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White House says it will not meet with Israel’s Bezalel Smotrich when he visits the US
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Biden administration officials will not meet with Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister who called for a Palestinian village to be “wiped out,” then backtracked, and who is visiting the U.S. next week to meet with leaders of Israel Bonds.
At least five liberal Jewish groups want the U.S. government to consider barring Smotrich from coming here. Ned Price, the department’s spokesman, said at Thursday’s daily briefing that questions on Israeli ministers’ travel should be referred to Israel, and that he does not comment on the eligibility of individuals to enter the United States.
The trip comes as Smotrich and his far-right allies in Israel’s governing coalition have upended traditions of comity between establishment U.S. Jewish groups and Israel. Those relationships have become even more strained in recent days, after Israeli West Bank settlers rioted in a Palestinian village. They also come amid raucous protests of the Israeli government’s plan to sap the power of the judiciary, which critics say endanger minority rights.
William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Smotrich’s remarks were “disgusting,” and a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, said the group would not be meeting with him.
Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency whether the minister will meet with the White House, a National Security Council spokeswoman said, “No U.S. government meetings are planned for this trip.” That includes officials in the U.S. Treasury, the counterpart to Smotrich’s ministry, she said.
Smotrich is also responsible for civilian affairs in much of the West Bank. His call to “wipe out” the West Bank village of Huwara came after a settler rampage through the village following a shooting there that killed two Israeli brothers. At least one Palestinian in another village died amid the riots.
“I think the village of Huwara should be wiped out, I think that the state of Israel should do it,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. A few hours later, he walked back his statement: “To remove any doubt, in my words I did not mean wiping out the village of Huwara, but rather acting in a targeted way against terrorists and supporters of terror, and exacting a heavy price from them in order to return security to local residents.”
This week, the State Department’s annual report on terrorism recorded a “substantial rise” in settler attacks on Palestinian in 2021, the first time it had made such an assessment. On Wednesday, Price called Smotrich’s remarks about wiping out the village “disgusting” and “incitement to violence.”
“Just as we condemn Palestinian incitement to violence, we condemn these provocative remarks that also amount to incitement to violence,” Price said in his briefing that day. “We call on Prime Minister Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials to publicly and clearly reject and disavow these comments.”
Netanyahu has yet to do so, and with Smotrich just days away from a visit stateside to give a speech to Israel Bonds in Washington D.C., five Jewish groups are saying the Biden administration should at least consider keeping him out and others will not sit down with him. AIPAC’s declining to meet with Smotrich is particularly noteworthy. It routinely meets with senior Israeli ministers.
“The administration should make clear that comments promoting grave violations of human rights, such as those made by Smotrich, are grounds for re-examination of a visa for entry to the United States,” J Street, the liberal Jewish Israel policy group, said in a statement.
Four other Jewish groups are saying outright that the Biden administration should keep Smotrich out, among them Americans for Peace Now, an affiliate off the Israeli left-wing group; the Israel Policy Forum, a group that advocates for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel; T’ruah, a liberal rabbinic human rights group; and Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group.
The T’ruah statement referred to U.S. immigration law, which bans entry to those who have “incited terrorist activity with intent to cause serious bodily harm or death.” It said the threat Smotrich poses is especially acute since he assumed responsibility for administering civilian life in parts of the West Bank.
“Smotrich’s comments are even more dangerous now that Israel’s de jure annexation of the West Bank has made him effectively the governor of the territory, with broad oversight over most areas of civil administration,” the T’ruah statement said.
IPF, a group led by former lay leaders of mainstream pro-Israel organizations, also joined the calls. its policy director, Michael Koplow, told JTA, “We believe that there are sufficient grounds to deny Smotrich a visa.”
The Americans for Peace Now petition, addressed to Biden, garnered more than 1,100 signatures less than a day after it was posted.
