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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.

(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.

“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.

The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”

Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.

Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.

“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”

Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.

That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.

A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)

As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”

“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.

Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”

He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”

That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.

During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”

He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.

“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”

Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)

“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)

For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.

Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.

The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”

The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”

Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).

Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”

But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.

The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.

At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”

Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.

A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.

“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”

Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)

Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.

But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)

Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”

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The post The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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He was president of his synagogue. Now he wants to be LA’s next mayor.

LOS ANGELES — Adam Miller volunteered with a Reform social justice movement as a teenager, lived in Israel as a young adult and was and became a leader of one of the country’s most successful synagogues.

But Miller, a businessman who is running for mayor of Los Angeles, hasn’t said much about his Jewish background on the campaign trail. Instead, he has been talking about his entrepreneurial credentials — he sold his software company for $5.2 billion in 2021 — and touting the accomplishments of the nonprofits he started. His campaign site doesn’t mention his Jewish connections at all.

Seated at a cafe in his tony West LA neighborhood of Brentwood, Miller explained why. In today’s political environment, he said, he felt he’d had to downplay his Jewish, pro-Israel identity early in the campaign. But with California’s nonpartisan June 2 primary approaching — with the top two winners going on to the general election — he was ready to open up.

“It pains me a little bit when other candidates are acting like they’re going to position for the Jewish vote,” said Miller, who is running as a Democrat. “They’re acting like all of a sudden they’re very aligned with the Jewish community, when I know as a Jew that’s not necessarily true.”

Miller, who is self-funding his campaign, is currently running third or fourth, depending on the poll, in a race to unseat incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. More than 40% of voters remain undecided. He’s pitching himself as a get-things-done moderate — and a course correction from the growing influence in City Hall of democratic socialists, members of the same left-wing movement that helped make Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City. Four Democratic Socialists of America members sit on LA’s City Council. One, Councilmember Nithya Raman, is Bass’ most formidable opponent in the primary.

At debates and in interviews, Miller has focused on the city’s most pressing issues: homelessness, housing, immigration and budget. Yet Miller’s Jewish bona fides may also hold his clearest arguments for leadership of the city. He leaned forward when talking about Ikar, the nondenominational synagogue where he once served as president, and about his identity as a Zionist — “even though it’s a dirty word now,” he said.

And a series of high-profile incidents affecting LA’s Jewish community during Bass’ term had helped clarify for Miller the problems facing the city.

“Look, to the vast majority of Angelenos, antisemitism is certainly not a top issue,” said Miller. “But as a Jew, antisemitism, freedom of speech, protection of religious freedom, is extremely important. And we can do better.”

A year in Israel

Miller’s Jewish story intersects with his journey into politics. As a teenager growing up in New Jersey, he was active in the National Federation for Temple Youth, a Reform youth movement, and was eventually elected social action chair of his region. The position involved traveling to Washington to lobby Congress on key issues — which in the 1980s included fighting apartheid in South Africa.

Miller recounts that he was always primed to be a supporter of Israel, raised with a grandfather who dreamed of living there, and in NFTY as a Zionist organization. After he finished graduate school, he visited the country for the first time, staying in Herzliya.

“I decided, after being there for almost a month, that I was going to give myself 10 days to see if I could get a job in Israel,” he recalled. He got hired at an investment bank in Jerusalem and lived there for a year, attending ulpan in the evenings.

The experience was formative. His company, Cornerstone OnDemand — a human resources enterprise software — later opened an office in Tel Aviv. “We were the No. 1 workplace in Israel for olim chadashim,” Miller beamed, using the Hebrew for new immigrants.

Miller’s involvement with Ikar began when the congregation was meeting in a JCC gym. Enchanted, he asked the rabbi to coffee. That was Rabbi Sharon Brous, then a mostly unknown Jewish Theological Seminary graduate, who invited him to that night’s board meeting. He served as Ikar’s president for a term in the mid-2000s.

In that time, he helped transform the congregation from an experiment in non-movement Judaism into a dynamic religious community that today has 1,200 member families — a directory that includes Steven Spielberg and former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti — and a multimillion-dollar budget.

When Miller stepped down from the board in February after entering the mayor’s race, Brous — now one of the most sought-out rabbinic voices in America — gave him a blessing in front of the congregation. (Brous did not respond to an inquiry.)

