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The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way
(JTA) — When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we thought it might be cool to hire a klezmer band. This was during the first wave of the klezmer revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and The Klezmer Conservatory Band were rediscovering the genre of Jewish wedding music popular for centuries in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe.
Of course we also wanted to dance to rock ‘n’ roll and needed musicians who could handle Sinatra for our parents’ benefit, so we went with a more typical wedding band. Modernity won out over tradition.
Or did it? Musician and musicologist Uri Schreter argues that the music heard at American Jewish weddings since the 1950s has become a tradition all its own, especially in the way Old World traditions coexist with contemporary pop. In a dissertation he is writing about the politics of Jewish music in the early postwar period, Schreter argues that American Jewish musical traditions — especially among secularized Conservative and Reform Jews — reflect events happening outside the wedding hall, including the Holocaust, the creation of Israel and the rapid assimilation of American Jews.
That will be the subject of a talk he’ll be giving Monday for YIVO, titled “Yiddish to the Core: Wedding Music and Jewish Identity in Postwar New York City.”
Because it’s June — and because I’m busy planning a wedding for one of my kids one year from now — I wanted to speak to Schreter about Jewish weddings and how they got that way. Our Zoom conversation Wednesday touched on the indestructibility of the hora, the role of musicians as “secular clergy” and why my Ashkenazi parents danced the cha-cha-cha.
Born in Tel Aviv, Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. He is a composer, pianist and film editor.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I was struck by your research because we’re helping to plan a child’s wedding now. It’s the first wedding we’ve planned since our own, and we’re still asking the same questions, like, you’ve got to make sure the band can handle the hora and the Motown set and, I don’t know, “Uptown Funk.” Your research explores when that began — when American Jewish weddings began to combine the traditional and secular cultures.
In the period that I’m talking about, post-World War II America, this is already a fact of life for musicians. A lot of my work is based on interviews with musicians from that period, folks now in their 80s and 90s. The oldest one I have started playing professionally in 1947 or ’48. Popular American music was played at Jewish weddings as early as the 1930s, but it’s a question of proportion — how much the wedding would feature foxtrots and swing and Lindy Hop and other popular dance tunes of the day, and how much of it is going to be klezmer music.
In the postwar period, most of the [non-Orthodox] American Jewish weddings would have featured American pop. For musicians who wanted to be in what they called the “club date” business, they needed to be able to do all these things. And some “offices” — a term they used for a business that books wedding bands — would have specialists that they could call on to do a Jewish wedding.
You’re writing about a period when the Conservative movement becomes the dominant American Jewish denomination. They have one foot in tradition, and the other in modernity. What does a wedding look like in 1958 when they’re building the big suburban synagogues?
The difference is not so much denominational but between the wide spectrum of Orthodoxy and the diverse spectrum of what I describe as “secular.”
Meaning non-Orthodox — Reform, Conservative, etc.?
Right. Only in the sense that they are broadly speaking more secular than the Orthodox. And if so they are going to have, for the most part, one, maybe two sets of Jewish dance music — basically a medley of a few Jewish tunes. You might have a wedding where it could be a quarter of the music or even half would be Jewish music, but this would be for families that have a much stronger degree of attachment to traditional Jewish culture, and primarily Yiddish culture.
There’s a few interrelated elements that shape this. Class is an important thing. For lower class communities in some areas, and I am talking primarily about New York, you’d have communities that are a little bit more secluded, probably speaking more Yiddish at home and hanging out more with other Jewish people from similar backgrounds. So these kinds of communities might have as much as a third or half of the music be Jewish, even though they consider themselves secular. It’s actually very similar to an Orthodox wedding, where you might also have half and half [Jewish and “American” music].
Jews in the higher socioeconomic class might, in general, be more Americanized, and want to project a more mainstream American identity. They might have as little as five minutes of Jewish music, just to mark it that they did this. Still, it’s very important for almost all of them to have those five minutes — because it’s one of the things that makes the wedding Jewish. I interviewed couples that were getting married in the ’50s, and a lot of them told me, “You need to have Jewish dance music for this to be a Jewish wedding.”
Composer and pianist Uri Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. (Nicole Loeb)
When I was growing up in the 1970s at a suburban Reform synagogue on Long Island, klezmer was never spoken about. I don’t know any parents who owned klezmer albums. Then when I got married a decade later, it was in the middle of the klezmer revival. Am I right about that? Were the ’50s and ’60s fallow periods for klezmer?