“Smotrich wants to bring his hatred to US soil. He has plans to travel to the United States later this month. We’re here to say that he is not welcome,” the petition says. “We have seen how incitement in Israel-Palestine has led to devastating violence and we urge your administration to deny entry to Smotrich and his hateful rhetoric.”
A sixth U.S.-based liberal group, the New Israel Fund, which raises money for social justice organizations in Israel, said Jewish groups should make clear Smnotrich is unwanted here. “Our responsibility right now as American Jews is to say ‘take your hateful racism, your homophobia your plans for an apartheid Israel and get out. We do not want you here’,” it said in a statement. Smnotrich has called himself a “proud homophobe.”
Daroff, of the Conference of Presidents, declined to comment to JTA on whether he would meet with Smotrich.But he tweeted his agreement with Price. “I agree. His statement seeking to ‘wipe out’ Huwara was, as Ned Price said, ‘irresponsible, repugnant and disgusting’,” he wrote.
Israel Bonds, which promotes investment in Israeli government bonds, said in a statement that because it works closely with the Finance Ministry, welcoming the sitting finance minister to its events was a matter of routine. Smotrich will speak to the group’s Washington, D.C. leadership meeting.
“As part of their long-established responsibilities, Israel’s finance ministers from across the political spectrum have historically, over Israel Bonds’ 72-year history, attended our events,” a spokesman said, replying to a JTA query. “One of the organization’s most unique and paramount attributes is that it remains unbiased with regard to any political party or affiliation.”
Hundreds of rabbis have said they would not welcome Smotrich or his allies into their synagogues and would encourage their communities to boycott him. The Presidents’ Conference did not invite ministers from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party to address its annual colloquy in Israel last month, although they were invited to a luncheon for all Knesset members.
One group that backs settlements, the Zionist Organization of America, said not meeting with Religious Zionism leaders was a mistake.
‘Nobody has to agree with them or disagree with them,” Klein said. “But they should speak and whoever wants to challenge them, challenge them, criticize them, disagree with them.”
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This Jewish activist was arrested and deported for her book ‘Lesbian Love.’ 100 years later, will NYC apologize?
In 1926, New York City police arrested Eve Adams, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who ran a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, for the crime of being gay.
The formal charges were more euphemistic. Officially, Adams was charged with disorderly conduct — that is, flirting with an undercover police officer who had entrapped her, and obscenity, for writing and possessing the book Lesbian Love.
The following year, the U.S. government deported Adams to Poland, in what was effectively a death sentence: 16 years later, Adams would be murdered at Auschwitz.
Now, a century after Adam’s arrest, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal — the first openly gay person to hold the elected position — is urging New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to formally recognize the city’s role in Adams’ persecution.
He sent a letter to Mamdani requesting that the city issue a formal declaration acknowledging Adams’ conviction in 1926 “was unjust and rooted in discriminatory law enforcement and affirming that New York City failed her as a pioneer of LGBTQ+ life, as an immigrant, and as a Jewish woman who was ultimately deported to her death.”
“Adams’s story is among the most unjust in our city’s history,” the letter reads. “One hundred years after her arrest, we have the obligation and the opportunity to say plainly that she deserved better.”
In a statement to the Forward, the Mayor’s office said they are reviewing the request.
“The Mamdani Administration is deeply committed to uplifting the stories of New Yorkers that have gone unheard throughout history,” deputy press secretary Sam Raskin said.
A pioneer
Born with the name Chawa Zloczower in Poland in 1891, Adams immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island at age 20.
In America, she adopted the name Eve Adams — a playful nod to her androgyny, invoking the biblical Adam and Eve — and wore men’s clothing.
“She was a vibrant activist, who was daring. She had an androgynous appearance, which immediately identified her as a lesbian,” said Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. “Wearing pants for women was just unthinkable in the time period.”
Adams soon immersed herself in New York’s anarchist circles, befriending prominent Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. She worked as a traveling saleswoman for leftist publications including Mother Earth, activities that landed her on the Bureau of Investigation’s watch list during the First Red Scare.
