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Prize-winning journalist Amir Tibon is moving back to the kibbutz where he and his family survived Oct. 7
(JTA) — “To be a liberal Zionist, it’s quite a lonely place,” said Amir Tibon, the Israeli journalist whose memoir “The Gates of Gaza” is one of the defining books of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
“Lonely” is relative, of course. Tibon’s story of how he, his wife Miri and their young daughters hunkered in a safe room as Hamas gunmen overran their kibbutz in southern Israel, and how his parents — Maj. Gen. (ret.) Noam Tivon and Dr. Gali Mir-Tibon — rushed into the war zone on a mission to save them, has made him one of the best-known survivors of the carnage.
In an interview, he described the outpouring of support his family received from fellow Israelis and American Jews, and the letters he gets weekly from people inspired by his book.
But Tibon, the opinion editor for the left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz, was speaking about a political reality. In the 33 months since Oct. 7, Israeli society has moved to the right, while the global left has turned Israel, its government, its people and its supporters into pariahs. That makes Tibon an inconvenient figure in both camps: too left for the Zionists, too Zionist for the left, and an eyewitness to events — acts of butchery on one side, security lapses on the other — that both would rather forget.
Meanwhile, even as he feels like a beleaguered minority, he remains committed to a vision of coexistence. “The one thing that is not changing: In this land, you have about 50% Palestinians or Arabs — some of them civilian citizens of Israel — and 50% Jews,” he said. “What do we do? How do we live together in this land? I think that question is not going anywhere.”
On July 28, at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, Tibon will receive the 2026 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for his memoir, subtitled “A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” The $100,000 award, established 20 years ago by the family of the late American real estate developer, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, is presented annually to an emerging author “who demonstrates the potential to make ongoing contributions to Jewish literature.”
In “The Gates of Gaza,” published in the fall of 2024, Tibon weaves his family’s rescue story with a wider history of Kibbutz Nahal Oz and the Gaza border communities and an account of the intelligence and policy failures that left them undefended. The book has also won the National Jewish Book Award, the Wingate Prize and the Bernstein Prize, and has been translated into Hebrew, German, French, Romanian, Italian and Hungarian, with a Spanish edition on the way.
The Rohr prize, Tibon said, arrives at a moment when he feels a duty to keep Oct. 7 in view. “It means that we are not forgetting Oct. 7,” he said of the prize. “We are not allowing anyone to minimize, deny, justify or otherwise just ignore that day and its place in history. There are very powerful forces that are trying to shift the conversation away from that day for various reasons. And by choosing this book, I think the judging panel is doing the opposite: It’s once again putting a spotlight on that day, and on everything that has changed because of it.
Since the attack, Tibon and his family have lived as evacuees in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek in northern Israel. In August, nearly three years after the invasion, they and other evacuees plan to move back home to Nahal Oz and join those who have already come back. Fifteen civilians from the kibbutz were killed on Oct. 7, and eight were taken to Gaza as hostages. More than 50 Israeli soldiers and security personnel were killed in the battle for the kibbutz and at the adjacent army base.
The return, he said, is “still a difficult, complicated situation on many levels — security, resources and just kind of the mental part of it.”
Counting his family, roughly two-thirds of the community who lived there before the attacks will soon be living there.
“I’m not sure everybody who is returning is definitely going to stay,” he said. “I think this is a test we still have to see — how is life going to look for families, what’s going to be the security situation, how much the education and health care and transportation and other government services are going to be high quality. These are all open questions. But we’ll see about all of these things.”
His daughters, Galia, 6, and Carmel, four and a half, have absorbed more in the last three years than any child should. “The kids here grow up too fast,” he said. “They understand a lot of what has happened — Oct. 7, the war with Gaza, the experience of having to leave your home, and then the subsequent Hezbollah and Iran wars. Unfortunately they understand pretty much everything.”
Between the book and a 2025 documentary based on his story, “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue,” Tibon has become one of the most recognizable faces of Oct. 7 — a status he wears uneasily.
“I don’t see myself as a spokesperson for anyone,” he said, pointing to others whose books have resonated widely, including the former hostage Eli Sharabi and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, Her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was abducted by Hamas from the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7. Hersh was slain by his captors after surviving for nearly 11 months in captivity.
Even within his own tiny community, Tibon said, “every story is different.” Nahal Oz has 450 residents. “Each family has its own story from that day.”
