May 2026

May 28, 2026 –

On Tuesday, May 26, 2026, the Park Slope (Brooklyn) Food Co-op voted to boycott Israeli products. Sixty-seven percent of more than 17,000 members on a Zoom call raised their virtual hands (likely using Israeli-made technology, mind you), and just like that, a beloved Brooklyn institution — a place famous for its heirloom mushrooms, its complicated artisanal cheese selection, and its mandatory two-hour-and-forty-five-minute work shifts — became the latest battleground in progressive America’s proxy war over Israel and the Palestinians.

The thing is that, as contentious and hard-fought as this was, the vote will not change a single thing on the ground. Not one Palestinian will be safer. Not one settler will be removed from a West Bank outpost. Not one Israeli democratic activist will be empowered. The Co-op carries, by one count, eight products connected to Israel/Palestine, including a tehina made in Nazareth by an Israeli-Arab company and a bell pepper that appears only seasonally. The Israeli economy will not even blink.

What the vote will do is make thousands of Jewish members feel unwelcome in their own neighborhood. It will give the Israeli and Jewish right-wing exactly what it needs to tell the Israeli and Jewish left: “You see? Even in Brooklyn, they hate us.” And it will allow a few thousand progressive Brooklynites to feel like they did something — while actually doing nothing — for the people they claim to care about.

This is not unique to my neighborhood; it is a microcosm of the progressive world. And we need to be honest about it.

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that the masses who voted for the boycott of Israeli products don’t care about Palestinians and don’t have good intentions. Many of them are watching the same unbearable footage from Gaza that I am watching. They are furious about 73,000 Palestinian deaths (of which 20,000 to 30,000 are understood to be Hamas terrorists), about rubble where homes once stood, about the racist and dehumanizing politics emanating from the extreme right-wing politicians in the Israeli Knesset — including legislation establishing the death penalty for Palestinian terrorists that murder Jews but not Israeli Jews who murder Palestinian Arabs, with legislators showing up wearing golden nooses on their lapels. That fury is can be understood. The grief is real. The moral urgency is right.

What is wrong is using BDS as the vehicle to make change. And what is exposed is the ease with which so much progressive energy flows into symbolic gestures that feel like action but actually function as theater.

Two weeks ago, Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim (where I am a proud member) gave a sermon from her pulpit on this very question — one of the most clear-eyed pieces of תוכחה tokhekha, of moral rebuke, I have heard in years. She named the BDS (Boycott, Divestiture, Sanctions) movement for what it is: not a movement for Palestinian statehood or liberation but, by the explicit declaration of its own founder, Omar Barghouti, a movement aimed at the elimination of Israel. She named its counterproductive logic:

“The BDS movement is not only wrong and ineffective, but also counterproductive. The hard right in Israel is clinging to power by making the case that the world hates Jews. The left in Israel, which works for justice and equality for Palestinians, is weakened every time the government can point to an example like this one, which would be particularly useful for the right wing in Israel.  ‘You see? The world is against us. Even in a place like Brooklyn, they hate us.’ Though aligning with BDS will not hurt the Israeli government, it will hurt many Jews right here, who will feel like their community has turned on them, like they have no place at the Co-op anymore.”

She continued:

“The hard right in Israel is clinging to power by making the case that the world hates Jews. The left in Israel, which works for justice and equality for Palestinians, is weakened every time the government can point to an example like this one.”

And she named, with precision, who gets hurt: not Netanyahu, not the settlers, but Jewish members of the Co-op who will now feel that their community has turned against them.

Rabbi Timoner also said something harder and more important. She was not subtle about where she stands on the underlying questions. She said, “I have probably spoken more forcefully and frequently for Palestinian freedom than any other leader in Park Slope. I was arrested in front of the Israeli consulate. Two weeks ago, I spoke of phasing out US military aid for Israel.” Rabbi Timoner is not a defender of the status quo. She is someone who has the progressive street-cred to say: this is the wrong tool to advocate for Palestinian rights, and it will harm the people you claim to be helping.

She is right. And the vote this week proved her point.

