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When observant Jews gathered to challenge pro-Israel orthodoxy, verbal sparring and walkouts ensued
Hundreds of observant Jews convened at a Manhattan synagogue on Sunday to foster an alternative to the prevailing right-wing discourse about Israeli and American politics in the Orthodox world. But the conference also surfaced uncomfortable arguments within the dissent, with some attendees walking out of one session in protest.
The gathering at B’nai Jeshurun marked the second annual conference for the U.S. chapter of Smol Emuni, which translates as “the faithful left” — a counterpart to a group of the same name working in Israel and the West Bank. A diverse group of speakers that included both Zionists and anti-Zionists grappled with settler violence, humanitarian and spiritual crises sparked by the war in Gaza, and religious rhetoric surrounding the war in Iran.
The big-tent approach gave voice to Americans, Israelis and Palestinians frustrated with Israel’s political direction — and led to some pointed exchanges, including a conference organizer’s public rebuke of the event’s headliner, Rabbi Saul Berman.
Berman, an activist in the American civil rights movement and the former senior rabbi of the Orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue, went off-topic from his keynote speech to deliver a broad critique of Islam in response to comments about Zionism made by a peace group leader in an earlier session.
For attendees who spoke with the Forward, the conference provided much-needed solidarity in a Jewish milieu that tends to sideline even mild criticism of Israel. It also showed the fledgling movement’s identity being worked out in real time.
“It’s very hard to thread the needle and say, “OK, I am progressive, and I am a Zionist, and I disagree with some things that the Israeli government is doing,” attendee Riva Atlas, a New Yorker who works as a financial researcher, told the Forward.
‘We respectfully disagree’
A morning panel about Gaza brought a few charged moments.
Among the panelists was Gregory Khalil, who co-founded the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding nonprofit Telos Group and advised the Palestine Liberation Organization on peace negotiations with Israel from 2004 to 2008.
In his remarks, he asked the overwhelmingly Jewish audience to understand the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank from their perspective — and to recognize that hardline Zionism can be an obstacle to reducing conflict.
Khalil said that Palestinians have been treated as an exception when it comes to the principle of universal human rights, and that “resistance” was inevitable as a result.
“The world often operates in two plus two equals four,” Khalil said. “For years, starve them, bomb them, tell them that they’re the criminals. People are going to resist.”
Asked whether he saw the conflict as theological in nature, Khalil said it was a “semantic question,” but that “Zionism very much functions like a religion” because it is often framed as “an article of faith beyond critique.”
Moderator David Myers, a Jewish history professor at UCLA, urged Khalil not to discount that Zionism has theological underpinnings for many Jews — “to think very seriously about considering the theological something other than a sort of new semantics.”
Rabbi Mikhael Manekin, a founder of Israel’s Smol Emuni movement who was joining by Zoom, added that “no matter what word you use to identify yourself — Zionist, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist — at the end of the day, so much of our tradition centers the holiness of the land of Israel. So one still needs to have a conversation about that. A third of our Mishnah is about keeping commandments in Israel.”
Toward the end of the panel, Khalil said he “almost got up and left” because he felt that there was not enough time devoted to talking directly about the devastation in Gaza.
The exchange rankled Berman, who hours later brought them back up in his address to the general session.
The rabbi, who famously led a megillah reading in jail after he was arrested in 1965 marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, expressed disappointment in the morning panelists, diverging from his assigned topic of the struggle over ICE immigration raids in Minneapolis.
“I did not appreciate the assertion that somehow the Jewish passion for Israel need not be heard,” Berman said. “I didn’t appreciate the sense that the theological root of Zionism is the source of horror and enmity and evil.”
Berman added his view that the “theological position within Islam is fundamentally at the root of the incapacity of the Islamic world to recognize the rights of Israel to exist as a Jewish state,” and that idea is “taught actively by imams all over the world, including here in the United States.”
During Berman’s comments, several attendees walked out of the sanctuary. One audience member held up a “BOOO” sign, scrawled on a piece of paper.
One of the conference organizers took to the mic to publicly push back on the esteemed speaker.
“We invited you to speak about immigration and you expressed other views. We appreciate hearing them. As organizers of Smol Emuni, we want to say that we respectfully disagree, but we’re very glad to have you here with us,” Rachel Landsberg, Smol Emuni’s program director, said to applause.
