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Queer yeshiva to publish first-ever collection of Jewish legal opinions written by and for trans Jews
(JTA) — In the midst of writing a 13-page analysis of a complex area of Jewish law, Rabbi Xava De Cordova found something she wasn’t expecting to see in the medieval-era sources: flexibility.
De Cordova is transgender and had long wondered whether she could feel a sense of belonging while studying reams of rabbinic writings on halacha, or Jewish law, which stretch back thousands of years and often prescribe different practices for men and women.
The laws of ritual purity, for example, prescribe specific behaviors for women on the assumption that they all menstruate. Trans women do not. De Cordova said that gap and others had her thinking, “I don’t really know if I can find a place for myself in this literature.”
But after digging into Jewish texts on the topic, De Cordova realized she’d sold the sages short: Medieval European rabbis were asking many of the same questions she was — and their answers reflected real-world complexity.
“I just found that the rabbis and the early halachic authorities’ understanding of niddah was so much more conceptual and vague and fluctuating than I ever realized before I started this particular work,” De Cordova said, using the Hebrew term for purity laws. Her conclusion: “Wow, there’s so much space for me within this literature.”
De Cordova’s realization is one of many that a dozen Jewish scholars and rabbis have had over the last year as they have scoured Jewish texts for guidance on how transgender Jews can adapt traditional rituals to their lived experience. Now, the group is preparing to release a batch of their essays, analyses of Jewish law called teshuvot, in hopes that they can inform the experiences of trans Jews who seek to live in accordance with traditional Jewish law.
The release of the essays comes at a time when lawmakers in dozens of states are targeting trans people and their rights, in some cases instigating fights that have heavily involved rabbis and their families.
In that climate, writing trans Jews into Jewish tradition “becomes an act of resistance because it’s about celebrating lives that are being demeaned and celebrating people who are being dehumanized in the public sphere,” said Rabbi Becky Silverstein, co-director of the Trans Halakha Project at Svara, the yeshiva founded in Chicago two decades ago to serve the queer community. The dozen rabbis and scholars are based at Svara and collectively form the Teshuva Writing Project.
Among the questions they have tackled: How could a trans man converting to Judaism have a bris, required for male converts? Is the removal of body tissue after gender-affirming surgery a ritual matter, given Jewish legal requirements for burying body parts? And is there a Jewish obligation, in certain cases, to undergo gender transition?
Just how widely their answers will be consumed and taken into account is a question. Most Jews who consciously adhere to halacha throughout their daily lives are Orthodox, and live in communities that either reject trans Jews or are reckoning with whether and how to accept them. Non-Orthodox Jewish denominations have made efforts to embrace trans Jews, but halacha is less often the starting point for most of their members. The Reform movement, the largest in the United States, expressly rejects halacha as binding.
Still, a growing number of Jews and Jewish communities strive to be inclusive while staying rooted in Jewish law and tradition. There are also a growing number of trans Jews who are connected to traditional communities, or who want to live in accordance with Jewish law.
“I think individual trans Jews who are not part of communities could use these teshuvot to guide their own decision-making,” said Silverstein, who was ordained at the pluralistic Hebrew College seminary. “We live in a time of religious autonomy in Jewish life, and where trans Jews actually are hungry for connection to tradition. And so they could use these teshuvot to help inform their own conversations.”
Organizations and initiatives such as the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet; Torah Queeries, a collection of queer commentaries on the Bible; and TransTorah.org have created rituals, readings, blessings and customs for trans Jews, and Svara runs a Queer Talmud Camp as well as intensive Jewish study programs throughout the year. But until now, no collection of Jewish legal opinions has been published by and for trans people.
“Halacha has to be informed by the real lived experiences of the people about whom it is legislating,” said Laynie Soloman, who helps lead Svara and holds the title of associate rosh yeshiva, in an approach that they said the group had adopted from the disability advocacy community. “That is a fundamental truth about halacha that we are holding as a collective and taking seriously in the way we are authoring these teshuvot.”
