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On the streets of Tel Aviv, protesters on cusp of a big victory vow to keep fighting
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Yaniv, a resident of Tel Aviv, has lost count of how many protests he’s been to during the past three months. But on Monday afternoon, he headed once again to Kaplan Street, the urban artery that has become ground zero of the anti-government demonstrations, to demonstrate once again.
Israel’s current rupture, said Yaniv, 34, is the “biggest crisis in my lifetime.”
“We’ll keep going until something changes,” he said. “They left us no choice. The damage has been done.”
Week after week, Yaniv and tens of thousands of other Israelis have filled the streets of Tel Aviv to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed overhaul of the country’s judiciary — which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power and influence. Then, on Sunday night, massive protests again took shape to oppose Netanyahu’s firing of his defense minister, who called for a pause on the legislation.
Now, the following day, the protesters came with a different feeling: that their activism might actually succeed, at least in the short term. After people gathered in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and elsewhere, Netanyahu announced that he would pause the legislation to allow time for dialogue. Several of his ministers had already called for him to do just that.
Justin Jacobs, a recent immigrant to Israel from the United States, said he is hopeful about the outcome of the protest movement. (Deborah Danan)
But even as the campaign to stall the legislation was poised to achieve an at least temporary victory, protesters were not in a celebratory mood. They vowed to continue demonstrating against what some described as Netanyahu’s broader authoritarian impulses.
“You see how the liberal voice that has been missing for so long is returning to the street and has become the mainstream,” said Ben Luria, a resident of Jaffa protesting in Tel Aviv. “It looks like they’ve succeeded in passing the message across.”
But for Luria, that success doesn’t translate into any desire to ease the pressure. “You can’t deny that this is no longer just a question of Bibi being Bibi, this is a dictator in the making,” he added, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “We need to put the line somewhere.”
Even as Israelis were glued to their TV screens, waiting to hear Netanyahu announce a suspension of the legislation, Daria, who immigrated to Israel with her family from what is now Russia, did not pin her hopes on Netanyahu changing course.
“I don’t think that even if they stop this legislation, they will stop anything else,” said Daria, who came to the protest with Yaniv and, like him, declined to give her last name. “Even if they say they’ll postpone until Pesach or for forever, that doesn’t mean that we stop protesting what this government is doing.”
Sunday night’s protests were followed by a countrywide general strike. Blocked streets and canceled bus routes in downtown Tel Aviv meant that a 20-minute journey to a high-risk pregnancy clinic on Monday instead took an hour and a half for Natalie Solomon, who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant. She said she hoped Netanyahu would concede and spare Israelis further disruption.
“Our country is falling apart,” she said, expressing her hope that an end to the political standoff is near. “I really hope Bibi backs down today, that’s the only option. … We care about democracy but we really just care about the health of our baby.
At the end of the day it really does disrupt day-to-day lives.”
Despite being on the cusp of their first major victory, protesters said the potential respite offered by Netanyahu would be a minor gesture, not one that could overcome the hard feelings that have built up over the past three months.
Justin Jacobs, an immigrant to Israel from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said Israel has “turned a corner” after Sunday night’s protests.”So, [there’s] a glimmer of hope that we’ll go back to the status quo, which to me remains not good enough,” he said. “But not good enough is still better than horrifying.”
Others were less optimistic. “My feeling, the feeling of my parents, my grandparents, [is] that there’s no future here, I don’t know if I’ll raise kids here,” said Yotam Weingrad.
Like Weingrad, Daria, recalling her family’s experience, is also considering her future in the Jewish state.
Yariv and Daria, left, walk in Tel Aviv after participating in anti-government protests on Monday, March 27, 2023; at right, Natalie Solomon said her trip to a high-risk pregnancy clinic took more than four times longer than normal because of the protests. (Deborah Danan)
“I grew up in a family with intimate knowledge of what it feels like to live under oppression, and I feel like it’s our duty to do whatever we can to prevent it,” she said. “But if push comes to shove, if nothing’s going to change, I’ll make the same decision my parents did — my kids aren’t going to live in a dictatorship.”
For those not emotionally invested in the Israeli crisis, the streets of Tel Aviv on Monday provided a rare experience, and a sense of uncertainty. Jennifer, a tourist from Utah visiting Israel with her two daughters, Holly and Diana, wanted to know if “it is going to get scary” and wondered if they’d be able to get back to the United States, as airports had closed due to the general strike.
