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Jews mobilized for Darfur 20 years ago. As violence surges again, where are they now?
They spoke of genocide and “Never Again.” They pushed to divest from entities that supported the offending government.
They protested the government’s blockade of humanitarian aid to the disputed region. They were arrested while protesting outside of an embassy.
The thousands of Jews who bused and flew to the National Mall from across the country on April 30, 2006 to call for these things fought on a platform that would be instantly recognizable to today’s pro-Palestinian protesters. But they were not there for Gaza. They were there for Darfur.
“Our halacha dictates that we help save lives,” Rebecca Stone, a Yeshiva University student who organized a fleet of buses from the Modern Orthodox school, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time, referring to Jewish law. “Apathy is really antithetical to Torah values.”
The Save Darfur Coalition sprung into being in the mid-2000s in response to the haunting spike in murders orchestrated by Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, whose Arab Islamist government waged a civil war against ethnic African tribes in the country’s Darfur region. They would eventually kill an estimated 300,000 civilians and displace another 2.7 million.
Many of the coalition’s loudest voices were Jewish, and cited what they saw as a uniquely Jewish imperative to prevent genocide. Together, they worked to elevate Darfur as a significant foreign policy issue.
“The American Jewish community has been absolutely vital in uplifting the issue of Darfur, the crisis in Darfur, and the situation in Sudan in general in the American consciousness,” Noah Gottschalk, chief external relations officer for the Jewish immigrant aid group HIAS, said in a recent interview. “When you look at the organizations that were founded in the aftermath of the genocide in 2003, so many Jewish organizations were part of that.”
Today, six years after the end of al-Bashir’s reign and 14 years after the founding of South Sudan as an independent country, Darfur is again descending into chaos as the RSF, Sudan’s government-backed paramilitary forces, have laid siege to the town of el-Fasher. More than 150,000 people have been killed, and another 12 million have been forcibly displaced. Rape, kidnapping and famine are rampant. The bloodshed is so extreme that it is visible from space.
Yet nothing like the Save Darfur Coalition has been reconstituted on the activist front — neither by the mainstream Jewish groups who mobilized for the cause two decades ago, nor the progressive left that activated so strongly over what they deemed a genocide in Gaza, during the war that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
“At this time, and simply for capacity reasons, we are not actively engaged in efforts around the ongoing tragedy in Darfur,” Barbara Weinstein, associate director of the Religious Action Center at the Union for Reform Judaism, told JTA.
Ruth Messinger attends the New York Action 2015 global mobilization event on Sept. 24, 2015 in New York City. (Brad Barket/Getty Images for Action/2015)
“The Jewish community has legitimately had several dramatic issues that have raised attention and concern, and often caused crisis, in the last three years, particularly Oct. 7 and rising antisemitism,” Ruth Messinger, the longtime head of American Jewish World Service and former New York City mayoral candidate who co-founded the Save Darfur Coalition, told JTA.
Messinger continued, “Those issues have appropriately concerned the Jewish communities around the world, and so concerned the Jewish communities that it’s been hard to create space for other concerns.”
It’s a conclusion that would have been foreign to Messinger two decades ago. Back then, she was at the forefront of a movement to take the lessons of the Holocaust, still relatively fresh, and apply them to a contemporary crisis.
She and others were haunted by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which occurred over just 100 days when the country’s Hutu government led an attempted purge of its Tutsi ethnic minority. An estimated 1 million Tutsis were massacred, and the speed and scale of the killings — many of which took place in churches, or in open fields in broad daylight — shocked the global consciousness.
Later, President Bill Clinton said he would have taken stronger action against genocide in Rwanda if he had known more at the time. Messinger and other Jewish leaders — those who had embraced the Never Again ethos 50 years after the term genocide was coined in the wake of the Holocaust — took that as a charge.
“There were a lot of people in the Jewish community who felt like we had missed the boat on Rwanda,” Messinger recalled. “We considered ourselves watchdogs for the potential next genocide.”
When, a few short years later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof started writing regularly about the crisis in Darfur, Messinger and others — a group including Rabbi Steve Gutow, diplomat Samantha Power and the Holocaust survivor and Nobelist Elie Wiesel— paid attention. In a meeting organized by American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wiesel directly implored Jewish leaders to do something.
“I will never forget that meeting as Wiesel addressed us in his soft-spoken, yet powerful, voice,” recalled Rabbi Marla Feldman, director emeritus of Women of Reform Judaism, who worked on social justice issues with the Reform Action Center at the time. “He looked directly at each of us gathered around, impressing upon us our personal responsibility to take action. No one could say no to his charge to organize that day.”
They decided to throw everything they had into mobilizing on Darfur. The coalition was born.
“Everyone who came to the meeting said, ‘Well, let’s continue working together, and we’ll call ourselves the Save Darfur Coalition,’” recalled Jerry Fowler, now a law professor at the University of Wyoming. At the time Fowler was the (non-Jewish) director for the Committee on Conscience — a division at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum committed to applying the lessons of the Holocaust toward preventing future genocides.
The museum, and more specifically the Committee on Conscience, played a significant role in elevating the crisis in Darfur within the Jewish community by issuing a rare warning that the region was at risk of tipping into genocide. When, in 2004, the U.S. government declared that the Sudanese government and its related militia groups, including the Janjaweed, were indeed committing genocide in Darfur, citing the United Nations Genocide Convention, the combined effect was to put Darfur on the map as a Jewish issue.
