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Rabbi Chaim Druckman, giant of Israeli settlement and Religious Zionist movements, dies at 90
(JTA) — Rabbi Chaim Druckman, whose mission was to unite the people of Israel, was father to a movement now poised to sow some of its deepest divisions in decades.
Druckman, who died Sunday at 90 after contracting COVID-19, was a giant in the religious Zionism movement, which sought to integrate the two preeminent philosophies that saw themselves as bulwarks against Jewish disintegration: Orthodox Judaism and Zionism.
In the 1950s, he established the hesder movement, which blended Torah study with military service. For tens of thousands of religious Jews, his innovation resolved a dilemma that had beset Israel’s founders: What was the most meaningful way for young Orthodox men to spend their first years of adulthood?
“We study Torah to fulfill our national obligation and serve in the army to fulfill our religious obligation,” Druckman often said.
Over the years, he led yeshivas and youth movements to extend that vision, and in 2012, he won the Israel Prize, Israel’s national award, for his lifetime of contributions to religious Zionist education.
Yet as much as he sought to bridge divides, he was as frequently positioned at their fault lines, in recent years disparaging non-Orthodox Jews and mentoring extremists who seek the marginalization of non-Jewish and non-Orthodox minorities in Israel. He also at least twice defended and sought to rehabilitate religious leaders convicted of sexual abuse, including of children.
Druckman was born in 1932 in Kuty, in what was then Poland and what is now Ukraine. He and his parents went into hiding during the Holocaust and then fled to the Soviet Union. He entered British Mandate Palestine in 1944 posing as the child of another couple and was reunited with his parents after the war.
He soon became a disciple of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the rabbi who helped shape the nationalist outlook of the National Religious Party. Kook’s teachings drove Druckman to become one of the first leaders of the religious Zionist movement to embrace the settlement of lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. He was at the seminal 1968 Passover seder in Hebron that is widely seen as the launch of the religious settlement movement and is believed to have coined the name of its principal body, Gush Emunim, which means bloc of believers.
Druckman became a figurehead of the settlement movement, although he lived most of his life in Mercaz Shapira, the Israeli village near Ashkelon where he ran the influential Or Etzion Yeshiva. He served in the Knesset in coalitions led by Likud and Labor prime ministers, from 1977 to 1988 and then from 1999 to 2003, with short periods in the opposition.
In the wake of the massive influx immigrants after the fall of the Soviet Union, Druckman as a senior religious court judge led an effort to ease conversion to Orthodox Judaism. His suasions backfired, leading haredi Orthodox judges to seek the nullification of thousands of conversions he had supervised.
However much he preached reconciliation among Jews, he stood hard and fast against any attempt to dismantle settlements, going so far as to advise soldiers to refuse orders to take part in the removal of settlements. He also stood by Jews accused and convicted of violent crimes associated with tensions over the settlements, including murder and terrorism, raising funds for those accused and welcoming them back into society.
He also stood by people who were accused of sexual abuse multiple times. He was rebuked in 1999 for failing to report credible reports of sexual assault by a yeshiva head he supervised, Zev Kopilevich, and he later championed another rabbi convicted of sexual abuse, Moti Elon. While he conceded in 2013 that the government was right to rebuke him, he also dismissed as “gossip” just this month multiple allegations of rape against another yeshiva head, Zvi Tau.
Until recently, Druckman championed Naftali Bennett and his Jewish Home Party as the natural heir to the National Religious Party tradition — but in 2021 when Bennett chose the path of reconciliation once championed by Druckman, joining a unity government with secular parties, Druckman cut him off and instead embraced the extremist Religious Zionist Party led by Bezalel Smotrich.
Druckman played a role in brokering the entry of the Religious Zionist Party into the government that Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to bring to power in coming days. The entry of Smotrich and a colleague, Itamar Ben-Gvir, into the government is likely to precipitate a crisis with Diaspora Jewry. They favor restricting Israeli laws to favor the Orthodox, annexing the West Bank and loosening laws that restrict troops from killing or physically harming Palestinians.
