Expanding the Conversation – Jewish Theological Seminary

Expanding the Conversation: Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya

onlinelearning@jtsa.edu — Thu, 29 May 2025 18:49:24 +0000

What does it mean to live fully in two worlds—and feel at home in neither?

In this episode of Expanding the Conversation, Dr. Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya, one of Israel’s leading experts on Arab society and state policy, shares a deeply personal and analytical perspective on the experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Drawing from her research and lived experience, she explores how government policy, economic marginalization, and social separation shape everyday life for Arab Israelis—and what it means to seek belonging, dignity, and equality in a divided society.

This conversation, recorded after her appearance at the 91�첥 convening Israel at a Crossroads, offers a rare and nuanced window into the complexities of identity, the enduring impact of the Nation-State Law, and the fragile promise of a shared future.

Discussion Questions

Glass Ceilings and Early Awareness
Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya begins her story with a childhood memory of visiting a kibbutz. How do early experiences of exclusion shape identity and ambition? Can you recall a moment when you recognized social or cultural boundaries for the first time?
Identity and Belonging
“We are part of the Palestinian people, and we are citizens of the State of Israel.” How does Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya describe the experience of holding both identities? What tensions and possibilities does she identify in that duality?
Measuring Democracy
Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya suggests that one way to evaluate a democracy is by how it treats its largest minority. What does this lens reveal about Israeli society? How might that same question apply to other democracies?
October 7 and Aftermath
How did the events of October 7 and the war in Gaza impact Arab-Jewish relations within Israel, according to Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya? What role can shared grief, empathy, or civic dialogue play in times of national crisis?
Hope and Responsibility
Despite the challenges, Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya emphasizes the need for shared society and a win-win future. What forces or values give her hope? What role can external Jewish communities play in supporting that vision?

SHOW NOTES

Video

speaking at Israel at a Crossroads

Further Reading

by NAS Research & Consulting
by Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya from the Israel Democracy Institute
(Remarks from the New Israel Fund’s Conference, May 15, 2025)

Transcript

Ellie Gettinger

Welcome to Expanding the Conversation, a podcast series that brings the Jewish Theological Seminary to you. The series focuses on the messages that emerge from Israel at a crossroads navigating religion, democracy and justice. A Convening that took place at 91�첥 in April 2025. I’m Ellie Gettinger, director of outreach for the Center for Lifelong Learning, and I will be curating the series, which will highlight key messages from the convening itself with insights from our panelists that were recorded separately.

Today, we learn with Dr. Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya. When my colleagues heard Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya, they felt that it was imperative that we share her thoughts with this podcast audience. She is one of Israel’s leading experts on the economic and social development of Arab society, governmental policy, and majority minority relations. She spoke on the panel Majority Rights and Equity for Minorities assessing the nation state law.

She offered a perspective that many of us were unfamiliar with, that of Israeli-Arab, sharing her lived experience. She bolstered these personal reflections with statistics and demographic information from her research. There are few moments in the talk where she speaks Hebrew and Rabbi Ayalet Cohen, the session moderator and dean of the 91�첥 Rabbinical School, provides translation. The talk opens with a story from her childhood.

Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya

When I was six years old, it was the first time that I went out from my neighborhood. My grandfather took me to a demonstration in Kibbutz Gezer Kibbutz Gezer is far from Ramla, from my neighborhood. For something like 5 minutes, I went to a demonstration that peace now arranged in Kibbutz Gezer. It was a sunny Saturday, and I couldn’t care less about the protests.

I was amazed by the swimming pools. It was the first time that I see a swimming pool in the kibbutz. I saw kids riding their bikes safely and I see green fields. The neighborhood that I grew up in was a very poor neighborhood. I told my grandfather that when I would grow up, I want to raise my kids in the kibbutz because it looked like a heaven.

And my grandfather told me that only Jews can live in the kibbutz. And I was really angry because he make my glass ceiling very low without even knowing what is a glass ceiling is. And I promised myself then that when I will grow up and I will have children, I will teach them to dream and to to make the effort to be, to achieve all they want.

And today, I’m a mother of three amazing girls, Carmel. She is studying law at Tel Aviv University, and Hala and now she’s finishing high school and Nir she will be studying in Yad B’Yad in the bilingual school. And I can say that about 40 years later from this, from this story, the glass ceiling is still low and the Nation State Law makes the reality much more complicated.

But we have a lot of good organization and a lot of good activists that promote equality for the Palestinian minority within Israel. It was very important for me to say that we don’t need law to feel as a second class citizen within our homeland. The glass ceiling and the reality is much more complicated than the law.

Ellie Gettinger

After her session, when I sat down with Nasreen, I wanted to understand what brought her to 91�첥 to share her story? What is the importance of connecting with an American Jewish audience? Why would this be something that you made time for?

Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya

Because we are 21% of Israeli population and you cannot deal with issues like democracy and minority and majority relations and state minority relations without bringing the perspective of the Arab minority. So I wanted to come and to speak about the current situation, the current political situation, about the complexity of our identities.

We as I spoke, we have a families in Gaza and in the West Bank, and we are also citizens of the state of Israel, and we have very complex identity. So I wanted the audience to hear from my personal experience and my personal point of view, what is what it look like to be a citizen of Israel and to speak about the challenges of our democracy and how we can work together to make Israel a real democracy to all its citizens.

That includes the Arab and the Palestinian minority living in Israel.

Ellie Gettinger

Returning to her convening remarks. Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya provides a context to understand the nation state law

Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya

In order to talk about the nation state law. We need to begin by understanding the context. Arabs are 20% of Israeli population. It’s not a small minority, and that also includes the people that live in East Jerusalem.

Some live in villages. Behind the wall was limited access to Israel. They don’t have all the legal rights. It seems the people that live in Israel and have Israeli citizenship. Arab and Jewish Jews in Israel live in, for the most part, separated lives. We have separate routines, not so much because of the law, but because the system is built this way.

And when I talk about the system, for example, school system is divided into four sectors. Is the secular, the religious, Jewish, ultra-Orthodox and the Arab. That means that Arab students and Jewish students do not have any interaction. And when we talk about the Arab minority, you need to understand that the same ways the Jewish people are divided to different groups.

We are also very diverse minority. We have religion. The majority of us are Muslim. We have Christian and Druze. We have geographical regions like the Bedouins living in the Negev, the Triangle area, the Galilee and mixed towns and of course gender. When we talk about the Palestinian minority, we need to understand that a large part of the minority don’t succeed to integrate within the Labor force the lower employment rates of Arab men and women. And that, of course, leads to a very high poverty rates. Almost 40% of Arab families live under the poverty line when we talk about children. Almost every second child lived under the poverty line in 2008. The Israeli government drafts a governmental resolution for the economic development of the Arab population with budget is larger than ever before, as almost no in investment or government Resolution 922 and the current one off the five year plan for 2022-26. Our government is government Resolution 550. All was our widest and the largest land till today, covering many areas and budget is at around 30 billion shekel about $8 billion. This governmental resolution shows that through the recent government have a shift towards the extreme right. There are importance that work towards development and closing gaps.

This include internal processes like the our commission of the early 2000. Pressure by international organizations like the OECD, Israel Civil Service officials and major civil society organization, and some members of the government. The ministers in the current government like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, are doing all they can to cancel and to freeze those budgets. The plan was already cut by about 15% because of the war, while other plan like were left without any cut.

It’s very hard to talk about any positive thing during those days, but it’s very important. We need to admit that thanks to this governmental investment and development and people like the new as people from the New Israel Fund think, do you and people from the SDF promoted several programs that succeeded to promote the Arab minority and so we can see a lot of positive trends.

We see significant increase in the number of Arab students in the higher education institution. We see greater inclusion of the tech industry, white collar and public service position. We see the increase in Arab employment rate, which is very positive trends.

We can’t talk about the Arab minority in Israel without talking about the crime, as in our towns was in our villages. In the last two years, the number of the victim reached a level higher than ever before, more than 230 victims during the last two years and 2022. During the Bennett Lapid government and inter-ministerial committee created the plan managed to decrease crime the first time in many years. However, since that plan worked only for one year, the government was only short lived, as you know, and the plan to fight crime was stopped by the current government.

We are also witnessing a sharp increase in crime. In the past three years. This year was already have more than 60 victims from the Arab society.

Ellie Gettinger

The statistics from Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya’s talk paint a stark picture of Palestinean Israeli life, which were drawn from her research. Tell me more about your work and who you partner with.

Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya

My research focus on inequality in Israel. I try to work with the Israeli government to promote equality, to promote our integration in the workforce and the higher education system and also in the civil service, because I really believe that if we want to make a change and right now we cannot be part of the political game because there we are not legitimate enough.

So one of the platforms that can help us to make a change is a civil service. So a large part of my research deal with large part of my research deal was the tools that can promote the integration of Arab civil services.

Ellie Gettinger

In this session, Dr. Haddad Haj-Yahya began to unpack the complexity of Arab Israeli identity and another important context to understand the situation of Arab citizen in Israel is a complex issue of Arab- Israeli identity.

Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya

As you may know, we are part of the Palestinian people and more than 20% of of us have family in Gaza or in the West Bank. At the same time, we are also as the citizen of the state, and this is our homeland where we want to feel belong as full number. Also, in terms of decision making, that complexity is much harder to Jews to accept, while almost all Arab on field and believes that the two parts of our identity is the Israeli one and the national one can live together and we don’t have any less duties. Our government part is low participation. We have low political influence and historical marginalization as Arab localities and institutions are under budget is averaging the Arab population ability to mobilize.

For example, the Arab school system consistently receives 20 to 40% less than the Jewish school system. The marginalization of the Arab minority and the discrimination as that Arab suffer lead to alienation and frustration, especially among the younger generation. Although, the Arab population suffer from discrimination as the majority of us want to make a change through a democratic institution and to have greater influence of politics.

For example, survey, that’s the Israel Democracy Institute I’ve done during the last few years shows that more than 80% of the Arab minority want to see our parties part of the government and want to to see Arab ministers. On the other hand, when we ask the Jewish population about our integration was in political gain, we have a majority that won’t accept us as part of the game.

The last three years were characterized by a raise of incitement against Arabs, specially during the Lapid- Bennett government when an Arab party, Mansour Abbas, was part of the government for the first time and after outbreak of the current ongoing war,

Ellie Gettinger

You have this great inside outside perspective because you’re someone who’s been looking at the society and researching the society. And at the same time this is your lived experience and you really did a tremendous job balancing that while you were talking. Here is the demographic. These are the challenges. This is how this affects me and my family. Is there a challenge there in how you are reflecting in or out?

Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya

I have a responsibility when I bring thoughts and ideas to the stage. I want to represent the thoughts of my community. I don’t bring thoughts and ideas that do not present large majority. So when I would speak about our link to integrate in the politics, when I say that we’re willing to integrate in the labor force inside of education system and to be part of the Israeli politics, I know that a large majority of the Arab and Palestinian minority in Israel think this way.

We want to be part. We want to be. We want to integrate. And this is the reason that I brought the idea to the stage, because I know that it can be meaningful to the audience to hear the way that we think and wish to be, to be part. At the same time, it’s very important for me to say that while many people from Israel think that we cannot have two identities, we cannot will integrate in the economic and inside Israeli society, we cannot have at the same time, Palestinian identity.

I feel that it’s it’s a very important to speak and to bring the ideas to identities of Israeli citizenship and the Palestinian nationality can live in very peaceful way.

Ellie Gettinger

In her talk, Dr. Haddad, has Yehia explored the experience of Israeli Arabs since October 7^th.

Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya

I want to move talking about the current situation, and we need to understand the major effect of that October seven massacre and the war in Gaza.

I have on state minority relations. In the beginning of the war, we saw a wave of solidarity within Arab society since we were also shocked by the events of October seven. As the war continued, it’s brought to the surface the complexity of our identity. We saw the loss the loss of life in Gaza while the most Israeli did not seen it.

We have families that kept telling us how the situation in Gaza is awful and unfortunately we have the privilege to see the news that the Israeli TV [speaking in Hebrew]. So they’re able they’re able to consume both the Israeli news that’s broadcasted within Israel, but also other Arab news sources that are available internationally.

The ongoing war brought about growing tension between Jews and Arabs citizens. That is that significant. The percentage of Arab reported that they don’t feel comfortable going to Jewish or mixed localities expressing themselves freely on the social media or speaking in Arabic near Jews. On the economic level, we saw increased level of unemployment among Arab citizens. And as always, during crisis situation, it takes longer to the Arab minority to get back to the employment market because there are we are overrepresented in low tech and nonprofessional jobs, which are always harder during this situation.

But I want to say that although the situation is really hard and with this current government, we see ministers that try to freeze budgets and try to do all their best to hit hard NGOs that promote shared society. But I really believe that we have a lot of good forces within the Israeli society that still believes that we can promote shared society and we can promote equality. Bad forces within our society had a lot of [in Hebrew] some of the the worst forces in Israeli society now have a huge platform and it’s time for other people.

It really depends on the context. So, for example, when we speak with the Israeli government, we specially concentrated on our citizenship. But when we talk in such forums, it’s very important for us to to show that we have a very complex identity. We are part of the two people. We are we have the Israeli citizenship, which it’s really important identity because I’m part of the state of Israel.

In the meanwhile, I’m also part of the Palestinian people. I have a large family. More than 500 people of my family live in the refugee camp of Jabalya in Gaza. We are part of the two people as the Palestinian and the Israeli. And we feel sorrow. And we and although it’s complicated, but I think that we have a very special role because there is no other minority in the whole world that speak the two languages, that know that suffer of the two.The two people.

We live, study, work. We spend most of our time with Jews, not only me. The majority of my community live in Jewish spaces. So we know why it’s so important to that Jewish people to have their own state, why they need the definition. And we know the sorrow and the pain of the Jewish people. At the same time, we also have families in the West Bank.

I have a family in Hebron and in Gaza, so the fact that I know what kind of suffer my family is dealing with all the pain in Gaza. We have a special and unique role and and promoting peace between the two people because there is no other minorities that really know how to be a bridge between the two people.

I’m Palestinian, I’m a mother. I’m Israeli. Our identity is very complicated in some places. I use the term I don’t even deal with my national identity, or neither was my Israeli citizenship. In some places we defined ourself as female. Sometimes as as I define myself as a researcher, sometimes as Palestinian, sometimes sometimes as Israeli. It’s really depends on the context.

But to be honest, my dream is to be to feel comfortable, to say the word. So use the definition Palestinian. When I talk with the Israeli government, because today when we talk and you talk about it, the official officer want us to integrate because of economic reason. And I want the state of Israel to promote more integration, not only because of economic reason, because I’m a citizen, because I’m a I’m a sorry, English is my fourth language.

[Hebrew] to Native minority. And I want the state to to treat me not as its enemy. I’m part of the state. And when the state of Israel will will succeed, it will be also my success. So it’s a is a it will be a lose-lose situation to all of us. All it’s be and it could be a win-win.

So I really believe in a win-win situation. and I believe that this kind of discussion can help us to, to, to, to come to this situation that also the state of Israel and the government not the current one, because I lost the hope from people like from Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu and Smotrich to try to to look at us as a human being and to treat us equally.

But so we have a lot a lot in common. We are the Arab minority in Israel is a large minority. The Jewish minority in the state is a large minority. And I believe that we have a very we have a common values. We have common challenges. And the ways that I want to believe said the ways that I will do anything to to make Jewish feel safe and to fight and to antisemitism after October seven and the war in Gaza, I want to believe that the people sitting here in this room will do anything that I will feel safe within my homeland.

Because if you want to measure the democracy of Israel, you can measure it, by the way, that the state of Israel is treating the largest minority.

Ellie Gettinger

Thank you so much to Dr. Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya for sharing with them. I so appreciated her willingness to sit down with me and offer additional insights into her experience. I would rate my own knowledge of Arab-Israeli life very limited.

I found it eye opening to consider the day to day challenges for a large portion of Israeli citizens. In closing the session, I returned to the end of Dalia Sheindlin’s message. She asked for American Jews to engage in these issues. What is our responsibility to Israel’s largest minority?

Thank you for listening. This audio was recorded at the 91�첥 Convening, Israel at a Crossroads. I hope you will expand this conversation, sharing your concerns and questions, and maybe this podcast with friends and family members. If you want to see complete footage of this session or of any of the sessions of the meeting, Israel at a Crossroads.

You can find a link on our website jtsa.edu/podcasts. Look for the “Expanding the Conversation” icon. Each episode includes discussion questions for individuals or groups to consider and links to our speakers, organizations and publications. If you would like to attend a Convening, you can find information about our upcoming programs at jtsa.edu/convenings

I’m Ellie Gettinger, director of Outreach for 91�첥. This podcast was produced by me with technical support from Chris Hickey, director of New Media. This is a production of the Jewish Theological Seminary. No part of this podcast may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The views expressed here in may not be those of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Expanding the Conversation: Roy Peled

Beth Mayerowitz — Thu, 22 May 2025 21:07:15 +0000

What does it mean to be a Jewish and democratic state?

In this episode, Dr. Roy Peled—legal scholar and former youth activist—reflects on the legal and political forces shaping Israel’s identity. Speaking at the Israel at a Crossroads convening, Peled traces the unfinished story of Israel’s constitution and the impact of Basic Laws on minority rights—especially the Arab minority. With clarity and nuance, he unpacks the political forces behind the Nation-State Law, the shifting role of the judiciary, and the tensions between national identity and democratic principles.

Peled brings both scholarly insight and personal conviction, inviting listeners to engage deeply with questions of power, belonging, and constitutional change in Israel today.

Discussion Questions

Constitutional Identity
Dr. Peled discusses the absence of a formal Israeli constitution. What do you think are the implications—positive or negative—of defining a state’s identity without a written constitution?
Majority and Minority
Peled highlights a lack of clear vision for the role of the Arab minority in Israel. How might a state balance national identity with full inclusion of minorities? What models from other countries, if any, come to mind?
The Role of the Courts
What tensions emerge between legal decisions that protect individual rights and those that shape public or national identity? How should courts navigate these tensions?
Nuance in Debate
Dr. Peled criticizes the polarization of conversations around Israel, both in Israel and abroad. What helps you hold space for nuance when discussing Israel’s identity and minority rights?
Personal Values
Dr. Peled identifies as a Zionist who believes in equality and democracy. How do your personal values shape how you engage in conversations about Israel? What assumptions do you bring to the table?

Show Notes

Video

speaking at Israel at a Crossroads

Further Reading

Basic Law: (Originally adopted in 2018)

TRANSCRIPT

Ellie Gettinger

Welcome to Extending the Conversation, a podcast series that brings the Jewish Theological Seminary to you. The series focuses on the messages that emerged from Israel at a crossroads navigating religion, democracy and justice. A convening that took place at Gates in April 2025. I’m Ellie Gettinger, director of outreach for the Center for Lifelong Learning, and I will be curating the series, which will highlight key messages from the convening itself with insights from our panelists that were recorded separately.

This episode features Dr. Roy Peled, a professor from the Haim Striks School of Law, College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon LeTsiyon. He spoke during the session, “Majority Rights for Minorities: Assessing the Nation-State Law.” Dr. Peled detailed the evolution of Israel’s Nation State Law, beginning with the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

Roy Peled

What is not often known is that one lines there says that as of this declaration, May 15th, 1948, the state will be run by interim institutions, which will be replaced by regular institutions in accordance with a constitution, That will be approved no later than October 1st, 1948. Now, you all know Israelis you know, we’re not known for our punctuality, but still we’re way off here.

What I want to raise here is why that happened and the reason that that happened. There are several reasons. Like any historical development, but it has much to do with David Ben-Gurion. I think one of the greatest men to walk the earth, but not flawless. There are a few explanations you’d like power and the Constitution always limits your powers.

That’s one explanation. But one that’s more important for our purposes is the idea that Israel is in the making that you don’t want to carve in stone its nature. It actually had less to do with the Arab population that nobody thought a lot about then, and more to do with the ultra-Orthodox, which Ben-Gurion wanted on board, and was afraid that defining the nature of the state, answering questions about equality, equality for women, equality for different streams in Judaism will push the ultra-Orthodox off board.

And therefore, he said, we can do without a constitution that we don’t really need, that let’s not sort of shake, shake our relationships at this point. So there was a commitment for a constitution and it never happened, at least not in the form of an actual constitution as you knew it from here. What happened was in 1950 that the Knesset decides to go forward step by step, as they called it, and work on chapters of the constitution.

And each chapter that will be agreed upon will become what we call today a Basic Law, beginning 1958 up to 1988. The Knesset confirmed nine of these Basic Laws on the constitutional component that every constitution has. So. So the equivalent of Articles one, two and three of your constitution, we had in those nine Basic Laws the judiciary, the executive, the legislature, capital, Jerusalem, etc., etc..

