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Meir Shalev and Yehonatan Geffen were Israeli cultural royalty. Their deaths leave a hole on the left.
(JTA) — Over the last few months, since the far-right government announced its plans for an overarching constitutional overhaul, Israel’s embattled liberal camp has experienced a renaissance. Unprecedented mobilization on the part of protesting masses, business leaders and the IDF vanguard has left the government in disarray and, in the wake of a seemingly endless string of electoral defeats, invigorated the left to an extent that it had not seen since the 1990s. The left may be dead, but it is not quite buried yet.
But amid this process of rejuvenation and weeks before Israel celebrated its 75th anniversary, the Israeli left experienced two symbolic blows in ironic proximity when two cultural titans died within days of each other.
Meir Shalev, an eminent novelist, and Yehonatan Geffen, an incredibly prolific journalist, author and songwriter, were also prominent public intellectuals. Both had spent decades dabbling in current affairs as columnists for the mass-circulation dailies Yedioth Aharonoth and Maariv, respectively.
Shalev was 74 when he died on April 11. Geffen, who died on April 19, was 76.
The symbolism did not stop at their premature and almost simultaneous passing. It was, rather, the final chapter of two lives that also began in great proximity: Shalev and Geffen were born a little over a year apart in the agricultural community of Nahalal, the Camelot of the Labor Zionism movement. Both were descendants of Zionist aristocracy: Shalev’s father was the Jerusalemite author and educator Yithzak Shalev, and Geffen’s maternal uncle the legendary general-turned-politician Moshe Dayan. Like many of their cohort, they were groomed for the driving seat of the newborn State of Israel.
Their formidable life’s work, thus, was largely an ongoing attempt to deal with the burden bestowed upon them by their pedigrees. And this is where they differ, despite the eerie similarities in their biographies.
Many of Shalev’s novels, especially the earlier ones, were loving tributes to his lineage. They included “A Pigeon and A Boy,” which is set during the War of Independence and won the National Jewish Book Award in 2006, and “The Blue Mountain,” set on a moshav (an agricultural cooperative) shortly before the founding of Israel. Though never overly sentimental and always strewn with a heavy dose of irony, Shalev’s writings were adoring accounts of a bygone generation, complete with their shtick and quirks and foibles. His protagonists were shrouded in a certain mythology, which Shalev did not labor to deconstruct entirely; he was just attempting to humanize and bring them down to earth.
But while Shalev looked up to his parents’ generation, Geffen blew a raspberry in their faces. He was part of a tight cohort of musicians and artists who grew up in Israel post-independence — a tribe that included David Broza, Arik Einstein, Gidi Gov, Shalom Hanoch and Yehudit Ravitz, all household names in Israel. Geffen’s song “Could It Be Over?”, featured on Arik Einstein’s 1973 album sporting the deliberately ironic title “Good Old Israel,” exemplifies the challenging relationship. From the opening line (“They say it was fun before I was born, and everything was just splendid until I arrived”), the song is a mischievous and self-deprecating take on Israel’s founding myths. Enumerating them one by one — the draining of the swamps, the heroic battles for Jewish sovereignty, the nascent Hebrew culture in the pre-state Yishuv — Geffen sarcastically concludes: “They had a reason to get up in the morning.”
More broadly, Geffen was bent on smashing every aspect of the Zionist ethos. In defiance of the image of the Hebrew warrior, of which his uncle Moshe was the poster boy, Geffen was an adamant pacifist as well as, famously, a very bad soldier himself. Having been called for reserve service during the first Lebanon War, in 1982, he was performing for soldiers ahead of the IDF offensive on Beirut when he was dragged off stage by the commanding officer for calling on the troops to refuse. His song “The Little Prince of Company B” (sung by Shem-Tov Levy), about a timid and frail fallen soldier praised as a hero against his will, was one of the first and best-remembered anti-war songs in the Hebrew canon.
