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Yair Cherki is famous for making Israelis understand Haredim. Now he wants Haredim to understand that he’s gay.
(JTA) — Yair Cherki, the religion reporter for Israel’s Channel 12, gained a name for his sidecurls, his cheery demeanor and his rapid fire delivery as he has guided his viewers into the lives and homes of Israel’s Haredi community.
On Tuesday, he delivered a different sort of message — a wrenching personal statement posted to Facebook.
“I love guys. I love guys and the Holy Blessed One,” a religious term for God, Cherki wrote. “It’s not a contradiction, and it’s not new.”
He went on to describe how he had grappled with a secret that had tormented him.
“I have always lived with the clash between this sexual preference and faith,” he wrote. “There are those who solved the conflict by saying there is no God, and there are others who have said there are no gays. In my flesh, I know they both exist and I try to resolve this internal conflict in multiple ways.”
What may have been surprising, beyond the content of the announcement itself, was the outpouring of support for Cherki evinced across Israel’s political spectrum.
“I love you my dear brother,” former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who is Orthodox, wrote on Twitter. “And I am very proud of you.”
Amir Ohana, the openly gay speaker of the Knesset from the Likud Party, responded with a heart emoji.
“This text is so beautiful and moving,” commented Meirav Michaeli, the leader of the left-wing Labor Party. “Thank you for giving it to all of us.”
Also flooding Cherki’s mentions were rivals from Israel’s usually cutthroat media world. “What a joy you are, Cherki,” wrote Shaul Amsterdamski, the finance reporter for the rival Kan network, Israel’s public broadcaster. (Channel 12 is privately owned.)
His public coming out comes at a time that far-right figures in Israel’s new government have shown an appetite for curbing the rights of the LGBTQ community.
Cherki said he would not quit his faith. “My community is still the religious community,” he wrote. “My tribe, my family and my friends. These are my beliefs.”
Not every Israeli was ready to understand, but some still spoke in loving terms.
“This post made me very sad,” commented Yehuda Glick, a former Likud lawmaker who leads a movement to allow Jewish worship on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. “It doesn’t change the fact that I love you not a single gram less than I loved you before I read it. But in total honesty, it’s a gut punch.”
Uriah Elkayam, a journalist, replied to Glick: “These kind of responses from you and your cohort crush souls and drain the lifeblood from people, because you think you are better Jews. This is a time to hug, or to shut up.”
Cherki, 30, rake-slim, generally sports a dark blue kippah and dark casual clothing.He recently cut off his payos, the sidecurls kept by haredi men.
Cherki made his mark in TV news by taking viewers into the homes of his fellow Haredim and asking them, in gentle, urgent tones, to explain why they believed what they believed.
He endeavored to keep Haredim from being reduced to cliches. A Haredi Knesset cafeteria worker who invited Cherki and another reporter into his home described his admiration for Bennett. The cafeteria worker also explained why he disagreed with Bennett profoundly on issues of national security, and was ready to vote for Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right, religious Zionist politician currently serving as Israel’s national security minister.
Cherki pointed at a cabinet stacked with the writings of the late Sephardic sage, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who founded the Haredi Shas Party. “A Shas house!” he said — a way of noting for viewers that parties which have traditionally represented Haredi Israelis no longer had a grip on their natural constituents.
Cherki’s job also led him into awkward encounters. In a segment on Haredi marriage, a matchmaker he interviewed chided him for not yet getting hitched.
He has been at pains to make clear that he is a believer. Last year, he explained how Haredim in B’nei Brak, a city north of Tel Aviv, were coping with the aftermath of a terror attack. Many believed that the heavily haredi city no longer had the protection of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, an eminent sage who had died days before the attack, and whom they believed protected the city.
The anchorman, Rafi Reshef, asked Cherki incredulously whether he bought into the “narrative” that Kanievsky had protected B’nei Brak.
Cherki shot him a pained look and said it was “a little bit of a private question.” Cherki said.
“I generally believe that the role of righteous people in the place where they live, there is significance,” he said. “The question of, if just because a rabbi died, at that moment, B’nei Brak is more vulnerable than before, is bigger than me. But I can understand and tell you the spirit and the thought processes of people who believe that.”
Reshef apologized. Cherki smiled.
Cherki also speaks to secular Israeli groups about the world of haredi Jews. “If I had to put in a single sentence what I’m trying to do on TV when I talk about Haredim, I want to say ‘They’re not all the same,’” he told a bar full of secular Israelis last month on a TV show that brings together different sectors of Israel’s deeply divided society..
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The post Yair Cherki is famous for making Israelis understand Haredim. Now he wants Haredim to understand that he’s gay. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI
As friends, relatives and even colleagues dive headlong into our AI future, I’ve been stuck nervously on the platform’s edge. I’m not a skeptic of technology by nature, but by experience. I’ve watched too many shiny new toys come along, promising to make society smarter or better connected, only to become superspreaders of confusion, alienation and disenfranchisement.
So when you tell me a machine can summarize any book, draw any picture or write any email, my first thought is going to be, What could possibly go wrong?
This, too, was the reaction of the Haredi rabbis who declared a communal fast over AI last month.