You’re definitely right. Up until the mid-1920s, you still have waves of immigration coming from Eastern Europe. So you still have new people feeding this desire for the traditional culture. But as immigration stops and people basically tried to become American, the tides shift away from traditional klezmer.
The other important thing that happens in the period that I’m looking at is both a negative rejection of klezmer and a positive attraction to other new things. Klezmer becomes associated with immigrant culture, so people who are trying to be American don’t want to be associated with it. It also becomes associated with the Holocaust, which is very problematic. Anything sounding Yiddish becomes associated for some people with tragedy.
At the same time, and very much related to this, there’s the rise of Israeli popular culture, and especially Israeli folk songs. A really strong symbol of this is in the summer of 1950, when the Weavers record a song called “Tzena, Tzena,” a Hebrew Israeli song written in the 1940s which becomes a massive hit in America — it’s like number two in the Billboard charts for about 10 weeks. Israeli culture becomes this symbol of hope and the future and a new society that’s inspiring. This is all in very stark contrast to what klezmer represents for people. And a lot of the composers of Israeli folk song of its first decades had this very clearly stated ideology that they’re moving away from Ashkenazi musical traditions and Yiddish.
So the Jewish set at a wedding becomes an Israeli set.
At a typical Conservative wedding in the 1950s and ’60s, you might hear 10 minutes of Jewish music. The first one would be “Hava Nagila,” then they went to “Tzena, Tzena,” then they would do a song called “Artza Alinu,” which is today not very well known, and then “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.” They are songs that are perceived to be Israeli folk songs, even though if you actually look at their origins, it’s a lot murkier than that. Like two of the songs I just mentioned are actually Hasidic songs that received Hebrew words in pre-state Palestine. Another probably comes from some sort of German, non-Jewish composer in 1900, but is in Hebrew and is perceived to be a representation of Israeli culture.
But even when the repertoire already represents a shift towards what’s easier to digest for American Jewry, the arrangements and the instruments and the musical ornamentation are essentially klezmer. The musicians I spoke to said they did this because they felt that this is the only way that it would actually sound Jewish.
That is to say, to be “Jewish” the music had to gesture towards Ashkenazi and Yiddish, even if it were Israeli and Hebrew. As if Jews wanted to distance themselves from Eastern Europe — but only so far.
Someone like Dave Tarras or the Epstein Brothers, musicians who were really at the forefront of klezmer in New York at the time, were really focused on bringing it closer to Ashkenazi traditions. Ashkenazi Jewish weddings in America are not the totality of Jewish weddings in America, and Israeli music itself is made up of all these different traditions — North African, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Greek — but in effect most of the really popular songs of the time were composed by Ashkenazi composers. Even “Hava Nagila” is based on a melody from the Sadigura Hasidic sect in Eastern Europe.
Of course, if you’re a klezmer musician you’re allergic to “Hava Nagila.”
Then-Vice President Joe Biden dances the hora with his daughter Ashley at her wedding to Howard Krein in Wilmington, Delaware on June 2, 2012. (White House/David Lienemann)
You spoke earlier about Latin music, which seemed to become a Jewish thing in the 1950s and ’60s — I know a few scholars have focused on Jews and Latinos and how Latin musical genres like the mambo and cha-cha-cha became popular in the Catskill Mountain resorts and at Jewish weddings.
Latin music is not exclusively a Jewish thing, but it’s part of American popular culture by the late 40s. But Jews are very eagerly adopting it for sure. In the Catskills, you would often have two separate bands that alternated every evening. One is a Latin band, one is a generic American band playing everything else. And part of that is American Jews wanting to become American. And how do you become American? By doing what Americans do: by appropriating “exotic” cultures, in this case Latin. This is a way of being American.
Jews and Chinese food would be another example.
And by the way, in a similar vein, it also becomes very popular to dance to Israeli folk songs. A lot of people are taking lessons. A lot of people are going to their Jewish Y to learn Israeli folk dance.
I’ve been to Jewish weddings where the “Jewish set” feels very perfunctory — you know, dance a hora or two long enough to lift the couple on chairs and then let’s get to the Motown. Or the Black Eyed Peas because they were smart enough to include the words “Mazel Tov!” in the lyrics to “I Gotta Feeling.”