 

 

Miller, who said he’s reached out to Garcetti for advice about the office, was eager to connect his experience at Ikar to his qualifications to lead City Hall. Both institutions, Miller said, were full of good people with great ambitions, adding that his unique advantage is practical organizational leadership experience — budgeting, development and operations.

“You have to have the right mission, but you also have to have the ability to execute,” he said. “Ikar is a good example. We had great ideas early on. We had a lot of excitement and hope and compassion, but I put in operational structure to make it a reality.”

Two longtime congregants who asked not to be named for publication agreed, crediting Miller for professionalizing the organization when it was still a fledgling startup.

“That understanding and capability,” Miller said, “is what I’ve been able to do over and over again across a number of different organizations, and what I will bring to City Hall. And none of the other candidates have that.”

Campaigning in counterpoint

Miller is likely right that most Angelenos don’t regard antisemitism as a top issue. But the last four years have offered Jewish residents of the city plenty of opportunities to rate the incumbent.

Bass’ term has seen an antisemitic shooting in Pico-Robertson, the city’s largest Jewish neighborhood; a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA that drew national attention; and dueling protests outside an Israeli real estate seminar at Adas Torah, an Orthodox synagogue, that devolved into a brawl. More recently, pro-Palestinian protesters entered Wilshire Boulevard Temple to protest an Israeli defense contractor speaking there.

Miller said the mayor’s response in each case reflected the same pattern. “I think the city just generally shows no urgency to any problems,” he said. “We see that with the fires and the slow recovery, we see that with the encampments, we see it with trash and public safety, but we also see it clearly with antisemitism — just not a sufficient response. Period.”

Local Jewish leaders have lobbied for buffer zones outside of synagogue entrances where protesting would be prohibited, a measure Miller sees as a no-brainer. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has vetoed a bill that would have mandated a police perimeter outside of schools, citing First Amendment protections. (Mamdani meanwhile signed a bill that created such a space around houses of worship, which passed with a veto-proof majority.)

Like many American Jews, Miller was alarmed by Mamdani’s rise, as he was by the rising influence of DSA on local politics, saying the movement, whose platform includes a boycott of Israel, “has been overall antisemitic.” But he hoped Los Angeles, under a Miller mayoralty, would be a counterweight to Mamdani’s militantly anti-Israel stance.

“It’s an enormous opportunity to do that,” he said. “And conversely, if both coasts are run by DSA mayors, I think we put the Jews at real risk.”

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With Israel Facing PTSD Emergency, New App Seeks to Help IDF Soldiers Heal

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff. Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi salutes fallen soldiers at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem in a picture published on Oct. 27, 2024. Photo: IDF.

When one of Tzur Kurnedz’s cousins woke from a coma after fighting Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, the first person he asked to see was Kurnedz.

The soldier, who had served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’s Golani Brigade and lost most of his unit in the fighting, wanted to speak with someone who could understand what he had just lived through. For Kurnedz, that need was painfully familiar.

Kurnedz, who served in an elite IDF unit and as a sharpshooter during the 2014 Gaza war, known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge (Tzuk Eitan), had developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) himself. He spent years working through his trauma with the help of family, friends, and body-and-mind therapy. Over time, he came to see how many gaps existed in the support system for former soldiers — and how difficult it was for many to access the tools they needed.

That experience became the foundation for Bishvilenu, a digital platform Kurnedz launched with his wife, Nomi Weiss, a social worker and lawyer, to provide long-term recovery support for soldiers, their families, and their communities.

What began as trauma in Kurnedz’s own life became a resource he could use to help others. “It’s healing. It’s growth,” Kurnedz said. “I wasn’t really willing to share my story before, and now it’s a powerful tool for me to help others.”

In Hebrew, “Bishvilenu” means “for us,” while shvil also means “path” — a fitting name for a platform built around the idea that trauma recovery is not a single intervention, but a long-term process. The app, which is free for soldiers and their families, creates individualized care plans built around three pillars: mind, body, and community. More than 400 IDF soldiers and family members are already using it, and that number continues to grow.

