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Peter Beinart, Elliot Cosgrove and other Jewish leaders face off over the future of liberal Zionism
(JTA) — For decades, liberal Zionism served the American Jewish majority as the ideological bridge between democratic and Jewish values: Support for Israel was based in, and justified by, a commitment to Jewish self-determination anchored in democracy, and animated by the promise of peace with the Palestinians.
On Tuesday night in Manhattan, a group of prominent rabbis and Jewish thinkers gathered to ask whether that bridge is now collapsing.
The conversation, held at B’nai Jeshurun in the heart of the famously Jewish and historically liberal Upper West Side, centered on what panelists described as a profound crisis in liberal Zionism — accelerated by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the devastating war in Gaza that followed, but rooted in decades of occupation, the rightward political drift in Israel and growing estrangement between American and Israeli Jews.
The panel brought together figures who have long wrestled publicly with Israel’s moral and political direction, albeit to different degrees: Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of the rabbinic human rights organization T’ruah; Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue; Peter Beinart, the writer and editor who lately has soured on the idea of a Jewish state in favor of a single, binational state of Arabs and Jews; and Esther Sperber, an Israeli-American architect and Orthodox activist critical of Israel’s shift to the right.
Representatives of the Zionist right were not invited to sit on the panel, said moderator Rabbi Irwin Kula, because “that’s [not] where the crisis is.”
“We are living through the collapse of a paradigm,” said Kula, describing a polarized Jewish community shaken by grief, fear of antisemitism, and, especially for liberal Zionists, despair that their vision of two states for two people will ever come about. Kula, who championed pluralism as the president of the Jewish organization CLAL, said the question was no longer how big the Jewish tent should be, but whether it had already been “shredded.”
Throughout the evening, Kula resisted turning the discussion into a debate over one state versus two states or competing historical narratives. Instead, he pressed panelists to articulate the fears and “nightmares” driving their positions — a strategy meant to surface “vulnerability” rather than certainty. For the most part, the audience — 700 in the sanctuary, and another 1,000 online, according to the synagogue — held its applause and jeers, as Kula requested, lending the evening the hushed air of a memorial service.
Cosgrove, who recently referred to himself as a “liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government,” framed his fears around internal Jewish fracture. Drawing on biblical imagery, he warned that American Jews were increasingly turning one another into enemies, and said that the role of pulpit rabbis like him is to make room in their congregations for disagreement.
“My primary fear, and that is my primary role right now, is that in a moment of time when the Jewish people don’t lack for external enemies, we are making internal enemies,” he said. “And I believe that the role of rabbinic leadership and all of leadership right now must be that we restrain ourselves from this need to call the other a ‘self-hating Jew’ or ‘self-hating Zionist,’ or whatever label you want to put on one side, and a colonial oppressor on the other side.”
Jacobs, whose organization has been outspoken in condemning Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank, said liberal Zionism’s credibility has been undermined by institutions that claim its mantle while abandoning their Jewish values.
For years, she said, major Jewish “legacy” organizations instructed American Jews that supporting Israel meant defending its government, ignoring occupation and silencing Palestinian voices. As Israel has moved further away from liberal democracy, that model has alienated young Jews, whose distancing from Israel was front of mind for a panel whose youngest members are in their 50s.
“You have a young generation who’s never known Israel without Netanyahu in the helm, or almost never known the possibility of peace for both Israelis and Palestinians,” Jacobs said.
“Unsurprisingly,” she continued, that generation “looks around and says, ‘Well, if you’re telling me that Zionism means defending occupation and defending illiberal democracy, I want no part of that.’”
Jacobs suggested that most American Jews remain deeply connected to Israel while opposing its current government and supporting a two-state solution — a position she described as underrepresented in communal leadership.
In March, a Pew Research survey found that about 46% of Jewish Americans, or a plurality, said a two‑state solution is the best outcome. Polling by Pew and others also suggests that while a substantial share of young Jews still affirms the importance of Israel and the two‑state idea, they also tend to be less supportive of Israeli policy and more questioning of traditional Zionist approaches than older generations.
Sperber brought the crisis into the realm of family and faith. Speaking as an Israeli with relatives across the political spectrum, she described conversations that have become nearly impossible, even among her siblings in Israel who share religious language and deep attachment to the land.
She said her own activism as a founder of Smol Emuni, or the “faithful left,” grew out of alarm at what she called the celebration of power, vengeance and dehumanization in Israel discourse in her community of Orthodox and otherwise observant Jews. Their uncritical support of the current Israeli government and its hawkish policies is often justified, she said, through distorted readings of Jewish tradition.
