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What will become of the Dutch farm school that saved my father from the Nazis?
In North Holland, a grand community house rises above neighboring farms. Built in 1936 by students of Werkdorp Wieringermeer (Werkdorp means “work village”; Wieringermeer was the name of the township), the building held the dining room and classrooms of a Jewish farm school. A stunning example of Amsterdam School architecture, the Werkdorp’s brick and cobalt-blue facade dominates the polder, or land claimed from the sea.
Today, the land grows tulips. Nearby, Slootdorp (“Ditch Village”) honors the canals that carry the water away.
In 1939, the school sheltered 300 German-speaking Jewish students, including this reporter’s father, who arrived, his head shaved, on Jan. 4, from Buchenwald.
Why a Jewish farm school? In the 1930s, most young German and Austrian Jews were city dwellers and had no idea how to milk a cow, raise chickens, or plow land. But as the Nazis barred Jews from education and professions, farm laborers were the immigrants most wanted by the handful of countries accepting Jewish refugees.
Some 30 such training schools were established in Germany, modeled on the hachsharah throughout Europe that taught Jewish youth the skills to settle in what was then Palestine. The Werkdorp, the largest in Holland, was non-Zionist. Its objective was to send young farmers to any country that would take them.
Today, volunteers have assembled a grassroots museum that showcases the Werkdorp’s years, 1934 to 1941. Pinned to the walls inside are pictures taken by the Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac, who visited in 1938, and by the Dutch photojournalist Willem van de Poll. They show students haying, plowing, feeding chickens, baking bread.
Also on the walls are images of the nearly 200 Werkdorpers who were not as lucky as my father. The Nazi official Klaus Barbie — who became known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for his harsh treatment of resistance fighters there — rounded up the Werkdorpers in 1941 and sent them east to concentration camps, where they were murdered.
A scroll of those victims’ names hangs near the entrance. In the huge kitchen, you can still see the kosher sinks, one tiled red and white for dishes for meat, the other black and white for dairy. Otherwise, the three floors of the great hall stand largely empty.
Protected from demolition by the Netherlands Agency for Cultural Heritage, the community house and its land have been owned since 2008 by Joep Karel who runs a private real estate company that builds housing. Karel pays for the building’s upkeep and opens it to cultural groups and schools.
But the developer has a grander plan. He wants to create a modern memorial center that tells the story of the Werkdorpers and the polder. To fund his venture, he would erect housing behind the community house, to be rented by migrant workers. In April 2020, the council of Hollands Kroon — the Crown of Holland, as the township is called today — approved such housing for 160 workers.
The organizers of the museum are uncertain: Will the project enhance their efforts, or thwart them?
A hero or a collaborator?
North Holland juts like the thumb of a right mitten into the North Sea. A decade before the community house was inaugurated in January 1937, the land beneath it was seabed. The first students, 11 boys and four girls, arrived in 1934 to live in barracks that had housed the polder’s builders. Their task: to build a school.
The farm school admitted refugees for a two-year course. Its purpose was to help them emigrate, the only way The Hague would allow the school to function. Residents spoke German; there was no need to learn the language of one’s temporary home.
Gertrude van Tijn, a leader of the Dutch Jewish refugees committee — tasked with finding countries that would accept thousands of Germans and Austrians forced to flee the Nazis — handled admissions. Most of the Werkdorp’s budget came from Dutch Jewish donors, with contributions from Jewish groups in Britain and America. Students’ families paid fees if they could.
The school was internationally recognized. James G. McDonald, the American high commissioner for refugees of the League of Nations, attended its opening ceremony. The legal scholar Norman Bentwich praised the village in The Manchester Guardian. Although the school was non-Zionist, Henrietta Szold, a leader of Youth Aliyah, brought 20 German teenagers there in 1936.
Werkdorp Wierengermeer helped at least 500 German and Austrian Jews, ages 15-25, escape the Nazi regime.
It was Van Tijn, a German Jew who’d married a Dutchman, who got my father, George Landecker, out of Buchenwald. He had been arrested in Frankfurt on Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom, and sent east by train to Buchenwald.