The teshuvot will be published later this month, and follow a long tradition of rabbis setting halachic precedent by answering questions from their followers. Those answers are traditionally based on an analysis of rabbinic texts throughout history. They can address questions ranging from whether smoking cigarettes is permissible to the particulars of making a kitchen kosher for Passover.
Some Jewish legal questions tackled by the group at Svara had not previously been answered, such as how to mark conversion for someone who is male but does not have a penis. In other cases, accepted Jewish law pertaining to gender can be painful for those who are nonbinary or trans, either because the answer is not clear or because the law does not match up with contemporary understandings that gender and sex are distinct.
“[Those are] areas where trans people are sort of most likely to either feel lost themselves or be interrogated by their community. … And so they’re sort of these urgent halachic needs,” said De Cordova, who was privately ordained by a rabbi from the Renewal Judaism movement. “And 99.9% of the literature about them so far has been written by cis people, about us.”
De Cordova concluded that trans women are obligated in niddah, the ritual purity laws. In her teshuva, she provides several approaches to emulate the complicated counting cycle that tallies the days a woman is considered ritually impure following menstruation. She suggests using a seven- and 11-day cycle originally proposed by Maimonides, the 12th-century scholar and philosopher. De Cordova also suggests that the imposition of a cycle not based in biology means ancient and medieval rabbis had some understanding of womanhood as a social construct.
“There’s many cases in which the rabbis sort of choose to orient niddah around their understanding of women, which I would call the social construction of womanhood by rabbis, rather than observable physical phenomenon or actual women’s experience,” she said.
For De Cordova, the experience of writing about niddah provided her with new insights about some of the oldest Jewish legal texts on the subject.
“They’re flexible enough and sort of responsive enough that I can really find a lot of freedom and space in working with them,” she said of the ancient sources. “And that was just a really sort of wonderful and freeing transition to go through.”
Last year, the Conservative Movement approved new language for calling up a nonbinary person to various Torah honors. The rabbis behind the opinion consulted with groups serving LGBTQ Jews and synagogues centered on them, but acknowledged that they were imperfect authors.
“When my coauthors and I published the teshuva, we wrote in it that we are all cisgender rabbis and that we hope that, increasingly, halachic work dealing with nonbinary and trans and queer Jewish life and identity and practice will… come from queer rabbis and scholars themselves,” said Guy Austrian, the rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center, a synagogue in upper Manhattan. “And I think the publication of the first batch of teshuvot from the Trans Halakha Project shows that that process is underway, and I think that that can only be a good thing for the Jewish world.”
Scholars at Svara, the queer yeshiva based in Chicago, have served the Jewish LGBTQ community for two decades and are now creating the first written set of Jewish law by and for trans Jews. (Jess Benjamin)
Adding to the question-and-answer tradition of Jewish legal opinions means trans Jews will now have new texts to guide their religious practice, Silverstein said. Trans Jews, the writers of the opinions acknowledge, already have their own ways of performing Jewish ritual that accords with their lived experience. But they say that when it comes to Jewish law, informal custom without a sourced legal opinion is not enough.
“I want cis[gender] clergy to realize that there are resources written by and for trans people that they can turn to when they’re trying to help a member of their congregation,” De Cordova said.
The authors of the legal opinions applied to be part of the collective and come from a religiously pluralistic group, ranging in affiliation from Orthodox to Conservative to Jewish Renewal. They have varying expectations for how far-reaching the impact of the new legal opinions will be.
Mike Moskowitz, an Orthodox rabbi and the scholar-in-residence for trans and queer Jewish studies at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which serves the LGBTQ community, said the teshuvot could provide a model for observant Jews who are also trans.
“I think it’s significant in modeling what an informed conversation can look like, which hasn’t really happened in Orthodox publications,” said Moskowitz, who was not part of the collective that composed the teshuvot on trans Jews’ practice. “I hope this models what can be done in other movements. What’s been tricky is that every movement has a different understanding of what halacha means.”
