic readers an essay insistent in its Yiddishkeit. The text begins by reminding readers of the execution of Rabbi Akiva by the Romans in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Unsparing of gory details, this account is followed by quotes from the Nobel-Prize-winning Holocaust poet Nelly Sachs, Gershom Scholem, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, Rabbi Pinhas of Koretz, Rabbi Menachem Nochum Twersky, and a rare modern too, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.
Blending nature with Jewish elements, Dillard recounts a trip to Lavi, a kibbutz in northern Israel near Tiberias, where she witnesses birds mating in mid-air. Juxtaposed with maxims by Christians, her narrative has an anthological aura, akin to that of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945) which by contrast contains almost no direct passages from Jewish mystics.
Overall, Dillard kept in mind, as she suggested to one critic in 1999, that her goal was to persuade “the agnostic intellectual” that all spirituality need not be discarded by a discerning reader. That said, in some of Dillard’s books, the transitions between different traditions, from Sufism to Inuit beliefs, could appear contradictory.
But then as friends observed, Dillard herself could seem to be a walking contradiction; she was obsessed with nature, but also a lifelong chainsmoker. And although according to Lori Kanitz and others, her works were redolent of such venerable Jewish ideas as tsimtsum (divine contraction) and shevirat ha-kelim (shattering of the vessels), she likewise surrounded herself with a self-created Jewish mishpocheh of literati.
Dillard achieved the latter feat by energetically supporting modern American Jewish writing, lauding authors with more sheer enthusiasm than they may have been accustomed to receiving from fellow Jews. Drawn to high spirits and celebrants among living Jews, she was a fan of Louis D. Rubin’s Small Craft Advisory about shepping nachas from boats; she termed Rubin’s book a “moving account by a happy man.”
Part of appreciating happy Jews for Dillard was relishing Jewish humor with a highly developed sense of the absurd. She provided a blurb for a book by Jewish chef Peter Kaminsky about how to prepare decidedly un-kosher pork products, noting: “I love ham and I love this book.” She similarly kvelled at the inherent absurdity of describing how in 1982, the American Jewish Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was assigned the task of guiding a tour group in Disneyland composed of visiting Chinese communist authors. And she valued that a hybrid factual/fictional work by journalist Jake Silverstein was both “warm and funny.”
Dillard also persistently lavished serious praise on Jewish contemporaries such as the American visual artist and novelist Rosalyn Drexler for being “committed to a lifetime struggle for excellence.” Dillard deemed Fortune’s Daughter (1985) by Alice Hoffman “one of the best” American novels of the previous decade and in 2010 welcomed a debut story collection from Hester Kaplan as evidence of a “remarkable new writer.”
Unsurprisingly, Jewish writer friends of Dillard expressed gratitude for her enthusiasm for their efforts. The biographer Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages includes an acknowledgement to Dillard for “precious gifts of time, friendship, intelligence, and candor.” Jewish readers can likewise be grateful to Dillard for her characterful investment of time, friendship, intelligence, and candor in conveying elements of Yiddishkeit in serendipitous contexts.
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Robert Kraft pledged $2M to aid Palestinians amid Macklemore row. How will he do it?
(JTA) — Robert Kraft has found himself in an unusual position: nixing the rapper Macklemore’s appearance at a stadium he owns for what he said was hateful behavior — and then taking up the performer’s charity challenge.
Macklemore challenged the Jewish pro-Israel billionaire to make a donation in support of the Palestinians days after pressuring singer Ed Sheeran to drop Macklemore from his tour over the latter’s pro-Palestinian comments. Kraft responded by announcing that he would donate $2 million to “fight this humanitarian crisis” in the Middle East.
“I have dedicated much of my life to building bridges between all people,” Kraft wrote in a statement posted by Gillette Stadium, which he owns and where Sheeran and Macklemore had been scheduled to play. “I believe deeply that all lives are worth protecting.”
Kraft’s statement Wednesday came in response to challenges from both artists: a public call from Macklemore to match his own $1 million donation to a group of six pro-Palestinian organizations; and what Kraft described as private conversations with Sheeran to commit twice that amount to unspecified groups. Kraft said his own donation was meant to match Sheeran’s.
Kraft’s gift comes as the controversy has prompted questions about how pro-Israel Jews in positions of power choose to wield their influence to combat what they see as antisemitism. His pledge carries additional, politically fraught implications, as Jewish groups have been divided on whether, or how, to donate directly to Gaza relief efforts.