Geffen’s counterculture instincts were informed by his great American heroes — notably the Jewish iconoclasts Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce — and this admiration was in itself a jab at his upbringing, characterized by vain parochialism masquerading as self-sufficiency. Geffen felt more at home in New York (where he spent several years) and Tel Aviv than in the fields of the Jezreel Valley; his tools were not a sickle and a plow, but rather a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky.
Shalev, in his political writing, also advocated for left-of-center politics that is sometimes derisively described as “Ashkenazi”: moderate, civil, Western in its orientation, calling to rally around a common good — a type of political discourse that, as recent events show, speaks to fewer and fewer Israelis. “The Israeli public is moving more and more to the right. The war in 1967 may have destroyed Israel,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “We took a big bite that is now suffocating us. All Israel has done since 1967 is deal with aspects of the occupation. Israel has not been dealing with the things I feel it should deal with. With my political views, I am a minority in Israel.”
Shalev was a pastor of sorts; Geffen was sometimes a Jeremiah and sometimes a court jester, and often both.
They were representatives of two distinct streams within the traditionally fragmented Israeli left; the very same left that, despite the current resurgence, seems too often to have more streams than members.
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On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked
I don’t often go to synagogue. Outside of the High Holidays, it is not somewhere I would ordinarily find myself on a Friday night.
In the last few years, I have made a point of spending Shabbat with my grandmother. We light candles, eat together and let the week recede for a few hours. I don’t see it as an obligation so much as the comfort of doing something that has been done before, by people I love, in a rhythm that existed long before I did.
And yet, synagogues have a strange way of finding me when I need them.
Last summer, while travelling through Europe to visit two of my closest friends, I found myself in London, exhausted from weeks of constant movement. I happened to walk past a synagogue and realized that Shabbat was the following day. I reached out and asked if I could join their services. I remember thinking that perhaps this was exactly what I needed: a few hours to sit still, focus, and breathe.
And I was right.
There is something uniquely grounding about entering a synagogue in an unfamiliar place and discovering that the ritual is familiar. You may be thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people you’ve never met, but you know when to stand. You recognize the melodies. You open the same prayers. You know that somewhere else in the world, other Jews are doing some version of the same thing.
So when, only a few days after moving to New York, I was connected with a member of Central Synagogue through a potential landlord and they invited me to join them for Shabbat services, I thought: Why not?
I had just arrived in a city where I was beginning a new job at the Forward, a new life, one that, for the first time, was entirely mine to shape. That is a daunting task. What better way to spend my first Friday night than doing something that has always made the unknown feel a little more manageable.
Moments after services began, I was sitting in the sanctuary, allowing myself to take in the week that had just passed — my first week in New York — when a man entered and began moving violently through the congregation.
He knocked down the Shabbat candles that had just been lit. He moved through the rows of congregants. I watched him strike another person.
People around me ran toward the sides of the sanctuary. My own body went into the same instinctive state of shock and survival: Where is the danger? Where can I go? What do I need to watch for?
The security response was swift. The intruder was stopped, we re-lit the candles, and services continued.
Those around me who knew I was new to the synagogue immediately went into protection mode. They checked on me, expressing disbelief that something like this could have happened there, especially given the level of security they pride themselves on maintaining. They told me that in the nearly three years since October 7, nothing like this had happened.
The clergy, too, seemed to understand what the moment required. They gave us strength and courage, using the same voices that had moments earlier been leading us in song and prayer to restore some sense of calm. Throughout the service and again afterward in their online response, they returned to the same idea: it was our duty to keep joy alive.
Joy, one of the rabbis said, is itself an act of resistance.
I understood the sentiment. But my body hadn’t quite caught up.
Shabbat is one of the rare times when I allow myself to become completely uninhibited. I sing. I look up from the prayer book. I watch the rabbis and the people around me. I let myself become absorbed in something larger than whatever has been occupying my mind that week. For a few hours, I am not thinking about work, or apartment hunting, or navigating a new city. I am simply there.
That is also why the disruption was so jarring. I had come to Shabbat to let my guard down, and suddenly I found myself unable to do so.