Even within Orthodoxy, conflicting opinions already exist, in a reflection of how halacha has always operated. For example, Talia Avrahami, a transgender Orthodox woman, follows the opinion of the late Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, known as the Tzitz Eliezer, who ruled that a trans woman who undergoes gender affirmation surgery is a woman according to Jewish law. But Avrahami was told she could not sit in the women’s section of her synagogue, because the rabbi who the synagogue follows does not accept Waldenberg’s opinion. Months earlier, Avrahami had also been asked to leave her teaching job at an Orthodox day school after students and parents learned that she was transgender.
Avrahami declined to comment on the new teshuvot, citing restrictions set by her current employer.
Silverstein says some Conservative rabbis have expressed interest in using the opinions to guide practice in their own congregations. But he is less sure if they will be adopted in the Orthodox community, which is the target audience for most traditional literature on Jewish law.
“When it comes to the Orthodox community, I’m not sure I am bold enough to dream that these teshuvot specifically are going to be adopted,” Silverstein said. “I’m not even sure I know what that means. But it is my hope that they will permeate throughout the Jewish community, at least through the Modern Orthodox community.”
The scope of the opinions written by the collective extends beyond the trans community. The first batch of answers, for example, includes an opinion about how to increase physical accessibility to a mikvah, ritual baths used to fulfill some requirements of Jewish law.
“Judaism thrives and Torah thrives when people are bringing their life experiences to the text and asking their questions of the text,” Silverstein said. “That’s how new Torah is uncovered in the world. And that’s how Judaism and Torah has stayed alive through so much of Jewish history.”
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Can the US really bring Iranians democracy?
The protesters at a January rally I attended in New York City’s Washington Square Park were loud and raw throated as they denounced the brutal Islamist regime in Tehran, then in the midst of slaughtering thousands of their comrades in Iran. A crowd of more than 1,500 called on the United States to make good on President Donald Trump’s all-caps promise that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”
I turned to an Iranian friend next to me who was lustily joining cheers calling for the tyrants’ overthrow. Like most of the rest of the protesters, she was also cheering the demonstration’s other prominent images: Israeli flags, the images of President Donald Trump and photos of Reza Pahlavi, the son and self-declared heir of the autocratic monarch Iranians ousted in 1979.
My friend’s parents had once been members of Iran’s leftist Tudeh Party, the country’s official communist faction, which was among the staunchest opponents of Pahlavi’s father. Recalling my own 20-month stay in Iran toward the end of his rule, I asked my friend if she understood the rampant corruption and repression under which Iranians lived during that time.
Was she aware of the role the U.S. played in installing the shah in power, and the torture of dissidents by SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, with support from Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad — a record Pahlavi has never acknowledged?
My dear friend fixed me in her gaze with clear eyes, devoid of illusion.
“Yes,” she said simply. “And it would be better.”
Lowered expectations
Whether the bombs and missiles the U.S. is now raining down on Iran will fulfill the promise Trump held out for protesters remains an open question. But In New York City, back in January, there was no mistaking their desperate faith in him — or the irony of that faith.
It was the U.S., after all, that joined with Great Britain in 1953 to overturn the democracy Iran enjoyed 73 years ago. Twenty-six years of U.S. support ensued for the autocracy that followed.
During the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, it was the U.S. that also supplied Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, with critical intelligence and precursor chemicals that enabled him to manufacture and deploy outlawed chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians, asphyxiating thousands.
Given this history and the woeful fates that befell Iraq and Libya after U.S. intervention, many liberals voice grave doubt that any U.S.-forced regime change could restore democracy to the country. But they may be missing an important point: the extent to which crushing U.S. economic sanctions and the Iranian government’s own brutal repression, corruption and incompetence, have produced economic and political desperation among many Iranians, which radically lowers the bar.
The redemption of ‘Big Satan’
Opponents of Trump can recite a litany of his political and personal depravities, his affronts to democracy here at home, and his unreliability as an international partner in support of human rights and democracy abroad.
But I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that such recitations fall on deaf ears with many Iranians.
Two reasons rise to the top, in my mind, that explain this.
