Uncategorized
Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew?
(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to prefer “American Jews.”
It’s seemingly a distinction without a difference, although I know others might disagree. There is an argument that “American Jew” smacks of disloyalty, describing a Jew who happens to be American. “Jewish American,” according to this thinking, flips the script: an American who happens to be Jewish.
If pressed, I’d say I prefer “American Jew.” The noun “Jew” sounds, to my ear anyway, more direct and more assertive than the tentative adjective “Jewish.” It’s also consistent with the way JTA essentializes “Jew” in its coverage, as in British Jew, French Jew, LGBT Jew or Jew of color.
I wouldn’t have given further thought to the subject if not for a webinar last week given by Arnold Eisen, the chancellor emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In “Jewish-American, American-Jew: The Complexities and Joys of Living a Hyphenated Identity,” Eisen discussed how a debate over language is really about how Jews navigate between competing identities.
“What does the ‘American’ signify to us?” he asked. “What does the ‘Jewish’ signify and what is the nature of the relationship between the two? Is it a synthesis? Is it a tension, or a contradiction, or is it a blurring of the boundaries such that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins?”
Questions like these, it turns out, have been asked since Jews and other immigrants first began flooding Ellis Island. Teddy Roosevelt complained in 1915 that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” Woodrow Wilson liked to say that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” The two presidents were frankly freaked out about what we now call multiculturalism, convinced that America couldn’t survive a wave of immigrants with dual loyalties.
The two presidents lost the argument, and for much of the 20th century “hyphenated American” was shorthand for successful acculturation. While immigration hardliners continue to question the loyalty of minorities who claim more than one identity, and Donald Trump played with the politics of loyalty in remarks about Mexicans, Muslims and Jews, ethnic pride is as American as, well, St. Patrick’s Day. “I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said in announcing her run for the Republican presidential nomination this month.
For Jews, however, the hyphen became what philosophy professor Berel Lang called “a weighty symbol of the divided life of Diaspora Jewry.” Jewishness isn’t a distant country with quaint customs, but a religion and a portable identity that lives uneasily alongside your nationality. In a 2005 essay, Lang argued that on either side of the hyphen were “vying traditions or allegiances,” with the Jew constantly confronted with a choice between the American side, or assimilation, and the Jewish side, or remaining distinct.
Eisen calls this the “question of Jewish difference.” Eisen grew up in an observant Jewish family in Philadelphia, and understood from an early age that his family was different from their Vietnamese-, Italian-, Ukrainian- and African-American neighbors. On the other hand, they were all the same — that is, American — because they were all hyphenated. “Being parallel to all these other differences, gave me my place in the city and in the country,” he said.
In college he studied the Jewish heavy hitters who were less sanguine about the integration of American and Jewish identities. Eisen calls Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the renegade theologian at JTS, “the thinker who really made this question uppermost for American Jews.” Kaplan wrote in 1934 that Jewishness could only survive as a “subordinate civilization” in the United States, and that the “Jew in America will be first and foremost an American, and only secondarily a Jew.”
Kaplan’s prescription was a maximum effort on the part of Jews to “save the otherness of Jewish life” – not just through synagogue, but through a Jewish “civilization” expressed in social relationships, leisure activities and a traditional moral and ethical code.
Of course, Kaplan also understood that there was another way to protect Jewish distinctiveness: move to Israel.
A poster issued by the National Industrial Conservation Movement in 1917 warns that the American war effort might be harmed by a “hyphen of disloyalty,” suggesting immigrants with ties to their homelands were working to aid the enemy. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
The political scientist Charles Liebman, in “The Ambivalent American Jew” (1973), argued that Jews in the United States were torn between surviving as a distinct ethnic group and integrating into the larger society.
According to Eisen, Liebman believed that “Jews who make ‘Jewish’ the adjective and ‘American’ the noun tend to fall on the integration side of the hyphen. And Jews who make ‘Jew’ the noun and ‘American’ the adjective tend to fall on the survival side of the hyphen.”