I kept my eyes toward the front of the room, watching for movement. When it came time to turn around during Lecha Dodi, I felt a jolt of anxiety at the thought of putting my back toward the congregation. I could no longer surrender myself completely to the moment and what it required of me. I knew, rationally, that the threat had passed. But my body had learned something different: that even here, even now, even in this room, I might need to be ready.
For a moment, I considered leaving. But the people around me seemed to embody a quiet confidence that everything was going to be okay. They had chosen to stay, and I followed their lead. There is a certain strength in knowing that you are not standing alone.
I had come to Central Synagogue because I wanted to feel at home in my new city. Instead, on my first Shabbat in New York, I was reminded how quickly the simple act of practicing Judaism can become an exercise in vigilance. And yet, looking around the room that evening, I also understood that vigilance does not have to mean retreat.
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Anti-Israel Republicans tests their strength in Florida primaries
Some insurgent Democrats have found success by making criticism of Israel central to their campaigns. Now a group of Republican candidates is trying to tap into a similar movement on the right, even if they are unlikely to win.
That divide is on display in Florida’s Republican primaries, set for Tuesday, where several long-shot candidates are challenging the party’s traditionally strong support for the Jewish state. Congressional candidates Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang and gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback have made opposition to Israel and AIPAC part of their political identity. But they have also gone further than most progressive critics of Israel, using rhetoric that has been widely condemned as antisemitic.
Bilzerian is a professional poker player and a social media personality once known as the “King of Instagram” for flaunting a lifestyle of luxury, fast cars, women, and guns. He is challenging incumbent Rep. Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress. Fine has made support for Israel central to his political identity, while also drawing condemnation for inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims and Palestinians.
Fine is a favorite to win reelection, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump and has a large fundraising advantage. He represents District 6, which is located just under the northeast part of the state and includes Daytona Beach, and is facing four primary challengers. Among them are Aaron Baker, an “America First” candidate who has criticized the “influence of foreign lobbies” and what he calls America’s “endless wars.” Baker also said he would oppose providing Israel with offensive weapons.
But Bilzerian’s attacks on Fine, who often wears a yarmulke in public, have gone well beyond criticism of Israel. He has repeatedly promoted conspiracy theories about Jews, including that Jews killed President John F. Kennedy. On social media, where Bilzerian has more than 30 million followers, he has asked if Adolf Hitler was a “good person,” has called Jews “dumb,” Judaism a “terrible” religion and referred to Fine as a “fat Jew.”
Bilzerian’s campaign treasurer, Patrick Krason, also served as treasurer for Kanye West’s short-lived 2024 presidential campaign. The rapper, who changed his name to Ye, engaged in a spate of antisemitic remarks and Holocaust denial in recent years. A Combat Antisemitism Movement report found that 33% of Bilzerian’s content on his campaign account was anti-Israel and antisemitic.
In recent days, Bilzerian posted antisemitic dog whistles, including that Florida’s “District 6 understands the Jewish problem,” and that “a vote for Randy is a vote for Israel.”
The imagery in Bilzerian’s closing campaign message has become quite provocative. In one AI-generated video, Bilzerian accuses Fine and his wife of engaging in “transgender pride groups that perform for children.”
Another AI video, posted Thursday, says Fine “wants you to die for Israel” and calls the congressman a “psychopath” who wants to watch “goyim cattle” die. He labels Fine a “Jewish supremacist” and “Satan’s creepy little minion” and says that the “fat Jew Randy” needs to be “tarred and feathered.” The video also includes AI-generated imagery of Fine dressed in a cheerleader’s outfit emblazoned with the Israeli flag and says it’s time for voters to “throw out Shylock and all his tricks.”
Fine said the video is “celebrating Hitler,” adding: “We have a choice on Tuesday, to embrace the kind of Nazism that led to the Holocaust or to repudiate this filth and reaffirm American values and character.”