The first is the enormous credibility that Trump and the U.S. have derived from being among the primary hate targets of Iran’s despotic regime. This effect has also benefited Israel, the partner of the U.S. in waging this war. Decades of demonization of “the Big Satan” — and Israel, “the Little Satan” — from leaders so many Iranians despise have performed a miracle of reputational resurrection.
Today, this relentless drumbeat of vitriol has rendered the CIA’s subversion of Iran’s mid-20th century democracy — and Israel’s help in setting up SAVAK — a distant memory. This theocratic regime is the present danger.
Secondly, as a famous saying in Washington goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” That appears to be why many Iranians, for now, are turning to Trump. In Iran, the protesters’ own lack of leadership and resistance infrastructure plays into this. There is no Charles de Gaulle or Nelson Mandela waiting in the wings to take charge, with highly disciplined and battle-tested resistance groups to support them.
Another important factor may be the American left’s inability to offer Iranians a compelling alternative vision.
Several liberal members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, have consistently praised the bravery of the protesters and their cause. But they have not proposed any way to hold their killers accountable, and have opposed Trump’s war as the way to do so. Their approach, diplomacy and international law, produced President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2016, which radically constrained Iran’s nuclear weapons development.
Based on my reporting from Iran for the Forward back then, I can attest that vast numbers of Iranians strongly supported this at the time. They saw the JCPOA as a way to open Iran up to greater Western influence over time — the greatest fear of the country’s hardline ayatollahs.
But Trump tossed that achievement into the rubbish heap of history in his first term. And the left’s toolbox has been useless since. In the meantime, outside of government, some on the left have played down or ignored the Iranian government’s killings and abuses — or even attributed January’s protests in whole or part to Mossad agents embedded in Iran.
‘Striving for democracy’
Another friend, still living in Iran, told me recently that his grandson had left him feeling shamed. How is it, his grandson asked, that his generation had allowed the shah to be overthrown and replaced by this cohort of theocratic thugs?
My friend in Tehran had no answer.
My friend’s parents had been ardent supporters of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, the fiercely nationalistic Iranian leader ousted by Britain and the U.S. in 1953. But now, the prospect of a return by the shah’s son as a U.S.-backed autocrat with strong ties to right-wing Israelis didn’t phase him at all.
For his part, Pahlavi has publicly espoused a commitment to secular liberal democracy. But just last month his main support group, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, proposed that Pahlavi should serve as the unambiguous “Leader of the National Uprising” who will be empowered to issue official decrees, install hand-picked executive officials during a “transition to freedom and stability” and act as commander-in-chief of Iran’s military forces.
His supporters, meanwhile, have been widely accused of harassing and viciously threatening opponents who do not accept him in this role.
Would a secular, hopefully more competent, authoritarian dictatorship, whether led by Pahlavi or someone else with U.S. backing, be an improvement, I asked my friend in Tehran?
Even as bombs were falling from the sky onto his city last week, he texted back: “Yes sure!”
“I think this can be a phase towards a better situation for striving for democracy,” he added.
To be honest, I fear he and other like-minded Iranians are betting on moonbeams. But even after Israel bombed Tehran’s oil storage facilities over the weekend, engulfing the city in a poisonous black cloud, he texted me poetry.
“Under the black smoke…I saw trees that were hosting a multitude of blossoms with their thin bodies,” he wrote. “It seemed like they were supposed to remind us of spring….To us, who have been stuck in a rut for years? The ideological Mafia rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran has stolen 47 springs from us.”
The post Can the US really bring Iranians democracy? appeared first on The Forward.
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Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them
(JTA) — The Department of Government Efficiency tagged Jewish themes as “DEI” in ChatGPT when searching for federal humanities grants to cancel last year, according to a class-action lawsuit.
The methodology contributed to the cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study violence against women during the Holocaust, postwar Soviet Jewish literature and hundreds of other topics, even as the NEH would soon bestow $10.4 million, its largest-ever grant, to the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish cultural project.
The suit brought by the Authors Guild; a member organization for several academic groups including the Association for Jewish Studies; and a number of individual scholars seeks to restore the canceled funding, which comprised around 80% of the NEH’s grants and was cut amid the Elon Musk-led task force’s broader slashing of federal spending last year.