Rabbi David Saperstein (center foreground) and Jerry Greenfield (background) of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame, are arrested outside the Sudanese embassy during a protest against the genocide in Darfur, July 29, 2004, Washington, D.C. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“Social justice is a huge component of the way American Jewry expresses their Jewish identity,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, director emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center. He was an active figure in both the Save Darfur Coalition and an earlier movement to push for a peace accord to end the Second Sudanese Civil War.
Quickly, Saperstein recalled, “Save Darfur” signs made their way into synagogues across the country.
“Many people put Darfur into their Passover Seders,” he said. “That helped deepen the connection [to] people forced to flee out of oppression and persecution, and what it was like to live in the desert, in a place not your home, with the hope of finding safety and security.” American Jewish World Service encouraged such identification by distributing Darfur-specific seder material.
Back then, Darfur crossed Jewish denominational boundaries. Everyone from the Union for Reform Judaism’s advocacy arm to the Conservative summer camp Camp Ramah to Yeshiva University engaged on the issue. Synagogues jumped onboard “Nothing But Net,” a UN-led initiative to raise funds to send malaria nets to refugee camps — and raised enough on their own to fully stock several camps. Young observant Jews would go on to intern with Darfur policy groups and bring their activism to the upper levers of power.
Union for Reform Judaism leaders distribute bed nets to Sudanese refugees in Dabaab, Kenya, as part of their organizational efforts with the Save Darfur Coalition, Feb. 10, 2009. Rabbi Marla Feldman, at the time a leader of social justice issues with the Religious Action Center, is second from left. (Claudio Gallone)
“I have this vivid memory of sitting in the Beit Knesset at camp listening to a Jewish World Watch staffer talk about the Janjaweed and show photos of devastated villages,” Ami Fields-Meyer, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and former White House policy advisor under former President Joe Biden, recalled about his time at Camp Ramah. “It was shocking. It was almost certainly my first exposure to human rights work.”
Adam Zuckerman was a 17-year-old high school student in Maine when Messinger came to his Portland synagogue to speak about Darfur. He was immediately engaged on the issue, making close friends with members of the state’s large Sudanese refugee community and riding buses to D.C. with them.
“I think a lot of it was that, with the legacy of the Holocaust, we had a responsibility to make sure that it never happened again to anyone,” Zuckerman recalled, about the pitch to Jews for getting involved in Darfur. “That was a sort of driving force in why I took on anti-genocide work.”
His friends in the refugee community included El-Fadel Arbab, a genocide survivor who spent nine years trying to enter the United States before finally being granted passage in 2004. Upon his arrival in Maine, Arbab was embraced by local Jewish groups. He would go on to tell his harrowing story, involving fleeing his village and living on the street as a child, at synagogues and Holocaust museums in the state and beyond.
Arbab quickly felt a kinship with his Jewish allies and supporters, rooted in shared trauma: what Darfur villagers suffered at the hands of the Sudanese groups had morbid similarities with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
“What they went through is also remarkable,” he told JTA. “So many Jewish people have been killed. Millions and millions have been killed. They’ve been tortured, they’ve been burned alive. And this is not right.”
Besides the brutality, the Jewish comparison also inspired Arbab — particularly the refrain “Never again,” which he often repeats himself. “They’re still fighting for justice. They’re saying, ‘These victims will learn from the history.’”
A list of the biggest voices within Save Darfur included some of the most prominent Jews in America at the time.
Speakers at the National Mall rally included Messinger; Saperstein; National Jewish Democratic Council director Steve Gutow; Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism, before he became its president; and Rabbi Marc Schneier.
They shared the stage with then-Sen. Barack Obama, months before he announced his presidential bid; the top Democrat in Congress, Nancy Pelosi; actor George Clooney; and a range of Sudanese and interfaith activists. “I don’t think there have been many rallies like it in recent years,” Feldman said.
Elie Wiesel speaks at a Save Darfur rally at the National Mall, Washington, D.C., April 30, 2006. (Screenshot via C-SPAN)
But perhaps the most noteworthy person to grace the stage was Wiesel, who had vocally lobbied not only on behalf of Rwanda but also over the plight of Soviet Jews. It was Wiesel who had inaugurated the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience in the first place, to, in the words of the committee’s mandate, “alert the national conscience, influence policy makers, and stimulate worldwide action to confront and work to halt acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity.”
Only a few months earlier, in January 2006, “Night,” Wiesel’s memoir of the concentration camps, was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection 50 years after its original publication. Though already a bestseller, the Oprah exposure introduced “Night” to a new generation of readers and reinforced Wiesel as a global authority on humanitarian crises.
He threw all of that leverage behind Darfur.
“I, as a Jew, am here because when we needed people to come to help us, nobody came. Therefore, we are here,” Wiesel told the National Mall crowd. “I am here as a member of the human family, and we believe that we sinned with Rwanda. We could have saved 6-800,000 men, women and children in Rwanda, and we did not, and the world should be ashamed for that.”