So that’s why we always hear that song! I will say though, even when the Jewish music appears superficial, it does have this deeper layer of meaning. It’s very interesting how, despite all these changes, and despite the secularization process of American Jewish weddings, the music still connects people to their Jewishness. These pieces of music are so meshed with other religious components. Of course, most people see this as secular. But a lot of people connect to their Jewish identity through elements such as Jewish music, Jewish food, certain Jewish customs that are easier to accommodate in your secular lifestyle, and the music specifically has this kind of flexibility, this fluidity between the sacred and the profane.
That’s beautiful. It sort of makes the musicians secular clergy.
It’s interesting that you say that. In his history of klezmer, Walter Zev Feldman refers to the klezmer — the word itself means “musician” — as a kind of a liminal character, an interstitial character between the secular and the mundane. The music is not liturgical, but when the klezmer or the band is playing, it is an interval woven with all these other religious components and things that have ritual meaning.
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When does criticizing Israel become antisemitism? Ask Mark Ruffalo
American actor Mark Ruffalo on Saturday denied that he is antisemitic, one day after Paramount accused the actor of invoking antisemitic tropes in his campaign against the studio’s $111 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
The clash lands as Paramount is trying to clear the last major obstacle to closing the Warner Bros. Discovery deal: a lawsuit filed by California and 11 other state attorneys general seeking to block it on antitrust grounds.
“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” Ruffalo said on Saturday. “Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people.”
Now, what started as a celebrity spat has turned into a stand-in for a much bigger fight: When does criticizing Israel’s government turn into hating Jews?
Ruffalo and his defenders say targeting a defense contractor’s technology and a media family’s wealth is ordinary corporate criticism. Paramount and its allies say invoking Israel in a business dispute imports old tropes about Jewish power and money into a fight that has nothing to do with Jews. The same argument has played out over campus protests, in Congress and across the globe since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.
The dispute began Friday, when Ruffalo posted a 2024 clip of former Oracle CEO Safra Catz reportedly discussing “profoundly scary technologies” the company built for the Israeli military after Oct. 7. Along with the clip, Ruffalo wrote that the war in Gaza was “a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle and has an estimated net worth of around $200 billion, has personally backstopped $40.4 billion in equity financing for his son David Ellison’s Paramount to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
Ruffalo called the elder Ellison a “classic Oligarch” and warned that the “most destructive and inhuman forces in the world” would soon sit inside an important media company if the merger succeeds. The deal would give the family control of CNN. It already owns CBS News.
Paramount fired back. “We are, as always, troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute,” a company spokesperson told The Wrap, a Hollywood trade publication. “Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.” The company added that the episode “exposes the true motivation of some who have advocated opposition to this transaction.”
It’s not the first time Paramount has made that argument. Axios reported in June that company executives believed antisemitism was fueling opposition to the merger more broadly, pointing to the Ellisons’ Jewish identity and Larry Ellison’s friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ruffalo pushed back on social media Saturday refuting the accusation that he is antisemitic and adding: “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
An advocate and activist
Ruffalo, 58, is best known for playing the Hulk in the Marvel cinematic universe and has been nominated for four Academy Awards, for his performances in The Kids Are All Right, Foxcatcher, Spotlight and Poor Things.
He has also built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most consistent activists, campaigning for environmental causes and protesting against the Trump administration. This fight is the latest flashpoint in the actor’s history of pro-Palestinian activism.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel, he has frequently called out Israel’s military action in Gaza, notably wearing an Artists4Ceasefire pin to the 2024 Oscars. In September 2024, he was among more than 700 SAG-AFTRA members who signed a letter demanding the actors’ union publicly call for a Gaza ceasefire and protect pro-Palestinian members from what they described as industry blacklisting.
In September 2025, he said he supported efforts to “boycott, divest, sanction, and prosecute” Israel. And just 10 days before the Oracle post, he joined Javier Bardem, Susan Sarandon and other artists in a statement arguing that despite the U.S.-brokered truce in place since October 2025, “there is no ceasefire in Gaza.”
That history is why three prominent voices in the fight against antisemitism sided with Paramount over the weekend.
“Words matter, and so does the willingness to draw a line when legitimate debate gives way to antisemitic tropes,” wrote Jim Berk, CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, praising the studio for “refusing to allow prejudice to masquerade as political or corporate criticism.”
He went on: “Invoking Israel in an issue where it is completely irrelevant is a textbook case of obsession and demonization.”