“We’ve never been to this part of the world so we’re kind of like ‘Wow,’ just taking in everything,” said Diana. “We don’t know what it’s like without the protests, and we’re like, ‘This is Tel Aviv. It’s a lot.’”
Support for the protests isn’t unanimous across Tel Aviv, a bastion of left-wing politics in Israel. Josh Eidelshtein called the protests “hypocritical,” and blamed them for fanning the flames of conflict.
“What if the protesters were right-wingers, Orthodox Jews, or Palestinians?” he said. “Would their strategies still be OK? There is too much hate being bred here, and it’s as if the collective stress and anxiety this country has lived on for so long has been set aflame. The same people who went out to vote [for the left] are now trying to work against the system because they didn’t get what they wanted.”
Khalil, who originally hails from the Arab village of Ein Hawd in Israel’s north, and has lived in Tel Aviv for 50 years, also opted to stay away from the protests, which he felt did not speak for him.
“The Arabs are a minority, what do they have to do with these protests?” Khalil said as he walked his dog near a giant yellow sign reading “Nonstop Democracy,” painted by the Tel Aviv municipality on the boardwalk.
“Bibi has done good things but now he’s silent. This is a man who knows how to speak,” Khalil said. Then, referring to Netanyahu’s coalition partners, he added, “He’s not the king of Israel anymore. He made big mistakes by taking those criminals into the government with him. They want to throw out all the Arabs.”
Also sitting out the protests was Meir Dayan, who counts himself among the supporters of Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform. He is especially in favor of the legislation that was due to be brought for a final vote on Monday, which would have increased the governing coalition’s control over Supreme Court appointments. But Dayan added that he didn’t appreciate the way Netanyahu attempted to pass the measures into law.
The path along the beach in Tel Aviv has been painted with pro-democracy messages. (Deborah Danan)
“The way they went about it was reckless,” he said. “Change to heavy organizational processes — because this is what this basically is, after all — doesn’t happen with legislation, it happens with people. It must be bottom-up and from a place of education, not ignorance.”
Dayan predicted that Netanyahu will halt the legislation now, and then in the summer months “when the left are overseas,” he will return it to the Knesset floor.
Roughly four miles away from the main protest, a smaller demonstration coalesced near Jaffa’s clocktower, a landmark at the entrance to Tel Aviv’s older counterpart. At this protest, children as young as 5 chanted “Shame!” and “Save Democracy!” while their parents stood to the side.
“Here the adults are quiet so the children are taking the lead. It’s exciting,” said Gavri, 10.
There are a few things he’d like to bring about in Israeli society: the failure of the judicial overhaul, as well as an end to fighting between Jews and Arabs. Like the adults protesting across the city, he vowed not to give up.
“I will be here until the end,” he said. “I hope it won’t be a long time.”
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Two women race to save Persian Jewish music before it fades
In the 1950s, Younes Dardashti, a Jewish man from Tehran’s Jewish ghetto, became one of Iran’s most celebrated singers. As the country underwent rapid secularization under the Shah, Jewish communities that had long been pushed to the margins found new opportunities. Dardashti’s piercing, unmistakable voice filled Iranian airwaves, exclusive concert halls and the Shah’s palace, earning him the title “Nightingale of Iran.”
Years after Younes Dardashti’s death, his granddaughter Galeet is still singing with him in New York.
Using archival recordings of her grandfather’s voice, Galeet Dardashti created her album Monajat — meaning an intimate conversation with God — layering her vocals over decades-old tapes of him singing Selihot, religious poetry chanted nightly before the Jewish New Year.
Across the country in Los Angeles, Cantor Jacqueline Rafii is also trying to preserve her Iranian grandfather’s traditional Jewish Persian music.
While in cantorial school, Rafii rediscovered cassette tapes made of her grandfather leading a Passover seder in Tehran. When her family was forced to flee the country following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, they brought that cassette tape with them.
“It was like a time capsule,” said Rafii.
She realized that those grainy and distorted recordings captured a Persian Jewish musical tradition that had only ever been passed down orally from generation to generation. In the diaspora, Rafii worried, they might disappear.
So Rafii sat at the piano with her father to turn what she heard on those old cassette tapes into sheet music so that others might replicate the music Iranian Jews have been singing for centuries.