“We hear a kind of admiration of power and vengeance and brutality that is using our Jewish tradition as its justification,” said Sperber. “People talking about the Palestinians as Amalek, a kind of mythical nation that is supposed to be destroyed.
“Our Judaism has been leached away from us, and we need to find a way to bring it back into a place that’s morally grounded in our Torah and in our kind of democratic and liberal” values, she continued.
What is needed, she argued, is not only broader inclusion but teshuvah — moral self-examination and repentance — a core Jewish response to catastrophe.
Beinart, a prominent journalist whose call for one state has placed him outside the liberal Zionist camp, described his own position as emerging from years of listening to Palestinians, including people in Gaza. He spoke of specific conversations that left him haunted by the scale of civilian suffering and fearful of being judged by future generations for silence or complicity.
“The most constructive role I could play is to nudge people a little bit to listen to Palestinians,” he said. Such conversations undermine assumptions about Palestinian intentions and force Jews to confront how “ethnonationalism in Israel-Palestine” contradicts their own ideals as Americans. The liberal Zionist promise — that one could affirm Jewish safety, democracy and equality simultaneously — has failed under the weight of reality, he suggested.
At the same time, Beinart — recently criticized by Zionists and supporters of the Israel boycott after his appearance at Tel Aviv University — acknowledged the cost of rejecting the Zionist idea of exclusive Jewish sovereignty: estrangement from the observant Jewish communities he once felt at home in, and anxiety about what that alienation means for his children.
“My nightmare is that I will continue to lose those relationships because I can’t find a way to communicate effectively with people who profoundly disagree with the positions that I’ve taken that I do it out of love for our people and then other people,” said Beinart.
Indeed, Cosgrove suggested that Beinart’s views have become so toxic in many parts of the Jewish community that it was a risk for a prominent pulpit rabbi like him to share the stage. “I’m concerned, because this is a public forum, that me sitting here quietly would signal my assent with anything that’s being said here,” Cosgrove said at one point, earning scattered applause.
Cosgrove agreed with the notion that American Jews could learn from Palestinian voices, but also said that critics of Israel should speak with Israeli soldiers and others “risking life and limb to make sure the atrocities of Oct. 7 never happen again.”
Repeatedly, the conversation returned to American Jews’ relationship with Israeli Jews — and to the question of responsibility across distance and disagreement. Even panelists sharply critical of Israeli policy rejected the idea of disengagement.
“We can’t try to create a Jewish community that has nothing to do with half of the [world’s] Jews,” Jacobs said, referring to the young anti-Zionist Jews who are severing their relationship with Israel, home to more than 7 million Jews. At the same time, she urged American Jews to stop using Israel as a proxy for Jewish identity and invest more deeply in Jewish life at home.
By the evening’s end, no roadmap had emerged for saving liberal Zionism — or replacing it. Sperber suggested Jews like her have a responsibility to continue to bring their “moral convictions to your Jewish community and the very broken country that we live in,” even in the absence of political solutions.
“The challenge is on us, those who still believe that Israel is a vital and important place that we care [about] and love,” she said.
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National Council of Jewish Women ejects LA chapter, other affiliates cut ties amid historic reboot
When wildfires blazed through Los Angeles last year, displacing tens of thousands of people, the local National Council of Jewish Women affiliate was well positioned to help. The national nonprofit’s LA chapter already ran donation drop-off sites across the city — its iconic thrift shops — and employed staff that knew how to sort the flood of donated items.
And after NCJW-LA chief executive Marjorie Gilberg sent an appeal to her members, colleagues at chapters in other cities also shared the letter with their own constituents. Hundreds of thousands of dollars soon poured in from outside of LA, and Gilberg’s nonprofit — which has focused on economic justice for decades — ultimately distributed more than $1 million in cash relief, donated goods and store vouchers to fire-affected families.
“It felt like a huge hug,” Gilberg said. “There was support coming from all these directions, from these women across the country to pull for LA. I was like, ‘Oh, this is what a network is for.’”
But last month, the chapter’s parent organization, the National Council of Jewish Women, cut ties with the LA group.
Citing a “strained” relationship, NCJW president Laura Monn Ginsburg informed Gilberg’s board May 8 that the national organization was terminating its affiliation with the LA chapter, whose $23 million annual budget is three times national’s size. NCJW gave the chapter 90 days to rebrand.