Here is the hypocrisy that doesn’t get named enough. The BDS movement applies a standard to Israel that it applies to no other country. We do not boycott China at the Park Slope Co-op, though the Uyghur situation is a documented atrocity. We do not boycott Saudi Arabia, whose war in Yemen has killed hundreds of thousands. We do not boycott Russia, whose unfounded, unwarranted onslaught on Ukraine has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.  We, of course, do not boycott our own government, which has armed and enabled catastrophes on multiple continents. We protest and push for change in all of these places without calling for their elimination — because we understand that a country and its current government are not the same thing, and because we believe in changing systems, not erasing people or nation-states.

Israel is the only case where the logic flips.

As liberal Jews and Zionists,  we owe it to ourselves to ask:   “why?” Rabbi Timoner asks it plainly: “We must ask ourselves whether, given 2,000 years of a steady drumbeat of antisemitism, we might be unconsciously acting out of bias.” That question deserves an honest answer, not a defensive one.

The meeting itself offered one data point. At a Co-op gathering last month, a member said, “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country.” The room applauded. Timoner noted, correctly, that the first person to use the phrase “Jewish supremacy” in this country was KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. The meeting this week was moved entirely to Zoom because, as Co-op staff put it, they could not guarantee the physical safety of presenters and members. Verbal confrontations had escalated into physical altercations.

This is what the proxy war looks like up close. A grocery store meeting that required security planning.

So, what would actually help Israelis and Palestinians?

Not a tehina boycott. First of all, we should buy Israeli products. Those that are distinctly and identifiably Israeli, like Osem and Sabra – and those that aren’t notably Israeli like Waze and Teva. What would also help is investment — of money, attention, and solidarity — in the Israeli and Palestinian civil society organizations that are actually doing the work of building toward a shared future. Organizations like the one built by Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, which many Reform congregations have hosted. Inon is an Israeli whose parents were killed on October 7. Abu Sarah is a Palestinian whose brother was imprisoned and died after Israeli military detention. Together, they wrote The Future Is Peace, now in its third week on the New York Times bestseller list, and they run an organization dedicated to nonviolent peacebuilding between Israelis and Palestinians. This is where the moral energy of progressive communities should be going.

What would help Palestinians is supporting organizations that are actually training Palestinian civil society leaders, building Palestinian economic capacity, and strengthening the Israeli left’s ability to push back against the occupation and toward two states. What would help is American Jews and progressive communities staying engaged with Israel rather than cutting the cord — because the cord connects us not just to the Israeli government, but to Israeli civil society that desperately needs allies right now.

The BDS movement, by design, closes that door. It treats all of Israeli society as one monolithic enemy. In doing so, it abandons the very Israelis and Palestinians who are trying to build something different.

Seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians live in that land. Their well-being is profoundly interdependent. You cannot want freedom for one without wanting it for the other. And you cannot want freedom for either while investing your energy in a movement that weakens the forces of coexistence and strengthens the forces of maximalism — on both sides.

The Co-op voted for boycott. The tehina and the bell peppers are still on the shelf for now. And Palestinians are no closer to freedom, and Israelis are no closer to security guarantees.

Beware this could be coming to a co-op near you…

Shabbat Shalom.

Minister May Golan’s recent attack on MK Rabbi Gilad Kariv and all Reform Jews in an antisemitic screed accusing him/us of “marrying dogs in your delusional synagogues,” was not merely a political insult aimed at one member of Knesset or one Movement. It was an attack on the religious identity and legitimacy of millions of Jews in Israel and around the world who find meaning, connection, and covenant through liberal Judaism, and through the use of “dogs,” an attempt to dehumanize us.

That these remarks came on the eve of Shavuot makes them all the more painful — and all the more revealing.

Shavuot is the festival of revelation, the moment when the Jewish people stood together at Sinai to receive Torah. According to the rabbinic imagination, every Jewish soul — past, present, and future — was present at that mountain. Torah was not given only to one ideology, one denomination, or one political camp. It was given to an entire people, diverse and disputatious from the very beginning.

The covenant at Sinai did not erase differences – rather, it sanctified collective responsibility despite differences.

