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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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Amid antisemitic attacks, Trump has forced an impossible choice on American synagogues
The Thursday attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, did not occur in a vacuum.
In the past few months, shots were fired at three congregations in Toronto; an explosion rocked a synagogue in Belgium; and an arsonist caused massive damage to Beth Israel Congregation in Mississippi. Antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs. The threat is real, it is escalating, and American Jews know it.
Which is why the federal government’s decision to use this moment in history to force Jewish communities to choose between their own safety and that of immigrants is so unforgivable.
That choice is being created as part of the government’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which under President Donald Trump has instituted troubling new changes.
The program was established in 2004 to help houses of worship pay for cameras, barriers, armed guards and alarm systems, then expanded after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre in 2018. It has perhaps never mattered more than it does right now. It provides, quite literally, life-saving money. The demand for grants vastly outpaces the supply, with thousands of organizations competing for a fraction of the security funds they need.
Now, those funds come with new strings attached.
Beginning in 2025, the Department of Homeland Security attached sweeping ideological conditions to new security grants. Recipients of new awards must cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, and must also agree not to “operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology.” They additionally must not run any aid program which “benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.”
When asked to clarify what those conditions mean in practice — whether a synagogue that declares itself a sanctuary for refugees would be disqualified, or whether a congregation offering programming for Jews of color or LGBTQ+ Jews would run afoul of the anti-DEI clause — the federal government’s answer has been months of contradictory guidance and confusion.
The terrifying potential consequences of that muddle were thrown into sharp relief by Thursday’s attack.
A man armed with a rifle rammed his truck through the doors of Temple Israel, driving down a hallway before being killed by the synagogue’s security staff. Thankfully, no congregants were hurt, and the children in the preschool run by the synagogue all made it home safely.
Many congregations do not have the independent resources to support security protocols as effective as Temple Israel’s proved to be. Instead, they rely on the government to help bridge the gap.
But under Trump’s second administration, security funding — the money that pays for the tools that may one day save lives — is now a lever to use to force political compliance.
This is of particular significance for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish denomination in the U.S. and that to which Temple Israel belongs. The movement’s commitment to welcoming the stranger, hachnasat orchim — stemming from the commandment to love the stranger, repeated no fewer than 36 times in the Torah — is core to its identity. It is no coincidence that many Reform congregations have declared themselves sanctuaries for refugees.
And it’s of particular significance because antisemitic violence is often linked to anti-immigrant sentiment. The deadliest act of antisemitic violence in U.S. history, the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, was motivated by hatred toward immigrants, and toward Jewish programs that aid them.
The Trump administration’s demand that liberal American Jews choose between a foundational Jewish value and basic safety from violence is heartbreaking. One anonymous rabbi described the dilemma with devastating clarity to JTA: “Money is being given to us on condition that we violate a specific mitzvah. I don’t see how we can possibly accept that money.”
Rabbi Jill Maderer in Philadelphia put it even more bluntly, saying “Jewish safety requires inclusive democracy and inclusive democracy requires Jewish safety. We do not comply so we will not apply.”
These are communities under armed threat — as Thursday clearly reminded us — forced to choose between their physical safety and their moral integrity. That is a choice that no American religious community should ever have to make. The government’s obligation to protect its citizens, especially its most targeted minorities, must not come with an ideological price tag.
What makes this especially galling is the timing. A government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, born out of a political standoff over immigration enforcement, is currently halting the review of security grant applications. Synagogues that applied for funding months ago are waiting for approvals that may not come.
They are waiting, in many cases, to find out whether the security upgrades that might have made the difference under circumstances like those that unfolded in Michigan will be funded or not.
There is a word for demanding that a persecuted minority community abandon its values in exchange for protection: extortion. The Trump administration would no doubt dispute that framing. After all, the administration claims to care deeply about Jewish safety. Thursday’s attack makes clear that it is not enough for the administration to make that claim; it must prove its commitment through action.
It must remove the political conditions from the Nonprofit Security Grant Program. It must let houses of worship be what they are: sanctuaries, not instruments of federal policy.
The post Amid antisemitic attacks, Trump has forced an impossible choice on American synagogues appeared first on The Forward.
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‘For As Long As Necessary’: Katz Says Campaign Against Iran Entering Decisive Stage
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz and his Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias make statements to the press, at the Ministry of Defense in Athens Greece, Jan. 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki
i24 News – Israel Katz said Saturday that the confrontation with Iran had entered a “decisive phase,” as US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets continued and regional tensions escalated.
Speaking after a security assessment at Israel’s defense headquarters alongside Eyal Zamir, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and senior military and intelligence officials, the Israeli defense minister said the campaign against the Islamic Republic would continue “for as long as necessary.”
“The global and regional struggle against Iran, led by American President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is intensifying and entering its decisive phase,” Katz said.