Over applause, he continued, “We are here because in Darfur, families are being uprooted, starved; children tormented and slaughtered in the thousands; and in the eyes of the victims, the world remains indifferent to their plight. We are here because we refuse to be silent. Remember, silence helps the killer, never his victims.”
It was a galvanizing moment, an explicit bridging from the Jewish communal trauma of the Holocaust to the modern-day tragedy in a far-off corner of the world with no obvious Jewish connection. To Wiesel, it just made sense.
“For my father, there was no split between doing what was right on the global stage and standing up for the Jewish community,” Elisha Wiesel, Elie Wiesel’s son, told JTA. “It wasn’t like those were two completely separate projects. My father felt that to be a good Jew meant to stand up and do the right thing on a global scale.”
And there was a divestment push within the Jewish community. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, under pressure from its members, divested its holdings from companies that did business with the Sudanese government, as a means of economically hurting al-Bashir’s regime. In so doing, it joined dozens of similar actions from the country’s leading universities, including Harvard, Columbia, and MIT, all celebrated by the activist group Investors Against Genocide. (A spokesperson for the Reconstructionist movement declined to comment for this story.)
Sustained Jewish activism around Darfur continued for years. In 2009, Jewish leaders were arrested for staging a demonstration outside the Sudanese Embassy in protest of al-Bashir’s expulsion of more than a dozen aid groups from Darfur. The rabbis were joined at the protest by Democrats including civil rights leader John Lewis. Several Jewish leaders also signed a Save Darfur Coalition letter urging Obama — then president — to resume humanitarian aid in Sudan.
The following year, a delegation of Jewish leaders — including Messinger, Saperstein and Jacobs — traveled to visit a camp for Darfur refugees just over the border in Chad. The trip happened to coincide with the holiday of Sukkot, which, like the Passover Seders before it, drove home the Jewish resonance of the cause.
“To see people living out in the open and eating out in the open,” Saperstein said, “had a particular resonance for us.”
As the years passed, the focus and methods of the Save Darfur Coalition attracted scrutiny and criticism from some corners. “Darfur Wasn’t Saved,” Slate declared in 2017 in a postmortem; groups like Genocide Watch have reached similar conclusions.
Critics dinged the movement for proposing the wrong policy solutions; for infighting among leadership; and for failing to steer more of its own financial resources toward direct aid, among other issues. Some, as early as 2006, were already accusing the movement and its Jewish leaders of using Darfur to ignore Israeli conduct in Gaza — which had just elected Hamas to power earlier that year.
Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani (right) with son Zohran and wife Mira Nair at a mayoral campaign event for Zohran, June 24, 2025, New York, New York. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
One of the foremost critics of the Save Darfur movement was Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan-born Columbia University professor, prominent critic of Israel and father of New York City’s mayor-elect.
In his 2009 book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, Mamdani argued that Darfur did not constitute a genocide; that those who applied the label may have been operating from a prejudiced perspective against Islam; that activists like those in the coalition didn’t have the proper context for the situation; and that Western intervention may have made the conflict worse. In promoting the book, Mamdani also didn’t mince words in criticizing the Save Darfur Coalition.
“Save Darfur is telling its supporters that the lesson of Rwanda is that there’s no point in talking about causes of conflicts,” Mamdani said on WNYC’s “The Takeaway” in April 2009.
Strains of dissent could also be heard from within the Jewish world, where some argued against what they saw as a conflation of Jewish and progressive values. “Health care, labor unions, public-school education, feminism, abortion rights, gay marriage, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, Darfur: on everything Judaism has a position — and, wondrously, this position just happens to coincide with that of the American liberal Left,” the Israeli writer Hillel Halkin complained in the conservative Jewish magazine Commentary in 2008.
But the Darfur coalition transcended typical ideological divides, including a wide array of Jewish groups as well as fundamentalist Christians and figures motivated by anti-Islam animus. The combination could be awkward. A series of rapid leadership changes, accusations of financial mismanagement and other infighting through the late 2000s led to the group’s ultimate collapse as a viable political force. Jewish communal leaders who spoke to JTA acknowledged that the coalition’s momentum couldn’t be sustained, but they believed that it had a lasting effect, particularly on Jewish communal organizing.
Zuckerman went on to become a close disciple of Messinger at the American Jewish World Service. Today he works for Public Citizen, a progressive group, on environmental issues.
He credits his Darfur activism with his trajectory, as well as for something else: his pro-Palestinian activism, which he has expressed through work in IfNotNow as well as with Jewish Action Maine, a group affiliated with the local Jewish Voice for Peace chapter.
“It’s been tricky, because I don’t feel like I necessarily fit into a box on it, and I am uncomfortable with some of the rhetoric and some of the slogans in these spaces,” Zuckerman said.
At the same time, he said, “I think it would be hypocritical for me to speak out about Darfur and not say anything when people who share my religion are also committing atrocities.”
A man amongst a group of African refugees, mostly from Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum on Aug., 2009 in Jerusalem, commemorating the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
Israel itself got involved in the initial round of Darfur activism, allowing hundreds of refugees from the region to apply for asylum there. (Upon arrival some of the refugees visited Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust museum.) Most of those asylum cases, which were handled by HIAS and did not involve Jews, took years to work their way through Israeli courts before a judge granted the Sudanese asylum seekers temporary status last year.