Bishvilenu offers clinically proven practices and tools, including narrative therapy techniques as well as breathing and physical exercises. Weiss serves as vice president and Kurnedz as CEO, but the team behind the platform includes medical and trauma experts from Israel and the United States. Among them are an emotional intelligence coach, a clinical social worker trained in trauma care, and a Brown University professor who previously led PTSD research at the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

As Weiss put it, the couple moved quickly to build a platform that could use technology “as a bridge” to help people receive support and empower themselves in the long process of trauma recovery.

“It’s a place to try to create a shared knowledge from all these trauma experts who have been working in the field,” Weiss said. “We’re the digital infrastructure. We’re not trying to be the trauma experts. We let the NGOs be the trauma experts, with the final say of what exactly their soldiers need, and we build the infrastructure as people who understand trauma. It’s more about having a place for all the expertise to be gathered than for us to try to be another voice in this oversaturated field of trauma experts.”

The need has only grown since Oct. 7.


Tzur Kurnedz, right, during his IDF service. Photo: Provided

A Mounting Crisis

Israel is facing a mounting mental health crisis, with post-traumatic stress disorder rising sharply among soldiers and the broader mental health system under extraordinary strain with no end in sight.

A report released in February 2025 by Israel’s State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, following an audit of mental health care, revealed that in the aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent Iron Swords War, approximately 3 million adults in Israel have experienced anxiety, depression, and symptoms of PTSD.

These numbers are astronomical, underscoring the scale of the psychological fallout Israel has faced since Oct. 7. They also point to a mental health system under extraordinary strain, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis expected to seek care in the years ahead.

The scale of the need has overwhelmed existing systems. According to Bishvilenu, more than 70,000 IDF soldiers are on the waiting list for the IDF Rehabilitation Department, including at least 9,539 diagnosed with PTSD. Reuters recently reported that Israel’s Defense Ministry has recorded nearly 40 percent more PTSD cases among Israeli soldiers since September 2023 and expects that number to rise by 180 percent by 2028. Of the 22,300 troops and security personnel currently being treated for war wounds, 60 percent suffer from post-trauma.

The crisis has also brought a rise in suicide attempts. Reuters cited findings from an Israeli parliamentary committee showing that 279 IDF soldiers attempted suicide between January 2024 and July 2025, and that combat soldiers accounted for 78 percent of soldier suicide cases in 2024.

The backlog positions Bishvilenu as part of a familiar Israeli pattern, in which civil society organizations step in to provide support when public systems are overwhelmed.

Weiss said the trauma of the current war has been compounded by public distrust in the government and by the exhaustion of a long conflict.

“People don’t really believe in the government. People don’t trust the people sending them to war,” she said. “Everyone is tired.”

Using Technology for Togetherness

Weiss said that while she and Kurnedz started Bishvilenu for deeply personal reasons, it quickly grew into something much larger than they had expected.

“Each person’s individual journey can also become a resource for others, and we’re trying to create togetherness where trauma creates isolation,” Weiss said.

Bishvilenu is designed not to be a replacement for trauma professionals but rather as a piece of critical digital infrastructure connecting soldiers, families, and the NGOs already working with them.

Since Oct. 7, NGOs and other organizations have offered soldiers short-term trauma support, often using their own specialized methods and rarely sharing data or insights with one another. Bishvilenu is designed to fill that gap.

The platform is distributed through NGOs working with IDF soldiers and gives soldiers and their families access to clinically validated tools focused on mental, physical, and community-based healing.

For the NGOs, the app extends the relationship with soldiers and their families beyond initial intervention. It helps organizations stay in contact, monitor needs, and measure outcomes. Soldiers, meanwhile, receive tools for self-assessment and self-regulation.

Bishvilenu now works with 10 NGOs, including the Jerusalem-based organization OneFamily, and is in talks to partner with about 10 more.

“We’re at a point now where NGOs are calling us,” she said, “and we see that we have a service we can offer that is really meaningful.”

The platform, she said, can identify red flags during treatment or signal when soldiers need specific aftercare. “For soldiers and families, it gives them tools to assess themselves, help themselves, and regain a sense of agency over their own process.”

The Bishvilenu team and its volunteers working in a bomb shelter. Photo: Provided

Behind the platform’s technology is a simpler idea that Kurnedz learned through his own recovery: trauma isolates, but healing often begins when people feel heard.