“Despite our good-faith efforts to preserve the affiliation,” Monn Ginsburg wrote, “the Board of Directors of NCJW, Inc., has concluded that continued affiliation with the LA section is no longer tenable.”
The collaborative response to the LA fires reflected one of the strengths that has made the National Council of Jewish Women a leading American social justice nonprofit movement for more than a century. The grassroots Jewish movement started out by seeding local sections and only established a national umbrella in the mid-20th century. As the parent group lobbied on progressive issues, dozens of local sections pursued that mission at the grassroots level in ways that served their local communities, working mostly independent of each other and collaborating when opportunities arose.
But that freedom for local chapters to choose their own priorities is now history. The Washington, D.C.-based parent organization, citing scores of section closures over the last two decades, is transitioning to a regional model focused more on political advocacy than community service. The national shakeup, which began in earnest last July, has already resulted in two sections closing and the decision by three more — in Arizona and Essex County, New Jersey, as well as LA — to break away from the national council. The movement’s six largest remaining chapters — as well as roughly 20 others in the network — may soon follow suit.
National leadership says the restructuring was necessary to prevent further closures, free local chapters from the burden of administration and allow the national organization to expand into places not currently served by the local model. And the group is betting that a tighter, advocacy-focused national agenda will effect greater political change locally and launch the Jewish women’s movement into the future.
“We want folks to take action that is more strategic, that is more thought through, to ensure that they are going to be more successful,” said Ellen Buchman, NCJW’s vice president of engagement and leadership. “We will never question whether the right people to do that is our grassroots — it always will be. The difference is how they will do it.”
But the uncertainty in the network points to a massive identity change for the legacy nonprofit, and to some, a tragic one. Leaders of some sections said moving away from community service work would not only abdicate a local responsibility, but also subtract a powerful Jewish presence from the front lines of American social justice during a time of rising antisemitism.
“We are a Jewish organization that has shown up in progressive places, we’ve shown up in women’s health, all these important issues across the country,” Gilberg said. “And they’re just tearing it down with no sense. It’s the worst possible time to be doing this to this kind of organization.”
A proud grassroots history
The story of NCJW reads like a progressive history of the United States — and in some ways, it is. The organization was founded in 1893 by women who had been invited to the participate in the Chicago World’s Fair, only to discover that the role others had intended for them was as hostesses pouring coffee. The organization originally focused on Jewish religious education for women and children, but quickly branched out to social welfare issues. Today, many of the movement’s 250,000 subscribers — the national group calls them advocates — are the children or grandchildren of lifetime members.
On virtually any American social concern you can think of since then — education, criminal justice reform, civil rights, abortion rights — NCJW, backed by the voices of hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, has been at the forefront of political advocacy.
On virtually any American progressive domestic cause you can think of today, there’s a National Council section pursuing it at the local level. And maybe only one; it’s often said in the NCJW network that if you know one section, you know — well, one section. Their efforts are wide-ranging and specialized: The Pittsburgh section operates a daycare center for children whose parents are required in court; Essex organizes an annual fair for low-income families to pick up free school supplies; Arizona runs a sexual assault trauma recovery center. The sections frequently partner with other local nonprofits, too — sometimes the only Jewish presence in those progressive spaces.
At its peak, the nonprofit had hundreds of sections — one veteran estimated as many as 200 in the post-Roe era. The national organization counted more than 125 in the early 2000s. But Jewish civic life across the country has since contracted, and younger members have grown scarce. There is no local chapter in the Washington metro area today — there were once five — or in some other major Jewish communities, including Boston and Philadelphia.
The 44 sections that remain today — that number does not include the three disaffiliating — range in size. Some have full staffs, thousands of members and budgets in the millions; others are fully volunteer-led, with a five-figure budget and a membership in the dozens.
They have enjoyed a symbiotic, mostly hands-off relationship with the national body. The nationally recognized legacy of NCJW helps the local chapters fundraise, and most sections are registered as 501(c)3 organizations under the national nonprofit’s group tax exemption. The sections pay dues according to their budget, and do the grassroots community work that bolster the national body’s credibility. They unite on certain national initiatives like Repro Shabbat, an annual abortion rights-themed Shabbat program held in 2,000 local communities, Buchman said.
“The organization does tremendous advocacy work nationally, so it does help us locally when we are doing our own advocacy work,” said Andrea Rakitta Mintz, the Essex chapter’s president. “But we are the ones who want to do the hands-on volunteering.”