Today much of the same Jewish institutional muscle that once advocated for Darfur has turned inward, toward fighting antisemitism and shoring up Jewish support for Israel since Oct. 7. That has included fending off accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
Over the last two years, Jews have at times disputed statistics and declarations about the state of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis — including allegations that Israel, like Sudan before it, has deliberately withheld humanitarian aid from a conflict zone — that come from the United Nations and various NGOs they had previously worked together with on Darfur causes. Jewish leaders, including at the RAC, have objected to resolutions to boycott or divest from Israel, usually on the grounds that such measures are divisive and unhelpful or can lead to antisemitism.
This has saddened some of the more progressive Jews who saw, in the Darfur fight, a commitment to a kind of universalism of Jewish values they now believe has atrophied.
“I don’t think our voice would have the same weight or the same legitimacy that it has now to speak out on Darfur, because we’ve been so silent, and in many cases so oppositional, to what’s been happening in Gaza,” Zuckerman said. “I think that when we are silent about something that people who share our religion are perpetrating, the world would look at us sort of sideways to be speaking out about [Darfur]. I think it would be seen as trying to distract from other crimes against humanity that are happening in another part of the world.”
Others worry that the fight over whether or when to declare a genocide is blinding people, including Jews, from focusing on what’s really important.
“The term ‘genocide’ is being used in different ways today than in the past, and that’s itself a challenge,” Feldman said. “You could get caught up in the wordsmithing of it — call it genocide, don’t call it genocide. There are atrocities and tragedies taking place around the world, and that speaks to us, and that has a claim on us.”
A protester holds a Sudan/Palestinian flag with the words “Gaza” and “Sudan” as US rapper Kendrick Lamar performs during the Super Bowl LIX halftime show, Feb. 9, 2025. (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, with some exceptions, the global pro-Palestinian movement has also been relatively quiet on Darfur — further lending itself to criticisms that a purported principled stance against genocide didn’t extend further than Israel. Many Jews in a post-Oct. 7 climate have noted a fraying of the kinds of interfaith, intercultural alliances that once helped bolster the Save Darfur Coalition.
Jews who spoke to JTA for this article had mixed feelings on this shift. But some were quick to point out that they don’t see Darfur and Gaza as comparable.
“It’s not a parallel thing because you didn’t have an Oct. 7 in Darfur,” Saperstein said. “You didn’t have the people of Darfur attack the population centers where the Janjaweed were. This is just civilians caught in the middle of a horrible, horrible attack from the north and from the Janjaweed militias.”
Elisha Wiesel, like his father a staunch supporter of Israel, also believes Jews’ relative silence on Darfur in the wake of Gaza is a problem. In part, he said, he feared that Jews were allowing terms like “genocide” to become diluted by pro-Palestinian activists.
“I think we have to restore language to its proper use, and we have to call it as we see it,” he said, noting that the Wiesel family foundation has taken on the cause of the persecuted Uyghur minority in China. Similarly, the best way to assert Jewish credibility on the world stage, he argued, would be for Jews to advocate both for Israel and for global humanitarian concerns like Darfur.
“Since Oct. 7 we’ve been reeling, as an American Jewish community, with our own tragedy. And worse, we’ve been having to be on the back foot as accusations of genocide have been flung at Israel,” Wiesel said. “I feel now is the right time to reengage. I think the best way forward is to tackle real genocides.”
Arbab, the Darfur genocide survivor, also disagrees with the genocide label being applied to Gaza. He described feeling an immense empathy for Jews and Israelis after Oct. 7, noting that the brutal nature of the Hamas killings at the Nova music festival mirrored the nature of how the RSF and other Sudanese militias have targeted innocents.
“These monsters, they jumped on people partying, and they’re butchering everybody,” he said. “Israelis want to protect their people and their land, and they come and attack them.”
El-Fadel Arbab, a Sudanese refugee from the Darfur region, reunites with his family in the United States after they fled the region amid reignited hostilities, March 2024, Boston, Massachusetts. Arbab has allied with the Jewish community to advocate for Darfur’s victims. (Courtesy of El-Fadel Arbab)
Arbab continued, “If you’ve been through this struggle, you definitely will say, ‘I stand with Israel.’ If you did not go through these horrible things, you might go to the other side, you might say, ‘Oh, I will support the Palestinians.’ But that is not the case to me. If I have the power, I will protect my people. And anybody who comes to my people, I’m not going to leave them alone.”
Times have changed, some of Save Darfur’s Jewish leaders said. Even setting aside Gaza, the sheer scope and scale of the world’s challenges today means that pushing Jews to mobilize around something like Darfur has become much harder.
“We can’t fight every crisis everywhere,” Feldman, now retired, told JTA. “The current leaders have to be strategic, and the population, to a certain extent, is also going to speak with their feet in terms of what’s compelling them today.”
For more progressive Jews who cut their activist teeth on Darfur, the relative inaction — not just from Jewish communities, but more globally as well — especially stings.
“Darfur was in every Jewish space. And it felt like everyone had a green ‘do not stand idly by’ wristband,” Fields-Meyer recalled. “The unmistakable message was that our moral obligations as Jews bound us to people for no other reason other than that they are human. And a lot of us took that to heart. I certainly did.”
