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Moment Magazine is known for its award-winning journalism, first-rate cultural and literary criticism and signature “Big Questions”—all from an independent Jewish perspective. Founded by Leonard Fein and Elie Wiesel in 1975, it has been led by Nadine Epstein since 2004. Moment is published under the auspices of the nonprofit Center for Creative Change and is home to projects such as the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, The Wide River Project, The Antisemitism Project, The Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest and MomentLive! public affairs programming. Learn more at momentmag.com.

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Volume 51, Number 2

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MOMENT BIG QUESTION What Does It Mean to Be Pro-Israel in 2025?

In 2012, we asked people from across the Jewish world and the political spectrum what it meant to be pro-Israel. Thirteen years later, we ask them what’s changed.

Editor: Jennifer Bardi

MOMENT

Do Young American Jews Define Being Pro-Israel in 2025?

Having seen anti-Israel outrage up close, four twentysomethings express a mix of hope and grief.

Editor: Jennifer Bardi

MOMENT

Some politically conservative Jews held out hope that the Nazis would see them as Germans too. by Dan Freedman

MOMENT FICTION

The Sound That Turtles Make

After his wife’s death, a rabbi ruminates on the smiles and silences in his marriage. by Michael Orbach

Don’t miss the important stories we publish on momentmag.com in between print issues. These include Jean Bloch Rosensaft on Marion Wiesel; Jacob Forman on the new threats facing South African Jews; Gloria Levitas on three generations of Timothée Chalamet’s showbiz family; Ori Nir on Israeli hostages; plus the last Jews of Tajikistan and more.

4 From the Editor-in-Chief

Dinner with the 1947 partition plan by Nadine Epstein

6 The Conversation

12 Opinions

Is Turkey Israel’s next big problem? by Ilan Berman

Don’t give an inch to Israel’s enemies by Naomi Ragen

Trump and the rise of lawlessness by Konstanty Gebert

Talking back in the age of Trump by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

16 Moment Debate

Do Jews have a special obligation to hide migrants or refugees who are in danger of deportation?

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklovitz vs. William A. Galston

18 Ask the Rabbis

Does Jewish law require that hostages be redeemed regardless of cost?

21 Jewish Word

Chaver: friend or lover? by Megan Naftali

22 Visual Moment

The secret life of an Art Deco diva by Diane M. Bolz

54 Talk of the Table

This Passover, try Inquisition soup by Vered Guttman

56 Literary Moment

Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America review by Robert Siegel

The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing review by Robert Alter

On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning review by Carlin Romano

61 Poem

“The Poem’s Journey” by Myra Sklarew

63 Caption Contest

Cartoon by Ben Schwartz 64 Spice Box

from the editor-in-chief

DINNER WITH THE 1947 PARTITION PLAN

One Saturday night not long ago, I went to dinner at a restaurant with a dear friend. He brought along a black leather satchel, his Havdalah kit. When we sat down, he poured wine, lit the braided candle and sang the Hebrew prayers in his sonorous voice. Then he surprised me by drawing an envelope from the depths of the Havdalah bag and laying on the table an original January 13, 1898 edition of the Parisian newspaper L’Aurore, featuring Émile Zola’s exposé accusing the French government of antisemitism and the French military of unjustly convicting Alfred Dreyfus of treason.

As my friend, a collector of first editions, pulled out other items, I understood I was witnessing a show-and-tell of Jewish history. Amid wine glasses and a platter of steaming roasted eggplant, he set down an original letter written by David Ben-Gurion, and then both the German and Hebrew first editions of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. These were fascinating, but it was the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan booklet printed in Hebrew on the brown paper of a past era that captured my attention. My eyes kept returning to the page with the map that illustrated how British Mandatory Palestine was to be divided between the river and the sea.

I hadn’t looked at it for years. There they were, three chunks of territory designated for the Palestinians, connected by thin lines depicting land bridges, and

three inverse sections of land representing the Jewish state. The Palestinian areas were Gaza; a wedge in the north that included the Mediterranean coast between Akko and Lebanon; and a huge swath of land encompassing the West Bank and the international city of Jerusalem.

Many thoughts marched through my mind as I gazed at this map—in addition to worries that food or drink might drip on it and the other valuable documents scattered about the table. Thinking of the UN today, I marveled at how twothirds of the countries participating in that young international institution, including the Soviet Union, had come together to solve a problem. I thought of the Jewish leaders of the time who were very divided about accepting the Partition Plan but ultimately did. I also thought of the very divided Arab leaders, who ultimately chose war instead.

It struck me that I was holding in my hands the origin document of the twostate solution. This 78-year-old map resembling a six-piece puzzle is the founda-

BY NADINE EPSTEIN

tion of the idea that in the long run there must be a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian homeland in the Middle East— two separate nations, side by side and, by necessity, geographically intertwined. My inner history nerd was tickled, but mostly I just felt sad. I still believe that ultimately two states are the way to go. Yet it now seems more likely that the modern strongmen of the Middle East, working with the one now running the United States, will create a different geopolitical and economic configuration. Any way you look at it, the path forward seems to have irrevocably changed. Tragically, the all-too-human tension between rational and irrational wants, between compromise—the main ingredient of wise problem-solving—and the warrior way, may have sabotaged it. From all sides.

In this issue we revisit a question we first asked in 2012 but that has been weighing on many hearts and minds since October 7, 2023: What does it mean to be pro-Israel today? Evoking fear and fury, this question is tearing the American Jewish community apart. One of my friends is so angry at what Israel has done in Gaza that not only has she washed her hands of Israel, she is ready to walk away from Judaism. Another friend insists that just about every single Palestinian would choose to destroy Israel given the opportunity. This same person believes that without Israel, diaspora Jews are lost. Yet another friend doesn’t care what havoc President Donald Trump wreaks on American democracy, as long as he helps Israel and fights antisemitism at home. The fractures run deep, and I can’t help but observe how people often draw, with real certainty, very different lessons from the same events. Even worse is their belief that they know what others think. That’s why posing this question to people with varied opinions is so important. Despite the chasms, I hold out hope that reading their perspectives will help spark new ideas and build bridges in our divided world.

A new darkness is falling on civilization. But there are ways to stave off darkness. One subtle strategy that works is to resist the pull of polarization. To

combat this, we must steer clear of the extreme language and simple narratives (the kinds our brains like!) that are tearing us apart, and instead, boldly explore the complexities of the issues dividing us to discover what holds us together.

That’s what we do at Moment. We speak and curate conversations in a non-hysterical way that allows nuance, trust and agreement to grow. We do this even though we know full well that expressing certainty and anger feels good and excites people. We do this because empathy is not an either-or choice: We can hold more than one thought—and more than one people—in our hearts and minds at one time. We do this as a counterweight to the know-it-all snark that often masquerades as reporting these days. This is what wise journalism looks like in a deeply polarized era.

I hope Moment speaks to you in a deep way and that you’ll join us in pushing back against the polarization that feeds antisemitism, conspiracy theories in general and many other societal ills. Please support our important work and reach out to me at editor@ momentmag.com to let me know how you are navigating these tumultuous times. I really want to hear from you. We’re all in this together.

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the conversation

LET’S BE FRANK(L)

GIVING THE VIENNESE THEIR DUE

THE FACT THAT FRANKL LOVED TO LAUGH ABOUT PUNS, AS DO I, (RE)AFFIRMS HIS GENUINE HUMANITY.

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I had been reading a noteworthy new book by Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World, which mentions Viktor Frankl in the context of Vienna’s creative contributions to the world, but—as I now can better recognize—he’s discussed all too briefly. The bright blue-on-white cover of Moment’s Winter 2025 issue featuring Noah Phillips’s long-form profile of Frankl (“In Search of the Meaning of Viktor Frankl”) immediately sucked me in and held my attention. From Frankl’s pre-Holocaust upbringing and early thinking about psychiatry to his depressing Holocaust experience; from logotherapy’s focus on the will to find meaning vis-à-vis Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle and Alfred Adler’s will to power to the emergence of the influential and still-best-selling book Man’s Search for Meaning; to Professor Frankl’s somewhat arrogant life after achieving global fame—I found it to be a holistic portrait that expanded my growing appreciation of Vienna’s history and the extraordinary role played by its Jewish population.

Bert Foer

Washington, DC

FRANKL’S LESSONS

I simply cannot thank you enough for the extensive insights into the life, mind and writings of Viktor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning is the only book I ever read that caused me to immediately purchase and give copies to all of my relatives and close friends. In addition, during my scores of teaching years at the secondary and university levels, I was able to share, with my all-too-often beleaguered, poverty-stricken, refugee-origin and/or physically and mentally challenged students the admonishment: You can choose your own attitude in dealing with what you face. The fact that Frankl loved to laugh about puns, as do I, (re)

affirms his genuine humanity.

Bill Younglove

Lakewood, CA

GOOD MEDICINE SEND IN THE CLOWNS

Thank you for the thoughtful and nuanced article about medical clowning in Israel. (“Do Clowns Have the Power to Heal?” Winter 2025). Josie Glausiusz captured in amazing ways both the deeply human aspects of medical clowning and the scientific evidence I and others have published on its effectiveness. Her thorough research into the therapeutic benefits of medical clowning helps validate what we see every day in our work. It helps to show that medical clowning isn’t just about entertainment but is a serious therapeutic intervention that can make a real difference in patients’ recovery.

Maya Barash

Vancouver, British Columbia Editor’s note: Barash is a pediatrician who recently published a study on the positive effects of medical clowning in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

A CLOWN TOUR TO RUSSIA

My wife, my two teenage Russian-speaking children and I went on the 2000 Patch Adams Clown Tour to Russia—orphanages, nursing homes, hospitals. Three weeks. It was our first clowning experience. We thought we were there to entertain people and dressed outlandishly, outfitted with rubber chickens, juggling balls and red rubber noses. But my two most memorable experiences were having a severely autistic child grab my finger and run me around in circles for five minutes and sitting in the room of a very elderly actress as she recounted her triumphs on stage and screen—in Russian, which I didn’t speak. Just being there was all they wanted or needed. Glausiusz’s article explains so eloquently why those experiences of 25 years ago are still so vivid in my memory.

Dave Thompson Bellingham, WA

BEHIND THE RED NOSE

Thank you for such a thoughtful and uplifting article about the heroic medical clowns in Israel who bring so much joy, distraction, healing and “normalcy” to the most harrowing times in people’s lives. I have spent many years leading programs in hospitals and truly respect the “serious” healing that clowns bring to patients, families and the hospital staff. “Do Clowns Have the Power to Heal?” eloquently takes us “behind the red nose” to hear how the clowns approach their important work to bring connection, levity and silliness into the darkest times in young children’s lives and elevate the spirits of everyone they encounter. And thank you to Josie Glausiusz for sharing her touching personal story. May she and her family take comfort from the fun and meaningful encounters they experienced during her son Aryeh’s illness.

Lisa Honig Buksbaum New York, NY

DUELING ABRAHAMS

AN UNEXPECTED ORIGIN STORY

In Robert Siegel’s book review (“A Tale Of Dueling Abrahams,” Winter 2025), he says author Anthony Julius rejects positive interpretations of the Akedah and that “Julius offers six different and more problematic readings.” It reminded me of my favorite interpretation, which I came across this Rosh Hashanah in a conversation between comedian Alex Edelman and Rabbi Sharon Brous at IKAR (it’s on YouTube). Edelman suggests that when this story was first written, child sacrifice was common practice in the Middle East among surrounding religions. The shocking part for original audiences would not have been that G-d asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, but rather that Abraham was stopped from doing so. Edelman explains that Judaism itself may have emerged partly as a rejection of child sacrifice: “The reason Judaism was created, frankly, was most likely because people didn’t want to sacrifice their kids anymore.”

Daniel Burstein

Jacksonville, FL

NO ONE SAVES MORE LIVES IN ISRAEL IN TIMES OF CRISIS.

There are many ways to support Israel and its people, but none is more transformative than a gift to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency services system. Your gift to MDA isn’t just changing lives — it’s literally saving them — providing critical care and hospital transport for everyone from victims of heart attacks to rocket attacks.

MOMENT DEBATE

TELL IT TO THE JUDGE!

In a recent “Moment Debate” both sides made some good points, and some were lacking (“Should there be term limits for Supreme Court justices?” November/ December 2024). However, neither addressed the elephant in the room, which is the fact that people are living longer, and their physical and mental health decline as they age—something the writers of the Constitution never considered.

There is now a real possibility that justices could develop dementia before they realize that they need to retire. We could well have justices spend years unable to recognize their colleagues, much less issue a decision. This dwarfs all other arguments. Thus, it is imperative that Supreme Court justices, and all others with lifetime appointments, instead have term limits imposed or mandatory retirement ages. Deborah Prigal Washington, DC

MOMENT DEBATE, ONLINE

“Moment Debate” in the Winter 2025 issue asked the question, “Should there

be broad limits on teen social media use?” Russell Shaw, the head of school of Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC, answered yes to this question, while Anya Kamenetz, a journalist whose books include The Art of Screen Time: Digital Parenting Without Fear, said no.

The responses to the debate on Moment’s social media platforms tended to agree that social media use was a problem but didn’t necessarily think it was a school’s or government’s role to curb it. “Yes, teens spend way too much time on social media,” said Ron Barnes on LinkedIn. “Parents should regulate what their teens are using, not the government.” Agreeing, May Shubert on X, said, “Teen social media use shouldn’t be controlled by government regulation, but by their parents who are responsible for them until [the] age of 18.”

Some on X think limiting social media for teens is a parenting issue, but at the same time they are concerned by what teens can be exposed to on the internet. “You have to be an adult (18 years or older) to do many things in this country. I don’t trust 16-year-olds to vote,” one commenter said, adding they also

shouldn’t be able to drive and that “there are a lot of adult things on the internet and TV. Needs to be looked at.” Others, such as Carolyn Hoxton posting on X, feel it would be difficult for parents to control their children’s social media usage. “Good luck with that. Do you have a teenager????” she asked rhetorically. And the question of whether or not restricting social media use should be a general issue rather than a teen one was also raised by one commenter on X, who said, “There should probably be limits on ADULT social media use too.”

MOMENT DEBATE POLL

We asked Moment’s followers on X to weigh in on the last issue’s Moment Debate. The majority answered “Yes.”

Dealing with the History of National Socialism in Germany’s Immigrant Society

The working group “History(ies) in an Immigrant Society,” at the nonprofit Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, explains its approaches and experiences.

by Jutta Weduwen and Sara Spring

Among the groups with whom Friedlander meets are the neighborhood moms. Neighborhood moms are women with immigrant backgrounds who are active in their urban neighborhoods as family counselors and support other families in their respective native languages. The neighborhood moms themselves have diverse experiences with migration: Some fled to Germany; others came to study or work; some immigrated here as children, others as adults; some have been living in Germany for decades; others immigrated here only recently.

encounters, the organization has for decades been taking a stand against antisemitism, racism, and growing rightwing extremism. The working group focuses on people with immigrant and refugee backgrounds and offers them seminars on the history of National Socialism, antisemitism, and racism. The participants also include the neighborhood moms.

Friedlander describes her encounters with the neighborhood moms: “I experience a lot of empathy among the women. Particularly those who immigrated to this country actually also often have the feeling that they are not wanted here. I always tell the women why I am here, that I went into hiding during National Socialism, that people helped me. Through my own personal history, I show how important humanity is.”

The talks that Friedlander has had as a witness to the Holocaust are part of a multiweek seminar series organized by the working group “History(ies) in an Immigrant Society” at the nonprofit Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. The nonprofit organization was established in the Protestant Church in Germany in 1958 to acknowledge responsibility for the National Socialist crimes. Through international volunteer services such as education and people-to-people

The seminars trace back to an initiative of the Berlin neighborhood moms, who turned to our working group because they lacked knowledge about the National Socialist era and felt they were unable to contribute to the debates on its history. The idea emerged in fall 2005. In the weeks leading up to the day remembering Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), there were many events commemorating and honoring those who perished in the Holocaust. Those gatherings raised questions among the neighborhood moms about the importance of Nazi history and how German society addresses it. They also expressed the desire to visit a concentration camp memorial.

On the initiative of the neighborhood moms, we developed

Neighborhood moms at a seminar with Action Reconciliation Service for Peace in Berlin-Neukölln

educational programs specifically aimed at people who have had little opportunity to study German contemporary history or are particularly interested in discussing Germany’s culture of remembrance. It was particularly important to us to include in the discussion people who are often excluded. Their voices are seldom heard in the media debates or their perspectives are dismissed as irrelevant.

Apart from the neighborhood moms, the seminars have meanwhile also reached numerous influential voices, for example, women from Roma communities, students who have recently fled to Germany, or school social workers who work with youth from immigrant communities.

has for decades been taking racism, and growing rightworking group focuses on people backgrounds and offers them National Socialism, antisemitism, also include the neighborhood moms.

Our educational programs aim to promote dialogue and exchange. In multiweek seminar series, we discuss Nazi history and examine the persecution and destruction of European Jewry, the genocide of the Sinti and Roma, and the persecution and ostracization of other minorities. We visit memorial sites such as the Sachsenhausen former concentration camp memorial, near Berlin. There, we learn about the National Socialist atrocities and also look at the forgotten, repressed memories, the gaps in the culture of remembrance in Germany, and current revisionist tendencies.

“I will never forget her words, when she said to us, ‘you must be the witnesses that we can no longer be.”

The participants especially value encounters with Holocaust survivors like Friedlander because such meetings facilitate a vigorous and in-depth examination of the Holocaust through the intimate experience of a life story. The consequences of persecution and the continuities after 1945 also become tangible.

to an initiative of the Berlin turned to our working group knowledge about the National Socialist to contribute to the debates emerged in fall 2005. In the weeks remembering Kristallnacht (the Night many events commemorating perished in the Holocaust. Those among the neighborhood moms Nazi history and how German expressed the desire to visit a

“During the seminar, Margot Friedlander visited with us and read her story. I will never forget her words, when she said to us, ‘you must be the witnesses that we can no longer be.’ […] We can learn from history: We want to engage in the fight against persecution and discrimination of minorities – especially also since we ourselves belong to a minority.” (Dalal Hassanein)

neighborhood moms, we developed

We are seeing great interest in the study of Nazi history as well as enormous empathy and compassion for the victims of Nazi persecution. For many, participation in the seminars is a launchpad for their personal engagement in support of tolerance, solidarity, and against exclusion. Many of our participants are personally affected by racism. They often report that there is little regard for their experiences and stories in Germany. In our seminars, participants often talk about their personal biographies and experiences. For this reason, we work with biographical techniques to look at the life stories of the participants. This approach provides the opportunity for participants to develop their personal histories into stories, to share them with others, and to experience appreciation for different life journeys. Given the diversity of biographies in our immigrant society, this is a valuable approach to reveal commonalities, but also the inequalities of opportunity in society. We often hear our participants with immigrant backgrounds say that they’ve been told that the history of National Socialism is “not their history.” In this context, the discourse on remembrance can also lead to exclusion if, due to their immigrant experience, people encounter surprise or even repudiation when they attempt to engage on the subject of Nazi history.

“We as immigrants often find that no one listens to us. Either I am not seen at all or I am judged on my appearance because I wear a hijab. Many people ask me why I am interested in the history. And I say, ‘I have been living here for years and why shouldn’t it interest me?’ And I ask in response: ‘Would you ask a native-born German such a question?’” (Nuriye S.)

It is not uncommon for participants to have their own family biographies relating back to Nazi history. One neighborhood mom reported in the seminar about her Polish grandfather who was deported to Auschwitz. Another participant who fled to Germany from Kosovo recounted how her grandfather fought as a partisan against Nazi Germany.

Neighborhood mom, left, with Margot Friedlander, right

Dealing with the History of National Socialism in Germany’s Immigrant Society

The working group “History(ies) in an Immigrant Society,” at the nonprofit Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, explains its approaches and experiences.

“Unfortunately we are not always welcome with our history. I have sometimes been dismissed when it comes to the subject of National Socialism, that some people maybe sense reproach on my part and prefer to repress the history. That a far-right party is gaining influence in Germany, of all places, shocks me and makes me nervous. Denial of history is dangerous and lays the foundation for right-wing extremist violence like the murders in Hanau.”

(Serbez Heindorf)

by Jutta Weduwen and Sara Spring

An important goal of our educational work is to raise awareness of the effects of antisemitism and racism in our current time. Also in our seminars, antisemitic and racist narratives are sometimes expressed among the participants. These antisemitic views can have very different origins. The stories can relate to narratives within immigrant communities, but also to narratives within the majority population in society. In the seminars, we use dialogue techniques to prompt critical analysis and self-reflection about one’s own images and attitudes. To bring about such change, sensitivity and careful trust-building are needed in the educational process.

“In my conversations with neighborhood moms, I talk about my time spent in hiding in Berlin. We were actually supposed to escape together, my mother, brother, and I. Then I decided to go into hiding.” Margot Friedlander is referring to her meetings with Berlin’s neighborhood moms. As a Jew, Friedlander was persecuted by the Nazis and survived the Holocaust and deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp by going into hiding in Berlin. The rest of her family perished. Fifteen years ago, she decided to return to Berlin from the United States to tell her story in Germany. Among the groups with whom Friedlander meets are the neighborhood moms. Neighborhood moms are women with immigrant backgrounds who are active in their urban neighborhoods as family counselors and support other families in their respective native languages. The neighborhood moms themselves have diverse experiences with migration: Some fled to Germany; others came to study or work; some immigrated here as children, others as adults; some have been living in Germany for decades; others immigrated here only recently.

particularly virulent and violent. Beyond the extreme right, there is widespread superficial agreement that there cannot be any antisemitism in Germany after the Holocaust. This has evolved into an “antisemitism without antisemites,” which hinders critical self-analysis. Like other nations, Germany, too, was part of a long tradition of anti-Judaism rooted in Christianity. The echoes of those resentments did not disappear in 1945, but resurface time and again in modern antisemitism. Particularly after October 7, antisemitism has been virulent within leftist groups, some of whom, in a post-colonialist approach, have one-sidedly positioned themselves behind the Palestinians and in many respects argued in an anti-Israel or antisemitic fashion. Also within Muslim and immigrant communities, a distinct antisemitism can be fed from the media and narratives from the countries of origin.

Neighborhood mom visiting the memorial site of the Sachsenhausen former concentration camp near Berlin

“We as immigrants often find that no one listens

us. Either I am not seen at all or I am judged on my appearance because I wear a hijab.”

As many studies show, antisemitism is prevalent to a degree in all parts of society in Germany, both within the majority population and among social minority groups alike. Right-wing extremist antisemitism is

The German public debates on antisemitism and racism are often polarizing. Whenever the public one-sidedly focuses on antisemitic resentments among immigrants, there is a tendency to repeat racial prejudices by attributing antisemitism particularly to immigrants and Muslims. In doing so, the majority population in society risks losing sight of antisemitism within its own ranks. Our experience shows that critical discourse on antisemitism can only succeed for everyone –irrespective of nationality or heritage – if the complexities of denial and repression are also taken into account.

Sara Spring is project manager of the working group “History(ies) in an Immigrant Society” at Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. She studied history and public history in Berlin and Jerusalem.

Jutta Weduwen is managing director of Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. She studied sociology in Hamburg, Jerusalem, and Berlin. Jutta Weduwen is a member of the Spokesperson Council of the National Working Group on Church and Right-Wing Extremism in Germany.

On the initiative of the neighborhood moms, we developed

Neighborhood moms at a seminar with Action Reconciliation Service for Peace in Berlin-Neukölln

OPINION ILAN BERMAN

IS TURKEY ISRAEL’S NEXT BIG PROBLEM?

