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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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Iran’s Leadership Draws Up Contingency Escape Plans Amid Widespread Anti-Government Protests: Reports
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
As anti-government protests continue to rage and spread across Iran, the country’s leadership is reportedly preparing for a potential collapse of the regime, with senior officials said to be drawing up contingency escape plans and stockpiling resources.
On Thursday, British Conservative Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat said intelligence reports indicate that Iranian senior officials are putting contingency measures in place, “which suggest that the regime itself is preparing for life after the fall.”
“We’re also seeing Russian cargo aircraft coming and landing in Tehran, presumably carrying weapons and ammunition, and we’re hearing reports of large amounts of gold leaving Iran,” the British lawmaker told Parliament.
Amid growing domestic unrest, the regime’s leadership has reportedly applied for French visas for their families in recent days, while also taking steps to secure assets abroad.
“In the past 24 hours, high-ranking dignitaries from the reformist clan — including the president of the Islamic Assembly — have been attempting to obtain French visas for their families via a Parisian lawyer,” Iranian-French journalist Emmanuel Razavi told the French news outlet Le Figaro.
Razavi also told the Nouvelle Revue Politique in a separate interview that the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, is one of the leaders seeking a visa. The journalist added that the nephew of former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani applied for a visa to France.
There have also been reports that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has a backup plan to flee the country if security forces fail to suppress the protests or begin to defect.
“The ‘plan B’ is for Khamenei and his very close circle of associates and family, including his son and nominated heir apparent, Mojtaba,” an intelligence source told the British newspaper The Times.
The Iranian leader would reportedly flee to Moscow, following the path of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
However, some experts have cast doubt on reports that Khamenei, who has not left Iran for decades, plans to flee, arguing the 86-year-old leader will likely die in the country.
As anti-regime protests continue to sweep Iran and security forces struggle to contain them, Iranian officials are increasingly blaming one another and foreign enemies, laying bare growing fractures within the regime.
All eyes on Iran. Widespread protests in Iran. Call for freedom
pic.twitter.com/9ONJUsb8U9
— Masud Gharahkhani (@MasudGh) January 8, 2026
The nationwide protests, which began with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran last week, initially reflected public anger over the soaring cost of living, a deepening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plummeting to record lows amid renewed economic sanctions, with annual inflation near 40 percent.
Increasingly, however, the protests have turned against the government itself, with demonstrators shouting slogans against the regime.
For nearly two weeks, widespread demonstrations have shaken the Islamist regime, with violent clashes between protesters and security forces drawing international attention and increasing pressure on the government to refrain from using violence against peaceful demonstrators.
Khamenei last week accused “enemies of the Islamic Republic” of stoking unrest and warned that “rioters should be put in their place.” Then on Friday, he described the demonstrators as a “bunch of vandals” who were trying to “please” US President Donald Trump, vowing authorities will “not back down.”
Iranian rights group HRANA said on Friday it had documented the deaths of at least 62 people, including 14 security personnel and 48 protesters, since protests began on Dec. 28.
As regime forces intensify their crackdown on protesters and opposition figures in an effort to maintain stability, the government has cut internet access and telephone lines — a move experts warned could signal an imminent violent escalation — though videos of the demonstrations continue to circulate online.
This week, US Trump reiterated his threat to strike Iran if security forces kill protesters, warning that any violence against demonstrators would carry “serious consequences” for the regime.
“I have let them know that if they start killing people, which they tend to do during their riots … we’re going to hit them very hard,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt.
According to the Norway-based Iran Human Rights NGO (IHRNGO), dozens of protesters, including eight children, have been killed since the protests began, with more than 340 demonstrations reported across all 31 of Iran’s provinces.
According to media reports and social media videos from Iran, anti-riot forces — including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij militia, local police, and the army — have used violent tactics such as live fire, tear gas, and water cannons to suppress demonstrations.
In widely circulated social media videos, protesters can be heard chanting slogans such as “Death to the dictator” and “Khamenei will be toppled this year,” while also calling for Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to step down.
The ongoing demonstrations are the largest since the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which erupted nationwide after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died in a Tehran police station following her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules, sparking calls for human rights and individual freedoms across Iran.
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Employees of Popular NYC Bakery Move to Unionize Over Company’s Support for Israel, ‘Zionist Projects’
A Breads Bakery location in New York City. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Staff members at the extremely popular New York City establishment Breads Bakery announced they are unionizing over working conditions, unfair wages, and the company’s support for Israel.