He continued, “Being consistent about those Jewish commitments means doing what’s necessary for families being torn apart by masked agents in Los Angeles, and for children under bombardment in Gaza, and for people under threat in Darfur, and for fellow Jews who are attacked for their identity. It means that there is no hierarchy of human dignity. We’re all worthy.”
A map of two years of hostilities in Darfur as of April 11, 2025. (AFP via Getty Images)
Today, the forces that are engaged on Darfur are trying to put pressure on the United Arab Emirates, currently Sudan’s largest arms dealer. President Donald Trump also signaled an interest in ending the conflict and dispatched Massad Boulos — a Lebanese-American businessman and Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, who has also proposed a roadmap to Israeli-Palestinian peace — to try to negotiate a ceasefire.
But recent failed ceasefire efforts have led the United States to consider wider sanctions on Sudan. On Dec. 9, the Treasury Department seemed to follow through, sanctioning entities associated with a Colombian group that, the United States said, was funneling mercenaries to Darfur.
Some remain optimistic that American Jewish leadership could reactivate on Darfur today — and believe that it would be the right thing to do.
“I’m hopeful that there will be really positive energy for Darfur,” said Gottschalk, the HIAS staffer. He noted that HIAS, which operates a refugee camp in neighboring Chad, has remained active since the last conflict and is engaged again on Darfur today — in part thanks to the legacy of the coalition. “We haven’t left. It’s been more than 20 years. It’s an expression of the Jewish community’s solidarity.”
People displaced from El Fasher and other conflict-affected areas are settled in the newly established El-Afadh camp in Al Dabbah, in Sudan’s Northern State, on Nov. 9, 2025. Tens of thousands were forced to flee after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took control of the city of El Fasher on Oct. 26, triggering intensified clashes across North Darfur. (Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images)
He continued, “When we’re working with people in Chad, we are absolutely the first and probably the only Jewish organization they’ve ever met or ever encountered with. We are representing our values and reflecting something really positive with the community.”
Today, Arbab still has family in Darfur under grave danger, though he was able to evacuate his wife and sons out of the region last year. He knows it’s harder now to get the international community to pay attention. He’s still speaking to some Jewish groups, though not as many as before.
The Sudanese government, he believes, fears the accountability that would come with the genocide label being applied once more to Darfur. He hopes the global community will activate again — and this time try to break the cycle of killing for good.
“The Jewish people, they went through their genocide a long time ago,” he said. “But the genocide now is the same, and even worse. These criminals, always, they’re thinking of new tactics and new ways to do more genocide, how to harm people. We have to stop that. Especially those who have felt the pain of the victims, they have to stand up.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jews mobilized for Darfur 20 years ago. As violence surges again, where are they now? appeared first on The Forward.
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Canada ‘is failing Jewish Canadians,’ prime minister says as he unveils effort to address antisemitism
(JTA) — Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney announced on Monday a new government body to combat racism, saying its first priority would be tackling antisemitism.
Carney addressed Canada’s surge in antisemitic hate crimes during a speech at Holy Blossom Synagogue, Toronto’s oldest Jewish congregation. He said the government had to “start with clearly admitting that Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians.”
Carney referenced the wave of attacks on Canadian Jews since Oct. 7, 2023, including bullets fired at synagogues and Jewish schools and attacks on Jewish businesses, community centers and Holocaust memorials.
Over two-thirds of the country’s religion-motivated hate crimes last year were directed at Jewish Canadians, who make up only 1% of the population, he said.
Carney said the government was responding by launching the Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion, with the mission of advising Canada’s government on combating all forms of hate.
“I am directing that the first responsibility of that council is to address antisemitism,” he said.
The council will be chaired by the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Marc Miller. Carney also announced that Marc Gold, a lawyer and Jewish community leader who retired last year from the Senate of Canada, will join the council.
Carney said the council will be tasked with reassessing the nature, scale and drivers of antisemitism, developing a whole-of-government approach to align federal policies and public safety programs, improving the collection of data on hate incidents, and measuring the impact of government efforts.
Several Jewish organizations are likely to be disappointed that Carney’s announcement did not include more sweeping enforcement measures against antisemitism.
Rich Robertson, the director of research and advocacy at B’nai Brith Canada, said the speech was a “missed opportunity.” The organization was advocating for a task force that could respond immediately to antisemitic incidents and a commission of inquiry to identify their root causes, he said.
“We were hoping for true tactical changes that could positively be actioned to change the lived experience of Jewish Canadians, and unfortunately, that is not what we received today,” Robertson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Pressures on Carney were mounting ahead of the speech. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada, pushed for him to strengthen law enforcement.
“Government and law enforcement must address the drivers of this crisis, including radicalization, promotion of terrorism, and terrorist entities operating here in Canada,” CIJA said in a statement shortly before Carney’s address.
The group added, “The Prime Minister has an opportunity to set the tone from the highest office to make clear that nothing can justify the hatred, intimidation, and violence Jewish Canadians are experiencing and that every tool at the government’s disposal will be used to confront it.”
Carney’s messages about Israel, Gaza and antisemitism have divided Jewish voters. In September, he led Canada to officially recognizing a Palestinian state. He said in October that he would fulfill the commitment of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited Canada. (The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza in 2024.) Last week, he spoke with Israeli President Isaac Herzog about the experiences of Canadians detained after trying to sail to bring aid to Gaza.