At Druckman’s funeral on Monday, Smotrich said Druckman “reproached” him frequently for his excesses, but in a recent interview with Yisrael Hayom, the nationalist daily, Druckman made clear that many of the ideas Smotrich champions had his blessing, including his proposal for a state based on religious law and his plans for anti-LGBTQ discrimination.
Tens of thousands of people attended Druckman’s funeral Monday in his home village of Mercaz Shapira. Israel’s leaders at his funeral remembered him as a unifier.
“All of us were your sons, all of us were your students,” President Isaac Herzog said, according to the Times of Israel.
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Nearly half of young Americans view US relationship with Israel as a burden, survey finds
(JTA) — Nearly half of young Americans, 46%, believe that the United States’ relationship with Israel is mostly a burden to the United States, according to a new survey from the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Harvard Youth Poll, which polled 2,018 Americans aged 18 to 29, found that just 16% of those surveyed described the U.S. relationship with Israel as mostly a benefit.
Respondents were asked about their view of other U.S. alliances, including Canada, which 53% saw as beneficial, and Ukraine, which 21% saw as beneficial. Israel received the lowest perceived benefit of any country tested.
The survey also found that 55% of young Americans believe the U.S. military action in Iran is not in the best interest of the American people.
It comes as attitudes about Israel among young Americans in recent years have grown sharply negative. Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center survey found that 70% of Americans aged 18 to 49 held a somewhat or very negative opinion of Israel. That view was split among partisan lines, with 84% of Democrats in that demographic holding a negative view of Israel, compared to 57% of Republicans.
The Harvard survey was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs between March 26 and April 3 and had a margin of error of 2.74 percentage points.
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Long Island father and teen son arrested after investigation into swastika drawn in school bathroom
(JTA) — A father and his teenage son were arrested Wednesday after an investigation into swastika graffiti at the teen’s school led police to search their home, where authorities said they found chemicals used to make explosives.
The arrests stemmed from an investigation into swastika graffiti found in a boys’ bathroom at Syosset High School on Long Island. After police determined that a 15-year-old student had drawn the swastika, the Nassau County Police Department sent officers to his home.
There, the teen told the officers about the explosive materials, according to prosecutors. He said his father had purchased the chemicals for him to build rockets.
During the subsequent search of the home, police found “highly unstable” materials that had been combined to make explosives, including nitroglycerin, multiple acids, oxidizers and fuels. They began to evacuate people in adjacent homes, fearing an explosion.
The teen was not identified by police due to his age. Francisco Sanles, 48, who was arrested at the scene, has pleaded not guilty to seven criminal counts, including criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. His son was charged with five counts, including criminal possession of a weapon, criminal mischief, aggravated harassment and making graffiti.
Swastika graffiti is relatively commonplace in schools, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting over 400 incidents in 2024: Syosset High School itself was hit by a spate of antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, in 2017. But it is relatively rare that incidents result in arrests.
In an email to the school district Wednesday night, the Syosset School District — which enrolls a large number of Jewish students — said its investigation had identified the student for the police, and he would face “serious consequences pursuant to the District’s Code of Conduct.”
“Antisemitism and hate speech have no place in our communities or in our schools,” the district said. “Syosset has long been proud of being a welcoming, empathetic, and inclusive community and those values remain firm. We protect those values and this community by confronting and holding accountable those who traffic in any form of hate.”
In January, New York City Police arrested and charged two 15-year-old boys suspected of spraying dozens of swastikas on a playground in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood with aggravated harassment and criminal mischief as a hate crime.
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Tucker Carlson calls campaign to shame a country club for barring a Jewish toddler ‘repulsive’
(JTA) — Catherine Rampell, the economist and pundit, likes telling the story about how her father once launched a public campaign against a Palm Beach country club when it banned his 4-year-old son from attending a birthday party because he is Jewish.
Now, Tucker Carlson has turned the anecdote into a sinister and “repulsive” tale of a crusade against folks who just want to hang out together.
Carlson substantially misrepresented Rampell’s anecdote, turning it into what Rampell on Wednesday said was “a coded story in defense of antisemitic and racist country clubs.”