One of the most important steps in his recovery, he said, was finally opening up about his trauma to his family, beginning with his wife.

“It was hard for me to share. It took a few years,” he said. “Last Hanukkah we had a family meeting, and it was the first time my family heard my story from Tzuk Eitan. It was very meaningful to feel heard. With trauma, you feel very isolated, like nobody can understand you. For me, it started with the small community I had — my family, my friends, even my military team. I did a lot of body and mind therapy, but the sense of community was the strongest part of the work for me.”

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Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work.

(JTA) — Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis.

Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza broke out in 2023.

The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey show declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.

Most striking for a country long accustomed to bipartisan American support: 57% of Republicans under 50 hold negative views of Israel. Support has cratered among the religiously unaffiliated, Black Protestants and Catholics. Among American Jews, support has slipped below two-thirds.

On social media, the Hebrew word “hasbara” has become a dismissive shorthand for pro-Israel advocacy, indicating how widely known Israel’s uphill efforts to shape its image have become.

Congress is increasingly reflecting this drop in public support. Earlier this month, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel, and 36 voted to block a sale of 1,000-pound bombs, representing the strongest congressional rebuke of U.S. military aid to Israel on record.

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, says the country is engaged in a global war for hearts and minds and it must spend accordingly.

“We had a major breakthrough this year, but we must as a country invest much much more,” Sa’ar said in December as the government entered budget deliberations. “It should be like investing in jets, bombs and missile interceptors. In the face of what’s arrayed against us and what’s invested against us, it’s far from enough. This is an existential issue.”

Alongside the budget, Sa’ar won approval for a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, headed by a director equivalent in rank to the ministry’s top political official — a structural consolidation meant to end years of scattered hasbara work across rival ministries.

Public filings, Knesset testimony and Israeli business reporting show where a portion of the 2025 allocation went.

A $50 million international social-media ad buy was split across Google, YouTube, X and Outbrain. Roughly $40 million went to hosting 400 foreign delegations — lawmakers, pastors, influencers, university presidents. A “media war room” was erected to monitor 250 outlets and 10,000 daily Israel-related items.

The Foreign Ministry also signed a $1.5-million-a-month contract with former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale’s firm to deploy AI tools against antisemitism online, a $4.1 million campaign aimed at evangelical churches, and the “Esther Project,” a paid influencer network running up to $900,000 through a PR firm called Bridges Partners.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for interviews and comment.

Defending the approach, Consul General Israel Bachar, Jerusalem’s top diplomat in Los Angeles since 2023, said in an interview that most of the money so far had gone into social media and delegations. His post oversees seven Western states and one of the largest Israeli expatriate populations in the world.

“We flew a lot of delegations to the country — whether it’s pastors, whether it’s politicians, universities,” Bachar said. “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.”

A veteran Israeli political strategist before his consular appointment, Bachar argued the anti-Israel shift in the United States is not primarily a messaging failure. He pointed instead to “sociological changes in America that have nothing to do with us” that are “being used against us.”

He called the situation a complex problem with “no silver bullet,” and said he favors additional spending on what he called “productions” in the United States — sitcoms, documentaries, feature films that touch on Israeli themes — alongside the ad buys and influencer work.

Ask the people who study public diplomacy for a living whether any of this will work, and the answer is, overwhelmingly, skeptical.

Their central objection is that no amount of messaging can outrun entrenched rejection by its target audiences of Israel’s armed response to conflicts with its neighbors.

“My position is that history shows all the money in the world won’t help if the policy is wrong,” said Nicholas Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California and one of the founders of the study of public diplomacy. “The U.S. discovered that in Vietnam when its own Cold War public diplomacy budget peaked.”

Cull coined the term “reputational security” to describe the argument Sa’ar is implicitly making — that a country’s standing is itself a strategic asset worth serious investment.

“It means protecting the country both by accentuating positive images and by eliminating negative realities,” Cull said. “I suspect that the government of Israel will be unable to sell its solutions to the world when so many of its own people dispute the validity of those solutions, and where the domestic consensus is wide of the international understanding of realities on the ground.”

The polling tells a similar story, according to a scholar who has been tracking it longer than almost anyone else.