In the camp he met his friends and teachers from Gross Breesen, a farm school in eastern Germany, from which he had graduated that May. Breesen was the Werkdorp’s sister farm school. By admitting the Breeseners and my father to the Werkdorp, Van Tijn got Dutch entry permits for all.
For the Gestapo in January 1939, such proof that a prisoner could leave Germany secured freedom.
Van Tijn saved thousands of young people like my father, but she worked with the Nazis to do so. After the war, historians and people seeking to repatriate Dutch Jews called her a collaborator. She moved to the United States and wrote a memoir, in which she criticized other Jewish leaders for their decisions under German rule. According to her biographer Bernard Wasserstein, she never published the memoir because she didn’t want to make money from describing the atrocities she had seen.
When my father arrived in 1939, the Werkdorpers were cultivating 150 acres — there was wheat, oats, rye, barley, and sugar beets for the animals: 60 cows, 40 sheep, and 12 workhorses. The residents raised chickens, grew vegetables, and baked their own bread. The school taught carpentry, welding and plumbing, skills I would see my father use, not always deftly, later as a dairy farmer in New York state. (Dad was a good farmer, but he was less than expert in all the other skills a farmer needs.)
My father got a visa to America and left Rotterdam on the steamship Veendam, arriving in New York on Feb. 5, 1940. Three months later, the Nazis invaded Holland, cutting off all routes of escape.
‘Their names should be spoken’
Over the decades, Wieringer residents have found ways to commemorate the residents who died.
Marieke Roos, then a board member of the Jewish Work Village Foundation, proposed a monument of their names. She raised funds and recruited volunteers. Completed in 2021, the memorial comprises 197 glass blocks embedded in a semicircle at the building’s gateway. They mirror the layout of the dorms, now long gone, which once embraced the rear of the community house. Each block commemorates a student, teacher, or family member deported and murdered. One honors Frits Ino de Vries (1939–43), killed at Auschwitz with his mother and sister, Mia Sara, who was 5.
Corien Hielkema, also from the foundation, teaches local middle schoolers about the Werkdorpers’ fate. Each student creates a poem, painting, or website about a Werkdorper because “their names should be spoken and their stories told,” she told me.
Rent from migrant workers may sound like an unusual way to fund a memorial center. But in Joep Karel’s plan, such housing would be built behind the community house, and would be reminiscent of the dormitories where my father lived. Hollands Kroon’s biggest exports are flowers, cultivated by workers from the eastern EU. The region desperately needs housing for these temporary workers. In 2024, the province gave Karel 115,000 Euros to start the project.
Joël Cahen, who chairs the fundraising for Karel’s Jewish Work Village Cultural Center, says that attracting tourists here won’t be easy — it’s a 45-minute drive from Amsterdam, “along a boring road,” he said. Nevertheless, he said he thinks Karel’s idea will work, though “it will take time.”
Some neighbors objected to housing migrant workers, Cahen said. They feared noise pollution, traffic and drugs. Months of legal delay produced a court decision in Karel’s favor, but by then construction costs had skyrocketed.
Now, Cahen said, Karel needs an investor. The developer did not answer a question about how that search is going, except to say, via Cahen, that he would break ground “as soon as possible.” Roos says she has been hearing “soon” for years.
And if the housing were to be completed and the workers arrived, where would they hang their laundry, store their recycling, hide their trash? It would be hard to hide the chaff of daily living on the site’s four acres. Who would visit such a memorial center, and how would the owner keep it running?
Those are legitimate questions, Cahen said. But “we need people to help us push this thing forward. This is a chance.”
Kees Ribbens, a senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in Amsterdam, told me that the community house has no “comparable examples in the Netherlands.” It is a “special building,” and a memorial center “would certainly be appropriate.”
Most of the agricultural training centers that saved German Jewish youth have been destroyed or reused. The director’s house of a farm school in Ahlem, Germany, is now a museum. But it became the local Gestapo headquarters, so it also tells that story. The Ahlem school buildings are gone. Gross Breesen, now in Poland, is a fancy golf spa.