In 1923, Adams published Lesbian Love, a collection of essays about the romantic lives of dozens of women in Greenwich Village. Katz described the book as far ahead of its time.
“The word “lesbian” was not used much. It was like a dirty word at the time, so you didn’t say it out loud,” Katz said. “Here she was, putting it on a book jacket.”
Two years later, Adams opened Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village. The underground tearoom became a rare refuge where lesbian women could socialize openly.
But the haven proved short-lived. In 1926, an undercover detective named Margaret Leonard visited Eve’s Hangout, where she met Adams. The following day, the two attended a play in Times Square together. Adams gave Leonard a copy of Lesbian Love — evidence of “obscenity” that prosecutors later used against her — and Leonard alleged Adams made sexual advances toward her during the taxi ride to the theater.
Adams was convicted and spent 18 months in jail before the United States deported her to Poland.
She settled in Paris, where she began a relationship with Jewish cabaret singer Hella Olstein Soldner. In 1943, the two women were arrested and sent to the Drancy internment camp. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz, where both were murdered.
Adams’ legacy
Over the years, Adams has come to be recognized as a Jewish LGBTQ icon. Her life inspired the play The Great Lesbian Love of Eve Adams, and she was the subject of a New York Times obituary published as part of the newspaper’s “Overlooked” series, which chronicles the lives of notable people throughout history whose deaths went unreported.
Hoylman-Sigal said he was inspired to commemorate Adams by the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, a nonprofit that documents local queer history, which asked him to send the letter to Mamdani. The Sites Project also offers historic walking tours of the city featuring Adams’ story.
“Their jaws drop when we tell them these stories, standing in front of the building where her tea room was,” said Ken Lustbader, co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.
On Wednesday, the centennial of Adams arrest, the Sites Project is hosting a performance and vigil in Adams’ honor at the former site of Eve’s Hangout — today, home to La Lanterna, an Italian cafe and pizzeria.
The site of Eve’s Hangout has also been recognized by the National Park Service as part of a roundup of Greenwich Village landmarks significant to LGBTQ history.
New York City, however, has never formally acknowledged the injustice of Adams’ arrest, conviction and deportation.
A posthumous apology would be unusual, though not without precedent: In 2019, the NYPD formally apologized for its 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn, describing the department’s actions as “discriminatory and oppressive.”
“I would love to see the mayor do it, but we could have one from the police department — an apology for sort of framing her,” Katz said. “They sent in a plainclothes policewoman to entrap her, and so that was really beyond a democratic process.”
The NYPD did not respond to the Forward‘s request for comment.
Whether or not the city issues an official acknowledgement, Hoylman-Sigal said he hopes the campaign will help keep Adams’ story alive.
“It’s an extremely poignant story, sorrowful, outrageous, sad — and one that most people don’t know about,” he said. “So I thought bringing attention to it was a righteous cause.”
Jacob Kornbluh contributed reporting.
The post This Jewish activist was arrested and deported for her book ‘Lesbian Love.’ 100 years later, will NYC apologize? appeared first on The Forward.
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Ever the restless spirit, Tel Aviv-born architect and designer Ron Arad is still reinventing himself and his art
When the announcement was made on June 12 that Ron Arad, 75, has been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), it marked another step in the Tel Aviv-born architect, artist and designer’s remarkably varied journey. Arad’s mother was the painter Esther Peretz-Arad and his father Grisha was a sculptor and photographer. After industrial design studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Arad traveled to London to become an architect, and has remained based there ever since. Yet although he won early fame with his piquant, witty concepts for chairs, Arad has proven anything but sedentary over the past half-century. Indeed, a 2010 retrospective at London’s Barbican Art Gallery was titled “Restless.”