But the reception for the book means he has had an impact on how people remember and discuss Oct. 7.”Tens of thousands of people around the world have read this book,” he said, and he still hears from readers weekly. “Most of them are very supportive and uplifting, but there’s also criticism, and I’m happy for that as well.”
Some of that criticism comes from the left, from those who feel his story of Israeli suffering crowds out attention that should be focused on the tens of thousands of Gazans killed in the war and the million-plus who have been displaced. Tibon doesn’t flinch from the argument that the war has been catastrophic for Palestinians — he has said so in print, repeatedly. And he remains a harsh critic of the Netanyahu government, which he feels has extended the war in part to keep its hold on power.
But he insists that Hamas’ culpability for all that followed cannot be erased: “This war never would have started without Oct. 7. That’s just a fact,” he said. “And that day, it was a catastrophe for Israelis, and it was just as much a calamity for the Palestinians.”
Tibon said he is less worried about the activist left’s hostility toward Israel than he is about the mainstream turn in U.S. public opinion. “Today 60% of Americans have a negative view of the country,” he said, “and nobody is going to convince me that 60% of Americans is antisemitic and supports BDS.”
The Netanyahu government, he said, has been “a godsend, a gift from the heavens, for the far left in America,” which prefers to point to Netanyahu and his far-right ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, rather than Israelis like Tibon’s family and the other residents of Nahal Oz who still yearn for peace.
But he warns fellow supporters of Israel against making the opposite mistake, and defending the Israeli government from justified criticism. “If you’re saying Netanyahu is immune from criticism and cannot be separated from Israel, you just made Zohran Mamdani’s day,” he said, referring to the anti-Israel New York City mayor.
Tibon is blunt about what he sees as an Israeli government strategy of trying to move on from Oct. 7. “The government would very much like to erase Oct. 7 from public memory,” he said, “or at least to frame it in terms that are very favorable for them, and make it smaller than the war writ large.”
Given the security failures on that day, Tibon remains flabbergasted that Netanyahu’s government has survived the almost three years since.
He argues Israel abandoned its founding doctrine of short, decisive wars for long, inconclusive ones in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran that served the coalition’s survival more than the country’s security: “They did not defeat Hamas. They did not defeat Hezbollah. They did not defeat Iran. But they managed to survive a full term,” he said.
Not everyone who lived through what Tibon’s family did has landed where he has politically. But while acknowledging the sharp political shift to the right in Israel since Oct. 7, he says it’s not just the left that remains “disgusted” with the government. Friends across the spectrum who served hundreds of days in reserve duty are appalled, for example, by legislation sheltering approximately 72,000 haredi Orthodox yeshiva students from the draft.
That contradiction, he said, is why figures like Avigdor Liberman, Naftali Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot — politicians critical of Netanyahu but hardly doves — are “ascendant right now.”
Asked if he’s changed his own mind about anything since Oct. 7, Tibon didn’t hesitate: “I’ve become more pessimistic.” Then, he catches himself. “If we succumb to total pessimism, then what’s the point of being here at all?”
If there is hope, he said, it has come from community, family and routine. He calls Mishmar HaEmek “a wonderful kibbutz” that “opened their hearts and their home.” Miri resumed her work with autistic children, now in Afula, a city in northern Israel. He went back to Haaretz and wrote the book. “It gives you a sense of purpose and meaning and something to get up for in the morning,” he said. He has also found purpose over the past three years in visiting the families of soldiers who died defending Nahal Oz or fell later in Gaza or Lebanon — “many dozens” by now. “I keep in touch with many of them,” he said. “There is no release from this.”
He is also grateful to the American Jewish organizations and synagogues, many from the Washington, D.C.-area where he and Miri once lived, for an outpouring of support that began on Oct. 8 and hasn’t let up.
“I also find a lot of reasons for hope within my own family — to see my daughters, how they’re growing and overcoming this trauma and becoming independent and strong every day — and to see my community, the people of Nahal Oz, who are doing a little bit every day to make things better and to overcome what happened.
“And I want to be optimistic that just as we are able to rebuild Nahal Oz now, and rebuild our life over there, we will also rebuild the country and put it on the right track.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Why Nick Fuentes endorsed Democrats in the midterms
Nick Fuentes is a devoted conservative, open antisemite and far-right agitator. On his Rumble show, one of the most viewed on the streaming platform, he regularly calls for mass deportations, labels women the biggest threat to America, praises Hitler, slanders Black people as illiterate and blames Jews for a host of societal ills.