As Anna Kislanski, CEO of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism, rightly stated, these comments represent “ignorance, incitement, and contempt” toward the millions of Jews who belong to the Reform Movement in Israel and around the world. The attempt to mock Reform synagogues and delegitimize Reform Jews is not simply an internal Israeli political dispute. It reverberates across Jewish communities worldwide, alienating Jews who seek connection with Israel but are too often told that their Judaism is somehow lesser, inauthentic, or unwelcome.

That alienation comes at an enormous cost.

For decades, Israeli leaders have spoken about the importance of Jewish unity and the centrality of Diaspora Jewry to the Zionist project. Yet again and again, members of Israel’s government choose language that humiliates and excludes the very Jews whose support, solidarity, philanthropy, advocacy, and love for Israel remain indispensable.

There is a profound irony in invoking Judaism while violating one of Judaism’s most foundational ethical teachings. As Kislanski reminded us, “derech eretz kadmah LaTorah דרך ארץ קדמה לתורה” — that basic human decency precedes Torah. Before revelation comes respect. Before religious authority comes human dignity.

And Shavuot itself reinforces that truth. The Book of Ruth, read on the holiday, tells the story not of coercion or exclusion, but of radical belonging. Ruth enters the covenantal story of the Jewish people not through purity tests or political loyalty, but through love, commitment, and shared destiny: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” The message of Shavuot is that Judaism grows stronger when people are brought closer, not pushed away.

MK Rabbi Gilad Kariv was therefore correct to point out that these attacks are bigger than any individual politician.

“May Golan didn’t just attack me with antisemitic remarks. She attacked the millions of Reform Jews in Israel and around the world. Soon, we’ll send this antisemitic, racist, and corrupt government packing.”

When Reform Jews are caricatured or demeaned by ministers of the Israeli government, the message heard by many Jews around the world is painfully clear: your Judaism does not count here.

And yet, despite these repeated insults, Reform Jews continue to show up for Israel. We continue to advocate for Israel in hostile spaces, invest in Israeli society, build bridges across communities, and fight for a vision of the Jewish state that is democratic, pluralistic, and morally serious.

This is precisely why the rhetoric of exclusion is so shortsighted. Israel does not become stronger by narrowing the definition of Jewish legitimacy. It becomes weaker. A Jewish state that dismisses vast portions of the Jewish world undermines the very idea of Jewish peoplehood it claims to defend.

The challenge before Israel and the Jewish world is not whether disagreements will exist. They always have. The question is whether we can sustain a covenantal relationship even amid profound disagreement — whether we can recognize that Jewish unity is not sameness, and that pluralism is not a threat to Judaism but one of the conditions for its flourishing in the modern age.

Millions of Jews do not need permission from politicians to live Jewish lives of meaning, prayer, learning, and commitment. Reform Judaism is not a caricature to be mocked from a podium. It is a living, vibrant expression of Jewish civilization rooted in Torah, moral responsibility, equality, and the enduring project of Jewish renewal.

On Shavuot, we remember that the revelation took place at the foot of a mountain spacious enough to hold an entire people. The task of Jewish leadership today is not to decide which Jews belong at Sinai. It is to ensure that every Jew knows they were already there.

In honor of Minister May Golan help support the Israeli Reform Movement and join our joint emergency campaign!  

Hag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom!

Friday, May 15, 2026 – כ״ח אִיָּיר תשפ”ו

There is a dangerous instinct that has been emerging in the Jewish world right now and increasing in intensity over the past few years: the belief that we must choose between defending Israel and defending moral clarity. This belief claims that if one acknowledges the horrors committed against Israelis on October 7, one cannot also confront allegations of abuse carried out in Israel’s name. Or conversely, that if one speaks honestly about Palestinian suffering, one must abandon the legitimacy of Jewish power and sovereignty altogether.

That binary is a false choice and represents a collapse of both moral seriousness and Jewish integrity.

This week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a deeply disturbing column detailing allegations of sexual abuse and torture against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. The reactions were immediate and predictable. Some treated the reporting as undeniable truth beyond scrutiny. Others dismissed it wholesale as blood libel before grappling with a single allegation. And a still more nuanced response saw the real need to scrutinize the sources quoted, various reports, and testimonies, while acknowledging that there is a real necessity for further investigation and exposure of whatever real and horrific behavior has and is occurring in the Israeli prison system.