A new national direction
Still, according to Buchman, the national vice president, the old system was unsustainable. “The antiquated 100-plus-year old system was not going to be able to continue if it was not going to be updated,” she said. For the national organization, it didn’t matter if the Los Angeles and Essex chapters were thriving if 10 or 20 other chapters were spiraling into dissolution.
And while the diversity of the sections was “wonderful,” Buchman said, it was also “something that we’re trying to reel in, so that through consistent advocacy as an organization we can have a greater impact, and be more of a household name.”
After bringing in a consulting firm to survey thousands of NCJW members and stakeholders, the national group formalized a new strategic plan, known as NCJW Forward, that replaced the sections with a regional staffing model. The plan established four core advocacy areas — reproductive rights, gender pay equity, family economic security, and combating antisemitism and hate — and included an increased focus on doing advocacy in Israel.
When it presented the formal plan to its sections in July 2025, NCJW offered them a choice: Integrate with the national organization — that is, turn over assets and donor lists and agree to the new structure — or disaffiliate. It gave sections until December 2027 to decide. Two of them, located in Greater Houston and Sarasota, closed in the next six months.
Buchman acknowledged the integration model would have staffing implications for both the national organization — which expects to hire up to 15 people over the next three years — and its affiliates. Some section staff will likely be let go upon integration with the national group, she said, and others may be kept on a case-by-case basis. Each section’s board of directors, meanwhile, would go from managing its affairs to serving as an advisory committee.
For some smaller sections, integration made sense. NCJW Miami, for example, already focused on reproductive justice advocacy, and it was fully board-run, with no staff. Integration meant surrendering independence, said Jessica Silver, a board member of the section, but it also came with additional national resources.
“We really don’t feel like we were giving up very much,” Silver said. “We can still really do everything that we want to do locally, and now we just have more of a partner in National in doing that work.”
The six additional sections integrating — whose budgets range from $30,000 to $200,000, according to Buchman — are Louisville, Minnesota, Colorado, Long Beach (California), Chicago North Shore, Kendall (Florida) and Utah.
Buchman said the three integrating sections with executive directors would be phasing them out. But NCJW Louisville’s executive director, Sarah Harlan, said the national organization had been flexible during the integration process, allowing her and her office administrator — the section’s only two employees — to stay on as contract staff.
Other volunteer-led sections, however, warned that integration would undermine decades of community work, if not squander it.
NCJW Arizona’s board president, Civia Tamarkin, said that though her section did not employ staff, merging was never an option. On a technical level, she said, her organization needed autonomy and local nonprofit status to advocate on state issues, serve on government advisory committees and partner with other Arizona-based nonprofits.
But she also did not trust NCJW staff for her region — which would be based in Denver, according to the strategic plan — to oversee Ruth Place, the trauma recovery center her section founded three years ago for survivors of sexual assault.
“It’s our Field of Dreams,” Tamarkin said. “We don’t want to lose that or turn it over to any other entity.”
The organization plans to rename itself the Jewish Women’s Action Alliance Arizona.
For larger sections, an uncertain future
When NCJW presented its sections in July 2025 with the option to integrate or break off, it offered a third route to the seven chapters whose budgets exceeded $750,000 — a new kind of affiliation. Affiliating sections would be required to commit to NCJW’s core issues; follow rules about how to allocate funds; and adopt the national group’s standards around Zionism, which include supporting a two-state solution.
The seven sections replied in September 2025 with a joint letter from their lawyers, Gilberg said, rejecting the proposal and outlining their concerns. She said the national organization has still not sent a letter in response. Buchman says the organization did respond, asking to meet in person rather than conduct a negotiation in writing.
Seven months later, without any changes to the affiliation proposal, Essex announced it was rebranding as Tovah, a decision that went into effect Monday.
Rakitta Mintz, the Essex president, felt the same way about her chapter’s signature programs as Tamarkin did about Ruth Place. The section’s Center For Women, which provides free career coaching to women re-entering the workforce, has helped 40 people get new jobs just this year. An annual fair where low-income families “shop” for free school supplies was another Essex hallmark she didn’t want threatened.
Neither of those efforts fits explicitly into the national organization’s four core advocacy issues. So while Rakitta Mintz was weighing the chapter’s options before cutting ties, she said she never saw the affiliation option as a real possibility.
“We did not want to lose our autonomy,” she said, “and we didn’t want to lose the ability to do our local hands-on volunteer work.”
The other five major sections — New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Michigan and St. Louis — entered mediation with the national organization, which pertained to possible changes to the organization’s bylaws. (A sixth section, Dallas, was offered affiliation later, and did not participate in the mediation.)
Buchman said those talks went well.