What’s important to say is that all these basic laws, although some of them were controversial, the one in Jerusalem, for instance, were always bipartisan. You know, we have more than two parties, but in American terms bipartisan, we’re agreed upon across the political spectrum. 1992 we have the first two basic laws that deal with human rights again, the equivalent of maybe your Bill of Rights.

These two are confirmed by a bipartisan majority. Notice, for 22 years later there is no Basic Law. And why is that? After the 1992 Basic Law, the Supreme Court had a series of decisions that struck down laws, mostly upsetting the Orthodox parties Aryeh Deri, the leader of Shas following that said, if it would be suggested to turn the Ten Commandments into a basic law, I will vote against it because I have no idea how the Supreme Court will interpret it.

So for many years, this whole project was put on hold and there were no basic laws legislated. When the recent right wing governments became more confident in their ruling the majority, they began to think it’s actually maybe a useful tool to have. And in 2014, this basic law about a referendum in case of withdrawal not important for our case, other than it was the first that passed on a strict coalition-opposition vote.

So all coalition members in favor, all opposition members against. And that was also the case with the second basic law to be enacted since basic law, Israel, the nation state of the Jewish people, which we’ll get to in more details.

Ellie Gettinger

Let’s get a sense of Dr. Pollard’s background to better understand how he became involved in this topic. You tell us a little bit about what your role is.

Roy Peled

Our talk here brings me to previous lives going all the way back to my youth in Hashomer Hatzair youth movement where I led Israeli Palestinian youth projects from the West Bank. But then as I became an academic and engaged in constitutional law teaching, the issue of minority rights in Israel was very center dealt with that a lot of talk about minority rights in Israel, in the States like to American students in Europe.

So this is sort of a combination of past activism and current academic interests.

Ellie Gettinger

Returning to Dr. Pellets talk. He considers the perception of the Arab minority in Israel.

Roy Peled

So I want to say a few words about conflicting visions on the status of the Arab minority since or through these points in history that I mentioned for many, many years.

The state of Israel doesn’t really ask itself what is our endgame in terms of our relationship with the Arab minority. It’s just not a question. There is an administrative question how we handle Arab localities, how we handle opposition Arabs in politics. But there’s no sort of in-depth discussion of their role in the country that begins to change with the Oslo Accords and not from the Israeli side, but actually more from the Arab side.

Well, from both sides, I’d say in these ways, Arabs begin to say to themselves, Wait, wait, wait, wait. Israel is going to strike an agreement with the PLO. And where does that leave us? The PLO is representing only the Palestinians outside of Israel per se. Not not officially, but in practice. That’s what they’re discussing about with the government of Israel.

The government of Israel insisted, and I think rightfully so, But this creates a problem that the PLO does not represent Israeli Arabs and that nothing about Israeli Arabs is part of this process. So Israelis Arabs begin to ask themselves, where does this leave us? And are we is anyone representing us? Are we deserted by our leadership in both senses of the national one, the PLO and and the Israeli government and something else happens.

Maybe it’s sort of a backlash to that is the Jews also begin to worry. They insist that anything that has to do with Arab-Israelis is an internal political matter. But as voices rise opposing or raising these questions, some Jews begin to feel well. So if there is now going to be a Palestinian state, I’ll give you a spoiler. That never happened even. But the sense was at the time that this may happen. And then there are claims for binationality of Israel. Where does that leave us? Is this going to be a solution of a one and a half Palestinian state and half Jewish state? So there begins to be more discussion about this nature come the year 2000 riots.

Again, very, very conflicting views. But Arabs were 12 Arabs were killed by the police in riots. That one has to say were very violent and cut off the country for a while. Arabs see they’re treated by the police not as protesting citizens, but as enemies as terrorists. Jews begin to think that way. There is a significant force within the country that challenges what we never thought about and took for granted that we basically own this place and serious security threats.

This leads to an interesting development in 2006, different Arab organizations for different initiatives within the Arab sector create what is known as the vision documents, saying, look, we think needs to be the relationship between the state and its national Palestinian minority. Each of them has a different voice, but basically they talk about either binationality or French version of Republicanism where all citizens are equal, but they present the Jewish majority with a vision, not one I necessarily like, any of them, but a well-argued and well thought through vision I had the time was asked to serve as a research assistant for a team of academics in Tel Aviv University that was brought together to respond, to put on the table the Jewish vision for the state’s relationship with its minority. We met for first four or five times and they just couldn’t agree on how to present a vision for the relationship between the state and its minority.

Ellie Gettinger

How are these conversations going on in Israel? And who’s at the table?

Roy Peled

Can I say something before and how it’s going on in the state?

Ellie Gettinger

Please, because I’m not sure it’s going on as much in the States,

Roy Peled

I have nothing to say about how often it happens. But talking about quality rather than quantity. I don’t there and don’t think it always happens on the highest quality. Even in academia, there is lots of simplicity, lots of labeling. It’s of sort of flattening of the discussion into preexisting narratives about either antisemitism on the one hand or settler colonialism on the other.

And normally people jump to the extremes, and that’s sad. And that doesn’t let people learn anything, which I have to say, I don’t I was I think what we had here today was in contrast to that, and I was very happy to see the audience sort of engaged on a deeper level. Does this happen in Israel? Not enough.

And in similar ways maybe to the problems here, but more out of fear or out of deep emotions that lead the discussion? Very few people on both sides, I think, but I’m more familiar with the Jewish side, are really willing to put themselves in the shoes of, for instance, what it’s like to be a minority in a Jewish state.

And people are very defensive. So they think that the moment I’ll acknowledge that it’s not the best experience, I’ll be required to give up my hopes for a Jewish state, or I’ll have to denounce Zionism or a sort of avoiding that back home. So people you don’t think that maybe, okay, I can I can accept that there are some problems.

And now let’s sit down and talk our way to more nuanced solutions. And it’s not everybody’s up in arms.

Ellie Gettinger

In his talk, he expands on the role of the courts in promoting minority right now.

Roy Peled

This also played out in the courts. And I want to mention two quick cases that the present very different notions of the relationship between the state and this minority, the Ka’adon case in 2000 is a case where a citizen, a nurse from village of Baqa al-Gharbiya, wants to improve his life standards, mostly the education of his daughters, and he wants to purchase a piece of land at a nearby community that’s being set up.

He goes there and he’s told, he look like a nice guy, but we don’t accept Arabs here. And he goes to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court, you know, not very long and not very complicated cases says no, that can fly. These sorry communities are erected on state land and the state cannot discriminate between Jews and Arabs. There are few complexities there because the Jewish agency is involved in how the lands were purchased to begin with.

The basically the Supreme Court says, no, and it’s a almost unanimous decision. I want to mention Justice Mishael Cheshin, because justice question is considered not rightfully, by the way, but is considered a conservative judge. Some stages even in this current judicial overhaul. He was the hero of the right. Again, I don’t think that for good reasons, but he is known for very lengthy and heated opinions.

He writes a one-line opinion in this case. He says in receiving their rights from the state, the petitioners were discriminated against and deserve a remedy from this course. That’s all this decision. So I want to contrasted with the second case in 2002, Adalah, which is very important legal NGO fighting for equal rights of Arabs in Israel, petitions to the Supreme Court against five municipalities that have a sizable Arab minority, and they ask the courts to force these municipalities to have Arabic on all their street signs, next to Hebrew, obviously. The court in this case accepts their petition. Justice Cheshin, which I mentioned a minute ago, is in the minority and thinks it should be rejected. And the difference is that this case is not about civic equality for the individual. This case is about the presence of the Arab minority in the public sphere. And Justice Barak, together with Justice Dorner in, say, the Arab minority is a native minority.

It’s not like immigrants from Russia, for instance, and it has the rights for its culture. And its language, of course, is part of its culture to thrive in its homeland. Justice Cheshin says maybe so, maybe not. But it’s not something for the court to decide. If it were a civic problem of an individual, if someone would get lost because he can’t find his way, because there are no sense I’d ruled in favor of him.

But the petitioners made it very clear and they did, that this is a political question that they want the court to back their right to be present in the Israeli public sphere. And justice question thinks that that is very different from Ka’adan. So there are conflicting visions here within the legal establishment, I’d say, about what equality for the minority means.

So we come to the Nation-State law and here maybe I’ll give it. There’s nothing unusual about the Nation-State law. You think about constitutions, many of them have a preamble saying this is the identity of our state. And if people basically accept the idea that Israel is a Jewish state, it could be under also, I think, many different circumstances, a very reasonable opening for a constitution.

It’s not unusual methodologically to have a preamble that says this is the character of our state. There are, however, some substantial issues I’ll mention for the lack of any reference to equality, exclusive national self-determination. We need to say it doesn’t say that only Jews have a right to self-determination, but to national self-determination. The change in the status of Arabic and the question Jewish of governmental support for Jewish settlements.

Now we have to remember the political background here is, as I mentioned earlier, sort of a growing insecurity of Jews in the legitimization of the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. You could debate how justified those fears are. I think that they are a result of some fearmongering. On the other hand, if you think six blocks south of here, those fears got some support in recent times.

So that’s sort of on the Jewish psyche. It’s also a time where there is growing demands, as Mr. mentioned, for integration of Arabs into politics. And this is for the far right, a way to poke the Arab parties in the eye, to say, we want to remind you that you are not equal citizens in this country. We want to make sure that everybody remembers its nature.

And as I said, if you look at the text, I don’t think that’s an impossible text. If you look at the context, that delivers a very different message. That’s the political motivation. It’s also an anti judiciary, political motivation, and the initiators say it very clearly. The court preferred along the years the Democratic part of the states definition on account of the Jewish part.

And we want to change that equilibrium. We want to bring the Jewish part to be more dominant. There is a petition to the Supreme Court against this law, and the Supreme Court, as I think anyone could expect, checks the petition, but says a few important things. And you have to remember this is a petition against a constitutional amendment.

So legally, it’s not a simple thing at all. But the Supreme Court says, look, the laws says that Arabic will be a language with a special status. That is actually in the signage case. I mentioned earlier what Justice Barak Chief Justice Barak said that Israel is the primary official language in the state, but Arabic is the language of a sizable native minority deserves a special status.

So there is no real change in reality there. And actually, in a way, it’s a recognition of the collective right of the Arab minority. The law talks about the governments supporting Jewish settlement, and some people try to argue that that is an overruling of the Ka’adan case. But actually, I have to say that in the bill, the draft bill, it said that the government can support separate settlements.