Creative Community for Peace, a Hollywood group that pushes back on boycotts of Israel, went further, with executive director Ari Ingel accusing Ruffalo of fusing “hostility toward Israel and Zionism with Jewish-associated wealth, media ownership, oligarchic power and ominous warnings about concentrated control into a single narrative.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, called Ruffalo’s posts “cynical and sickening.”
Antisemitism vs. anti-Zionism
The fight lands amid the worst stretch of global antisemitism in decades. Researchers at Tel Aviv University found that 20 Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks worldwide last year, the highest toll in more than 30 years — a count that includes a gunmen who killed more than a dozen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December.
As incidents rise, and amidst Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza and its war with Iran, the country’s standing in the world has cratered.
A Pew Research Center survey of 36 countries this spring found a median of 67% hold unfavorable views of Israel, with opinion growing more negative since 2025 in most countries where Pew has trend data. Even in the U.S., Israel’s staunchest ally, Americans no longer clearly side with Israelis over Palestinians for the first time since Gallup began asking in 2001 — a reversal driven largely by independents and voters under 35.
Where the merger stands
Representatives for Paramount and California are expected to meet Monday for preliminary talks, at Paramount’s request, though people briefed on the discussions cautioned there’s no guarantee they will lead anywhere. The Writers Guild has also sued to block the deal.
The stakes of delay are real: if the deal doesn’t close by October, Paramount would owe Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. If there is no resolution, a trial is set for March.
The post When does criticizing Israel become antisemitism? Ask Mark Ruffalo appeared first on The Forward.
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AIPAC wants to defeat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race. Mike Rogers would rather it stay out.
In the race for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, both candidates are trying to turn a narrow margin into victory.
Republican Mike Rogers is trying to win as the more moderate alternative to Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive and an outspoken critic of Israel. El-Sayed, who narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary, hopes to repeat a strategy that worked for him: campaigning against AIPAC and its political influence.
The pro-Israel lobbying group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million trying to defeat El-Sayed in the primary. Now, with $60 million in cash on hand, according to the latest FEC filings, it is eager to keep a fierce Israel critic out of the Senate. There is just one problem: Rogers would rather AIPAC stay out of the race.
Allies of the Republican nominee have reportedly asked AIPAC not to run ads to boost him, fearing that the group’s involvement would backfire and give El-Sayed the same political foil that helped him overcome its massive spending in the primary. Axios reported that AIPAC officials didn’t take that rejection easily. However, after Rogers spoke with AIPAC chair Michael Tuchin, the group shelved an ad it had already produced attacking El-Sayed.
AIPAC spokesperson Deryn Sousa told Axios that its members “are highly motivated to be involved in this race and we will be looking at every option to make the case that El-Sayed’s policies are bad for Michigan and bad for America.”
Rogers did not outright reject support from pro-Israel donors. His campaign reportedly suggested ways AIPAC could help without putting its own name front and center. The disagreement is over whether having the group attached to the campaign would help him win or make his job harder.
Michigan’s narrow margins
Recent Michigan elections leave little room for error. Trump carried the swing state in 2024 by about 80,000 votes. In the Senate race that same year, Democrat Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes. Four years earlier, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 2.8 points.
A recent AARP poll found El-Sayed at 48% and Rogers at 47% among 877 likely voters, well within the poll’s 3.3-point margin of error. El-Sayed leads among independents by six points. To close the gap, Rogers would need more independents and some dissatisfied Democratic primary voters.
For Rogers, that creates an important distinction: He wants to run against El-Sayed’s positions on Israel and his associations with controversial Israel critics without allowing El-Sayed to turn the election into another fight over AIPAC.
AIPAC has already become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who joined President Donald Trump’s crusade to question the 2020 election results. The wars in Gaza and Iran have only intensified that backlash, as Democratic voters have increasingly rejected U.S. policy supporting Israel.
Michigan has one of the largest Arab American populations in the nation, and it is the birthplace of the “uncommitted” movement to protest the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war in the 2024 presidential primary — making the politics of Israel and Gaza particularly complicated. A recent Fox News poll showed that 55% of Michigan voters opposed continuing U.S. aid to Israel.