“We were trying to take this distorted tape from the ’70s and plunk out the notes,” she said. “To write something that had never been written before.”
What began with a single tape became a larger project. Rafii set out to collect and notate as many Persian Jewish melodies as she could. She put out a call on social media to try to find people who remembered Jewish prayers from Iran. Eventually, she found Dardashti, who taught Rafii her grandfather’s Yom Kippur melody for “El Nora Alila.”
A transcription challenge
According to Dardashti, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and specializes in Mizrahi culture and music, Jews have played an important role in Persian musical life for centuries.
After the 7th century, when Muslim forces conquered Persia, there were periods during which non-religious music was restricted under Islamic law. Because Jews were classified as najis, or “impure,” they faced limitations on the types of occupations they could legally pursue. Music, being a marginalized and often stigmatized profession, was typically avoided by Muslims. This made it a particularly viable livelihood for Jews who often performed the jobs that were restricted to Muslims.
Because of this, religious minorities, namely Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians, were responsible for sustaining Persian musical traditions when Muslims could not.
Classical Persian music often features singers interpreting the poetry of figures like Hafez or Rumi. One of its defining features is tahrir, a rapid oscillation in the voice that can sound like a controlled break or yodel, used to convey emotional intensity.
The music relies on modal systems and tonal structures distinct from Western scales. It also includes microtones — notes that fall between the pitches used in Western scales and cannot be easily represented on a standard musical staff. To make the melodies accessible, Rafii notates them “in a format that would be compatible with Western music,” eliminating some (but not all) of those microtones, adding chords to mimic their sound, and establishing a regular meter.
Persian Jewish music draws directly from this tradition, applying its musical forms to Jewish liturgy — Torah chanting, High Holiday prayers, and religious poetry — as well as to songs about daily life written in Judeo-Persian.
“It’s really about interpreting a text,” Dardashti said. “Just as a Persian classical singer would interpret a poem, in Persian Jewish music you’re interpreting Hebrew liturgy in a very similar way.”
For centuries, this music was transmitted entirely orally, passed down from generation to generation, with each singer adding their own interpretation and stylistic flair. During the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from the 1940s through 1979, Jews enjoyed a golden age in Iran. Jewish musicians, who often came from lineages of family members who had been making music for centuries, moved to the fore and became nationally recognized stars. Dardashti’s grandfather was perhaps the most prominent. Because Israel and Iran had good relations at the time, he frequently traveled between the two countries to share his talents.
Younes Dardashti became a cantor at synagogues across Tehran. Because his chanting was done in a musical style Iranians of all faiths were used to hearing on the radio, Galeet Dardashti says, non-Jews would press their ears to the doors of the synagogue to hear her grandfather’s voice.
A tradition passed down by men
Traditionally, Persian Jewish liturgical music was preserved and performed almost exclusively by men because of Jewish religious norms that limited women’s public singing. Now in the diaspora, that chain of transmission has begun to break down, with fewer and fewer Iranian Jews learning the songs their parents and grandparents once sang.
Rafii says she has faced obstacles in “expressing her cantorial pursuits” to more traditional members of the Persian community in the U.S., where women’s singing is still not embraced. And while she is unsure whether she will “ever in her lifetime … share these melodies personally in such communities,” she remains “hopeful that her work may be useful” to those seeking to transmit Persian Jewish music to the next generation.
For Dardashti, singing Persian Jewish music as a woman is just another layer of the reinvention that has been a feature of Persian Jewish music for generations. Though she too does not perform her music in Orthodox Iranian Jewish settings, she embraces the unique role she can play in leading services for Reform and Conservative Iranian Jews, for whom Ashkenazi-style music is often the default.
“I feel like right now this community needs me; there aren’t many people who can do this work and are willing to do it in an egalitarian setting,” said Dardashti. For the last few years, she has led high holiday services in the traditional Persian style at Kanisse, an egalitarian Jewish community for Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in New York City.
Though both Rafii and Dardashti are Iranian, neither grew up immersed in Persian Jewish musical traditions.
Like many Iranian Jews who came to the United States after the revolution, their families entered a Jewish landscape dominated by Ashkenazi practice. Dardashti’s father, himself a cantor, trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where the focus was almost entirely Ashkenazi. “I grew up the daughter of a Persian cantor who was singing Ashkenazi music,” Dardashti said.