The Werkdorp is one of a very few farm schools in Europe whose original building is dedicated to its history.
What my father did and didn’t tell me
My father talked a lot about his first farm school, Breesen. Survivors from Breesen, in America and around the world, remained his closest friends.
Yet he mentioned his time in the Netherlands only once. My mother had served a Dutch cheese to some guests. Dad told us how he’d been hitchhiking in Holland with a friend, when a truck carrying Edam cheeses had picked them up. They rode in the truckbed, hungry, surrounded by giant cheese wheels.
It was such a slim memory. I assumed he had lived in Holland for a few weeks. I learned only recently that Werkdorp Wieringermeer had protected him from January 1939 until February 1940.
Now I think my father didn’t want to remember his Dutch year. Because like refugees today, everywhere, he was terrified.
Dad once told an interviewer how he’d read a memoir by a man who was arrested on Kristallnacht and transported by train to Buchenwald. My father realized, “That’s me. I did that too.” He had no memory of actually doing it at all.
The brain is good at shielding us from trauma. His year at Werkdorp Wieringermeer may have been like his train ride after Kristallnacht, a time he needed to forget. He was worrying about his parents and siblings, who would not escape Germany until November. (One brother, his wife, and toddler would not survive the war.) He was anxious about the U.S. visa the Breeseners had applied for as a group (they circumvented the American quota on Germans, another story). He had been forced to watch people hanged at Buchenwald for trying to escape.
Yet my father was an optimist when I knew him, and never dwelled on suffering. And I never thought, “I should ask about his experience in the Holocaust because I will want to write about it one day.”
So the only thing I knew about his experience in the Netherlands was that he’d hitched a ride in a truck full of cheese.
An hour’s drive beyond the Werkdorp from Amsterdam, there’s a memorial to the 102,000 people deported from the transit Kamp Westerbork and murdered during the Second World War. It draws 150,000 visitors annually. Cahen hopes the Werkdorp could attract 10,000.
Like Westerbork, the Werkdorp was a transit point — but with a key difference: Many of its residents were saved.
As the daughter of one of them, I hope the tension over the future of its community house will ease, and that someone will make a grand memorial center flourish there.
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Are You Jewish? California considers asking on official state forms
Ever since the Holocaust demonstrated the danger of appearing on state registries, many Jews have been wary of self-identifying to the government.
But a bill racing through California’s state legislature would let Jewish people do just that — and it was a coalition of Jewish groups who proposed it.
California’s SB 1387 would mandate that any California agency collecting demographic data on ethnicity — whether on unemployment forms or college applications — add an option for Jewish ancestry.
Its supporters say the benefits of having data about the Jewish population will allow the state and Jewish community groups to better support them. The increase in antisemitic hate crimes during the Israel-Hamas war provided the initial thrust, according to California State Sen. Henry Stern, who introduced the bill.
“We were reaching for data that we didn’t have,” Stern told the Forward. “We had the data on hate crime incidents, but we didn’t have the demographic data to show that for such a small population with this number of incidents, you’ve got a serious problem.”
The bill has already passed in policy committees in both houses of the California state legislature. Just one more committee review remains before the bill heads to the Senate and Assembly floors.
Passing the bill would make California the first state to track Jewish identity as part of its demographic data.
What good can come of tracking Jews?
While many Americans think of Judaism primarily as a religion, many Jews have long understood themselves both as a religious community and as a people with shared ancestry.
That sentiment is reflected in a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, which found that American Jews are more likely to describe being Jewish in terms of culture (55%) or ancestry (52%) than religion (36%). According to the same survey, only one in 10 Jewish Americans say being Jewish is only a matter of religion.
David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, a coalition of Jewish federations, synagogues and other nonprofits advocating for the bill, said collecting data on Jewish ethnicity would help challenge other common assumptions about the community.
“The assumption is often that the Jewish community is a monolithically white, wealthy, and successful community,” Bocarsly said. “I think there are a lot of Jewish community members who would fall into that category, and a lot who wouldn’t. This would paint that more complicated picture.”
