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What the Epstein files show about Jeffrey Epstein’s Jewish world
(JTA) — Sometime in the early 2010s, Jeffrey Epstein walked into Dr. Steven Kaplan’s office for a root canal.
The procedure took some time and required multiple visits. The two men got to chatting. “He was just another guy, that’s it,” Kaplan recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The subject of Judaism came up.
“I wanted to put some yiddishkeit into him,” Kaplan said. “I was telling him, ‘You should meet a Jewish girl, because I think these girls are going to want you for your money.’ He said, ‘I would marry a Jewish girl.’”
Kaplan, who says he was unaware at the time of Epstein’s 2008 conviction and sentencing for sexual solicitation of a minor, sent Epstein several books on Judaism and offered to connect him with his rabbi. That meeting never happened, but when Epstein offered to help Kaplan fix up his office, a different proposal emerged: Kaplan asked his patient to donate to his children’s Jewish school or any Jewish institution.
Epstein agreed, telling Kaplan he would do it in honor of his mother. Soon his accounts wired $25,000 to Yeshiva Tifereth Moshe, in Queens, via the Jewish donation service MATCH. (He had initially promised $50,000, Kaplan said.) On a form for MATCH explaining his donation, included in the latest Justice Department release of files pertaining to his investigation, Epstein (or an assistant of his) wrote, “I AM IMPRESSED WITH THE CHILDREN I HAVE SEEN FROM THE YESHIVA.”
“Maybe that donation is helping him in the next world,” Kaplan told JTA. He added that, by the tenets of Orthodox Judaism that stipulate 10% of one’s earnings should go to tzedakah, or charity, Epstein’s donation was “nothing.” A spokesperson for the yeshiva told JTA they didn’t know anything about the Epstein connection. (JTA could not independently verify Kaplan’s account, but in emails revealed in the Epstein files, Epstein’s assistants relate conversations they had with Kaplan in which he urges the donation.)
Kaplan said he was of two minds today about Epstein’s support of Jewish causes throughout his life. “He still has a Jewish neshama,” Kaplan said, using the Hebrew word for soul, of the man who had orchestrated a wide-ranging network of underaged escorts; maybe giving money to Jewish causes was still a net good, regardless of where that money came from.
Yet Kaplan added that if Epstein were alive today and wanted to give to a yeshiva, knowing what he now knows about his crimes, he would have to ask his rabbi.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” the endodontist said. “I would go to the rabbi and say, ‘Is it a mitzvah for him to give it? Or is it bad for us to take it?’”
Kaplan’s ethical dilemma reflects one theme surfaced in the Epstein files released by Congress last month about the financier and convicted sex offender’s connections to the Jewish world.
Scrutinized for evidence of Epstein’s misdeeds, the files have enabled armchair sleuthing about Epstein’s associates, fueled antisemitic conspiracy theories and caused powerful players implicated in them to face new consequences — as when Harvard University broke ties with its former president, Larry Summers, on Wednesday.
The files also offer a window into Epstein’s workaday, small-scale networking, suggesting an almost obsessive effort to be involved in the affairs of his friends and associates. Jewish groups and individuals made up a significant share.
The files show that Epstein made donations to and connections with Jewish causes with which he had little to no personal relationship. They also show that some Jewish groups benefitted from donations from Epstein even after his 2008 conviction for sexual solicitation of a minor — though it remains unclear whether they knew about it. Some have said specifically that they did not.
Epstein served 13 months in a county jail following that conviction, which was largely swept under the rug thanks to a “sweetheart deal” between Epstein and former U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta. Many in the public had little knowledge of him or his misdeeds until investigative reporting about the deal emerged in 2018 and Epstein was arrested the following year.
Epstein sought to leverage his Jewish largesse as he also sought to improve his public image both before and after his conviction, the latest files show.
One email shows that he sought placement on the website eJewishPhilanthropy, then something of a directory for Jewish philanthropy insiders, for one of his foundations in 2013.
“The Foundation supports many jewish causes around the world as well as numerous Israli [sic] causes,” an Epstein staffer wrote in a draft letter sent to Epstein for approval.
Describing Epstein as “a financier and science philanthropist,” they trumpeted his support of the Jewish National Fund, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Columbia Jewish Foundation, UJA- New York, and Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, along with a few yeshivas that were not Kaplan’s. The bio goes on to note Epstein’s “long partnership with Leslie Wexner.”
Epstein’s only note: “no wexner affiliations please.” Six years later, Wexner, a prominent philanthropist to Jewish causes, would reveal that he had broken ties with Epstein years earlier after a decades-long relationship and forced him to repay $100 million he said Epstein had stolen from him. Epstein had previously served as a director of the Wexner Foundation, which funds fellowships for young people entering a career in Jewish communal service and intensive adult education programs for volunteer board members of Jewish organizations.