So why, on the morning of the 2026 midterm elections, did he post, “Get out and vote Democrat today?”
It sounds like a joke, which wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the shockjock humor the far-right influencer employs. Fuentes paraded with MAGA flags on Boston University’s liberal campus when he was briefly enrolled there. He went to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He had dinner with the then-former president Trump alongside Kanye West. He celebrated the president’s win in 2024.
But Fuentes was not kidding. In his streams on Rumble, where he runs his podcast, America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes, he has been telling his followers, often called Groypers, to vote blue no matter who. He has done the same on X, where his once-banned account was reinstated when Musk bought the platform.
What changed his mind? Well, in large part, Israel.
Fuentes has been complaining for nearly a year now about Trump, for myriad reasons. On X, Fuentes harshly criticized Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files and his failure to deport millions. He slammed the war with Iran. And, as ever, the streamer known for his antisemitism has speculated about Jewish influence on rightwing politicians and causes.
On a stream urging his followers once again to vote for Democratic politicians in congressional races, he said that Trump had failed to end the “genocide in Gaza” and had instead broken his promises not to start any new wars — and done so at Netanyahu’s bidding no less. Angrily, he pointed out that Trump had come into office with control of both the House and the Senate, and with the support of some of the most-desired demographics of American voters: young men.
“For the first time in like a quarter of a century, it was hip to be Republican. It was cool,” Fuentes said, recalling Trump’s win in 2024. But then, he argued, the Republican leadership blew it: “You lost the comedians, you lost the podcast bros, you lost the normies! Normies don’t like war with Iran. Normies don’t like 3.7% inflation!”
But don’t take Fuentes’ endorsement of Democrats as proof that the worst antisemitism now lies with the left; the influencer has been clear that he reviles the Democratic party and is still a right-winger. Not only is he an avowed white nationalist and antisemite, he is a devout traditionalist Catholic who does not believe women should be allowed to vote. However much he dislikes anything to do with Jews, he is not truly interested in uniting with anti-Zionist progressive candidates just because they criticize Israel. (He is, however, happy to endorse Amy Action, a blonde white Democrat, over the Indian Vivek Ramaswamy, who Fuentes called an “anchor baby.”)
Instead, he has said his Democratic endorsement is a tactical one, a way to steer and influence the Republican party to come closer to his Christian nationalist, antisemitic, closed borders ideology.
“James Talarico is a Satanic wicked disgusting figure. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed in Michigan is a lying scumbag. He’s trying to maintain this facade that he’s Woke 2.0, patriotic, just wants healthcare — he’s a Muslim socialist. Pure contempt for America and whites,” Fuentes said on a stream about the midterms. “These are some of the worst Democrats ever! But maybe that is the wake up call we are going to need as the anti-left opposition to put up some legitimately good candidates.”
If there is a blue wave on Tuesday night, as Fuentes predicts, he believes the Republican party will blame him for it — and he’s ready to accept responsibility. He did, after all, urge his followers to vote Democratic. But don’t be fooled; he won’t be pushing the Democrats to become groypers. Most likely, he’ll present himself and his followers as the natural successors to lead the Republican party in 2028.
The post Why Nick Fuentes endorsed Democrats in the midterms appeared first on The Forward.
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Capers Funnye wasn’t a ‘Black Jew’ — he was a good Jew
This morning, when I woke up, it was the first time in my entire life that my spiritual leader, my rabbi and my friend, was gone. People are born and die every day, and we live totally oblivious to that fact, but I feel the absence of this one human being almost on a cellular level. And the very person I would call to help me make sense of a time like this is the one who is gone.
Rabbi Capers Funnye wasn’t your typical rabbi. How could he be, though? After all, his congregation was full of Black folks and people of color. There were also some white congregants, but for the most part, his temple was a place created for people like me to have somewhere to go and practice Judaism freely without suspicion or judgment. Beth Shalom was established over one hundred years ago by Black Jews who knew at that time that they could actually be arrested here in America, in Chicago, for daring to say out loud that they were Jewish. I know that sounds unthinkable, but it’s a historical fact: It used to be illegal in Chicago for Blacks to claim that they were Jewish.
Rabbi Funnye dedicated his life to ensuring that Black Jews wouldn’t have their Jewishness questioned.