In his public comments, Kraft has insisted that he does not object to pro-Palestinian advocacy or aid as long as it does not cross the line into advocating for Hamas.
But where will Kraft donate? The New England Patriots owner didn’t specify in his public statement, and a representative didn’t immediately respond to questions from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In Macklemore’s own post issuing the donation challenge, he said the $1 million he was giving constituted his entire net earnings from Sheeran’s tour. He named six beneficiaries: the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, HEAL Palestine, Medical Aid for Palestinians, American Near East Refugee Aid, Gaza Soup Kitchen and UNRWA USA, a nonprofit supporting the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees.
UNRWA itself has proven particularly contentious among the Jewish community. After an investigation revealed that agency members had participated in Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, the Trump administration led a successful effort to slash the agency’s funding.
In his posts, Kraft offered clues to where he has given in the past.
“I’d like the people who are speaking in support of the Palestinian people to know that for decades, I have supported efforts that create opportunity for Palestinians and have brought young Palestinians and Israelis together to build businesses, create jobs, and forge relationships,” he wrote on Wednesday. In an earlier statement, Kraft said he has “created athletic and entrepreneurial opportunities for Palestinians who I admire and respect.”
One well-known organization that fits Kraft’s description of bringing Palestinians and Israelis together, Seeds of Peace, has a documented relationship with the businessman. In 1994, the year after the peacebuilding initiative launched, Kraft hosted more than 100 teenagers from Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco at a Patriots game.
Seeds of Peace did not immediately respond to a JTA request for comment about whether Kraft would be giving to the group as part of his new pledge.
Kraft has also invested heavily in a push to bring American football to Israel via the Kraft Family Israel Football League. In that context, Palestinians have played for league teams — including for the Judean Rebels, a team based in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Steven Koltai, a Jewish onetime entrepreneurship liaison for former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and author of “Peace Through Entrepreneurship,” said he welcomed Kraft’s commitment.
“I would love to see, as a Jew who believes in the two-state solution and particularly in humanitarian relief to the millions of Gazans who are completely blameless, if we could show that side of who we are,” Koltai told JTA. “I think that he would be doing an incredible mitzvah for the whole Jewish world, especially the American Jewish community, if he could leverage his money towards something like this.”
Jeremy Burton, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, told JTA that Kraft “deserves kudos for leaning in with his philanthropy.” Prior to the pledge, Burton had praised Kraft’s actions against Macklemore, saying in a statement that Kraft “drew a clear moral line in the sand about the demonization and offensive conduct that he will not allow in ‘his home’.”
“One can work to end Palestinian suffering without being antisemitic,” Burton wrote to JTA in a text Thursday.
Kraft has said he pressured Sheeran to drop Macklemore because he thought the latter’s conduct at a recent show, in which the rapper had accused Israel of genocide and broadcast footage from Columbia University’s encampments, crossed the line into “hate speech.” According to The Wall Street Journal, other NFL team owners had also voiced objections to Macklemore performing in their stadiums after witnessing one of his sets.
The Journal also reported that Kraft, in his conversation with Sheeran, recalled that Macklemore had performed in a costume with antisemitic signifiers in 2014. Sheeran, whose tours have grossed nearly $2 billion since 2008, and Kraft are friendly: The singer performed at Kraft’s 2022 wedding.
Backlash has been swift, with Sheeran distancing himself from the decision to drop Macklemore, and the singer’s other opening acts and supporting band leaving the tour in protest. Some of them named Kraft specifically in public comments. Figures including children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, have also defended Macklemore, with Ocasio-Cortez additionally criticizing Kraft.
“When you see what Robert Kraft did to line up all of the stadiums to censor speech in that one specific way, it’s become clear that this is not just about one music artist or two music artists, but this is about how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in Gaza,” the congresswoman told TMZ.
Others, including singer Pink and Barstool Sports mogul Dave Portnoy, have criticized Macklemore or defended Kraft’s decision.
Much of Kraft’s philanthropy has gone to fighting antisemitism and to Jewish organizations. He recently gave $10 million to Brandeis University to endow a new center for Jewish life at the school.
Koltai, who himself has not worked with Kraft, said it’s possible for Jewish donors to distribute money to Gaza through “vetted, kosher organizations” that are “clearly not Hamas.” He suggested that Kraft look beyond his past donations to peacebuilding and sports efforts in order to address the current need.
“Sewage, water, housing, medical care and child care are all much more important than a summer camp or a football team,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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