Now the latest Epstein files release has turned up the heat on Wexner, who again denied knowledge of Epstein’s alleged crimes in a congressional deposition last week. It has also thrown other major funders of Jewish causes into the spotlight, including some for the first time.
Epstein’s Jewish giving far predated his 2008 conviction, and had no clear ideology. Some of it was already known before the latest files release. He and his partner and co-conspirator, Ghislane Maxwell, cultivated relationships with both FIDF, which raises money for the welfare of Israeli soldiers, and Seeds of Peace, which holds summer camps bringing together Israeli and Palestinian youth. They gave large sums to Hillel International and YIVO, as well as $500,000 to the religious day school Ramaz, and backed an Israeli charity that distributed aid to the needy. (That group, Ziv Tzedakah Fund, received $100,000 from Epstein in 2006 before shuttering less than a year later.)
Other Jewish groups solicited Epstein for donations well after his conviction in 2008. Harvard Hillel, whose building Epstein had helped facilitate Wexner’s funds to build, made personal appeals to him in 2010 and 2011 — stoked in part by a Jewish dean, Henry Rosovsky, who brokered Epstein’s giving to Harvard Hillel and who Maxwell testified had received a “massage” at Epstein’s townhouse. (Rosovsky died in 2022.)
“We regret that anyone associated with our organization contacted Mr. Epstein during the years in question, and in the intervening years Harvard Hillel has revised our ethics standards to prohibit interactions of this nature,” Harvard Hillel’s current director, Jason Rubenstein, told the Harvard Crimson this month about the solicitations. Rubenstein added that the staff who sought the donations haven’t been involved with the organization in over a decade.
In 2015, a senior vice president of Touro College, the private Jewish New York institution, made a personal appeal to Epstein for him to fund a “medical incubator as well as resiliency in higher education.”
“I have read with interest about your prior philanthropic pursuits and the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation’s generous contributions to various causes,” wrote the official, Michael Newman. “A donation to Touro College would further your foundation’s goals in both education and medical research.” A Touro spokesperson told JTA that Newman’s letter “was a blind prospecting note to a philanthropist that went unanswered.”
Some of Epstein’s post-conviction Jewish giving was prosaic, the kind of mid-level donations made as favors that rarely trigger nonprofits’ due diligence mechanisms.
UJA-Federation of New York, for example, accepted a $50,000 donation from Epstein in 2017. The occasion: the UJA’s signature Wall Street Dinner, which drew more than 2,000 people and raised $29 million. Epstein made his donation in support of one of the honorees, Howard Lutnick, who was then chair of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald and is now President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary. (Trump himself is prominently mentioned in the Epstein files.)
Invited to fill a table at the event, Epstein declined, responding that Lutnick — who was also his next-door neighbor — could fill his. Lutnick recently admitted to a more extensive relationship with Epstein than he had previously publicized, including visiting his island after he had previously said he had cut ties; the White House has said it will stand by him.
A spokesperson for the UJA declined to comment further to JTA on Epstein’s donation.
For his part, Epstein did not appear to be wedded to UJA as a cause. Emailing with Summers in 2019, six months before his arrest, he discouraged the former U.S. Treasury Secretary from donating to the New York federation: “much rather you use you extra funds for your own benefit „ rather than the UJA,” Epstein wrote. “Agree re no UJA,” Summers wrote back. “Po=dering [sic] uses of money.”
The American Jewish Committee, meanwhile, invited Epstein to a gala dinner in 2013 in honor of Matthew Bronfman, a prominent Jewish philanthropist, though it was not clear whether he attended.
“AJC takes seriously this inquiry given Jeffrey Epstein’s reprehensible crimes,” a spokesperson told JTA in a statement. The spokesperson said that the 2013 invitation “is a standard form solicitation used routinely for honoree events and doesn’t reflect any AJC ties or relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.” The group added that it had two donations from Epstein on file, both predating his conviction: $15,000 in 2000 and $25,000 in 2003.
Nonprofit watchdogs are suggesting that groups that accepted Epstein’s money after 2008 should take a harder look at their practices.
“With respect to any donations accepted after the conviction, I find the compartmentalization truly astonishing,” said Laurie Styron, of the watchdog Charity Watch. “Throwing sex trafficking victims under the bus in service to revenue growth that will eventually support the mission of some unrelated charitable effort is not OK. Anyone who tries to justify this really needs to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves if they would feel differently about trading justice for money if it were their own daughter or mother or sister who was trafficked.”
Indeed, what should be done about Epstein’s Jewish donations now is another thorny question. Some of the Wexner fellowship’s alumni, responding to his Epstein ties, have begun lobbying for Wexner’s name to be dropped from the program; a few have made public reparations for benefitting from Wexner’s money.
