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Why a liberal Zionist rabbi isn’t taking to the streets over Israel’s judicial reform plan
(JTA) — Israel’s 75th anniversary was supposed to be a blowout birthday party for its supporters, but that was before the country was convulsed by street protests over the right-wing government’s proposal to overhaul its judiciary. Critics call it an unprecedented threat to Israel’s democracy, and supporters of Israel found themselves conflicted. In synagogues across North America, rabbis found themselves giving “yes, but” sermons: Yes, Israel’s existence is a miracle, but its democracy is fragile and in danger.
One of those sermons was given a week ago Saturday by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, expressing his “dismay” over the government’s actions. Hirsch is the former head of ARZA, the Reform movement’s Zionist organization, and the founder of a new organization, Amplify Israel, meant to promote Zionism among Reform Jews. He is often quoted as an example of a mainstream non-Orthodox rabbi who not only criticizes anti-Zionism on the far left but who insists that his liberal colleagues are not doing enough to defend the Jewish state from its critics.
Many on the Jewish left, meanwhile, say Jewish establishment figures, even liberals like Hirsch, have been too reluctant to call out Israel on, for example, its treatment of the Palestinians — thereby enabling the country’s extremists.
In March, however, he warned that the “Israeli government is tearing Israeli society apart and bringing world Jewry along for the dangerous ride.” That is uncharacteristically strong language from a rabbi whose forthcoming book, “The Lilac Tree: A Rabbi’s Reflections on Love, Courage, and History,” includes a number of essays on the limits of criticizing Israel. When does such criticism give “comfort to left-wing hatred of Israel,” as he writes in his book, and when does failure to criticize Israel appear to condone extremism?
Although the book includes essays on God, Torah, history and antisemitism, in a recent interview we focused on the Israel-Diaspora divide, the role of Israel in the lives of Diaspora Jews and why the synagogue remains the “central Jewish institution.”
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You gave a sermon earlier this month about the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding, which is usually a time of celebration in American synagogues, but you also said you were “dismayed” by the “political extremism” and “religious fundamentalism” of the current government. Was that difficult as a pulpit rabbi?
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: The approach is more difficult now with the election of the new government than it has been in all the years of the past. Because we can’t sanitize supremacism, elitism, extremism, fundamentalism, and we’re not going to. Israel is in what’s probably the most serious domestic crisis in the 75-year history of the state. And what happens in Israel affects American Jewry directly. It’s Israeli citizens who elect their representatives, but that’s not the end of the discussion neither for Israelis or for American Jews. At the insistence of both parties, both parties say the relationship is fundamental and critical and it not only entitles but requires Israelis and world Jews to be involved in each other’s affairs.
For American Jewry, in its relationship with Israel, our broadest objective is to sustain that relationship, deepen that relationship, and encourage people to be involved in the affairs in Israel and to go to Israel, spend time in Israel and so forth, and that’s a difficult thing to do and at the same time be critical.
American Jews have been demonstrating here in solidarity with the Israelis who have been protesting the recent judicial overhaul proposals in Israel. Is that a place for liberal American Jews to make their voices heard on what happens in Israel?
I would like to believe that if I were living in Israel, I would be at every single one of those demonstrations on Saturday night, but I don’t participate in demonstrations here because the context of our world and how we operate is different from in Israel when an Israeli citizen goes out and marches on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. It’s presumed that they’re Zionists and they’re speaking to their own government. I’m not critical of other people who reach a different perspective in the United States, but for me, our context is different. Even if we say the identical words in Tel Aviv or on West 68th Street, they’re perceived in a different way and they operate in a different context.
What then is the appropriate way for American Jews to express themselves if they are critical of an action by the Israeli government?
My strongest guidance is don’t disengage, don’t turn your back, double down, be more supportive of those who support your worldview and are fighting for it in Israel. Polls seem to suggest that the large majority of Israelis are opposed to these reforms being proposed. Double down on those who are supportive of our worldview.
