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She was a dancer who leapt to the top of her field — then the Trump administration fired her
When she walked up to the Kennedy Center on the first day of her internship in 2013, she was Jane Rabinovitz, a recent grad from William & Mary, fresh off a stint as stage manager for an Argentine aerial tango company performing in Miami, and newly determined to forge a career in the arts.
By the time security escorted her out with her personal belongings 12 years later, she was Jane (Rabinovitz) Raleigh, a veteran employee who’d risen in the ranks to become director of dance programming. In August, she and her small team were fired amidst the upheaval fomented by President Donald Trump, who in his second term has installed himself as Kennedy Center chairman and attempted to reshape the institution.
The team was dismissed on a Thursday. By Monday, the center announced its new dance director: former Washington Ballet dancer Stephen Nakagawa. Raleigh was hardly shocked. She’d known since early March about the letter Nakagawa had sent to Richard Grenell, the center’s new president, praising Trump and lamenting “radical leftist ideologies” and the “rise of ‘woke’ culture” in the ballet world.
For six months, Raleigh saw firsthand that “what was happening inside of the Kennedy Center very much mirrored the general chaos that was happening in the government, the DOGE experience that people were having,” she told me over Zoom from her home in D.C. “You’re watching the chess pieces be moved around the board, but it’s people’s lives.”
“There was definitely an overarching feeling of waiting for the shoe to drop,” Raleigh said. “I was committed to staying until I was removed,” she added. But “I did believe from the beginning that everyone would be fired at some point.”
When her time came, the choreography felt familiar. “The cadence of it mirrored what had been happening at the center for many months,” she said. In some cases, entire teams were erased and their programs sunset. In other cases, like hers, “the leader would be fired, and then one, two, or three days later, a new person would just show up.” Often, she said, that person had some connection to Trump or Grenell. (Grenell and the Kennedy Center press office have not responded to multiple requests for comment.)
In the five or seven minutes Raleigh said it took for her and her two assistant managers to be fired, she was informed that this move was the result of “a loss of confidence in my leadership and a loss of confidence in the team’s ability to align with leadership’s vision.”
According to Raleigh, Grenell had communicated that vision in a meeting only the previous week, suggesting they present more “broadly appealing” programming in the vein of So You Think You Can Dance or Paula Abdul. She left the conversation with “a directive to start exploring more commercial offerings,” and immediately began reaching out to agents to pursue it. But before she had a chance to share a proposal, the team was out.
“I didn’t really have a chance to even try,” she said.
From Purim spiels and horas to a career in the arts
Raleigh was born in Washington, D.C., and raised just across the river in Virginia by her Jewish father — that’s the Rabinovitz — and her Catholic mother. Theirs was a mixed household, like the one Raleigh now shares with her husband, who grew up Catholic. But her parents decided to raise their kids Jewish and joined Temple Rodef Shalom, a reform synagogue in Falls Church, Virginia.
A language lover and future Spanish major, Raleigh “ate up” Hebrew school lessons, even “practicing writing secret notes in Hebrew to myself,” she said. She connected to her Jewish community primarily through the arts. She sang in the youth choir and later became a founding member of the teen choir, Kol Machar. And for many years she performed in the Purim spiels her dad wrote and directed as a hobby. One year when she was in college, the woman playing Esther dropped out of the Tarzan-themed Purim spiel at the last minute. “My dad called me,” she recalled, “and he was like, either you can be Esther or I’m gonna have to be Esther.”
Raleigh danced a formative hora at her bat mitzvah and another at her wedding a few years ago. “The hora and Jewish artistic experiences have always been a moment to blend my Jewish life and my secular life,” said Raleigh.
In her secular life, she trained seriously in ballet. She minored in dance at William & Mary, led the student dance company, and interned one summer at the American Dance Festival. Soon after graduation, she decided to pursue a career in the arts instead. She grew up going to the Kennedy Center frequently, so that’s where she went.
Her path there led from intern all the way up to dance director. Raleigh curated ballet seasons and contracted, budgeted, and presented both ballet and contemporary dance with an eye toward exposing audiences to a broader variety of work. She brought in Alonzo King LINES Ballet from San Francisco for their Kennedy Center debut in 2024, for example, introducing audiences familiar with classical, narrative productions to a more contemporary vision of ballet by an important living artist.
Raleigh says she felt lucky to put the center’s ample resources to use to support local and emerging artists and present some of the world’s best companies in a worthy setting. “I frequently would have striking moments of realization sitting in the Opera House, when the curtains would go up on shows that I’d be working on,” she said.
“That sense of wonder,” she added, “does not go away.”
A Trump tailspin
Trump took little interest in the Kennedy Center during his first term. He never attended performances back then, Raleigh said, though his daughter Ivanka Trump frequently came to the ballet. Like other presidents before him, he did appoint new members to the historically bipartisan board; Raleigh said she worked closely over the years with a few who were “real ballet supporters.” Unlike his predecessors, Trump repeatedly skipped the annual Kennedy Center Honors.