And Za’akah, an advocacy group for Hasidic sexual abuse survivors, has harshly criticized the yeshivas and other Orthodox institutions that accepted funding from Epstein, even the ones that had no knowledge at the time of his conviction or the allegations against him.
“You can’t come into the holiest place in Judaism and say, ‘I’m paying for this with the wages of prostitution,’” Asher Lovy, the group’s founder, said in an Instagram video in which he cited Talmudic teachings.
Lovy added, “By doing that, Epstein was afforded the opportunity to launder his reputation — the reputation he had rightly earned as a sex trafficker.”
At least one yeshiva that received an Epstein donation has sought to distance itself from him. The Texas Torah Institute, a yeshiva in Dallas, recently issued a statement saying it was unaware that Epstein had paid out $28,000 in tuition payments across 2008 and 2009.
“Until the recent release by the Justice Department of over 3 million documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, Texas Torah Institute was unaware of any potential connection with Epstein,” Rabbi Eliyahu Kaufmann, the school’s dean, told the Houston Chronicle.
Kaufmann added that the school “conducted an internal review” and determined that the checks were not signed by Epstein himself, but instead by his financial advisor Harry Beller — who also facilitated other yeshiva donations over the years, the Epstein files show. (Other Jewish schools that received donations from Epstein did not return JTA requests for comment.)
Beyond the donations, the latest files have renewed scrutiny on Epstein’s Jewish associates — and induced a cascade of consequences for many of those named beyond Summers.
Casey Wasserman, the Jewish entertainment agent, has lost top clients over his relationship with Epstein and is currently facing calls to step down from the Los Angeles Olympics planning committee.
Thomas Pritzker, a cousin of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, has stepped down from his role as chair of Hyatt Hotels over his Epstein connections, while Norwegian diplomat Mona Juul, who played a large role in facilitating the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, has also resigned from government after emails revealed Epstein had left her children millions in his will.
Financier Leon Black, whose foundation publishes the Jewish Lives series of biographies from Yale University Press; World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder; art curator David A. Ross; renowned linguist and pro-Palestinian advocate Noam Chomsky; and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak are among the other Jewish names also facing a new round of scrutiny over their Epstein ties. The latest files show that Epstein and an Israeli security delegation had had a New York apartment, in which Barak stayed on multiple occasions, outfitted with hidden cameras.
Bard College, meanwhile, has opened an investigation into its longtime president (and former Jerusalem symphony director) Leon Botstein. Botstein has said his interactions with Epstein — whose dinner invitation his spokesperson said he had turned down in 2013 because of a Rosh Hashanah obligation — were part and parcel of the difficult job of raising funds to keep a struggling liberal arts college in business.
Some of Epstein’s interactions on Jewish topics had more to do with status than money.
The files show that he was invited to a “very private screening for friends and family” of the 2017 drama “Disobedience,” about closeted lesbian Orthodox women. The invitation had come through Peggy Siegal, a publicist who was a key power broker in his affiliations with celebrities — while also, the files show, cracking Jewish-inflected jokes to him about his sexual predilections.
Epstein indicated that he would attend. The screening, held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, had a guest list packed with celebrities, including the film’s co-stars Rachel Weisz and Alessandro Nivola, as well as showbiz royalty like Daniel Craig, Jennifer Connelly, Steven Soderbergh, Naomi Watts, and Jeffrey Wright. Also on the guest list: Israeli writer-director Oren Moverman and director Mira Nair, the pro-Palestinian advocate and mother of current New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Other files show that he got involved in 2013 in seeking a conversion to Judaism for one of his female associates.
“Jeffrey says he needs a Rabbi who does conversions for Shiksa’s ….might you know of one!” his assistant wrote to an intermediary, using a Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman.
The intermediary, who had pitched Epstein to finance a variety of deals over the years, was quick to oblige. “Yes, What level Orthodox, Conservative or Reform,” he responded. “Obviously the Orthodox is the most rigid but accepted by everyone, as you go down the scale the work gets easier but less acceptance. Not a real issue unless one has a child and the question of religious acceptance of that child. Pick a flavor and I will find.”
The emails show that the intermediary then reached out to a prominent Orthodox conversion advocate, Rabbi Adam Mintz, who advised him to approach Rabbi Lisa Rubin at Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. A connection evidently took place, as Epstein later made a reference to a contact being enrolled in “Jew class.”
Reached for comment, Mintz told JTA he never interacted with Epstein and didn’t know the particular conversion request was connected to him.
Rubin directed questions about Epstein to a spokesperson for the synagogue. “Rabbi Rubin has no awareness of any of her conversion students having had any connection to Epstein. She is not aware of any past contact with him,” the spokesperson said.
The year after the initial introduction, Epstein urged the intermediary to apply pressure to speed the conversion. “lisa rubin the rabbi you gave [redacted], its important that [redacted] gets her conversion asap,” Epstein wrote, a day after receiving an email from someone who said she had “missed a third of the classes” taught by Rubin.