“If at the push of a button, I can get a hold of a d’var torah for my Shabbos meal from AI, to us, that’s a problem,” a Haredi leader told me at the time. “No, no — I want you to open the book and read it and come up with a question and come up with an answer. That’s part of what’s holy about learning Torah. It’s not just end result. It’s the process.”
Curious about their logic, I spent some time tracking down Lakewood’s gedolim to learn more. This was no straightforward task — I found it easier to get a hold of their wives than the great rabbis themselves. Even at dinner hour, these titans of Torah study were still in the beit midrash. But eventually I got through to three — thanks to my cousin Jeffrey, who knew a rav who knew a rav — and that was fortunate, because I came away with the Jewish skeleton key to our brave new world.
That key is the Jewish value of עֲמֵילוּת (ameilut), or toil. As far as Jewish values go, ameilut is an obscure one. It lacks the celebrity swagger of its better-known peers like chesed and tzedakah or the political power of tikkun olam. It was never associated with a biblical matriarch or carved into a golem’s forehead. Yet I believe it is just as crucial. Yes, toiling is a mitzvah. And in the age of AI, ameilut can be a human road map.
The word’s root appears a couple dozen times in the Hebrew Bible — unsurprisingly, it’s a recurring theme in Job — but its salience comes not from the Torah but from commentary on Leviticus 26:3, which establishes ameilut as a sacred endeavor. When God implores Israel to “walk with” the commandments, Rashi, an 11th century rabbi whose commentaries are considered authoritative, reinterpreted this to mean that God wants Jews to be ameilim b’torah — toiling in Torah study. He is reinterpreting God’s command that we walk and move forward to also mean that we should take time to stand still, turn over (and over) the same words to find new meaning and view getting stuck as a sign of progress.
For Haredim — who pronounce it ameilus — the notion that struggle can be its own reward underpins a life spent poring over sefarim in the beit midrash (and missing phone calls from the Jewish press). It follows that ChatGPT, which transforms knowledge from something developed to something consumed, is anathema to their approach. They’ve realized that making learning easy has actually made learning hard.
To be sure, the goals of the Haredi world are not exactly the same as mine. Those communities are famously insular, wary of the internet and especially cognizant of secular society’s pernicious influence. I’m basically the opposite: I love to mix it up (including with Haredi Jews) and am extremely online. A little narishkeit is good for the soul, as far as I can tell.
But I’ve found that ameilut-maxxing translates pretty well to non-religious life, too. It’s an imperative to embrace the challenge. As a notoriously limited chef, I’m now toiling in cookbooks; as a writer, I can cherish the blank page. Reframing the hard part as the good part, then, is a reminder that the toil is actually our divine right. Because ameilut is something AI can’t experience, replicate or understand. It is the very essence of what it means to be alive.
The post The one Jewish value everyone should hold dear in the age of AI appeared first on The Forward.
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Mistrial Declared in Case of Students Charged After Stanford Anti-Israel Protests
FILE PHOTO: A student attends an event at a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at Stanford University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Stanford, California U.S., April 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in a case of five current and former Stanford University students related to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests when demonstrators barricaded themselves inside the school president’s office.
Twelve protesters were initially charged last year with felony vandalism, according to prosecutors who said at least one suspect entered the building by breaking a window. Police arrested 13 people on June 5, 2024, in relation to the incident and the university said the building underwent “extensive” damage.
The case was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court against five defendants charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. The rest previously accepted plea deals or diversion programs.
The jury was deadlocked. It voted nine to three to convict on the felony charge of vandalism and eight to four to convict on the felony charge to trespass. Jurors failed to reach a verdict after deliberations.
The charges were among the most serious against participants in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protest movement on US colleges in which demonstrators demanded an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and Washington’s support for its ally along with a divestment of funds by their universities from companies supporting Israel.
Prosecutors in the case said the defendants engaged in unlawful property destruction.
“This case is about a group of people who destroyed someone else’s property and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. That is against the law,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement, adding he sought a new trial.
Anthony Brass, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told the New York Times his side was not defending lawlessness but “the concept of transparency and ethical investment.”
“This is a win for these young people of conscience and a win for free speech,” Brass said, adding “humanitarian activism has no place in a criminal courtroom.”
Protesters had renamed the building “Dr. Adnan’s Office” after Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian doctor who died in an Israeli prison after months of detention.
Over 3,000 were arrested during the 2024 US pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to media tallies. Some students faced suspension, expulsion and degree revocation.
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Exclusive: FM Gideon Sa’ar to Represent Israel at 1st Board of Peace Meeting in Washington on Thursday
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar speaks next to High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas, and EU commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Suica as they hold a press conference on the day of an EU-Israel Association Council with European Union foreign ministers in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
i24 News – Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar will represent the country at the inaugural meeting of the Gaza Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday, i24NEWS learned on Saturday.
The arrangement was agreed upon following a request from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will not be able to attend.
Netanyahu pushed his Washington visit forward by a week, meeting with US President Donald Trump this week to discuss the Iran situation.
A U.N. Security Council resolution, adopted in mid-November, authorized the Board of Peace and countries working with it to establish an international stabilization force in Gaza and build on the ceasefire agreed in October under a Trump plan.
Under Trump’s Gaza plan, the board was meant to supervise Gaza’s temporary governance. Trump thereafter said the board, with him as chair, would be expanded to tackle global conflicts.