Under Erdoğan, a once-neutral nation flexes its regional muscle.

When the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad abruptly fell to Islamist forces back in December, it took a key Iranian ally off the board. On the heels of Israeli gains against two other Iranian proxies—Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah—it also helped put Israel’s chief regional nemesis on the strategic back foot.

But in the wake of Assad’s ouster, Israeli officials are nervously eyeing another potential challenge. After years of focusing overwhelmingly on the threat posed by Iran and its assorted affiliates, Israel now faces a resurgence of Sunni radicalism, backstopped by an increasingly powerful and imperial-minded Turkey.

There’s ample reason for policymakers in Jerusalem to be concerned. By all accounts, the anti-Assad offensive spearheaded by onetime al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was orchestrated in Ankara. Turkey’s government has long maintained close ties to Syria’s rebel factions and astutely mobilized them to exploit the fragility of the Syrian regime after its patron had been dealt serious setbacks.

Since taking power, HTS has returned the favor. It has launched discussions with Ankara about a strategic partnership that would include a significant military foothold in the country. And it has signaled that it would take a sterner line against the country’s Kurdish rebels (a core Turkish demand). All of which has given Turkey a significant stake in the new, post-Assad Syria.

As a result, “there is a real possibility that Iranian influence in Syria will be replaced by that of Turkey,” says retired IDF Brigadier General Eran Ortal, who previously headed the Dado Center, the Israeli military’s in-house think tank. “No one knows what the possible Turkish role on our border will be. It is a major

regional power, a NATO member, a major defense manufacturer and an extremely Islamist, anti-Israel player.” Indeed, “we can already see [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s attempts to use the new Syrian regime to further his claims to the Eastern Mediterranean,” notes Ortal, now a senior scholar at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

He isn’t the only one worried. An Israeli government committee recently warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Turkey was exhibiting increasingly overt regional ambitions—and that those designs could bring Ankara into direct confrontation with Jerusalem in the future.

“The threat from Syria could evolve into something even more dangerous than the Iranian threat,” the commission, headed by former Israeli National Security Adviser Jacob Nagel, laid out. In response, it counseled, Israel needs to ramp up its defense expenditures, “increasing the defense budget by up to NIS 15 billion [$4.1 billion] annually over the next five years to ensure the Israel Defense Forces are equipped to handle challenges posed by Turkey, alongside other regional threats.”

These concerns are all the more striking because Turkey was once an ally of the Jewish state. Back in the 1990s, following the Soviet collapse, ties between the two countries had blossomed, animated by what analysts termed a “common sense of otherness” amid the region’s shifting politics.

Over time, however, Jerusalem and Ankara fell out in spectacular fashion. The rise of a new, Islamist bent to Turkish politics, encapsulated by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), tilted the country in a decidedly anti-Western direction and away from partnership with Israel as well.

Burgeoning ties to Middle Eastern states led Ankara to become an increasingly vocal critic of Israel, with Erdogan styling

“ TURKEY WAS ONCE AN ALLY OF THE JEWISH STATE.

himself as a protector of the Palestinians. Escalating diplomatic skirmishes and high-profile clashes such as the notorious 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, in which Israel killed ten Turks in the process of raiding a Turkish boat as it took part in a flotilla attempting to break the Gaza blockade, eventually led to a full diplomatic rupture between the two countries.

Ever since, Erdogan has sought to burnish his credentials at Israel’s expense. He has done so by hosting Palestinian radicals; by helping Iran to bust Western sanctions designed to curb its nuclear program; and by agitating for an Islamic alliance to unite against Israel.

So, does Turkey rank as Israel’s next great foe? Not necessarily. As astute Turkey watchers point out, Islamist sentiment in that country is abating, replaced by a more nationalist, realpolitik ethos. Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute calls this the “third phase” of Turkish politics, in which the country is “basically married to no part of the world...just in love with itself.”

Or, more accurately, in love with an expanded vision of its potential regional power and influence. Those prospects have been greatly strengthened by Erdogan’s successful orchestration of Assad’s ouster and are likely to spur still more regional activism on Ankara’s part. It will be up to Israel, long preoccupied with the Iranian threat, to adapt to the results.

Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

DON'T GIVE AN INCH TO ISRAEL'S ENEMIES

The inability to face hard choices has brought the country to its knees.

Anyone who can write a learned essay predicting what will happen in the world tomorrow or a week from now—let alone a month or a year—is not a brilliant thinker but a presumptuous fool. We are in uncharted waters. In Israel, after more than 17 months of battle, hundreds of IDF casualties and more than 1,000 civilian deaths, our genocidal enemy still holds our citizens hostage, bizarrely dictating terms as they sit among the rubble of their decimated terrorist kingdom.

We gave them that power over us. Is it admirable that we are willing to open our jails to free mass murderers, people who blew up the Park Hotel, who murdered the Fogel family, who raped and beheaded a 17-year-old religious girl? Or is it despicable weakness and catering to political pressure? And if we finally give in to their demand that we leave the Gaza Strip, will that be the ultimate sacrifice for human life, or the ultimate collapse of our will to exist?

So far, Israel has firmly refused to leave Gaza with Hamas still intact, its pockets open for the flood of international billions that will no doubt come pouring in unimpeded the moment Hamas declares victory and its intention to rebuild. Such a scenario would be a disaster for Israel, whose nine million people would be in the direct firing line of homicidal jihadist maniacs and Hitler-worshippers once more.

And yet, over and over, our prime minister dutifully sends out his “negotiators.” What is there to discuss besides how, and at what pace, we shall commit suicide and destroy our safety and security by leaving the hard-won battlefields of Gaza?

There is an insoluble problem here. Trump-appointed negotiator Adam Boehler didn’t see it: “I think that we can reach a deal between what Hamas and Israel want which will allow the release

of the hostages,” he told CNN. He was dreaming, and has since been sidelined. What Hamas wants and what Israel wants are diametrically opposed. To paraphrase a line from the musical Chicago, we see ourselves alive; they see us dead.

Don’t misunderstand me. I think President Trump and his entire administration are probably the most pro-Israel in history, and we have taken much strength and encouragement from their nurturing statements in our support. Trump had us at “Release the hostages or all hell will break loose.” But the shocking news that he tried to negotiate directly with Hamas to release American hostages, basically behind our backs, battered Israel still further. U.S. envoy to the Middle East Steven Witkoff has since restored some clarity, firmly rejecting Hamas’s offer to release only the American hostage and remains. (Thank you, Mr. Trump.)

Many countries have negotiated directly with Hamas for the release of their kidnapped citizens. Why not America? Because we like to think, especially with Trump finally in the White House, that America is family. Our family wouldn’t leave hostages who are citizens of Israel behind to save their own.

The unspoken truth that is so painful for Israelis to contemplate is that in order to do what is necessary for Israel’s well-being, we may have to sacrifice the remaining hostages.

The Bibi talking points of “winning the war and saving the hostages” have been sounding hollow for some time now. This inability to face the hard reality of our choices has brought the country to its knees. My neighbor, who has three little kids and spent months as a reservist fighting in Gaza, has been called up again. My grandson also spent time in training just last week. All of them have been called up for the purpose of releasing hell on Gaza and finally ridding us of the death cultists on our borders. The

IDF soldiers preparing for ground activity in Gaza, October 2023.

longer that takes to happen, the longer my neighbor’s wife has to cope alone with the kids and my grandson’s new wife has to cope without her husband. And the entire country has to put off its dream of finally going back to normal, whatever “normal” will look like post-October 7.

We need closure. Our entire country was traumatized by the horror of the fate of the Bibas family. The coffins holding the strangled, battered corpses of those two darling babies and their mom haunt our dreams. Add to that the testimonies of hostages released alive, and the daily (wrongheaded in my opinion) release of information on what went wrong with our military and our government on October 7, and every single Israeli needs the catharsis of a clear victory to go on as a nation.

For in many ways, these events are a replay of the Holocaust. What Israelis need now more than anything is to see that the Zionist dream with its promise of security for the Jewish people is real and not a fantasy, and that this time our antisemitic murderers will finally pay for what they’ve done, and pay in full. That is the only end possible for our nation. And that outcome is non-negotiable.

Naomi Ragen lives in Zichron Yaakov, Israel, and is the author of 14 novels, most recently The Enemy Beside Me.

THE RULE OF LAWLESSNESS

From Gaza to Ukraine, the Trump administration is inviting a world of unchecked aggression.

When President Donald Trump announced his plan for Gaza in February, critics immediately pointed out that it was immoral (put forward without consulting those affected by it), criminal (ethnic cleansing) and undoable (neither Egypt, Jordan nor the Palestinians want any part of it, nor is anyone willing to finance it). Fewer bothered to focus on the plan’s fundamental illegality. Apparently, it was no concern of Trump’s that it is legally impossible simply to change the status of a territory by fiat.

This was not an oversight: The plans Trump has floated to take over Greenland, Panama or Canada also lack any legal basis. This might seem unimportant, since they, like the Gaza plan, are utterly undoable. Still, it’s hardly reassuring that the country that until recently was the leader of the free world did not massively break international law only because its intentions could not be put into practice. Especially as the “free world” itself, based as it is on democracy and rule of law, is increasingly coming under threat.

Another Trump proposal—the still developing deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine—shares all the features of these other initiatives except, unfortunately, for the undoability. Although for now the Trump administration is engaging in what look like pragmatic attempts to negotiate a Russia-Ukraine agreement, it would be perfectly doable for Moscow and Washington to impose capitulation on the embattled country, since without U.S. support Ukraine would go under anyway. To be sure, European support, already greater than America’s, could gradually fill in the gap. But even if the EU is willing, this will take time. More important, however—and more pressing to those of us here in Poland and the Baltic states—is the U.S. choice to disregard the main transatlantic lesson of the 20th century, which is that if the

United States does not counter aggression in Europe as soon as it happens, it will have to repel it later, at much greater expense of treasure and blood. The Trump administration’s initial moves on Ukraine suggested that it has drawn the opposite lesson. In all its actions toward Ukraine, starting with its vote against a UN resolution confirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the United States sends the message that it can live with lawlessness—by others and possibly itself.

This sends a dire message to all Europeans: You’re on your own. To be sure, the United States has no intrinsic obligation to defend Europe—but withdrawing the support freely offered by Washington for the last 80 years, at a time when Russia is already fighting a war of aggression, not only betrays the victim but encourages further lawlessness. It is a green light to future Russian imperialist designs. And Putin has made his goal explicit: to roll back NATO to where it stood in 1989 and make Central and Eastern Europe again a Soviet sphere of influence. This need not necessarily mean war— but Poland has a border with Russia in Kaliningrad, and Russia has a military presence in Belarus, as it will in whatever is left of Ukraine. With the United States out of the picture, no Polish government would be able to, say, refuse to grant Russia an extraterritorial corridor connecting Kaliningrad and Belarus, fight against a reoccupation of the Baltics, or resist a Russian takeover of Poland’s petrochemical industry—to name only the most obvious future Russian moves. Our only alternative is to have our cities become new versions of Bucha, complete with war crimes, and still lose in the end.

As we painfully learned in the last century, the best way to counter aggression is to build a legal system that deters it and, crucially, is endorsed by a strong and supportive international coalition. This is what the United States did, quite effectively, in the post-World War II

“

THE DIRE MESSAGE TO ALL EUROPEANS: YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN.

era. As a bonus, this system helped to bring about the demise of communism. The main factor, of course, was the system’s own unredeemable ineffectiveness and the resistance of peoples to its evil. But had there not been a shining alternative present, what sense would that resistance have made?

The Trump administration’s policies are directed not at this or that default of international law, but at the rule of law itself, as seen in such seemingly minor examples as its sanctions against the International Criminal Court, adopted as Trump was putting forward his illegal Gaza plan. True, the court’s warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant were fatally flawed, but the U.S. sanctions targeted the court itself, not any flaws in its performance. This disregard seems also consistent with how the administration treats U.S. law—the attack on birthright citizenship is a flagrant example.

Such a stance implies the active rejection of both lessons of 20th-century resistance to the triumph of violence—the pragmatic and the ideological one. The bottom line is that the United States can no longer be regarded as a standard-bearer of the rule of law. It’s true that U.S. democracy, however weakened, still remains an incomparably preferable option to the alternative, exemplified by Russia, China and Iran, their proxies and associates. But can we accept that the best thing to be said for the city on the hill is that it is not a slum?

Konstanty Gebert is a journalist in Warsaw, Poland.

WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?

The value of talking back in the age of Trump.

Since January 20, when TrumpMusk, Inc. began to demolish the life-saving programs and humanistic advances of the last hundred years, progressives have been lamenting, “What can we do? How can we stop this?”

The obvious answer is, Ramp up our political engagement: Register new Democratic voters. Volunteer to work at the polls. Hold politicians’ feet to the fire. Lobby our legislators. Post comments online. Start our own Substacks. Donate as much as we can to candidates of substance—ideally charismatic visionaries who can lead us into the light.

The less obvious answer is, Keep talking back. Civil confrontation is one of the most potent forms of political resistance. Talking back means not letting a neighbor get away with a caustic comment about Jews and money. Nipping a cousin’s latest conspiracy theory in the bud. Not letting frustration or hopelessness paralyze our vocal cords.

As a political modality, talking back gets scant attention until someone famous does it. Alicia Keys didn’t just say thank you when she accepted her award at the Grammys. “This is not the time to shut down the diversity of voices we’ve seen on this stage,” she said. “DEI is not a threat, it’s a gift. The more voices, the more powerful the sound.” Likewise, Chris Kluwe, a former NFL football player, talked back to the Huntington Beach, CA, City Council about its plan to put a plaque extolling MAGA on the wall of the public library. “MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement,” Kluwe declared, drawing applause.

We’re not all boldfaced names, though, and it takes a special kind of chutzpah to criticize a family member, friend or neighbor in private life. Older parents don’t appreciate being called out by their kids for using a racist term. Men don’t expect to be scowled at or censured for telling a sexist joke. Gen-

tiles can get testy when Jews explain why erecting a creche in the public square makes us feel “othered.”

Thanks to the feminist epiphanies that gobsmacked me more than 50 years ago, I find it impossible to ignore anti-woman slurs or sexist insults. In the 1990s, a friend gave a dinner party and put me next to a Nobel laureate whose research I’d drawn upon for one of my books. Whenever I asked him a question, the scientist directed his eyes and his answers to the men at the table. His dismissiveness was flagrant enough that other guests squirmed. I debated my options: turn my back on him and swallow the indignity, or talk back and ruin the party. I talked back. The scientist and his wife left in a huff. I apologized profusely to my host and the remaining guests, but they said the confrontation was “great theater.”

One Tuesday, during a weekly political discussion group I attend on Zoom— that day it was nine women, three men— one of the men referred to “the female president of Mexico,” meaning Claudia Sheinbaum. Unable to resist a teachable moment, I asked why her gender was relevant. Did he realize he was reinforcing the notion that a default president is male? Would he have called Emmanuel Macron the male president of France?

A productive interchange ensued. Two other women on the call volunteered their experiences with similar diminutions. The man said he understood. He apologized. Our discussion of tariffs and trade policy continued where it had left off.

“I’m not opening this gate unless you give me a smile.” A young friend of mine told me a security officer at her university greeted her with that line daily. To her, it felt like emotional blackmail, as if this man with the power to bar her from campus was entitled to dictate her behavior. Like millions before her, she was afraid to make a scene, so she smiled. But her slavish obedience haunted her, and one

day she finally replied firmly, “Your behavior is unacceptable. Open the gate.” He opened it sheepishly, apologized, and hasn’t done it since.

A final anecdote: One Passover, I attended a seder whose leader went around the table asking everyone to name people who are as bitterly oppressed today as Jews were in Mitzrayim. Most answers were topical—Syrians living under Assad, incarcerated Black men—but one middle-aged man said, “45.” Later, I realized he meant Donald Trump, the 45th American president. The man was actually equating Biden’s treatment of his defeated opponent with our people’s 400 years of enslavement in Egypt. Had I understood, I would have challenged him loud and clear. I wish I had.

Whether we’re taken seriously or patronized, ignored or ridiculed, once we articulate our reactions they’re out there circulating in the cosmos, imprinted on our listeners’ psyches, recorded in the book of life. Talking back tells the world that we’re not indifferent to its fate; that passivity is not an option; that we steadfastly believe in human perfectibility and the possibility of political and social transformation. Just as a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can alter the weather across the globe, what we say in response to wrongheadedness or wrongdoing can be seismic enough to discomfort the comfortable and change the most made-up of minds.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the author of 12 books, most recently Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy.

moment debate

YES “

Do Jews have a special obligation to hide migrants or refugees who are in danger of deportation? Yes. I see three primary reasons why Jews should be at the front lines of such a movement. First, because the history of the Jews is one of frequently being refugees. For roughly 2,000 years we were second-class citizens at best, and often displaced.

Second, our texts not only command us to save lives but also have a very unique and robust moral commitment to refugees. In fact, the Torah tells us once to love God, once to love your fellow Jew, but twice—in Leviticus and Deuteronomy—to love the ger, sometimes translated as the stranger, which certainly in my view includes the refugee.

Finally, xenophobia right now is in the zeitgeist. People have the illusion of being under attack from the refugee and asylum-seeking communities. A lot of political energy is being directed there, and we’re called to respond to it.

People sometimes call this “the Anne Frank question.” Is that a useful parallel to today’s situation? While there are clear parallels between protecting a refugee from being deported to a very dangerous situation and providing sanctuary to a Jew in the Holocaust, there are also vast differences in context, so I think we should resist comparisons. But I do find inspiration from the countless righteous gentiles who risked their lives to provide sanctuary for Jews. That history is a moral charge to us. The stakes are often just as high for the refugee, and the risks to us are likely much lower than they were for those providing sanctuary in those moments. So I’d push back a little against the comparison, while also being inspired by it.

Our

texts not only command us to save lives but also have a very unique and robust moral commitment to refugees.

RABBI SHMULY YANKLOVITZ

How do we decide when it’s OK to break laws to help others? The principle of Dina d’malchuta dina, that we are bound by the laws of the land, is important to honor. And yet we sometimes don’t obey secular laws that contradict Torah. Defining those red lines is a very interesting question. For example, Jews engaged in civil disobedience in communist Russia to study Torah and perform circumcisions, and also in the U.S. civil rights movement and with Cesar Chavez and his movement for the rights of immigrant workers. Civil disobedience actions such as getting arrested at a protest are important but symbolic. Civil disobedience in the sanctuary movement can be lifesaving: It’s literally providing physical security, standing up not just for someone’s political rights but for their basic survival. So it feels clear to me that a Jewish legal perspective would sanction such civil disobedience.

When the current administration stripped houses of worship of their traditional protection from ICE raids, that was a really aggressive move telling faith communities that they do not have a moral calling above the law.

How much should we weigh the consequences—the danger to migrants, or to ourselves? If one feels that one’s life would be at risk, one certainly wouldn’t be obligated to provide sanctuary.

The danger might not only be of personal persecution. We know that the murderer in the Tree of Life shooting was largely motivated by his belief that that synagogue was involved in refugee advocacy. And so, if a community feels that rising antisemitism combined with anti-refugee sentiment puts the whole community in danger, I don’t think

they’re obligated to embrace that risk. But I do think it is the ideal our community should strive for.

Conversely, I think it’s a very poor moral excuse to say that this is a politically divisive issue and our community should stay out of politically divisive issues. In any case, it’s better to shelter refugees humbly and quietly than to declare sanctuary publicly and symbolically, which can bring more heat than light.

What else should we be doing? First, continuing advocacy to make clear that the Jewish community is concerned with the dignity and protection of asylum seekers and refugees. Second, humanitarian service to help meet the basic needs of people who can’t find jobs or are afraid to look for basic social services. Here in Arizona, for instance, we have a project to provide migrants who need them with supportive services including showers. Third, learning and teaching. We should educate ourselves and others about the plight of refugees fleeing environmental destruction, poverty, gangs and war. Some Jews lately have been expressing far-right, anti-refugee views—a rarity in Jewish history. We need to foster a healthier cultural discourse.

Do people who personally survived persecution through others’ help carry some kind of special obligation to pay it forward? No—we can’t expect or demand victims always to be in leadership. But it is uniquely powerful when we can involve them, and their personal stories can open hearts and inspire others to engage.

Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz is an Orthodox rabbi, founder and president of Uri L’Tzedek (a Jewish social justice organization), and author of 27 books on Jewish ethics.

Do Jews have a special obligation to hide migrants or refugees who are in danger of deportation?

NO “

Deliberately breaking the law for what you consider a good reason gives others an opportunity to break laws with less reason.

WILLIAM A. GALSTON

Do Jews have a special obligation to hide migrants or refugees who are in danger of deportation? No. Obligation is a very strong word—it doesn’t mean it would be nice, or praiseworthy, but that it’s a moral baseline, and if you fall short, you’re culpable. I’m not prepared to take that step. On the other hand, there’s a lot of force to the adjective “special,” because of our history as Jews. We’re famously enjoined 36 times in the Torah to remember that we were strangers in Egypt. So from a Jewish point of view, there is reason to engage questions like this seriously.

People sometimes call this “the Anne Frank question.” Is that a useful parallel to today’s situation? Not sheltering Anne Frank would have condemned her to death, a fate she ultimately suffered. But her helpers were incarcerated, and they might have been executed. What they did was morally admirable in the extreme. They were righteous gentiles, the sorts of people whose names end up in Yad Vashem. But as the moral philosophers say, their act was supererogatory— not obligatory.

I don’t think the case of immigrants in danger of deportation is the same, except for the relatively few who have fled a legitimate fear of persecution, incarceration, even death in their home countries—say, if they’ve unintentionally run afoul of the drug cartels in Guatemala.

If you think that under U.S. law a particular immigrant has a legitimate claim to asylum because of fear of persecution—and you also believe the government is ignoring the law and indiscriminately expelling people back to risk danger and death—well, under those circumstances I might take a risk, a legal risk, to create a visible example of what

can happen when the government itself doesn’t take the law seriously.

But most illegal immigrants in the United States don’t face that kind of threat if deported. That dramatically weakens the case for obstructing the government.

How do we decide when it’s OK to break laws to help others? We can’t know, actually, because—as I learned from that great Jewish thinker Isaiah Berlin—the moral world doesn’t have one simply dominant good. Multiple goods are always in conflict at some point, especially in extreme cases. The moral calculus doesn’t have an algorithm; we have to make an “all things considered” judgment that is inherently contestable.

The problem with deliberately breaking the law for what you consider a good reason is that it gives others an opportunity to break laws with less reason. And the rule of law is itself a very Jewish principle and an essential building block of every decent political order. There’s also the Talmudic maxim that “the law of the land is the law”: Wherever Jews live, they should follow the laws of the community. American Jews in modern times especially should think twice about deliberately breaking laws, since they are citizens in full and get to participate in making those laws.

During the civil rights era, American Jews participated in nonviolent civil disobedience. They felt the cause justified it—a strong argument. Does sheltering people who are in the country without benefit of law fall into the same category as fighting against segregation? I would say no. A liberal democracy has no right to discriminate against citizens on basic rights. But deciding whom to admit to the citizen body is a core democratic

decision. There’s a very strong presumption against impeding those laws.

How much should we weigh the consequences—the danger to migrants, or to ourselves? It’s an important component of the moral calculus—not dispositive, but important. There are two factors that point in opposite directions. The greater the risk to the migrant, the greater the presumption that one must do something to help. The greater the risk to the helper, the lower the presumption that there’s an obligation.

