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NYC’s Celebrate Israel Parade set to draw big crowds — and protests — amid Israel’s political turmoil
(New York Jewish Week) — For the first time in a dozen years, Ameinu, the former Labor Zionist Alliance, will be marching in the Celebrate Israel Parade, the annual gathering that draws tens of thousands of marchers and spectators along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.
“It was becoming harder to identify with the overall vibe of the march,” Kenneth Bob, the national president of the liberal organization, said about why the group stopped participating. “It didn’t reflect our more nuanced values about Israel. And because of restrictions on what we could put on our signs, it made it difficult for us to express our brand of Zionism.”
But this year, Ameinu will be back, wearing T-shirts that read in Hebrew on the front, “Zionism = Democracy,” and on the back in English, “Marching for Democracy.” At a time of turmoil in Israel, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis are taking to the streets in protest of efforts by Israel’s right-wing government to transform its judiciary, Ameinu’s participation — and objections voiced by at least one pro-Israel activist group — are signs of the political currents swirling around the largest Zionist solidarity event outside of Israel.
“We will be reminding other participants and those watching the parade that we are marching in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Israel and around the world who are fighting for the future of the state,” the organization said on its website.
Despite or perhaps because of those political currents, Jewish organizations across the political spectrum are gearing up for what organizers say will be one of the largest Celebrate Israel parades ever on Sunday, June 4, to mark Israel’s 75th birthday. Several groups are marching for the first time, and Long Island has the most marchers in a decade.
Organizers says more than 40,000 people are expected to march — some in sympathy with the Israeli protesters, others who support the government’s proposed overhaul, and still others who say the 75th anniversary of the Jewish state should be an occasion for Jewish solidarity no matter who heads its government or the policies they promote.
To underscore that last message, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, the parade’s sponsor, generated, for the second year, a letter signed by area rabbis from all denominations urging participation in the parade.
“Events like the parade bridge the divide between us, whether political, religious, or cultural,” the letter reads. “It’s a chance for us to gather as Jews and walk together, showing the world that we are one community even when we disagree.”
Plans by Israel’s acting consul general in New York, Israel Nitzan, may test that proposition. Nitzan will lead an Israeli delegation of as many as 18 cabinet ministers and other Knesset members, which would be the most ever to attend the parade. They include the minister of economy and industry, Nir Barkat, and the minister of Diaspora affairs, Amichai Chikli, as well as Simcha Rothman, the chair of the law and justice committee who is an architect of the judicial reforms and has been pressing the case for them with U.S. Jews. The two most controversial members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, the far-right ideologues Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, are not scheduled to attend.
Israeli New Yorkers who have been protesting the government’s judicial overhaul plans have already objected to the government officials’ inclusion. Shany Granot-Lubaton, the organizer of the UnXeptable-Saving Israeli Democracy activist group, said they expect more than 400 of their supporters to follow the Israeli ministers and Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset for the far-right Religious Zionist Party, as they travel throughout the city in the coming days for the parade and a conference the same day organized by the nationalist news agency Arutz Sheva.
UnXeptable issued an open letter urging the organizers “to refrain from allowing Israeli government ministers to march at the head of the parade,” saying the lawmakers “have not earned the respect of your allies and friends in Israel, and many of your own community members, here in America.”
“They will not have a peaceful vacation in New York City,” Granot-Lubaton told the New York Jewish Week. “We served our time in the army and are fighting for Israel because we love it and care for it and not for any other reason. Nobody loves Israel more than us.”
Protesters attend a massive demonstration against proposed judicial reforms in front of the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, Feb. 13, 2023. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Rabbi Rachel Ain, the rabbi of the Conservative Sutton Place Synagogue, was one of the 15 rabbis who signed the letter urging participation in the parade. Her synagogue has presented programs to explain the complexities of the political struggle in Israel today, but she said the unrest has “not affected our support for Israel; my synagogue is happy to participate in the parade.”
Ain added, “You can love and support the Jewish state and also understand that things are complicated.”
Ammiel Hirsch, rabbi of the Reform Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and former head of ARZA, the Reform movement’s Zionist organization, also signed the statement.
“It is more important than ever to participate in the Celebrate Israel Parade because it represents our commitment not to elements of this government but to our relationship with the people, the state of Israel, and the Zionist ideal,” said Hirsch. “The best response is not to walk away but to double down with those in Israel who are as distressed as we are and want to see a more representative Israeli government.”