That was changed, that could not go through the Knesset, which again is a good sign. The Knesset wouldn’t legislate something. Talking about segregative settlements. It did say Jewish settlements in the court says, you know, let’s see what that means in the future. It may mean like a Jewish state, a community who whose culture is Jewish. But clearly and by the way, even some of the initiators of the lawsuit, clearly any Arab can live in a Jewish community.

It’s not an idea to segregate them, maybe sort of more intentional religious communities. We don’t know. Let’s wait to see how that is used. So the court interprets the law as very benign. Now, it’s been used by some judges as a leader. First of all, the number one use of this law since then is by Jewish criminals petitioning the government not to extradite them because of the clause, the state’s commitment to protect Jews.

But that never succeeded. There were a few cases where judges in the lower instances used the court once to deny Arab petitioners who asked for support of the reimbursement on expenses of students driving to Arab schools somewhere else from their municipality. And the lower instance judge said, Well, the municipality has the right to be a Jewish settlement and it doesn’t have to support that.

But that has been overruled, I have to say. Not the outcome but the argument. So the the impact was not dramatic officially. That said, there are social implications, right? There is a message coming with this bill. It was not necessarily embraced by the judiciary and not necessarily embraced by parliament, but definitely pushed by certain factions in the parliament that says we want to remind you who’s the boss, and that has all kinds of effects.

Also, lawyers say on our willingness to fight the state in some fronts out of fear, future interpretations of this law will be very problematic. And the courts are changing what happened so far is not necessarily what will happen.

Ellie Gettinger

In this moment of heightened political rhetoric. How can we temper our responses in dealing with something as politically charged as minority rights in Israel? If you could nuance the conversation. These are the things that I want people to know in order to get to that gray area. What would you want to present?

Roy Peled

So one would be I myself am a Zionist. I believe strongly that there is no reason that a Jewish state identified as such should not exist and at the same time be democratic. But to begin with, I want people to understand that not everybody has to believe that, and that when people question that, that doesn’t immediately turn them to illegitimate, antisemitic.

Some people argue that out of antisemitic views, but definitely not everybody. And by saying you can only enter the discussion if you accept that you’re limiting the discussion way more than necessary and you’re losing just lots of people you can talk to. So that’s one thing. The other is that there are many different ways to think of a Jewish state.

It’s easier here in the States to explain that a Jewish state isn’t necessarily a halachic state, but quite a few Israelis think that they don’t really want the restaurants to be closed on a Saturday or not to be able to go to a movie on Shabbat. But they sort of implicitly accept that there is some inherent preference to Jewish religious or Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox practices in the state of Israel and I don’t accept that.

I think that we need to remember that a Jewish state can mean many different things and that we sort of have to break the nexus between the culture of the state, its its symbols and its laws and its use of of force, of power, and that not everything with our Palestinian citizens is a zero sum game that we can give space to Palestinian aspirations for a better life.

We don’t have to accept any of their demands if there is such a thing as there. There are many different pastimes or political leadership. Not municipal, not local. National leadership is often quite radical. I have my criticism of it. I don’t expect many of their arguments and demands from the state. But that’s fine. I don’t have to. And I and I can acknowledge their issues, their problems. The harm that the state inflicts on them without having to submit myself to all their demands.

Ellie Gettinger

In closing his comments at the convening, Dr. Peled begins talking about how change can happen. Spoiler alert he comes back to the question of the Israeli constitution.

Roy Peled

Nothing is going to change without a political change. Good things happened in the civil service in the past decade. At the same time, horrible things happened on the political level and there was an ongoing, escalating rhetoric against the Arab population in support of, if not explicitly, definitely implicitly, Jewish supremacy and no real change in the current. That can happen without change on the political level.

That said, and if that happens, we do see signs of more willingness, political integration of Arabs. Conflicting signs sometimes. But that that is also there. We do see a more economical integration again, mostly because of the civil service, understanding how crucial this is for the state, not for the minority. I mean, they’re not mutually exclusive, but the motivation was how important it is for the state.

And at the end of the day, if we really come to an actual Israeli constitution, it will have to answer the question which some may not want to deal with, but will never settle in a sort of secure and sense of coming to an actual permanent nature of the state without giving some sort of recognition one way or another to the fact that there are not just non-Hebrew speaking citizens in Israel, but an actual national minority within the state.

Ellie Gettinger

Where do you find kind of hope or promise in this challenging moment?

Roy Peled

I have to search very thoroughly to find it these days. I find it, so one, as I said in there and the current Arab leadership and how it responded to October 7th and in lots of local initiatives between Arab municipalities and Jewish ones in the civil society on the political level, in in more willingness than in the past to accept the need for integration.

We saw that in the so-called change government by Bennett Lapid. But then we have to say Bennett was here last month in Columbia and said that he won’t repeat that, that the government needs to be composed of Zionist parties. Now, again, I’m a Zionist. I want Israel to be honest, but that doesn’t say that it has to be exclusively Zionist.

I can’t say I hope because I think even as a political statement it’s harming, but I hope that will change. Let’s say if people like him are back in power, I think that in the long run, after years that the courts have sort of got us used to the idea that equality is part of our Constitution, that we see more Arabic in the public sphere, that we see more Arabic, not just as sweepers, but as doctors and heads of departments in hospitals and in high ranking civil service positions.

People are more open to that. I think with the right leadership and with a bold leadership, things can change rather quickly.

Ellie Gettinger

Thank you so much. The need for a constitution and the challenge of ensuring rights without one came up repeatedly at the convening. Israel at a Crossroads. Dr. Roy Peled provided an excellent framework for understanding these complex issues, and particularly in addressing the shift in the passage of Basic Laws since 2014. I keep going back to the question. He turned back on me. How are we in the U.S. talking about minority rights in Israel?

Expanding the Conversation: Seth Farber

onlinelearning@jtsa.edu — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:56:37 +0000

In Israel today, the question of “Who is a Jew?” is not only legal—it’s deeply personal.

In this episode of Expanding the Conversation, Rabbi Seth Farber, founder and director of Itim, reflects on the intersection of religious authority, individual identity, and democratic values. Drawing from biblical narratives, courtroom battles, and grassroots activism, Rabbi Farber explores how Israel’s religious bureaucracy impacts the lives of citizens at every major life cycle moment—marriage, burial, conversion—and what it will take to create a Jewish state that welcomes all Jews.

Discussion Questions

“Mi Eilah?” – Who Are These?
Rabbi Farber frames his talk around Jacob’s biblical question, “Mi Eilah?” as a metaphor for how Israeli institutions question Jewish identity. How does this question resonate today, especially for converts, immigrants, and those outside the Orthodox mainstream?
Pluralism and State Power
What are the implications of having state-controlled religious institutions in a democratic society? What models might reflect a pluralistic vision of Judaism in Israel?
Conversion and Inclusion
What does the episode reveal about the experience of Jews by choice in Israel? What does it say about the boundaries of community and the authority to define Jewishness??
Judaism and Zionism
Farber argues that Judaism is not an afterthought in the Zionist story, but central to it. How do you interpret the relationship between Judaism and Zionism today?
Hope and Responsibility
Despite the bureaucratic and legal challenges, Rabbi Farber speaks of being “blessed to live in this moment.” What gives you hope when thinking about Jewish identity and the future of the Jewish people?

Show Notes

Video/Image

speaking at Israel at a Crossroads

Further Reading

Seth Farber “” JTA (July 10, 2017)–Farber referred to this article in his talk.

Transcript

Ellie Gettinger

In this episode, we hear from Rabbi Seth Farber, the director of Itim. Itim means Passages in Hebrew. It is an Israeli advocacy organization dedicated to building a Jewish and democratic state in which all Jews can be full Jewish lives. In both his remarks and our conversation. Rabbi Farber explored the many ways the religious establishment impacts personal decisions, particularly around high stakes moments like weddings, burials and conversion.

He opened with a biblical story about family coming together and the challenges in reuniting.

Seth Farber

Let’s be honest, our people are dysfunctional. We always have been. And because of that, I’d like to take you to a moment in our history where we sought for just a moment to address the dysfunctionality. After generations and generations of not just not getting along, where brothers, tried to kill each other, where brothers dismissed each other for who they were.

The family finally comes together at the end of the Book of Genesis. After all this tragedy and all this trauma for a moment, if just a moment, everybody is together. Joseph is told the Book of Genesis in chapter 48. Having brought the family together, Joseph is told your your father is sick. Joseph takes his two sons, Menashe and Ephraim, to meet his father, ostensibly for the last time. Jacob is told your son, the Viceroy, his children are coming before you. Jacob proceeds to tell Joseph a concise form of Jewish history. He kind of rewrites Jewish history, forgetting about all the bad stuff except for the loss of his wife. God appeared to me in Canaan.

He blessed me. He promised me I would be a great nation. And then I’m like, just. And like every story that we’ve known until now about the dysfunction of the family. Jacob promises, Joseph that the family will come together again. A kibbutz galyuot, The returning of the exiles of sorts. Of course, it happens in exile.

Your two sons who were born here in Egypt, your two sons who were born in Egypt. They will be mine. Everybody will be together again. Then the Bible gets to what I perceive to be the seminal verse of the Book of Genesis, something that’s so instructive for the discussion of Jewish pluralism in Israel.

Having promised Joseph that his two sons will be Jacob’s. The Bible records vayar Yisrael b’ne Yoseph Jacob looked out at the two sons of Jacob, who he’d just promised were going to be his. And he says two words vayomer, Mi Eilah? Who are these? This isn’t just an informational question. It’s an existential question. When Jacob looks at the story of the family coming together, it’s alien to him.

Think about the scene for a moment. Imagine what Joseph’s children look like. They probably got up that morning. They put on their Egyptian best, and I could only imagine that Jacob thought the Joseph sons would come with their Rambam in one hand and their Shulhan Arukh on the other hand. Mi Eilah, is the question that’s being asked over and over and over again the state of Israel, thousands of times every week.

Who are you? You know what they say about Israel. We love aliya and we hate olim. It’s much more than that. We can’t stand the fact, we meaning the Jacobs. We can’t stand the fact that this vision of the family coming together doesn’t look like what we thought it was going to look like by any means. But if the question of mi eilah isn’t just an informational question, if the question of Jewish pluralism is not just a question of information, it’s also a question of of existential character.

And the response of Joseph is particularly instructive. Jacob looks and says mi eilah, vayomer Yosef el aviv. Joseph looked at his to his father and said b’nai hem asher natan Elohim bazer. This has three parts to it, first: These are my children. That’s the first piece of it. The solution to a dysfunctional family. A family that doesn’t get along. A family who refuses to respect it is to acknowledge we’re all part of this. The second thing is: These are not just my children. I know they don’t look like the way you thought they were going to look. I know that you didn’t think that this is the way Jewish history is going to play itself out.