Stern told the Forward the information could have practical applications across a range of policy areas, from public health to education.
He says the data could help public health officials identify communities that would benefit from targeted education and genetic screening programs for conditions that disproportionately affect some Jewish populations, such as Tay-Sachs disease and BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers.
It also could close an education gap in California schools. Stern pointed to what he described as inconsistent Holocaust education across California districts. Knowing how many students identify as ethnically Jewish, he argued, could encourage districts to incorporate more Jewish history and culture based on the makeup of their student body rather than in response to state mandates.
“We know that good data creates good policy, so this will allow us to be able to inform better policy in the future,” said Bocarsly. “The goal of this isn’t to get more resources for our community; it’s to get the right amount of resources for our community.”
Opposition to the bill
Opponents and those who are wary of the bill cite concerns ranging from moral to technical.
Amid rising antisemitism, Bocarsly acknowledged concerns that the data would turn into a government-owned list of Jews. Some worry that a Jewish box would “flatten” multiethnic identities. And what about people who are religiously Jewish but not ethnically, like converts or adoptees?
Bocarsly said the law would account for that. Because the data collected on these forms is disaggregated, it can only be presented in statistical form and without personal identifiers — the same way sexual orientation or transgender identity is treated on state forms. Participation would remain voluntary, and respondents could select multiple ethnic identities. Checking any box remains optional, as per existing state law.
Most of the opposition has come from pro-Palestinian Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Bend the Arc.
In its statement of opposition, Jewish Voice for Peace-Bay Area said that treating only one religion as an ethnicity is “legally inconsistent and factually wrong.” The best way to count and analyze the Jewish population, it said in an official opposition letter, was through scientific polling by organizations like the Pew Research Center.
Diana Scott, chair of Workers Circle NorCal, a secular Jewish social justice organization, questioned both the cost and necessity of the proposal. She argued that demographic checkboxes were originally intended to advance diversity efforts in areas such as education and said she does not believe Jews currently face the same lack of representation that justified those programs.
“Why should this data suddenly be collected at a time when we are doing away with diversity programs?” Scott told the Forward. “The original purpose of these checkboxes, at least in education, was to make sure there were programs representing people who weren’t being represented. I don’t think that’s the case right now for Jews.”
Scott also said the bill would cost money that could be better spent on programs benefiting a broader range of Californians, including Jews.
But Stern, who is Jewish, said he believes some of the objections are more personal than based on the substance of the bill.
“They see a member of the Jewish caucus, especially me, who’s been very outspoken in support of Israel,” the senator said. “I think if this bill might have been carried by someone else, maybe it wouldn’t even have attracted that kind of opposition.”
Bocarsly said that surveys like Pew’s cannot provide critical information useful to policymakers. While Pew’s studies of American Jews are conducted only periodically and rely on sampling, the California data would be collected on an ongoing basis through state administrative systems.
More importantly, he said, Pew does not measure outcomes such as health, educational attainment, incarceration, or poverty among Jewish Californians – data that would be essential for informing state policy.
How will the data be protected?
But the bill’s intention of collecting more detailed data on Jewish constituents to help produce better policy also raises a sensitive question: How securely can the government protect those who check the Jewish box?
John M. Abowd, an expert on privacy-protected data publication and the former chief scientist at the United States Census Bureau, told the Forward that he believes concerns about government collection of racial and ethnic data are legitimate.
Although any demographic data released publicly would be aggregated and would not identify individual Jews by name, Abowd said that alone does not guarantee anonymity. By combining geographic and demographic characteristics, such as age, sex, and household composition, a skilled analyst may still be able to identify individuals included in a statistical dataset.
At the same time, Abowd says there are several legal protections designed to control the government’s use of voluntary race and ethnicity data. “Those protections in California are frankly very strong,” he explained.
Bocarsly emphasized that any identifying information would remain within the records of the agency collecting it — be it a hospital, school district or law enforcement agency — and would not be released publicly. While he acknowledged the possibility one such organization could fail to abide by confidentiality laws, California’s longstanding privacy laws mean there are serious consequences for infractions.