Berman, a graduate of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, had represented the Orthodox mainstream in a lineup that also featured Conservative rabbis and ex-Hasidic Jews, and had top billing on conference promotional materials.
Yet he had been an imperfect fit from the outset. In an interview after the conference, Smol Emuni executive director Esther Sperber said Berman had expressed prior to accepting an invitation to speak that he disagreed with the organization’s approach to Israel.
Sperber said she was honored that the rabbi — whom she described as “one of the luminaries of the Modern Orthodox world” — attended the whole day. But she took offense at his comments, which she felt painted all of Islam with a broad brush.
“Our intention was for the conference to focus on what we as Orthodox and observant Jews can do better,” Sperber said. “And I think our sense was that Rabbi Berman’s comments were more focused on what Palestinians can do better.”
Sperber added that the Smol Emuni movement is “not looking to include everyone in the Jewish world” but welcomes anyone who identifies with the religious left and supports universal human rights for Palestinians.
‘Whispered invitations’
While the clashes punctuated the gathering, other sessions more quietly worked through challenging topics, including ICE and immigration policy, grounded in the Torah’s call to protect the stranger; a screening of Children No More, a documentary about activists holding silent vigils in Tel Aviv for children killed by the Israeli military in Gaza; a conversation about “Zionism and Nationalism in the Haredi Community”; and a session about creating more nuanced Israel curriculum in Jewish schools.
Several speakers described the difficulty of challenging what can seem like a strong uncritically pro-Israel consensus in religious Zionist communities.
“Close friends in Israel — decent, religious, fair minded and highly educated people — sent me the following reading on Purim. I shudder as I read the words: ‘A bomb has been dropped in Tehran in your honor. Purim Sameach,’” Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller told the crowd. “What an obscene perversion. A sickness has overtaken the religious Zionist community.”
Some spoke despite potential repercussions in their communities, while others remained silent observers. One conference attendee declined to speak with the Forward, citing potential backlash from his Israel-aligned congregation if they learned he had attended.
Gershon Rosenberg, a junior at the modern Orthodox Jewish day school SAR Academy in the Bronx, said during the Israel education panel that he faced intense backlash from his community after writing an op-ed in his school newspaper arguing for a broader understanding of the conflict in Gaza. But he also found peers expressing support.
“A lot of people would reach out to me and say, ‘It was so meaningful for me to see someone else, a young person, show that I’m not alone, that there are a lot of other people out there in the Orthodox community who have these persuasions,’” Rosenberg said.
Rabbi Sharon Brous, who leads the unaffiliated Los Angeles synagogue Ikar, said a local Smol Emuni gathering, organized through “whispered invitations,” had helped attendees realize their views on Israel were more widely held than they had assumed.
Sperber, who grew up in Israel and now lives in New York City, said she felt like she was “living in a different reality” than her family due to their political differences.
Most troubling to her, she said, was leaders citing Jewish tradition to enact vengeance.
“The situation in Israel and the region is dangerous and combustible, but my other very deep, deep concern is not just the danger of war, but its corruption of our faith and our Judaism,” Sperber said. “Our tradition has been hijacked.”
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Florida redistricting scrambled the map. Three Jewish Democrats found a way through.
Three Jewish Democratic House members from Florida emerged victorious from their party primaries Tuesday amid a redistricting shakeup that scrambled South Florida’s congressional map and threatened to end some of their political careers.
U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Lois Frankel and Jared Moskowitz all won Democratic nominations in newly redrawn districts, each facing different challenges from the new map and their primary opponents.
But their victories only secured their spots on the November ballot. The bigger question is whether they can win reelection under a successful Republican effort designed to flip four Democratic seats. Earlier this year, Florida’s state legislators approved the new congressional lines at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis, to increase the number of Republican seats from 20 to 24 of the state’s 28 districts.
The three Jewish incumbents took different routes for survival.
After her old seat was transformed into more favorable territory for Republicans, Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee and one of Congress’ most prominent Jewish members, moved into Broward County’s heavily Democratic Black-majority precincts, raising questions about representation in a district with a large Black population.