As Jews, we do not get to avert our eyes simply because the conversation is painful, politically inconvenient, or weaponized by those who seek Israel’s destruction.

Nor do we get to surrender our critical faculties and abandon standards of evidence because the allegations confirm our prior assumptions and fears.

The Jewish task is harder than that, because two things can be true at the same time.

There is, undeniably, a massive, global, coordinated effort to demonize Israel, beyond the critique of particular policies or governments, and to erode the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. We see this in the selective outrage, the persistent double standards, the immediate inversion of victim vs. aggressor after October 7, and the normalization of hateful and vengeful slogans that would be unimaginable if directed at any other nation. There are anti-Israel movements, institutions, influencers, and even governments for which the issue is not where Israel ends its borders, but whether and how Israel should.

We are not paranoid for recognizing this reality. We are historically literate and facing the world with our eyes open and our backs stiffened.

On top of all that, at precisely the moment when we are recoiling from the NYT piece, another report was released this week that should shake every person of conscience to their core: “Silenced No More”, the most comprehensive documentation to date[1] of the systematic sexual violence committed by Hamas against Israelis on October 7 and during the subsequent captivity of 251 others. Based on more than 430 testimonies, thousands of visual records, and years of investigation, the report details rape, torture, mutilation, forced nudity, and sexualized brutality carried out deliberately and systematically as a weapon of war against the Jewish People and State.

The content is horrifying. And so is the timing.

The juxtaposition of these conversations reveals a deeply broken public discourse. Jews are being asked, once again, to hold unbearable truths while much of the world chooses selective moral outrage against Israel. The same international ecosystem that spent months dismissing, minimizing, and denying outright the sexual violence committed by Hamas against Israelis on October 7 suddenly rediscovers the language of human rights when the accused are Israelis. That moral hypocrisy is real. That moral asymmetry is real. And Jews are not wrong to feel gaslit by it.

But the obvious moral inconsistency in the world towards Israel does not absolve us of our own Jewish moral responsibility.

There is another truth that liberal Zionists ignore at our peril: there is a documented pattern of abuses against Palestinians — some isolated, others systemic — that have too often been minimized, excused, normalized, and defended by sectors of Israeli society, by State institutions, and by many Diaspora Jewish defenders of Israel. We have to discern that not every accusation is true. Not every claim is beyond dispute. But neither can every awful and morally repugnant revelation simply be dismissed as antisemitic propaganda or treated as an unfortunate exception detached from larger realities of occupation, war, rage/revenge, trauma, and dehumanization.

Our people’s commitment to a covenant forged at Mount Sinai and evolved over the millennia cannot lose our capacity for moral self-scrutiny.

This week, we begin reading the book of BaMidbar. The Israelites are counted tribe by tribe, family by family, each person (well, each male adult) seen and accounted for. But the deeper message of BaMidbar is embedded in its name itself: wilderness. Judaism is born not in certainty, but in the wilderness between redemption and promise, between slavery and sovereignty, between powerlessness and power, between exile and living in our ancestral Homeland.

It is a certain truth that power changes a people.

For two thousand years, Jews knew what it meant to fear the knock on the door at night, the prison guard, the unchecked cruelty of authorities. Zionism emerged because Jews understood that moral aspiration without agency leaves Jews vulnerable to the worst of the human condition. But attaining sovereignty for the first time in two thousand years carries its own immense moral and political tests. The question is no longer only whether Jews survive. It is what Jews become when we possess power.

Israelis and Diaspora Jews often misunderstand one another because our two historic experiences were shaped by different historical traumas. At the risk of generalization, Israelis were heavily influenced by the conviction that Jews can never again depend on the goodwill of others for survival. The mentality of many Diaspora Jews was shaped by the minority condition and by attentiveness to how Jews are perceived morally by the societies around them, and therefore how we must behave and identify as a minority population.

Both instincts and orientations to the world around us are reality-based.

A Judaism concerned only with survival can eventually lose its soul. A Judaism concerned only with moral performance eventually can lose its ability to survive.