“We had lived through a previous term, so there was certainly no expectation that anything would be different,” Raleigh said. Until Trump posted on social media in February, shortly after his second inauguration, announcing his intentions to take over as chairman, oust board members, and shake up programming in order to “make the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. GREAT AGAIN” and usher in “a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”
Raleigh found out about Trump’s plan when the public did. At first, she didn’t give it much credence — Trump had said a lot of things during his first administration that he hadn’t acted upon, she said. However, it quickly became clear he would follow through this time, and it “put everybody into a tailspin.”
The purge began immediately. Several board members and longtime chair David Rubenstein were dismissed and replaced by Trump and his appointees. Center president Deborah Rutter was removed after an 11-year tenure, to be succeeded by Grenell.
“Every single day you would come in and be like, what will have happened today?” Raleigh said. A pattern emerged where “basically every payday Friday was mass firings day.” Sometimes it was three people, she remembered, and sometimes 20. Those waves of dismissals were “the most chaotic, traumatic, repeatedly painful thing.”
In response to the uncertainty and upheaval, staff at the Kennedy Center began working to form a union. “The Kennedy Center’s new management has communicated its intention to radically alter the Center’s programming priorities, eliminate staff, and dismantle our mission-essential programs,” the union website states. “We no longer believe our institution trusts us and we no longer trust our institution.” Raleigh said her team participated in the organizing effort — which members hoped would help them fight to protect jobs, working conditions, creative autonomy, and more — and she was vocal in backing it.
When she and her team were notified around 11:40 a.m. on Aug. 21 of a meeting that was to take place in the HR suite five minutes later, they knew what was coming. It took just a few minutes for HR and legal to fire them and hand over their termination paperwork, Raleigh recalled.
On the way back to their desks, Raleigh and her team sent a few texts to share the news and “staff from every corner of the building” showed up, as they had done for others so many times by then. They had an hour to say goodbye, get their things, and get out.
Suddenly jobless, they set up at her apartment, divvied up the list of artists they were presenting in the upcoming season, and called them all to share the unfortunate update. It felt particularly difficult to digest the fact that they couldn’t be behind the scenes to support the performances scheduled to take place that weekend as part of the center’s local dance commissioning project. “The piece was about how Black women can support other Black women and femmes to have rest and resilience in the world,” Raleigh said. Without a team, they worried, “Who’s going to take care of this piece of art?”
Next steps
Raleigh’s fears extend beyond the Kennedy Center. She told me she’s concerned about the fate of dance and the arts in the face of the “dismantling, essentially, of the NEA” by the Trump administration and recent shifts by key arts funders, with reports that longtime supporters like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, and Ford Foundation are now focusing on other priorities. And all this while arts organizations are still recovering from the pandemic’s crushing blow.
“The dance field has not been in a moment of incredible glory and surplus in my entire lifetime,” Raleigh said. So while the current state of affairs is “horrible,” perhaps “this is a moment for us to be thinking about what are new ways and new paths that we can chart going forward.”
Since her departure from the Kennedy Center, she’s been focused not only on the search for a new full-time job, but also on launching the DC Dance Network. It’s an effort to connect artists to resources and one another. “If we want to build a better fabric, a more supportive fabric, of the dance community nationally, why not start at the tiniest, most local version?” said Raleigh, whose fledgling organization announced its first commission in early November.
Living through the turmoil at the Kennedy Center and witnessing the tumult in the government “has totally transformed my approach to community, my approach to what it means to be a good neighbor,” Raleigh said. “This idea is very Jewish, that we’re commanded to do mitzvot so that we have the opportunity to do more in the future, that we’re compelled to repair the world through tikkun olam. All of that has really been informed from my Jewish childhood.”
She’s stayed in touch with her former colleagues and the union and participated in advocacy efforts. She was part of a group that showed up at the Kennedy Center to personally deliver a petition with more than 1,600 signatures collected by Hands Off the Arts demanding the organization reinstate wrongfullly terminated employees, recognize the union, and more. “They’re not getting off the hook,” she said.
Raleigh is waiting to see what kind of dance season, if any, the Kennedy Center announces for 2026-27. It remains to be seen which companies will agree to perform there and whether audiences will attend. In the meantime, Raleigh’s been heartened to see that none of her programming — which runs through June 2026 — seems to have been changed or canceled.
And she’s returned as a spectator, back in the seats where she fell in love with the arts as a kid. In October, she went to see the Stuttgart Ballet perform at the Kennedy Center for the first time in more than 30 years. At the first intermission, the older woman sitting next to her — who said she’d seen the company during their last visit — turned to Raleigh and said, “Isn’t this amazing?!”