In addition to the Michigan primary, AIPAC had some setbacks in other midterm races across the country. Last week, progressive candidate Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed Melissa Hernandez in the closely watched California special election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned after allegations of sexual assault. Earlier this year, Analilia Mejia prevailed in a New Jersey special election for a House seat, after an AIPAC-associated super PAC spent more than $2 million targeting another Democratic candidate. Many congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC.
AIPAC has also become increasingly controversial on the right. Prominent America First voices, including Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have attacked AIPAC’s influence over American foreign policy.
Winning over Jewish Democrats
Last week, Rogers launched a “Democrats for Rogers” effort to target voters who are uncomfortable with El-Sayed, in particular Jewish Democrats who remain uneasy with his rhetoric on Israel — including his calling Israel “bloodthirsty.” Jewish voters make up 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan.
Rabbi Asher Lopatin, a Modern Orthodox rabbi in suburban Detroit who backed Stevens in the primary and usually votes Democratic, endorsed Rogers at that event and urged others to do the same. Lopatin focused his criticism not only on El-Sayed’s positions on Israel but on his relationship with Hasan Piker, the popular left-wing pundit who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric and who appeared with El-Sayed on the campaign trail.
El-Sayed “has shown contempt for the Jewish community and, frankly, for American values by making Hasan Piker, a vicious antisemite and racist, his campaign surrogate and someone he buddies up with,” Lopatin said.
The Democratic nominee understands that vulnerability. Since winning the primary, El-Sayed has sought to reassure Jewish voters that his opposition to Israel is not hostility toward Jews. “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said in a recent TV appearance. “They are not the same as AIPAC and Israel.” In that interview, El-Sayed also disavowed some remarks by Piker, though he did not commit to ending campaign appearances with him.
That helps explain why Rogers prefers AIPAC to remain out of the spotlight. The Republican nominee would rather spend the fall forcing El-Sayed to defend his positions on Israel, his relationship with Piker and distrust among Jewish voters than spend it answering attacks over millions of dollars in AIPAC money pouring into his campaign.
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The note Netanyahu would never write
George H.W. Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 1993, after losing his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton. On the desk, he left his successor a handwritten note wishing him well with obvious sincerity and ending with an expression of democratic grace: “Your success now is our country’s success.”
It is hard to imagine a sentence further removed from Benjamin Netanyahu’s conception of political power. When Naftali Bennett replaced him as prime minister in 2021, Bennett arrived at the traditional handover expecting a serious transfer of responsibility for a country facing Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other threats.
In an interview this weekend with Israel’s Channel 12, Bennett said he cleared his day, and was shocked when Netanyahu gave him about 30 minutes, volunteered little, asked to keep living in the prime minister’s residence and for state funding for his wife’s car, and otherwise was eager to end the encounter.
The contrast goes far beyond manners. Netanyahu treats political defeat as something closer to dispossession, and those who threaten his hold on power as enemies whose legitimacy must be destroyed. Bennett said Netanyahu had warned him before the new government was sworn in that if he went ahead with it, he would deploy “all the heavy artillery” to brand him a traitor. Bennett says Netanyahu, whom he called an “anarchist,” kept his word, via a “poison machine” – a sophisticated social media influence operation featuring mass Whatsapp groups and bot accounts amplifying talking points – such as the theory, now popular on the right, that the Shin Bet helped Hamas attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in order to harm Netanyahu.
Five years later, the target has changed: It is former military chief Gadi Eisenkot. The method has not.
Eisenkot is now Netanyahu’s most dangerous electoral challenger, an extraordinary target for such a campaign. Eisenkot spent four decades in the IDF and rose to its chief of staff. After the Hamas attacks, he joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet for a few months, despite their political disagreements. His son Gal was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023, and two nephews were killed during military operations in Gaza. Yet even Israel’s increasingly brutal politics seem unable to leave room for a measure of respect.
Instead, Eisenkot is portrayed as dangerous, weak and somehow beyond the bounds of acceptable government. His military record itself becomes evidence against him. His willingness to construct a governing majority that might depend on an Arab party – something that is essential for the societal health of Israel, whose population is 20 percent Arab – is presented as something inherently disqualifying. The objective is larger than defeating his arguments. It is to make his accession to power appear intolerable.
From smear campaign to security risk
I was reminded of this Sunday while appearing on television with Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who spied for Israel, spent some 30 years in an American prison, and now hopes to enter Israeli politics. Pollard, who over the weekend endorsed a splinter right-wing party and seemingly hopes to parlay that into a Knesset seat or other position, comes at Netanyahu from the ultra-nationalist far-right, but essentially supports him. He explained that he could never support a government headed by Eisenkot because Eisenkot had weakened the IDF as chief of staff.