What else should we be doing? First, we should insist on, and organize around, the rule of law. Governments zealously pursuing immigrants are typically indifferent to the facts of individual cases. We see that now, with people being rounded up and treated illegally. Second, Jews ought to financially support lawyers and other groups arguing for case-by-case determinations—I would reach into my pocket for that. Finally, if we are dissatisfied, as we have every right to be, with the immigration laws, we should back leaders who are committed to changing them. I’ve worked on immigration reform for many, many years. It’s steady work! Political circumstances are not salubrious right now for immigration reform. But we have the obligation to continue the fight.

Do people who personally survived persecution through others’ help carry some kind of special obligation to pay it forward? If I were such a person, I think that that would have considerable weight in my calculation.

William A. Galston is Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

ask the rabbis Does Jewish law require that hostages be redeemed regardless of cost?

independent

Jewish law should be reckoned in context rather than in blanket one-size-fitsall applications. While there is barely a mitzvah more urgent than the redemption of captives, the question of cost must be considered—not in funds but in lives. The kidnappers’ demand in the present case was not ransom money but a pause in a war against thousands of sworn mass murderers and the release from imprisonment of hundreds more, all hell-bent on resuming their campaign of mass slaughter and rape against our people at the first opportunity. For every three or four hostages redeemed at this cost, how many dozens of innocents are we risking to be blown to pieces on a school bus one day, or massacred at a concert? Israel abolished the death penalty decades ago. This was a huge mistake, for which we are now paying dearly. In the words of the second-century CE Rabbi Elazar: “Anyone who acts mercifully toward the cruel will in the end act with cruelty toward the

merciful” (Midrash Tanchuma, Metzora, Ch. 1). But here we are. God help us.

Rabbi Gershon Winkler

Walking Stick Foundation Golden, CO

humanist

Maimonides put it plainly: “There is no mitzvah as great as the redemption of captives” (Mishneh Torah, Zeraim, Hilkhot Matnot Aniyim 8:10). This reflects a core Jewish value—pidyon shevuyim, the obligation to redeem captives. Yet even as our tradition exalts this duty, many sages wrestled with the consequences of paying high ransoms, fearing it would invite further hostage-taking. How well do we understand this now as we watch our people come home—alive and dead— for the brutal price of releasing hundreds and thousands of terrorists!

Some later halachists opposed such deals, warning they would endanger future generations. The case of Yahya Sinwar—the architect of October 7— haunts today’s debate. He was among

the 1,027 terrorists freed in 2011 in exchange for Gilad Shalit. And yet, despite these arguments, the Jewish people have made up their minds, expressed in yellow ribbons and anguished cries to “Bring them home.”

In this, we stand with Maimonides. He rooted his view in the Torah’s decrees: “Do not harden your heart” (Deuteronomy 15:7) and “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16). Surely he knew the arguments against excessive ransom. Yet his love for the Jewish people was too great. Like him—and despite all arguments—we refuse to harden our hearts or stand idly by the blood of our fellow Jews.

Rabbi Jeffrey Falick Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Metro Detroit Farmington Hills, MI

renewal

As is common in halacha, we have a clear statement of Jewish law on this question—followed by centuries’ worth of circumventions. The Mishnah tells us that redeeming hostages is a great mitzvah, but communities must not pay more than the value of the hostage. Our rabbis worried about consequences: Paying excessive ransoms could drain the finances of Jewish communities and endanger their security by encouraging more kidnappings. Nevertheless, individuals were permitted to pay any amount for the release of their loved ones.

Israel has faced agonizing hostage dilemmas in the past. As with our remaining hostages in Gaza, the issue is not financial, but political and strategic. Will the release of Palestinian prisoners lead to further violence against Israelis? Will a negotiated end to the war in Gaza in exchange for the hostages endanger Is-

A man reads notes written to Gilad Shalit in March 2009.

rael’s security if Hamas finds its way back to power?

But there are costs to not redeeming our hostages too. Remaining in a state of war itself incites continuing attacks. Moreover, Israel’s security depends on its people being willing to go to war to defend it. Abandoning the hostages would surely undermine Israelis’ basic trust in the government and the army.

Jewish thought has always distinguished between immediate mortal danger and potential risks. One is not required to forfeit one’s own life to save a person in peril, but if the risks are manageable and there is considerable safek sakanah—doubts with regard to the dangers of rescue—one should attempt to redeem a person in danger. Perhaps, through negotiation and statecraft, the cycles of escalatory violence can be diminished. Meanwhile, the lives of our specific hostages in Gaza hang unutterably in the balance.

Rabbi Gilah Langner Congregation Kol Ami Arlington, VA

reconstructionist

How much is a human life worth? Jewishly, we can’t calculate it and shouldn’t try. Every person is created in the Divine Image and is valuable beyond measure. Jews and our allies must bear that message loudly and proudly, even as our society makes “cost-benefit analyses” de rigueur and turns the “cost” of a human life into a political football. How much of your loved one’s value is intrinsic, and how much varies according to, say, lost earning potential? Is an urbanite worth more than a kibbutznik or a foreign worker? We should be aghast at such formulations, but they’re commonplace. To express values, Judaism generally roots for rules. Yet today the studies on which politicians rely literally undervalue future lives, to “justify” more pollution or the risk of war here and now. For our beloved hostages now, we must do all we can, while yet aware of future risk to others when we “reward terror.”

Most Israelis understand the conundrum, though the paths they advocate diverge. Just two clear rules: No cynical or self-serving motives in these life-anddeath debates; and if we err, err toward pikuach nefesh, saving lives.

Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb

Congregation Adat Shalom (Emeritus) Bethesda, MD

reform

The continuing tragedy of the hostages in Gaza raises one of the hardest ethical dilemmas generations of Jewish scholars have been forced to answer.

The Jewish textual debate is an ethical one rather than legal or theological. Utilitarian approaches to ethics found in Jewish texts suggest that captives should be redeemed, but not at a cost that exceeds their value, since that could put a financial burden on a family or community. Alternatively, a “common good” approach also found in the texts asserts that captives should not be redeemed if doing so enables additional kidnappings, thus putting other people at risk. Finally, a care-based approach to ethics is also evident—captives should be redeemed no matter the cost, to comfort grieving families and end captives’ suffering.

Is there a right answer to this question? No. Each ethical lens suggests a different vision of how an ethical community would behave. But, as a rabbi, I pray that as you read these words, more families will have been reunited with their loved ones.

Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer Hebrew Union CollegeJewish Institute of Religion Fresno, CA

conservative

As with so many challenging questions, it is easy to find rabbinic sources that conflict.

The Talmud (Bava Batra 8b) calls pidyon shevuyim a great mitzvah and says that captivity is worse than starvation and death. Similarly, in the Mishnah Torah, Maimonides writes: “The redemption of captives held for ransom takes

precedence over sustaining and clothing the poor. You do not find a mitzvah greater than the redemption of captives.” Yet there is one major exception, as explained in the Mishnah (Gittin 4:6): “One does not ransom captives for more than their value because of tikkun olam.” The Talmud offers two explanations: First, the rabbis feared the financial burden to the community; second, they were afraid that high ransoms for captives would encourage kidnappers to kidnap more Jews and demand still higher ransoms. We know from the Talmud, the commentaries, the Cairo Geniza and the responsa literature that there were many exceptions to the rule.

Do we bring the hostages home from Gaza? On the one hand, the Jewish people will not be able to move past October 7 until all 251 hostages are back home. On the other hand, the deal includes releasing terrorists with blood on their hands, endangers Israelis and encourages further violence and kidnapping. Jewish tradition affirms both answers, a modern-day version of Sophie’s choice. When dealing with the brutality and barbarity of Islamic extremism, there are no good choices.

Rabbi Amy S. Wallk Temple Beth El Springfield, MA

modern orthodox

On the one hand, the tradition is that redemption of captives (hostages) is the highest priority, ahead of community needs such as Torah learning, synagogue, holiday needs or tzedakah. On the other hand, the Talmud says that one should not pay an excessive ransom for captives, lest it encourage more captive-taking. In the famous case of Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg (c. 1215-1293), the rabbinic great of his time and place, the community was ready to pay any amount to free him. Rabbi Meir felt, however, that his captor was demanding an outrageous ransom; he instructed his community not to redeem him. He remained in captivity until he died.

In the end, for our hostages, it’s a judg-

ment call; the decision cannot be based on some written or traditional rule. The living generation has the authority and capacity to weigh each factor, including the value of human life, the IDF principle of solidarity and its effect on morale, the price demanded and the likelihood of repeat killing and hostage-taking if the demands are met. I personally believe that, since every human being is of infinite value, Israel should pay the extortionate and dangerous price (including pledging a permanent cease-fire that likely keeps Hamas in power). I count on Israel having learned the lessons of October 7—not to allow another miscalculation of Hamas’s intentions, not to permit reconstruction of Gaza unless Hamas is removed from power—so the post-redemption cost will not be that high.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life/Hadar Riverdale, NY

orthodox

The easy answer seems to be “Of course not.” People correctly cite the Mishnah Gittin that you don’t redeem captives at more than their value and the Gemara’s explanation that this could burden the community or stimulate captive-takers to up the ante. But they should remember that this refers to a different kind of hostage-taking from the one we’re dealing with. Historically, hostage-taking was a way to make money quickly without much effort. But war, halachically, is treated as a time when the usual primacy of the preservation of life—both for the enemy and for combatants—is set aside. Otherwise, people could never be commanded to go to war. War is dangerous! You can get killed! But in a mitzvah war, everyone is commanded to participate, not just soldiers at the front.

In 1970, a terrorist group hijacked four planes and was holding hostages on the ground and negotiating. Among the hostages was Yitzchak Hutner, at the time one of the most important rabbis in the world. A separate negotiation for him was proposed, for a huge amount of money,

and the question of whether it was permissible went to Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, an important Ultra-Orthodox decisor and Hutner’s friend. Kamenetsky said no: You can redeem a Torah scholar for more than the usual value, but not in time of war. The hostages were eventually freed, but the incident illustrates the idea that in wartime you don’t redeem captives if it means aiding and abetting the enemy in the midst of a battle.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein

Cross-Currents

Los Angeles, CA /Jerusalem

sephardic

Applying the traditional sources to the current situation is a bit complicated. The Mishnah (Gittin 4:7) speaks about kidnapping for ransom, while we deal with murderers who have political demands. The Mishnah sees criminals possibly kidnapping more people and asking for higher ransom, while we deal with a price that might bring murder and destruction and put a whole country in existential danger. Another view might be that after so long, with hostages in captivity in horrific conditions, no price is too high. Judaic sources can offer general guidelines, but the specific decisions during negotiations should be in the hands of professionals.

My personal view is that the whole world has been held captive by terrorists for more than 50 years now, and we are all paying a very high price. Terrorists around the world copycat one another to achieve their goals and wreak havoc on individuals and governments. World governments should unite in their efforts to eradicate terrorism, kidnappings and human trafficking, through military force, advanced intelligence and full financial transparency.

Rabbi Haim Ovadia

Torah VeAhava Potomac, MD

chabad

The Jerusalem Talmud says, “One who saves a life is as though they have saved

the entire world” (Sanhedrin 37a). The Babylonian Talmud teaches that redeeming captives (pidyon shevuyim) is one of the greatest mitzvot, since captivity is worse than death (Bava Batra 8b). This value runs from the dawn of Jewish history to the present day— Abraham risked his life to save Lot from captivity, and the ethic remained a hallmark of the Hasidic masters’ activity. Maimonides and the Shulchan Aruch codify this point in Jewish law, although the Mishnah (Gittin 4:6) presents a seemingly contradictory teaching: “We may not redeem captives beyond their appropriate ransom, due to tikkun olam” (repairing the world).

Since the first Jibril Agreement in 1985, Israel has freed hundreds or thousands of terrorists for a few Israeli hostages. While every life is of infinite value, a tragic result is that hostage-taking has become a core tactic of terrorist strategy against Israel.

What, then, can be done? In the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s view, the dynamics of hostage exchanges in contemporary Israel are more problematic than the cases in which halacha exhorts against redeeming hostages. Not only do such exchanges encourage future kidnappings, they also eviscerate prison’s deterrent effect, as murderers know they will only remain imprisoned until the next hostage exchange cycle. Moreover, the released terrorists go on to commit further acts of terror, killing more Israelis.

The Rebbe taught that Israel must not allow itself to be held hostage to a paradigm that empowers terrorists. Instead it should reorient its security policy toward credible deterrence and proactive defense to eliminate the hostage-taking threat.

While the Jewish people value mercy and peace, our enemies cynically exploit these virtues. Our tradition warns that shortsighted kindness can lead to disastrous consequences. Rather than repeating the cycle of capture and release, we must break the current paradigm and forge a new path, guided by the Torah’s explicit view of tikkun olam.

Rabbi Elisha Pearl Judean Hills

jewish word

Chaver: Friend or Lover?

In English, there’s no shortage of words to describe someone you’re in a relationship with (or would like to be): a crush, a fling, a main squeeze, a “situationship.” In contrast, not only does Hebrew not have these terms, the word chaver (masculine form) can refer to both a “friend” in a platonic sense and a “boyfriend” in a romantic one.

I learned this distinction the hard way when I was 14 and befriended a non-Jewish boy at school. My mom, ever the inquisitive one, started asking about him. I casually responded in Hebrew that he was just my chaver, and she immediately corrected me, insisting he wasn’t my chaver—he was a yedid (acquaintance or distant friend)—out of concern that I might be in a relationship.

Seven years later, during a trip to Israel, I listened as two Israeli women shared their frustration with the word chaver and how it fails to capture the complexity of defining a relationship. I recently reached out to one of those women, Shir Yehoshua, who told me the word still causes her angst. When she uses chaver to describe a close male friend, people assume she is talking about her boyfriend. She doesn’t use the word yedid because she thinks it negates the closeness of the relationships. “If you have a female friend, you wouldn’t call her yedida ,” Yehoshua says. “If you call her yedida, she’s not your friend.”

The root of the word chaver is chet. bet. reish ( ר.ב.ח) , which means connection, according to Galia Hatav, a specialist in biblical Hebrew at the University of Florida, adding that the Hebrew word for society (chevra) shares the same root. Joel Chasnoff, a stand-up comedian in Israel who publishes an online newsletter called Hebrew is Magic, thinks the double meaning speaks to the Israeli conception of friendship. Chasnoff grew up in Evanston, IL, and joined the IDF after graduating from college where he noticed that “friendship in Israel, like ‘friendship’

in Hebrew, it’s not just someone you know,” he says. Friends in Israel “reveal secrets, they are much more intimate, and I think part of it might be related to that idea of being bound together.”

Even those in charge of setting the standards of the modern Hebrew language acknowledge the confusion surrounding the term. “It could be a little blurry, and sometimes I think the speakers want to make it blurry,” says Barak Dan, head of the Academic Secretariat of the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem. “In many cases, it’s very convenient when you don’t want to make it clear.” To dis-

רֵבָח

tinguish between relationships, Hebrew speakers sometimes use a doubled phrase. “One can say chaver,” Dan says, “and the listener would ask, ‘Is he [a] chaver or chaver chaver?’” Yehoshua did this when her best friend came out as a lesbian, and said she had a chavera. “Chavera, chavera?” Yehoshua asked, “or like me and you chavera ?” Another way to differentiate between a friend and a romantic partner, is to use a definite article and say ha’chaver (the boyfriend). If a woman were to say, “ze ha’chaver sheli,” it would be understood as “This is my boyfriend.”

In the past 20 years, a newer term has emerged for those seeking a clearer distinction between friends and romantic

partners: ben zug (masculine) and bat zug (feminine). This term translates to “spouse,” “partner” or “mate,” and is especially useful in LGBTQ+ communities but is not exclusive to them. Chasnoff, for example, has a friend who refers to her spouse as bat zug . “It’s a younger generation’s attempt to break away from norms and boxed-in, defined relationships,” Chasnoff says. “It’s the idea that I can love this person and have a romantic relationship with this person, maybe even have a child with this person, but I don’t want to be defined as boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife.”

In the 1970s, the slang term yaziz became popular to describe a “friend with benefits” or someone with whom you have casual sex. The Hebrew letter zayin was substituted for the letter dalet in the word yedid to allude to the Hebrew slang words lezayen (to have sex) or ziyun (sex).

The Academy of the Hebrew Language has never thought it was worthwhile to coin a new word for boyfriend, according to Dan. “We normally let the language speakers figure things out themselves.”

A suggestion was once pitched to the Academy to create a new compound word, chaben and chabat , from chaver ben (friend, son) and chavera bat (friend, daughter), but Dan says it doesn’t fit Hebrew’s structure. “In Hebrew, when you make a compound word like that, it doesn’t have meaning,” he explains, because Hebrew is built around roots and patterns, unlike languages such as English or German, where compound words can be easily understood.

Have relationships evolved past the words used to describe them? Perhaps the ambiguity of the word chaver captures the awkwardness of modern relationships. Friends and family asking for clarification can force couples to ask themselves and each other “What are we, exactly?”

BY MEGAN NAFTALI

The Secret Life of an Art Deco Diva visual moment

BY DIANE M. BOLZ

Enigmatic, glamorous and unapologetically ambitious, Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka took Paris by storm in the 1920s with her glossy portraits and sensual, stylized nudes, soon becoming one of the leading artists of the Art Deco era. A model of the “modern woman,” strong, savvy, bold and independent, Lempicka understood the power of personality, celebrity and reinvention. “There are no miracles,” she has been quoted as saying. “There is only what you make.”

Early on, her paintings were collected by performers, artists, designers and others in the arts, and when her work was rediscovered in the 1970s, Hollywood stars, including Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson and later Madonna, got into the act. Just last year her life and art were the subject of the Tony-award-nominated Broadway musical Lempicka, and she has recently been profiled in a feature-length documentary, The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival.

some of the most defining works of the Art Deco era,” says Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. With their foundation in Cubism and the aesthetics of modernity, the angular forms and polished surfaces of her images are the very epitome of the Art Deco style. The term for the designation comes from the 1925 International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris, which launched a revolution in product design, furniture, fashion and architecture in the United States and Europe.

Hurwitz in Poland, most likely in Warsaw, in 1894, during a time of violent antisemitism. Her Jewish parents had converted to Christianity before she was born in an effort to assimilate, and she early learned to hide her Jewish ancestry. She met her future husband, prominent lawyer and Polish aristocrat Tadeusz Lempicki, at a costume ball. Dressed as a peasant girl, she enhanced her role in characteristic dramatic style by bringing along a live goose. The couple married circa 1916 and lived for a time in Saint Petersburg.

Currently, a major retrospective of her work, the first mounted in the United States, is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through May 26. Conceived by Gioia Mori, the preeminent scholar of Lempicka’s work, and Furio Rinaldi, curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where the show premiered last fall, “Tamara de Lempicka” features more than 90 paintings and drawings that showcase her distinctive style and unconventional life.

“Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings united classicism and high modernism to create

A lover of fashion, Lempicka understood the importance of appearance and couture. “She was a powerful woman,” relates her granddaughter Cha Foxhall in an interview for the exhibition’s audio tour. “She had a very strong presence. When she walked into a room, every head would turn because of her strong energy, and also, of course, because she would always be fabulously welldressed…When there’d be a group of people, she would be the center.”

Lempicka was born Tamara Rosa

In 1917, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested and imprisoned by the Cheka, the secret police, for allegedly spying for tsarist networks. With help from the Swedish consul, Tamara was finally able to secure his release and the couple, along with their young daughter Kizette, fled to Paris. The family survived for a while by selling the jewelry they were able to smuggle out, but with Tadeusz unable to find work, Tamara turned to earning a living through art. She soon became immersed in Paris’s café society and free-wheeling art scene. Tadeusz, however, was apparently unhappy in Paris and with his wife’s new lifestyle. They divorced in 1928. That same year, Lempicka met the man who would become her second husband, art collector Baron Raoul Kuffner.

In Paris, Lempicka studied first with Symbolist painter Maurice Denis and then with French Cubist painter André Lhote. By 1922 she had developed her own personal style, characterized by bold lines and angular shapes. She first

Artist Tamara de Lempicka at home in New York, circa 1943.

exhibited her paintings in Paris at the Salon d’Automne in 1922 under the name “Monsieur Lempitzky,” a male version of her last name, in part to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field, but also as a reflection of her own fluid sexual identity. Later signing her works as “Tamara de Lempicka,” she transformed the primarily male tradition of portraying the female nude into something wholly new.

An adroit businesswoman, Lempicka acted as her own manager. She used family and friends as her subjects, as well as romantic partners, both lovers and husbands. In 1927, a painting of her daughter, Kizette on the Balcony, won First Prize at the Exposition Internationale. Kizette’s maternal grandmother had reportedly warned the young girl: “Well, you know, sit still, because someday you might be in a museum.”

Lempicka kept the fact of her Jewish ancestry secret for her entire life, even painting a portrait of her daughter in her

First Communion dress to make sure she was identified as Catholic. One of the reasons Lempicka urged her second husband, Baron Kuffner, who was also of Jewish descent, to leave Europe was that she knew the Nazis would be violent in their attacks against Jews. In 1939, Lempicka and Kuffner left Paris for the United States, settling in California. In time, Kizette was able to join them.

The peak of Lempicka’s renown was in the 1920s and 1930s with her arresting portraits and imposing nudes. In the 1940s, she turned to painting more traditional and subdued still lifes and interiors. By the 1950s, her popularity had faded, and by the end of the 1960s, her work was almost forgotten. In 1972, however, a Paris gallery reintroduced her art and brought Lempicka back into the limelight. Her works hang in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and are coveted by collectors, says Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “for their magnetic appeal,

exquisite pictorial technique and flawless draftsmanship.” In 2020, one of her paintings sold for 16.3 million pounds ($21.1 million) at Christie’s London. “She has a knack for the magical image that will stick in your memory,” wrote artist Francoise Gilot in an article for Vogue Paris. “Her draftsmanship caresses, embraces and sometimes sets afire.”

After the death of her husband in 1961, Lempicka established a home in Houston to be closer to her daughter and granddaughters. In the 1970s, she moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Barbra Streisand, who first discovered the artist’s work in Paris in 1979, writes in her preface to the exhibition catalog that Lempicka was a woman ahead of her time who refused to be bound by convention. Streisand relates that before the artist died at her home in Cuernavaca in 1980, she asked that her ashes be scattered on Popocatepetl, a volcano in central Mexico. “She always,” says Streisand, “understood the power of an image.”

Young Girl in Green (Young Girl with Gloves), circa 1931, oil on board.

Portrait of Ira P., 1930, oil on panel.

PETER BEINART

JEREMY

BEN-AMI

HILLEL HALKIN

MORTON KLEIN

JENNIFER

LASZLO MIZRAHI

FANIA OZSALZBERGER

JUDEA PEARL

MARTIN PERETZ

DAVID K. SHIPLER

RONEN SHOVAL

DANIEL SIERADSKI

CECILIE SURASKY

CAT ZAVIS

EDITOR: JENNIFER BARDI

What does it mean to be pro-Israel? After October 7, this question is especially fraught, often accompanied by emotions ranging from anger to fear to indignation. Yet the question may be more important than ever, with Israel and Hamas embroiled in an existential clash that has transformed how many people around the world—including Jews—view the Jewish state.

This is not the first time Moment has asked this question. In 2012, we posed it to 24 prominent people from across the Jewish world and political spectrum who gave very different answers. Looking back, that seems like a relatively peaceful time, five years after Hamas began to govern Gaza and some ten months before the next war would break out between Israel and the terrorist group. With so much transpiring since then, we felt compelled to revisit this topic.

