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Netanyahu ally wants to stop Diaspora donors from funding pluralistic education in Israeli schools
(JTA) — In 2019, Israel’s Noam party drafted an internal report about an alleged plot by foreign forces to take control of the country’s schools in order to teach pluralistic values. At the time the party’s far-right leader, Avi Maoz, was a fringe politician with no authority to carry out the “cleansing” of which he dreamed.
Among the forces allegedly seeking to corrupt Israeli children, Maoz’s report named the European Union and the liberal New Israel Fund, both of which are longtime nemeses of the Israeli right.
But the plot to deny children what Noam considers a proper Jewish education doesn’t stop with the EU and NIF, according to the report. It also blamed many of the mainstream institutions of British and American Jewry, including the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, the Shalom Hartman Institute think tank, and U.S. donors to Israeli civil society organizations such as the Slifka and Mandel foundations.
“We must protect our people and our state from the infiltration of the alien bodies that arrive from foreign countries, foreign bodies, foreign foundations,” Maoz once said, according to Haaretz. “I would be very happy to have sufficient power to be appointed minister of education, to cleanse the entire education system of all foreign influences and to add Judaism, tradition, heritage and Zionism to the education system.”
Maoz hasn’t been appointed minister of education, but his dream of banishing these groups came a little closer to reality in December when Benjamin Netanyahu cut a deal with Maoz to form his government. In negotiations, Maoz had secured an appointment as a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office under Netanyahu with control over extracurricular content in schools through a new department called the Jewish National Identity Authority. A few weeks later, Netanyahu’s cabinet took a critical step toward putting Maoz in charge.
Amid headlines about Maoz’s ascendance, someone leaked to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth the Noam party’s 2019 education memo along with other internal reports focused on perceived enemies in the Israeli military and Justice Ministry, and on LGBTQ individuals in general.
While the Israeli press referred to the reports as “blacklists,” the backlash to them has become subsumed in the general outcry over Israel’s new far-right government, including the anti-gay politics popular among many new members and the plan to strip Israel’s judicial branch of some of its powers.
Yet it’s in the area of education that the Noam party has the clearest path forward to accomplishing a specific political goal. And success for Noam could lead to a new type of rift between Israel and American Jews. The organizations he attacks are more than charities for Israeli school children — through their billions of dollars in donations, the institutions of American Jewry made themselves into partners in the very founding and development of the Jewish state.
In his new position, he would oversee funding and accreditation for external programs in Israeli schools. Each school can choose from thousands of approved programs, which range from sexual education and bar mitzvah preparation, to the types of pluralistic lesson plans — often meaning alternatives to the strictly religious or strictly secular options offered in Israeli schools — that Maoz has railed against.
For Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, whose Israeli branch was named in the Naom report, Maoz’s rhetoric betrays ignorance about the integral role of outside contributions in Israeli history.
“It’s not clear to me that these folks understand the depth of how Diaspora Jews have invested in the whole infrastructure of Israeli civil society since the founding of the State of Israel,” Kurtzer said. “So the portrayal of this as somehow Diaspora Jews are burrowing under the system — well, that is basically the whole story of how Zionism succeeded.”
Mark Charendoff, a longtime executive in Jewish philanthropy, also pushed back against Noam.
“There is a long and positive history of Diaspora Jewry’s involvement with education in Israel,” said Charendoff , who currently serves as the president of the Maimonides Fund, an increasingly influential New York-based charity. “The Israeli school system should certainly protect its integrity but even [the medieval sage] Maimonides found wisdom he could learn from among other cultures and used it to enrich our own.”
The Noam party memos, at least one of which Maoz has endorsed as a blueprint for his tenure, were obtained by Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal, and recently shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Here are the American Jewish charities named in the memo and which of their programs were targeted:
The Cleveland-based Mandel Foundation is singled out for the leadership training it offers education professionals. The report says Mandel has spent more than $58 million on this effort and is accused of harboring a liberal agenda. Mandel programs have included training for educators from across the denominational spectrum.
The Abraham Initiatives, which is based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel and promotes equal rights for Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens, is described as a Jewish-Arab left-wing group. The report also singles out the programs, schools and teacher trainings aimed at supporting reconciliation and coexistence between Jews and Arabs.
The Shalom Hartman Institute, with offices in Jerusalem and New York City, earns a mention in the memo thanks to its Be’eri Program for Pluralistic Jewish-Israeli Identity, which is dedicated to enhancing Jewish and democratic values among secondary school educators and their students in Israel.
American Judaism’s Conservative movement is implicated through the Schechter Institutes which it sponsors and the affiliated Tali Education Fund. Dozens of schools throughout Israel receive curriculum materials related to pluralistic Jewish culture and heritage from Tali.
The U.S.-based Reform movement makes the list thanks to the training offered to Jewish education teachers as part of a program run jointly by the Reform-affiliated Hebrew Union College and Hebrew University.