“California has laws on the books that protect against individual information from being shared publicly — very restrictive laws that have been on the books for 50 years,” he said. “We trust the laws more than we trust the people to uphold the laws.”
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Germany could criminalize denying Israel’s right to exist. Could the U.S. follow?
As Germany considers an unprecedented law that would criminalize denying Israel’s right to exist, American free speech advocates worry the proposal could spark similar efforts in the U.S. to curb Israel-related speech.
The proposed law, which passed Germany’s upper house of parliament last week, would make publicly denying Israel’s right to exist a crime, with a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
“We’ve now seen a trend of what’s been happening in Europe can come over to the United States,” said Kevin Rachlin, vice president of government relations at the Nexus Project, which describes its mission as both fighting antisemitism and protecting free speech.
He said denying Israel’s right to exist can be antisemitic, yes, but not always.
“If we are going that whole step of making it punitive and punishable by law — that’s why we have our First Amendment to protect us from that.”
The bill specifies that the speech would be criminalized only if it would reasonably encourage “a willingness to commit acts of antisemitic violence.”
But not everyone will agree on what that means, said Michel Rosenfeld, a professor of law and comparative democracy at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law. A memo accompanying the bill includes as examples chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” or displaying maps in which Israel is replaced by a Palestinian state.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an American free speech watchdog, has warned that similar laws could come to American soil.
“We can expect similar bills and regulations to pop up across borders,” the foundation said in a statement. “That’s why the First Amendment is so vital — it can act as a bulwark against speech restrictions that have advanced in other nations from doing the same here.”
In the United States, such a law would be a blatant violation of the First Amendment, scholars say. But Germany, where Holocaust denial, Nazi symbols, and even public insults are already criminal offenses, has long drawn the boundaries of protected speech differently.
“Under German law, antisemitic pronouncements amount to hate speech and can be criminalized,” Rosenfeld said. “In the United States, you can say antisemitic things as much as you want. It’s free speech.”
In Germany, supporters of the bill have argued that antisemitism is occurring “openly on our streets” and pointed to the surge in antisemitic incidents post-Oct. 7 as evidence that stronger measures are needed. Just this week, a 65-year-old German man was assaulted and left with life threatening injuries after an argument over an Israeli flag pin he was wearing, according to German authorities.
Those incidents are why Shannon Seban, director of European affairs for the Combat Antisemitism Movement, hopes the German bill will serve as a model.
“Our judicial system needs to evolve in order to adapt to this new reality, and to the fact that you have contemporary forms of antisemitism,” Seban told the Forward. “I hope that plenty of other European countries will now adopt such a law.”
But that prospect worries some Jewish Americans, who argue that prison time for anti-Zionist speech is a bridge too far. Even organizations that have argued anti-Zionism can veer into antisemitism have generally not envisioned such speech as the basis for criminal prosecutions.
“I have a real issue of criminalizing any thought or speech, regardless of what it is,” Rachlin said.
The German context
According to Rosenfeld, the bill should be understood in the context of Germany’s postwar constitutional order. In the aftermath of World War II, the Allied powers outlawed the Nazi Party and banned its symbols as part of the country’s “denazification.” Those restrictions were later incorporated into German law, reflecting the country’s commitment to preventing the reemergence of Nazism.
That history shapes Germany’s relationship with Israel. The two countries maintain what German officials describe as a “special relationship,” borne out of Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust, with Berlin defining Israel’s security as part of its Staatsräson, or reason of state.
“In Germany, the Jewish state and standing for the Jewish state is particularly important in that it’s, if you wish, an inescapable outgrowth of the Nazi period,” Rosenfeld said.
Israel’s Ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, lauded the bill as a signal that “those who deny Israel’s right to exist and spread antisemitic incitement will not get away with it unpunished.”
The legislation may also reflect broader anxieties about Germany’s political trajectory. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, whose leaders campaigned on belittling Germany’s efforts to atone for the Holocaust, is now the second-largest party in the country’s parliament. A campaign to ban the party as unconstitutional has gained momentum, though faces an uphill battle given the AfD’s popularity.