DAVID K. SHIPLER

To ask what it means to be “pro-Israel” today is to ask: Which Israel? The juggernaut in Gaza? The vigilante in the West Bank? The humane democracy? The refuge for Jews?

Those multiple Israels coexist as overlays on a complicated map—of power and vulnerability, of bigotry and decency, of trauma and resolve. You can pick and choose among them, or you can accept them all as parts of a whole, a set of contradictions that constitute a very real country that is not just an idea, not a myth, not a wish, but a hard place to live and often a hard place to love.

Ugly labels have been attached to Israel’s extreme military onslaught following the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023: War crimes. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. The debate over these terms blurs an important line— one that differentiates Israeli policy from its society, military action from civic culture, and the Jewish state from the Jewish people. Some critics and protesters blur that line by absurdly insinuating global Jewish culpability for Israel’s anti-Palestinian assaults. Some pro-Israel advocates blur that line by calling any denunciation of Israel antisemitic. There is plenty of antisemitism, to be sure, but

We spoke with the same people who participated in our 2012 Big Question project, or at least, as many as we could. A few, sadly, are no longer with us, so we turned to individuals close to them. Others felt they couldn’t respond. One explained that a new job precluded him from offering his opinion this time around; another was “too heartbroken by the horrifying events of October 7 and all that has followed.”

Our 2025 redux adds a layer: “What does it mean to be pro-Israel, and what, if anything, has changed for you?” We were struck by the very different lessons our respondents have taken from the grim events of the past few years. At times, they speak as if they have been living in many separate realities. Despite the chasms, we hold out hope that bringing these disparate perspectives together may help spark new ideas and build bridges in our divided world. —Moment editors

it cannot be fought effectively without discernment and focus.

To state the obvious, then, it is possible to condemn Israel without being antisemitic, and it’s reasonable to be pro-Israel without being pro-government. This is demonstrably so during the right-wing Netanyahu era, just as being pro-American does not mean being pro-government in this autocratic Trump era. There is more to a country than its government, and you can’t see it by blinding yourself to a nation’s varied facets.

My five years living in Jerusalem as bureau chief for The New York Times (1979-1984) prevent me from putting Israel into a neat box. I wrote extensively about its flaws as I made deep and lasting friendships with compassionate people, both Jews and Palestinians, who were driven by their yearning for human rights and neighborly understanding.

One of my Israeli friends, Clinton Bailey, died recently after a long, inspirational career recording and publishing Negev and Sinai Bedouins’ oral poetry and defending them against displacement by Israeli authorities. He was one of Israel’s many anomalies: a Jewish admirer of and advocate for Arab culture. Another Israeli Jewish friend, Yehuda Litani, also deceased, was a clear-eyed journalist and short-story writer who reported from the West Bank, produced an Arab-language TV news show and

held firm convictions of distress at the plight of Palestinians and the failings of his country.

I cannot think about Israel without thinking about them—and about other Israelis I know who do not compromise their fierce devotion to country but also hold dear the noble enterprise of a just, inclusive democracy. When I answered this question in 2012, I noted that, according to a Hebrew University poll at the time, 70 percent of Israeli Jews favored a Palestinian state despite rocket attacks from Gaza. As of July 2024, that support had plummeted to 21 percent in a joint Israeli-Palestinian poll, the lowest since the early 1990s. Twice as many, 42 percent, voiced support for

TO ASK WHAT IT MEANS TO BE “PRO-ISRAEL” TODAY IS TO ASK: WHICH ISRAEL?

“annexation of the West Bank without equal rights for Palestinians.”

Following the traumatic October 7 attacks, Israel lost its moral high ground in the rubble of Gaza. But the test of any society is its capacity for self-correction. Being pro-Israel means believing in that capacity.

David K. Shipler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. His latest book is The Interpreter, a novel set at the end of the Vietnam War.

JUDEA PEARL

In 2012, I concluded my answer to this question: “Those who do not see Israel as the central piece of Jewish life are not pro-Israel, and I doubt they are pro-Jewish.” Today, in 2025, being pro-Israel requires a deeper appreciation of Israel’s centrality in Jewish life, along with a fresh understanding of the underlying forces that have led to the tsunamic upsurge in antisemitism and anti-Israelism following October 7.

First, Israel’s centrality encompasses not only its historical, cultural and spiritual significance to Jewish identity but also its embodiment of Jewish “normalcy.” The existence of Israel is a necessary ingredient for ensuring that Jews everywhere are treated as equals—not as a unique, tolerated, respected or admired minority but as equals. No Jew can be truly equal in the family of man before Israel stands equal in the family of nations.

Second, in examining the surge of antisemitism and anti-Israelism, we must acknowledge our own responsibility for this escalation. For 76 years, we have treated anti-Zionism as secondary to antisemitism—dangerous and distasteful, yes, but only when it threatened to spill over and trigger the real menace: antisemitism. To be pro-Israel in 2025 is to understand that anti-Zionism per se, or Zionophobia as I prefer to label it, threatens every Jew, even when it is devoid of traditional

antisemitic tropes and laden with Judeophilic assurances. We now recognize that Zionophobia, not antisemitism, is the virus fueling hostilities on our college campuses. Our obsessive fixation on antisemitism has allowed Zionophobes, left and right, to dig Hamas-inspired intellectual tunnels under our campuses and institutions—tunnels that have had a lethal effect after October 7.

Finally, being pro-Israel entails addressing Israel’s faults candidly yet empathetically, understanding that many of these shortcomings—including excesses, blunders, divisions and alleged crimes— are products of an entrenched, relentless and absolute Arab rejectionism of Jewish sovereignty in any form. I often call this rejectionism the “elephant in the room” because the Western world refuses to see—let alone acknowledge—its giant presence, even though it remains the paramount obstacle to peace, dwarfing all others. Being pro-Israel thus means pursuing lasting peace bravely yet not blindly. It means proclaiming loudly and unceasingly the Zionist vision of peace: “Two states for two peoples, equally legitimate and equally indigenous,” as I have formulated it, and insisting, unyieldingly, that peace begin with both sides accepting the latter part of the vision—“equally indigenous.”

Judea Pearl is professor emeritus of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. His latest book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words, will be published in July.

CECILIE SURASKY

A decade ago, I argued that the mainstream American Jewish insistence that being pro-Israel—and a Jew in good standing—required either ignoring or actively supporting Israel’s cruel and illegal violations of Palestinian human rights was dangerous. I said that this was a form of “loving Israel to death,” and I still stand by my statement. What is dif-

ferent is that after so much bloodshed, the number of American Jews who share this view has grown exponentially.

As anyone who interacts with young Jews knows, a large portion of our youngest generation understands that there is no Jewish future built on the subjugation of others. We should be proud of them, not punish them, for learning the many ethical lessons we taught them. For many, like me, the only way to be pro-Israel is to hold that every person who calls this land home—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—deserves a life of safety, dignity, opportunity and freedom.

In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky correctly proposed that the indigenous Palestinian population, like anyone, would resist having an exclusionary Jewish ethnostate imposed on them. His solution—overwhelming them with an “Iron Wall” of military might to force negotiations for eventual peace— wrongly assumed that freedom could be won at the expense of another.

Instead of leading to coexistence, some eight decades of Jabotinsky’s model has instead yielded an endless cycle of repression and reaction that continues to hurt, kill and dehumanize virtually everyone—both the Palestinians who have borne the overwhelming brunt of this “wall,” made possible in large part by the U.S. military, and everyday Israelis forced to live as dominators and occupiers. It has also emptied out the meaning of Judaism for countless Jews.

Far from being a zero-sum game, it should be apparent to all that in this state of forever war there are no winners. No cumulative death counts can ever capture the trauma-filled equivalent of a nuclear bomb that is detonated each time one person, one home, one family or one community is lost.

And now, Jews around the world must do the unthinkable: explain to our bewildered and utterly heartbroken children why the state they were told was meant to be a safe haven for Jews is not only demonstrably unsafe but has committed what so many prominent experts, including Israeli scholars Omer Bartov and Raz Segal, have called genocide against Palestinians.

If we want a future, we must reimagine what it means to love Israel, honoring every person’s right to belong on this land. We must reject perpetual war and remember that our fates are intertwined, that the “other” is a deliberately manufactured illusion and that our survival depends on embracing one another as equals—if not kin. If we did so, the world would rejoice and lift us all on its shoulders.

Cecilie Surasky is the director of communications and narrative at the Othering & Belonging Institute and the former deputy director of Jewish Voices for Peace.

MARTIN PERETZ

I’m not sure that it’s possible for me to become more pro-Israel than I was in 2012, when this question was first posed to me. After all, I am 85 and have loved Israel for 76 of those years.

For many American Jews, especially those more lax in their Zionism, October 7 was a reminder of the very real dangers

I DO NOT THINK IT ' S HYSTERICAL TO SAY THAT BIBI HAS STEERED ISRAEL INTO DANGEROUS WATERS AND SHOULD BE HELD TO ACCOUNT FOR HIS DERELICTION.

that Israelis face every day from those who would have the world entirely rid of Jews. And then, to see the response in many academic, left-wing and Arab circles (on October 8, before any counterattack had been mounted) further reinforced the point that a Jewish state is necessary.

I said in my previous response that a “qualification for being pro-Israel is to not get hysterical about every internal happening in Israel.” That may hold true. But I do not think it’s hysterical to say that Bibi has steered Israel into dangerous waters and should be held to account for his dereliction. This, by the way, is the wish of most Israelis as reflected in opinion polls.

We can fault him for many things: bungling the return of the hostages, allying himself with the worst elements in Israeli politics, allowing the settlers to run wild in the West Bank. But worst of all might be that, under his watch, the attack happened at all—this in itself is disqualifying. It’s not anti-Israel to acknowledge these failures. In fact, I would say it’s the responsibility of anyone who loves Israel.

One can say this and still remain cleareyed about the identities of the architects of this destruction: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. The blood that has been shed in the last year and a half—Palestinian and Israeli—is on their hands.

Martin Peretz is the former publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic. His memoir, The Controversialist, was published in 2023.

PETER BEINART

In 2012 I said that being pro-Israel means helping Israel live out the words of its declaration of independence, which promises a Jewish state that will provide complete social and political equality, irrespective of race, religion and sex.

I would now make a distinction between being pro-Israel and being pro-Israeli; I consider myself the latter in the sense that the safety and flourishing of

Israelis is extremely important to me, but I am opposed to the Israeli state as it exists today. There’s a fundamental problem in that it’s built on legal supremacy of one group over another. Ultimately, this is dangerous for Israelis.

I’ve noticed that in American Jewish discourse, the term “Israeli” is used synonymously with Jewish Israeli, but that’s not how I mean it. I’m using it to describe all of the people who have citizenship rights in the country and all the people who live under the control of the state, even though many of them cannot become citizens. I think all the people who live in this territory would be better served by the principle of equality under the law rather than one that gives legal privilege to one ethno-national group. And because Israel is the name of the state but also the name of the land and of the Jewish people, it can’t represent those who live there who are not Jews. An equal, binational state might be called Israel-Palestine or Palestine-Israel.

Certainly a state can cease to exist because the people within it create a different political system. To take one obvious example, when apartheid ended in South Africa, the entire structure of the political system changed. A new constitution was written. The country’s name happened to stay the same, but it was a very legitimate form of reconstituting. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, I would love to see the day when it ceases to exist as a repressive state and becomes one that provides greater human rights to its people.

The appeal in the declaration of independence to the Jewish people throughout the diaspora to rally around the Jews of Eretz Israel “in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream, the redemption of Israel” refers to the idea that the state is part of a messianic process. In a weird way, that last phrase is asking Jews around the world to gather in the State of Israel in an effort to awaken God to send Mashiach (the Messiah), to transform the world. Which is probably not the way that most American Jews think about Israel. It’s a religious Zionist idea that also raises a very fundamental question: whether Zionism itself

requires going to live in Israel. Very early Zionists were clear in their argument that it basically didn’t make any sense to call yourself a Zionist if you weren’t actually going to live in Zion.

Regardless, if you think of Jews as a people who have obligations to God and obligations to one another—Jewish solidarity—Jews should have a sense of concern about the actions of the state that are done in the name of the Jewish people, wherever Jews live.

I’ve grappled pretty publicly with the evolution of my own views, which have changed in large measure because of a deepening role in conversation with Palestinians and my efforts to incorporate the Palestinian experience into my understanding of what I see as good for my people, for the Jewish people. I sometimes see other folks in the Jewish community struggling with the idea that support for the Jewish state is sacrosanct, and yet they feel deeply alienated by the particular Israeli government or by particular Israeli policies. To me those things are, in a deep sense, inseparable. A lot of my evolution had already occurred in 2012, but in some ways, I’ve traveled ideologically since then. In 2012, I would have supported the idea of a Jewish state living alongside a Palestinian state. I came to the conclusion around 2020 that partition wasn’t possible and that it wasn’t the most just outcome either, and that’s when I began arguing for an equal, binational state. Who knows what I’ll believe if you do this again in another 13 years.

Peter Beinart is a journalist, commentator and former editor of The New Republic. His most recent book is Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.

JENNIFER LASZLO MIZRAHI

A decade ago, I said we must be both educated on and engaged with Israel—its

opportunities, challenges and neighbors. That has never been truer. Part of being pro-Israel today means navigating difficult conversations. The discourse has grown more polarized, and anti-Zionism—often a thinly veiled form of antisemitism—has made public support for Israel more challenging. The global landscape is shifting, requiring greater vigilance in defending Israel’s legitimacy and the safety of Jews worldwide.

While I no longer work at an Israel-focused organization, I still wake up in the middle of each night to check the news. Have any of the hostages been found or released? Are Israelis under attack? Thanks to WhatsApp, I stay in close touch with friends, family and former colleagues there. I wear a yellow ribbon and a #BringThemHome dog-tag necklace in public—a constant reminder of those still held captive.

I’m not in Israel, but Israel is always inside me.

But loving Israel doesn’t mean agreeing with everything its leaders or people do. Both Israel and the U.S. share the values of democracy, freedom of speech and minority rights—yet both are struggling to uphold them. To be pro-Israel today is to love Israel enough to see it clearly—not as perfect, but as family. It means fighting for the hostages, supporting those suffering from war-induced trauma and advocating for climate solutions that benefit Israelis and the world. It means rejecting efforts to demonize Israel while also championing efforts to make it better.

The country’s challenges are relentless, but so is its potential. Loving Israel can’t just mean wringing our hands. It must mean rolling up our sleeves—supporting its people, innovations and future.

In 2012, I said that I dislike the term “pro-Israel” because it often implies being “anti” something else. That hasn’t changed. I oppose terrorism, war and hate—but I am not anti-Palestinian. While peace feels distant, I still believe in its possibility.

The horrors of October 7, 2023, underscored the depth of hatred fueling

violence against Jews and Israel. Every person being held hostage keeps us awake at night. Being pro-Israel today means demanding their release while also grieving for innocent Palestinian victims who suffered greatly from what Hamas started. It’s also grappling with the painful compromises required to bring the hostages home.

But supporting Israel must be about more than reacting to crises—it must also be about building a better future. Some of my past work focused on empowering people with disabilities, and in Israel, the psychological toll of war is staggering. PTSD and trauma affect not just soldiers but civilians and children. Supporting organizations that help Israelis with mental health and disabilities is an essential act of love and commitment.

Today, as a full-time climate advocate, I see another urgent connection: Israel is both highly vulnerable to climate change and a leader in climate solutions. With more than 800 startups tackling climate challenges, Israel’s ingenuity is helping the world develop alternative energy, revolutionize agriculture and build resilience. Supporting Israel means nurturing these innovations and expanding global collaborations.

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi is cofounder of the Mizrahi Family Charitable Fund and former head of The Israel Project. She writes a blog for The Times of Israel on the intersection of Jews, Israel and climate solutions.

MORTON KLEIN

Thirteen years ago, I said that the Palestinian Arabs’ real goal was to destroy Israel (rather than to establish a peaceful Palestinian state in Gaza and/or Judea/ Samaria and/or Jerusalem). This was unfortunately confirmed by events of the past 13 years, most dramatically by the horrors of October 7: the gleeful participation of Hamas terrorists cheered on by Gazan sympathizers; vows to repeat

October 7 until there is no more Israel; the deadly “knife intifada” wave of terror incited by Palestinian Authority (PA) terrorist dictator Mahmoud Abbas from 2015 through today; the PA’s $400 million a year “pay to slay” policy rewarding Jew-killers; and more. Their real goal is to murder every Jew and destroy the Jewish state. Both the PA’s and Hamas’s charters call for that.

My calls then were for Jewish leaders to educate people much more and to inform people of Israel’s rights. The real threats Israel faces are as important as ever, given the onslaught of lies about Israel.

Today, I would expand my call for rabbis and other Jewish organizational leaders and Israeli leaders to promote the pro-Israel cause by fighting anti-Israel propaganda lies: the lie that Israel is an “occupier” of her own lawful, G-d given land; the lie that Jerusalem is holy to Muslims (it is a lie that Mohammed visited Jerusalem, almost no Arab leader visited Jerusalem when Arabs controlled it, and Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran); the lie that Israel commits “genocide” (in fact, Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties); the lie that Israel is an “apartheid” state (in fact, Israeli Arabs have equal rights in Israel); and the lie that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are “moderate” (in fact, they are as bad as Hamas; the PA’s ruling party Fatah bragged in a video that its members participated in the October 7 attack, adding “We killed them…and stepped on their heads”).

I would likewise expand my call for rabbis and Jewish and Israeli leaders to support the United States in withholding any aid to the Palestinians while the PA continues to violate the Oslo Accords. The PA still refuses to arrest terrorists and collect arms; glorifies terrorists; names schools, streets and sports teams after terrorists; pays terrorists lifetime pensions, rewarding them for murdering Jews; and engages in anti-Israel lawfare at the UN, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

Pro-Israel Jewish leaders should also support the virtually unanimous resolution of the Knesset and the Israeli people opposing a Palestinian state; support the Israeli government and a clear majority of Israelis who support Arabs’ emigration from Gaza; support the right of Jews to live in the Jewish homelands of Judea and Samaria; and support Israel in not giving away any more land, because any land given away becomes an Arab terrorist enclave.

I would also expand upon the list of actions that should accompany being pro-Israel. Being pro-Israel also means writing letters and articles promoting pro-Israel Jewish groups and positions; supporting and sending one’s children to Jewish day schools (day school graduates are much more supportive of Israel and often become informed pro-Israel activists); buying Israel Bonds; making Israel a priority when deciding whom to vote for; sending one’s children on Israel trips sponsored by ZOA, Birthright or other pro-Israel groups; urging one’s college-aged students to do a pre-college year learning in Israel or a mid-college year at a university in Israel; and learning Jewish history.

My statement in 2012 that exchanging 1,000 terrorists for Gilad Shalit was a terrible mistake was also sadly confirmed by the fact that released Hamas terrorist Yahya Sinwar and 40 other released terrorists led the horrific October 7 pogrom. I am deeply concerned that Israel is making the same terrible mistake again today by releasing thousands of Arab terrorists with Jewish blood on their hands.

I would change one aspect of what I previously said: At this point, I believe that those who still want a Palestinian Arab state in Gaza and/or Judea/Samaria and/or Jerusalem are either ill-informed, delusional (in that they fail to understand or appreciate the real threat) or anti-Israel. While I understand that someone who wants a Palestinian state may be well-intentioned or believe that he is pro-Israel, in fact promoting a Palestinian Arab state is not a pro-Israel position. The Israeli people understand

JEWISH LEADERS SHOULD SUPPORT ISRAEL IN NOT GIVING AWAY ANY MORE LAND, BECAUSE ANY LAND GIVEN AWAY BECOMES AN ARAB TERRORIST ENCLAVE.

that such a state would be an existential threat to Israel and every Jew. Indeed, in July 2024, the Knesset voted overwhelmingly to reject a Palestinian Arab state, with only the nine Arab Knesset members opposed.

Morton Klein is the president of the Zionist Organization of America, having served in that position since 1993.

DANIEL SIERADSKI

Seems like I was on the money in 2012 in terms of what the mainstream definition of pro-Israel is in the United States, which I said was “to deny the existence of Palestinians as a people and their right to statehood, freedom and equality, to portray Arabs as bloodthirsty terrorists who seek no more than to murder Jews, and to denounce as an antisemite anyone who suggests any legitimacy to the Palestinian narrative or right to statehood.” Only it has gotten dramatically worse, now including open (rather than oblique) support for criminal lawlessness, vio -

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A LOVER OF ISRAEL WHEN THE ISRAEL YOU LOVE NO LONGER EXISTS AND, IN TRUTH, NEVER REALLY DID?

lent state repression and genocide. Our communal leaders now go so far as to “hechsher” far-right antisemites while calling for young Jewish dissenters to be federally investigated.

What does it mean to be a lover of Israel when the Israel you love no longer exists and, in truth, never really did? How does one love a state that will happily feed you to the wolves if it means never having to take responsibility for its actions toward Palestinians and others harmed by the policies it vilifies you for having opposed? A nation where our only common bond is blood and soil, rather than shared social, cultural and spiritual values, cannot rightly be called a Jewish nation.

Thus the best way to be pro-Israel— that is, for the endurance of the Jewish people and our faith, culture and values, not for the state—is to oppose this Israeli government and its reflexive supporters with every fiber of our being until they and Israel reflect the values that inspire rather than mortify liberal and progressive diaspora Jewry. We must stand up and firmly tell them, “No. Not in our names.”

Daniel Sieradski is a writer, activist, designer and strategist. He was the founder of the blog Jewschool.com.

RONEN SHOVAL

In 2012, I talked about a three-phase attempt by those who were bent on destroying Israel: first through war, then through terrorism, then, when those failed, by waging a culture war to cast Israel as an apartheid, guilty-of-warcrimes state. Today those battlefields merge, and at the same time Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon, and Hamas and Hezbollah are trying to murder innocent kids and mothers and fathers and families. Basically, the last phase, the delegitimation process, is happening with billions of dollars coming from Qatar and other places into groups that describe themselves as NGOs and are trying to eliminate our right to exist.

I think many Jews in America were in denial about the last phase. Then they woke up after October 7 and saw what was happening inside universities and in society, and they understood what I was talking about in 2012.

The main question here in Israel is, who are we? Anti-Israel people around the world say that Judaism is a religion. We are not a religion. We are a nation, a state. We are a people: the Jewish people. This distinction is very important, and it raises a big question of identity for Jews in America. Because if we are a people who have a right to our homeland, then, the Jews in America ask themselves, what are we doing in the diaspora?

What is it to be pro-Israel if you are not Israeli? It’s about being able to identify good from evil, right from wrong, and to make the moral decision to understand your part in the history. We have a huge challenge in our generation because there are many temptations toward a non-moral world, and Israel is standing out as something that you have to be courageous to support. Christians, Muslims and Jews who identify themselves as pro-Israel are people who have moral courage. This has been the test of human beings since the beginning of time: Are we going to support the right cause or go with the stream toward what seems to be popular?

Can one criticize the Israeli government and still be pro-Israel? It depends, because there are two types of criticism. One type is when you criticize someone in order to improve them and make them better. A different type of criticism is in order to break someone. We Israelis take responsibility for shaping our future by voting, fulfilling our democratic right. To those outside Israel who are criticizing our government, I say, if you want to take responsibility for what’s happening right now, you’re more than welcome to make aliyah and participate in the long history of the Jewish people here, to help us by voting and being part of the society.