The New York City-based Alan B. Slifka Foundation is named in the memo as a supporter of the Abraham Initiatives and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
The Russell Berrie Foundation, which is headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey, is included because of its contributions to the New Israel Fund and the Shalom Hartman Institute.
With offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, Israel Venture Network makes the list over its support for an independent program that trains all administrators in the Israeli school system.
Headquartered in New York City, the New Israel Fund is described as one of the main organs in the alleged conspiracy. “The New Israel Fund and funds affiliated with it have set out to take control of the education system,” read the first line of the report.
The organizations are named as “examples” in the memo, suggesting that the list is not exhaustive. Guilt by association with any of these groups would implicate a wide swath of American Jewry. IVN, or Israel Venture Network, for example, receives funding from the Jewish federations of multiple American cities and the Weinberg Foundation. The Abraham Initiatives lists numerous mainstream Jewish donors including the Klarman Family Foundation and late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Kurtzer said the leaked memos didn’t come as much of a shock to him. Any organization that is “pro-democracy, pro-pluralism, and believes in strong relationships between Israel and the diaspora” is familiar with being targeted in this way, he said.
“Some of the elements of the far right have built a whole industry on classifying anybody who has commitments to any of these values and branding them as anti-democratic and anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist,” Kurtzer said. “It hasn’t really stopped our work in Israel, though, sometimes it makes it unpleasant and uncomfortable to have to fend off some of these accusations.”
One of the largest donors to Shalom Hartman Institute goes unmentioned in Noam’s report: the Claws Foundation, which has given the institute millions of dollars. It would be hard to condemn this particular foundation as a liberal interloper: Claws is run by Jeff Yass and Arthur Dantchik, a pair of American Wall Street billionaires and prominent libertarians who are reviled by the Israeli left. In 2021, Haaretz revealed that Yass and Dantchik are major donors to the Kohelet Policy Forum, an influential Israeli think tank behind many of the recent landmark initiatives of the right.
Maoz’s politics also fit awkwardly with those of his own political predecessors, said Eitan Cooper, executive vice president of the Schechter Institutes of Jewish Studies. Cooper helps run one of the programs targeted by Maoz, the Tali Education Fund, which provides a non-Orthodox Jewish curriculum to about 80 secular Israeli schools.
Cooper recalled how the Tali program got started in the 1980s with the help of Zevulun Hammer, who served as Israel’s education minister for many years while helping lead the National Religious Party. Noam is one of the offshoots to have emerged after the National Religious Party’s dissolution in 2008.
“Hammer was the one who adopted Tali as education minister,” Cooper said. “He thought it was great and in fact, he gave Tali its name.”
But Cooper also said that there had always been fringe members of Hammer’s circle who looked at Tali with skepticism because of its non-Orthodox orientation. Some even alleged that the program was run by covert Christian missionaries.
Prior experience has steeled Cooper for this moment, and he said he’s not particularly concerned that Maoz’s threats will pan out.
“This kind of negative response to what we do has always existed,” Cooper said. “The educational ministry continues on, it sets the criteria for the programs that are accepted. I really don’t know what he is positioned to do. He hasn’t done anything yet.”
He believes that the demand for Tali’s content ensures the program will carry on.
“Our target audience is still out there,” he said.
Nachum Blass, who chairs the education policy program at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, regards it as inevitable that Maoz will secure authority over external programs at schools. And Blass said that Maoz could proceed to cancel programs he didn’t like or block new programs.
“There are thousands of programs,” Blass said. “If Maoz wants to review every program and decide which to cancel, it’s a very long process, and he will face lawsuits and petition to the Supreme Court.”
But the bigger worry for Blass is the chilling effect of Maoz’s rhetoric.
“The real danger,” he said, “is that schools will censor themselves and not pick certain programs because they worry they doesn’t fit the spirit of the times.”
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Is AIPAC a ‘monster’ that decides Congressional races? The data shows otherwise
At a rally for progressive candidates last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called AIPAC “monsters.” The pro-Israel lobby, he told the crowd, uses “millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another.”
This is not an insulated idea. Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, was proud to stress that he was a candidate AIPAC would never endorse starting with one of his very first online ads.
On the left — and, more quietly, the right — versions of the “monster” narrative are spreading, suggesting that AIPAC is an electoral force with bottomless pockets that decides who serves in Congress.
The truth is quite different. To find it, I pulled both primary and general election outcomes for every Congressional candidate that AIPAC’s traditional PAC backed in 2022 and 2024 — 788 candidates across the two cycles — from the Federal Electoral Commission. I ran the same exercise for 17 peer single-issue PACs, including the NRA and Planned Parenthood.