This is part of a much, much bigger story. One that you, Jacob, don’t understand. You’ve lost your perspective. It actually has a double aspect because it’s not just it’s a bigger story. It’s a bigger story that God planned. If all the Jews don’t look exactly like you, Jacob, that’s not because people didn’t turn out the way you thought they would.

It’s because that’s part of God’s plan. There’s a bigger story here than you see. And for those who remember. Traditional interpretations were in the Midrash and subsequently in Rashi. If you remember that text, Rashi says, Joseph, I love this line that Joseph pulled out his Ketubah with ready pulled out his marriage document with Osnat the daughter of Potiphera, right. The priest of On. I know, I know my ketubah doesn’t look like your ketubah. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a ketubah. And then there’s an amazing pause in this story, because if the first question is the transition from informational to existential and the second question is known and the saying, the response is there’s a much, much bigger picture out here.

And our solution to the diversity of our people is not to deny them who they are, but to embrace them for who they are and who could they could be. The biblical text records Bring them close to me. I wish to bless them. This third dimension is actually the most dramatic. It requires a demand from Joseph, also something we have to meet somewhere for Jacob to bless. Joseph has to move as well.

The story of Jewish pluralism in Israel is a painful story. It’s a painful story that has a dramatic history, a history of a series of bad decisions, of horrifying decisions.

What I do Itim, We’re trying to effect rectify the situation. We’ve helped more than 100,000 families navigate the labyrinth of Jewish life in Israel. People who came to the Jewish state and said, I want to live Jewish. You think after 2000 years we’d get that right? But quite the opposite. Over and over and over again, Whether you’re an immigrant from the FSU, from the former Soviet Union, or an immigrant from the states, or you grew up in Israel, day after day, people are asking mi eilah, Who are you? We know you are, but who are you?

Ellie Gettinger

ITIM, as an organization, was entirely new to me. In our conversation, I wanted to get a better sense of the organization. Can you describe the work that Itim does?

Seth Farber

We have a pretty robust legal division. 30 people work and we have four departments. One department is just an assistant center that’s helped more than 100,000 families over the years as they navigate. And we’ve represented people in all sorts of systems, in burial and marriage and divorce.

And conversion is a very strong area in which we have, and that allows us to filter up the kind of systemic issues that are that are problematic in Israel at any given time. Is there anybody you go to will say, if you have a problem call Itim when the issues filter up, then we have a legal division that basically tries to take things systemically when we see ills in society and things that the religious establishment I say more than the rabbinate, it’s the religious establishment. This could be the rabbinical courts. It can sometimes be even the Interior Ministry. When we see them overstepping their bounds or doing things that actually are detrimental to what our perception of what the Jewish state should be.

We also have a policy division where we work with the decision makers in Israel. Whether it’s the tenacity of someone is in the case at full time or someone who’s not a lobbyist, but someone who is discussing the issues and understanding the issues and making sure that our voice is heard in committee meetings.

Some of the issues are taken care of on the municipal level, the legal division in the and the policy division of Itim. They basically try to change things systemically. Vision is where we started talking about it at the beginning, and that’s our conversion. That we started a seven or eight years ago.

We now have something like 70 rabbis that are supportive of it and 46 rabbis that are converting on a regular basis. We have conversions every week and we’re certainly the largest converting group outside the state of outside of the rabbinate of the state of Israel. We’re the largest in the world. We’re now we’re in outright competition with the rabbinate, I like to say.

And I and I and I believe it. Our goal is not to continue to do this forever. Our goal is to negotiate with the state of Israel, the religious establishment, to create a different style religious establishment that provides people with choices. And if they want to convert the way the rabbinate is converting, great. If they want to convert the way we are great.

And I think there can be different channels. But the ways people can choose how to live their Jewish lives.

Ellie Gettinger

Getting back to his talk, Rabbi Farber details some of the ways in which people are looking for additional channels for their religious lives.

Seth Farber

We just finished a study. We interviewed 400 families that went through Israel, through rabbinical courts.

It’s one of the streams and it’s in order to get married in Israel, you have to go through the rabbinical courts to either prove you’re Jewish, if you’re an immigrant from the former Soviet Union primarily, or if you want to get divorced. We asked couples if you knew what you were going to go through, would you get married again?

40% said wouldn’t want to do it. That’s a tragedy, it’s a failure. It’s not a failure of the religious authorities. It’s a failure of the Zionist enterprise we were taught. I think it was a mis-teaching that Herzl and Ben-Gurion were the great threat to traditional Judaism. That’s what they taught us in Hebrew University, in graduate school. They taught us that Zionism was considered the great threat to Judaism.

One of the things we’ve learned since October 7^th, is that Zionism and Judaism actually have a capacity to go together specifically when there’s no religious coercion. It’s not just that these individual stories of heroes, young men and young women and older men and older women who in the face of incredible catastrophe, sought to express their Jewish lives.

It’s a symptom of the fact that people in Israel feel strongly about their Judaism. Jews in Israel want to express their Judaism. So how can it be that 87% of Jewish Israelis say they have very, very little confidence in the religious establishment? But what I’m really here to tell you is not the horrifying stories I see every day, and I’m here to tell you is not only is there hope, but there’s real hope.

Sometimes we have to go to the courts. Sometimes we have to argue the case. Sometimes we have to work on regulations. But the most important thing is we have to tell a big story, there is a big story going on right now. My parents both ran from Europe. They’re both survivors. My father was smuggling arms for the Haganah in 1947 in Berkeley.

I grew up here, with most of you screaming: One, two, three, four. Open up the Iron Door. Five, six, seven, eight. Let my people immigrate. I got to Israel and I thought we had made it. And then I realized the social fabric of Israel, the opportunity to forge ahead with what Rabbi Greenberg calls the Third Era in Jewish history, not only in his terminology of a new covenant, but a Third Era in Jewish history, where we’re now determining what Judaism is going to look like for the next millennia.

That’s incredibly, incredibly powerful. And there are signs in every way that things are changing. The chief rabbi, the new chief rabbi who’s been in power for four and a half months. I met the previous chief rabbis in the first year of their term. Once or twice we said we would meet all the time. Never happened. The present chief rabbi, has met me already four times.

He’s agreed to sit on panels with me. There’s a dialogue going on. Something’s changing. Not just in the leadership. Something’s changing in the Israel, body politic, people are recognizing they’re waking up that Judaism is important to them and they’re not going to suffer anymore. The ills and the failures of a religious establishment that keeps on asking mi eilah, Who are you?

We’ve been incredibly, incredibly successful in the courts, even this morning. We’ve been incredibly successful. If I I’ll just give you one example. If you open up the website of the Religious Council in Kiryat Motzkin, a small town northern Israel, you will find there an apology from the chief rabbi of Kiryat Maskin to a mikvah attendant. Four years ago, he called on the phone and said are you were make for attending to works for me.

And she said Yes. And he said, Are you the Ethiopian? And she said, Yes. And he said, When did you convert? And she said, I didn’t convert. He hung up the phone and he sent out a WhatsApp to his community saying which made it to her as well, because she’s a member of one of the ultra-Orthodox synagogues in Kiryat Motzkin.

And that said, if you went to the mikveh with the Ethiopian attendant, please ask a rabbi if you have to go again. I’m not telling you that the horrify you. I’m telling you that to tell you after four years, the apology arised and that mikveh attendant was hosted by the chief rabbi of Israel two weeks ago in his office, where he apologized on behalf of the state of Israel for the way she was treated.

So, yes, sometimes we have to use the courts and sometimes we have to use policymakers and sometimes you have to use the press. Some things are changing with more and more people are saying Here I’ll get to my last point. We’ve represented all sorts of people in court, Maxim, Maxim and Alina Sarnikov

Maxim and Alina made aliya because of you. You’re responsible for them, more than the people of Israel. They made aliya the 1993 and second grade. They went to school in. They both went to second grade in Ashkelon in P.S. 3 They grew up together. By the time they were 16, there were a couple. By the time they were 18, they drafted together Maxim in Aliya because his mom is Jewish, Alina, mainly because her dad is Jewish.

They went to the army and they said to aliya, you’re never going to be able to get married to Maxim unless you go through a conversion. The Army has a conversion program, as many of you know. Today, in Israel, 6% of Israel’s Jewish population is not a halakhically Jewish. In Maxim and Alina said We want to be part of this.

So Alina went through the conversion program in the Army, and Alina has a conversion certificate from the chief rabbi of Israel. And years after right at Maxim and Alina’s Wedding, which I performed under the auspices of the Chief Rabbi. And you’ll hear why in a minute at their wedding when the major television station in Israel came to film us.

Maxim looked at the camera. He said, You know, when they dropped me and I’m in field intelligence, they dropped me on the side of the Litani River in Lebanon. He said, No one question my girlfriend’s conversion. But in 2012, when they came into Ashkelon, Rabbi Bloi, he was the chief rabbi of Ashkelon, said, I don’t accept the army conversions.

She said, I’m holding a conversion certificate of the chief rabbi of Israel. And he said, I don’t accept and go to the rabbinical courts. The rabbinical court supported her standing, but it didn’t make a difference for Rabbi Bloi, I assure you, when he tells the story, he doesn’t call me Rabbi Farber. And in the end, in 16 Rabbinates and 40 soldiers were being told, even though they’d converted under the auspices of the chief rabbi, not talking about private conversions that I’m involved in.

I’m not talking about non-Orthodox, I am talking about conversions of the Chief Rabbinate. They wouldn’t accept. And we sued we sued the Chief Rabbinate to recognize their own conversions. Only Kafka could make that up. I can’t. What I’m telling you is because we went to court, because we weren’t willing to let anybody say mi eila anymore. Today in Israel, every rabbi and it has a registrar that registers converts there.

It’s not legal not to register converts. We’ve changed things, and this is my takeaway. It’s an existential problem. People are challenging people’s identities. We need to work towards a place where people say by name, These are my children. This is part of a bigger story. There’s an unbelievable story that we are blessed to live in this generation. We are blessed, all of us, people living in Israel, people living here in North America, in the former Soviet Union, in South America and in Europe and in Australia.

We’re blessed to live in a moment where our family is coming together and we can’t for even a moment give up the dream of what it means for our family to come together. And I’ll leave you with one sentence let no one tell you in the area of religious pluralism that Israel is 76 or 77 years old, Israel is 77 years young. There’s no reason to think we would have gotten it right by now. Things have happened. There’s been changes in our community, but it’s up to us and our children to change that. We’re young enough to change things. We’re doing it.

