Author: David Leibermann

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Major American Jewish organizations that hoped to send a unified message about the turmoil in Israel yesterday instead found themselves tussling, partly in the public eye, about what exactly they wanted to say.  Should they praise the massive anti-government protests that have taken shape in recent months? Should they criticize Israel’s sitting […]

BERLIN (JTA) — Novelist Ruby Namdar’s appearance at a major conference of European Jewish leaders wasn’t meant to include a speech to an empty chair. But there he was on Sunday night, addressing the chair he had thought would hold Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for Diaspora affairs. Chikli had been scheduled to address the summit, […]

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Yaniv, a resident of Tel Aviv, has lost count of how many protests he’s been to during the past three months. But on Monday afternoon, he headed once again to Kaplan Street, the urban artery that has become ground zero of the anti-government demonstrations, to demonstrate once again. Israel’s current rupture, […]

JERUSALEM (JTA) — After three months of demonstrations dominated by detractors of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul plan, supporters of the proposed reform took to the streets Monday, making their voice heard in Jerusalem and across Israel. Gathered outside the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, thousands of pro-reform protesters, including settlers bused in from the West […]

(JTA) — Like hundreds of thousands of her fellow Israelis, Kelly Breakstone Roth’s instinct on Sunday was to take to the streets. The only wrinkle: She and her family have been in Brooklyn for the last two years, part of the diaspora of hundreds of thousands of Israelis living abroad. They couldn’t just walk out the […]

This is a developing story. (JTA) — Israel was filled with surreal images Sunday night as thousands of people lit bonfires and gathered to protest in the streets against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his planned judicial overhaul. On Monday morning, those dramatic scenes were replaced by another: of packed trains and crowded roads as […]

(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, exactly a day after Gallant called for a stop to far-reaching reforms to the judiciary that have divided the country and that the defense minister said posed security risks to Israel. The dramatic move could accelerate a crisis that Israel’s president, Isaac […]

(JTA) — Israel’s defense minister called for a pause on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to overhaul the country’s court system,  dealing a potentially debilitating blow to proposals that have brought hundreds of thousands of Israeli protesters into the streets and have drawn international criticism, including from President Joe Biden and other world leaders. Yoav […]

(New York Jewish Week) — More than 200 American and Israeli Jews gathered on the Upper West Side on Wednesday to protest a private event featuring Moshe Koppel, the cofounder of the Kohelet Forum, the conservative think tank whose ideas undergird the judicial overhaul being advanced by Israel’s government.  As people walked into a building […]

(JTA) — After a day of raucous protests, arrests and clashes in the street protesting the Israeli government’s controversial judicial overhaul, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised speech encouraging Israeli unity, pledging to protect minority rights — and vowing that the first major piece of the overhaul plan would still pass next week. Netanyahu’s […]