But even this latest bill to criminalize denying Israel’s right to exist might not pass Germany’s constitutional test.
According to Rosenfeld, whether German courts uphold the proposal will depend in part on how they characterize anti-Zionism. If judges conclude that denying Israel’s right to exist is necessarily antisemitic, they would be more likely to view the restriction as constitutional and a part of Germany’s historic responsibility, he said.
On the other hand, if a judge understands anti-Zionism as political speech, then the bill would likely be struck down.
“It would be unconstitutional because not only is that a political opinion, but it would single out Israel,” he said. “In other words, to say that the United States should not exist, or that Cuba should not exist and the United States should take it over, that Canada should be the 51st state of the United States — you can say all these things, but you can’t say that Israel should not exist?”
But others don’t see any inconsistency. Seban, a French politician who spoke out against antisemitic comments directed at her during her campaign, maintains she supports free speech as “a fundamental principle of our democracy.”
At the same time, Seban said she doesn’t view the language the bill targets as deserving of legal protection.
“When you would like to erase a country from the map, a country that has been recognized by international organizations and such, it’s no longer free speech. It’s a call to violence. It’s a call to destroy states. It’s a call to erase people,” Seban said. “So there is no free speech anymore.”
‘Non-legally binding’
For years, antisemitism watchdog groups like the Anti-Defamation League have advocated for U.S. states to pass legislation adopting a definition of antisemitism that treats most expressions of anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
But it was always with a caveat: the definition, written by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, would be “non-legally binding.”
In practice, that meant institutions such as schools, branches of government, or law enforcement could use the definition as a training tool or guideline to help identify antisemitism — not for criminal prosecution.
For example, on its website, the ADL says it “does not support the adoption and application of the IHRA Definition in a manner that would create new categories of legally prohibited speech that are subjected to either civil or criminal penalties – something we believe the First Amendment and principles of free speech would prevent.”
The ADL did not respond to the Forward’s question about its stance on the German bill, instead directing the Forward to speak with the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which backs the bill.
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental right of the utmost importance and a vital safeguard of our democracy,” Katharina Glinder of the Central Council of Jews in Germany wrote in a statement to the Forward. “Yet it, too, is subject to legal limits and must yield where human dignity is violated. Anyone who calls for the annihilation of peoples or the destruction of entire nations must not be allowed to hide behind fundamental freedoms with impunity.”
Glinder added that the bill could “serve as a model for other liberal democracies to follow.”
Remko Leemhuis, director of the Berlin office of American Jewish Committee, which also supports the IHRA definition as “non-legally binding,” said in a statement that AJC supports the German bill, “provided it is designed to withstand constitutional scrutiny.”
Meanwhile, the Nexus Project — which wrote an alternative definition of antisemitism that does not classify all anti-Zionism as antisemitism — has argued that lawmakers undermine the premise that IHRA is “non-legally binding” when they codify it in legislation.
Rachlin said Germany’s proposed bill illustrates that slippery slope, calling it the logical next step after the country codified the IHRA definition into law in 2017. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if such a proposal to criminalize anti-Zionism cropped up in the U.S. — though that doesn’t mean it would pass constitutional muster.
“Could this happen at the federal level? Maybe. Could it happen at the state level? I could see that happening,” Rachlin said. “Would it be challenged? Yes.”
Yet Rachlin also acknowledged that his commitment to a more absolutist version of free speech stems from what may be a distinctly American tradition.
“I can hate what you say, but I’ll defend it because you have the right to say it,” Rachlin said. “That’s kind of the American viewpoint on this. In Europe, it’s a very different game.”
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Mamdani isn’t the real resistance against Netanyahu — Israelis are
If you, like so many American Jews this week, are focused on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s video message urging protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the city in September, you’re missing the real story.
Pay attention, instead, to what is happening thousands of miles away — not in Manhattan, but in Israel, where the latest polls show Netanyahu and his ruling coalition trailing badly.