White Jews love to reminisce about the Civil Rights Movement and their close relationship to the Black community, and this coalition brought about monumental changes to American society. But those same white Jews who marched in Selma and rode buses to Mississippi had little to no interaction with Black Jews. We were nonexistent. A myth, if you will. Some people had heard that there were Black people who called themselves Jews, but no one had actually ever seen one or met one.
We were there, but just as other Jews had hidden before, we were hiding too. We worshipped in basements, living rooms, and the backs of storefronts. We were in the shadows until Rabbi Funnye came along. He was born to leave the world a better place than he found it, and that’s exactly what he did.
Rabbi Funnye was supposed to be an AME pastor, but the church didn’t need him. The synagogue, the Jewish people, did.
I used to joke with him that I’d known him so long I could remember when he had a full head of black hair. And I did. I can remember going to services and seeing him on the bimah on Shabbat. Even as a little kid, I recognized he was different. He had a voice that could command the attention even of a pew full of antsy five-year-olds. But he also had a smile so warm that we never felt scolded. When he spoke, people couldn’t help but listen, and eventually he started saying what people wanted and needed to hear.
I watched him rise from assistant rabbi to leader.He could teach Torah in a way that held the congregation’s interest, imparting important lessons while adding levity with razor-sharp wit and perfectly timed humor.
If I’d been born male, I probably would’ve wanted to be a rabbi my whole life. I wanted to be like him. But I was a girl, and that was unthinkable.
But he made me believe I could do things.
I can remember when he started to integrate the Chicago Jewish community. When we’d go to events like Shabbat dinners or Black and Jewish seders, he was unfazed by the whispers and stares when he’d ask where the tables were for those who were both Black and Jewish. While this made the rest of us uncomfortable and, for some, unwilling to ever go back into any room where we were treated as oddities, he was undeterred.
He went back, over and over again. He would not allow the existence of Black Jews to go unacknowledged any longer. And many of us went with him. I was one. I saw how he was treated at times by white rabbis and even just by people who were white and Jewish and still felt that somehow they were better than him. It would infuriate me, but not him. He’d smile, tell a joke or one of his signature stories that would completely disarm them.
And while the behavior of some of my white co-religionists would thoroughly anger me, Rabbi Funnye understood how to deal with bigotry and hate in other ways. He grew up in it. He knew how to rise above it. Another lesson learned. He never met hate with hate or derision with derision. He met it with love.
He knew that was the only way he could move us from the shadows and out of the margins, into the mainstream. And it was also the only way that he could show white Jews we were nothing to fear or exclude.
At times, his message wasn’t popular with Black Jews who wanted nothing to do with white Jews or with white Jews who weren’t ready to accept the fact that G-d made Black Jews too.
None of that changed the fact that it was the right one.
Chief Rabbi Funnye wasn’t a Black Jew. He was a good Jew. And that is the lesson that I, and hopefully all who knew him, will learn from his life.
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All Jewish eyes are on Michigan as heated El-Sayed-Rogers Senate campaign draws to a close
(JTA) — DETROIT – The U.S. Senate race in Michigan, a deeply contentious contest that has strained Jewish relationships with the Democratic Party, drew to a bitter close Tuesday as voters headed to the polls in a race that could shape which party controls the chamber.
At its center is Abdul El-Sayed, the former county health director and Democratic nominee whose anti-corporate, Medicare For All candidacy has become a rallying cry for the national progressive movement.
His uncompromising stances on Israel have also made him a target among pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC, which has spent heavily against him in both the primary and general election. AIPAC’s rare entry into a general election race came to support El-Sayed’s opponent, Republican former congressman Mike Rogers.
One of El-Sayed’s positions on Israel — to end all U.S. military aid — was once thought a far-left pipe dream. But that has changed. On Election Day morning, Trump announced that, under his watch, nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel would wind down by the end of the year. Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in agreement with the need to end aid and deny Democratic critics a point of attack.
In his announcement of the plan, Trump cited El-Sayed.
“Why should we suffer the slings like lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it?” Trump said on Fox News, referring to Israel’s financial strength.
Representatives for the El-Sayed and Rogers campaigns, and for the Republican Jewish Coalition, did not immediately return requests for comment on Trump’s new pledge. It is unclear whether it will be straightforward for the White House to halt the funding by the end of 2026, given that the existing memorandum of understanding that governs it extends to 2028.