“In order to learn Persian Jewish music, I had to start from scratch,” she added. “I knew nothing.”
She turned to her father, asking him to teach her the melodies he had grown up with in Iran but had not performed formally since coming to the U.S.
Her work, while rooted in a desire to preserve Persian Jewish music, is not without experimentation. Dardashti adds her own flair to her grandfather’s music, laying his vocals over her band and arrangement. “I’m also reinventing, because music isn’t static. Cultural transmission is messy — everyone changes things. So I lean into that messiness.”
Connecting cantors across cultures
Rafii is also continuing to transmit Persian Jewish music in an unconventional way by bringing it to Ashkenazi audiences.
When she entered cantorial school, she said, there were no formal pathways to train in non-European musical traditions. Now, she says cantors from across the country — “in particular, Ashkenazic cantors” — have reached out to her for Persian Jewish sheet music and guidance on incorporating these melodies into their services.
“They want to share how diverse the Jewish family is,” she said. “Now that there’s sheet music for Persian Jewish music, it’s accessible, and they can offer it to their community.”
Dozens of non-Persian cantors have already begun including these melodies in their services.
At Valley Beth Shalom, a largely Ashkenazi congregation in Los Angeles, Rafii regularly weaves her grandfather’s Persian tunes into worship and teaches them to the synagogue’s youth choir.
“I like to include them as part of an everyday service,” she said. “Why don’t we just combine the melodies and make this part of the American Jewish experience?”
The post Two women race to save Persian Jewish music before it fades appeared first on The Forward.
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Passover liberation and US liberty both summon us to remember and renew
At our campus Seder this week, I found myself talking to a student about Passover as a holiday of memory. She seemed puzzled and asked me to explain. The Seder plate, the ritual of reclining, and the talk of freedom, I told her, were all meant as reminders of enslavement in Egypt. Of course, she knew that. But I told her that even before the Jews cross the Red Sea to escape bondage, the Torah says something like “you better remember this!” Just after the final plagues — the killing of the first born — are visited upon the Egyptians, but before the Israelites escape from slavery, God tells Moses how the Passover holiday will be a commemoration of the events about to take place!
This day shall be to you one of remembrance: you shall celebrate it as a festival to GOD throughout the ages; you shall celebrate it as an institution for all time. Ex 12:14
You shall observe the [Feast of] Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your ranks out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day throughout the ages as an institution for all time. Ex 12:17
The commemoration of liberation, and the memory of bondage, are given sacred status — and even prior to the liberation itself. The festive meal, the Passover Seder, is a communal insistence on memory. And this insistence is not restricted to what happened to other people in the distant past. The Torah’s word for remembering here is zakhor, which means something closer to “reliving” than to what we usually think of historical recollection. We are slaves in Egypt, just as we are at the foot of Mount Sinai to receive the Commandments.
As it so happens, during Pesach this year I am also working at Wesleyan University on a national program to encourage college students to protect our democracy by participating in it. Inspired by the students who went to Mississippi in 1964 to register Black voters in the face of violent suppression, we launched Democracy Summer 2026, a nonpartisan call to young people to strengthen their democratic muscles by using them. We are mindful of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence as we build programs along with colleges and universities across the country that aim to remind our fellow citizens of the importance of exercising our powers as constituents of this constitutional republic. The mission statements of educational institutions — from small private religious schools to large public universities — express an obligation to contribute to the public sphere. When we do contribute, we are participating in history, learning about ourselves and the world around us; we contribute to our institutions and to the country whose freedoms allow them to fulfill their purposes.
As part of this work, I’ve been rereading Danielle Allen’s wonderful Our Declaration (2015), a book that helps us through a slow reading of a core founding document. Allen describes teaching the Declaration of Independence to a group of working adults in a night class in Chicago and how by doing so she came to appreciate its famous words more profoundly than ever: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” She came to see these words (and the Declaration as a whole) as aimed at her and her students — that they were part of that “WE,” members of the political community that recognized the power of these truths. This realization didn’t happen right away. At first her students thought that the Declaration represented “institutions and power, everything that solidified a world that had, as life turned out, delivered them so much grief, so much to overcome.” They had to make the document their own to see themselves as participants in its legacy.
These students “regifted” the Declaration to Allen by helping her see its argument for political equality as her own political patrimony. The founding fathers would not have seen it this way: Allen is a Black woman whom they would not have recognized as a citizen. But by reading the text slowly and carefully with her students, she and they claimed it as their rightful inheritance: “an understanding of freedom and equality, and of the value of finding the right words.”