And together we’re going to move this project forward. Community initiatives are the bread and butter of what has to happen in Israel for things to change. There’s a dual movement that has to happen. I believe very strongly in community initiatives and even kind of stepping out. It’s no secret in Israel, following multiple attempts to change legislation in one area that’s particularly close to my heart, which is the issue of conversion to Judaism.

We started the first, Yediot Aharonot, the largest Israeli daily, called it the first rebellion of the Religious-Zionist community. And following a whole set of procedures where we tried to change legislation of how conversion works in Israel, the National Conversion Authority. We simply this is how by the way, I know I’m Israeli because we just decided to create facts on the ground and just started converting our set right.

We just started performing conversions ourselves was the first time the religious Zionist community had moved out of the dream that somehow the Chief Rabbinate was the be all end all. So I understand that the notion and by the way, today we’re doing 30% of the Orthodox conversions in Israel. As a startup with a budget write, the budget of the national conversion authority is 146 million shekel per year.

Earlier, our budget for this particular program was about two and a half million shekel a year, and we’re doing 30% even with a number of initiatives that are all certainly not just worthy, but highlight the power the community initiatives can take, can take off. And I think there’s also a need to force the hands of the religious establishment to tell you two stories about October 8th that I was involved in.

Okay. One more successful than the other, in my humble opinion can We were in a serious state of shock after Simhat Torah, not unlike you. We convened in our office. I have 30 people working with me, nine or ten lawyers, and we had a meeting on Zoom the next day and we said, What are the points that we can leverage what our work is to help the situation right now?

I sent off three letters to the chief rabbi and the ninth or 10th. I don’t remember which day it was. The first one related to burial. I was very involved almost ten years ago in arranging a new system of burial in Israel that allows soldiers who were killed in the line of duty, who weren’t halakhically Jewish or weren’t able to prove it, but who were fighting in the Israel Defense Forces to be buried, so to speak, within the fence.

There was a modus operandi that was created that enables soldiers who were killed in the line of duty to be buried. I come back to those words that I use all the time, not just with dignity, with respectfulness is a response to the need of the community. Earlier, the Chief Rabbi, I said it’s simply inconceivable given the fact that 6% of Israel’s Jewish population is not halakhically Jewish, that there weren’t people in the Nova Festival who either aren’t halakhically Jewish or studying for conversion, and we need to come up with a way. Now, a directive needs to come after you office now that says, just like we we bury soldiers like that, they were able to be buried.

Second letter I remember was a few days later related to the issue of mikvah. And this is such an important issue for me because I want to understand what makes Israel different than any other example we’ve ever had in the last 2000 years.

If you look at a local mikvah here in the States, so the average number of people let’s just talk about women for now who visit that mikvah, I don’t know, 100, 200, 500, the number of women who use Israel Israel’s because every year is 600,000. Okay. That is a staggeringly high number. Do you need to have a policy that people can come through the front door and have access?

And we’ve sued the state of Israel to allow women to have autonomy in mikvahs and not to have to use the attendants that are provided by the rabbinate. And we’ve changed the law multiple times. So on the 13th, the 14th of October, when there was a massive call up and there were 300,000 men who were slowly leaving their homes and there were sirens going off and just about every community in Israel.

And then our office started getting calls from women who said, I’m too scared to go to the mikvah. I have kids at home and my husband’s been called up and what am I supposed to do? And I sent off a letter to the chief rabbi, and I said, Hey, it’s an emergency. We need to open mikvahs for us during the day, which is traditional a lot of practice is not generally done unless is in the time of emergency.

And we wrote a whole brief explaining why this was a time of emergency. Now, the first letter I got back from the chief rabbi said, No, no, no, we don’t need to do that. And there was a series of letters back and forth until the 30th of October and 30th October. I got a letter saying after we’d already opened, the mikvahs was in every city during the day.

I got a letter thanking us for the initiative to open mikvahs for us. On the other hand, when it came to the burying of people in the Nova. The response I got was, We know how to answer it. We know how to deal with that, don’t worry. And I kept on writing in my letters. You can see there’s going to be desecration of God’s name.

Someone is going to be buried outside the fence. And the question is, is Judaism going to be a moment that sanctifies God’s name or is going to a place that horrifies God’s name? Desecrates God’s name? And the truth is, we lost that battle. There were two people, two families. But I’ll just tell you one follow up story, because it’s so it’s tragic and it’s beautiful at the same time.

There were two families were buried outside the fence because of that. Now we’re in the middle of sponsoring legislation that will demand that anybody killed in terrorist incidents, that they will receive the same treatment, whatever their, you know, bonafides. So they will be buried because the family wants buried in the Jewish cemetery in a halachic way that doesn’t hurt anybody else.

We didn’t win that battle. Well, it’s much more important is that there was a sense that something has to change here. There has to be a recognition of the significance of this moment. This is not a shtetl anymore. Not us living in Israel, not you living here. Something dramatic has changed. From my perspective, something beautiful. Incredible. What generation gets the opportunity to change Jewish life for the next millennia?

So it goes slowly and it goes from the bottom up, but it also goes from the top down. People always ask me, What’s in your toolbox? And the answer is a stick and a carrot for not able to change the way an institution that exists and has gigantic budgets available to change the way they think. And we’re not going to be successful even if we do all the bottom up.

And if we don’t do the bottom up, we’re certainly not going to be able to change the way they think.

Ellie Gettinger

Let’s talk a little more about your toolbox. What are the other ways that Itim is delving into religious disparity in Israel?

Seth Farber

Just issued a long 88-page report where we did something that no one’s ever done before, which is we followed the money of how the Kotel is funded.

Ellie Gettinger

What did you find?

Seth Farber

We found out that they’re operating and it’s a governmental agency, like a semi-governmental agency, but they’re not meeting just about any of the criteria that the government says that they have to meet to do this. I’ll just give you one example and forget about the we just got we discovered some really interesting things about the Kotel.

One is that it turns out that you can have a bar mitzvah on the inner sanctum of the Kotel, but only if you give a certain amount of donation to the Kotel Authority. That doesn’t seem right for a semi-government organization that seems, you know, dead wrong. So we found that, again, that’s even the way their organizational structure works.

At the head of the Capital Authority is a rabbi who’s been there for many, many years. And governmental agencies are supposed to have turnover and boards and a review and, well, oversight. All those things are not happening in a way that they should be. So that’s something we’re trying to promote again in a time where there wouldn’t be war.

Some of the other things that are going on in Israel that are shaking the core of Israeli society, these things would become we’d be able to fix things much quicker than we are able to do now.

Ellie Gettinger

In the Q&A, Rabbi Farber addressed the importance of developing a welcoming environment for those who convert to Judaism.

Seth Farber

And every year in Shavuot, in our office, we have a bet who’s going to be the first person to come along in the press. If Ruth was truly converting today, she wouldn’t be accepted, right? Every year there’s like a pool in the office. If you’re asked a historical question. So I think the jury’s still out or we don’t. Right. Or Halakhah doesn’t always speak the language of what we perceive to be historical truth, the historical development of certain halakhot. You know, we the jury’s still out.

We simply don’t have enough concrete information. And even if we had the historical information, we still don’t have enough capacity to we we sublimateourselves at a certain point, a certain process and that doesn’t mean it’s not dynamic. Quite the opposite. The question of what determines in general how someone converts and the extent to which conversions are accepted or not.

This is the Achilles heel of our generation. I’m being nice. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate, they’ve is completely twisted halakha. You might remember, because I became famous for publishing the blacklist of the rabbis, who the Chief Rabbinate rejected when they were with. They we agreed in court that they would give us the list of rabbis they accepted, and he sent me the list of the rabbis they had rejected.

Judaism is so committed to making sure that converts are fully embraced by our community. The way we know that someone who is not observant is still part of the Jewish community. We learn that from the convert, according to the Talmud in Masechet Yevamot. Where the convert is the paradigm for the person, not only do we not check after them when someone converted, we don’t start asking questions at all.

So what does it mean that Alina, the rabbi of Ashkelon, wouldn’t accept this conversion? What does it mean that we have lists of rabbis in this institution for generations of rabbis who were committed to Halakha? What does it mean that all of a sudden, the moment it comes on 91�첥 stationery or RA stationery, it’s it’s automatically rejected? What kind of absurdity is that?

I say with full confidence, because I’ve seen it happen the other way for political reasons. I’ve seen the chief rabbi himself certified conversions that came out of conservative synagogues in North America because there was a family relative involved. That kind of hypocrisy is not acceptable if we believe that we’re not a shtetl anymore. If we have enough confidence to get up and say something new is here, we’re in a new era in Jewish history.

We have a sovereign state and we’re proud of the Judaism of that sovereign state. We’re not embarrassed about it. We don’t start doing backroom deals. That’s what we did. We were in Fill in the blank. This is our moment of expressing a Judaism that embraces our diversity. I feel strongly and I think you’re with me. And this doesn’t compromise on our not our values or our principles at all.

We do not compromise on our principles. And for me that means halakhic principles, but we don’t allow a small group of men, and I make it very clear men. We don’t allow them to rewrite 2000 years of halakhic history to fit their interests that we’re just not going to allow anymore because that is not just the destruction of Judaism, it is the destruction, the denial of God’s hand in history.

Ellie Gettinger

As we wrap up. Is there anything that you would like to add?

Seth Farber

Look, I think it’s really important for listeners to know that the situation isn’t bad. First of all it’s unbelievable that we’re in a Jewish country and we have Jewish marriage, we have Jewish burial. And the government’s funding that. I am not an advocate of total separation of church and state or synagogue and state, as the case may be.

People think, after all the bad stuff you’ve seen in all the corruption, shouldn’t we just, you know, break? And I don’t think there are simple solutions to complex problems. We want to have a Jewish and democratic state, and I think it’s actually a great opportunity of our generation. It’s an opportunity for the last 2000 years. Wow. This is unbelievable.

I do believe that we have to provide people with more opportunities and more choices. And I think people will vote with their feet. I think people now are just voting with their feet to leave. I’d much rather see people vote with their feet to stay, not just leave physically, but like to get married outside of Israel. They get divorced outside their habitat to get married outside the religious councils and more, but more importantly, for the Zionist enterprise to survive and thrive.

People don’t think. They think this is an afterthought, Judaism and Zionism. And I think it’s quite the opposite. I think it’s actually at the core of the story. And one of the things I’m working on now is trying to promote that narrative, that bigger narrative, the story of this really affects every Jew everywhere. I’ll put it this way, people often talk about the three denominations, so I have three denominations, also.