You lament in your book that the connections to Israel are weakening among world Jewry, especially among Jewish liberals.
The liberal part of the Jewish world is where I am and where the people I serve are by and large, and where at least 80% of American Jewry resides. It’s a difficult process because we’re operating here in a context of weakening relationship: a rapidly increasing emphasis on universal values, what we sometimes call tikkun olam [social justice], and not as a reflection of Jewish particularism, but often at the expense of Jewish particularism.
There is a counter-argument, however, which you describe in your book: “some left-wing Jewish activists contend that alienation from Israel, especially among the younger generations, is a result of the failures of the American Jewish establishment” — that is, by not doing more to express their concerns about the dangers of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, for example, the establishment alienated young liberal Jews. You’re skeptical of that argument. Tell me why.
Fundamentally I believe that identification with Israel is a reflection of identity. If you have a strong Jewish identity, the tendency is to have a strong connection with the state of Israel and to believe that the Jewish state is an important component of your Jewish identity. I think that surveys bear that out. No doubt the Palestinian question will have an impact on the relationship between American Jews in Israel as long as it’s not resolved, it will be an outstanding irritant because it raises moral dilemmas that should disturb every thinking and caring Jew. And I’ve been active in trying to oppose ultra-Orthodox coercion in Israel. But fundamentally, while these certainly are components putting pressure on the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, in particular among the elites of the American Jewish leadership, for the majority of American Jews, the relationship with Israel is a reflection of their relationship with Judaism. And if that relationship is weak and weakening, as day follows night, the relationship with Israel will weaken as well.
But what about the criticism that has come from, let’s say, deep within the tent? I am thinking of the American rabbinical students who in 2021 issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for the “violent suppression of human rights.” They were certainly engaged Jews, and they might say that they were warning the establishment about the kinds of right-wing tendencies in Israel that you and others in the establishment are criticizing now.
Almost every time I speak about Israel and those who are critical of Israel, I hold that the concept of criticism is central to Jewish tradition. Judaism unfolds through an ongoing process of disputation, disagreement, argumentation, and debate. I’m a pluralist, both politically as well as intellectually.
In response to your question, I would say two things. First of all, I distinguish between those who are Zionist, pro-Israel, active Jews with a strong Jewish identity who criticize this or that policy of the Israeli government, and between those who are anti-Zionists, because anti-Zionism asserts that the Jewish people has no right to a Jewish state, at least in that part of the world. And that inevitably leads to anti-Jewish feelings and very often to antisemitism.
When it came to the students, I didn’t respond at all because I was a student once too, and there are views that I hold today that I didn’t hold when I was a student. Their original article was published in the Forward, if I’m not mistaken, and it generated some debate in all the liberal seminaries. I didn’t respond at all until it became a huge, multi-thousand word piece in The New York Times. Once it left the internal Jewish scene, it seemed to me that I had an obligation to respond. Not that I believe that they’re anti-Zionist — I do not. I didn’t put them in the BDS camp [of those who support the boycott of Israel]. I just simply criticized them.
Hundreds of Jews protest the proposed Israeli court reform outside the Israeli consulate in New York City on Feb. 21, 2023. (Gili Getz)
You signed a letter with other rabbis noting that the students’ petition came during Israel’s war with Hamas that May, writing that “those who aspire to be future leaders of the Jewish people must possess and model empathy for their brothers and sisters in Israel, especially when they are attacked by a terrorist organization whose stated goal is to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State.”
My main point was that the essence of the Jewish condition is that all Jews feel responsible one for the another — Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. And that relationship starts with emotions. It starts with a feeling of belongingness to the Jewish people, and a feeling of concern for our people who are attacked in the Jewish state. My criticism was based, in the middle of a war, on expressing compassion, support for our people who are under indiscriminate and terrorist assault. I uphold that and even especially in retrospect two years later, why anyone would consider that to be offensive in any way is still beyond me.