Wonder if I can get them to play this on the radio in the district pic.twitter.com/IAXVV7pNp7
— Dan Bilzerian (@DanBilzerian) August 13, 2026
Other Republican primaries
A similar, if less blatantly antisemitic, theme is also showing up in the Republican primary for Marco Rubio’s former Senate seat.
Jake Lang, a far-right provocateur who was pardoned by Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is running for the Senate seat held by Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody. Lang, who said his mother is Jewish, renounced his connections to Judaism and Israel and built an online following around Christian nationalism and attacks on both Muslims and Jews. This included performing a Nazi salute outside AIPAC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., and an “anti-Islamification” rally against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani outside Gracie Mansion.
In the crowded Republican primary for governor to replace the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, James Fishback has made opposition to Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign. Fishback, who said “Americans shouldn’t die for Israel,” has attacked the frontrunner, Rep. Byron Donalds, over support from pro-Israel donors. Fishback, who is polling at 18%, promised to pull Florida’s investments from Israel Bonds. Running what The New York Times described as a “rage bait” campaign, Fishback has associated himself with antisemitic personalities on the far-right. He also criticized politicians who “visit another country” only to end up “kissing a stupid wall,” a reference to prayer visits to the Western Wall.
Florida Republicans are not expected to abandon their party’s longstanding alliance with Israel when they vote in Tuesday’s primary. But these long-shot candidates have large online followings, and their campaigns are testing whether the growing anti-Israel movement on the right can also find its place in electoral politics.
In his recent memoir, Vice President JD Vance recounted a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk months before he was fatally shot, in which Kirk warned about a growing strain of anti-Israel sentiment on the American right that has at times slid into outright antisemitism.
Fine’s stance
Meanwhile, since winning the special election in 2025 to replace now-Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, Fine has made his Jewish identity and support for Israel central to his political persona. Fine also served as Ron DeSantis’ Jewish outreach chair during the 2018 gubernatorial election.
Known for his combative nature, Fine has built his political brand as one of Israel’s most outspoken defenders in Congress, frequently using social media to target his critics. He has also said he began wearing a yarmulke in solidarity with Jewish students facing antisemitism on college campuses after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Last week, vandals spray-painted a swastika on one of Fine’s campaign signs outside an early voting location in Flagler Beach. Police are investigating the vandalism, which Fine described as an antisemitic attack.
There are roughly 750,000 Jewish residents in Florida, making it the third most-populous Jewish state after New York and California. Jews make up 4% of the Florida electorate. Nearly 60% of the state’s Jewish electorate identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, according to the American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University.
Some Florida Democrats have also shown less interest in following the anti-Israel shift seen among progressives elsewhere, like in the Michigan Democratic primary win of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate.
Last week, the Hillsborough County Democratic Party canceled a planned keynote address at its annual gala by former New York Assemblyman Michael Blake, who made attacks on AIPAC a major part of his unsuccessful congressional campaign against Rep. Ritchie Torres. The Florida event also featured Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Rep. David Jolly, a longtime supporter of Israel.
The contrast ahead of Tuesday’s primary is striking: In Florida, the loudest challenge to bipartisan support for Israel is coming not from the progressive left, but from the Republican right.
The post Anti-Israel Republicans tests their strength in Florida primaries appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish watchdog urges NYPD to use cutting-edge detection tech after synagogue attack
(JTA) — A Jewish security watchdog is doubling down on safety measures in the wake of a Friday night attack against worshipers at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, calling on police to identify cutting edge tactics to identify hot spots for potential hate crimes and to place more officers in those areas.
But Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, acknowledged that preventing situations like Friday’s is not straightforward.
“It’s difficult, because you’re trying to balance being open for the public for worship, and at the same time, keeping our sanctuary safe,” Silber told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
On Friday night Larry Montes, 46, was able to make his way into Central Synagogue’s main sanctuary before he disrupted the service with antisemitic slurs and was apprehended by a security guard. Silber said he’s been in contact with Central Synagogue security leadership about the incident and understood that Montes had not initially raised any red flags when he entered the building.