My three denominations are people who want to live in the past. They think nothing happened in 1948 or 67 or 76 or whatever that you choose. Nothing’s happened. We just have to. We just were in there. It’s Israel, but yeah, we’re basically to do the same thing. People only care about the future, whereas they say whatever happened the last 2000 years was a big deviation from Jewish history. Jews were not their homeland.

Now we’re back and let’s pick it up from where we came from. The development of halakha, the relationship to the Jews and the Diaspora, all those things are secondary to, you know, building the land. And there’s a third group that says we have to build a future based on them. Once you break it down those lines that I think the differences between, let’s say the religious, Zionist Orthodox that I subscribe to or the, you know, Masorti movement, they’re there.

They were all in the same place. So we can argue about the differences and the the nuances, but I think we’re all part of that third denomination. I think that’s the denomination that’s most necessary in this generation. Again, as as an Orthodox Jew, I feel like that’s part of the divine plan. We’re going to build something for the Jewish people.

It’s different than anything we ever knew before, and therefore the models we have to work on, the models that we have, and we can’t forgo all the not just the beauty of the last 2000 years, but the responsibility of the last 2500 years. But even given that we have an opportunity to build something very new and hopefully it’ll happen in our lifetimes, you know, that’s the hope.

Ellie Gettinger

Thank you so much, Rabbi Farber, for sharing your thoughts with me. In this episode, I gained insight into the political levers at play in creating a more pluralistic Israel. Rabbi Seth Farber kept returning to the question of mi eila, Who are these? I appreciated his work in providing better answers to this question and his very detailed perspective on how to push Israeli society forward.

Thank you for listening. I hope you will expand this conversation, sharing your concerns and questions, and maybe this podcast with friends and family members. If you want to see complete footage of this session or of any of the sessions of the meeting, Israel at a Crossroads.

Expanding the Conversation: Rakefet Ginsberg

onlinelearning@jtsa.edu — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:48:48 +0000

What does Jewish pluralism actually look like in Israel today?

In this episode of Expanding the Conversation, Rakefet Ginsberg, Executive Director of the Masorti Movement in Israel, reflects on how Israelis are redefining religious identity and reclaiming spiritual space—from the egalitarian Kotel to public Yom Kippur services in Tel Aviv. Drawing on her work at the grassroots level, she offers stories of coexistence, struggle, and hope, and makes a compelling case for expanding access to Judaism that is both meaningful and inclusive.

Discussion Questions

Pluralism in Practice
Rakefet Ginsberg described the egalitarian section of the Kotel as a space where diverse Jewish expressions coexist. What does this tell us about how pluralism functions outside of formal policy? What challenges and opportunities does this model present?
Ownership of Judaism
Ginsberg emphasizes the need for Israelis to “take ownership” of their Judaism. What might that look like in practice—for religious, secular, and traditional Jews?
Building Trust Across Difference
How can trust be built between communities with vastly different religious worldviews? What lessons can we take from Ginsberg’s conversation with Rabbi Eliezer Melamed?
The Role of Institutions
What role should state institutions like the Chief Rabbinate play in defining or regulating Jewish life in Israel?
Sources of Hope
In difficult times, Ginsberg points to community, song, prayer, and memory as sources of hope. What spiritual or communal practices sustain you in moments of challenge?

Show Notes

Video

speaking at Israel at a Crossroads

Further Reading

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed “” Weekly Article Revivim (July 24, 2021)
Rabbi Daniel Gordis “” Israel from the Inside (October 9, 2022)

Transcript

Ellie Gettinger

In this episode, we hear from Rakefet Ginsburg, the executive director and CEO of the Masorti Conservative Movement in Israel, Rakefet spoke at a session entitled “Religious Pluralism in Israeli Society,” where she focused on the ways in which Israeli society is engaging in questions around pluralism.

Rakefet Ginsberg

Bechol dor v’dor hayah vadam lirot et haetzmo k’ilu yatzan Mimitzrayim, every generation a person needs to see himself like he’s the one who got out from Egypt.

And I thought Every generation we have to fight for our freedom in different ways, in different levels. This is our time. We’re doing that and we’re doing that in different ways. It’s pretty hard and sometimes make you feel like there is no point to find the government with it, to fight to the institutions, although we do that together as coalitions.

And I want to say and we probably going to refer to that, the fact that there are coalitions who can have Orthodox organizations, Reform, Conservative, even secular organizations that deal with Jewish pluralism in Israel today. And I think it means something about what we feel compared to what the government actually does or do not necessarily do. Since the Masorti movement is I want to say that as a grassroots organization that work on two levels. One, we work with communities around the country and we work for the Israeli society. We’re here here in Israel to work for and make Israel a better Jewish, pluralistic, democratic state, not just for Conservative Jews. For Israelis.

The Masorti movement, in my eyes as CEO, is a vehicle for that vehicle that help Conservative Jews but help Israelis all over the country. They don’t have to sign as a Conservative Jews. They just need to be Israelis who want to enjoy from their Jewish life, pluralistic Judaism, egalitarian Judaism in Israel, we’re the address for them. And we want to be an address for them. We knew and we know today more than ever, that we can change things on the ground.

I want to tell you one story about the Kotel. We have a small part at the Kotel that is an egalitarian, that is called ezrat Yisrael. I hope all of you visit there. If you haven’t yet, please make sure that in your next visit in Israel, you’re there. This place was built because of a lot of pressure. And the pressure came mainly because American Jewry thought we’re coming to Israel and we have no place the Kotel.

We can’t have an egalitarian prayer. It started, by the way, with Conservative rabbis that started this fight. It took years and years to achieve that. And it’s not what we dream of. We wanted to have a place that’s going to be big enough and going to be nice enough and going to be able to host everybody. But we got a place that is small and has a very horrible platform.

But there is a platform and the Masorti movement runs this place to give other religious services on the ground there. So it’s a beautiful archeological garden that the government gave and said, okay, we give you the platform, but that’s all from this point, you’re by yourself and we use this place for prayers and we use this place for services of bar and bat mitzvah.

And it started with a few families that came from North America and some families that came from South America. And every year and every month, we saw more and more people. And today I’m not talking about the wartime because this is a really different thing with all the flights. You all know that it’s much more complicated. But let’s say September 20, 2023, okay, just before the war, when we’re talking about an average busy Monday and I’m saying busy because we have 40, four zero services per day, per day.

There is no synagogue in the world that can hold 14 services per day, 40 services per day! Now, you would think, okay, they’re all North Americans. No, they’re North Americans and South Americans. And third, our Israelis, Israelis that maybe never heard the word pluralistic Judaism. Okay. But they practice by fact, pluralistic Judaism, because when they can choose, they realize there’s another opportunity.

There is an opportunity for me to have a service for my child, a bar mitzvah or a bat mitzvah for my children in an egalitarian way. And the beauty of this place is that we have six services at the same time. One table conservative family with a woman rabbi next to her reform bar mitzvah with a man rabbi next to them.

And while they’re an Orthodox family, that’s a bat mitzvah and they use the table as a separation. Then they stand from both sides of the table. And near them a secular family from Nahariya that have a service for their child. And another one that comes from Beersheva. And this is an educational moment that I can’t even describe.

When they realized that the service just next to them by the woman rabbi is actually pretty similar and it’s by the halakhah. And this girl that reads the bar mitzvah, she writes beautifully from the Torah. I don’t have to teach them what egalitarian Judaism is at that moment. They know what egalitarian Judaism is. I don’t have to talk about pluralism at that moment, since there are more and more organizations, more and more places.

We’re getting to more and more people and not just the Masorti movement. We do that, but other organizations do that as well. And bringing Judaism pluralistic Judaism, to people. So there’s a huge gap between what the government allowed us to do and the Chief Rabbinate that is so disconnected from everything that’s going on, on the ground must tell you, you just need to see the elections, how they run the elections for the Chief Rabbinate to understand that Israelis has nothing to do with it, how people really feel about their Judaism.

And I think this whole term of the last three years, two and a half years, showed us that more and more Israelis actually think we don’t need the ultra-Orthodox to hold Judaism for us. We want to take ownership of our own Judaism. It’s not going to be the same way, but it’s going to be ours. And I think for many, many years, Orthodox ultra-Orthodox were afraid from Judaism that’s going to be different from them in Israel. And by that they got a lot of power and it got a lot of budgets. And now it’s a system that holds itself. We can and we should keep fighting this system. We should fight this system as coalitions. But one of the most important thing is we need to decrease this fear that people will be less afraid from the different Judaism that they see near them.

We see Hilonim secular people in Israel, which is a tricky term, but let’s say Hilonim in the Israeli term because they’re afraid from those systems sometimes we talk about, you know, let’s have a service in the school or something like that for one of the holidays. And there are like really a real okay with a rabbi getting into our school.

It’s not going to make our children now super Orthodox, and they want to eat at my home tomorrow. We need to get their trust that we’re not changing them. We’re actually giving them the opportunity to take ownership of their Judaism. By that, it’s a process that this society is afraid from that side and this side, that afraid from this side.

And we happen to be many times in the middle that we’re thinking, okay, where do we belong? What do we do with that? But that’s exactly our role to make sure that we can decrease this fear. Ultra-Orthodox kids, mainly with their teachers, came on motzei Shabbat that was to Erev Tisha B’av to the egalitarian Kotel, took the whole place, put the message, sign the middle, and started to pray in a very loud way that the actually didn’t let us pray.

And we come every Shabbat, every evening of the Shabbat, have to pray at the egalitarian Kotel. And they actually took our took the only place that we can have. We could have an egalitarian prayer there. It was horrible because the words that were there is like, we’re fighting for religion, we’re fighting This is this is a religious war.

Now think about the Tisha B’av, Kotel. You’re standing there with the stones. You know, you see the destruction in front of your eyes and they’re talking about hatred, you know, among Jews. It was a horrible, horrible night. No prayer can be accepted if something like that happens. I mean, no God can hear a prayer that comes by interfering or arresting other Jews from praying.

And those videos were all over the media. Some rabbis started to write short notes. Maybe we had to rethink how we do that. We have to rethink if this is our way. And one rabbi wrote, I saw this video of this woman saying, no prayer is accepted like and I saw it again about and I thought, this is an opportunity.

And I called him. I won’t tell you the whole story. That can take us 3 hours. But it’s it’s it’s a very interesting way. How they accepted me eventually was Rabbi Eliezer Melamed that is very known among the Orthodox community. And I got to his house and I thought, it’s going to take us 20 minutes. I’m going to say thank you for saying what you said.