Katz also praised US strikes on Kharg Island, a key Iranian oil hub, describing them as a “severe blow” to the Iranian regime. He said the attacks were an appropriate response to Iranian threats against the strategic Strait of Hormuz and to what he called Tehran’s attempts to pressure the international community.
At the same time, Katz said the Israeli Air Force was continuing a “powerful wave of attacks” against targets in Tehran and other parts of Iran.
He accused the Iranian leadership of using “regional and global terrorism” and strategic blackmail in an effort to deter Israel and the United States from pursuing their military campaign, warning that such actions would be met with a “strong and uncompromising response.”
Katz added that the outcome of the conflict would ultimately depend on the Iranian population. “Only the Iranian people can put an end to this situation through a determined struggle, until the overthrow of the terrorist regime and the salvation of Iran,” he said.
According to the minister, the confrontation now pits the Iranian regime’s determination to survive against growing military pressure from Israel and its allies.
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Trump Rejects Efforts to Launch Iran Ceasefire Talks, Sources Say
US President Donald Trump speaks on the day he honors reigning Major League Soccer (MLS) champion Inter Miami CF players and team officials with an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, March 5, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump’s administration has rebuffed efforts by Middle Eastern allies to start diplomatic negotiations aimed at ending the Iran war that started two weeks ago with a massive US-Israeli air assault, according to three sources familiar with the efforts.
Iran, for its part, has rejected the possibility of any ceasefire until US and Israeli strikes end, two senior Iranian sources told Reuters, adding that several countries had been trying to mediate an end to the conflict.
The lack of interest from Washington and Tehran suggests both sides are digging in for an extended conflict, even as the widening war inflicts civilian casualties and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz sends oil prices soaring.
US strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island, the country’s main oil export hub, on Friday night underscored Trump’s determination to press ahead with his military assault. Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz shut and threatened to step up attacks on neighboring countries.
The war has killed more than 2,000 people, mostly in Iran, and created the biggest-ever oil supply disruption as maritime traffic has halted in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil is transported.
ATTEMPTS TO OPEN LINES OF COMMUNICATION
Oman, which mediated talks before the war, has tried multiple times to open a line of communication, but the White House has made clear it is not interested, according to two sources, who like others in this story were granted anonymity in order to speak freely about diplomatic matters.
A senior White House official confirmed Trump has rebuffed those efforts to start talks and is focused on pressing ahead with the war to further weaken Tehran’s military capabilities.
“He’s not interested in that right now, and we’re going to continue with the mission unabated. Maybe there’s a day, but not right now,” the official said.
During the first week of the war, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that Iran’s leadership and military were so battered by US-Israeli strikes that they wanted to talk, but that it was “Too Late!” He has a history of shifting foreign policy stances without warning, making it hard to rule out that he might test the waters for restarting diplomacy.
“President Trump said new potential leadership in Iran has indicated they want to talk and eventually will talk. For now, Operation Epic Fury continues unabated,” a second senior White House official said when asked to comment on this story.
The Iranian sources said Tehran has rejected efforts by several countries to negotiate a ceasefire until the US and Israel end their airstrikes and meet Iran’s demands, which include a permanent end to US and Israeli attacks and compensation as part of a ceasefire.
Egypt, which was involved in mediation before the war, has also tried to reopen communications, according to three security and diplomatic sources. While the efforts do not appear to have made progress, they have secured some military restraint from neighboring countries hit by Iran, according to one of the sources.
Egypt’s foreign ministry, the government of Oman and the Iranian government did not respond to requests for comment.
POSITIONS HARDEN ON ALL SIDES
The war’s impact on global oil markets has significantly increased the cost for the United States.
Some US officials and advisers to Trump urge a quick end to the war, warning that surging gasoline prices could exact a high political price from the president’s Republican Party, with US midterm elections looming.
Others are pressing Trump to maintain the offensive against the Islamic Republic to destroy its missile program and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to Reuters reporting.
Trump’s rejection of diplomatic efforts could indicate that, for now, the administration has no plans for a quick end to the war.
Indeed, both the United States and Iran appear even less willing to engage than during the opening days of the war, when senior US officials reached out to Oman to discuss de-escalating, according to several sources.
One source said Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had also sought to use Oman as a conduit for ceasefire discussions that would have involved U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
But those discussions have not materialized.
Instead, Iran’s position has hardened, said a third senior Iranian source.
“Whatever was communicated previously through the diplomatic channels is irrelevant now,” said the source.
“The Guards strongly believe that if they lose control over the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will lose the war,” the source added, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite paramilitary force that controls large parts of the economy.
“Therefore, the Guards will not accept any ceasefire, ceasefire talks, or diplomatic efforts, and Iran’s political leaders will not engage in such talks despite attempts by several countries.”