But Carney, the leader of Israel’s Liberal Party, has also introduced public safety legislation supported by national Jewish organizations, including CIJA and B’nai Brith Canada. Most significant among them is Bill C-9, which would strengthen Canada’s criminal code by creating new offenses for intimidation and obstruction at houses of worship, schools and community centers used by religious groups.
That bill has also faced backlash from free speech advocates, including both Jewish conservatives and progressives. Pro-Palestinian Jewish groups say that it would wrongly criminalize protesting against events like real estate sales for Israeli settlements in the West Bank if they take place in synagogues.
Carney appeared to acknowledge those criticisms in his announcement of the new ministerial council.
“I want to be clear about what these measures are and what they are not,” he said. “They are not curtailments of freedom of expression. They are not constraints on legitimate criticism of any government on any subject anywhere. But they are the basic standards we owe one another in our shared public institutions.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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National Council of Jewish Women ejects LA chapter, other affiliates cut ties amid historic reboot
When wildfires blazed through Los Angeles last year, displacing tens of thousands of people, the local National Council of Jewish Women affiliate was well positioned to help. The national nonprofit’s LA chapter already ran donation drop-off sites across the city — its iconic thrift shops — and employed staff that knew how to sort the flood of donated items.
And after NCJW-LA chief executive Marjorie Gilberg sent an appeal to her members, colleagues at chapters in other cities also shared the letter with their own constituents. Hundreds of thousands of dollars soon poured in from outside of LA, and Gilberg’s nonprofit — which has focused on economic justice for decades — ultimately distributed more than $1 million in cash relief, donated goods and store vouchers to fire-affected families.
“It felt like a huge hug,” Gilberg said. “There was support coming from all these directions, from these women across the country to pull for LA. I was like, ‘Oh, this is what a network is for.’”
But last month, the chapter’s parent organization, the National Council of Jewish Women, cut ties with the LA group.
Citing a “strained” relationship, NCJW president Laura Monn Ginsburg informed Gilberg’s board May 8 that the national organization was terminating its affiliation with the LA chapter, whose $23 million annual budget is three times national’s size. NCJW gave the chapter 90 days to rebrand.
“Despite our good-faith efforts to preserve the affiliation,” Monn Ginsburg wrote, “the Board of Directors of NCJW, Inc., has concluded that continued affiliation with the LA section is no longer tenable.”
The collaborative response to the LA fires reflected one of the strengths that has made the National Council of Jewish Women a leading American social justice nonprofit movement for more than a century. The grassroots Jewish movement started out by seeding local sections and only established a national umbrella in the mid-20th century. As the parent group lobbied on progressive issues, dozens of local sections pursued that mission at the grassroots level in ways that served their local communities, working mostly independent of each other and collaborating when opportunities arose.
But that freedom for local chapters to choose their own priorities is now history. The Washington, D.C.-based parent organization, citing scores of section closures over the last two decades, is transitioning to a regional model focused more on political advocacy than community service. The national shakeup, which began in earnest last July, has already resulted in two sections closing and the decision by three more — in Arizona and Essex County, New Jersey, as well as LA — to break away from the national council. The movement’s six largest remaining chapters — as well as roughly 20 others in the network — may soon follow suit.
National leadership says the restructuring was necessary to prevent further closures, free local chapters from the burden of administration and allow the national organization to expand into places not currently served by the local model. And the group is betting that a tighter, advocacy-focused national agenda will effect greater political change locally and launch the Jewish women’s movement into the future.
“We want folks to take action that is more strategic, that is more thought through, to ensure that they are going to be more successful,” said Ellen Buchman, NCJW’s vice president of engagement and leadership. “We will never question whether the right people to do that is our grassroots — it always will be. The difference is how they will do it.”
But the uncertainty in the network points to a massive identity change for the legacy nonprofit, and to some, a tragic one. Leaders of some sections said moving away from community service work would not only abdicate a local responsibility, but also subtract a powerful Jewish presence from the front lines of American social justice during a time of rising antisemitism.
“We are a Jewish organization that has shown up in progressive places, we’ve shown up in women’s health, all these important issues across the country,” Gilberg said. “And they’re just tearing it down with no sense. It’s the worst possible time to be doing this to this kind of organization.”
A proud grassroots history
The story of NCJW reads like a progressive history of the United States — and in some ways, it is. The organization was founded in 1893 by women who had been invited to the participate in the Chicago World’s Fair, only to discover that the role others had intended for them was as hostesses pouring coffee. The organization originally focused on Jewish religious education for women and children, but quickly branched out to social welfare issues. Today, many of the movement’s 250,000 subscribers — the national group calls them advocates — are the children or grandchildren of lifetime members.
On virtually any American social concern you can think of since then — education, criminal justice reform, civil rights, abortion rights — NCJW, backed by the voices of hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, has been at the forefront of political advocacy.
On virtually any American progressive domestic cause you can think of today, there’s a National Council section pursuing it at the local level. And maybe only one; it’s often said in the NCJW network that if you know one section, you know — well, one section. Their efforts are wide-ranging and specialized: The Pittsburgh section operates a daycare center for children whose parents are required in court; Essex organizes an annual fair for low-income families to pick up free school supplies; Arizona runs a sexual assault trauma recovery center. The sections frequently partner with other local nonprofits, too — sometimes the only Jewish presence in those progressive spaces.