“There wasn’t something so out of place that it required them to pull him aside, but they noticed him as not someone they were familiar with,” he said. According to CSI, the synagogue’s team was able to quickly defuse the situation anyway due to the training it had received.
In the wake of the incident, Silber said the CSI is sending a bulletin to synagogues about steps to improve synagogue safety, a copy of which was shown to JTA.
The CSI has begun discussions with the NYPD about using tools like “datamining, crime cluster mapping and pre-emptively deploying against hot spots” in order to prevent hate crimes before they can happen. The CSI coordinates security for Jewish institutions and communities in the New York area, and is jointly funded by the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council. (70 Faces Media, the parent company of the JTA and New York Jewish Week, receives UJA funding.)
The CSI bulletin is also encouraging other synagogues to partner with the Community Security Service, another Jewish nonprofit that trains congregants to volunteer as greeters who can provide more personalized discernment of possible threats.
“Central Synagogue isn’t Park East, Park East isn’t KJ, KJ isn’t Congregation Beth Elohim — they’re all so different, and that’s why having members of the synagogue trained can really be a force multiplier,” Silber said, listing some of the city’s most prominent congregations.
In the incident on Friday night, Montes yelled during the service, disrupting it, and then struck a 63-year-old congregant and headbutted a member of security personnel who was escorting him out.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the congregation’s senior rabbi, was away for a family event when the incident occurred on Friday, according to The New York Times. But she wrote on Instagram that the security director “heroically restrained and escorted” Montes out of the synagogue, which occurred within one minute of him disrupting the service.
Montes has three previous arrests in New York City, each for a robbery between 2019 and 2023, according to police.
He was arrested at the scene and arraigned in criminal court immediately that night, where, according to police, he was charged with four counts of assault as a hate crime, two counts of assault, criminal mischief as a hate crime, criminal mischief, disruption of a religious service, criminal trespassing as a hate crime, two counts of aggravated harassment and two counts of harassment.
The District Attorney’s office requested bail at $50,000 cash with $150,000 bond and the judge set bail at $10,000 cash with $30,000 bond. Montes’ next court date is August 20, according to the DA’s office.
The attack comes as antisemitic hate crimes against Jews in New York City have risen by 8.5% compared to 2025, as of the end of July. Debate has swirled this year over whether North American synagogues need to step up their security in the mold of European congregations in the wake of attacks like the attempted one in West Bloomfield, Michigan, in which a man drove a fireworks-laden truck into a synagogue.
A number of politicians have weighed in to condemn Friday’s attack.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the U.S., wrote, “When American Jews say they feel unsafe, this is why. Antisemitism is real and it’s increasing by the day.”
Some have ascribed a lack of safety to rhetoric used by the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a longtime Israel critic who turned heads with his recent video panning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, called the attack “a direct result of Mayor Mamdani’s sustained campaign of incitement” in a post on X.
Meanwhile, some of Mamdani’s Jewish allies have pointed out that a Facebook profile that appears to belong to Montes has shared a number of posts criticizing the mayor.
Mamdani wrote that he was “horrified by the assault” at the synagogue, and that all New Yorkers “must be able to observe their religion without fear of violence.”
Montes’ social media posts include sharing a video of a Prager U commentator taking down Israel critics and multiple photos that suggest support for Israel, including a hand shaded with the Puerto Rican flag shaking another hand shaded with the Israeli flag.
His aunt, who lives in Puerto Rico, told the New York Post that her nephew “might not have been in his right mind,” and that he has expressed a desire to become Jewish.
“I told him he had to be careful with that because those things are sacred — you have to approach them seriously,” she told The Post in Spanish.
A woman named Michele Anenberg-Poma posted a photo of herself on Instagram with wounds on her lip and arm, and wrote, “I am the woman who was assaulted last night at Central Synagogue.”
She added, “You will not punch out our Jewish light. You will not stand and cause harm to our eternal light.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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