In response, the intermediary offered to find another rabbi. Over the following two years, Epstein would personally authorize reimbursements for classes with a female rabbi. It is unclear if the classes ever led to a conversion.
The would-be convert’s name is redacted in most of the files, indicating that she may have been a potential victim or co-conspirator. Epstein’s reasons for seeking a conversion for her are unknown, though he was known to have arranged sham marriages, including same-sex ones, for some of his victims in order to help them obtain American citizenship.
Epstein appears to have had closer relationships to at least one other rabbi. Between 2010 and 2011 he frequently advised contacts to connect with Rabbi Sam Klagsbrun, a former Jewish Theological Seminary professor, who died in 2023. In the emails Epstein occasionally referred people to Klagsbrun, a practicing psychiatrist, seemingly as patients; other times he authorized payments to him.
Synagogue representatives, including some rabbis, also made direct appeals to Epstein at many points, according to the latest files. In 2014, a co-founder of The Beis, an upstart Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side geared toward South African Jews, asked Epstein for help with seed money to purchase a building. He drew on his perception of Epstein’s Jewish background in his appeal.
“I couldn’t help but notice your ‘Israel’ chalkboard in the dining room – and I have a feeling that you grew up like me in the City – more culturally Jewish than religious,” the pitchman, film producer Daniel M. Rosenberg, wrote to Epstein. He later added, “The rabbi told me that we all needed to go out of our comfort zones on this one. So this email certainly qualifies. Want to meet with an amazing, worldly, brilliant (and very connected) rabbi?”
Requests for comment to Rosenberg and to The Beis’ rabbi were not returned.
Additional pleas for Epstein’s cash or other forms of largesse came from a Naples, Florida, Reform synagogue president, now deceased, as well as two synagogues located on the U.S. Virgin Islands where Epstein frequented — one Reform, one Chabad.
While it was unclear whether Epstein ever donated to the synagogues, the files showed that Orthodox schools beyond Kaplan’s received his money.
Some donations appear to have come in the form of tuition reimbursements for specific students — such as one redacted attendee of Bais Yaakov of Ramapo, a Jewish girls’ school in New York. A bill for $22,600 in tuition to the school in 2015 was included in Epstein’s files.
Beller, Epstein’s assistant, facilitated multiple donations from Epstein to yeshivas, sometimes specifically for tuition. He signed a check for $15,000 from Epstein’s holdings to Yeshiva Aderes Hatorah in Jerusalem in 2010. The next year Beller signed a check for $1,000 to Chabad Neshama Hebrew School in Brooklyn, and sent another $6,000 of Epstein’s money to American Yedidim, an Israeli aid group based in Florida. In 2014 Beller signed another $18,610 cash withdrawal to Yeshiva Mercaz Hatorah, a Jerusalem school catering to English-speaking Orthodox boys.
Another Epstein associate, Darren Indyke, signed a $24,500 check from Epstein’s office to Yeshiva Gedola Ohr Yisrael, in Brooklyn. The check is dated 2016. Indyke, a co-executor of Epstein’s estate, last week settled a class-action lawsuit Epstein’s victims filed against him for up to $35 million. The suit had claimed that Indyke and fellow co-executor Richard Kahn used financial maneuvers to aid Epstein’s abuses and pay victims and recruiters.
Indyke has also been subpoenaed by Congress in connection with the Epstein investigation. Attempts to reach Beller and Indyke were unsuccessful.
The post What the Epstein files show about Jeffrey Epstein’s Jewish world appeared first on The Forward.
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‘He made Black Jews not invisible anymore; he was the bridge’
Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, Jr. rabbi and spiritual leader of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, and the Chief Rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, died Nov. 2 at the age of 74.
A cousin of Michelle Obama and an important leader for Black Jews in America, Funnye was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and converted to Conservative Judaism. He held leadership positions in Chicago’s Jewish community and was a consultant to many cultural institutions throughout the United States.
“I’ve known him my whole life,” said Rabbi Tamar Manasseh said. “There is nothing that prepares you for this. I think it’s really important for people to know that he made Black Jews not invisible anymore. He was the bridge.”
“At that time it was not the priority for other Black Jews, but for him it was the priority,” Manasseh continued. “There were a million times that he was uncomfortable to one day bring comfort to us all.”
Funnye was born in 1952, in Georgetown, South Carolina, and attended Howard University. He received a B.A. in Hebrew literature and a rabbinic ordination from the Israelite Board of Rabbis, Inc., in Queens, New York, and a B.A. in Jewish studies and an M.A. in human services administration from the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, in Chicago.
In 1995, Funnye, Michelle Stein-Evers and Robin Washington (an editor-at-large at The Forward) founded the Alliance of Black Jews.