The parade has received an endorsement from Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who in March warned that political divides in Israel could lead to “a real civil war.”
The parade, he said in a video message shared by the JCRC, “promises to be a powerful reminder of everything that holds us together as one proud people. … I marched myself as a student in Ramaz [High School] and it was a terrific experience.”
The largest funder of the parade is UJA-Federation of New York, which contributes $200,000. (UJA-Federation is also a funder of 70 Faces Media, the New York Jewish Week’s parent company.) This year for the first time it is contributing an additional $75,000 to sponsor a Celebrate Israel “Block Party” on 63rd Street that will run during the day. Vendors will sell kosher food, and there will be Jewish and Israeli crafts and various children’s activities.
There will be participation from “every part of the Jewish community,” according to Howard Pollack, director of the parade. “I’ve been getting emails from people asking how they can march and where can they sit to enjoy the parade. The enthusiasm is like nothing I have ever seen before. We normally have groups from out-of-state, but this year for the 75th anniversary, we have a lot more. They are coming from Florida, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and Connecticut.”
The parade will include 20 floats, 13 marching bands and the same number of dance groups. Musicians Matisyahu, the Maccabeats and Harel Skaat will each be performing from different floats.
Mindy Perlmutter, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council-Long island, said 22 groups with about 500 marchers will take part under the JCRC-LI banner — what she called the largest number in at least a decade.
Ameinu will be marching under the banner of the American Zionist Movement. They are among about a dozen of AZM’s 41 affiliated organizations, including Hadassah and Young Judaea, that will be marching together. Other affiliates will march under their own banners, according to Herbert Block, AZM’s executive director.
A contingent on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue during the Celebrate Israel Parade, June 2, 2019. (Courtesy JCRC-NY)
Also marching under the AZM banner for the first time will be the Baltimore Zionist District, which heeded the AZM’s call for members to make a special effort to join the parade to celebrate Israel’s 75th birthday. Also coming for the first time will be representatives from the Druze Zionist Organization in Israel, representing a non-Jewish minority living primarily in Israel’s north.
“There will be one or two from Israel and a couple who live in New York,” Block said. “They will march with the Druze flag in our contingent.”
Members of the Givati Brigade Association, which supports the elite unit of the Israel Defense Forces, will also marching for the first time. Some members of the unit were among the hundreds of Israeli reservists who announced they would boycott reserve duty before the judicial reforms were suspended this spring.
“We hope people will understand how important it is to support not only the Givati Brigade but the IDF in general,” said Itzhak Levit, chair of the GBA. “The Givati Brigade has been involved in all military operations since 1948. Former members of the brigade who live in New York will join us in the parade; we expect around 25.”
Over the decades some have noted that the parade, launched in 1964, gradually drew less grassroots support than it did large contingents of children bused in from various Jewish day schools. And there have been political disputes: In 2015, in addition to guidelines saying that all groups marching must “recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people,” parade organizers banned groups that advocate for the boycott against Israel. A decade ago there were calls from the right to ban the New Israel Fund and other left-wing groups from marching. And in 2012, LGBTQ Jews marched for the first time under the banner of Manhattan’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, after decades in which LGBTQ Jews were prevented from marching with signage identifying them as gay and lesbian.
Gideon Taylor, CEO of JCRC-NY, the UJA-Federation agency that runs the parade, said there were no new guidelines issued this year concerning the unrest in Israel or any other topic.
The parade has also attracted small groups of pro-Palestinian protesters, as well as a small contingent from Neturei Karta, the anti-Zionist Hasidic sect.
Kenneth Bob, the Ameinu president, told the New York Jewish Week that this “is an important year to be marching. Israel is celebrating its 75th birthday and with all that is going on in Israel we thought this is the time to march for Israel and in support of the protestors. Once we came up with the idea to combine our love for Israel with support for the demonstrators [in Israel], it was a quick and easy decision to decide to march; it’s a good fit for us.”
The Celebrate Israel Parade kicks off on Sunday, June 4, at 11:30 a.m. at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street and will march to 74th Street. The Celebrate Israel Block Party will take place on 63rd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues from 11 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. The parade will be televised on Channel 9 in New York and livestreamed on the website celebrateisraelny.org.
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Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique?
AppleTV+’s new thriller Unconditional has the trappings of so much streaming content.