Wasserman Schultz’s opponents argued that the seat should continue to be represented by a Black lawmaker. In her victory speech, Wasserman Schultz promised “to work every day to live up to the legacy of Alcee Hastings,” the congressman who represented the district from 2013 until he died in 2021.
Frankel, a seven-term Jewish Democrat and outspoken supporter of Israel, also relocated to the neighboring district and easily defeated Lake Worth Beach activist Victoria Doyle, winning 75% of the Democratic vote. The seat is now ranked solid Democratic, according to the Cook Political Report.
Moskowitz survives the left. Now he faces a Jewish Republican.
For Moskowitz, who was elected in 2022 after Ted Deutch retired to become chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, Tuesday’s outcome is likely just the beginning.
Moskowitz, who built a reputation as an outspoken supporter of Israel and one of the more bipartisan members of the House, defeated Oliver Larkin, a democratic socialist and fierce critic of Israel, by a 63%-37% margin.
Larkin called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel and accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. He also associated with popular streamer Hasan Piker, who has been embraced by progressive insurgents even as he has championed terrorist groups as righteous fighters against Israel — leading to accusations he trafficks in antisemitism.
“I’ve taken on extremes in the DSA and won,” Moskowitz said in his victory speech, adding in a post on X: “My condolences to @hasanthehun.”
But the new district with a substantial Jewish population was deliberately drawn to be far more favorable to Republicans than Moskowitz’s previous seat, which Frankel will now represent, making him one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the state this fall.
His Republican opponent, Scott Singer, the Jewish former mayor of Boca Raton, won a five-way GOP primary with 31% of the vote. Singer, a Miami Beach native and Georgetown Law graduate, highlighted his support for Israel and his roots in the district.
This setup will test Moskowitz’s political strength.
“We’re running in a tough district hand-drawn by Republicans to defeat me, but I plan to win that too,” Moskowitz said on Tuesday night.
“People here don’t want ideological purity tests. They want someone who will lower costs, fight for the middle class, and stand up to antisemitism and hate in both parties.”
Fine easily defeats openly antisemitic Bilzerian
Elsewhere in Florida, Jewish Republican Rep. Randy Fine easily fended off a primary challenge that attracted national attention because of the antisemitic rhetoric of Dan Bilzerian, the social media influencer once known as the “King of Instagram.”
Bilzerian had repeatedly attacked Fine as a “fat Jew,” called Judaism “terrible,” promoted conspiracy theories about Jews and said he wanted to “kill Israelis.” In the final days of the campaign, Bilzerian posted antisemitic dog whistles, expressing confidence that each voter in the district “understands the Jewish problem,” and that “a vote for Randy is a vote for Israel.”
The race was one of several Florida Republican primaries that tested whether a growing online movement on the right — hostile to Israel and that has at times slid into outright antisemitism — could translate social media followings into electoral success.
Fine won 57% of the vote, which is located just under the northeast part of the state and includes Daytona Beach. Bilzerian came in second, securing nearly 19%.
The race to succeed Ron DeSantis
A somewhat similar dynamic played out in the Republican primary for governor.
U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed frontrunner, won the nomination to succeed DeSantis with about 48% of the vote. James Fishback, a 31-year-old investment manager who made opposition to Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign, finished third with about 10%.
Fishback, who ran what The New York Times described as a “rage bait” campaign, promised to pull Florida’s investments from Israel Bonds, criticized politicians who “visit another country” only to end up “kissing a stupid wall,” and associated himself with antisemitic personalities on the far-right.
Donalds, by contrast, has been a strong supporter of Israel, though he voted in 2024 against the Antisemitism Awareness Act, bipartisan legislation addressing rising antisemitism on college campuses. He is now listed as a cosponsor of a modified bill that clarifies First Amendment protections. Born in Brooklyn and raised for part of his childhood in Crown Heights, he has spoken of his familiarity with Jewish communities and has maintained relationships with Chabad leaders in Florida.
He will face former Republican Rep. David Jolly, who won the Democratic gubernatorial primary, in November. Both nominees are outspoken supporters of Israel.
A progressive upset for Senate
The night was not a clean sweep for establishment candidates.
State Rep. Angie Nixon, a new member of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated Alex Vindman, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union, for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.