Funnye became the first African American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis in 1997, and was named Chief Rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, in New York in 2015.
He also served as a rabbi for congregations in Nigeria, Uganda, and other sub-Saharan African nations.
“Rabbi Capers Funnye was my ‘rebbe’ for connecting with the Black community and for understanding how important it is to bring the Black Jewish community to the very center of the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Asher Lopatin.
“I was inspired as he fought hard to gain acceptance as a full member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and then succeeded in getting full membership in the New York Board of Rabbis and opening up the New York Board of Rabbis to graduates of the Israelite Rabbinical Academy,” Lopatin said. “I will never forget his passion, his brilliance, his insight and his love for Judaism, the Jewish community and Israel. May his memory be a blessing.”
“It was an honor to welcome Rabbi Funnye and members of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis to become part of our rabbinic family. His steadfast commitment to group relations helped us to better understand the dynamics of the Black Jewish community,” said Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis. “May we continue to perpetuate his legacy.”
“Rabbi Funnye has touched countless lives with his spiritual leadership, wisdom, and unwavering commitment to our congregation and the broader Hebrew Israelite community. His legacy of faith, service, and dedication will continue to inspire generations,” Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation wrote on its Facebook page.
The post ‘He made Black Jews not invisible anymore; he was the bridge’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Top Jewish lawyers quit Indiana ACLU amid controversy over new director
Four attorneys have resigned from the ACLU of Indiana amid concerns over the incoming executive director’s approach to free speech and allegations of antisemitism.
Legal director Kenneth Falk, a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer who has twice argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, along with deputy legal director Gavin Rose, senior staff attorney Stevie Pactor and staff attorney Josh Bleisch, all resigned in recent weeks, the ACLU of Indiana’s board confirmed in a statement to the Forward. Their resignations were first reported by the Indy Star.
The concerns center on Nikkita Oliver, a lawyer and longtime Seattle activist who was announced in June as the next executive director of the ACLU of Indiana.
Oliver, who posted a Palestinian flag on Instagram about two weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, alongside quotes about oppressed peoples’ “right to resist,” made comments during a July meeting that a former staff member interpreted as questioning Jewish attorneys’ ability to represent pro-Palestinian activists fairly.
Oliver, who uses they/them pronouns, also said they objected to the ACLU’s landmark legal defense of neo-Nazis’ right to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1977, which raised questions for some former staff about whether Oliver was committed to defending free speech irrespective of ideology.
Oliver’s original start date of Sept. 1 has been pushed back as the ACLU of Indiana conducts a third-party investigation “to establish the facts.”
“It is distressing that a small group of staff who have, at most, interacted with me once seem to have generated these rumors and false allegations,” Oliver wrote in a statement to the Forward, adding that they “welcome a fair, third-party review.”
A disputed meeting
The wave of resignations followed a July “get to know you” coffee conversation between Oliver and Neil Hudelson, ACLU of Indiana’s director of philanthropy at the time.
Hudelson told the Forward that during that meeting, Oliver brought up a 2016 free speech case involving pro-Palestinian student activists at Indiana University, which the ACLU had declined to take. Two community members had reached out about the case after their hiring was announced, Oliver said.
Hudelson said he was unfamiliar with the case, or why the ACLU might have decided not to pursue it, and asked Oliver for details, which Oliver said they didn’t know. Hudelson then recalled explaining to Oliver that the ACLU of Indiana has repeatedly defended pro-Palestinian activists’ right to free speech.
Where the conversation took a turn, according to Hudelson, was when Oliver said three times that it was “very interesting” that the ACLU had declined to take the case.
The two parties’ interpretations of the interaction differ.
Hudelson’s interpretation was that Oliver viewed the organization’s Jewish attorneys, who had vigorously defended pro-Palestinian activists’ free speech rights, as biased against Palestinians.
“It’s not hard to know that 50% of our legal team at the time was Jewish,” Hudelson, who is not Jewish himself, told the Forward. “The fact they kept repeating, just finding it ‘very interesting,’ struck me as antisemitic.”
While Oliver also recalled bringing up the 2016 case, they disputed the idea that it had anything to do with the attorneys’ religious background.
“I am a direct person who says exactly what I mean without hedging,” Oliver said in a written statement documenting their recollection of the meeting. “I did not intend or insinuate anything beyond providing an example of a meritorious case the affiliate did not take.”
Hudelson filed a complaint at the time about the interaction and said he hoped the matter would be resolved with a private investigation.
Tensions flare
Pactor, one of the Jewish attorneys who resigned, told the Forward she had raised concerns about Oliver’s commitment to the ACLU’s nonpartisan mission. (The legal arm of the ACLU must refrain from intervening in political campaigns in order to maintain its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.)
