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The Orthodox world has abandoned its values by abandoning Palestinians
In parts of the Orthodox world, racist rhetoric has been normalized.
Rabbis speaking from the bimah refer to Palestinians as Amalek. Calls to block humanitarian aid are incorporated into divrei torah. One might hear that “Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and their parties speak for the great majority of the religious Zionist community” — a terrifying normalization of religious extremists — or even that the Palestinian people do not exist.
We know where this kind of rhetoric leads. After undercover Israeli border police killed four members of the Bani Odeh family as they drove home from a shopping trip in Nablus in mid-March, one of the two surviving sons recounted being pulled from the car and beaten by a soldier who told a friend, “we killed the dogs.” That boy is only 11 years old; he will live the rest of his life with the memory of seeing his parents and two of his siblings killed in front of him.
The scale of Palestinian suffering in Gaza and the West Bank cannot be justified or ignored. However, in much of the American Orthodox and observant Jewish community — of which both of us are proud members — this pain is barely acknowledged, let alone condemned.
We know that these are deeply painful times for Israelis, who have endured two years of terror, fear and loss. But we believe our community has a moral imperative to empathize with Israelis and Palestinians alike — not one at the exclusion of the other.
The silence we see in our communities is neither incidental nor neutral. It is structural and communal, reinforced by political and institutional pressures.
Our tradition teaches “shetikah ke-hoda’ah” — that silence is tantamount to approval. We have seen this truth manifest in our modern world, through political upheavals like the #MeToo movement and the continuing Jeffrey Epstein scandal. These moments have proven that silence in the face of known misdeeds is not neutral.
Yet even with this clarity, too many forces in our community currently push for silence when it comes to the suffering of Palestinians. Among them are demands by funders who see supporting Israel as inconsistent with holding empathy for Palestinians, and cultural norms that suggest unquestioning support for Israel is a central principle of contemporary Orthodox life.
This communal silence allows us to ignore scathing reports of Israeli human rights and international law violations, including many issued by Israeli nonprofits such as B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Yesh Din and Peace Now.
What fills that vacuum should alarm anyone committed to principles of humanity and basic decency.
As Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller warned at a recent conference organized by Smol Emuni, the Orthodox left group we co-founded, if we cannot speak against Israeli war crimes or settler violence “it appears as if Judaism supports the massacre of innocents, the stealing of land and sheep, the burning of homes, the uprooting of olive trees, and the murder of children.”
Our tradition has been distorted by those, like Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who speak the language of revenge and supremacy.
Now, more than 900 days after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, it is time for the Orthodox community to refocus on the heart of our tradition. We must answer the biblical question: What does God demand of us right now?
How do we, as religious Jews, respond to horrific violence perpetrated by Jews? How do we face this historical moment in which Jewish people have killed more civilians than ever in modern history?
The horror inflicted on the Bani Odeh family is not an isolated incident. It is part of a sharp escalation of Israeli military and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. In March to date, seven Palestinians have been killed by Jewish extremists. That’s on top of the more than 68,000 people killed in Gaza during the war, including at least 20,000 children. (The total estimated death toll in Gaza includes both combatants and civilians.)
Where are the public reckoning with Jewish-led violence, and the demand for moral accountability? The sermons, communal statements, the school assemblies? Why aren’t rabbis invoking the most basic commandments: “thou shalt not kill,” “thou shalt not steal”?
Where is the Torah that teaches that every human being is created in the image of God? The Torah that commands us to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before God”?
In many Jewish spaces, we acknowledge Jewish suffering, condemning Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and antisemitism. But a moral and religious life demands that we ask not only what has been done to us, but what wrongs we have done to others.
We must create more communal spaces for pain to be heard and questions to be raised, a reprieve from the isolation many of Orthodox Jews horrified by Israel’s abuse of Palestinians experience in our communities. We must elevate voices within our tradition that reflect a different set of values, values centered on humility and compassion and a commitment to share the land with all those living on it. For every rabbinc teaching that celebrates force, we must quote others sources that demand kindness. When we hear “He who is kind to the cruel will become cruel to the kind,” we must answer “Walk in God’s ways — just as God is merciful, so too you must be merciful.”
And we must learn to listen to the voices of people on all sides of this conflict, even those that are unsettling. Because without hearing from others we cannot learn to live with them.
We co-founded Smol Emuni U.S. as a grassroots movement for those who share a deep commitment to and love for the land and people of Israel, and who believe in the essential Jewish principle that all humans are created in the image of God. We see the pursuit of justice and equality as an essential expression of Judaism. As Rabbi Mikhael Manekin, founder of HaSmol HaEmuni in Israel, often says “we are ‘smol’” — Hebrew for “left” — “not despite our faith, but because of it.”