Over 30 percent of workers across the company’s locations in New York have signed authorization cards to join the newly formed Breaking Breads Union, which will be represented by United Auto Workers. They compared their hardships as staff members of the company to so-called “genocide” taking place in the Middle East and are demanding that the bakery sever all ties with Israel.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the workers said they refuse to participate “in Zionist projects” such as fundraisers that support what they claim is Israel’s “occupation of Palestine.”
“We demand a future with a redistribution of profits, safer working conditions, more respect, and an end to this company’s support of the genocide happening in Palestine,” they previously said in statement released on Jan. 2. “We cannot and will not ignore the implicit and explicit support this bakery has for Israel. We see our struggles for fair pay, respect, and safety as connected to struggles against genocide and forces of exploitation around the world. There are deep cultural changes that need to happen here, and we need to see accountability from upper management.”
Staff members supporting the union said they delivered the same statement as a speech in front of the bakery’s owner and Israeli founder Gadi Peleg as well as its CEO, fellow Israeli Yonatan Floman, inside the bakery’s Union Square flagship location and also outside of the establishment.
The New York City bakery produces artisan, handmade breads and pastries, but is most famous for its babka. It has five locations across Manhattan, has been featured on television, and has done collaborations with high-profile figures including chefs and cookbook authors Martha Stewart, Padma Lakeshmi, Katie Lee Biegel, and Molly Yeh, as well as Israeli chef Ben Siman-Tov. The bakery regularly sells pastries or breads inspired by the Jewish holidays, such as Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, and Purim. It is reportedly a spinoff of a Tel Aviv bakery, and its menu includes challah, bourekas, and other traditional Jewish foods.
Following the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Breads Bakery launched a project called “Strand With Us,” in which they sold special heart-shaped challahs on Fridays and sent all profits to support Magen David Adom emergency medical services in Israel. The bakery raised more than $20,000 as part of the project. The company also donated its signature black-and-white cookies to a bake sale fundraiser that raised $27,000 to help a Tel Aviv-based organization preparing meals for displaced families and hospital workers in Israel. The bakery additionally sold cookies featuring the Israeli flag, according to Breaking Breads, and annually participates in the Great Nosh, a Jewish food festival on Governor’s Island that is supported by some pro-Israel groups that donate to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
In November 2023, one location of Breads Bakery in Manhattan was vandalized after someone spray-painted with red graffiti the message “Free Gaza” on the store’s window.
In a statement on Wednesday, Breads Bakery said it is concerned about “divisive political issues” in its bakeries.
“Breads Bakery is built on love and genuine care for our team. We make babka, we don’t engage in politics. We celebrate peace and embrace people of all cultures and beliefs,” the company said. “We’ve always been a workplace where people of all backgrounds and viewpoints can come together around a shared purpose, the joy found at a bakery, and we find it troubling that divisive political issues are being introduced into our workplace.”
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Emma Goldman, superstar? The Jewish anarchist has a surprising role to play in American musical theater
Lately I’ve been thinking about Emma Goldman, the Russian-born Jewish anarchist who attracted droves of followers in her 30-plus years in the United States. I’ve not really been focused on her place in history writ large, more her surprisingly robust soap box in the world of musical theater. For all her import to the American left, on Broadway she’s mostly a bit part. And that bothers me.
Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s Ragtime, now in a lauded revival at Lincoln Center, devotes a song to her 1906 speech at Union Square. From there she interprets the subtext of a meeting between the WASPy, rich character “Younger Brother” and Black pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. As a featured player, minus ensemble numbers, she’s in the mix for less than 10 minutes — she features more in E.L. Doctorow’s novel.
When I saw the Encores production at New York’s City Center last year, I remembered that Goldman has a cameo in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins; in a brief encounter that would later haunt her, she hands a pamphlet to William McKinley’s future assassin Leon Czolgosz. Her role there, played by a member of the ensemble who doubles other parts, is even smaller.
While on vacation in Colorado over New Year’s (I skied; the chair lift conked me in the head), I got an email about an upcoming production of a chamber opera called E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman. I had to know more. Was she finally getting her due?
The piece, which began performances at Theater for the New City on Jan. 8, is by composer Leonard Lehrman and librettist Karen Ruoff Kramer. It’s actually not new at all, just the most recent production of a story they’ve been telling — or gospel they’ve been spreading — for over 40 years. To date they’ve presented the piece, together with educational slides, in five countries, at universities and synagogues, for groups like the Workers Circle and to mark important anniversaries, like the centennial of the Haymarket Riot that helped radicalize Goldman. They believe the work is more topical than ever.