Pactor said she filed a complaint expressing concern over a comment Oliver made during a meeting with her in July about wanting to turn Indiana “light red.”
In a statement to the Forward, Oliver said by turning the state “light red,” they meant ensuring equal access to voting, which “naturally shifts the political landscape away from an exclusive focus on a single party.” (Indiana has largely voted for Republicans for president.) Oliver also noted that Pactor was in the running to become executive director but was not selected.
For Pactor, those concerns were compounded by Oliver’s social media history.
Less than two weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, Oliver posted a Palestinian flag to Instagram and quoted author Arundhati Roy, who said “People have the right to resist annihilation.” Oliver added in the post that Martin Luther King Jr. “began to see the limits of non-violent protest” toward the end of his life.
“I am heartbroken and angry,” Oliver wrote at the time. “If we want the violence to stop, we must stop the root cause. This means ending the occupation of Palestine by Zionist Israel, supporting Palestinian liberation and ending the apartheid state.”
The ACLU of Indiana board defended the post to the Forward as “an intellectual critique of power dynamics, not an incitement of violence.”
After two Israeli embassy staff, Yaron Lichinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025, Oliver reposted this message on their Instagram story: “20k children dead: violence is okay. 2 israeli embassy staff members dead: violence is not okay anymore.”
In another post, after the May 2026 shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego that killed three people, Oliver reshared an image on their Instagram story calling the attack “the direct result of white supremacist, Zionist and anti-Muslim rhetoric being pushed by the state and media.”
Blaming the mosque attack on “Zionist” rhetoric without evidence was concerning, Pactor said, especially since the two teenage gunmen had expressed neo-Nazi views in writings they left behind.
In a statement to the Forward addressing their social media posts, Oliver wrote, “These posts speak to the double standard that can exist in the media when some deaths are deemed tragic, and others are deemed necessary. All life is precious. I understand that, outside of free speech, pro-Palestine advocacy is not within the ACLU of Indiana’s portfolio, and I do not intend to change that.”
On Sept. 27, a group of 79 Jews across the country who identified themselves as “organizers for Palestinian rights” submitted a letter of support for Oliver, writing that they could “attest that Nikkita [Oliver] explicitly and consistently cares about the safety of Jewish people.”
Tensions continued to flare among the ACLU staff, culminating in a Sept. 29 board meeting attended by Hudelson, who said board members said Oliver was the victim of false allegations.
Hudelson said he was fired two days later. The board said it would not comment on the details of personnel matters but noted that one employee was fired “for cause.”
Pactor resigned a few weeks later, on Oct. 19.
The Skokie question
Oliver also brought a perspective to free speech advocacy that appeared to diverge from the ACLU’s longstanding tradition of defending the rights of even the most objectionable speakers.
In 1977, the ACLU famously represented neo-Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago that has been home to many Holocaust survivors. The neo-Nazis never ended up marching, though they won the legal right to do so in court — with Jewish ACLU attorney David Goldberger arguing on the neo-Nazis’ behalf.
The ACLU’s decision to defend the rights of neo-Nazis was controversial; at the time, many Jewish lawyers resigned in protest. But it also helped establish the organization’s credibility as a group committed to the principle of free speech for all.
The ACLU has repeatedly reaffirmed its decision in the Skokie case. Today, the ACLU website notes that many consider the Skokie case “one of the ACLU’s finest hours.”
Oliver told Hudelson during their July meeting that they disagreed with how the ACLU handled the case.
“If I had been the head of the ACLU during Skokie, I would have found a different approach through integrated advocacy — such as submitting an amicus brief on the First Amendment — that protected the free speech of all without subjecting a Jewish community to potential harm,” Oliver wrote in their account of the meeting with Hudelson.
That approach conflicts with the way the ACLU has historically operated. Falk, who had served as legal director at the Indiana ACLU since 1996 before resigning, is among those Jewish free speech lawyers who have represented clients many find unsavory. He has argued on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan on multiple occasions, including when the hate group wanted to host a rally at the Gary, Indiana City Hall.
“If we don’t stand up for the rights of everyone, even people we don’t necessarily personally agree with, all of our rights are diminished,” Falk told The Indiana Lawyer in May. (The Forward was unable to reach Falk for comment.)
Hudelson and Pactor both told the Forward they were concerned by Oliver’s approach.
“Ken was always saying, ‘You don’t know what it’s like until your rabbi has to ask you why you have the Grand Wizard of the KKK in your office,’” Hudelson said. “But that’s what we do. We’re the ACLU.”
In a statement, the board said the ACLU of Indiana was not changing its approach to free speech litigation.
“I understand that under the law hate speech is free speech, and I believe in the ACLU’s mandate to protect all people’s civil liberties and civil rights,” Oliver wrote in a statement to the Forward. “I am aware of the ACLU’s stance and understand the difference between the affiliate’s work and my own frameworks and political leanings.”