“In that moment, we were just audience members having the same transformative experience at the ballet,” Raleigh said. “She clearly didn’t know who I was,” Raleigh added, and “I just got to revel in the ballet with her.”
The post She was a dancer who leapt to the top of her field — then the Trump administration fired her appeared first on The Forward.
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A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel
Something significant is happening between Israel and Syria, and it deserves more attention than it is getting.
With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Syrian officials have agreed to create what they call a “joint fusion mechanism” — a permanent channel for coordination on intelligence, de-escalation, diplomacy and economic matters — during meetings in Paris. It appears to be the beginning of institutionalized contact between two countries that have formally been at war since 1948.
If this process continues, it will count as a genuine foreign-policy success for President Donald Trump’s administration.
To understand how profound that change would be, it is worth recalling the two countries’ shared history.
Israel and Syria — which the U.S. struck with a set of targeted attacks on the Islamic State on Saturday — have fought openly or by proxy for decades. Before 1967, Syrian artillery positions in the Golan Heights regularly shelled Israeli communities in the Hula Valley and around the Sea of Galilee. After Israel captured that region in 1967, the direct shelling stopped, but the conflict did not.
Syria remained formally committed to a state of war; Israel entrenched itself in the Golan Heights; both sides treated the frontier as a potential flashpoint to be managed carefully. After Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, Syria became Israel’s most dangerous neighboring state.
A 1974 disengagement agreement created a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, which mostly ensured peace along the border, but did not resolve anything fundamental. In Lebanon, Israel and Syria backed opposing forces for years, and their air forces clashed briefly during the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, Iran’s growing role in Syria and Hezbollah’s military buildup added new threats. The Syrian civil war then destroyed basic state capacity and created precisely the kind of militia-rich environment Israel fears along its borders.
Now, with the dictator Bashar al-Assad gone and the former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in power, Syria is a broken country trying to stabilize. Sharaa’s past associations, disturbingly, include leadership of jihadist groups that were part of the wartime landscape in Syria. But today he governs a state facing economic collapse, infrastructure ruin and a population that needs jobs and basic services. His incentives are simple and powerful: ensure the survival of his regime, invite foreign investment, and secure relief from isolation and sanctions. Those goals point toward the U.S. and its partners, including Israel.
The Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to see new Syrian cooperation with Israel, with the suggestion that progress with Israel will become a gateway to international investment, and to a degree of political acceptance that Syria has lacked for years. Al-Sharaa’s willingness to engage is therefore not a mystery.
Israel’s motivations are also straightforward. After the Gaza war, Israel is facing a severe reputational problem. It is widely viewed abroad as reckless and excessively militarized. The government is under pressure over not only the conduct of the war but also the perception that it has no political strategy and relies almost exclusively on force. A diplomatic track with Syria allows Israel to present a very different picture: that of a country capable of negotiations with ideologically opposed neighbors, de-escalation, and regional cooperation.
There are significant security incentives, too.
Israel wants to limit Iran and Hezbollah’s influence in Syria. It wants a predictable northern border. It wants assurances regarding the Druze population in southern Syria — brethren to the Israeli Druze who are extremely loyal to the state, and who were outraged after a massacre of Syrian Druze followed the installation of al-Sharaa’s regime. It wants to ensure that no armed Syrian groups will tread near the Golan. A coordinated mechanism supervised by the U.S. offers a strong diplomatic way to address these issues.
The U.S. will benefit as well. The Trump team is eager to show that it can deliver lasting diplomatic achievements in the Middle East after the success of the Abraham Accords in Trump’s first term. A meaningful shift in Israel–Syria relations would be a very welcome addition, especially as the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza war faces an uncertain future.
The main questions now are practical. Can the “joint fusion mechanism” function under pressure? What will happen when there is, almost inevitably, an incident — a drone downed, a militia clash, a cross-border strike? Will the new system effectively lower the temperature, or will it collapse at the first crisis?
Will Iran — facing its own profound internal political crisis — accept a Syria that coordinates with Israel under U.S. supervision, or will it work to undermine al-Sharaa? How will Hezbollah react if Damascus appears to move away from the axis of “resistance” and toward a security understanding with Israel?
How would an Israel-Syria deal impact Lebanon’s moribund efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s military capacity? Al-Sharaa has already helped significantly by ending the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through his territory. Might he also actively help with the disarming of the group?
No one should expect a full peace treaty soon. The question of possession of the Golan Heights probably remains a deal-breaker. Public opinion in Syria has been shaped by decades of official hostility to Israel, and Israeli politics is fragmented and volatile.
But diplomatic breakthroughs can confound expectations. They usually begin with mechanisms like this one, involving limited cooperation, routine contact and crisis management.
If this effort helps move the border from a zone of permanent tension to one of managed stability, that alone would be a major shift. It would also send a signal beyond the region: U.S. engagement still matters, and American pressure and incentives can still change behavior.
The post A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”