“She’s talking about how war drains the economy from everything else, and militarism, to stay alive, will look for an enemy or even create one artificially,” said Lehrman, whose piece features him on piano and acting as Goldman’s lover, friend and partner Alexander Berkman. (Caryn Hartglass plays the title role.)
“It’s happening right now,” added Lehrman, “the creation of an enemy in order to distract from domestic failure.”
Lehrman and Kramer began work on the musical in 1984, first basing it on historian Howard Zinn’s play Emma. As the pair researched Goldman’s life, the story took a different tack. The pair met as expats in Germany, and, given that connection, gravitated toward her life in exile, which began in 1919 when the U.S. deported her as a radical “alien.” The action of the piece tells her life story through the various parts of a visa application she filled out from St. Tropez in 1933. (The section on the form for “name” deals with identity and her marriages for which she took other surnames; for “sex” she offers the Austin Powers “Yes, please” — though Lehrman and Kramer wrote it first — and goes on like that, even covering her 1916 arrest at the Forward building for giving a talk about birth control.)
“I need America,” she says in the opening moments. “And I need to know: Does America need me now?”
It makes a certain sense for Goldman to express her ideas through song. Les Miserables, if nothing else, has shown the anthemic potential of staging a revolution. (Its signature anthem shows up in real-world protests with some regularity.)
Goldman is credited with saying, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution,” a quotable that gets its own number in Lehrman’s musical. Speaking over Zoom, Lehrman wore a shirt with those words and a portrait of Goldman.
Lehrman noted that in addition to his opera, there are two other ones about Goldman they know of — one by Elaine Fine, made in collaboration with Zinn, and another by Canadian composer Gary Kulesha.
Given her radical bona fides and thoughts about capitalism, some may wonder if Goldman might clash with the format of musical drama. We don’t have too much to go on for musicals, as the form as we now know it arguably wasn’t established until around 13 years before her death, with Showboat (it debuted in 1927, after her deportation; one suspects she would approve of how it addressed racial prejudice).
In her time, opera for the bourgeois and Vaudeville for the masses were popular musical entertainment. While Goldman turned down offers to appear on Vaudeville stages, Samantha M. Cooper, professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas, observed in a 2023 lecture, Goldman was a fan — if also a critic — of opera, writing about it with some frequency in her magazine Mother Earth, and even in a lecture notes in admiration of Richard Wagner.
Cooper argues that perhaps Goldman’s most pivotal reference to opera comes in her memoir, Living My Life. In it Goldman recounts how, after watching a performance of Carmen at the Met, her mentor Johann Most asked her to recall her first experience at the opera in Königsberg.
She vividly recounted seeing Il trovatore as a school girl, where she “first realized the ecstasy music could create in me.” Hearing her impassioned reflection, Most told Goldman she had talent and must “begin soon to recite and speak in public.”
“He grinned and emptied his glass to my ‘first public speech,’” Goldman recalled.
Could it be that we have opera, then, to thank for Emma Goldman’s oratory, and so, her future presence in musicals?
E.G. makes clear that the firebrand activist is not so uni-dimensional as Ragtime and Assassins make her seem. Her life was limned with contradictions. She enjoyed the finer things — and also railed against fatcat industrialists up to the point of attempted murder.
Drawing from letters historian Candace Falk found in the back of a record store — the owner showed them to her when she learned her dog was named “Red Emma Goldman” — Lehrman and Kramer’s piece reveals Goldman as a sexual creature with a biting wit. And it makes the case that while she was condemned to a life away from America for her so-called subversion, she was nonetheless a patriot.
“It’s important that people see that there was a courageous way of being very much American that was not the same thing as just buckling under when McCarthy comes and says, ‘You guys have to shut up now,’” said Kramer.
Though the portrait in E.G. makes for a more comprehensive profile than the one now at Lincoln Center, it also presents something larger in its invitation to consider her legacy.
“E.G. means ‘For example, take this example,’” said Kramer. “Not in the sense of cloning Emma in all respects, but certainly the insistence on understanding and the courage to push for things that are right, even if they’re not popular, and that others should do that too.”
In the canon of musical theater, there are many examples to choose from. I like the one who dances. Sign me up for a shirt.
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