There is an obvious problem with that argument. Eisenkot served as the IDF chief of staff from 2015 to 2019. Netanyahu was prime minister throughout his tenure. If Eisenkot presided over the degradation of the Israeli military, Netanyahu presided over Eisenkot. It is utter nonsense, but that is how the poison machine works. Responsibility flows away from Netanyahu while culpability attaches itself to whoever threatens him. Institutions that Netanyahu himself headed somehow become the failures of his opponents.
Now this has collided with a matter of security for candidates.
Eisenkot’s campaign says threats against him – from the rabble whipped up by Netanyahu – are increasing as the election approaches, and he has requested state protection. The Shin Bet in recent days declined to provide an armed security detail, although it will provide intelligence assistance.
That decision is astonishing in a country whose domestic security service once failed catastrophically in preventing the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin – after months in which he was called a traitor, a murderer and a Nazi by a campaign of agitation presided over by the young Netanyahu.
The lesson Israel drew was supposed to be permanent: when serious political incitement converges with a credible physical threat, the state errs on the side of protecting its leaders.
The contrast becomes almost grotesque when one considers whom the state does protect. Netanyahu’s son Yair who has lived in Miami for years, receives Shin Bet protection there. Yair, who is 35, avoided military service and has made himself a regular participant in the same poisonous political media ecosystem that serves his father, especially by attacking his opponents on X. The Netanyahu family successfully pressed to have responsibility for his security transferred to the Shin Bet, over the agency’s objections.
And the entitlement extends into the future. Netanyahu, like other former prime ministers, is set to receive lifelong Shin Bet protection. But a ministerial committee has approved extraordinary post-premiership protection for the Netanyahu family: Sara Netanyahu for as long as her husband is alive, and their sons for at least five years. The state can therefore find the resources and justification to protect a prime minister’s adult son living in Miami during a devastating war, and to plan years of protection for the family after Netanyahu leaves office, while the man currently leading many polls to replace Netanyahu is told to make do without an armed state security detail.
Bennett has issued an even more chilling warning. He says the relentless campaign against Eisenkot and other opposition figures could persuade someone that these politicians are monsters who must be stopped by violence. Bennett himself receives protection as a former prime minister.
The man making the decision at the Shin Bet is David Zini, perhaps the most politically controversial director in the agency’s history. He was a senior officer whose reputation as a far-right firebrand stopped his advancement in the military, and his appointment generated fears that Netanyahu was seeking a loyalist to lead an institution that must serve the state rather than the prime minister. That distinction goes to the heart of Israel’s present crisis.
The lesson Netanyahu still hasn’t learned
A democracy depends on people in power understanding that the state and the government are different things. The Shin Bet serves Israel. The IDF serves Israel. The civil service serves Israel. The prime minister serves Israel. Political opponents remain Israelis, and an opposition leader who may soon become prime minister deserves protection based on the threat against him rather than his usefulness to the incumbent.
Of course, Netanyahu’s entire “judicial reform” effort, which tore Israeli society apart in 2023 before the Hamas attack, was animated by the illiberal and fundamentally anti-democratic proposition that the elected government should be largely unchecked.
The Bush note seems almost quaint from Israel today, but its message is anything but sentimental. Bush understood that Clinton’s safety, legitimacy and success had become matters of national interest because America was more important than George Bush. The 30-minute handover to Bennett and the security controversy surrounding Eisenkot belong to the same story because both reveal what happens when a leader has difficulty separating the interests of the country from his own political survival.
There is an irony here that Israelis should appreciate. Netanyahu has always seemed, in some ways, Israel’s most American politician. He spent his formative years in the United States, lived in the Philadelphia area, studied at MIT and speaks beautiful American English. Yet in his behavior, Netanyahu has almost become anti-American; there is nothing in him that the Founding Fathers could admire.
There is, of course, a final irony. It would be misleading in 2026 to pretend that George H.W. Bush’s conception of political succession describes the current occupant of the White House. President Donald Trump and Netanyahu have far more in common with each other on this score than either has with Bush.
Israel, like the United States, desperately needs a return to the standards and ethics of the past, when the leader’s success actually was the country’s success.
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