Despite this seemingly permanent shpilkes (restless agitation), humane consideration for the pathways of others has been a constant in Arad’s public projects. His design for Beit Shulamit (2025), a cancer treatment center at the HaEmek Medical Center in Afula, northern Israel, intended to serve Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze communities in Israel and Palestine, deliberately freed patients and visitors from “horrible hospital corridors,” Arad told an architectural periodical. Patients walking around the site are given views of nature outdoors at every turn, in a facility that is the first to offer specialist cancer treatment for residents of West Bank conflict zones, including the cities of Jenin and Nablus. Named in honor of Dr. Shulamit Katzman, a pediatrician, the building’s gently curved lines embrace the public.
This awareness of social cohesion is also present in an Arad sculpture on the Tel Aviv University campus. “Kesher” is dedicated to the estimated 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died from adverse conditions in transition camps on the Sudanese border while trying to emigrate to Israel between 1979 and 1990. Composed of dynamically soaring, interwoven metal tubes, the artwork, wrapped around two live palm trees, a ubiquitous symbol of the Middle East, evokes an expedition. A repeated figure-eight symbolizes the endless continuity of the immigrants’ route and the resolve that it communicates.
In England, Arad assisted the National Health Service (NHS) in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. A flock of UK Jewish celebrities posed for photos wearing Arad-designed cotton masks, including actor Stephen Fry, comedian David Baddiel, and television host Natasha Kaplinsky. Despite lively colors, the masks, intended to be sold for fundraising, retained a somewhat tragic aura, like the grotesque permanent smile of Victor Hugo’s Gothic novel The Man Who Laughs.
Potential tragedy inherent in triumph likewise radiates from another Arad project, the Totzeret HaAretz (ToHA) tower, an office skyscraper in central Tel Aviv which was inspired by the shape of an iceberg. Its angular glass, built as the polar ice caps are rapidly melting and the fate of the passenger liner Titanic’s collision with an iceberg is particularly relevant, the ensemble when complete will include an 80-floor companion tower, Tel Aviv’s tallest building.
Similarly, Arad is aware of the agony of defeat as well as artistic victories he has experienced over the years. When his codesign for a National Holocaust Monument Ottawa in Canada failed to win a competition, Arad published the concept anyway. The result is a highly literary, theological rumination on the impact of the Shoah on modern Jewish history. Ever conscious of the pedestrian’s progress, Arad’s design featured concrete walls framing 22 narrow passageways, one for each country in which Jewish communities were decimated. These walls, spaced around a meter apart, would have allowed only one visitor to fit through at a time. The solitude would have been lessened by an architectural allusion to the covenant of the pieces (Brit Bein HaBetarim), the first of a series of covenants between God and the Patriarchs. In this narrative, God revealed himself to Abram (later Abraham), promising that his descendants would inherit the Land of Israel.
Less loftily or weighty with destiny, Arad’s chief promise as an artist is to his own creativity. He was so inspired by a melody by the American Jewish songwriter Jonathan Richman about shedding personal inhibition and pretension by accepting new, unfamiliar surroundings and contexts, that in all seriousness he informed an interviewer in 2005 that he wanted Richman’s tune, “I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar” to be played at his funeral. Another impeded project where dancing might have been at least delayed was a London Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre design, initially approved in 2017, but later bogged down by objections about its proposed site, Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament. However, in January, a Holocaust Memorial Act 2026 received Royal Assent, officially clearing a legal hurdle blocking the construction of Arad’s UK Holocaust Memorial; the recent conferral of a CBE by Charles III, known to take particular interest in Jews and Holocaust victims, represents further establishment endorsement of Arad and his work.
Despite this authorized approval, Arad looks likely to remain an offbeat spirit, drawing inspiration from a wide range of predecessors, including the Czernowitz-born Austrian Jewish creator Friedrich Jacob Kiesler who innovated with 1965’s “Shrine of the Book” in Jerusalem to house the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, among other texts. Kiesler was also responsible for an unbuilt architectural concept, the Endless House, a biomorphic, continuous form with no beginning, end, or even boundaries between floor, wall, and ceiling. Some Arad projects resemble completed versions of things Kiesler and his fellow Jewish surrealists might have only dreamed of.