Vindman, who became nationally known after testifying during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, entered the race with greater national name recognition and establishment support. Nixon, who pushed a pro-Palestinian agenda on a state level and actively campaigned with members of the Squad and alongside Larkin, pulled off an upset win, receiving 56% of the vote to Vindman’s 44%.
She will face incumbent Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, who easily won her primary. Moody was appointed to the seat after Marco Rubio left the Senate to become President Donald Trump’s secretary of state.
The post Florida redistricting scrambled the map. Three Jewish Democrats found a way through. appeared first on The Forward.
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I drove a friend to a protest in Jerusalem. Now Israel’s government wants to send me to prison.
‘The people fighting to save Israeli democracy are fighting for the only version of Zionism that can last.’
META: Amit Cahanovich is charged with five counts of joint arson after giving someone a ride to a demonstration where recycling bins were set ablaze.
For nine months I was a political detainee in Israel. My trial is about to begin.
I am as Israeli as they come. My grandparents came to this country — then Palestine, in the 1930s — as Europe began to burn. They helped found a farming village in the Jezreel Valley, Beit Shearim, while most of the family they left behind was murdered in the Holocaust. My late father was a colonel in the Israeli army. I served as a combat soldier in a classified unit, and after Oct. 7, I used my expertise as a data professional to consult for the army during the war. I am married with three young children.
We have no other passports, no other identity than Israeli. But I am now facing charges as an alleged criminal, part of a conspiracy no less — for nothing more than aiding a protest. My story speaks to the lengths of the Israeli government’s efforts to silence dissent.
On Sept. 3, 2025, around the 700th day of the war in Gaza, the families of hostages still held and tortured in Hamas’s tunnels begged Israelis to take to the streets. More than 40 hostages were already dead in captivity, some murdered, some dead from other causes. Like many Israelis, I could not stand by while the government worked to frame this as the families’ private grief rather than a national emergency — anything to delay a reckoning and stay in power a little longer.
I was arrested after a demonstration day in Jerusalem, where a few recycling bins were set on fire — a common occurrence at such protests, before and since. My alleged part is giving a ride to a friend who allegedly lit one of them. Seven of us now face charges that would fit an organized crime indictment. I’m charged with five counts of joint arson, each carrying a sentence of up to 15 years.
I did not know most of my co-defendants. Lawyers call this a legal dragnet, a familiar tool in democracies that are sliding.
For 33 days I was incarcerated in appalling conditions, classified as a danger to the public, moved between three prisons, and even spent one night in a dungeon, for no real reason. After those 33 days, I was released, but remained on house arrest. A probation officer eventually found I posed no danger. The prosecution fought the finding anyway. It took a High Court justice, ruling on a co-defendant’s appeal eight months in, to confirm what we had argued from the start: that “dangerousness” was being used not to assess a threat but to punish us before any verdict. A month after that ruling, I was released.
Since Oct. 7, Jewish terror against Palestinians in the West Bank has surged, met by law enforcement so weak it barely counts as such. Yet dozens of investigators were assigned to the conspiracy cases that included my own, and, according to press reports, the Shin Bet itself took part in interrogations over recycling bins. The Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent to the FBI, exists to fight terrorism and espionage, not to regulate protest. When a government routes political dissent through its most powerful security service, the question is no longer whether a protester broke a law. It is whether the state has begun treating opposition itself as a threat.
This is not incidental. It is the method of a coalition that unites Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the heirs of the banned, terrorist-designated Kach movement founded by the radical American-Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane; and with ultra-Orthodox parties that take state money while keeping their youth from modern education and army service. Together they have spent years capturing the institutions meant to check them, the security services, the state comptroller’s office, a weakened judiciary. None of this happens in the dark. It happens on television, because the government’s allies all but run the news agenda. Nearly all criticism gets folded into “Israel as victim.” Antisemitism, though it does exist, gets invoked even when it doesn’t, as a method to silence dissent internationally. Protesters, including hostage families whose only demand was that the state bring their own home, got called traitors and enemies from within.
Meanwhile war has become the alibi. War in Gaza. War in Lebanon. War in Iran. Every operation begins with tactical wins and promises of strategic victory that never fully arrive. Every day of it was used to postpone the prime minister’s own corruption trial a little further.