“There has been a paradigmatic shift that has taken place in America about Israel,” said Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, who has surveyed American and Arab attitudes toward Israel for decades. “I have been tracing shifts, particularly among Democrats, for a decade and a half. I have never seen a shift like the one we’ve seen.”

Born in Israel to an Arab family, Telhami was long a two-state advocate operating within the American foreign policy mainstream before moving considerably leftward in recent years.

He described a new “Gaza generation” — a majority of young Americans who, his polling shows, now see Israel as committing genocide and who see the United States as implicated in it.

Telhami said the moment reminded him of a previous episode. He served on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy in 2005, when Washington tried to spend its way out of the reputational damage of the Iraq War with campaigns aimed at Muslim audiences.

“Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” he said. “Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.”

Many Israelis believe the country has simply never told its story well enough, and that with enough money and the right platforms, it can. But the conventional wisdom that Israel has not been active on the frontiers of public diplomacy simply isn’t true, according to Ilan Manor, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University who has long studied the Foreign Ministry’s online presence.

Israel was one of the first countries in the world to build a global digital-diplomacy operation, Manor said. Before Oct. 7, he said, its accounts reached roughly a billion people, a scale rivaled only by the United States.

“The problem is not that we lack infrastructure. The problem is not that we lack skill,” Manor said. “The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore. And that’s a much, much deeper problem that no amount of money is going to repair.”

He calls it a credibility gap, borrowing the term American reporters used for Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era statements. “If you’re not a credible spokesperson, if you’re not a credible state, it doesn’t matter how good your message is,” Manor said. “It doesn’t matter how viral it might get. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get.”

The credibility problem is now compounding itself. As disclosures have revealed Israeli contracts with influencers, shell websites, and AI-driven campaigns, pro-Israel posts on American social media routinely draw comments accusing the poster of being a paid foreign agent, whether they are or not.

Similar concerns come from inside the pro-Israel branding world. Joanna Landau, founder of the Tel Aviv–based Israel branding nonprofit Vibe Israel, has spent more than a decade flying international influencers to Israel on lifestyle-focused trips. She said she was not available for an interview but has laid out her views in a recent series of essays on her Substack, “Reputation Nation.”

Landau called the 2026 allocation “a long overdue course correction” but warned that structural failures would swallow the money. “Israel’s narrative has no single strategic owner,” she wrote, noting that messaging responsibility is scattered across the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the Government Press Office and the IDF.

According to the government’s own announcements, she added, most of the new funding is slated for “tactical activity” — “the same tools Israel has relied on for years, only now with many more zeros.” Her conclusion: “A large budget poured into a broken system produces scale, not strategy.”

The spending does vault Israel into the same league as some of the world’s largest public diplomacy operations, according to Landau.

Exact comparisons are hard to make, and there are no widely accepted figures for what different countries spend on public diplomacy — the work is scattered across culture ministries, state broadcasters, foreign affairs budgets, and intelligence agencies, often without a single label.

Germany, for example, funds Deutsche Welle, its international broadcaster, and the Goethe-Institut, its global network of cultural centers, at hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but both operate independently of the government. Britain spends around $450 million on the BBC World Service and millions more on international scholarships, also at arm’s length from direct messaging. The United States allocates an estimated $2.3 billion through State Department programs and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. China’s public diplomacy spending has topped $10 billion. Qatar has built Al Jazeera into a global network through state funding whose full scope is not publicly disclosed.

Israel, a country of roughly 10 million people, is now set to spend on its global image at a scale normally associated with much larger countries.

It may be too late, according to one Israeli scholar who has argued for two decades that Israel chronically underinvests in public diplomacy.

Eytan Gilboa, a professor of international communication at Bar-Ilan University, said he welcomes both the larger sum and its consolidation inside the Foreign Ministry, which he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had deliberately “dried up” in favor of rival ministries.

But Gilboa agrees the current moment may be beyond repair.

“This is the worst crisis in Israel’s image abroad,” he said. “In the past, we have seen criticism of Israeli policy. Since Oct. 7, we have seen a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.” He argued that Israel has lost a generation of Americans, calling it “highly dangerous, because these people are going to be the next politicians, elites, journalists.”

“Perhaps $730 million is not enough,” Gilboa said. “You have to establish a mechanism, a system that would systematically address all the challenges. I am quite pessimistic.”

The post Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work. appeared first on The Forward.

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