When it is built, Arad’s Holocaust Memorial will pay tribute to several minority groups targeted by the Nazis, in addition to the Jews. The Learning Centre is intended to explore antisemitism, but also extremism, Islamophobia, racism, homophobia and other forms of prejudice in today’s society. Much of it will be underground, drawing visitors down narrow stairs into the exhibition space and learning center, in yet another example of Arad’s obsession with peregrinations, like a modern-day architectural Benjamin of Tudela, a medieval Jewish traveler. Ever shedding past identities, Arad told the 2005 interviewer that the living person he most admired was Bob Dylan, for “reinventing himself and for reinventing us.” In a comparable way, Ron Arad has also reworked his own optic to express modern Jewish identity in a variety of forms, as an excursion hampered by tragedy and ominous echoes at times, but also with the possibility of quick-witted celebration.
At last year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Arad presented a bronze sculpture titled “I doubt therefore I think” (Dubito Ergo Cogito). Inviting museumgoers to sit on it, the artwork likely referred to a time-honored Jewish tradition of doubt as the mitzvah of questioning. This mitzvah has accompanied Arad’s career-long odyssey in the arts.
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New Jewish-Arab political party debuts in Israel, aiming to topple Netanyahu
A newly established Jewish-Arab political party debuted Tuesday and is joining the crowded field vying to take down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in Israel’s next election, slated for October.
Makom Lekulanu, which translates to A Place for Us All, ( is led by Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green, co-founders of the Israeli-Palestinian coexistence organizing group. Other Standing Together leaders will also join the party, including Haifa City Council member Sally Abed; Ghadir Hani, a Palestinian peace and women’s rights activist; Itamar Avneri, a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council member; and Yonatan Zeigen, whose mother, well-known peace activist Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri.
According to Daood and others who spoke at a press conference in Nazareth publicly launching the new party, Makom Lekulanu’s platform will focus on many of the same issues that Standing Together has organized around for years: peace, social justice, soaring violence and crime in Arab communities, the cost of living and climate justice.
Party leaders say they are running not only to oppose Netanyahu and his coalition, which currently includes far-right extremists National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but to offer a fundamentally different vision.
“We are doing this because this is the last moment to save our society,” Daood told the modest crowd, many of whom were clad in the telltale purple that has become synonymous with Standing Together. “We are being abandoned, murdered; our future is going up in flames. And I know that in order to repair things, it is not enough to say only what we oppose. We also have to say what we support.”
“So today I am saying: no to Netanyahu, to Ben-Gvir, to Smotrich,” she continued, to enthusiastic applause. “But I am also saying yes. Yes to Israeli-Palestinian peace, yes to national and civil equality, yes to social justice.”The press conference took place at the scenic Rose Cafe in Nazareth, a choice that underscored the message its founders are trying to send. This is not, they insisted, a Jewish party with token Palestinian representation or an Arab party with a couple of Jewish allies, but what Daood called “a truly shared party, one of genuine partnership between Jews and Arabs.”
According to Abed, this means tearing down the arbitrary dividers that have been built around Jewish and Arab leadership.
“I have always been told, ‘You will be responsible for Arab society, and we will be responsible for Jewish society,’” she said. “But I want to lead and take responsibility for all of society, together with my Jewish partners.”
“That’s what A Place for Us All will be: taking responsibility for all of society, together, on the path to ending the occupation, to peace and to real equality.”
A decade organizing
The party grew directly out of Standing Together, the Jewish-Arab grassroots movement founded in 2015. Since the Oct. 7 attack, and the ensuing wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, Standing Together has become one of Israel’s most visible anti-war and anti-occupation organizations, growing its membership more than tenfold and emerging as a prominent voice on the international stage as well.
Inside Israel, the movement has organized ceasefire protests and rallies calling for a hostage deal, protected aid convoys headed for Gaza from right-wing attacks, raised funds for bomb shelters in Bedouin communities and provided protective presence for Palestinians facing settler violence in the West Bank.