I have been in the army since October 7, something like 150 days. I left my family, I left my home, I left my friends, and I went to the battlefield, okay? So, if somebody wants to be serious with criticisms, make aliyah and you can criticize your state from inside. I do it all the time, in public appearances, on X, in whatever I’m writing. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree. That’s our project.

If anything has changed in my thinking since 2012, it’s that I’m less optimistic. I believe that Israel will only survive long-term if the West survives—and I’m not optimistic regarding the West. And so being pro-Israel right now is to be pro-Western civilization, pro-Judeo-Christian values. It’s looking to our roots and understanding that the tree cannot grow to the sky without them and that if the roots crumble, the tree falls.

Ronen Shoval is an Israeli professor of political philosophy and author. He is head of the Argaman Institute and was dean of the Tikvah Fund.

FANIA OZSALZBERGER

“A very common sentimentalist mistake...is to assume that first we have to cure hatred and become friends and then we can make peace,” Amos Oz (19392018) said in 2012. “Throughout history it has worked the other way around.

First peace is made between enemies with clenched teeth and even with bad intentions. Then eventually, sometimes, an emotional healing occurs.”

“This may take generations,” my father concluded. Indeed. Perhaps even longer than he thought.

Amos Oz was a humanist, a Zionist and a peace seeker. Unlike for many of his left-wing peers, his vision of peace was not starry-eyed. He peppered it with stark realism, unapologetic pride in Israeli and Hebrew culture and some good old kibbutznik pragmatism.

Based on this, he believed that the model of two neighboring states, Israel and Palestine, is the only solution that will not shed rivers of blood. Neighboring states, mind you, but not immediately friendly or trusting. A decent, well-negotiated divorce.

At a time when left-wing dreams of peace imploded and right-wing visions waxed imperial and messianic, Oz kept a solid balance of realism and hope. He was never enamored of the Palestinian leadership. He despised Yasser Arafat (who led, he said, one of the bloodiest national emancipation movements in modern history). In the wake of the Oslo Accords, when the Palestinian Authority emerged as a viable peace partner, Oz had no illusions about a sudden emotional conciliation and flaming affection between Israelis and Palestinians. “Make Peace Not Love,” he insisted.

By contrast, Oz shrewdly observed that Likud, under Benjamin Netanyahu, had a clear pro-Hamas strategy. By nurturing the Islamist fanatics, Likud hoped for them to take over (as they eventually did in Gaza), thus killing off the Oslo Accords and any other prospective peace plan. In parallel, Netanyahu spent decades cleansing Likud itself of every remaining moderate. The Hamas-Likud mutual interest was to perpetuate war until one side won and the other side vanished. Oz’s prophecy has proved eerily accurate.

I cannot know for sure what his humane and sensitive mind would have made of October 7 and the Gaza War. His absence at this horrible time is a

public loss and a private blessing.

But one thing is clear: Oz embraced the two-state solution precisely in order to prevent October 7 and similar catastrophes. He foresaw them. (“I don’t envy my children and grandchildren,” he often said, “if we don’t reach a tenable compromise with the Palestinians very soon.”) He also foresaw, and accurately diagnosed, Israel’s other calamity, the rise of a racist and messianist nationalism bent on making the Arabs disappear, led by a cynic bent on destroying democratic checks and balances to escape his own conviction in court.

Today, more than ever, the global community stretches all the way from people who say “Right or Wrong, it’s Israel we have to stick behind” to those who say, “Israel was born in sin and shouldn’t be there.” Oz tried to address the fanatics and de-fanaticize them. My own wish is humbler: It’s the moderates I try to engage.

Can Israel and Palestine “divorce,” aided by tough love from the international community, or under the colossal foot of the unpredictable Donald Trump? After October 7, I am far more aware of the tectonic cultural changes and the grimly realistic security arrangements requisite for such a scenario. I find myself negotiating tougher terms for my late father’s vision: a long-term demilitarization of the future Palestine. Amending and monitoring hate-ridden school curricula. Deradicalizing both societies—more so the Islamist-jihadist Palestinians but certainly also the racist and increasingly violent Israeli far right.

This may indeed take generations, but it has to start now. The young Israel always claimed to have one hand on the gun and the other stretched out for peace. We must revive this claim and prove we’re dead serious regarding both hands.

As to my father’s powerful belief in the future of Israel, I am glad to keep the torch and pass it to my sons. But, as he taught me, not every future Israel is worth defending or dying for.

Not the Netanyahu Israel, in which so-called Judaism has declared a war of life and death against democracy. Not

the Smotrich and Ben-Gvir Israel that has ditched Jewish and Western universal values, including humanism and equal rights. Not the Israel of religious zealots, happy to trample all over the prophets’ legacy while celebrating an eternal war against an eternal Amalek.

The alternative, the Israel for which we are “pro,” is simple. A state for the Jews and all its citizens, peaceful to its neighbors, a law-abiding member in the international community. Far from being an Amos Oz invention, this is Theodor Herzl’s basic Zionist creed.

Hence, a thriving Palestinian-Israeli and Druze-Israeli minority, emanating its moderation across the border to a future Palestine. Hence, many sorts of Jewishness, and other worldviews, flowering side by side.

A secure Israel? For sure. But security is never only military. Security hinges on social solidarity, which must rise

THE YOUNG ISRAEL ALWAYS CLAIMED TO HAVE ONE HAND ON THE GUN AND THE OTHER STRETCHED OUT FOR PEACE. WE MUST REVIVE THIS CLAIM AND PROVE WE ' RE DEAD SERIOUS REGARDING BOTH HANDS.

from its current ruins (ask the hostages’ families). Security is also the ancient Jewish talent, badly eroded in recent years, for open-minded and respectful internal debate.

And one day, who knows? “The state is not holy, not a fetish but a vehicle,” my father said. One day, in a world without states, the Jews might relaunch the prophets’ ancient universalism. Until then, both he and I believed in the Israel we have loved, that superb vehicle of Jewish emancipation: fiercely democratic, open-mindedly Jewish, ever argumentative, wisely defending itself from within its internationally recognized borders, and very carefully peace-seeking.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is an Israeli essayist, political activist and history professor emerita at the University of Haifa. Amos Oz was a renowned Israeli writer and public intellectual.

JEREMY BEN-AMI

Today, as we stare into the moral and strategic abyss toward which Benjamin Netanyahu and the far right are dragging Israel, the debate over what it means to be pro-Israel in the United States seems more urgent than ever.

It remains hard for many who, like me, have deep connections to and deep love for Israel to find a welcoming home in traditional “pro-Israel” advocacy where support for Israel—right or wrong—is demanded, even when it comes to the most reckless policies of the sitting Israeli government. This powerful and emboldened right wing has a crystal-clear vision: They believe Jews have a divine right to all the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean (and maybe more), and they have no qualms about Israel always living and dying by the sword or denying other people equal rights in the same land.

This “pro-Israel” vision, I fear, would condemn our children and grandchildren to never-ending violence and bloodshed

and, in asking us to be anti-Palestinian, anti-human rights and anti-international law, undermine the Jewish values and principles on which I was raised and on which I raise my children.

Thankfully, there is another path, another definition of pro-Israel that, yes, promises security through strength, but even more so through the very hardnosed diplomacy that’s landed lasting peace deals before. This alternative path for Israel is rooted in its founding values of equality, justice and democracy. It’s a path where we hold fast to the aspiration to be a light among nations.

Where I have changed my views in recent years is that I no longer define this path narrowly as leading to a “two-state” solution to the conflict, but rather I believe it’s a path to a much bigger deal.

Following the horror of October 7, the devastation of the Gaza war, and ongoing political shifts in Israel, we clearly need a new vision if we’re going to move Israelis and Palestinians toward the durable “win-win” scenario I described in this magazine well over a decade ago. I call it the “23-state solution”—a comprehensive, regional security and economic development agreement that normalizes Israel’s relations with all its neighbors and facilitates meaningful regional cooperation to create and launch a successful Palestinian state next to Israel. Arab states get the chance to resolve the region’s conflict with Israel once and for all and to reap the security and economic benefits of fully normalized relations with Israel. Israelis get recognized borders, true regional integration and guaranteed security and global acceptance. Palestinians get the chance to recover and rebuild supported by massive international investment, while finally achieving the freedom, self-determination and security of statehood.

This is a pro-Israel vision that offers everyone a chance to chart a new future and build a better life for the next generation. The majority of American Jews support this vision. Despite loud and well-funded voices on the fringe, poll after poll shows our community opposes Netanyahu, supports a peace agreement that leads to a

Palestinian state, and rejects an ever-expanding settlement movement. Public opinion surveys among Israelis and Palestinians also show that even in the wake of October 7 and the horrific fighting of the past year and a half, majorities of both societies can be rallied in support of this vision of regional integration, cooperation and security.

To my mind, this pro-Israel vision is the only way to guarantee a future for the Israel my parents and grandparents fought to build. And I know it’s the only vision for Israel that my children will fight for as well.

Jeremy Ben-Ami is the founder and president of J Street and author of A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation.

CAT ZAVIS

In 2012, my late husband Rabbi Michael Lerner (1943-2024), with whom I worked as co-editor of Tikkun magazine, spoke of Israel operating from a stance of power and domination, and he essentially said that to be pro-Israel was to brook no criticism of Israeli policy and to ignore the treatment of the Palestinians. This stance, he said, bred hatred for Jews around the world. He also argued that “most Jews have made Israel their substitute for the God who didn’t show up to save us during the Holocaust,” likening it to a kind of pathology or post-traumatic stress disorder.

I think he would say the same thing today. Most Israelis and Jews were comfortable with the occupation until October 7, and now, many are really struggling to see the humanity of Palestinians and are not confronting their PTSD. And he would still say that if we’re going to continue to wreak havoc on Palestinian lives, it’s going to make Jews unsafe. Instead of thinking about what it means to be pro-Israel, he was much more concerned about Jews and Judaism, and what we need to do in Israel and in Palestine to

create humanity, dignity, justice and liberation for all people, from the river to the sea. That may mean a one-state solution. It may mean a two-state solution. It may mean a confederation. But most importantly what it means is uplifting the Palestinian voices that have been marginalized, oppressed, jailed or killed, and the voices of their allies that are calling for liberation of Palestinians. Palestinian liberation would ultimately bring forth liberation for Jews and Judaism.

Michael was a liberal Zionist. He talked a lot about Israel as idolatry—that it had become the God under which Zionism equals Judaism, and so if you’re anti-Zionist, you’re antisemitic. That’s just not our tradition. Israel is a state with a lot of Jews. It is not a Jewish state. It’s not enacting Jewish values. Michael ultimately didn’t believe in nation-states, and neither do I. He believed there should be regional ways of negotiating and working together, kind of like the European Union. But in the current construction he would favor a nation-state or a confederation that ensured everyone’s rights and then also addressed the historical wrongs. He would support reparations, repairs and some right of return for Palestinians. He would also put strict limitations on Jewish immigration.

He was horrified about what was happening in Gaza after October 7. He would have called it a genocide, and I know that he would want the United States to stop funding this war to push Israel to real peace. He also taught and wrote and talked a lot about settler Judaism, how it had become the mainstream Judaism in Israel, in many ways to allow settler attacks and pogroms. This is part of the Zionist playbook. And so I think he’d be way more critical of Israel now, and he might be willing to admit that the Zionist political project, as a project that aimed to ensure Jewish safety and a Jewish democratic state, has failed.

Cat Zavis is the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, CA, and executive director of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Rabbi Michael Lerner was the founder of NSP, Beyt Tikkun and Tikkun magazine.

HILLEL HALKIN

One goes from sense of outrage to sense of outrage. At an army command that should have, and easily could have, prevented October 7 from happening and didn’t. At the thievish gang of rabid nationalists, religious scoundrels, bootlicking opportunists and once honorable politicians who have sold their souls, led by a conscienceless man long convinced that his and his country’s fate are identical, that Israel has the misfortune to be governed by at the worst possible moment. At a hypocritical world that accuses this government, as if it were not bad enough, of monstrous crimes it has not committed. At a Democratic administration that lacked the spine to censure the moral and intellectual lunacy of pro-Hamas agitation on and off American campuses. At a harebrained Republican president of the United States whose Middle East policies encourage the most sinister forces in Israeli political life. At American Jews on the left who have joined the enemies of their people. At American Jews on the right who urge Israelis, from the comfort of their living rooms, to go on killing and being killed forever. If there is anyone I’m not outraged by these days, it’s Hamas, both because it’s pointless to be angry at beasts for being beasts, and because by now we’ve killed enough of them, as well as enough ordinary Gazans (few of whom deserved to die, though most cheered the October 7 massacre when it took place), for some of the fury to have abated.

What does it mean to be pro-Israel in 2025? It’s easier to think of some of the things it does not mean. It does not mean blaming Israel for most of the carnage in Gaza. It does not mean exonerating Israel of its measure of responsibility for the hatred Palestinians bear toward it. It does not mean hectoring Israel to implement a two-state solution that has not been implementable for years. It does not mean supporting Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria, which should be hoped for by Palestinians who dream of getting back all of Palestine, not by Israe-

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE PRO-ISRAEL IN 2025? IT ' S EASIER TO THINK OF SOME OF THE THINGS IT DOES NOT MEAN.

lis who wish to preserve their share of it. It does not mean backing nutty schemes for evicting Gaza’s Palestinians and lining its coastline with Trump Towers. It does not mean calling everyone who criticizes Israel an antisemite. It does not mean being sure you know what is best for Israel when many thoughtful Israelis are far from sure themselves, since while there may be workable solutions for Gaza, there are none in sight for the Palestinian problem as a whole—and this problem, if not resolved, will cause Israel to become either an apartheid or a binational state and, in either case, will spell its doom. And if the thought of Israel’s doom does not cause you genuine anguish, you cannot possibly be pro-Israel.

And there is this, too: If you happen to be Jewish, you need to understand that, should Israel not pull through, your people’s history will have come to an effective end. Without Israel, Jewish life the world over, in America as elsewhere, would not be worth continuing another day. If you care about being a Jew, you have to care desperately that Israel survives and prospers, not just for its sake, but for your own. More pro-Israel than that you couldn’t be.

Hillel Halkin is a translator, political commentator and author of many books, including Letters to an American-Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic. M

How Do Young American Jews Define Being Pro Israel?

Thomas Harris

is a Harvard senior majoring in integrated biology (evolutionary biology/ecology) with a focus on environmentalism.

Being pro-Israel on a college campus right now means a bunch of things. For one, it means dealing with antisemitism, but on a smaller scale than the media portrays. Incidentally, I don’t like the word antisemitism because it makes it feel scientific and impersonal; I just say Jewish hate.

I’d seen anti-Israel activism at Harvard before October 7, but after that, the sentiments went beyond anti-Zion-

Having seen antiIsrael outrage up close, these twentysomething Jewish Americans express a mix of hope, grief and high expectations for the Jewish homeland.

Interviews by Jennifer Bardi

ism into hate speech about Jews, and it made me realize that I’d been living in a time of relative calm. In such “normal” times, being pro-Israel wasn’t such a large part of my Jewish identity. When I think about Judaism, I think about coming together with my family, going to temple, Friday night dinners at Chabad or Hillel—stuff I do as part of a community. But in response to the criticism that my community has gotten, it’s necessitated my connecting being pro-Israel with my identity, and now it’s just super important to defend Israel and to move it front of mind.

It’s important to educate people that Israel isn’t just a bunch of white settler colonialists. Israelis are people who were expelled from their homes, many

throughout the Middle East, people who had been persecuted for thousands of years coming together and creating a state to protect themselves. You’re talking about a legitimate democracy in the Middle East.

I’ve been to Israel five or six times in my life (not since October 7), and I want to go back. I probably wouldn’t consider making aliyah in the near future because I want to do land conservation, and there isn’t that much land to conserve in Israel; they’ve done a pretty good job ecologically. Anyway, I think that Jews in the diaspora have a right to defend Israel but also to criticize Israel. And so, I’m pro-Israel in the sense that I support the State of Israel and its continued existence, but I also feel it’s important to be critical of the

Israeli government when necessary, just as it’s important to criticize the American government. Being critical of the government, in a constructive way, is one of the most patriotic things you can do.

I also think there are a lot of people who are pro-Israel but wary of Israel’s actions, and they feel somewhat isolated. I don’t necessarily blame the Jewish community for wanting to put out a single message on Israel when hate speech is being thrown at Jews left and right. But when it comes to internal Jewish spaces, it’s really important to hold Israel to the highest of standards.

A friend outside of my Jewish community has Palestinian family who have been affected by Israel’s campaign in Gaza. We’ve discussed the conflict openly, and something I’ve taken away from our discussions, but I don’t think he has, is that we vehemently disagree on the past but not on the future. I firmly believe that almost every instance of violence since 1948 has been a case of Israel defending itself, whereas he would say that Israel was always the aggressor. But when we talk about the future, about having a Jewish state in the region and creating a state for the Palestinian people, the particulars might be slightly different, but wanting peace is a shared sentiment. And yes, people say there’s no room for a two-state solution anymore, because of the settlements and so on. But I still think a two-state solution would be one of the best ways to resolve this conflict.

It’s really important to continue having these conversations, not so much about Israel’s past but about its future.

Amanda P.

is a junior studying human development at a University of California campus. She asked that her last name and school be withheld.

For me, being pro-Israel coincides with the definition of Zionism that holds that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in the land of Israel,

because that’s where our ancestors come from (it’s in the Torah). And also so that we have a place to go if there were to be another Holocaust.

My family has been in the United States since the 1890s. But why? Because we had to escape Europe, escape the pogroms in Austria. So, I think two things can be true: that America has given my family and many other families the opportunity to succeed in life safely and freely (I’m big on patriotism and proud of my American identity); at the same time, I have a cultural tie to Israel that I don’t have to the United States.

In 2019, I went to Israel with my synagogue—all my friends and all our families—and it was so amazing to explore our homeland and be in a place where the majority is Jewish, where you can walk around without any fear of antisemitism. But there’s a lot of stigma in the United States around being a Zionist and being pro-Israel. People think it means you’re anti-Palestinian and that you support everything the Israeli government is doing. That’s not the case.

In seventh grade, my Hebrew school teacher was talking to us about Israel and issues like the BDS movement and why it was bad, and then he said, “When you guys go to college, something big is going to happen.” We all thought he sounded like a crazy doomsdayer, and then that something literally happened with October 7. We had an [anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian] encampment at our school pretty much all of spring quarter. It was on the quad in the middle of campus, and anytime someone would walk by wearing anything remotely Jewish, even just a Star of David or a yellow ribbon for the hostages, people in the encampment would run up and call them out. It was almost militant how they carried walkie-talkies to relay messages like “They’re on the perimeter” or “They’re coming this way.”

There’s nothing wrong with peaceful protest, and you can have your own opinions, but I don’t think you should be allowed to promote violent rhetoric, such as yelling “Death to Jews!” and “Globalize the Intifada!” And while it’s

case by case, if someone who’s been given the opportunity to come to our country and study is being violent, taking over buildings and causing mass disruption, they should be deported. Because that’s not what America stands for.

People in California tend to be more progressive, especially on a campus, where in addition to chanting “Free Palestine,” they’re also opposing anti-Asian hate, anti-Black hate. And we 100 percent need those movements. But I find it very odd that Jews and Israel aren’t included in anti-hate efforts. There’s this perception of Jews as all white Ashkenazi oppressors. And so it is difficult.

Still, I’m more hopeful for Israel’s future than scared. Very hopeful. President Trump likes to say that if he’d been in power on October 7, the attack by Hamas wouldn’t have happened. I think it’s very self-absorbed to think that, but like it or not, Trump is a very extreme person, and I think he’s a person who follows through on what he says. His is the first administration in a long time that’s had a truly hands-on approach and is fully on deck to support democracy for all in the region. (Hamas is not a democracy. Hamas is a terrorist organization.) Does the Trump administration need to be in charge of the whole redoing of Gaza? Probably not. And I probably wouldn’t have gone about promoting the idea the way Trump did, such as sharing the absolutely comical “Trump Gaza” AI video. (I don’t know how you’re supposed to take that seriously. Like, why is there a shot of Trump and Bibi shirtless at a beachside pool? No one needs to see that!) But there can’t be a free Palestine with Hamas in power.

Even before Trump came back into office, I had no fear that Hamas would survive—it was just a question of how long it would take to eradicate them and how many innocent lives that would claim, which is horrible. It’s challenging, because Hamas has brainwashed its citizens into being antisemitic and being anti-Israel. I think that says more about Hamas than the Palestinian people. Is part of being pro-Israel to acknowledge

the suffering on the other side? Yes and no. I think in Jewish spaces, as a Jewish person, I can promote things that are pro-Israel without always giving a recognition statement that I’m sorry for the innocent lives lost on both sides. I don’t think I should have to say that, because it’s just basic humanity. I think it’s just understood.

Zahava Feldstein

has a master’s in divinity from the University of Chicago. Last year she left Stanford, where she was pursuing a PhD in education with a concentration in Jewish studies. Today she is a director at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

I’m not sure what pro-Israel means. Pro the country? Pro its policies? Pro the idea of a Jewish state? It’s an interesting choice not to use the word Zionist instead.

I grew up a rabbi’s daughter attending Jewish day school, BBYO and Jewish summer camp, then teaching at a Hebrew school. So, deeply invested in the Zionist Jewish-American educational program. And then I went to Scripps College in California, where the worst thing you could be was a Zionist. As an American studies major, I was learning a framework for understanding the world where everything is about systems of power, where the residue of imperialism, colonialism and racism covers every facet of our society. Under those paradigms, it made sense that no Western country had the “right” to exist. But what my classmates and professors demanded of me, as a Jewish student, was more than that. They needed me to denounce not just the right of a Jewish state to exist but the need for a Jewish state to exist. In my sophomore year of undergrad, I took a class called Palestinian Ethnography. On the first day, the professor said to each student: Tell us about yourself, what you know about this topic and why you’re here. I said I’d gone to a Jewish school for 16 years but knew nothing

about Palestinian ethnography because I hadn’t heard the word Palestinian much growing up. I would come to realize that I actually knew a lot; names like the SixDay War and the Yom Kippur War were just different—strategic namings, as I was taught in that class.

During this time, I found a journal I’d kept from a high school trip to Israel and Poland. It had a blue tie-dye cover (which my teenage self thought symbolic). Our tour guide had taken us to the Golan Heights and told us about Eli Cohen, the Israeli spy who had collected intelligence there. He was eventually caught and publicly hanged in Damas-

up was my community. I was resenting my upbringing and setting aside my Jewish epistemologies in order to say, yeah, your understanding of the Jew is better than my study and my lived experience.

This is what’s happening on college campuses right now: Around the idea of “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” other marginalized groups get to define what their liberation looks like, while Jewish students have to say, you— non-Jewish classmate, professor, administrator—you have the right to define what liberation looks like for me.

Why do I have to go out of my way to denounce Israel or Zionism or Jewish day school before you’ll say I can speak in your space?

I went to Stanford to get a PhD because I wanted to be a scholar. I wanted to write my dissertation on the ethnic studies mandate in California and whether or not Jews should or could be included in it. Then I walked into the ethnic studies classrooms and got the answer: You don’t belong here. I became an expert on campus antisemitism not just because I was studying it, but because I was living it as well.

cus in 1965. The guide told us that Cohen’s body had never been returned to Israel and that he was a national hero, encouraging us all to make a pledge to the Jewish state. And so I wrote in this journal, in huge letters, “I pledge that if the State of Israel goes into an all-out war in my lifetime, I will fight. There are so many Muslim nations in this world, there sure as hell better be a Jewish one.”