In 1938 the Yiddish poet Mordechai Gebirtig wrote “Undzer Shtetl Brent” — “Our Town Is Burning” — about the violence closing in on Polish Jews. It calls out to brothers standing with folded arms, watching the fire instead of fighting it. By the time the song became an anthem, the fire had become a catastrophe. I think about it constantly now, not because I believe Jews are fated to see danger only once it’s too late, but because I fear we are, again, mistaking smoke for weather.
Israel is scheduled to hold elections in late October. Ahead of them, the government’s allies are working to inflame the West Bank, the same cynical mechanism that has worked before: unite a divided public against an external enemy, and postpone the reckoning again. There are even signs that the government could try to postpone the election using so-called emergency regulations or putting up other obstacles. Netanyahu himself once made this exact argument when he demanded former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resign while on trial for corruption, warning that a leader facing charges can never be trusted to put the country’s survival ahead of his own. He was right then. The dynamic he described is now his own government.
The people fighting to save Israeli democracy are fighting for the only version of Zionism that can last: an independent judiciary, free elections, equality before the law, a state that answers to its citizens rather than demanding loyalty to one man. If this government is not replaced, if it teaches a country that dissent is danger, the price will not be paid only by protesters like me. It will be paid by the dream my grandparents crossed the sea to build.
Amit Cahanovich is a native Israeli, married and a father of three, and an independent data consultant. He recently spent nine months as a political detainee in Israel and is now writing a play based on his experience.
The post I drove a friend to a protest in Jerusalem. Now Israel’s government wants to send me to prison. appeared first on The Forward.
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Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab
A new whistleblower report alleges that the Trump Administration’s investigations into campus antisemitism were merely efforts to extract millions from universities, under the pretense of rooting out hate.
The report, written by the Washington, D.C.-based Government Accountability Project on behalf of former Department of Justice Attorney Haley Van Erem, alleges that the administration’s antisemitism task force carried out “politically motivated” investigations that were “unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” The investigations did not follow proper Title VI procedure, she said, adding that they were opened with predetermined outcomes, and did not respect the First Amendment.
The report has prompted Jewish U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) to initiate an investigation into the allegations. The Nexus Foundation, a watchdog organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and protecting free speech, released a statement supporting Raskin and Van Erem.
This is not the first time Raskin or Nexus have criticized the administration’s antisemitism task force. Many left-leaning Jewish organizations have long criticized Trump’s efforts, with Raskin describing them as “weaponizing, distorting and exploiting the reality of antisemitism to attack academic freedom.”
In a statement to the Forward, the DOJ denied that Van Erem worked on university investigations. “And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations,” a spokesperson wrote.
According to the report, Van Erem was involuntarily re-assigned from her role as a DOJ Civil Rights attorney to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in order to investigate alleged antisemitism at medical schools — a probe prompted by a single New York Post article about protesters shouting “Free Palestine” and wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at a medical school graduation.
Unable to find enough evidence of antisemitism at medical schools, Van Erem said, the task force soon expanded its probe to entire universities to increase the chances of finding it.
“This was one of the first major indications to the DOJ assignees that the investigations were not grounded in law or fact,” the report reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to request to comment.
Van Erem also criticized the administration for breaking the protocol of Title VI investigations, pursuing enforcement before first issuing a finding and allowing universities to resolve issues voluntarily. That enforcement: withholding funds.
To restrict funds, the administration used a separate legal mechanism that allows them to do so “for convenience” and for “not satisfying purpose.”
“The funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative findings,” according to the report.
Van Erem and colleagues found no evidence at Brown of “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, the report said. But a supervisor allegedly discouraged sending Brown a closure letter stating those findings. According to the report, the administration settled with Columbia before an investigation was finished. Harvard sued the Trump administration, before its own investigation was complete, claiming the funding freeze was unlawful.
Van Erem said she observed findings of discrimination that she believed were actually “protected First Amendment activity” and believed that the task force’s settlement “content-based conditions” violated free expression.
Brown and Columbia both settled with the administration to restore federal funding, with Columbia paying the government $200 million and Brown agreeing to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. A federal judge recently dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, saying antisemitic incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to constitute a Title VI violation.
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