You were executive director of ARZA, the Reform Zionist organization, and you write in your book that Israel “is the primary source of our people’s collective energy — the engine for the recreation and restoration of the national home and the national spirit of the Jewish people.” A number of your essays put Israel at the center of the present-day Jewish story. You are a rabbi in New York City. So what’s the role or function of the Diaspora?
Our existence in the Diaspora needs no justification. For practically all of the last 2,000 years, Jewish life has existed in the Diaspora. It’s only for the last 75 years and if you count the beginning of the Zionist movement, the last 125 years or so that Jews have begun en masse to live in the land of Israel. Much of the values of what we call now Judaism was developed in the Diaspora. Moreover, the American Jewish community is the strongest, most influential, most glorious of all the Jewish Diasporas in Jewish history.
And yet, the only place in the Jewish world where the Jewish community is growing is in Israel. More Jewish children now live in Israel than all the other places in the world combined. The central value that powers the sustainability, viability and continuity of the Jewish people is peoplehood. It’s not the values that have sustained the Jewish people in the Diaspora and over the last 2,000 years, which was Torah or God, what we would call religion. I’m a rabbi. I believe in the centrality of God, Torah and religion to sustain Jewish identity. But in the 21st century, Israel is the most eloquent concept of the value of Jewish peoplehood. And therefore, I do not believe that there is enough energy, enough power, enough sustainability in the classical concept of Judaism to sustain continuity in the Diaspora. The concept of Jewish peoplehood is the most powerful way that we can sustain Jewish continuity in the 21st century.
But doesn’t that negate the importance of American Jewry?
In my view, it augments the sustainability of American Jewry. If American Jews disengage from Israel, and from the concept of Jewish peoplehood, and also don’t consider religion to be at the center of their existence, then what’s left? Now there’s a lot of activity, for example, on tikkun olam, which is a part of Jewish tradition. But tikkun olam in Judaism always was a blend between Jewish particularism and universalism — concern for humanity at large but rooted in the concept of Jewish peoplehood. But very often now, tikkun olam in the Diaspora is practiced not as a part of the concept of Jewish particularism but, as I said before, at the expense of Jewish particularism. That will not be enough to sustain Jewish communities going into the 21st century.
I want to ask about the health of the American synagogue as an institution. Considering your concern about the waning centrality of Torah and God in people’s lives — especially among the non-Orthodox — do you feel optimistic about it as an institution? Does it have to change?
I’ve believed since the beginning of my career that there’s no substitute in the Diaspora for the synagogue as the central Jewish institution. We harm ourselves when we underemphasize the central role of the synagogue. Any issue that is being done by one of the hundreds of Jewish agencies that we’ve created rests on our ability as a community to produce Jews into the next generation. And what are those institutions that produce that are most responsible for the production of Jewish continuity? Synagogues, day schools and summer camps, and of the three synagogues are by far the most important for the following reasons: First, we’re the only institution that defines ourselves as and whose purpose is what we call cradle to grave. Second, for most American Jews, if they end up in any institution at all it will be a synagogue. Far fewer American Jews will receive a day school education and or go to Jewish summer camps. That should have ramifications across the board for American Jewish policy, including how we budget Jewish institutions. We should be focusing many, many more resources on these three institutions, and at the core of that is the institution of the synagogue.
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Netanyahu leads in exit polls, but change bloc by Eisenkot has more seats
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s parliamentary election has ended with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party remaining the largest faction, according to exit polls published as voting ended at 10pm local time.
However, the results showed that Netanyahu’s bloc of parties falls far short of the 61 seats needed to form a government. No other party or bloc of party has the ability to a government either.
Exit polls, taken through the day and published as polling stations closed, are only an indication of the final results, the official count can take hours or days to become clear. Also, exit polls are not always accurate.
And in an election that analysts have predicted will be tight, it’s too early to tell who will lead the next Israeli government.