In Torah study, I strive for something similar to this claiming of an inheritance. Such a claim, I find, is also what we are meant to feel when we read the Haggadah at our Seders. I study not to acquire expertise about holy texts but to participate in an ongoing conversation about enduring questions. Through the teaching that we were slaves in Egypt, we are meant to feel how it is to be oppressed and to consider our obligation to claim our freedoms, an essential step in developing a people. And we are also meant to help other groups escape oppression, make good on claims for liberation that resonate with our story. This is not only for the week of Passover. Rashi teaches that we must make mention of the exodus from Egypt every day. Every day we must claim our freedom and, we might add, find the right words for others to do so.
This is also the message of our summer call to action this year. As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, let us claim our political patrimony, our rightful inheritance. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: it is our republic so let us keep it!
The post Passover liberation and US liberty both summon us to remember and renew appeared first on The Forward.
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Downed Planes Raise New Perils for Trump as Tehran Hunts for Missing US Pilot
Traces of an Iranian missile attack in Tehran’s sky, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Two US warplanes were downed over Iran and the Gulf, Iranian and US officials said on Friday, with two pilots rescued and a third still missing and being hunted by Tehran’s forces.
The incidents show the risks still faced by US and Israeli aircraft over Iran despite assertions from US President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that their forces had total control of the skies.
The first plane, a two-seat US F-15E jet, was shot down by Iranian fire, officials in both countries said.
The second plane, an A-10 Warthog fighter aircraft, was hit by Iranian fire and crashed over Kuwait, with the pilot ejecting, two US officials said.
Two Blackhawk helicopters involved in the search effort for the missing pilot were hit by Iranian fire but made it out of Iranian airspace, the two US officials told Reuters.
The degree of injuries among the crew of the aircraft remained unclear. The status and whereabouts of the missing F-15E crew member was not publicly known.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it was combing an area near where the pilot’s plane came down in southwestern Iran and the regional governor promised a commendation for anyone who captured or killed “forces of the hostile enemy.”
Iranians, who have been pummeled by American air power for weeks, posted gleeful messages celebrating the plane downings. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that the U.S. and Israel’s war had been “downgraded from regime change” to a hunt for their pilots.
Trump has been in the White House receiving updates on the search-and-rescue operation, a senior administration official told Reuters. The Pentagon and US Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
NO SIGN OF END TO WAR
The prospect of a US service person being alive and on the run inside Iran raises the stakes for Washington in a conflict with low public support and no sign of an imminent end.
Iran has officially told mediators it is not prepared to meet with US officials in Islamabad in coming days and that efforts to produce a ceasefire, led by Pakistan, have reached a dead end, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The US and Israel opened the campaign with a wave of strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28. The war has killed thousands and threatened lasting damage to the global economy.
So far, 13 US military service members have been killed in the conflict and more than 300 have been wounded, according to the US Central Command.
Iran has rained down drones and missiles on Israel. It has also taken aim at Gulf countries allied to the US, which have so far held back from joining the war directly for fear of further escalation.
In a security alert on Friday, the US embassy in Beirut said Iran and its aligned armed groups may target universities in Lebanon and urged US citizens in the country to leave while commercial flights are still available.
Israel has been waging a parallel campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon after the militant group fired at Israel in support of Iran.
TRUMP THREAT TO STRIKE BRIDGES, POWER PLANTS
On Friday, as Trump threatened to hit its bridges and power plants, Iran struck a power and water plant in Kuwait, underlining the vulnerability of Gulf states that rely heavily on desalination plants for drinking water.
On Thursday, Trump posted footage on social media showing dust and smoke billowing up as US strikes hit the newly constructed B1 bridge between Tehran and nearby Karaj, which was due to open this year, and said more attacks would follow.
“Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) anywhere in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” he wrote in a subsequent post.
On Friday, a drone hit a Red Crescent relief warehouse in the Choghadak area of Iran’s southern Bushehr province.
Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery had been hit by drones. Other attacks were also reported to have been intercepted in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Missile debris landed near the Israeli port of Haifa, site of a major oil refinery.
Oil markets were closed after benchmark U.S. crude prices gained 11% on Thursday following a speech by Trump that offered no clear sign of an imminent end to the war.