“We also feel strongly that we will come back to the table to make more progress,” she added. “We haven’t yet figured out when that will be, but we had not talked for months, and we have now, and that’s a sign of true progress.”
LA’s banishment stunned many in the network, including leaders of the other sections that had joined it in mediation. But it did not blindside Gilberg, who had been preparing for the possibility LA would be going independent by securing the section’s own IRS tax determination letter.
According to Buchman, the national vice president, the LA section’s work simply did not align with the NCJW vision.
“To us, the LA section does a beautiful job focusing solely on financial independence and economic security, and that’s never been what our organization has chosen to do,” Buchman said. “Certainly, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that economic justice isn’t part of our work to improve the lives of women, children, and families, but our priority issues are broader than that.”
Gilberg pointed to numerous places in NCJW Forward that seemed to highlight economic justice work, including on its page about family economic security, though its policy ambitions do not include cash assistance, which features in several ongoing NCJW LA programs.
“In their current policy priorities, there’s paid family leave — which is specifically an economic justice issue,” Gilberg said. “That’s one of their big four things.”
Buchman said 10 more sections were likely to integrate and estimated eight to 10 others were “on the fence.” She did not say which chapters fell in each category.
Those numbers, combined with the five departures and five in mediation, left about a dozen sections unaccounted for. Buchman, who joined NCJW two years ago with more than 30 years of nonprofit experience, said she didn’t know where those chapters stood.
But she didn’t regard disaffiliation or closure as a subtraction for the national group.
“It frees us up to meet our goals, which is to expand,” Buchman said. “There are cities that have advocates but no sections. Or legislative opportunities but no advocacy. Where we have donors but no fundraising.” She added that it was possible she’d send fundraisers into cities where disaffiliated sections continued to operate.
To some NCJW veterans, though, the breakup felt like a slow-motion collapse for an organization that once spoke for hundreds of thousands of Jewish women.
“A lot of people have a very nostalgic feeling for NCJW,” said Tamarkin, the Arizona section head. “They may be third-generation, fourth-generation and are very sad to see the federation broken up.
“On the other hand,” she continued, “times change, organizations change, and in such a competitive economic climate for nonprofits, every organization has to do what they are advised is the best route forward.”
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Trump says Netanyahu ‘turned his Troops around’ after he asked Israel not to bomb Beirut
(JTA) — U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming credit for another truce between Hezbollah and Israel, nearly two months after surprising both sides by declaring a ceasefire that has teetered ever since.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said nothing has changed in Israel’s approach to battling Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it is based.
“I had a conversation with Bibi Netanyahu today, asking him not to go into a major raid of Beirut, Lebanon. He turned his Troops around. Thank you Bibi!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday afternoon. “I also had a conversation with Representatives of the Leaders of Hezbollah, and they agreed to stop shooting at Israel, and its soldiers. Likewise, Israel agreed to stop shooting at them. Let’s see how long that lasts — Hopefully it will be for ETERNITY!”
The post followed another similar message published hours earlier in which Trump said “there will be no Troops going to Beirut, and any Troops that are on their way, have already been turned back.”
The posts came after days of heavy fighting in Lebanon, where multiple Israeli soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah drones and Israel spurred an evacuation in the outskirts of Beirut after warning that it would soon launch an operation against Hezbollah outposts there.
In a post of his own on X, Netanyahu confirmed that he had spoken with Trump but did not say that he had agreed to a ceasefire.
“Tonight, I spoke with President Trump and told him that if Hezbollah does not cease attacking our cities and citizens—Israel will attack terror targets in Beirut. This stance of ours remains unchanged,” Netanyahu wrote. “In parallel, the IDF will continue to operate as planned in southern Lebanon.”
The Lebanese Embassy in Washington, meanwhile, said in a statement that Lebanon had learned that Hezbollah had agreed to a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire.
The hostilities in Lebanon and northern Israel reflect a distinct front in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. When Trump declared a ceasefire in that war in early April, Israel at first maintained that it did not apply to Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy. But Trump insisted that Netanyahu cease fighting in Lebanon, too.
Two months later, Trump is still negotiating for a permanent end to the Iran war. On Monday, he said on CNBC that he found the talks to be “very boring” and did not care if the Iranians dropped out of discussions.
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Smotrich’s surprise appearance at Israel Day Parade sparks backlash from NY and Jewish leaders
(New York Jewish Week) — Amid a record crowd at New York’s annual Israel Day parade on Sunday, one participant is standing out.