It was a dramatic day in Israel, with voter turnout reaching its highest level in decades, according to the Central Elections Committee. An hour prior to polls closing, the committee said some 74.3% of the 7.3 million eligible voters had cast their ballot, compared to just 66.3% in the last election in 2022.
Indeed, lines at polling stations were longer than usual, with some Israelis waiting more than an hour to cast their votes.
Israelis have described this election, the first national election since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack, as a battle over the country’s character and how best to address the security concerns that have arisen over the past three years.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners, a bloc comprising mostly far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, have largely campaigned on a platform of protecting Israel from existential threats, including what they describe as security threats posed by the country’s Arab population.
Casting his ballot in a school in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said he was voting “For the future of the State of Israel.”
“We cannot leave this battle in the hands of the left and the Arab parties,” Netanyahu said, accusing them of wanting “to bring an end to the Jewish state.”
Adalah, a legal center for Arab minority rights, filed a complaint with the Central Elections Committee. It said in a statement that “senior government officials have been inciting against Palestinian citizens of Israel exercising their right to vote as turnout in Arab towns rises.”
The group of parties trying to oust Netanyahu – the “change bloc” led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot – has argued that the election is a vote on Israel’s future as a liberal and democratic nation.
The opposition has framed the election as a referendum on Netanyahu’s handling of the aftermath of Oct. 7 and the subsequent wars in Gaza, Lebanon and against Iran.
After casting his vote at a school in the city of Herzliya, Eisenkot told the crowd: “We are setting Israel on a new path. We will be worthy of your trust. I promise.”
It is traditional for party leaders to cast their votes in front of cameras and to campaign right up until polling stations close. Netanyahu and his coalition partners traveled the country trying to mobilize their supporters, warning they would not be re-elected unless more right-wing voters turned out to vote.
However, under Israel’s system of proportional representation, differences in turnout among communities could drastically change the political map. Larger numbers of Arab voters, who tend to vote for one of the two Arab political factions, can affect the distribution of seats and the balance of power between the blocs, potentially complicating Netanyahu’s efforts to form a government.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu leads in exit polls, but change bloc by Eisenkot has more seats appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I went to Michigan to talk to Jewish voters about Abdul El-Sayed
I’d just climbed the steps to another home on my canvassing list, a lovely residence in the suburbs of Detroit, and rang the doorbell. I was there last week to talk with Jewish voters about the upcoming Michigan Senate election. The woman who answered asked me to come inside, and I demurred, telling her that my project discourages its volunteers from accepting such invitations, for safety reasons. She was petite and elderly, with a soft, open face. She reminded me of my long deceased mother. We chit-chatted a little, then I got down to brass tacks. “What are your feelings about the race?” I asked. “About Abdul El-Sayed?”
Her face sagged. “You’re too late,” she said. “My husband and I already voted. For Mike Rogers. And I feel terrible!” She looked like she was about to cry. “Please,” she said, “Come inside.” I relented (but didn’t sit down on her sofa).
The Michigan race pits El-Sayed, a progressive young Democrat, against Rogers, a Republican former Congress member who is closely allied with Donald Trump. As a New Yorker, I don’t have a vote in the election. But I came to Michigan as a Jew who is increasingly frightened by the threat posed by MAGA and horrified by what Trump-think and Trump power is doing, and not just to immigrants, people of color, sexual and gender minorities, middle-class and working people, students, intellectuals, and those whose jobs and civic activity nurture liberal and progressive causes.
I’m also worried about us Jews.
We are disproportionately members of the communities I just listed. We are also vulnerable to antisemitic acts and policies, which appear to be increasing. (At my shul on Rosh Hashanah I was chilled to find flyers placed by the Siddurs, instructing how to hide or flee if a terrorist were to enter the sanctuary.) And we are vulnerable to the politics of Christian nationalism. I grew up in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s. I vividly recall being made to sing “The Crusaders’ Hymn” in grade school and memorize the words (“Onward Christians soldiers, marching as to war. With the cross of Jesus, going on before!”). Making public school kids do this is now illegal. But for how long?