Reading this as a sophomore in college, I cried. How could I have been so indoctrinated into this terrible, violent ideology? I was now fully in the anti-Zionist framework, and what I was giving

In one class, we were talking about Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed He has this line where he says that the only way for the oppressed to become emancipated from their oppression is to learn their own history, to stop letting the oppressor teach them their own history. Elsewhere Freire says that the oppressed, once liberated, are bound to recreate the same systems that once oppressed them. So we read this, and my classmates say, that sounds like the Jews. In these situations I struggled with the analytical and historical arguments to throw back and instead sat with questions: How come I’m not allowed to feel pain? Why can’t there be any complexity to my experience, and why do I have to go out of my way to denounce Israel or Zionism or Jewish day school before you’ll say I can speak in your space?

So to me, being pro-Israel sounds like a response, an antagonism to being anti-Israel. But if someone asks me if I’m a Zionist, I also hesitate, because everyone’s definitions are different. I never said I was pro-Israel to my Stanford classmates. In fact, I went out of my way to show that I was trying to be in solidarity with them

and that I was trying to have nuanced conversations, considering complexity and counterfactual information. But even bringing scholarship or Jewish identity into the classroom made me a target for their anti-Zionist activism.

For so long, my Judaism was wholly entangled with Zionism, and so the past few years have been a process of trying to find a way to Judaism that doesn’t fundamentally depend on the concept of a modern political nation-state. I believe that Jews have the right to determine how to ensure our safety and continued existence (of course different Jews have different opinions on that), but I hesitate to use the term pro-Israel to describe myself. When people ask me where I’m from and then follow up by asking me if I’m a Zionist or how I feel about what’s going on in the Middle East, they’re not asking me because I’ve studied it in graduate school—they’re asking me because I’m a Jew. Usually, they just want to fight me on it.

Having existed in American Jewish establishment spaces and in radical leftist political spaces, which fundamentally disagree with each other on definitions and on history, I now inhabit a very nuanced complexity, where I struggle to speak and make sense of things in ways that are empathetic. It’s terrible. And if anyone thinks they have all the answers and knows all the details, they are not thinking deeply enough.

Eliana Padwa

is the cofounder and codirector of Halachic Left. She has taught middle school history in New York and is currently a Dorot Foundation Fellow doing human rights activism in the West Bank and studying Hebrew and Arabic.

First and foremost, I reject the binary of pro- and anti-Israel. One can be pro-human rights, pro-democracy, profree speech. One can support a particular political candidate or hold a position on an issue. But asking if someone is

“pro” a state serves only to erase all nuance and distinctions, creating a litmus test that tells us very little about one’s actual politics. We would do better to talk about: political Zionism; the settler movement; historic and religious attachments to the land; care for our fellow Jews; the actions of a particular nation-state. The framework of “pro-Israel” demands an affirmative call of support to all of the above concepts and conflates criticism of any of them with criticism of all of them.

Nevertheless, what do people mean when they say they are pro-Israel? I am the codirector of a group that speaks

In the current political climate, nothing scares a Jewish communal leader more than the specter of being labeled “anti-Israel.”

from the perspective of those living in Orthodox and traditionally observant communities, which surveys show are generally supportive of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not optimistic about peace with Palestinians. In our communities, it seems that being pro-Israel means never criticizing Israel’s history or its current conduct, at least when it comes to its treatment of Palestinians. You can attempt to critique its governing figures, or even policies such as the proposed judicial reform, but only in the name of “saving Israel from itself,” without a larger analysis of how generations of Jewish supremacy,

oppressive legal systems and military occupation led Israel to this point. The pro-Israel community is more comfortable merely blaming these realities on Palestinians themselves, rather than taking responsibility.

In practice, being pro-Israel in the observant world means never looking at ourselves in the mirror and seeing the atrocities against Palestinians being committed in our names. In today’s discourse, acknowledging simple facts (around 750,000 people were expelled from their homes between 1947-1949; more than three million Palestinians live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank with no legal say in the Israeli government that controls their lives; more than 600,000 Israelis living in the West Bank are there in violation of international law) is construed as anti-Israel. To the self-identified pro-Israel camp, bringing these realities into the conversation, without explicitly framing them as fundamentally the fault of Palestinians themselves, is tantamout to calling for the “destruction of the State of Israel,” which in turn is equated with calling for the expulsion of all Jews. These dynamics tragically led even the liberal pro-Israel community to refuse for many months to condemn Israel’s destruction of Gaza, even when it was clear that the military campaign was, from the start, unconcerned with international law or proportionality and lacked any coherent goal beyond revenge for October 7.

The phrase “pro-Israel” has led to a deep fear in our communities: In the current political climate, nothing scares a Jewish communal leader more than the specter of being labeled “anti-Israel.” As soon as someone dares offer a critique of Israel’s treatment of a people under its control, they are at risk of being canceled by the pro-Israel camp, even if they too identify as such. To criticize Israel in a meaningful way is to risk forfeiting one’s social standing or even one’s job—and so our communities are not speaking out. But we must not let this fear tactic succeed in silencing calls for freedom and justice for all. M

Some politically conservative German Jews refused to recognize the threat until it was too late.

By Dan Freedman

Early in 1934, as Adolf Hitler consolidated his stronghold in Germany, a 25-yearold youth group leader named Hans-Joachim Schoeps hailed the emerging dictatorship

as the embodiment of “military order and discipline, will to power, and authority.” Schoeps embraced the adulation of Hitler, seeing the Nazis as Germany’s best hope to restore the nation to greatness.

But there was one problem. Schoeps was Jewish.

A self-styled monarchist and scion of the distinguished family that had produced both the theologian-philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the composer Felix Mendelssohn, Schoeps described Nazi antisemitism as a “not very important side effect.” Of course, the vast majority of Germany’s approximately 525,000 Jews recognized that Nazism posed a threat. But a small number of politically conservative Jews saw themselves as indistinguishable from gentile Germans. They shared Hitler’s distaste for the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic.

Conservative German Jews “had every intention [of] marching with the [Hitler] regime,” writes Philipp Nielsen, a historian and author of the book Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935. Schoeps, who named his youth group the German Vanguard, didn’t appear to realize that “the National Socialists’ emphasis on race might also be a problem for him as a Jew.”

Conservative Jews, who longed for restoration of pre-World War I imperial Germany, made up about 10 percent of the Jewish population. Few if any of them voted for the Nazis in the crucial elections between 1930 and 1933, when Hitler brought the curtain down on parliamentary democracy in Germany. Instead, many drifted toward the non-Nazi German National People’s Party, known

by the acronym DNVP, which also was antisemitic and little interested in Jewish support. But the failure of Germany’s politically conservative Jews to accurately read the threat Hitler posed is a case study in what happens when a population has a clear idea of a leader’s track record of hatred but supports him anyway.

Some conservative Jews believed Hitler stoked antisemitism only as a way to “stir up the masses,” wrote Sarah Ann Gordon in her 1984 book Hitler, Germans and the “Jewish Question.” Others didn’t believe Hitler would last very long, considering the volatility of German politics.

Once Hitler came to power in 1933, conservative German Jews implored him to recognize them as loyal Germans. Their presence in the western part of Germany, they argued, dated back to at least Charlemagne. Many had fought in the trenches of World War I—some 12,000 Jewish soldiers had died fighting for Germany. Of course, there was absolutely no chance of changing Hitler’s mind. Hatred of Jews was a foundational principle of Nazism, as he outlined in 1925 in Mein Kampf. Yet some of these Jewish conservatives either didn’t seem to understand or they didn’t care—or perhaps a little of both.

They belonged to splinter groups that wanted to “make Germany great again,” says Michael Brenner, a professor of German and Jewish history at American University in Washington, DC. Like their non-Jewish counterparts, conservative German Jews “saw Hitler as a potential vehicle for German national revival,” says Volker Benkert, who teaches German and European history at Arizona State University. “Conservative German Jews thus thought that if they would assimilate enough, they could be part of this political group, and the fact that many German Jews served in World War I would make them immune to Nazi antisemitic attacks.”

Max Naumann was another prominent conservative Jewish figure who, along with Schoeps, cozied up to the Nazis. A veteran of trench warfare in World War I who was awarded the Iron Cross, Naumann saw German Jews as an indivisible part of the German body politic. As head of the League of National German Jews (Verband nationaldeutscher Juden), he advocated total assimilation. The group’s monthly publication, The National German Jew (Der nationaldeutsche Jude), reportedly had a circulation of 6,000 in 1927. According

A crowd salutes as Adolf Hitler drives by in 1938.

Conservative German Jews thought that if they would assimilate enough it would make them immune to Nazi antisemitic attacks.

ed: “We have always held the well-being of the German people and the Fatherland, to which we feel inextricably linked, above our own well-being. Thus, we greeted the results of January 1933, even though it has brought hardship to us personally.” As Germany’s crucial election of March 1933 approached, Naumann attempted to flip the Nazi script by arguing “the election campaign must not be a struggle of religious conceptions, it must be a decisive struggle about our Germanness!”

The words fell on deaf ears. Hitler began stripping Jews of positions within the civil service, universities and the medical and legal professions. Jews were barred from acting in stage and film productions. The pre-Holocaust purge of Jews led to the 1935 Nuremberg laws that deprived Jews of German citizenship and forbade interfaith marriage and other intimate relationships.

Naumann and other conservative Jews saw Italy’s Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, as a hopeful model—a fascist dictator who was not notably antisemitic. For Hitler, antisemitism was hardwired into Nazi ideology, so a switch was never in the cards.

Conservative Jews also worked to undercut a stereotype they imagined was playing into Germany’s worst instincts about Jews. A consortium in 1929 bought a farm near Cottbus, southeast of Berlin, to demonstrate to Germany’s rural population that Jews too could undertake hard agricultural labor. At the time, Berthold Timendorfer of the B’nai B’rith Masonic Lodge called the farm an important element in the “war against antisemitic stereotypes.”

to historian Nielsen, Naumann once proposed moving the Jewish observance of Shabbat to Sunday to conform with the rest of Germany. Naumann and other politically conservative Jews

were anti-Zionist, believing advocacy for a Jewish state would undercut their status as Germans first.

After Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, Naumann stat-

For their part, Schoeps, Naumann and others sought to deflect Nazi antisemitism by drawing distinctions between themselves and “Eastern European Jews”—more recent arrivals on German soil from Poland and former Austro-Hungarian regions such as Galicia, much of which is in present-day Ukraine. These Jews embodied the stereotypes of shtetl Jews and primarily spoke Yiddish. Some were Social Democrats or Communists. They were a sharp contrast to

Hans-Joachim Schoeps

Max Naumann

Leo Löwenstein

the long-standing Jewish communities in the Rhineland who spoke High German and were not culturally distinguishable from non-Jewish Germans.

They “hoped to convince Hitler that Jews would be loyal followers if he only erased antisemitism from his program,” says Brenner of American University. They naively thought disassociating themselves from Eastern European Jewish immigrants could accomplish that.

One conservative Jew in Germany, Leo Löwenstein, appealed directly to Hitler on behalf of Jewish veterans of World War I. He won a meeting with a Hitler underling who asked him to write a follow-up memo. In it, Löwenstein contrasted Eastern European Jews, who he suggested were overly active in left-wing anti-Nazi politics, and “indigenous” Jews who were loyal. Löwenstein promised that through his Jewish veterans group, young Jews would be educated in military spirit and groomed for military service.

Löwenstein made little progress with Hitler’s staff but found a more receptive audience in an appeal to Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, who had won fame as commander of German ground forces in World War I. Von Hindenburg agreed with Löwenstein and exempted Jewish war veterans from antisemitic dictates. But the aging general died in 1934, and the status of Jewish war veterans faded away as the 1935 Nuremberg decrees took effect and the Nazis plunged forward to Kristallnacht, war and the Final Solution.

The death of von Hindenburg arguably erased the last structural obstacle between Hitler and dictatorial power. With the office of president vacant after von Hindenburg’s passing, the Nazis held a plebiscite on Aug. 19, 1934, in which voters were asked to approve merging the presidency and the position of chancellor, which Hitler occupied. Naumann’s League of National German Jews urged a vote for the merger—in other words, a vote essentially to formalize the Hitler dictatorship. “To the German fatherland belongs body and soul that portion of Jews who, like our-

selves, know no other fatherland than Germany…We urge all Jews who feel German to vote ‘Yes.’”

The League statement, which was reported in The New York Times, reiterated how its membership had welcomed Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 “although it brought rigors for us.”

The plebiscite result: 38 million— about 90 percent of Germans—voted yes. In those long-ago days before exit polls, it is impossible to say how many German Jews were among them. But 4.25 million Germans overall had the courage to vote no, according to William L. Shirer in his landmark book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Jews on the right eventually realized that loyalty to Germany afforded them no protection against the Nazis. In the eyes of Hitler, they were simply Jews. The Holocaust loomed before them, as it did for all German Jews and the entire Jewish population of Europe.

The Gestapo closed down Naumann’s

Jews on the right eventually realized that their loyalty to Germany afforded them no protection against the Nazis.

League of National German Jews in 1935, and he died of cancer in 1939. Löwenstein was sent to Theresienstadt but survived the war. He died in 1956 on a visit to Israel. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Schoeps fled to Sweden, where he sat out the war. His parents were less fortunate. His father died in Theresienstadt; his mother, at Auschwitz. He returned to Germany in 1946.

Though derided in some quarters as a “Heil-Hitler Jew” (“Heil-Hitler Jude”), Schoeps became a professor of religious history at the University of Erlangen in northern Bavaria. He died in 1980. His son, Julius Schoeps, has angrily denied that his father was ever a Nazi. Like other German Jews, Hans-Joachim Schoeps believed Hitler and the Nazis were “a nightmare that would soon pass,” Julius said in a 2019 interview. He acknowledged his father thought it “possible for German Jews to come to some kind of arrangement with the regime.’’

“But,’’ he added, in retrospect, “that was a mistake.” M

Association of National German Jews newsletter, Jan. 1925.

morning when Rabbi Gershon Edelman woke and saw the Styrofoam heads covered with the sheitals, the wigs, that his late wife wore, he momentarily forgot that she was no longer among the living.

Her passing was sudden. A mild stomach ache that didn’t fade alongside a light yellowish tint to her skin. She always hated doctors, and he didn’t push her to see one: over a few months their kitchen filled with the bags of homeopathic medicines the wives of the other rabbis recommended. Finally, there was the emergency room visit where a scan revealed a cancer in full bloom like a hideous flower a year and a half ago.

Shortly thereafter: the funeral of Rebbetzin Freeda Edelman, of blessed memory. A devoted wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother whose life had been intertwined with the growth of the Orthodox Jewish population of Far Rockaway and Long Is-

land. Through the long course of her life, she witnessed the explosion of the frum velt, the religious world, from a handful of Jewish families clinging to Empire Avenue to street after street of houses adorned with mezuzahs and men in black hats scurrying to shuls for the evening prayers. So many people tried to attend the levaya, the funeral, that they closed the street of the funeral parlor. Her body was flown to Israel for burial on the Mount of Olives, where Rabbi Edelman already had a plot waiting for him.

Twinned to the belated realization of his wife’s death was another feeling, slow in coming, that in their blissful half-century together, Rabbi Edelman could have treated her better. Of course, Rabbi Edelman, Rosh HaYeshiva, head rabbi of the Derech HaTorah yeshiva, champion of the Jewish people, had fulfilled all that the Torah commanded of a faithful and dutiful husband. He mentally reviewed their lives as if they were a piece of the Talmud he was expounding upon: He provided for her with the salary he received from the yeshiva; they had fulfilled the commandment of pru urvu, being fruitful and multiplying, with the seven children they had

together; she lived to see more than a dozen grandchildren and even two great-grandchildren. She had much nachas, pleasure, from them. She had not wanted for anything. Or so he thought.

But still a feeling nagged at him: was there something he did wrong? Could he have been better?

No, of course not! This was just his mind being idle, he told himself. Since her death, Rabbi Edelman had not been himself: He was not learning as well as he was wont. He often found himself staring at the skylight during his morning learning sessions wondering about the shapes of clouds. Even worse, his mind wandered during the typically razor-sharp Talmudic lecture he delivered to the elite students in the yeshiva.

This had never happened to Rabbi Edelman since he first began teaching half a century ago. He had always had an ability to learn—a vague term that meant an ability to weave together the Talmud and its associated commentaries into a coherent whole. That ability had propelled him from a humble religious household, a house of poshut, simple Jews, to the upper echelons of the religious Jewish community, the top yeshivas—Mir and Briske, both in Eretz Yisroel—and eventually to his wife, the daughter of the former head of the Derech HaTorah yeshiva.

Some grief was acceptable, of course, even welcomed. Hashem, God, did not

create robots, Rabbi Edelman liked to exhort his students. Rabbi Edelman was inconsolable in the four days of shiva after the funeral, not even rising to greet the great rabbis who visited—four days instead of the customary seven since the Jewish holiday of Sukkot coincided with the shiva and, per Jewish law, superseded the mourning period.

On this morning, Rabbi Edelman looked at the auburn hair that was his wife’s favorite wig, illuminated by the rays of sunlight streaming through their windows. When she first put it on so many years ago, Rabbi Edelman thought the red coloring was immodest, but gradually he admitted to himself that he liked seeing her wear it. Sheker hachain, v’hevel ha’yofi, as he sang—badly and off-tune to her—every week before the Friday night Kiddush in the Aishet Chayil song: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is nothing.” But the verse concluded: ishah yir’at Adonai hi tithalal. “A woman who fears God is to be praised.” In a rare moment of pride he allowed himself, Rabbi Edelman thought his wife possessed all those qualities: charm, beauty and a fear of God.

Like all religious Jewish women, the Rebbetzin covered her hair her entire married life. A woman’s hair was considered a nakedness, and the Talmud was replete with stories of how the sight of a woman’s uncovered hair could drive a man mad with desire. This made it easier when the treatment made her hair fall out. He almost forgot her hair’s original dull brown color until he saw loose strands of it draped on the pillow.

Their marriage was arranged, but not forced. He had been a rising student in

her father’s yeshiva, invited frequently to their Shabbat table for meals and given the privileged seat next to the old man. He sang alongside the other yeshiva buchurim, students, at the table. Once his future father-in-law asked him to deliver some divrei Torah, words of Torah, at the table. Eager to impress and terrified of offending, the young Rabbi Edelman avoided eye contact with anyone at the table while he spoke, instead switching his gaze between the fake lilies in the centerpiece and a painted picture of the great rabbi, the Chazon Ish, on the wall.

Weeks later, he was invited for dinner one night, an uncommon occurrence, and after the plates were cleared, his future wife came out in a dark dress with careful white stitching. The young Rabbi Edelman, with a beard composed of sparse and straggly black hairs, had been surprised. She had asked him the standard questions one was asked on a date: about what he was learning, about his hobbies, books he had read. He could only answer the first question. When he returned to the yeshiva later that night, his fellow yeshiva buchirim congregated around him like he was a celebrity, tittering and chattering like birds.

Later, after they were married, Rabbi Edelman found out that his father-in-law was supposed to talk to him about meeting his daughter beforehand, but—as with so many worldly things—he forgot. Far from a flaw, this was considered a sign of his commitment to Torah and Avodath Hashem, service of God. The story his father-in-law liked to tell was that Rav Alyashiv, the great sage in Israel, was so involved with Klal Yisrael, the Jewish community, that he was rumored to not

even know the names of his children. In his father-in-law’s case, it wasn’t this involvement that caused him to forget, but early onset Alzheimer’s. This led to Rabbi Edelman taking over the yeshiva earlier than expected. Still the yeshiva prospered, moving from a run-down office building on Mott Avenue to a brandnew building on Broadway paid for by the Sendoff and Rubin families.

But lo! It was morning, there was no time for thoughts like this. Vayehi Ohr, and Hashem said “Let there be light.” That was in the beginning of Beresheit, Genesis. But then in the next few verses, Hashem created light again! This, even children knew. Because God created two types of light, one for the rest of the world and a second kind that he hid away for the tzadikim, the holy men, at the end of time. Perhaps this was why Rabbi Edelman was so unfocused in his learning; he reminisced instead of beginning his day. His children had told him that this grief was natural, but still he chastised himself for it. I should be grateful for what I had, Rabbi Edelman told himself, not sad at what I lost. Besides, he could let his mind roam later in the day when he took his five-minute coffee break. He threw off the down blankets and swung his spindly legs over the side of the bed. His legs had once been thick like tree limbs. He had even played basketball as a teenager. He sat up and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands, careful not to touch his eyes with his fingertips that might be impure from sleep. He said the benediction of Modeh Ani, the traditional blessing thanking God for returning a person’s soul after sleep. On Rabbi Edelman’s

The Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest was founded in 2000 to recognize authors of Jewish short fiction. The 2023 stories were judged by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Moment Magazine and the Karma Foundation are grateful to Newberger Goldstein and to all of the writers who took the time to submit their stories. Visit momentmag.com/fiction to learn how to submit a story to the contest.

night table was a washing cup and a shallow pan. Since his wife died, Rabbi Edelman needed to remind himself to fill the cup with water each night. It was one of the million things that his wife had done for him, unasked, that now he struggled to do. But last night, he had remembered, and he poured the oncewarm-now-cold water over his hands and recited the blessing of Negel Vasser to rid his hands of the ritual impurity that came from sleep.

Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the washing of the hands, he said in Hebrew.

He listened to his voice echo in the empty room. How strange it was to hear his voice and not hear her quiet assent and amen. Since Rebbetzin Edelman’s passing, he divided his time between the yeshiva and his empty house; rarely did he speak with anyone at home, aside from the stray phone calls he received from his children, and those were usually brief. If someone needed him, he could be found in the yeshiva where he always was. Now that his wife was gone, what emergency could possibly warrant his attention? An unopened iPhone his children bought him sat in a box by his bed.

He brushed his teeth, spat out the toothpaste, and splashed cold water across his face. His daughters and daughters-in-law had removed nearly everything that belonged to his wife, but her green toothbrush remained in a cup on the sink. That could be the focus of a speech, a dvar Torah, how all that remained of a person once they were gone—well, what physically remained

She mentioned once wanting to visit Paris. Next year, he always said smiling, knowing that they would never go.

of a person—was nothing, a toothbrush, a wig. But souls endured. His wife’s neshoma was in Gan Eden, heaven, waiting for him. He was sure of it. But he should throw out the toothbrush. Lifting up the toothbrush, Rabbi Edelman held it above the small garbage can near the toilet. Perhaps he wasn’t ready to do that yet, he thought, and placed it back in the cup. He stared at the pink and blue tiles that lined the bathroom floor and shone in the morning light. They reminded him of the meager jewelry he had given his wife over the years, some passed down from his own mother, all of which had been taken by his daughters and daughters-in-law.

A woman’s greatest jewels are the Torah learned by her sons and sons-in-law, he had said more than once—and his Rebbetzin had smiled. Had she smiled?

Was he misremembering? Had the lines around her mouth tightened when he said that or when he mentioned something displeasing to her, like when their son was kicked out of the yeshiva? She mentioned once wanting to visit Paris during the summer, instead of their usual trip to a bungalow in the Catskills, where he was surrounded by his students. Next year, he always said smiling, knowing that they would never go.

He ran a black plastic comb through his long white beard to make sure there wasn’t any food in it. He practiced a smile in front of the mirror. The Tannaim of Beis Shammai said a person’s face was Reshus Harabim, a term for a public place, and one was not allowed to cause damage in a public place so he must smile.