Eisen, a professor of Jewish thought at JTS, noted that the challenge of the hyphen was felt by rabbis on opposite ends of the theological spectrum. He cited Eugene Borowitz, the influential Reform rabbi, who suggested in 1973 that Jews in the United States “are actually more Jewish on the inside than they pretend to be on the outside. In other words, we’re so worried about what Liebman called integration into America that we hide our distinctiveness.” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading Modern Orthodox thinker of his generation, despaired that the United States presented its Jews with an unresolvable conflict between the person of faith and the person of secular culture.
When I read the texts Eisen shared, I see 20th-century Jewish men who doubted Jews who could be fully at home in America and at home with themselves as Jews (let alone as Jews who weren’t straight or white — which would demand a few more hyphens). They couldn’t imagine a rich Jewishness that didn’t exist as a counterculture, the way Cynthia Ozick wondered what it would be like to “think as a Jew” in a non-Jewish language like English.
They couldn’t picture the hyphen as a plus sign, which pulled the words “Jewish” and “American” together.
Recent trends support the skeptics. Look at Judaism’s Conservative movement, whose rabbis are trained at JTS, and which has long tried to reconcile Jewish literacy and observance with the American mainstream. It’s shrinking, losing market share and followers both to Reform – where the American side of the hyphen is ascendant — and to Orthodoxy, where Jewish otherness is booming in places like Brooklyn and Lakewood, New Jersey. And the Jewish “nones” — those opting out of religion, synagogue and active engagement in Jewish institutions and affairs — are among the fastest-growing segments of American Jewish life.
Eisen appears more optimistic about a hyphenated Jewish identity, although he insists that it takes work to cultivate the Jewish side. “I don’t think there’s anything at stake necessarily on which side of the hyphen you put the Jewish on,” he said. “But if you don’t go out of your way to put added weight on the Jewish in the natural course of events, as Kaplan said correctly 100 years ago, the American will win.”
—
The post Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
What It’s Like in Israel — During ‘Operation Lion’s Roar’
An Israeli air defense system intercepts a ballistic missile barrage launched from Iran to central Israel during a missile attack. Photo: Eli Basri / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
I haven’t been sleeping much.
It starts with an (intentionally) obnoxious screech on your phone that overrides all your “leave me alone” settings, and harangues you that a missile alarm has gone off. The radar and satellite tech behind this disruptive howl is almost magical, but in the moment, no one cares.
Then the promised air raid sirens sound all around: you have 90 seconds to reach a bomb shelter.
Fortunately, there’s a bomb shelter in my building. Some aren’t so lucky: they run down the block to public shelters, or to Tel Aviv’s new underground subway, which was built with this exact scenario in mind.
The attacks come in waves of an hour or two.
Imagine having a baby that wakes you up all day and night, except instead of a baby it’s a homicidal Islamist regime, and instead of wanting to be changed or fed, it wants to kill you.
Emergency notifications from the Israeli Home Front Command indicating the approach of Iranian missiles. Photo: Daniel Pomerantz.
Israel has the most advanced, multi-layered missile defense system in human history, but it’s only about 88% effective — and that remaining 12% takes out entire apartment buildings. Iran already claimed its first victims in Israel and across the region.
This war is horrible, but there are many reasons Israel needed to wage it:
1. Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
This isn’t some Iraq era claim of “WMDs” — we know this is true because (among other reasons) Iran essentially says so. The regime very publicly insists on enriching uranium up to levels that have no possible use other than making warheads, all while paradoxically claiming “peaceful purposes.”
And if all that weren’t enough, Iran hides its “peaceful” nuclear program hundreds of feet under a mountain. Make of that what you will.
2. Iran is also developing ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) capable of reaching the United States. We know this because (again) the regime says so. A lot. They brag about it. This is not a question mark.