Mike Rogers’ campaign gets much of its money from a rich Texan named Tim Dunn, a Christian nationalist who wants to abolish public schools. Not long ago, Dunn told a member of the Texas legislature — a Jew — that Jews should not hold major political office.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, is a public health expert with a long history of activism for progressive causes. A native-born American, he went to a suburban Detroit high school where he was on the football team and had many Jewish classmates. He has repeatedly said that the fact that he is Muslim is merely incidental to the fact that he is an American who deeply respects the rights guaranteed to everyone in this country under the U.S. Constitution — including to worship, or not, as one pleases.
Polling shows El-Sayed leading Rogers, but the margin of error puts them very close, and the race is tightening. Pundits say that if El-Sayed loses, the Senate could remain Republican. But if he wins, it would signal to the whole country that the Democratic Party is entering a new phase of progressivism — one prefigured by Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City.
Like El-Sayed, Mamdani is a Muslim who sharply criticizes the Israeli government. And though many New York City Jews are wary of him, his main opponent during his campaign, Andrew Cuomo, wasn’t part of MAGA or surrounded by antisemites, as Mike Rogers is. I’d canvassed for Mamdani, and the stakes are much higher in Michigan. So I decided to spend five days in suburban Detroit as part of a joint canvassing effort by Jews in Seed the Vote, Bend the Arc Action, IfNotNow Movement, and Michigan United Action. Our goal was to knock on doors and share our own stories with fellow Jews.
Mine is that my maternal grandparents fled here from the Pale of Settlement, and my mother told me about my grandmother escaping a pogrom after her parents dressed her with a large cross around her neck, and paid a peasant to hide her under hay in a cart. She was fifteen years old when the pogrom happened — prime age for a Jewish girl to be raped.
She and her extended family made it to Pittsburgh. To the United States, the capital of democracy and pluralism. In all of history, Jews have never done so well as we have under democracies like this one. We’ve become so comfortable, as one Detroit-area rabbi remarked in his Kol Nidre sermon this year, that his community’s biggest intramural argument used to be over where to get the best bagels.
Then a Lebanese-American man whose relatives had just been killed by an Israeli air strike on Lebanon drove a truck into Temple Israel, a metro-Detroit synagogue. Dozens of preschoolers were inside. No one was hurt, but the building was damaged. El-Sayed, quickly made a lengthy statement condemning the culprit’s inexcusable antisemitism and vowing to support Jewish safety. But he also tried to explain the man’s terrorism. “Hurt people hurt people,” he said.
He later apologized for introducing political context so soon. But months later, his words still anger some people with whom I spoke. One woman glared, said she had grandchildren at the synagogue preschool, and slammed the door on me. Other canvassers described a man in a car who saw their t-shirts, sporting slogans like “Jews for Shared Safety,” and screamed that if he were to see El-Sayed and his family on fire right now across the street, he would do nothing to help them. He added that he was on the board of a shul.
Rogers’ campaign and its supporters are flooding TV and the social media with material excoriating El-Sayed as a dangerous Islamic fundamentalist and antisemite. AIPAC has also painted him as a threat to Jews, and spent over $30 million attacking him to defeat him in the primary. El-Sayed won anyway, but Michigan’s Jews remain saturated with a miasma of anti-El-Sayed propaganda. The woman who reminded me of my mother said she voted for Rogers because her father was a Holocaust survivor and she had to put Israel first, even though she knew Rogers could “roll back everything, including civil rights and abortion rights, that we Jews have worked so hard for. And even though I’ve never voted Republican in my life!”