At its peak, the nonprofit had hundreds of sections — one veteran estimated as many as 200 in the post-Roe era. The national organization counted more than 125 in the early 2000s. But Jewish civic life across the country has since contracted, and younger members have grown scarce. There is no local chapter in the Washington metro area today — there were once five — or in some other major Jewish communities, including Boston and Philadelphia.
The 44 sections that remain today — that number does not include the three disaffiliating — range in size. Some have full staffs, thousands of members and budgets in the millions; others are fully volunteer-led, with a five-figure budget and a membership in the dozens.
They have enjoyed a symbiotic, mostly hands-off relationship with the national body. The nationally recognized legacy of NCJW helps the local chapters fundraise, and most sections are registered as 501(c)3 organizations under the national nonprofit’s group tax exemption. The sections pay dues according to their budget, and do the grassroots community work that bolster the national body’s credibility. They unite on certain national initiatives like Repro Shabbat, an annual abortion rights-themed Shabbat program held in 2,000 local communities, Buchman said.
“The organization does tremendous advocacy work nationally, so it does help us locally when we are doing our own advocacy work,” said Andrea Rakitta Mintz, the Essex chapter’s president. “But we are the ones who want to do the hands-on volunteering.”
A new national direction
Still, according to Buchman, the national vice president, the old system was unsustainable. “The antiquated 100-plus-year old system was not going to be able to continue if it was not going to be updated,” she said. For the national organization, it didn’t matter if the Los Angeles and Essex chapters were thriving if 10 or 20 other chapters were spiraling into dissolution.
And while the diversity of the sections was “wonderful,” Buchman said, it was also “something that we’re trying to reel in, so that through consistent advocacy as an organization we can have a greater impact, and be more of a household name.”
After bringing in a consulting firm to survey thousands of NCJW members and stakeholders, the national group formalized a new strategic plan, known as NCJW Forward, that replaced the sections with a regional staffing model. The plan established four core advocacy areas — reproductive rights, gender pay equity, family economic security, and combating antisemitism and hate — and included an increased focus on doing advocacy in Israel.
When it presented the formal plan to its sections in July 2025, NCJW offered them a choice: Integrate with the national organization — that is, turn over assets and donor lists and agree to the new structure — or disaffiliate. It gave sections until December 2027 to decide. Two of them, located in Greater Houston and Sarasota, closed in the next six months.
Buchman acknowledged the integration model would have staffing implications for both the national organization — which expects to hire up to 15 people over the next three years — and its affiliates. Some section staff will likely be let go upon integration with the national group, she said, and others may be kept on a case-by-case basis. Each section’s board of directors, meanwhile, would go from managing its affairs to serving as an advisory committee.
For some smaller sections, integration made sense. NCJW Miami, for example, already focused on reproductive justice advocacy, and it was fully board-run, with no staff. Integration meant surrendering independence, said Jessica Silver, a board member of the section, but it also came with additional national resources.
“We really don’t feel like we were giving up very much,” Silver said. “We can still really do everything that we want to do locally, and now we just have more of a partner in National in doing that work.”
The six additional sections integrating — whose budgets range from $30,000 to $200,000, according to Buchman — are Louisville, Minnesota, Colorado, Long Beach (California), Chicago North Shore, Kendall (Florida) and Utah.
Buchman said the three integrating sections with executive directors would be phasing them out. But NCJW Louisville’s executive director, Sarah Harlan, said the national organization had been flexible during the integration process, allowing her and her office administrator — the section’s only two employees — to stay on as contract staff.
Other volunteer-led sections, however, warned that integration would undermine decades of community work, if not squander it.
NCJW Arizona’s board president, Civia Tamarkin, said that though her section did not employ staff, merging was never an option. On a technical level, she said, her organization needed autonomy and local nonprofit status to advocate on state issues, serve on government advisory committees and partner with other Arizona-based nonprofits.
But she also did not trust NCJW staff for her region — which would be based in Denver, according to the strategic plan — to oversee Ruth Place, the trauma recovery center her section founded three years ago for survivors of sexual assault.
“It’s our Field of Dreams,” Tamarkin said. “We don’t want to lose that or turn it over to any other entity.”
The organization plans to rename itself the Jewish Women’s Action Alliance Arizona.
For larger sections, an uncertain future
When NCJW presented its sections in July 2025 with the option to integrate or break off, it offered a third route to the seven chapters whose budgets exceeded $750,000 — a new kind of affiliation. Affiliating sections would be required to commit to NCJW’s core issues; follow rules about how to allocate funds; and adopt the national group’s standards around Zionism, which include supporting a two-state solution.
The seven sections replied in September 2025 with a joint letter from their lawyers, Gilberg said, rejecting the proposal and outlining their concerns. She said the national organization has still not sent a letter in response. Buchman says the organization did respond, asking to meet in person rather than conduct a negotiation in writing.
Seven months later, without any changes to the affiliation proposal, Essex announced it was rebranding as Tovah, a decision that went into effect Monday.