A young woman disappears into hostile territory. Her mother, already juggling a family health crisis, does her own sleuthing to get her daughter back. People die, twisty alliances emerge. It’s all part of the suspense boiler plate, and it sizzles just enough to keep your interest. What makes the show, airing May 8, different from every other show is the early response.
Sight almost entirely unseen, the internet was in an uproar. The show is Israeli, and the announcement trailer showed the character Gali (Ronn Talia Lynne) in her IDF uniform. Pro-Palestine accounts were quick to shout “hasbara” or “overt ziopropaganda” for a show whose premise is ostensibly a sympathetic story of an Israeli taken prisoner by the evil, Putin-era Russian state. (The trailer makes no mention of Palestinians or a war in Gaza. The show doesn’t either.)
The online response alone proves the challenging optics for anything Israeli, but the show actually has quite a bit to say about the Jewish state’s propaganda apparatus — within the country and without.
On a layover in the Moscow Airport, Gali and her mother, Orna (Liraz Chamami), are taken in for questioning. Security claims to have found drugs in Gali’s backpack — an echo of the Naama Issacher affair from 2019 — and she’s summarily sentenced to seven years in a Russian jail.
Orna returns to Israel and hires a PR handler to plead Gali’s case. Together they curate a specific image to sell to the state media.
Gali is a “happy, good-hearted girl. She served in the army, like everyone” and even extended her service, Orna says in radio and television interviews. The file photo for news segments is exactly what so many outside of Israel would object to: Gali in uniform. In Israel it tugs heart strings. Abroad, it makes the abductee a war criminal who had it coming.
It’s probably not giving much away, given that the hands behind this show are the creators of Hatufim, which became a hit in the U.S. as the antihero-forward War on Terror commentary Homeland, that Gali is not a perfect victim. This is a strange sort of hasbara, if one Israel often produces, the kind that’s peopled by problematic characters operating in the society’s gray zones. (See streaming hit Fauda, following a morally-dubious undercover unit made up of trigger-happy adulterers exploiting their Palestinian contacts.)
What’s surprising, given the premise, is how much time the show spends not in Russia or Israel, but in India, where Gali and Orna were touring before their fateful missed connection in Moscow. It’s here we’re given entree into the Ugly Israeli abroad, a stereotype that is growing increasingly common thanks to reports of poor behavior — stealing money from temples, creating chaos in hospitals and restaurants — in the global East. (On the flip side, many Israelis, like a couple at a noodle shop in Vietnam, are being harassed by other tourists for no reason other than their country of origin and some feel the need to hide their identity while traveling.)
Gali sings the praises of an Indian gastropub that will give you dysentery. “We are so lucky because for the last three months the kitchen has been condemned by the health department,” she smirks. “But yesterday some truck driver hit a wild boar, so they gave them an exemption. So it won’t be a waste.”
In a later episode, one of Gali’s companions wisecrack about the pestilential heat and jibe that prisons in India are particularly atrocious. (This must ring alarm bells for those aware of Israel’s carceral system for Palestinians.)
Russia is equally backward. Unlike in Israel, “not everyone here is happy to work with a woman,” a Russian arms dealer weighs in. If you didn’t get it, these countries are backward. Israel has its problems, but at least it has women in power!
Watching, I was reminded of social media posts by Indians complaining about racism and drug use from IDF veterans on the so-called “Hummus trail.” One post by AJ+ said the soldiers come there to “detox” from “carrying out a genocide in Gaza.”
Unconditional is under no illusions that Israelis can be a disruptive presence. If anything, it pushes the concept to new places. These Sabras ruin mindfulness workshops and start shoot-outs in hotel lobbies. It’s not great for the brand.
But then again, we live in a climate where simply acknowledging the existence of Israelis — as seen in a recent ballyhoo surrounding author R.F. Kuang — can prove controversial or politically-loaded, no matter how neutral the depiction.
Why Apple would give their imprimatur to an Israeli project today, when public opinion of the Jewish state has fallen off a demographic cliff, is a valid question likely explained by the positive reception of another Israeli import on the streamer, the show Tehran, about an IDF hacker stuck in Iran. From within the silos it’s hard to tell if audiences will cancel their subscriptions, as some have threatened.
Maybe, like Gali’s uniform, the show is a Rorschach. BDS types may boycott, yet the show seems to echo many of their talking points about Israel’s overzealous campaign in Gaza after Oct. 7 — at least by way of metaphor.