The third-party investigation is set to be completed in November.
The post Top Jewish lawyers quit Indiana ACLU amid controversy over new director appeared first on The Forward.
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Arab parties are kingmakers, but will Israel’s Jewish leaders accept them?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Less than an hour after election night exit polls were published, Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, whose representation was predicted to almost double, declared: “We will translate this electoral power into an influential political force … we’re here — not on the sidelines.”
With all the votes now counted, Ra’am has indeed grown from five to eight seats, while the other Arab party, the Joint List, has received 11. Their combined unprecedented 19 seats out of a total of 120 in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, now make the Arab parties a powerful force and one that could potentially break the political deadlock after neither the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot have enough seats to form a governing coalition.
A record number of Arab-Israelis voted in last Tuesday’s election, signaling for the first time in Israel’s history that the country’s Arab public, which makes up around 21% of the general population, is demanding to be counted in Israel’s political process.
The question, now, is whether Israel’s Jewish political leaders — and the public they represent — are ready to accept them as legitimate partners in governing the country.
“The Arab parties managed to produce an historic turnout in the Arab community, a reflection of this population joining Israeli democracy and the democratic process, and their desire to see their issues being taken care of by the Israeli government and political system,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“But while they performed phenomenally and beyond any expectation, it’s still too early to tell whether the massive expectations that led Israeli Arab voters to the streets will actually be met by a political system willing to respond to this desire,” he said.
The record voter turnout among Arab-Israeli citizens breaks with a decades-old tradition of shunning Israel’s political institutions in protest over the conflict with the Palestinians – many themselves identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel – and a feeling that whoever is in power will not truly address their needs.
After four years of a government dominated by far-right Israeli nationalists, however, Arab voters felt they had no choice but to step up, analysts told JTA. It was not only the inflammatory rhetoric and attacks on the Arab community by senior government ministers that drove up turnout to some 80% – compared to only 53.2% in the last election in 2022 – but also the outgoing government’s policies.
Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who prior to his political career was convicted for incitement to racism, has overseen mass demolitions of illegally built homes, especially in the Bedouin towns in Israel’s Negev region, and failed to address soaring crime rates in Arab towns.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has threatened to force the Arab population in Israel out of the land, outlining in September a plan to Judaize Arab-majority areas in Israel’s periphery. In one recent case, he even backed young Israeli Jews who set up an illegal outpost inside an Israeli-Arab town.
It is such moves, as well as multiple statements casting suspicion on Israel’s Arab sector, especially following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, that ultimately pushed the community to vote en masse, according to experts on the Arab community. Many cast ballots for the first time.
“It was an existential fear,” said Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, who has researched political trends in Israel’s Arab community for years.
He pointed to a poll published following the election by Arabic-language newspaper Kul al-Arab showing that nearly 92% of Arab voters said that the main thing driving them out to vote was the fear of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
“It’s an almost unprecedented motivation,” he said. “But it can also be a formula for a cascade of expectations.”
Among those expectations now is that Israel’s majority Jewish parties that have promised change in the country – and promised to oust Netanyahu and his far-right partners – will include Arab parties or at least make use of this electoral momentum.
The political party Ra’am, which has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, has already shown a willingness to join the government. The party, which focuses on social welfare issues and fighting crime, already broke down barriers in 2021 by joining former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in a government that briefly ousted Netanyahu.
For the Joint List, an alliance of three majority Arab parties focusing on socialist politics, civic equality for Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinian nationalism, joining an Israeli government or even providing it with a safety net from the outside is a big step.
All three parties – Hadash, a left-wing socialist party, Ta’al, a party promoting Arab civic rights and equality, and Balad, which represents pan-Arab nationalism – hold at their core the fight for Palestinian rights and national statehood.
Yet at least two of the parties, Hadash and Ta’al, have indicated a willingness to put some of their agenda aside in order to help change Israel’s current leadership.
“We are ready for political cooperation to form an alternative government that will present a genuine alternative and commit to a fundamental change in the current government’s racist policies,” Yousef Jabareen, head of the Joint List, said as votes were being counted on Thursday. “A government that will work to recognize the rights of the Arab public and end its exclusion, and that of its representatives, from the political system.”
However, Gadi Taub, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-host of the Israel Update podcast, called including such parties in Israel’s government “ridiculous.”
“These parties are anti-Zionist, they are against the very existence of Israel and some of them are direct terror supporters,” he said, referring to statements made by Balad’s leader Sami Abu Shehade after Oct. 7, which he later walked back.
“None of them will designate Hamas as a terror organization, even after Oct. 7,” noted Taub, adding that Israeli law should forbid parties that are openly against a Jewish state from running for parliament.