3. Iran’s terror proxies have killed thousands of Americans, Israelis, Europeans, and Arabs, including the Beirut barracks bombing that took the lives of 220 US Marines, and the unimaginable October 7 Massacre in Israel. Claiming that the work of proxies isn’t “really” Iran’s doing this is like hiring a hitman and then claiming that you didn’t “personally” murder anyone.
4. Of course, the greatest victims are the Iranian people, 80% of whom want to overthrow the regime — after 47 years of unimaginable suffering. This regime murdered thousands of its own people just last month, most for protesting, some for using Star Link terminals.
We seem to forget that military might can be used appropriately and effectively.
For every nightmare of intervention, such as Iraq or Afghanistan, there are also success stories, such as Libya, Kosovo, and most recently, Venezuela. And this isn’t even “intervention,” this is self defense. The regime’s President Masoud Pezeshkian declared in December, “we are in a full-fledged war with America, Israel, and Europe,” as Iranian officials continued to scream “Death to America” in the halls of Parliament, and on the streets.
And Iran puts its money where its mouth is: backing up its homicidal rhetoric with actual homicide. Lots of it.
Iran is now spreading a distorted history, claiming that all of its problems can be traced to America. That isn’t true: it’s a psyop, designed to weaponize our democracy against us. One can debate whether America should have helped affect a coup in Iran in 1953, but the leadership America helped bring to power back then (the “Shah”) is the very same leadership whose return the Iranian people are now risking their very lives to demand. America and the Iranian people are completely aligned in this, and the death of Ayatollah Khamenei was met by cheers and celebrations.
Genocidal maniacs have a way of telling us exactly what they plan to do: we ignored Hitler in the run up to World War II, we ignored Al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11, and we now ignore Iran at our peril.
But we’re not ignoring Iran.
We must hope that the people of Iran are ready to take back their country, and institute a new, organized government. It is entirely possible that Iran, the Middle East, and the world at large are on the verge of greater peace and stability than we have seen, or even imagined, in any of our lifetimes.
But we aren’t there yet, and we need the united support of all our allies, and our entire democracy, in order to succeed.
Daniel Pomerantz is the CEO of RealityCheck, an organization dedicated to deepening public conversation through robust research studies and public speaking.
Uncategorized
Family of Former FBI Agent Robert Levinson Demands Iran Be Held ‘Accountable,’ Return His Remains
People walk near a mural featuring images of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on a street in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 17, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
The family of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in Iran in 2007 and is believed to have died while in Iranian custody, is calling on the Trump administration to make sure Tehran returns his remains and is held “accountable” for its actions following this weekend’s US-Israel airstrikes on the Islamic Republic.
Washington has maintained that Levinson, a retired FBI special agent, was taken by Iranian officials on March 9, 2007, while working as a private contractor for the CIA on the Iranian island of Kish, where he had traveled to meet a source. His family was never informed of what officially happened to the American citizen, but in 2020, the US government officially concluded he had died while in Iran’s custody. The details and circumstances surrounding his death remain unknown. Levinson was a father of seven children.
Levinson’s family issued a statement, shared on social media, following Saturday’s killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the US-Israel airstrikes.
“For nearly 19 years, Iran has lied, obstructed, and refused to answer for the kidnapping, detention, and death of our father, Robert Levinson,” the family said in its statement. “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led the regime responsible for these crimes. His death does not erase what Iran did to our father, and it does not end our fight for accountability. But it is a significant moment for our family and for every family that has suffered at the hands of this regime’s hostage-taking and wrongful detention.”
“Now Iran must do what it has refused to do for nearly two decades: provide full accountability for what happened to our father, return his remains to our family, and disclose the truth about his kidnapping, imprisonment, and death,” they added. “Our family will not stop demanding the truth. And we will not stop demanding justice.”
The family also expressed gratitude to US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio “for using the power of the United States to confront Iran and to hold it accountable, including by recognizing and addressing Iran’s long-standing practice of wrongful detention.”