For Zeigen, the decision to join the slate is rooted in personal loss as well as political conviction.
“For years, I worked with people battling poverty, marginalization and trauma — the overwhelming majority of them as a result of institutional abandonment,” he said at the press conference. “On Oct. 7, I experienced that abandonment firsthand. My mother, Vivian Silver, did not survive the massacre at her kibbutz.”
“Out of the devastation of losing her, I made a decision,” he continued. “I left my job as a social worker, and since then I have dedicated my life to one thing: Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Zeigen described his grief now intermingling with another emotion: fear for the future his children will inherit.
“That is why I insist on turning despair into action,” he said. “Because I refuse to accept bereavement as fate — not for Jews and not for Arabs, not for Israelis and not for Palestinians.”
The new party’s leaders have been careful to stress that Standing Together is a separate entity from A Place for Us All. In a joint statement issued ahead of the launch, Daood and Green said the movement would remain active and independent, with a “full and substantive separation — organizational, legal, financial and political” between Standing Together and A Place for Us All. Both Daood and Green said they will take unpaid leave from their leadership roles in the movement in order to run.
Daood said the move into electoral politics is a natural progression of what she and Green have helped create over the last decade.
“For 10 years now, we have been effecting change right where it was needed most. We know how to build this kind of power on the ground,” Daood told the Forward. “Now we want to take that power and translate it into votes so that we can effect change from within the Knesset.”
While rumors of a political run have swirled around Standing Together for months, Green said he and Daood felt they had finally reached a now-or-never moment.
“I truly believe we are at a critical juncture,” Green explained. “This is the point where the Israeli people either keep going down this path of ethnic cleansing and endless war and occupation and terrible quality of life, for both Palestinians and Jews living here — or we can turn around, right now, and go in the other direction, in the direction of life and peace and security for all.”
“The right wing in Israel very much understands we are at this juncture,” he added. “And they have been very clear about what they are offering. I could not live with myself if I didn’t offer an alternative to Israeli voters.”
Seeking an edge
A Place for Us All will face an uphill battle from the start.
Any party led by Standing Together’s founders is likely to intensify the criticism the movement already faces from right-wing Israelis who have branded them as traitors for speaking out against the occupation and the suffering in Gaza. Posters featuring images of Gazan children have been torn down, and activists, Green included, have been harassed by right-wing agitators, in some cases outside their own homes.
A Place for Us All is also already drawing criticism from within the Israeli left, where some fear that the addition of a new party could split an already fragile anti-Netanyahu camp. In Israel’s electoral system, any party that fails to cross the electoral threshold — currently set at just over 3% of the vote — receives no seats, meaning it cannot take part in the post-election negotiations that determine who will build the 61-seat coalition needed to form the next government.
Green strongly rejects this concern.
“Every poll makes clear that winning without Jewish-Arab partnership is impossible,” he argued. “The only path to replacing Netanyahu is to maximize turnout among Jewish and Palestinian citizens and ensure that they vote for the same political bloc.”
According to Green, only one in four Palestinian citizens between the ages of 18 and 24 is currently planning to vote. “But with our party running, that statistic jumps up to two out of four,” he said.
If the scene outside the cafe was any indication, the party’s message may already be resonating with at least some of the young people it hopes to bring into politics. As the press conference unfolded, groups of teenagers passing by stopped to cheer on the speakers.
Inside, excitement was also running high. At one point, activist Galit Mass-Ader openly wept as she embraced Ghadir Hani who is joining the party’s list.
“For me, this is a decision that has been years in the making. I’ve been working for peace and coexistence nearly my whole life,” Hani told the Forward. “But since October 7, there have been so many difficult moments of pain and despair.”
“This party is the exact opposite of that,” she said. “It is the embodiment of hope — hope that belongs to both Jews and Palestinians, and to all those who are ready to reject the old, stale politics in favor of a new, shared political system.”
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