The data shows that while AIPAC has an impressive operation, its electoral results do not outperform those of any other major single-issue lobby. AIPAC itself cites a 95% win rate on endorsed candidates as evidence of its political muscle, but that high level of success is partially attributable to the fact that, according to my sample, some 86% percent of AIPAC’s endorsements go to sitting members of Congress. And incumbents win about 95% of general elections — regardless of who funds them.
What’s more remarkable than the number of elections AIPAC wins is how often it gets credit or blame — depending on your politics — for deciding races.
When former Rep. Cori Bush lost her 2024 primary against an AIPAC-backed challenger, AIPAC was widely cited as influencing the race — even though even though Bush spent much of 2024 fighting a federal investigation into her campaign-fund spending, and lost to Wesley Bell, a former St. Louis County prosecutor with the kind of district-wide name recognition no PAC can buy. That same year, Rep. Summer Lee, who had been at least as outspoken on Israel’s conduct in Gaza as Bush, beat AIPAC’s preferred candidate in the Pittsburgh primary by more than 20 points.
Somehow, the narrative that AIPAC rather than voters decides Congressional races wasn’t overturned by Lee’s win. It’s almost like people who want to believe that Jews control politics in the United States have a bias toward seeing instances that on the surface may appear to confirm that belief — and toward ignoring those that contest it.
When the group’s main PAC supported candidates who were not yet sitting members of Congress, their picks won about 91% of primaries. This sounds high, indeed, but other major lobbies do even better. For instance, lobbies including the NRA, Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood all boast success rates over the same period of more than 95%.
AIPAC is, in this context, indistinguishable in terms of its win rate than all other lobbies.
Perhaps an even more important test is tight races — primaries decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. Here, AIPAC wins about 79% of the time. This is comparable to the win rate of all other lobbies I saw, but not by far the largest. For instance, the NRA’s win rate in these tight races is 84%, the Sierra Club 88%, and Planned Parenthood 83%.
So it is true that AIPAC plays a real role in American politics. What gets missed amid the excess scrutiny on AIPAC: that role is, in effect, no different from that of any other lobby. In fact, AIPAC is in practice often slightly less effective than many of its peers.
That truth helps make clear how dangerous the disproportionate attention AIPAC receives from the media, and from candidates opposed to its priorities, can be. To single out a well-funded lobby with many Jewish members, and to cast it as the secret hand behind every contested race, isn’t just wrong on the data. It rhymes with the oldest antisemitic trope there is: that Jews quietly run the world.
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Feds open antisemitism investigation into National Education Association
(JTA) — The Trump administration is launching an antisemitism investigation into the National Education Association, the influential public school teachers union, over purported employment discrimination.
The probe is based on allegations that Jewish members of the NEA were harassed and “physically intimidated” during the organization’s 2025 annual convention, including a reported case of NEA members appearing to cheer at mention of the 2005 attack on a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.
The complaint, based on the accounts of several Jewish NEA members, also spotlighted recent controversies, such as materials from the union that labeled a map of the state of Israel as “Palestine” for Indigenous People’s Day and a handbook that failed to identify Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. They further alleged that the union’s diversity hiring guidelines harmed its Jewish members.
The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal group that has brought several other such antisemitism cases to the Trump administration, filed the complaint that triggered the NEA investigation. The case is being handled through the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose authority to investigate employment discrimination also extends to union membership.
“We really appreciate the EEOC’s decision to open this investigation,” Marci Miller, director of legal investigations at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In a statement to JTA, the NEA said, “We take concerns like this seriously and are reviewing the matter through our established processes.” The union added that it “does not tolerate antisemitism in any form and is committed to ensuring that all members and students, including Jewish members and students, can work and learn in a safe and welcoming environment.”
The NEA has previously said its map labeled “Palestine” “does not meet our standards,” and updated its Holocaust handbook in response to the pushback.
Jews in public school education have expressed concern about tensions over the last few years. In 2021, many Jewish groups rallied against NEA proposals to oppose Israel; the measures did not pass. At its 2025 convention, the NEA had voted to boycott the Anti-Defamation League, though its executive committee rejected the vote following pushback from Jewish groups.
The GOP-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce is also investigating the union over antisemitism, citing several of the same instances later outlined in the Brandeis Center complaint.
The EEOC’s NEA case is part of an expansion of the Trump administration’s antisemitism investigations beyond college and K-12 campuses. Last week the U.S. Health and Human Services Department opened its own probe into the American Psychological Association, also based on a Brandeis Center complaint.
In addition to alleged harassment of Jewish members at the convention, Miller said the center’s NEA complaint also involved diversity-based hiring practices at the union: “Jewish members in particular have been harmed by this policy because they have not been recognized as a racial or ethnic group worth counting for purposes of this policy.”