El-Sayed’s campaign has galvanized young voters and a range of other constituencies, and he pulled ahead in the polls in the race’s final stretch. But his questioning of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and whether it or Iran posed a greater threat to the United States, as well as his prior associations with figures such as Hasan Piker, the streamer who has spread extreme rhetoric about American Jews, have sparked concern among Jewish Michiganders.
So, too, did comments the candidate made following the March terror attack on Temple Israel, a major synagogue in the state, in which El-Sayed appeared to link the attack to Israel’s war in Lebanon after reports that the attacker lost family in an Israeli strike. Hostile behavior from some of El-Sayed’s supporters toward pro-Israel Democrats, most prominently on display at the state party’s spring convention, have also alarmed Jews. El-Sayed has pledged to stand up to antisemitism.
Some Jews who had long considered themselves Democrats, including several local Jewish leaders, have cited such controversies in pledging to vote for Rogers. In some Michigan Jewish neighborhoods, yard signs proclaim that a vote for Rogers is a vote “against antisemitism.”
Accordingly, Rogers has made a play for the Jewish vote. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in October that his opponent is “anti-Jew,” while running ads that played up El-Sayed’s tenuous family associations with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Top Republicans have seized on the narrative, with President Donald Trump calling Jews “crazy” if they back El-Sayed, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz calling him a national security threat. A Trump administration event to address antisemitism was held at a Michigan synagogue weeks before the election, though El-Sayed’s name was not mentioned there.
Jewish Democrats who had broken with El-Sayed found major validation in the race’s dramatic closing days. Democrat Haley Stevens, a strongly pro-Israel congresswoman who had narrowly lost to El-Sayed in the primary, flipped sides to endorse Rogers days after her Jewish fiancé, a Democratic megadonor, did the same.
The surprise move, which Jewish Democratic leaders joined many other prominent Democrats in criticizing, came after days of back-and-forth between Stevens and El-Sayed as she sought to publicly pressure him to condemn a PAC ad that had linked rising grocery prices to U.S. aid to Israel.
Meanwhile, some prominent Jewish Democrats in the state either avoided endorsing El-Sayed or did so with heavy reservations. Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, whose leadership has been deeply divided on El-Sayed, issued a statement Monday declaring the caucus would never vote for a Republican.
“Our commitment to the Democratic ticket remains resolute as we work to build a more inclusive coalition,” the caucus stated.
Throughout the campaign, El-Sayed has sought to reassure Jewish voters. He apologized for his Temple Israel comments; distanced himself from Piker; hired a Jewish outreach director; said in a recent “60 Minutes” interview that Israel has a right to exist; and sent mailers to Jewish households stating, “I am committed to protecting all Michigan Jews against hatred and injustice.” He told JTA in August that “the prerequisite of Jewish safety is never in question to me.”
More than 1,000 Michigan Jews have signed an open letter pledging to vote for El-Sayed, compared to 560 who have done the same for Rogers. Progressive Jewish figures of note have held salons throughout the state in a bid to convince on-the-fence Jews to back him.
Yet El-Sayed also has continued to stake out positions many Jews find alienating. He asserted in the campaign’s closing weeks that Israel was “not actually our friend” and declined during a debate to say whether Israel or Iran was the bigger danger to the U.S. His campaign also released an ad, designed to appeal to conservatives, that featured a brief clip of Tucker Carlson, the right-wing pundit who has promoted conspiracy theories about Israel. In addition, El-Sayed’s careful sidestepping of objectionable material about Jews and Israel from his ostensible allies, such as Piker and his uncle, left-wing anti-Israel pundit Cenk Uygur, has continued up to Election Day.
Ahead of Election Day, some liberal-leaning Zionist Jews tried to put pressure on El-Sayed to speak more directly to their concerns. A group of rabbis and other Jewish leaders launched Nonnegotiable Michigan in a bid to have him affirm what they called five core principles of Jewish participation in the Democratic Party, including “Jewish sovereignty in Israel.” After silence from the campaign, some of Nonnegotiable’s figureheads urged their followers to write in the 19th-century Jewish poet “Emma Lazarus” instead of voting for either candidate.
Michigan’s already small Jewish population, which numbers around 105,000 adults, has further splintered over El-Sayed’s candidacy. But it could prove pivotal to the outcome of a race that may determine control of the chamber. In 2024, the state’s Senate race was decided by fewer than 20,000 votes.
Either way, the race has crystallized the Democratic Party’s shifting fault lines over Israel — and many Jews’ growing uneasiness with their place in the liberal coalition.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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