Rakitta Mintz, the Essex president, felt the same way about her chapter’s signature programs as Tamarkin did about Ruth Place. The section’s Center For Women, which provides free career coaching to women re-entering the workforce, has helped 40 people get new jobs just this year. An annual fair where low-income families “shop” for free school supplies was another Essex hallmark she didn’t want threatened.
Neither of those efforts fits explicitly into the national organization’s four core advocacy issues. So while Rakitta Mintz was weighing the chapter’s options before cutting ties, she said she never saw the affiliation option as a real possibility.
“We did not want to lose our autonomy,” she said, “and we didn’t want to lose the ability to do our local hands-on volunteer work.”
The other five major sections — New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Michigan and St. Louis — entered mediation with the national organization, which pertained to possible changes to the organization’s bylaws. (A sixth section, Dallas, was offered affiliation later, and did not participate in the mediation.)
Buchman said those talks went well.
“We also feel strongly that we will come back to the table to make more progress,” she added. “We haven’t yet figured out when that will be, but we had not talked for months, and we have now, and that’s a sign of true progress.”
LA’s banishment stunned many in the network, including leaders of the other sections that had joined it in mediation. But it did not blindside Gilberg, who had been preparing for the possibility LA would be going independent by securing the section’s own IRS tax determination letter.
According to Buchman, the national vice president, the LA section’s work simply did not align with the NCJW vision.
“To us, the LA section does a beautiful job focusing solely on financial independence and economic security, and that’s never been what our organization has chosen to do,” Buchman said. “Certainly, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that economic justice isn’t part of our work to improve the lives of women, children, and families, but our priority issues are broader than that.”
Gilberg pointed to numerous places in NCJW Forward that seemed to highlight economic justice work, including on its page about family economic security, though its policy ambitions do not include cash assistance, which features in several ongoing NCJW LA programs.
“In their current policy priorities, there’s paid family leave — which is specifically an economic justice issue,” Gilberg said. “That’s one of their big four things.”
Buchman said 10 more sections were likely to integrate and estimated eight to 10 others were “on the fence.” She did not say which chapters fell in each category.
Those numbers, combined with the five departures and five in mediation, left about a dozen sections unaccounted for. Buchman, who joined NCJW two years ago with more than 30 years of nonprofit experience, said she didn’t know where those chapters stood.
But she didn’t regard disaffiliation or closure as a subtraction for the national group.
“It frees us up to meet our goals, which is to expand,” Buchman said. “There are cities that have advocates but no sections. Or legislative opportunities but no advocacy. Where we have donors but no fundraising.” She added that it was possible she’d send fundraisers into cities where disaffiliated sections continued to operate.
To some NCJW veterans, though, the breakup felt like a slow-motion collapse for an organization that once spoke for hundreds of thousands of Jewish women.
“A lot of people have a very nostalgic feeling for NCJW,” said Tamarkin, the Arizona section head. “They may be third-generation, fourth-generation and are very sad to see the federation broken up.
“On the other hand,” she continued, “times change, organizations change, and in such a competitive economic climate for nonprofits, every organization has to do what they are advised is the best route forward.”
The post National Council of Jewish Women ejects LA chapter, other affiliates cut ties amid historic reboot appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump says Netanyahu ‘turned his Troops around’ after he asked Israel not to bomb Beirut
(JTA) — U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming credit for another truce between Hezbollah and Israel, nearly two months after surprising both sides by declaring a ceasefire that has teetered ever since.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said nothing has changed in Israel’s approach to battling Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it is based.
“I had a conversation with Bibi Netanyahu today, asking him not to go into a major raid of Beirut, Lebanon. He turned his Troops around. Thank you Bibi!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday afternoon. “I also had a conversation with Representatives of the Leaders of Hezbollah, and they agreed to stop shooting at Israel, and its soldiers. Likewise, Israel agreed to stop shooting at them. Let’s see how long that lasts — Hopefully it will be for ETERNITY!”
The post followed another similar message published hours earlier in which Trump said “there will be no Troops going to Beirut, and any Troops that are on their way, have already been turned back.”
The posts came after days of heavy fighting in Lebanon, where multiple Israeli soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah drones and Israel spurred an evacuation in the outskirts of Beirut after warning that it would soon launch an operation against Hezbollah outposts there.
In a post of his own on X, Netanyahu confirmed that he had spoken with Trump but did not say that he had agreed to a ceasefire.
“Tonight, I spoke with President Trump and told him that if Hezbollah does not cease attacking our cities and citizens—Israel will attack terror targets in Beirut. This stance of ours remains unchanged,” Netanyahu wrote. “In parallel, the IDF will continue to operate as planned in southern Lebanon.”
The Lebanese Embassy in Washington, meanwhile, said in a statement that Lebanon had learned that Hezbollah had agreed to a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire.
The hostilities in Lebanon and northern Israel reflect a distinct front in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. When Trump declared a ceasefire in that war in early April, Israel at first maintained that it did not apply to Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy. But Trump insisted that Netanyahu cease fighting in Lebanon, too.
Two months later, Trump is still negotiating for a permanent end to the Iran war. On Monday, he said on CNBC that he found the talks to be “very boring” and did not care if the Iranians dropped out of discussions.
The post Trump says Netanyahu ‘turned his Troops around’ after he asked Israel not to bomb Beirut appeared first on The Forward.