He pointed out that attempts to ban the Arab parties from running in this election were ultimately blocked by Israel’s Supreme Court, although Shehade did withdraw from the race. No other country would tolerate political leaders that “do not acknowledge the self-determination” of the country they live in, said Taub.
Including Arab parties in a government is something that was not even considered by Jewish or Zionist-focused parties until the offer came from Ra’am in 2021. In fact, there have only ever been two Muslim Arab ministers, Ghaleb Majadele, a member of the Labor Party, who served under former prime minister Ehud Olmert and Issawi Frej, from the Meretz Party who served from June 2021 to December 2022.
Three years after Oct. 7, when fear and mistrust of Arabs because of the attack remain high, the idea of aligning politically with Arab politicians who openly advocate for Palestinians is even more complex.
While Netanyahu and his coalition partners painted such a collaboration as an existential threat for the state in the lead-up to last week’s vote, almost all the parties in Eisenkot’s bloc, except for the Democrats headed by Yair Golan, also ruled out the possibility.
Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group, said it was difficult to evaluate whether Israeli society as a whole was now ready for such political influence from Arab Israelis, but said the more pertinent question was whether Eisenkot and his political partners, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, were ready for it.
“This is pretty much their only option if they want to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu,” she said. “The main question is how important it is for them to remove Netanyahu that they would be willing to compromise on something that they made a frontline issue?”
Zonszein added that even center-left former prime minister Yair Lapid, whom she characterized as pragmatic in every other way in his efforts to oust Netanyahu, has stated that he would not work with the Arabs.
She called lumping the entire sector together “outrageous.”
“It really defies the very notion of a democracy,” Zonszein said, accusing Netanyahu of dismissing “Palestinians just for being Palestinians, regardless of the fact that they are law-abiding citizens, that they pay taxes and are present in all aspects of the workforce.”
Throughout Election Day, the embattled Netanyahu published a stream of video clips declaring that Arabs were “flocking” to the polls. He told his supporters that if they did not want an Islamist state in Israel, then they’d better get out and vote for him.
Analysis by some fact-checkers has since revealed that many of the images Netanyahu used to scare his voters were in fact AI-generated fakes.
Tani Frank, director of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Center for Judaism and State Policy, argued that the delegitimization of the Arab vote was one of the “focal points of the Likud campaign.”
“One reason for this is to weaken the ability of the change bloc to form a government with the support of, or reliance on, the Arab parties — specifically Ra’am and Mansour Abbas, who has already done so previously,” he said.
Frank said he believed that the willingness of Jewish Israelis to accept cooperation with Arab parties, especially after Oct. 7 and the Likud campaign, was extremely limited.
A few days before the election, a snap poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that “a clear majority of Israeli Jews opposed either Arab party playing a role in any government.”
While a majority of those on the left said that they would support a coalition of center and left-wing parties with the support or participation of the Arab parties, those in the center and right preferred another round of voting rather than forming a coalition with them.
Since the election, Netanyahu and his supporters have tried to cast doubt on the mass Arab turnout and on the legitimacy of the Arab political leadership. This has included accusations by members of his Likud party of voter fraud and foreign interference from Qatar, followed by statements Thursday from the Central Elections Committee that it was investigating foreign funding irregularities.
Netanyahu wrote in a post on X: “The elections in the State of Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination of the Jewish state, through serious criminal offences involving bribery, threats, violence, forgery and the use of prohibited software to mobilize voters.”
Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, head of the elections committee, said on Sunday at a press conference with the country’s attorney general and the director of the Israel Security Agency, the Shin Bet, that the investigation into alleged foreign funding was serious and ongoing but would not change the results.
“Our position is that even if the suspicions are substantiated, this would not undermine the integrity of the electoral process or the election results as a whole,” he said.
On Saturday night, protests were held by both those against allowing Arabs into the government and those who believe it is the only way forward. A small group of those who are against such a move gathered in Tel Aviv chanting that Israel must not allow “terror supporters into the government.” Much larger groups of protesters in favor of a collaboration gathered around the country urging Eisenkot to take the step.
Mohamed Darawshe, a political analyst and director of strategy at Givat Haviva, a leading center educating for a shared society in Israel, said that if after the massive turnout on Election Day the Arab parties were not included in a change government, there would be great “disappointment.”
“If they are blocked from the right wing, that is understandable. But if their natural partners in Jewish society block them, they will end up turning their back on the whole political scene,” he said.
Darawshe said such a scenario would make Arab society unlikely to participate in such numbers in future elections.
“It will be like a vote of no confidence in the Israeli political system and complete disbelief in the promise that Israel can offer political equality as promised in the Declaration of Independence,” he said.
Political equality, Darawshe pointed out, is “not just allowing Arab citizens to exercise their equal rights on the day of the elections, but also to exercise their rights the day after the election, meaning allowing them to be part of the coalition and not to create a glass ceiling at representation in parliament.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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