The suit names the NEH, its acting chair, and several DOGE staffers as defendants, including Justin Fox, who the suit alleges was behind the ChatGPT methodology.
While DOGE’s use of keywords to cancel research grants was already known, as was the sweep’s effect on Jewish projects, the suit has revealed new details in its methodology, including staffers’ use of ChatGPT and their contention that works dealing with Judaism are a form of DEI.
In a filing on Friday, attorneys for the plaintiffs said Fox specified that he considered Jewish grants, including those focusing on the Holocaust, part of DEI.
“For a different grant about violence against women during the Holocaust, Fox testified that ChatGPT properly classified the grants as involving DEI, and thus slated it for termination, because it was ‘specifically focused on Jewish cultures’ (as in, it was about the Holocaust) and the ‘voices of the females in that culture,’” reads the filing.
“More generally, Fox stated that he identified as DEI any grant about a specific ‘minority group,’ meaning any particular ‘ethnicity, culture . . . race or gender or religion,’” the filing went on.
“It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture,” Fox stated about one canceled grant for a project about “violence against women during the Holocaust,” as the latest court filing described it. Fox continued, “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
When asked in a deposition about the criteria for cancellation, the NEH’s acting chair Michael McDonald said he hadn’t known that DOGE used ChatGPT in its selection process, while also noting that he didn’t agree with the assessment that the Holocaust constituted DEI. The final authority for canceling the grants rested with DOGE, not McDonald, depositions indicated.
Fox, the suit alleges, had created his own “Detection List” of identity-based traits, with separate categories for “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” before running the databases through the generative AI software.
His prompt, according to the lawsuit: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” The grants that turned up were all terminated, with only a few exceptions.
Many Jewish-themed projects were among the NEH cancellations, including a grant for “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union,” a translation project that was published in book form last month. The book was singled out during the lawsuit’s discovery phase, which noted, “ChatGPT classified this grant as DEI because ‘[t]his anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR.’”
“I find it annoyingly amusing that they weren’t bothering to read the grants themselves — that they needed a machine to give them some sense,” Sasha Senderovich, a University of Washington professor who co-translated the volume with University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign professor Harriet Murav, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Three-quarters of their NEH grant had already been paid out, Senderovich said. He believes the NEH’s decision to cancel his grant was an example of “authoritarian logic.”
The book “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” showcases Jewish literature written in the Soviet Union; at right, Jewish women buy flour before Passover in Moscow in 1965. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)After Senderovich used similar language in a Forward story last year following the cuts, an NEH official called the accusation “tendentious” and accused “wokeness and intersectionality” of being the true authoritarians in a text to McDonald, according to the court filing.
While the DEI justification has generated headlines, Senderovich said, “I think it’s also somewhat misleading to get hung up on what they typed into ChatGPT.”
The NEH’s final grant cancellation list, he noted, included many projects that had not been flagged as DEI. One such cancellation noted by the plaintiffs’ attorneys — which DOGE canceled over McDonald’s objections — was “a grant to advance the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill [sic] University.”
Murav, for her part, told JTA, “I am reeling from these cascading waves of hatred.” She rejected the idea that Jews should be considered part of DEI: “DEI initiatives seek to redress historic failures in American society. DEI efforts in the world of the university are not aimed at American Jews, because American Jews are over-represented in the professions and in the academy.”
Also canceled by DOGE: a project on “the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust,” according to the suit. Documentary filmmaker Marisa Fox, whose own grant for a project matching that description was canceled, bemoaned the Trump administration’s new priorities in the Hollywood Reporter last year.
“I’ve seen firsthand how meeting a Holocaust survivor, whether in person or through a project, can dispel the most deep-seated antisemitic beliefs,” Fox — no apparent relation to the DOGE staffer — wrote then. “But if the NEH, NEA and local humanities councils are defunded, the platforms that can bridge divides will be severely limited. And so, too, will our chances of stemming hate’s rising tide.”