In a late episode, Orna tells her government companion Rita (Evgenia Dodina) about a time a classmate broke Gali’s arm, and the teacher excused his actions because his mother was in the hospital.
“You’re exactly like the teacher,” Rita tells Orna. “You give me a thousand excuses for Gali. ‘It’s because of me. It’s not her fault. Poor thing.’ It doesn’t matter she didn’t understand what she was getting into, and it doesn’t matter she didn’t mean to.”
Orna says it’s different with Gali — because it’s her daughter. One can overlook a lot when it’s your family, or, for that matter, your country.
The post Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli man indicted in attack on Catholic nun in Jerusalem’s Old City
(JTA) — An Israeli man was indicted on Thursday in connection to the violent assault of a Catholic nun in Jerusalem last month, after prosecutors said he targeted her over her Christian identity.
Yona Schreiber, 36, from the West Bank settlement of Peduel, was arrested last week and has since been indicted on charges of “assault causing actual injury motivated by hostility toward the public on the grounds of religion, as well as simple assault,” the state attorney’s office said in a statement.
According to the indictment, Schreiber, who is Jewish, attacked the nun just outside of the Old City in Jerusalem because he identified her as a Catholic nun. Schreiber allegedly pushed and then kicked the nun as she was lying on the ground and also attacked a passerby who attempted to intervene.
תקיפת הנזירה אתמול באזור קבר דוד בירושלים – שוטרי מרחב דוד איתרו את החשוד (36) ועצרו אותו בחשד לתקיפה ממניע גזעני >>> pic.twitter.com/agRpznR84X
— משטרת ישראל (@IL_police) April 30, 2026
The nun, a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archeological Research, suffered bruises on her face and leg due to the attack, the state attorney’s office said.
The attack, which drew condemnation from Catholic leaders as well as faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, comes amid mounting concern over hostility toward Christian clergy and holy sites in Israel.
Cases of Jews harassing Christians have risen sharply in recent years. Last month, the IDF punished a soldier who was filmed bludgeoning a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon. This week, the IDF also announced that it would discipline a different soldier who was seen placing a cigarette into the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary in a photo posted on social media.
Israel’s attorney general asked the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, where the indictment was filed, to hold Schreiber in detention for the duration of the legal proceeding.
The assault carries a maximum prison sentence of three years, which could increase to six years if prosecutors prove the attack was motivated by religious bias.
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Jewish real estate magnate Steven Roth likens Mamdani’s ‘tax the rich’ rhetoric to ‘from the river to the sea’
(New York Jewish Week) — Jewish real estate mogul Steven Roth compared New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “tax the rich” rhetoric this week to racial slurs and pro-Palestinian rhetoric on an earnings call for his company, Vornado Realty Trust.
“I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Roth said, referring to the phrase commonly used at pro-Palestinian protests that many Jewish groups consider antisemitic.
The remark by Roth, who has long been a notable philanthropist to Jewish causes, adds to mounting tensions between New York business leaders and Mamdani over his recently announced “pied-à-terre” tax on second homes valued at more than $5 million.
During the call Tuesday, Roth also expressed support for Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, whose $238 million dollar penthouse was featured in a video by Mamdani announcing plans for the tax last month.
“We are all shocked that our young mayor would pull this stunt in front of Ken’s home and single him out for ridicule,” Roth said. “The ugly, unnecessary video stunt is personal for Ken and sort of personal for me.”
Roth’s comments touched on a longstanding source of friction between Mamdani and some New York Jewish leaders, who have criticized the mayor over his views on Israel and his previous defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” another common pro-Palestinian slogan viewed by some as a call to violence against Jews.
In the wake of Mamdani’s election, some Jewish business leaders, including Dave Portnoy, the Jewish founder of Barstool Sports, said that they planned to leave the city altogether, citing the mayor’s fiscal policies and concerns about antisemitism under his leadership.
In a statement responding to Roth’s comments, Mamdani’s office said that he wanted all New Yorkers to succeed, including “business owners and entrepreneurs who create good-paying jobs and make this city the economic engine of America.”
“That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken. It rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink,” the statement continued. “The status quo is unsustainable and unjust. If we want this city to become a place that working people can afford, we need meaningful tax reform that includes the wealthiest New Yorkers contributing their fair share.”
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