The EEOC has tackled antisemitism cases against other institutions, but its role in such investigations is controversial. The agency’s chair, Andrea Lucas, is currently demanding that the University of Pennsylvania turn over a list of Jews affiliated with the university as part of the commission’s antisemitism investigation into the Ivy League school. Several Jewish groups, as well as the university itself, have argued that such a demand will make Jews less safe.
Some Jewish groups have alleged that the administration has used antisemitism allegations as a pretext to undermine institutions it considers ideologically unfriendly.
One of Lucas’s defenders in the Jewish community is Kenneth Marcus, the Brandeis Center’s founder. Lucas herself is not Jewish but recently defended her legal strategy to Jewish leaders at a campus antisemitism conference.
Asked about this, Miller said the Brandeis Center was providing “dozens” of Jewish witnesses to the EEOC for consensual interviews.
“There’s no demand for anybody else,” she said. “We have plenty of information.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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New York primary tests Mamdani’s pull and Israel as a campaign issue
New York City Democratic voters are going to the polls today in congressional primaries that are doubling as a referendum on U.S.-Israel relations, as candidates allied with Mayor Zohran Mamdani test whether his brand of democratic socialism and criticism of hardline pro-Israel money in politics will translate into broader electoral success.
Mamdani has endorsed Columbia Gaza war encampment leader Darializa Avila-Chevalier and former City Comptroller Brad Lander in challenging sitting members of Congress, and Assemblymember Claire Valdez for an open seat.
All have campaigned using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and Mamdani himself has singled out Israel and its champions as adversaries.
At a Brooklyn campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”
The statement drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some of Mamdani’s supporters. And it comes as Democratic infighting over Israel nationally has intensified, with candidates across the political spectrum increasingly treating support from AIPAC as politically toxic.
All three of the Mamdani-endorsed congressional candidates have made Israel or AIPAC a central part of their campaigns, though each in different ways. AIPAC backs candidates aligned with continued U.S. support for Israel military aid and has spent upwards of $38 million nationally this election cycle, a Politico analysis found — though exact AIPAC contributions are difficult to track due to its use of shell PACs and tactic of funneling money directly to campaigns.
In the 10th Congressional District in lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn, Lander is challenging incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, zeroing in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to AIPAC. Lander opted not to take part in New York City’s annual Israel Parade, while Goldman used his participation to appeal to Jewish voters.
Earlier this month, Israel and Gaza consumed roughly 15 minutes of a one-hour debate between the candidates. Goldman expressed a desire to move on, arguing that “Israel is not the most important issue in this district,” while Lander countered that Gaza represents “one of the significant moral and humanity challenges of our time.”
Goldman has defended his support for Israel as consistent with his values. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in February that there is “an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified.”
The heat boiled over on Sunday when a Brooklyn coffee bar chain, Poetica Coffee, declared on social media after Goldman and his young daughter stopped by that it would have turned Goldman away from the cafe had staff known who he was, posting to Instagram that they don’t serve “genocide enablers.”
Next to a picture of Goldman taken outside the shop after he had ordered a coffee, and another image showing $9.82 refunded, the post added: “Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice? Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference?” (The account has since been disabled.)
Lander, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, had acknowledged the potential for anti-Israel passions in the race to get out of hand — telling an interviewer that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
Goldman has not commented on the incident, other than to reply on Instagram: “The barista could not have been nicer to my 7-yr-old daughter and me.” Lander criticized the coffee shop’s response, telling the Forward, “There are plenty of ways to lobby elected officials and express outrage at the votes they’ve taken without turning coffee shops into places people don’t feel welcome.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Avila Chevalier attended a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 widely condemned for condoning Hamas’ violence. She has said she attended in anticipation of an Israeli military response, citing “a pattern in which whenever there is an incident, the state of Israel engages in a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.”
And she told the New York Editorial Board last week that Zionism “is an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”
She faces AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY-13, which covers Upper Manhattan and portions of the Bronx.
“To know that my opponent takes AIPAC money is something that, for a lot of people, is just disqualifying. It is [about] Palestine at the heart of it, but it’s also what it says about someone’s inability to stand up against something that is so blatantly horrific, someone who refuses to name a genocide,” Avila Chevalier told the Nation. “Can you trust someone who won’t even say that word to fight for you on the most basic of issues?”
Addressing AIPAC’s support for him in a primary debate, Espaillat said “no one dictates or tells me how to vote, my constituents do that.”
Meanwhile, in NY-7, which includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, Valdez has sought to make Israel and AIPAC a campaign issue in a race where AIPAC is not involved and the candidates have broad agreement on Gaza.
Valdez faces Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, whom she has critiqued for not using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions until after he announced his candidacy. She also accused Reynoso of benefiting from secretive pro-Israel money, despite no evidence that AIPAC has supported his campaign.
The post New York primary tests Mamdani’s pull and Israel as a campaign issue appeared first on The Forward.