The challenge is holding both truths simultaneously.

That means acknowledging that some of the allegations now emerging may indeed reflect real abuses that demand investigation, accountability, and moral reckoning. Israel is not exempt from the corrupting dangers of war, occupation, rage, vengeance, trauma, and dehumanization of the “other.” No army is. No nation is. Certainly not one that has lived in the anxiety-producing state of perpetual existential emergency and war.

It also means that we must resist the flattening language that increasingly dominates discourse about Israel. We have to be astutely aware that hateful language, anti-Israel, and anti-Zionist impulses that transform complexity into caricature and turn Israelis into metaphysical embodiments of evil are essentially antisemitic. When every accusation immediately becomes proof of the Jewish people’s civilizational depravity, when nuance itself is treated as moral weakness, truth becomes impossible to pursue.

Israel risks not merely losing political battles but losing its democratic and moral center. The pro-democracy protests were not about courts or legislation alone. They were about the fear that a traumatized society can slowly normalize extremism, cruelty, and the abandonment of restraint. When that happens, the democratic and Jewish character of the State of Israel are compromised.

That warning matters now more than ever.

The real danger to Israel is not criticism. Israel has always survived criticism. We Jews and Israelis are known to be the best self-critics. However, the danger is the erosion of the moral vocabulary that allows Israelis and Jews to be unable to distinguish between necessary force and moral nihilism.

There are voices today insisting that any Jewish self-critique strengthens Israel’s enemies. I understand that fear. We live in a world where Hamas atrocities were denied almost instantly, where antisemitism mutates effortlessly into anti-Zionism and back again, and where accusations against Israel are often held to standards applied nowhere else in the world.

But Jewish ethics has never depended on whether the nations of the world are fair.

The Torah does not command us to pursue justice only when the media framing is balanced or the activists are consistent.

Nor, however, can Jews afford the luxury of naiveté. There are those who will seize upon every proven and unproven allegation to dismantle the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty. Jews know the history of blood libels precisely because we have lived through them.

And yet history also teaches another lesson: the inability to confront wrongdoing within one’s own camp is the beginning of moral collapse.

BaMidbar reminds us that the wilderness is disorienting. There are no easy maps there. Only competing fears, truths, and moral obligations. The Israelites in the desert are constantly oscillating between panic and purpose, tribalism and covenant.

So are we.

The task of liberal Zionism today is not to become prosecutors of Israel nor defense attorneys for every action committed in its name or by those in its employ. It is to insist that Jewish power must remain tethered to Jewish moral responsibility. That loving Israel means refusing both demonization and denial. That our covenant did not end the moment Jews acquired an army and a State.

If anything, it became harder to fulfill it.

[1] The Commission’s findings are grounded in an unprecedented body of reviewed documentation:

• Over 10,000 photographs and video segments
• More than 1,800 hours of visual material
• 430+ testimonies and interviews with survivors, witnesses, released hostages, experts, and family members
• Victims from 52 nationalities, in addition to Israeli victims

Friday, May 15, 2026 – כ״ח אִיָּיר תשפ”ו

Today, Israel marks Jerusalem Day (well, actually yesterday because of Shabbat).

Few cities occupy the Jewish imagination as much as Jerusalem does. It lives in our prayers, our poetry, our liturgy, our grief, and our dreams. Three times a day, Jews turn toward Jerusalem. At weddings, we break a glass in memory of Jerusalem. At our moments of greatest joy, we are commanded never to forget her. The Psalmist tells us:

 “אם אשכחך ירושלים תשכח ימיני…”
(תהילים קל”ז)

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither…” (Psalm 137)

And yet perhaps no city forces us to confront harder truths about ourselves than Jerusalem does.

Jerusalem Day was established to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem following the Six-Day War. For many Jews, it symbolizes return, survival, sovereignty, and the extraordinary arc of Jewish history. After two thousand years, Jews once again found themselves with access to the Old City, the Kotel, and the beating heart of Jewish memory.

There is something undeniably miraculous about that story.

But over the years, Jerusalem Day has also become increasingly painful for many of us. Not because our connection to Jerusalem has weakened, but because our love for Jerusalem compels us to look honestly at the city as it actually exists.