Decades of occupation, ongoing war, and the erosion of Israeli democracy have not only strained Israeli society but strained Judaism itself. We need, in response, to invest in an Orthodox Judaism that is brave enough to be humble, and faithful enough to be self critical. We need a Judaism for those seeking an authentic Torah vision that insists that justice, equality and human dignity are not departures from our tradition, but its very core.
We need to pursue justice and teshuva returning to God’s call to “swerve from evil, to do good, and to pursue peace.”
The post The Orthodox world has abandoned its values by abandoning Palestinians appeared first on The Forward.
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US Senate Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel Fails — but Raises Questions About Future Democratic Support
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A failed Senate vote to block US arms sales to Israel has further exposed a deepening divide within the Democratic Party, one increasingly defined by younger voters and liberals whose views on Israel are shifting rapidly.
The Senate on Wednesday rejected two resolutions led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have halted roughly $450 million in weapons transfers to Israel, including bombs and bulldozers. The measures failed, ensuring the sales will move forward. But the margin, and who supported the effort, marked a significant political inflection point.
Of the 47 Senate Democrats, 40 voted in favor of blocking sales of bulldozers and 36 voted in favor of blocking transfers of so-called “dumb” bombs. The failed vote represents the largest show of opposition to military aid for Israel within the party in recent memory. While previous efforts spearheaded by Sanders drew support from a smaller bloc, this vote saw roughly 80 percent of Senate Democrats vote against transferring aid to the Jewish state, signaling a seismic shift in the dynamic between the Democratic Party and Israel.
Further, many traditionally stalwart supporters of Israel, such as Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Cory Booker (NJ), voted in favor of Sanders’s resolution, signaling that anti-Israel sentiment has migrated from the far-left fringes of the party into the mainstream.
That change is closely tied to evolving public opinion, especially among younger Americans.
Recent polling, including newly released data from the Yale Youth Poll, shows that younger voters are far more critical of Israel than older generations. Large shares of voters under 30 now support restricting or even ending US military aid, a position that departs sharply from the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington. Polls show that a supermajority of Democrats believe that Israel has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza, an assertion which lacks little evidence and has been boosted by foreign entities tied to Iran.
Data also suggests that increased social media consumption aligns with more skeptical attitudes toward foreign policy regarding Israel. Those who receive their news from social media, especially youth-centric platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, are far more likely to exhibit anti-Israel animus than those who consume traditional broadcast news media.
The Senate vote reflects the increasing pressure of Democratic lawmakers to stake an aggressive stance against Israel. Several lawmakers who backed the resolutions argued that continued arms transfers should be reconsidered amid the expanding regional conflict involving Iran and mounting humanitarian concerns. They argued that the Trump White House has not sought out appropriate congressional approval for the ongoing war in Iran. Many also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, suggesting that he has escalated hostilities in the region rather than acted in self-defense from existential threats. These same voices expressed dismay at civilian casualties in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.
The lawmakers largely framed their votes not as opposition to Israel’s existence, but as a challenge to current policies and the use of US-supplied weapons.
Opponents, including most Republicans, maintained that US military support remains essential to Israel’s security, particularly as tensions with Iran escalate. They warned that blocking arms sales could weaken a key ally in a volatile region.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization dedicated to increasing support for the GOP among Jews, framed the vote as reflective of a broader anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party.
“There is only ONE pro-Israel party, and it is the Republican Party,” RJC wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the group J Street, endorsed the vote as an “encouraging” sign of progress.
“It’s encouraging to see a growing number of senators recognize that unconditional US military support for Israel is no longer tenable in light of the Netanyahu government’s policies. The work now is to translate that shift into action: alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, stopping violence on the West Bank and pursuing paths to end the ongoing fighting across the region,” Ben-Ami wrote.
A self-proclaimed “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobbying organization, J Street has come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to combat antisemitism or anti-Israel narratives within liberal political circles.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), one of the most strident defenders of Israel in Congress, criticized his party’s turn against Israel, saying in a new CNN interview that they have “boxed themselves in” by supporting Sanders’s resolution. He dismissed the notion that Democrats would become more likely to support Israel with a change in Israeli leadership.
“When Netanyahu goes, and you’re now on record with this, you’re going to revert back and say that now that he’s gone, I can now start sending offensive weapons?” Moskowitz pondered.
Despite the failure of the resolutions, the size of the Democratic vote in favor underscores how quickly the political landscape is changing ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
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Duke University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Over Antisemitic Political Cartoon
Aerial view of Duke University on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Duke University has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and impounded its money for posting an antisemitic political cartoon on social media, The Duke Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
According to the student paper, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. The image was created in 1970 by political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
The Chronicle said the image elicited no fewer than 10 formal complaints from Jewish students for showing a blatant antisemitic trope. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further into history, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
In a statement to the Chronicle, SJP denied that it intended to endorse the cartoon’s antisemitic messaging, saying it “was never intended to be antisemitic” and that anti-Zionist activism is “not the same as targeting Jewish people.”