His daughters and daughters-in-law

What contest judge Rebecca Newberger Goldstein has to say about this story:

“The Sound That Turtles Make” is a convincing close-up portrait of a person who has faithfully sleepwalked through his life—emphasis here on the “faithfully,” since he’s allowed a religious rigidity to take the place of experiencing life and submitting to the demands of love — only to wake up from his sleep when it’s too late. In a way, it’s an Orthodox Jewish spin on Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.”

What if, like the smile that wasn't a smile, the closet had been empty all this time?

there as well, though neither seemed to pay much attention to him and instead snuck glances at each other.

Mid-meal, Rachel went to help his wife take in some dishes and she stooped and whispered something in Yeruchmiel’s ear and they both laughed. When the dishes were brought out and Rachel and Rebbetzin Edelman returned to the table, Rachel whispered something in the Rebbetzin’s ear and she, too, laughed. What had Rachel said to his wife? She didn’t want to tell him, but a week later in the evening as they prepared for bed and he kept on prodding her, she finally spoke.

had been models of efficiency. They had expected him to grieve for the shiva; the shloshim, the thirty-day anniversary of her death; then the yartzeit, the annual anniversary of her death; but otherwise, to move on. Rabbi Edelman always prized the story of the great rabbi who, when he found out his son had died over Passover, a time when mourning was forbidden, refused to let himself cry. But Rabbi Edelman was finding himself to not be that great. Only Rachel, the girl who dated his troubled son Yeruchmiel, seemed to understand.

While all their other children had floated easily in the religious world they inhabited—their daughters marrying talmudei chachamim, Torah scholars, their sons becoming them—Yeruchmiel struggled. He was thrown out of yeshiva after yeshiva, including the high school attached to Derech HaTorah. How wounded his wife looked when the principal said that Yeruchmiel was no longer welcome in the school; that Rabbi Edelman’s son was caught with a Rolling Stone magazine filled with improperly dressed women; that a teacher caught him smoking marijuana on school grounds. But those struggles were in the past. They sent Yeruchmiel to a special high school for troubled children in Israel and he stayed in the country for several years. He returned, and, while he still wasn’t interested in learning, he wore a yarmulke and sat not far from his father in

shul when he visited. Rabbi Edelman was still disappointed: He felt that of all his children, Yeruchmiel had the greatest potential. As a child, his rebbe offered a dollar to any student who memorized a few lines of a Mishna. Yeruchmiel spent the weekend memorizing portion after portion. Can you imagine? Rabbi Edelman was incredulous. A six-year-old, reciting hundreds of lines of Hebrew? Can you imagine that dedication? He heard rumors that Yeruchmiel was no longer frum, no longer religious: that he was off-the-derech.

Later it was discovered that one of the rabbis in a yeshiva Yeruchmiel attended had done things, unmentionable things, to children in the class. He wasn’t reported to the police, and switched schools. Rabbi Edelman heard he fled to Israel.

Yeruchmiel even began living with his girlfriend, which initially horrified Rabbi Edelman, but his wife demanded that they be allowed to stay in the same room together when they visited. That was one of their few arguments. While putting on a fresh undershirt—his children had arranged for a housekeeper to come and clean and do the laundry once a week while he was in yeshiva— he recalled one Friday night meal. The table was set and a few of his students and a local family were by the table, all of them eager to hear the divrei Torah, words of Torah, that Rabbi Edelman gave over. Yeruchmiel and Rachel were

“Rachel said when you bobbed your head during the songs, you looked like a turtle with a beard.”

At first, he was outraged. How dare his future daughter-in-law make fun of him! Mocking a great sage was equivalent to mocking the Torah! But then as his wife smiled, he also began to laugh. Moments later, he glanced at the mirror in their bathroom, and he wondered if he could pull up his black waistcoat, his rekel, over his head and disappear into his shell. He walked out of the bathroom with his waistcoat as high as he could raise it.

“Meep, meep,” he said to his wife.

“What?” a perplexed Rebbetzin Edelman asked, covered in her quilted nightgown with her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose.

“I wasn’t sure what sound turtles make.”

How they had laughed until they both sobbed! That was a good night. Toward the end, there were not many.

After his undershirt, he put on his tzitzit, the ritual fringes, and then the same white shirt he wore yesterday. “Abba,” his son Avrohom, a rabbi in the yeshiva, asked. “Where are you holding?” Where was he holding?

Rabbi Edelman took out one of the four identical black suits his wife had bought him off the rack at a Marshalls. He occasionally fondled the pocket and thought about the names of the brands: Bill Blass, Sean John, one suit his wife had delighted to find on sale at Marshalls with the name Hickey Freeman.

Rachel was the root cause of all this

unhealthy thought. Not Chas V’shalom, God forbid, because of anything she did; while she and Yeruchmiel were still not married, Rachel acted like all the other daughters-in-law and cleaned out the house and helped out, cooking meals that sat uneaten in Tupperware containers in the refrigerator. But one day, shortly after the shiva, she gave him several cards. Less than a dozen, perhaps ten. At first, he was perplexed. I found them in the drawer, she explained. Each card was identical: simple pastel white and red flowers on the front flap with the words “May our anniversary be full of loving moments that fill our hearts with lovely memories,” and his name signed under that with a different year of the Hebrew calendar.

It took him a few moments to understand. Each year, before their anniversary, Rabbi Edelman took off during lunch and asked one of the yeshiva students to drive him to a CVS where he browsed the aisles for a card. He always found a card quickly that said exactly what he wanted; he didn’t realize that each year, they had been the same card. How she smiled when he gave her the card! She said, “You always give me wonderful cards.” And his duty done, he returned to the yeshiva. But what if the smile was fake? What if he looked at the lines around her eyes instead of her mouth? He took a few moments with the cards, his shoulders heaved, and he would have sobbed had he been alone. Rachel placed her hand on his shoulder. Being touched by a woman not directly related to you was not proper, but her hand on his shoulder felt right.

To himself, he admitted: he was not a perfect husband.

He looked in her closet. All her clothing was gone. The long black dresses, the long-sleeved shirts, the ankle-length skirts. This wasn’t unexpected, but the emptiness made him suck in his breath with a gasp. What if, like the smile that wasn’t a smile, the closet had been empty all this time?

One of their first arguments in decades occurred when her doctor suggested an experimental treatment. It wouldn’t

cure the cancer, but could give her a few more months. The doctor said that the chances of success were slim, and it was painful. Rabbi Edelman thought, of course, every chance at life was worth it. When things are difficult, it’s a test from Hashem, he told his students innumerable times. You push through. His wife surprised him then in the nondescript office: “No.” Later as they talked, he said that giving up was a sin. Her face was pained but she was adamant. His wife’s recalcitrance made him wish he could call his own rabbi for advice, but his rabbi was long dead.

Who was that young boy that one of his sons had at his house the other week? He was a ba’al teshuva, a returnee to the faith, who became religious through Rabbi Edelman’s youth organization, Ignite. All of religious Judaism was new to him, but he seemed to take it all in. He gave a dvar Torah at the table. Now, I don’t understand, the boy began, we’re reading the Tanakh and there are miracles happening every single day to the Jewish people when they serve Hashem. But when they serve idols, then bad things happen. So why did they keep on serving idols?

It was a basic and obvious question. The answer was that the yetzer hora, the evil inclination, was so strong that it made even the most obvious thing opaque.

“Right, so the evil inclination,” the boy said. He righted his kippah, which was faintly emblazoned with the name of a sports team. “But what does that mean? So I was reading this news article and there’s this kind of fungi called the zombie-ant fungus and scientists observed this fungus in the wild. You have this ant and this ant is totally doing normal ant-like things, like foraging and building and hanging out with the other ants. Until he gets this fungus and then he’s totally different. He wanders away from the nest and attaches himself to a leaf and doesn’t let go even after he starves to death. Then, the fungus sprouts. And I know this isn’t a traditional divrei Torah, but I couldn’t help thinking that worshipping idols must have been something like that. A kind

of fungus that infects you. Where you can’t control your actions, and you are suddenly not yourself.”

Suddenly not yourself. A fungus? That’s what Rabbi Edelman felt this morning. Like he wasn’t in control of himself. Rabbi Edelman wanted something to remind him of his wife, something of hers to say that she had been there. He took the stairs down to the first floor of the house and walked past the kitchen and the dining room, both dusty from underuse. Where was their laundry machine? He had never done the laundry in all their years of marriage. It must be in the basement! He opened the white door and took the carpeted stairs down. Large crickets scurried out of his way. Had they always been there? Had his wife always needed to watch her step? Was this another thing his wife never told him?

In the dim light of the basement, he saw children’s toys: an old red and yellow cab, a small slide, Legos. The useless debris of their lives. In the corner he made out a white washing machine and dryer. He saw something black under the washing machine. He pulled himself down to the floor and felt it: lacy. It might be a pair of her underwear. He tried pulling on it, but it was stuck. He grasped the bottom of the washing machine and prepared to lift. Like Samson grasping the pillars on the Philistines, he pushed up.

But he was no Samson. The washing machine remained where it was and instead he toppled to the floor. As he collapsed in the basement, his final thoughts were a prayer, not to live more, but for God to whisper to him that the Rebbetzin had been happy, that her smile had not been forced, and that many years ago, when she glanced at him across the dinner table, past the plastic lilies that never wilted, her eyes had seen a future with him and that she accepted him for the loving husband he never could become. M

Michael Orbach is a writer in Brooklyn whose fiction has appeared in St. Anne’s Review, Ilanot, and Jewishfiction.net. He is working on a novel.

THE

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talk of the table

This Passover, Try Inquisition Soup

BY VERED GUTTMAN

The case against María Días, prosecuted by the Spanish Inquisition, began on January 12, 1484. Her crimes? Secretly marrying in a Jewish ceremony, keeping the Sabbath, praying from the siddur and observing the holiday of Passover.

A wax worker from the town of Palma (near Cordoba) in Andalusia, Días had fled and was not present at her trial in the court of the Inquisition in the city of Ciudad Real, where she had been accused of secretly practicing Jewish customs. The trial records, housed in the National Historical Archive of Spain in Madrid, detail her “crimes” and the dishes she allegedly prepared for two Passover seders: “She celebrated the Feast of Unleavened Bread which they begin by eating lettuce, celery and other green vegetables...sow thistles and vinegar, and another ceremo-

ny which they make with maror, which means bitter, and certain little cakes of unleavened bread.”

We are, of course, familiar today with lettuce and celery, but what is sow thistle? And what did the plant, a wild herb with yellow flower heads and a bitter taste, have to do with heresy?

The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478, and its first recorded sentence was issued three years later. The primary targets were Crypto-Jews, i.e. Jewish converts to Catholicism (also known as conversos, Marranos, Anusim or Meshumadim) whom the authorities suspected of secretly maintaining Jewish traditions.

One of the ways the Inquisition tried to expose Crypto-Jews was through their food—the dishes they prepared, the foods they avoided and food-related rituals. In fact, according to French-Spanish food

historian Hélène Jawhara Piñer, nearly 60 percent of Inquisition trials used food as evidence of heresy. “Food is politics,” Piñer explains. “It is the case these days, and it was even more so before.”

Inquisition law, as issued in 1481, outlines specific signs that could identify a backsliding converso (Judaizer). If, for instance, suspects eat food that has been cooked overnight in the oven, it means they are celebrating Shabbat. They are also suspect if they eat meat during Lent; if they take neither meat nor drink on the Day of Atonement; if on the Feast of Tabernacles they use “green branches” or send fruit as gifts to friends; if they throw a piece of dough in the stove before baking; if they bless a cup of wine before meals and pass it around among the people at table; if they pronounce blessings while slaughtering poultry, cover the blood with earth, separate the veins

from meat, soak the flesh in water before cooking, and cleanse it from blood; if they eat no pork, hare, rabbits or eels; and if they eat unleavened bread or bitter herbs on Passover.

The sow thistle, allegedly used by María Días at her Passover seder, was one such bitter herb. The Mishnah lists five herbs that qualify as maror (bitter herb): hazzeret, ulshin, tamcha, harhavina and maror (here referring to the specific herb, not a generic category). Maimonides, himself a native of Cordoba, identified harhavina as sow thistle.

While unfamiliar to most of us, sow thistle seems to have been an herb regularly used in Andalusia. A 13th-century anonymous cookbook from that region, published last year in a new translation by food historian Nawal Nasrallah, includes recipes for sow thistle syrup and jam. And 13th-century Andalusian botanist Ibn al-Baytar, in his Compendium on Simple Medicaments and Foods, noted that sow thistle was known in Andalusia as “Abraham’s thorn” and was also referred to as one of the “vegetables of the Jews.”

For her new cookbook, Matzah and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardi Jews, food historian Piñer has created a sow thistle soup recipe based on María Días’s trial records. Her research draws from a variety of historical sources, including the writings of Maimonides concerning Jewish law and medical research, and Inquisition trial records that span the period from 1481 to the late 19th century in Spain and Mexico. “For me, as a food historian,” says Piñer, “Inquisition trials are the best source to understand the complexity and richness of the food practices of the Jews of Spain and the territories [in the New World] where Jews were settled.”

Paradoxically, while Jewish texts were banned during the Inquisition, this very prohibition list later served as an unwitting guide for conversos seeking to preserve their faith in secret.

Spanish prosecutors referred to Passover as Pascua de los Judîos (Passover of the Jews) or Pascua del Pan Cenceño (Passover of the Unleavened Bread). Over time,

converso observance of the holiday adapted. Some kept it for only a few days, while others observed it for seven. Some fasted on the first day. And some, particularly in Mexico, used the Latin Vulgate Bible in place of a traditional Haggadah. But wine, matzah and bitter herbs were a common denominator and were frequently mentioned in the Inquisition records.

In the testimony of Mexican converso Diego Diaz Nieto in 1601, he mentions dipping the bitter herb in vinegar, just as the trial records of María Días state: “They set out a basket in which there are lettuce, celery, and others of the most bitter greens, and a piece of roast meat in memory of the [Passover] lamb, and a little dish with balls of [haroset]…And they dampen the lettuce and celery in vinegar and eat it.” An Inquisition record from 1624 in Cuenca, Ecuador, identifies Judaizers as those “who celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread, beginning by eating lettuce, celery or other bitter herbs.”

These days, says Piñer, a very similar herb called tagarninas grows wild in Andalusia in springtime and is used by local cooks for Easter stews and soups. In Israel, sow thistle is called “maror of the garden,” and has been used by some Yemenite Jews as maror. Samaritans, of whom there are still communities in Israel, serve the herb with the Passover lamb sacrifice, following a verse from Exodus: “And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it.”

But what of María Días? It turns out that it was her servant who denounced her. According to the trial record, this person reported seeing Días “keeping and celebrating no less than the Jews do.” Fernando de Trusillo, a former rabbi of the conversos in Palma, was also called to testify. According to Piñer, he told the court that when he had lived in Palma seven years earlier, María Días observed Shabbat and Jewish holidays just as he did.

María Días was found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition. The trial papers give no indication of how she was located, but we do know that on February 24, 1484, Días was burned at the stake.

ANDALUSIAN SOUP

Matzah and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardi Jews by Hélène Jawhara Piñer

ingredients ( serves 4) for the broth : carrots, peeled, washed and cut into chunks

clove garlic, mashed cups water tbsp. salt 2 1 2 1 4 1

medium onion, peeled and sliced stalks of celery, peeled, washed and cut into chunks

for the soup : cups vegetable broth oz. cleaned and rinsed tagarninas, cut in 1/2-inch pieces (can substitute asparagus if needed)

small cloves of garlic, sliced tsps. olive oil bay leaf tsps. salt tsp. black pepper strands saffron, crushed in a mortar with one ice cube eggs, beaten shallot, thinly sliced unleavened breads or matzahs tsp. smoked paprika (optional)

instructions

for the broth :

1. Take a pan and pour in 4 cups of water and salt and bring it to a boil.

2. Add the chopped vegetables, cover and cook for about 10-15 minutes, until tender.

for the soup :

1. In a pan, pour olive oil. Add the thin slices of garlic and bay leaf. Sauté over medium heat for 2-3 minutes, making sure not to burn the garlic.

2. Add the cut tagarninas (or asparagus), salt, pepper and saffron previously crushed in a mortar with one ice cube. Mix gently for about 2 minutes and add 4 cups of vegetable broth. Add the cooked vegetables as well. Cook covered over medium heat for approximately 15 minutes. Then, turn off the heat.

3. In a bowl, beat the eggs. Pour them into the soup and gently stir to cook them.

4. Prepare the bowls, and add finely chopped scallions. Then add five pieces of broken matzah, and pour the soup on top. Sprinkle with smoked paprika if desired. Serve immediately.

—Jodi Blecker

JUDAISM IS ABOUT LOVE WITH RABBI SHAI HELD

Rabbi Shai Held is the president and dean of the Hadar Institute, where he also hosts the podcast Answers With Held. Moment spoke with him about his new book Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.

Why did you decide to write a book about love? In the decades I have spent teaching Jewish thought in the American Jewish community, I have been struck time and again by how deeply so many Jews have internalized key aspects of traditional Christian anti-Judaism. Perhaps the most insidious caricature of all has been the insistence that Christianity is about love, whereas Judaism is about…something else, like justice, or rules, or rote rituals. For centuries, Christianity has told a story about how Judaism was (and is) a loveless religion and Christ came into the world to fill a lacuna at the heart of Judaism. And over time, many Jews came to believe this story. We know from both philosophers and social scientists that minority groups often come to see themselves as the majority group sees them–and Jews ceding the language of love to Christians is a powerful (and tragic) example of that. I wrote Judaism Is About Love to help Jews recover and reclaim the heart of Jewish life. Heart in both senses of the word: the core, but also the love and care that are central to the Torah.

Even if we say Judaism is centered on love, it is hard to see God as centered on love when the biblical God is so often angry and vengeful. I don’t actually think it’s that hard to see God as centered on love. Consider: The Bible verses that are most often quoted within the Bible itself are “the Lord, the Lord, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving kindness (chesed) and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6-7). To get technical for a moment, Exodus 34:6 describes God’s attributes, whereas Exodus 34:7 describes God’s actions. Chesed, or divine love, appears in both 34:6 and 34:7, but anger appears only in 34:7. What this means is that according to the book of Exodus itself, angry is something God gets, but loving is something God is.

This is crucial to the Bible’s vision of God. I should add that I don’t see divine anger as inherently problematic. A God who gets angry is a God who cares, a God who takes us seriously as moral agents. The extent of God’s anger as depicted in some texts, and the violence that it brings, are obviously disturbing–and I don’t pretend to have a solution–but the anger is in and of itself not the issue. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel noted, in a world that is so often indifferent to what the powerful do to the weak and defenseless, divine anger can actually be a kind of balm.

How should we approach those who have deeply wronged us—i.e. must we love our enemies? One of the reasons that many of us find this question particularly difficult to think about is that we tend to use the word “enemies” to describe very different things: the person I don’t get along with at work; the cousin who cheated me in business, and the genocidal fanatic who wants to murder me and my people. In broad terms, I’d

“Angry is something God gets, but loving is something God is.”

say that the Jewish tradition does require us to love the first two “enemies” I’ve just mentioned, but not the third. It is almost a truism in our culture that love of enemies is a uniquely and distinctively Christian idea. But many of the things that love of enemies has been taken to mean by Christians are also amply attested to in biblical and Rabbinic sources. Some examples: not retaliating when someone hurts us; resisting schadenfreude; repaying cruelty with kindness. Jews rarely explicitly categorize these ideas as “love of enemies,” but these same ideas are found all over the Jewish tradition.

How is your argument applicable to our everyday lives? Here is just one example: The Torah mandates that we “walk in God’s ways,” which, according to rabbinic tradition, means that we are called to be present with people in their moments of vulnerability and suffering. We are

summoned to clothe the naked, to visit the sick, to comfort the mourners and to bury the dead—in other words, to live lives of chesed, of love manifested as kindness. The ideal tradition set before us is to integrate who we are on the inside with how we act on the outside and thus to be fully present to others both in heart and in deed. In a world suffused with suffering, we are commanded to respond with love; in a society that is so often indifferent to those who are hurting, we are bidden to embody compassion and kindness. Part of what it means to be human is to be a vehicle through which God’s love is delivered to those who most need it.

This past year you have gone around the country talking to people about your book. What have you learned? Just how hungry many Jews are for substantive, deep Torah. Jews want to talk about God. They want their rabbis to help them think and talk about God. People want to be spiritually nourished, emotionally uplifted and intellectually challenged; they want to talk about the big questions, like what it means to be a Jew and a human being in an impossibly broken world. I had been worried that after October 7 no one would want to talk about love, but I was mistaken. I have found many people to be more open-minded and open-hearted in their approach to Talmud Torah (Torah study) than I have ever experienced before.

Rabbi Shai Held

literary moment

BOOK REVIEW ROBERT SIEGEL

IT’S ALL HAPPENED HERE

Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America

By Clay Risen Scribner,

480 pp.

At a time when fealty has been elevated to a governing principle in Washington, when federal employees who advanced DEI programs or investigated the violence of January 6 or advocated mass vaccination have found themselves investigated or informed upon, the parallels are impossible to ignore. In the years between the end of World War II and the late 1950s, many Americans faced questions about their loyalties. A belief in communism, or a past association with the Communist Party of the United States of America or its front organizations, could (and for many did) spell professional ruin. A refusal to answer investigators’ questions or to name colleagues with communist leanings in their past or present might lead to prison.

The bad news, driven home by Clay Risen in his excellent history of what has come to be referred to as the McCarthy era, is that if we are hoping for political heroics or judicial courage to affirm the importance of civil liberties, the American past does not augur well.

The term “McCarthy era” is an unfortunate one. The eponymous Joseph McCarthy makes an ideal icon if one’s purpose is to minimize the excesses of what Risen more correctly calls the Red Scare. It was in fact President Harry Truman who launched federal loyalty boards in 1947, hoping, as Risen recounts, to generate enough public fear of communism at home to sell a war-weary public on spending abroad. The spending was needed to contain the territorial and political ambitions of Joseph Stalin in Greece and Turkey in a nascent “cold war.” Over the following ten years, federal loyalty programs would lead to an estimated 2,700 dismissals of federal employees and 12,000 resignations. There were state programs modeled on Truman’s federal plan, as well as loyalty programs at state universities and in the private sector.

As the Red Scare got underway, McCarthy was a Wisconsin freshman senator, a backbencher of little note and a man with a serious drinking problem. He would rise to fame only in 1950, making outrageous and undocumented claims of pro-Soviet communists running amok in the State Department. Probably the most remarkable and overlooked fact about McCarthy was the stunning lack of success of his personal witch hunt. In postwar Washington, the popularity of communism among some progressive New Dealers, when Communist Party membership was legal and Stalin was America’s wartime ally, was indisputable. What was in doubt was whether a communist affiliation equaled a propensity for espionage.

McCarthy did not find the communists he claimed to know about, but he became popular as the leading champion of anti-communism, despite trafficking in empty accusations that he could not substantiate. After repeatedly promising to do so, he was publicly debunked on

the new medium of television. The moment when Boston lawyer Joseph Welch dressed him down on camera, in the middle of a congressional hearing, with the rhetorical question “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” gave rise to a narrative of “problem solved, dangerous bad guy denounced for selling snake oil”—even if the bad guy remained hugely popular. By that point, though, left-wing civil servants, union officials, Hollywood actors and screenwriters, authors, playwrights and various others who had once believed in the promise of Marxism had lost their livelihood. McCarthy’s dramatic fall did little to undo their deprivation. We should be mindful that political repression is not just about the few celebrity persecutors and victims but about the thousands of anonymous citizens hunting down, being hunted by and fearing one another.