In New York, it’s the same old story: Israel guilty, Palestinians blameless, nothing in between. In Tel Aviv and Jerisalem, in Nazareth and Eilat, something else is brewing: change, maybe even hope.
Gadi Eisenkot — the former IDF chief of staff who broke with Netanyahu’s government over the Gaza War — now leads a new party, Yashar. Projections suggest his bloc would win 59 seats if the election were held today, compared to 51 for Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, according to the latest poll,
Eisenkot also beats Netanyahu head-to-head as the preferred prime minister, 43% to 37%.
If Eisenkot joins with Arab parties his coalition would receive 69 seats, substantially more than the 61 seats needed to govern. Though Eisenkot has not said yet whether he would link up with Arab parties, a plurality of Eisenkot’s potential voters (44%) said they would support such a move, in a country where Arab parties have only once been part of a governing coalition.
Eisenkot is no dove. He is someone who has concluded, rightly, that the threats Israel faces include the ones it’s inflicting on itself.
He has vowed to strengthen Israeli democracy and pursue diplomacy with Israel’s neighbors. His party’s platform calls for non-military national service for Arabs, something 75.8% of them favor. His likely coalition partners will include the Democrats, a smaller party expected to win 10 to 11 seats, for whom resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue is a defining issue. “I see the conflict and the continued occupation as the greatest tragedy of our lives,” Emilie Moatti of the Democrats said at a party rally last month. “The most moral and patriotic act is to end it.”
These are the most hopeful winds to blow through Israeli politics in memory, ahead of the Oct. 27 election — the closest Israelis have come to real, structural change in years. Meanwhile, in the United States, it’s Mamdani’s admission that he lacks the power to arrest Netanyahu — and call for the federal government to do so instead — that has captured the media’s attention and consumed American Jews all week. But one of these stories is theater, the other is real.
We’ve let ourselves become consumed by an empty threat from a politician with no power to carry it out, instead of doing everything we can to support those Israelis who actually have the power to change their country.
In this farce, Netanyahu and the anti-Israel movement each need a cartoon version of the other to keep telling their one-sided story.
Imagine if Mamdani used his platform to draw attention to Makom Lekulanu, “A Place for Us All,” the only Arab-Jewish party standing for election. Instead the mayor of the American anti-Israel movement keeps the focus relentlessly on Netanyahu — because a country full of Netanyahus is a much darker story to tell, and a much more useful foil, than the complicated, pluralistic reality the polls actually show.
Netanyahu and his American supporters need Mamdani for the same reason — to paint Israel as besieged and alone, and all of Israel’s critics as clownish and illegitimate. But Netanyahu’s real critics aren’t clowns. They’re serious, Israel-loving Israelis — a former army chief among them — and they are beating him at the polls.
With Netanyahu offering voters more of the same — attacks on the judiciary, fear-mongering over Arab citizens voting and deeper dependence on his religious and far-right partners — a growing number of centrist Israelis have concluded that a Netanyahu win would put Israel’s very future at risk.
“If Netanyahu wins, it’s going to be a significant crisis, maybe a final crisis for many segments of Israeli society,” journalist Nadav Eyal said on the Jonah Platt podcast.
In this context, Mamdani’s theatrics are one more sign of how untethered the American conversation about Israel has become from what’s actually at stake on the ground. American Jews should stop reacting to him and start paying attention to the people with the power to actually change Israel’s future.
They can’t donate to Israeli political parties, but they can support Israeli NGOs that fund get-out-the-vote and voter education campaigns. They can back U.S. nonprofits that help promote better Israeli policies. And they can do the simplest thing of all: talk about this election — online, in shul, at the Shabbat table, anywhere the conversation has gotten stuck on Mamdani, which is everywhere. Doing that will add real dimension to a very stale debate.
New York voters will, in time, vote on whether their mayor’s selective obsession with Israel is making their city a better, more affordable place to live. That’s their business. But anyone who cares about Israelis and Palestinians should put their energy and focus where it really matters: on the people and movements who haven’t been this close to real, positive change in years.
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