I also canvassed Jews who were enthusiastically voting for El-Sayed. Other supporters, though, were terribly conflicted. At one door, a person — I won’t say their gender because they were so anxious about being identified — told me they are high up in local, Jewish-inflected Democratic Party politics. (I looked them up later and verified this.)
They, too, invited me into the sanctum of their home, as though afraid for the neighbors to see them talking with me. “I voted for El-Sayed,” they said. “But it was a horrible decision to have to make!” They strongly agreed with me about the need to vote for him, but they didn’t want their Jewish bigwig colleagues to know. “Half of them would never speak to me again,” they said. “What about your personal friends?” I asked. “Could you talk to them about the need to vote for El-Sayed?” “Yes,” they said. “I can do that.”
“This is what canvassing is about,” I told myself as I left.
Some Jewish bigwigs who openly support El-Sayed have been holding wine-and-cheese house parties for the un-decideds. Michigan Jews for Democracy sponsors these intimate gatherings. I went to one last week, at the house of Elaine Driker, formerly board president of Hillel of Metro Detroit. Former Michigan Congress member and political progressive Andy Levin addressed the group.
The setting was a cozy living room. To ensure that attendees felt comfortable voicing their feelings, journalists were told they could quote the speakers, but questions from the audience were off the record unless the individuals asking them agreed later to be quoted. The attendees were engaged, intent, and split, with some expressing strong support for El-Sayed and others venting reservations.
At the end. Levin summed things up. “We’re here struggling as Jews,” he told the audience. With young progressives entering the Democratic Party, he added, “We are really coming into a new era of politics in the United States, and I’m really hopeful about it.” He talked of the need to elect El-Sayed, then “hold him to be a great senator for the Jewish community.” Yes, he is a Muslim, Levin noted, and that is good. He added that, for Jews as for everyone, pluralism in government “has been great for us.”
This election in Michigan, Levin concluded, is “a time of great wrestling with God. Of wrestling with each other.” Then we all repaired to a room to eat brie and fine bread and wrestle some more.
The post Why I went to Michigan to talk to Jewish voters about Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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Noah Wyle, TV’s nice Jewish doctor, is People’s Sexiest Man Alive
(JTA) — Noah Wyle, the Jewish actor who both mends and steals hearts as a doctor on the hit HBO Max medical drama “The Pitt,” has been named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.
Tuesday’s announcement described the actor’s “smoldering intensity” and “leading-man looks,” while noting that “he loves to do the dishes.”
Wyle, 55, told People he initially thought the news was “a classic set-up for a prank.” His wife, Sara Wells, helped persuade him to accept the honor, he said, because she believes his qualities as a husband and father are worth celebrating.
The actor, who starred in the ’90s medical drama “ER,” is enjoying a career resurgence as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the brilliant, troubled emergency-room physician at the center of “The Pitt.” The role has earned Wyle two consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding lead actor in a drama series, along with renewed attention to his own Jewish heritage.
As JTA reported last year, Wyle drew on his father’s Russian-Jewish background in helping create Robby, his first Jewish character. The doctor wears a Star of David necklace and, in a pivotal scene in the show’s first season, clutches it while reciting the Shema, a central Jewish prayer, during an emotional crisis.
Wyle, whose father is Jewish and mother is Episcopalian, did not grow up in a religious household. But in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle this year, he said Judaism had become more relevant to his life through the show and that his daughter, then 10, has expressed the most interest to “pick up the mantle of Judaism.” She helped him with the pronunciation of the Shema, he said, and her bat mitzvah has been scheduled.
Wyle has also brought Jewish history into “The Pitt.” In an episode he wrote for the show’s second season, a patient with ties to the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Wyle said portraying a Jewish character offered an opportunity to present a humanist and healer at a time of heightened antisemitism. “I have come to learn that the world’s knowledge of Jews comes through depictions of them in the media,” he told the Jewish Chronicle.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Noah Wyle, TV’s nice Jewish doctor, is People’s Sexiest Man Alive appeared first on The Forward.