A growing number of city, state and Jewish leaders are denouncing the participation of Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right Israeli minister who joined the march without having been announced in advance.
“The facts: Smotrich was NOT invited. Crashed at the last minute. Marched in the back of the parade. Not one New York public official joined him,” David Greenfield, the CEO and executive director of the Met Council, which sponsored a pre-parade breakfast for elected officials Sunday, wrote in a post on X.
Greenfield was responding to a groundswell of anger about Smotrich’s presence at the rally, which is typically framed as a broad Jewish communal celebration of Israel. While the inclusion of Israeli government officials has long been a sticking point for some who would prefer the parade to avoid politics, this year Smotrich’s presence in particular has proved galling for several prominent parade participants.
“Bezalel Smotrich is a far-right extremist whose hateful and divisive rhetoric is fundamentally at odds with the values we hold dear in New York,” Gov. Kathy Hochul, who joined the march, wrote in a post on X Monday. “Yesterday’s parade was a celebration of Jewish pride, community, and unity. I strongly condemn his participation.”
Attorney General Letitia James, who attended the parade, and New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores also condemned Smotrich on Monday.
The Israeli government had promised its largest-ever delegation this year, in part a show of strength at a time when New York City’s anti-Israel mayor, Zohran Mamdani, vowed to skip the parade. But it had not said that Smotrich, who recently said he believed he was facing International Criminal Court charges, would be among the group. Smotrich joined the parade after flying in from Israel early Sunday morning.
Mamdani condemned the inclusion of Smotrich and other ministers in the parade, telling MS Now in an interview published Monday that he was “offended” by their presence.
“You can see in the participation of the far-right Israeli minister Smotrich, as well as a number of other ministers, a vision of annihilation, a complicity in genocide, and frankly, a belief that does not have much value for even the sanctity of children in Gaza,” Mamdani said. “I am offended, as I know many New Yorkers are, by their participation.”
Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, has been sanctioned by several countries for inciting settler violence against Palestinians. The head of Israel’s far-right Religious Zionist Party, Smotrich has previously advocated for annexing the majority of the West Bank, called for the “total annihilation” of cities in Gaza, and said that it would be “justified and moral” to block humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.
On Friday, Mark Treyger, the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which organizes the parade, said he did not know exactly which Israeli officials would be at the parade.
“We don’t have the full details as far as who is or who is not coming from the Israeli delegation,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time.
“That’s usually handled from the consulate office, and I will refer to them as far as handling that,” Treyger added. “But for me personally, it’s really not about politicians. It’s about the people that we are welcoming, as far as families across New York, the state, the region, folks coming in from across the country that are looking forward to this parade.”
For some of them, Smotrich’s participation was a blemish.
“Bezalel Smotrich should be sanctioned by American political and Jewish communal leaders – not marching alongside them in the streets of New York City,” the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street wrote in a post on X. As a political organization, J Street does not officially participate in the parade, but its members typically march as part of liberal delegations.
Other liberal Jewish groups similarly criticized both Smotrich’s presence and New York politicians for participating in the same parade as the Israeli delegation.
“It is shocking to see New York officials march alongside Kahanists like Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit members, whose support for illegal settlements and territorial expansion inspire violence, hatred and the further immiseration of the West Bank and Gaza,” New York Jewish Agenda wrote in a post on X.
“We are grateful to Mayor Mamdani for refusing to march in the Israel Day Parade, which featured some of the Israeli politicians who have not only cheered on the genocide of Palestinians, but are part of the government committing that genocide,” tweeted the left-wing group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, adding, “Shame on every elected official who marched yesterday.”
Israel had announced several participants in advance of the parade, including Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli and Immigration and Absorption Minister Ofir Sofer. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, who has said he wants to see Gaza flattened by a nuclear bomb and then resettled by Jews, was also on the list.
Tamar Glezerman, an organizer for Israelis for Peace, which took part in a small demonstration along the parade route to oppose the Israeli government delegation’s presence, told JTA Sunday that she was surprised to see Smotrich in the group.
“They hid that because the Israeli government is, you know, a group of cowards, and they don’t want to get pushback,” she said.
Treyger appeared to respond to the outcry on Monday, writing in a post on X that while “some individuals who attended were neither invited by JCRC-NY nor known to us in advance, participation in the parade is not an endorsement of any political figure or ideology.”
A spokesperson for JCRC declined to clarify whether Treyger was referring to Smotrich specifically.
“We reject rhetoric that dehumanizes others, fuels division, or diminishes the dignity of any human being,” Treyger continued.
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