Carlson, the far-right firebrand who sits at the center of the Republican Party’s schism over antisemitism, on Tuesday interviewed his brother Buckley on his streaming show about their shared disaffection for President Donald Trump over launching the Iran war. Tucker Carlson was until recently close to Trump, and Buckley Carlson was a speechwriter for the president.
The brothers in the podcast discussed Trump’s purported distaste for WASPs, shorthand for White Anglo Saxon Protestants who are descended from immigrants who arrived in the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. Trump’s grandfather was German-born, and his mother was Scottish.
“He’s very fixated on the WASP thing, and does talk about it a lot,” Tucker Carlson said.
“There’s another group in America that’s kind of fixated on the WASPs too,” his brother responded.
“I’ve noticed that,” Tucker said. And his brother continued: “With equal fervor and hostility.”
That led into a discussion of “status anxiety” driving social change, which Tucker Carlson says “everyone lies about.” That’s when Carlson recalled meeting Rampell at Fox News about a decade ago, when he was a host at the network and she was a guest commentator.
Referring to Rampell, who graduated with honors from Princeton University and who was then about 30, as a “girl” and a “liberal neocon person” who was “not smart,” he recalled asking her about her upbringing. She told him she grew up in Palm Beach, the wealthy Florida enclave where Carlson has also spent a lot of time.
“And she’s like, ‘Yeah, we moved there, and my dad sued the Bath and Tennis club for discrimination because they wouldn’t let him in,’” Tucker Carlson recounted.
“Like, that’s repulsive to me,” he continued. “A club should have, you should have the right to hang out with whoever you want to hang out, on whatever basis you want to make that decision. She was, like, bragging about it, and I was like, the hatred behind that, the desire to destroy something is so evident. This girl’s a hater.”
Rampell, who scould only vaguely recall the encounter, set the record straight on Wednesday on the Bulwark podcast. Rampell works for the Bulwark, a centrist political outlet, as well as for the liberal cable news channel MSNOW.
“My father didn’t sue country clubs,” she said. “Tucker is actually right that freedom of association is allowed under the law.”
Instead, Rampell’s father, Richard, a CPA, was moved in 1990 to launch a publicity campaign against clubs in the area that excluded on the basis of race, religion or gender, after his toddler son was told he would not be invited to a preschool classmate’s birthday party.
“We learned this, or my family learned this, because my brother was in preschool at the time, and he was not invited to a birthday party, and was subsequently found out that the reason he was not invited is that the country club that Tucker is referring to, the Bath and Tennis club, did not allow Jews in its doors, even 4-year-old Jews, as it turns out,” Rampell said.
“When your own child becomes a victim, it awakens emotions you never knew you had,” Richard Rampell told the Palm Beach Daily News on May 16, 1993.
Carlson did not say “Jews” when he discussed the topic on his livestream. But Rampell said she detected plenty of codes, including his exchange with his brother about a group “fixated” on WASPs, and the ostensible oxymoron he uses to describe Rampell a “liberal neocon.”
“You’ll understand what that’s a euphemism for,” Rampell said.
“Neoconservative” or “neocon” are sometimes used as anti-Jewish pejoratives, on the left and the right. Rampell’s writing and commentary do not reflect the views of actual neoconservatives, who champion shrinking the welfare state as well as a robustly interventionist foreign policy.
Rampell noted that Carlson is no stranger to euphemisms for Jews, recalling that in his eulogy for the slain conservative leader Charlie Kirk last year, Tucker referred to the killers of Jesus as “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus.”
Trump in 1993 sought assistance in turning the Palm Beach estate he had purchased, Mar-a-Lago, into a country club. One lawyer he consulted with advised Trump to emphasize that the new club would be open to all comers – it would not restrict Jews or Blacks or others.
“You’ve got an island with a lot of Jewish residents who have no club to go to,” said the lawyer, Paul Rampell — Catherine’s uncle, and her father’s partner in campaigning against country club bigotry.
Trump agreed and hired the lawyer, who helped him secure permission to launch the club.
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