This week on The Pluralist Podcast, Orly Erez-Likhovski and I spoke with journalist Nir Hasson, one of the most important chroniclers of Jerusalem today. Nir has spent years documenting Jerusalem not as myth or slogan, but as lived reality: beautiful, holy, fractured, unequal, exhausting, and at times surprisingly hopeful.

He spoke about the gap between the Jerusalem many Israelis imagine vs. the Jerusalem that people actually inhabit every day.

The rabbis spoke of two Jerusalems: ירושלים של מעלה ושל מטה — the Heavenly Jerusalem and the Earthly Jerusalem.

There is the Jerusalem of dreams and prayer, the symbolic Jerusalem suspended above history, carrying the weight of Jewish longing and redemption.

And then there is the Jerusalem of infrastructure, policing, schools, housing permits, garbage collection, public transportation, demographics, and politics. The Jerusalem where nearly 40% of the city’s residents are Palestinians, most of whom are not citizens of Israel. The Jerusalem where East Jerusalem neighborhoods have faced decades of underinvestment and neglect. The Jerusalem where Jews and Palestinians often live within minutes of one another, while experiencing entirely different realities.

Too often, we speak only about ירושלים של מעלה while refusing to confront ירושלים של מטה.

But Jewish tradition never asked us to choose between them.

In fact, perhaps holiness begins precisely when we refuse to separate the dream from the reality.

The Jerusalemite poet Yehuda Amichai once wrote:

“Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.”

And elsewhere:

“The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over industrial cities.”

Amichai understood something essential about Jerusalem: it is impossible to disentangle holiness from humanity here. Jerusalem carries all of it simultaneously — memory and violence, sanctity and nationalism, transcendence and brokenness.

Nir spoke painfully about covering the annual Flag March (which took place yesterday) through the Muslim Quarter year after year — watching groups of young Jewish Israelis chant racist slogans, assault Palestinian residents and journalists, vandalize shops, and transform what should be a celebration of Jewish connection into a day associated with fear and humiliation for many Jerusalemites.

We should have the moral courage to say clearly: this is a חילול השם. A desecration.

A Jerusalem whose holiness cannot recognize the dignity of all who live within it ultimately betrays the very vision the city is meant to embody.

And yet Nir also shared something that surprised me. After spending the last two years covering the devastation and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, he told us that Jerusalem is paradoxically one of the only places where he still finds some hope.

Because despite everything, Jerusalem remains one of the few places where Israelis and Palestinians still regularly encounter one another as human beings. At Hebrew University. In hospitals. On the light rail. In cafes, shops, and workplaces. In all the messy, imperfect, ordinary ways, human beings share space together.

That fragile reality matters.

Our beloved Israel Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism continues working toward a different vision of Jerusalem — through legal advocacy, public pressure, education, and coalition building.

This week, our Movement participated in a Knesset discussion addressing violence against Christians in Jerusalem and the growing racism surrounding the Flag March. They appealed to police and educational authorities to act decisively against incitement, violence, and humiliation. Yesterday, many in our Movement joined the annual Flower March in the Old City, distributing flowers and messages of coexistence in response to hatred.

These are small acts. But Jerusalem is built through accumulated acts of moral imagination.

The Jerusalem we pray for will not emerge automatically from Jewish sovereignty alone.

It depends on the kind of society we choose to build here.

Jerusalem forces us to wrestle with some of the deepest questions facing Israel and the Jewish people right now: Can power remain tethered to moral responsibility? Can Jewish particularism coexist with democratic equality? Can holiness survive nationalism untethered from humility? Can we hold both security and dignity at the same time?

Those questions live in Jerusalem more intensely than anywhere else.

And still, even now, I cannot give up on Jerusalem.

Not ירושלים של מעלה.
And not ירושלים של מטה either.

Because to love Jerusalem honestly means refusing both romanticism and despair. It means insisting that the earthly city, with all its fractures and failures, can still move a little closer to the heavenly one.

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…”

The deeper challenge may be this:
What does it mean to truly remember her and to work for her future?

Shabbat Shalom and Hodesh Tov!