This was not the first time that the anti-Zionist group posted antisemitic imagery. In 2024, the Harvard chapter of its faculty spinoff, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP), posted a political cartoon of a Jew lynching an African American and an Arab. In the illustration, a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David and containing a dollar sign at its center dangles a Black man and an Arab man from a noose. In its posterior, an arm belonging to an unknown person of color wields a machete that says, “Liberation Movement.”
Such activity is an integral part of the playbook of anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging on social media, scholars have found.
From 2013 to 2024, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University studied over 76,000 posts created by Students for Justice in Palestine and its affiliates, finding that over half, 54.9 percent, included only a single, evocative image.
“In contrast, Reels (5.3%) and Videos (4.9%) are used far less frequently,” the institute said in a report based on its research. “Based on these descriptions, we see a strong preference among campus-based anti-Israel groups for static visual formats, suggesting that this type of bimodal content represents the highest form of shareability within activists networks.”
To boost their audience and reach, pro-Hamas groups also post together in what ISCA described as “co-authored posts,” of which there were over 20,000 between 2013 and 2024. Their content set off strong emotions in the individual users exposed to them, inciting incidents of antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and violence. Such outrages, it added, increased in proportion to the concentration of anti-Israel groups on a single campus, evidence of “particularly strong” correlation.
ISCAP’s conclusions can be found in the real world, as SJP and its network of student groups have helped fuel a historic wave of antisemitic incidents on college campuses over the past two and a half years — from spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew” to gang assaulting Jews at Columbia University’s Butler Library.
SJP has also expressed its hope of inciting insurrection in the US and amassing a jihadist army.
In 2024, the national SJP organization proclaimed on X that the anti-Zionist student movement is a weapon for destroying the US, saying that “divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal” but enacted with the later goal of initiating “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” On the same day the group issued the statement, Columbia University’s most strident SJP spinoff, created after SJP was suspended, was reported to have distributed literature which called for “popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to a previous event. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Netherlands Reports 867 Antisemitic Incidents in 2025 as Cases Remain at Alarmingly High Levels
March 29, 2025, Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands: A pro-Palestinian demonstrator burns a hand-fashioned Israeli flag. Photo: James Petermeier/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in the Netherlands remained at alarmingly high levels last year, according to newly published figures, as Jews and Israelis across Europe continued to face a persistently hostile environment marked by harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
On Wednesday, Dutch authorities released a new annual antisemitism report showing 867 registered cases in 2025, a figure that remains at deeply troubling levels and virtually unchanged from the 880 antisemitic incidents recorded the previous year.
Even though Jews make up less than 0.3 percent of the Dutch population, anti-Jewish hate crimes account for 26 percent of all discrimination cases.
Eddo Verdoner, the Dutch national coordinator for combating antisemitism (NCAB), said the data reflects a worrying normalization of antisemitic incidents and called for sustained, coordinated action to address them.
“We have been recording hundreds of antisemitic incidents each year for years now. What I fear is that we are slowly getting used to figures that are unacceptable, that hatred is becoming the new normal,” Verdoner said in a statement.
“The figures once again paint a worrying picture, underscoring the need for decisive action in schools, online, and in the courtroom,” he continued.
The newly released report shows a decrease in violent antisemitic incidents, with 34 cases compared to 42 in 2024. However, local police registered an increase in antisemitic threats in 2025, with 93 cases compared to 88 the previous year.
Of the 867 registered incidents, more than 400 involved Jewish individuals or institutions in everyday settings, including residential neighborhoods, public streets, and areas around Jewish buildings and cemeteries.
In light of these figures, Verdoner called on authorities to strengthen enforcement and prevention efforts, prioritizing higher detection rates, expanding Holocaust education, and placing greater emphasis on Jewish life as a way to counter ignorance and prejudice.
“At the moment, Jewish life in the Netherlands can almost only continue thanks to the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, the police, and interventions such as cameras and bulletproof glass,” he said.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, the Netherlands has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In one of the most controversial incidents, local authorities opened an investigation last year into Batisma Chayat Sa’id, a nurse who allegedly stated she would administer lethal injections to Israeli patients.
In another instance, Amsterdam-based Jewish columnist Jonath Weinberger publicly denounced rising antisemitism in health-care settings, saying she was denied medical care by a nurse who refused to remove a pro-Palestinian pin shaped like a fist.