Another lesson this book underscores: The victims of the Red Scare are often not easy to love, certainly not in hindsight. Risen writes with the benefit of a cache of decrypted wartime Soviet diplomatic cables known as the Venona transcripts. They were recorded in a code that was cracked only after World War II ended and were not made public until 1995. The cables rebutted progressive pieties that Soviet espionage was a paranoid fiction. The files made it clear that there had in fact been much pro-Soviet espionage through the 1930s and 1940s and that rising star diplomat Alger Hiss and the convicted atomic spy Julius Rosenberg had, in fact, been spying for Moscow. (They

If we are hoping for political heroics or judicial courage to affirm the importance of civil liberties, the American past does not augur well.

also make clear that Julius’s wife Ethel, convicted and executed along with him, did little to merit such punishment. In fact, she did not even have a code name in the Soviet cables. In any case, President Eisenhower declined calls to commute her sentence to life in prison.)

American communists who were still keeping the faith up through the 1940s are hard to accept as idealists. Stalin had liquidated his opposition in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. His onetime rival Leon Trotsky had been purged and assassinated in Mexico. George Orwell, who went to Spain to write about the civil war there and ended up fighting in it, called out the communist leadership there in 1937 for what they were: loyal not to the workers of Spain but to the interests and orders of Moscow.

Edward R. Murrow of CBS took on McCarthy, revealing him as a fake by airing and disproving McCarthy’s charges in his documentary program See It Now, and he is the closest I can find to a hero in this story. But the thrust of Murrow’s journalism, great as it was, was that non-communists were being caught up in the witch hunt, not that a radical political idea has a protected place under the umbrella of free speech. A journalist who is not mentioned, Murrey Marder of The Washington Post, did equally important reporting showing that McCarthy’s alarms about communists at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey were unfounded.

The Supreme Court, for its part, was painfully slow to find something constitutionally amiss in the purges. Ultimately Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had led the court to desegregate schools, came around. Risen reminds us, though, that when Eisenhower named Warren to the court, he was not only the Republican governor of California and the unsuccessful vice presidential candidate in 1948 but a former “tough on crime” prosecutor who was also proudly tough on communists.

A few members of Congress spoke out, but most did not, and the House Un-American Activities Committee remained active and energetic through the

1950s and, after a name change to the “House Committee on Internal Security,” was finally shut down only in 1975.

Joseph Welch, the aforementioned Boston lawyer (he was hired by the Army for Senate hearings exploring McCarthy’s spurious claims of communist penetration of the military) is rightly remembered for his superstar performance skewering Senator McCarthy. But even he did so after first slyly alluding to McCarthy aide Roy Cohn’s homosexuality, a reminder of another shameful campaign Risen writes about that was going on at the same time, the so-called Lavender Scare that forced gays out of the federal government.

Red Scare does not describe a country deeply devoted to free speech and willing to fight for the right of others to express dissenting or disagreeable opinions. Many who took issue with communist-hunting did so privately, though with rare courageous exceptions. McCarthy, though diminished by the

Army-McCarthy hearings and Murrow’s reporting, remained popular among both Republicans and Irish Catholic Democrats. When McCarthy ultimately was censured by the Senate in 1954, the only Democrat not to vote for censure was Senator John F. Kennedy, whose family counted McCarthy as a friend. Kennedy was hospitalized at the time and might have gone either way, but he never definitively said how he would have voted.

While the parallels between those times and today are inexact to say the least, they caution us against hoping that the constitutional guardians of our freedoms will risk having, or at least publicly stating, an unpopular opinion. They also urge us to look less to places like contemporary Hungary or Turkey for insight into our present situation and more to our own history and its tragic shortcomings.

Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary correspondent.

BOOK REVIEW ROBERT ALTER

THE COLORFUL CREW WHO UNLOCKED THE PAST

The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing

By Joshua Hammer Simon & Schuster, 400 pp.

Modern archaeology, which began in the 18th century, underwent an explosion of activity in the century that followed. Its most remarkable achievement was the unearthing of unknown civilizations in the Near East, the cradle of Western civilization—a feat that involved an initial encounter with two major languages, Sumerian and Akkadian, long lost and forgotten. The recovery of these languages and of the striking bas-reliefs and sculptures that came with them was something like the discovery of a new planet in our solar system.

As Joshua Hammer shows in highly readable prose, the discoveries caused

a sensation in England, where many of the plundered artifacts were brought. Crowds flocked to the British Museum to see them, and the two principal explorer-archaeologists on whom Hammer focuses were feted as national heroes, one being given an audience with Queen Victoria, the other embraced as a friend by Charles Dickens. The artifacts, of course, spoke for themselves; the amazingly lively Assyrian bas-reliefs of royal lion hunts and battle scenes can be admired to this day in the British Museum.

The languages, on the other hand, were initially a daunting challenge, written on clay tablets and incised in stone in cuneiform, which, to the untutored eye, appeared as angular markings that looked like chicken tracks, with no punctuation and no division between words. Their decipherment through arduous efforts is one of the great intellectual achievements of the 19th century. Hammer, who is a freelance journalist, not a scholar, has scrupulously informed himself on these matters through reading and through extensive consultation with authorities in the field. He painstakingly shares what he has learned with his readers by frequently introducing images of the cuneiform into his text and explaining step by step how the symbols work.

Since this is a book meant to be popular history, much space is devoted to vividly evoking the 19th-century figures and scenes, even when it is not necessary for the story of recovering the ancient languages. Thus we are told that the Persian Emperor Cyrus was “a fearsome looking warrior who wore a heavy sheepskin coat, high leather boots and black kohl, or mascara, smeared around his eyes.” An archaeological dig is conveyed in the following terms: Botta, its French supervisor, “organized labor teams and ordered them to spread out across the dun-brown mound and cut trenches in the earth. Soon, tunnels bathed in gloom snaked through the tell, strewn with broken bricks and crammed with sweating, singing, shirtless laborers.” Sometimes this penchant for colorful evocation roams far afield from the archaeological story. Here’s the beginning of the chap-

ter in which the young Henry Rawlinson, one of the book’s two protagonists, first sets sail for the Middle East:

On an early July day in 1827, dozens of cadets stood on the deck of the Neptune in Portsmouth Harbor, excited and, in many cases, filled with trepidation about the voyage that lay ahead. Resplendent in red jackets with gold-tasseled epaulets and white trousers, the young men took the measure of one another and of the ship that would be their home for the next six months, a six-gun, three-mast, triple-deck East Indiaman merchant vessel chartered by the East India Company.

The aim is somewhat akin to that of those sumptuous movies set a couple of centuries back, where part of the pleasure for viewers comes from the elaborate recreation of the costumes, carriages, gas lamps and other paraphernalia of a vanished era. One does not want to begrudge Hammer these scene-setting passages, though they sometimes lead to a certain expository sprawl, as when the mention of Rawlinson as a soldier-archaeologist leads Hammer into a whole paragraph on such figures, going back to Rome in the first century BCE.

Much of the interest of the book is in the personalities of the main investigators. There was competition among English, French and German researchers of Mesopotamia, inflected by the nationalism of the era. Rawlinson was joined in the pursuit of discoveries by another Englishman, Austen Layard. At first, the two were friends and avid collaborators. Eventually, great bitterness ensued between them. The main cause was Layard’s siding with Edward Hincks, an Irish Protestant parson, in the interpretation of the tablets. Rawlinson and Layard had braved the terrible dangers and hardships of the Middle East in order to get their finds—blistering heat, sandstorms, brigands, dysentery, malaria, cholera and other diseases, as well as breakneck climbs up sheer cliffs to reach some of the ancient treasures. Hincks, by contrast, when he was able to get copies of the texts, worked in solitude in his

country parsonage, and that work was marked by genius, often demonstrating that Rawlinson had gotten things wrong. One didn’t have to confront poisonous snakes, armed desperadoes and brutal climate in order to decipher the texts.

Another figure in this story is George Smith, a young working-class man who, having left school at the age of 14, was employed as a money engraver. Lacking in education, he had an abundance of native brilliance, and he succeeded in deciphering Akkadian where others had failed, giving us the lost Epic of Gilgamesh. He made two trips to Mesopotamia funded by a newspaper, then a third, on which he was finally sent by the British Museum. This time, alas, he contracted dysentery and died in Aleppo at the age of 36. Hammer devotes only brief attention to Smith, whose striking story is laid out in detail by David Damrosch in his excellent The Buried Book: The Loss and Recovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh from 2007. Unaccountably, Hammer does not cite Damrosch.

Though, as I have said, Hammer has done much to work up the details of this complicated historical subject, there are lapses. The ancient Nabataean kingdom was not “a Bedouin Arab state.” The Nabataeans created an important mercantile center with an urban concentration, exemplified by the extraordinary city of Petra, which can be seen in present-day Jordan, carved out of red rock.

The links between the Mesopotamian finds and the Bible understandably have compelled the attention of researchers from the first discoveries to the present. Perhaps the most famous of these connections is the discovery in the Gilgamesh epic of a flood story with details quite like those of the Noah narrative in Genesis. The inevitable inference is that the Hebrew writer was familiar with the Akkadian text and adapted it for his own purposes. The wild man Enkiddu in Gilgamesh exhibits features that also show up in the representation of Esau in Genesis. Other links, large and small, abound.

Unfortunately, Hammer is particularly shaky when he touches on the Bible. The third-century BCE Greek translation of

the Bible was not done from the Aramaic but from the Hebrew. The prophet Samuel, we are told, led the Israelites to victory against the Philistines around 1100 BCE. But Samuel was not a military man and fought no battles against the Philistines, and the date is almost a century too early. The Book of Jonah is mentioned as though it were a historical source on Nineveh, though it offers a fantasy version of the Assyrian city written centuries after the destruction of Nineveh, and this late biblical book could not possibly precede the 7th century BCE as Hammer declares. The “big fish,” moreover, in Jonah is not a whale. Similarly, the Book of Daniel, composed around 165 BCE and featuring many miraculous details, is by no means a historical source on the Babylonian court.

References to the Hebrew language are especially questionable. Hammer cites a supposed Hebrew word kinu, meaning “legitimate” or “true.” There is no such word in Hebrew, though this might be a mistake for ken. As an example of a lack of correspondence between Hebrew and Akkadian, Hammer reports that “the word if in Akkadian is shumma, it’s een or lu in Hebrew.” Lu is correct, een is again not a Hebrew word, and shumma looks suspiciously similar to the Hebrew shemma, a common term for if or lest as the language evolved into rabbinic Hebrew. I am not competent to say whether there are similar lapses in the treatment of the Akkadian, but perhaps Hammer’s consulting Assyriologists saved him there.

The Mesopotamian Riddle is clearly not a flawless book, but it is definitely a good read, and it effectively conveys much instructive information about the discovery of this ancient world, together with deftly drawn portraits of the discoverers. What is riveting in the story Hammer tells is the stubborn persistence of these explorers and their sheer physical courage and willingness to risk life and limb in the quest to rescue the precious remnants of a seminal civilization whose very existence had been forgotten. The quest for immortality in Gilgamesh, the striking opposition between civilization and the wild in that epic, would have many echoes

in later Western literature and thought. Hammer properly summarizes the heroic character of the explorers’ project at the end of his epilogue: “Layard, Botta, Rassum and other archaeologist-adventurers had braved the dust and disease of Mesopotamia to retrieve these relics, driven by a hunger to understand the world and to grasp the immensity and longevity of human experience. Then, in a feat of analysis, intuition and stamina, Rawlinson and Hincks had extracted meaning from the 2,500-year-old signs gouged in clay and carved in stone.” This is a resonant narrative, abundantly deserving to be read, about the human imperative to seek knowledge, an enterprise more genuinely exciting than the fictitious one undertaken by the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Robert Alter is a biblical scholar and the author of 23 books, including his translation of the Hebrew Bible. He is a professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

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BOOK REVIEW CARLIN ROMANO

ISRAEL DOESN’T FIT YOUR FRAMEWORKS

On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

By Adam Kirsch

W.W. Norton, 160 pp.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning

By Peter Beinart

Alfred A. Knopf, 192 pp.

Is it possible to be evenhanded in discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Israeli-Hamas war? Is it even desirable?

Scholars and diplomats who see two historical narratives of injustice colliding believe one must at least try. Others, partisans on both sides, insist one story substantially outweighs the other on the scales of justice. No world political dispute finds so few intellectuals and activists occupying middle ground. For those clustering around the poles, you’re either with us or against us.

Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice and Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning illustrate that reality. Neither succeeds at evenhandedness, and one doubts either would want to. Kirsch’s book, the more tightly researched and convincing one, explains a concept and movement that few Jews or others understand despite its rapid advancement in academe. Without making an explicit pro-Israel argument, it dissects the premise on which much anti-Israel activism, or at least rhetoric, is constructed. Beinart’s book, on the other hand, reinforces his reputation in recent years as aggregator-in-chief of every possible anti-Israel position.

Both books provide useful information and talking points for anyone invested in these issues. But it logically behooves one to read Kirsch’s first, because On Settler Colonialism examines the philosophical assumptions that create the policy choices that are Beinart’s focus. His analysis sets the table for evaluating Beinart’s views.

Kirsch declares at the outset that he’s not writing “about Israeli politics or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” or “the conduct of the war or how the larger conflict should be resolved.” Of course, he inevitably is, however obliquely, because “the idea of settler colonialism” and Israel’s putative embodiment of it fuel much of the resistance of Palestinian Arabs to Israel. Although he foreshadows the application of this framework to Israel by citing a few leading denunciations of the country, such as Yale professor Zareena Grewal’s X post (on October 7, 2023!)

calling Israel “a murderous, genocidal settler state,” he concentrates first on describing the concept’s broad outlines.

To Kirsch, settler colonialism is not a historical concept but an influential radical ideology. It began in the 1980s and 1990s in reference to the United States, Canada and Australia—not Israel—and deems countries founded on land that rightly belongs to indigenous inhabitants illegitimate. Such countries, it holds, are perpetrators of a world-historical crime.

Kirsch explores the idea’s multi-decade rise in academe, quoting canonical texts and exponents. The concept, he explains, covers any historical process in which a colonizing power erased, replaced or displaced an indigenous population. Its early theorists castigated the United States and Canada for what they did to Native Americans and Australia for its treatment of Aboriginals. It maintains that the enormous injustice of settler colonialism continues in those nations to this day and that all who live there except for indigenous victims remain guilty.

Kirsch lays out some corollaries and implications of the concept for which its chief theorists argue. For instance: Settler colonialism always incorporates genocide of one type or another. Assimilation of its victims, through citizenship or complacency, does not whitewash the crime. The oppression that continues can be solved only by decolonization, and it justifies retaliatory, liberationist violence. Within academe, settler colonialism theorists engage in rhetoric with which few outsiders will be familiar, such as referring to North America as “Turtle Island,” a nod to a supposed pre-Columbus usage.

In most of the book, Kirsch questions aspects of settler colonialism writ large. He argues that the very notion of an “indigenous people” is a myth, that everyone except the first East African humans came from somewhere else. (He criticizes the recently fashionable “land acknowledgements” among progressive institutions as hypocritical virtue signaling.) And in a case where one people displaced another by force without either one being indigenous, the concept of settler colonialism simply doesn’t apply.

Only in the last third of his book does Kirsch zero in on the ideology’s application to Israel, arguing that, despite having become the paradigm of settler colonialism for many pro-Palestinian activists, Israel does not fit the concept. Unlike the French pieds-noirs in Algeria, or the Germans in Africa, Kirsch contends, the Israelis enjoy no “colonial” mother country to return to. Unlike settler colonial states whose actions severely reduced the population of their victims—Aboriginals, for instance, are now only about 3 percent of Australians—the 150,000 Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel after 1948 have grown to two million. Unlike the Europeans who came to America, the Jews can argue that their community predated the notion of a Palestinian community and that they themselves had suffered exile. Unlike the Belgians in Africa, Israelis didn’t seek to exploit the so-called “native” population for profit. Unlike the Chinese in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Israelis are not acting to destroy the native culture or language of their minority citizens.

Kirsch expresses sympathy at several points for Palestinians. He concedes that they’re often marginalized and oppressed. He remains in favor of an independent Palestinian state. But he rejects the decolonizer’s goal of eliminating Israel (and also its likelihood of happening). Further, in recognition of the immense amounts of fierce hatred toward Jewish Israelis by many Palestinians—he cites a poll showing a large majority of Palestinians supporting Hamas’s October 7 massacre—he accepts Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s famous insistence in his “Iron Wall” essay that Jewish Israelis must hold the upper hand militarily in their homeland or risk a genocide being committed against them.

Beinart would call that military upper hand “supremacy.” To Kirsch’s grim size-up of the contemporary situation, he brings an equally grim view but an almost wholly opposed perspective on who’s responsible for it. Like Kirsch, Beinart occasionally makes gestures toward those he knows will disagree with his current (if still evolving) beliefs. In regard to October 7, he remains “shaken by its horror.” He considers himself “a Jewish loyalist.”

In Memoriam

POEM MYRA SKLAREW

When Moment published “What Is a Jewish Poem?” by Myra Sklarew half a century ago, the magazine was new. Who could have predicted then how often that poem would be anthologized, cited and read aloud in classrooms? It opens with a run of questions—some comic (“Does it wear a yalmulka / and tallis?”), some solemn (“Does it live / in the diaspora / and yearn for homeland?”), and it ends in invitation:

Little Jewish poem in your shtreimel hat, little grandfather sing to me, little Jewish poem come sing to me.

Myra died this winter at the age of 90, leaving to us the singing in her poems. A trained biologist, she turned her attention in book after book to complexities in nature and human history—wonders, mysteries and terrors alike. We’re grateful to her family for allowing us to publish her work in this issue. Here again there are questions about poetry. (Where can it take us? How does it conjure worlds?)

And here again, we find an invitation: Come in—come in. How hard it has become to imagine such a welcome.

—Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor

THE POEM’S JOURNEY

Where will this one take me? Will it be a Greek village near the coast or high up on a mountain, Yiayia dictating the morning’s work?

Or do I follow the girl who lands on the shores of West Africa, her twenty-four charges sleepy after the long journey?

Or is it a stream of words coursing into unknown territory, creating the country as it goes: climate, culture, past and future?

When I set these aging feet down on the new earth crisp as paper, my walking stick in the form of a pencil, my steps composed of letters, we will shape the landscape in a new language. No knock on the door at four a.m., no deportations, nor those who hunger in their crowded boats. Only the arms of strangers, saying: Come in—come in.

Myra Sklarew (1934-2024) authored many books of poetry and prose, including: From the Backyard of the Diaspora; Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems; and Lithuania: New & Selected Poems. Among her honors are a National Jewish Book Council Award in Poetry and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She was a professor emerita at American University, where she cofounded the MFA program in creative writing.

His family, he tells us, printed out the names of the hostages after October 7 and put them on the refrigerator door. He calls Hamas “a corrupt and despotic organization with a long history of brutality against both Israelis and Palestinians.”

But he completely rejects that the security of Israel’s Jews justifies, in its war on Hamas, “the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name.” Israel, he asserts, is guilty of the mass killing of children, and “evil resides not only in our enemies— Haman, Amalek, Hamas—but in us and the state that speaks in our name.”

The backstory of Beinart’s perspective involves that phrase he regularly invokes—“in our name.” It implies that if, as he later suggests, Israel as a Jewish state is a settler colonialist entity, then all Jews who support it are, to revive an old-fashioned political term, fellow travelers in settler colonialism.

Fleshing out the “in our name” point, Beinart shares how he was “raised to see the world; Jews are an extended family.” It leads him to repeatedly speak of “our people,” to begin sentences with “We,” as if all Jews should act or think in a similar, cohesive voice. He repeatedly writes that way even as he offers the passing traditional nod to Jewish disagreement: “Jews have always quarreled, and we should.” Yet the dominant thrust of his book is that Jews should not quarrel about what the present Israeli government has done. There’s a moral right and a wrong, a Jewish way to deal with hostility and threat and a non-Jewish way.

Beinart blisters Israel throughout “for the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated with the support of many Jews around the world.” Supporters of current Israeli policy “justify starvation and slaughter.” Jews ignore “the crimes we commit.” The Israeli government fights for “supremacy,” not “security.” Israel is an apartheid society, he maintains, despite two million Arab Israelis enjoying citizenship and, as he himself notes, their constituting “25 percent of Israel’s doctors, 30 percent of its nurses, and 60

percent of its pharmacists.”

On larger issues apart from the Israel-Hamas war, Beinart’s views line up with his well-known announcement a few years ago that he believes Israel should be replaced by a single state encompassing both Jews and Palestinians, including those from the West Bank and Gaza. (Beinart now describes Jewish support of Israel as a primarily Jewish state as “idolatry.”) “Palestinians made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home,” he writes, not making clear whether he means the 150,000 actually displaced in 1948—most of them now dead—or the more than 6 million the UN currently places in that category.

As it moves forward, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza confirms just how far Beinart has tilted to perspectives shared by few even on the liberal left. Israel’s longtime prisoner Marwan Barghouti, whom Beinart describes as “Hamas’s most formidable political rival,” is touted as someone who has praised Nelson Mandela. No mention there that Israel sentenced him to five life sentences for murderous attacks on Israelis. Similarly, Beinart never writes concretely of Hamas’s mayhem. Rather, he cites and offers the Palestinian position on almost every controversial event in Israeli history, from the 1948 war and what caused Palestinians to flee to the claim that, at American universities, the “students and faculty in greatest danger are Palestinians and their supporters.”

Inevitably, Beinart’s position on “settler colonialism” as applied to Israel clashes completely with Kirsch’s. In the passages where he deals with the notion, Beinart raises examples of cruel Jewish violence in the Bible, such as the violence that concludes the Purim story. He asserts that Jewish leaders who emphasize Jewish continuity with the land of Israel since time immemorial cite Genesis, Exodus and the “books of Judges and Kings,” but that they like to leave out the Book of Joshua, which tells how “the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua Ben Nun conquered Canaan from the seven nations that lived there.” Jews, he maintains, have always preferred to ignore that they “can

be oppressors,” preferring their image as victims. (He does concede that “no one knows whether Joshua Ben Nun actually conquered the territory or existed at all” and that “Jews have an ancient and profound spiritual connection to this patch of land.”) Beinart leaves unclear whether he thinks who was there first matters in the end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seemingly accepting that both Jews and Arabs go back far enough to invoke justice claims to their disputed lands.

In finally assessing where Beinart has ended up ideologically, one has to return to his “in our name” leitmotif. It’s the key to why he feels current Israeli policy violates what it means to be Jewish.

He thinks Jews worldwide are a family—maybe just like his family. But Jews worldwide aren’t a family, any more than they are a settler colonialist movement. They share key features and characteristics, in Wittgenstein’s sense of family resemblances, but not others—it does no good to pretend otherwise. That makes it the height of chutzpah for Beinart, an American Jew with South African roots, to pronounce to Israeli Jews what they may or may not do to protect their lives.

From his safe perch as a highly connected media figure in the Northeast, Beinart can afford to take a sentimental view of Judaism and Jewish ethics. Let us simply be the best, kindest people we can, he seemingly urges, and everything will turn out all right. Many Israeli Jews have painfully learned the naivete of that view. They’ve become realists. Kirsch’s own reluctance to condemn Israelis for how they’ve reacted to October 7 shows his understanding of that development. The certainty Beinart exudes throughout his book does not alter a simple truth: The current Israeli government does not speak or act in Beinart’s name or “our” name. It speaks, until it is toppled, for the state of Israel.

Carlin Romano teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delhi and Visiting Professor of Humanities at Ashoka University on a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar grant to India.

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