Levinson’s son, Dan Levinson, talked to “Fox & Friends” over the weekend about the need for the Trump administration to pressure Iran to take accountability.
“We’re just looking for answers. We still don’t know what exactly happened to him,” the younger Levinson said of his father. “There was no person more responsible for my father’s fate than Ayatollah Khamenei. At any time he could have waved his hand and had my dad released. He chose not to. We begged and pleaded. We sent so many letters. I went over there twice asking for a meeting and his people rebuffed us. Ignored us.”
Levinson said there is still a $25 million reward for information leading to the recovery and return of his father’s remains.
In March 2025, the United States imposed sanctions on three Iranian intelligence officers for their alleged involvement in Levinson’s disappearance.
In December 2020, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned two other Iranian officials who are accused of authorizing Levinson’s 2007 abduction. The FBI released posters seeking information about them last year.
Uncategorized
The Jewish space lasers are real — well, kind of
Everyone made fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene when she said that Rothschild-funded space lasers had caused forest fires.
But, as it turns out, the space lasers are real. Well, sort of. They aren’t starting forest fires or causing major weather events, as Greene claimed in her post. Israel does, however, have a laser that shoots in the general direction of space. But that’s enough for some conspiracy theorists to feel vindicated.
“No longer a ‘Conspiracy Theory.’ Israel just used a Directed Energy Weapon (DEWs),” reads one viral tweet about the lasers. “During Biden’s term the media worked relentlessly to Fact Check these weapons as conspiracy theories.”
Indeed, as Israel and Iran exchanged missiles over the weekend, videos circulated online purporting to show Israel shooting down missiles using a laser. In the video, missiles launched by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel, appear to flame out moments after taking off. (Israel has yet to officially confirm that the rockets were shot down by lasers, and the videos aren’t definitive; the missiles could have been defective and burned out on launch.)
But it is true that Israel has been working on defensive lasers for years. In 2022, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, “We have successfully completed a series of tests on our new ‘Iron Beam’ laser air defense system. This may sound like science fiction, but it’s real.” The laser system was reportedly delivered and deployed across Israel in December.
“It has nothing to do with the ‘Jewish space laser’ conspiracy theory,” said Mike Rothschild, a researcher on extremism and author of Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories. “Conspiracy theorists often take real or in-development technology and twist it around for their own purposes.”
The laser works by shooting a grouping of small beams toward the projectile it is attempting to destroy, explains a report on the system’s development in National Defense Magazine. When one hits its target, the beams concentrate on the target until it is incinerated.
The lasers are less effective than the existing Iron Dome system, which works by intercepting missiles with other missiles and exploding them before they hit the ground. The laser can only reach missiles within about a 10 kilometer range, and, like any beam of light, can be blocked by terrain or atmospheric conditions like haze or clouds. On the other hand, the lasers are cheap to use, since they don’t require a ballistic missile for each engagement, and, for the same reason, they cause less collateral damage from falling debris.
The existence of the laser and its first — or first public — deployment has plenty of people joking about Jewish space lasers being real, and apologizing to Greene, though the Iron Beam has little to do with Greene’s allegations of a laser used to start targeted forest fires for government profit.
Conspiracy theorists may be crowing about the supposedly huge secret they’ve uncovered. But the laser isn’t secret at all. The Iron Beam is a well-funded and well-publicized project that has been in development for years, funded by both the U.S. and Israel. The first model was unveiled in 2014 at the Singapore Air Show. Smaller versions have been used to shoot down drones at close range for the past several years.
The aura of secrecy is key to the world of conspiracy theories. If antisemites can frame anything done by Jews or Israel as an underground, hidden project, it gains an undertone of corruption and danger.
The Iron Beam, however, has its own Wikipedia page. It features 40 sources — which means there are at least 40 other articles, going back over a decade, about the laser defense device. If you think that’s a secret, you’re just not paying attention.
The post The Jewish space lasers are real — well, kind of appeared first on The Forward.