Even as staffers appeared to classify Jews as “DEI,” the NEH is moving forward with its support of Tikvah-aligned Jewish scholars. Ruth Wisse, a prominent Yiddish and Jewish cultural scholar, emeritus Harvard professor and senior fellow at Tikvah, is set to deliver the NEH’s annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities later this month at what has been rechristened the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Wisse’s lecture is titled “A Message from the ‘Blue and White’ in the ‘Red, White, and Blue,’” a reference to the colors of the Israeli and American flags.
A request for comment to Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen was not returned as of press time. Tikvah had a previously unreported connection to NEH senior leadership, the deposition shows: Dorothea Wolfson, who has worked with Tikvah and directs a program established by a former Tikvah board chair, is married to Adam Wolfson, the NEH’s assistant chair for programs. Adam Wolfson said in the deposition that he had made introductions but wasn’t involved in the grant selection.
As it shines a spotlight on DOGE’s practices, the suit also brings a different long-simmering debate to the forefront: whether Jews are considered part of “DEI,” the broad suite of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at universities and other institutions that conservatives have railed against.
Some prominent Jewish voices, including current CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, have argued that DEI practices are at least latently antisemitic because their practitioners do not consider Jews an underrepresented minority. The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus antisemitism has frequently been paired with anti-DEI initiatives.
Yet at the same time, a broader anti-DEI push on the right has also ensnared Jewish projects, or generated confusion among university administrators as to whether Jewish events should be canceled on campuses where DEI is outlawed.
Fox, according to investigations of DOGE staffers last year, is a former investment banker whose DOGE tenure also included stints overseeing cuts at USAID and the General Services Administration. His NEH tenure coincided with a directive for that organization to eliminate $175 million in federal grant funding. The DOGE project largely wound down following its architect Musk’s official exit from government a few months into its tenure, decimating numerous federal agencies and jeopardizing some initiatives to benefit Jews.
“It’s just ridiculous. You have these kids being told just go in and cut as much as you can,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Author’s Guild, told JTA about the DOGE maneuvers. “They were given no real instruction.”
The guild is one of several organizations that have co-signed onto the lawsuit, which is requesting the refunding of the grants. It is now awaiting a judge’s ruling on a summary judgment that would avoid a trial.
Among several individual authors represented by the guild in the suit is Jewish author and independent scholar William Goldstein, founding editor of the New York Times’ Books website, whose NEH grant was meant to fund a biography of Jewish LGBTQ playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer.
The post Lawsuit says DOGE used ChatGPT to flag Jewish-themed humanities grants as ‘DEI’ before canceling them appeared first on The Forward.
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Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen
(JTA) — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has called on Israel to rein in its attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure, marking a rare note of caution from a Republican lawmaker who has said he helped push the United States to join Israel in waging war against Iran.
In a post on X on Sunday, Graham praised Israel for its role in the war before adding that “there will be a day soon that the Iranian people will be in charge of their own fate, not the murderous ayatollah’s regime.”
“In that regard, please be cautious about what targets you select,” continued Graham. “Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor.”
Graham’s post linked to an Axios article that reported that the United States was alarmed by Israeli strikes over the weekend that targeted 30 Iranian fuel depots. On Monday, U.S. gas prices rose to their highest levels since 2024.
The warning from Graham, an ally of President Donald Trump and staunch supporter of Israel, comes days after the Republican hawk told the Wall Street Journal that he had played a key role in urging Trump to strike Iran.
Prior to the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Graham made several trips to Israel where he met with members of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom he said he coached on how to lobby Trump to strike Iran.
“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” Graham told the newspaper.
On Monday, Graham also directed his criticism at Saudi Arabia’s decision to stay on the sidelines of the campaign against Iran.
“It is my understanding the Kingdom refuses to use their capable military as a part of an effort to end the barbaric and terrorist Iranian regime who has terrorized the region and killed 7 Americans,” wrote Graham in a post on X Monday. “Question – why should America do a defense agreement with a country like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is unwilling to join a fight of mutual interest?”
The post Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen appeared first on The Forward.