And he’s going to say, Yeah, okay. And that’s it. And I was there for three and a half hours and we were talking for three and a half hours. Now the talk was very open and very direct. I didn’t try to be anybody else than just myself and say, This is who I am, This is why I do that.

And he asked very directly, he said, Why do you go to the Kotel? And I said, Look, I have three boys. They were born in Israel and raised in Israel. I want them to feel that Israel is their home. They can live anywhere else in the world and they’ll be fine. But I want them to feel that Israel is their Jewish home no matter what.

And if you eliminate us from the Kotel, the most important thing and for me personally, my grandparents met at the Old City in Jerusalem. So for me it’s like this is really family home. If you take me for this place and say to my children, That’s not your place, you have no place here.

What actually you mean by that? What’s the next generation future going to be here? We’ve talked a lot about a lot of things. And I said I’m a pluralistic Jew. He immediately said, I’m not. I said, I think the truth is, among a lot of people, a lot of ways to practice Judaism. He said, no, I don’t think so. I think you’re wrong.

But I understand one thing you’re doing that because you really feel that this is an important thing for you and you’re doing that for the next generation and you’re doing that. And I get it that you want your children to feel at home. I want that for my children as well. This, after three and a half hours, was the only thing that we could agree about.

All the rest we thought, though, I thought about women’s leadership. You know, everything was different. This was the only thing that we said, I want my children to feel at home. You said, I want my children to feel at home. And this is my commitment that your children are going to feel at home and vice versa. That was a beginning.

At the end of these three and a half hours, I said, Can I? I came there without telling anyone. It’s a long story, but then said, Can I tell or write about this meeting? He said, Yes. It wasn’t an easy thing at the beginning. Like, Are you sure? Tell people that you met a friend here.

A month later, he wrote an article that says, Leave that part for Conservative and Reform Jews. Let them do that in their own way. We disagree with their way, but we’re respected and we understand that that’s their way to connect their Judaism. He was not sure when we’ve met. He was sure that I’m doing that just because I want to interrupt him, because I want to, you know, put my finger in his eye, like I’m doing that in purpose just to make him angry because I don’t want him to practice his Judaism in his own way.

And when I said, I don’t care about where you practice your Judaism, I care about how I can practice my Judaism. I care about the fact that I want my children to feel that they can practice their Judaism in their way. This is a moment of trust, and I’m talking about it because I think we’re so afraid. They’re afraid of us.

The fact that I’m not afraid from them doesn’t mean that they are not afraid of me. We need to build trust. We need to work on it. And we need to have more and more Israelis that can take ownership of their Judaism. And by that, we can show that we’re not trying to make this state a democratic with no Judaism.

Judaism is part of what this country must be about, a body without a soul. It must be there. But still, the fact that we’re there with pluralistic Judaism is not against them, is not, instead of its side by side with. And this is something for a lot of people hard to accept because you have to give up on power.

You have feminism worked for years to be accepted by men, and it takes time. It’s not an easy thing automatically to just let it happen, but it’s a process and the process needs to come from both sides. One of the things that we’re seeing that when we grow and we have more and more people that getting married outside of the Chief Rabbinate, the Chief Rabbinate become more strict.

But at the same time, we hear the terminology, we’re going to be more open. We in this, but eventually we make the revolution. Kids just don’t get married through the Chief Rabbinate. So the revolution is here. We should change the Chief Rabbinate’s, right. Married in in our I.D.. If I don’t get married through the Chief Rabbinate, we should change it.

But at the same time, we have more and more people that understand the Chief Rabbinate is not Judaism. The Chief Rabbinate is an institution, and we shouldn’t let this institution to defined our Judaism. And we have to take ownership of our Judaism. And Israel can and must be Jewish, pluralistic, democratic state, because our people are going to make it like this.

We’ve started to do a service of Yom Kippur. We’re doing a Neila, and now we’re doing not just Neila, but we’ve started with Neila in Habima Square. Habima Square is the biggest city square in Tel Aviv, I think the biggest in Israel. It’s a huge place. And we had a rabbi there with two people and we thought in several to one, we thought they probably going to be like ten people, maybe 15 will join, but at least we’re going to we’re going to have some kind of presence, especially because we’re talking about years that this whole debate of do we have a mehitza are in their public area.

We don’t have a mehitza outside. Let people see that there is an option without a mehitza to have a Jewish service outside there. Thousands of people were there, thousands of people. The funny thing is, I have tons of I never had so many videos from a career like I have from it. Think about it. People who took video on Yom Kippur at the city square for prayer.

But that’s exactly the people that come. Those are Israelis that if you ask them to join a synagogue, they’ll say, if you’re asking them who they are, what’s their identity? They’ll say, I’m Hiloni, okay, I’m secular. But that’s exactly the Israeli. I want to say a little bit political term because it’s easy for us to say if you don’t drive on Shabbat, you’re you’re a religious If you do drive on Shabbat, you’re secular.

But actually it’s much more wider and more complicated that as everything in life, it’s not black or white. And many, many Israelis do kiddush, Shabbat dinner, the bar mitzvah. Okay, They don’t consider themself as religious, but they still practice something in Judaism and want to connect. And by having this service at Habima Square, people that could just join and felt like it’s mine because it’s in my area, I can get there with my child to see and touch a tefilla and suddenly it’s ours.

And many people that I’ve never knew before, and some of them are celebrities, wrote they after, like this is a Judaism that I want. I don’t think they’re going to join the majority movement tomorrow, unfortunately. I wish they were. They need and want to connect, even though they consider themselves as Hiloni because knocking on a door synagogue is something else for them, having a religious and spiritual life, it’s much more important for them.

And they want their children to understand, as I said before, why do they live in Israel eventually? It’s not an easy place to live, to choose to live in. And those who choose to live in Israel not do that just because it’s comfortable or they were born and just stayed. You need to have something in addition to that.

And something in addition is your roots. And if you don’t connect to your roots, then we may lose those roots. Israelis understand it even if they think this religious organization or this Orthodox institution is not for me. They need to find a way and our role is to offer those ways.

Ellie Gettinger

I wanted to dig in a bit more into the Neila service, particularly in thinking about the challenges and opportunities in marketing pluralistic Judaism. You gave a description of the Neilah service. What are other ways that that it’s like becomes a branding exercise to say that this is also Judaism and we are here as part of Judaism?

Rakefet Ginsberg

I want to start with saying that the whole split between Hiloni and the Dati in Israel, I think it’s a very political split. I know a sociological. A lot of people thought, you know, you’ll say hiloni, dati and masorti, which means you’re somewhere in between. But the way we the way we describe it is actually you drive on Shabbat, you don’t drive in Shabbat, you relate to Judaism. That’s the middle. The majority in every sociological research says that the majority in Israel are masorti. Maybe it’s not masorti like at Noar, almost all these like the majority movement, but actually they are masorti.

And when you think about the Masorti movement, you think, okay, what’s the difference? What do I actually look for when I see or talk about those differences? So many times the egalitarian issue is the difference, but I think the Israeli society 20 years ago, 40 years ago, is not the Israeli society that we see today. I grew up in an Israeli society that thought that a woman cannot be a pilot.

I grew up in an Israeli society that women could not be in a combat unit, and we broke this ceiling glass and we found that there are possibilities. And actually, why not? And when we have this opportunity to do that in a halakhically way more and more people say, especially more and more women say, why not if that’s an option?

And I don’t belong to start with to an Orthodox synagogue or an Orthodox community, then I can bring my values to my Judaism and I can combine and find a way that’s going to fit my ways. Now, a lot of Israelis think about synagogue as the Orthodox institution that they don’t want to belong to because that means that they’ll have to keep Shabbat in their way or they can do only one thing and not another, or maybe wear a dress or have a, you know, cover their head and then they get into a place that they don’t have to apologize for who they are.

They can come with their shorts and sneakers and they can be who they are. And they don’t have to pretend like there’s somebody else and connect their children. And I think more and more Israelis look for this kind of way. So being at a city square or a place that is open, have no walls, you don’t have to ask for permission.

You can just join or leave whenever you want. It’s a way that’s respectful for them, that respect the fact that they are not necessarily going to do everything or nothing. It’s their way to do whatever they choose and people need those opportunities. And we are here to offer those opportunities.

Ellie Gettinger

As she wrapped up her talk, Ricafort owned the current challenges and talked about the importance of hope in times in which there are so many issues affecting Israelis society.

Rakefet Ginsberg

Hope is a hard thing, really hard. And there are days that you wake up in the morning and what’s going to happen tomorrow. We need to make sure that we’re going to be okay. If we relate to our history, this is part of our resiliency. If we think about we were of a day, we were slaves in Egypt, but eventually we got out.

We’re the hostages square every day? And we were there for Purim every day at 5 p.m. service of circle of prayer and singing together and just hold the hope together. One, because we understand that we can do that by ourselves. Nobody can do that by himself. We need community. And being together is being a community. And second, because praying and singing together give us hope and singing is religious ritual as well.

Sing, Lu Yehi. It’s like let it be an American “Let it Be” for many people. That’s that’s a prayer. That’s a way to hold hope. We all need this spiritual thing. We were there on Purim, reading the Megillah together and knowing that eventually it ended with a happy end. That gives us hope. Our history gives us hope. We belong to a nation that survived, which means we have it in our genes, not just in biological genes.

We have it in our spiritual genes. We have it in our cultural genes. The ability to survive and get through this. It’s not easy, but it can happen and it will happen to us. Reminding that every day to people, to ourselves, that spiritual thing that we as a religious organization can bring to people and need to bring to people today, that’s our that’s part of our role in times of war.

We can fight, but it’s not less important than fighting because those hostages will be back, not just because of a deal. The fact that we will have a deal is because we hope and believe that they must and can come back home. If we want believe that it can happen. It will never happen. We need our politicians to do their their role, but we need to our role as well.

And the role is to hold this hope to make sure that everybody remember that we can. And it is possible to make this place a better place, that we can have better democracy, that we can live in peace one day. Peace is not black or white. It’s a process. Different levels of we can do that and we will do that.

That’s our role as religious organization

Ellie Gettinger

in closing our conversation, we talked about hope, but also the practical reality of funding. There’s so many hurdles and there’s so many challenges because of kind of entrenched power, money, all of those pieces. Where are you finding moments of hope in this in this process?

Rakefet Ginsberg

It’s hard to say. The more days that you think, my God, it’s getting worse than days that you feel there’s a hope in terms of funding, You can see that it’s getting better. But I think even the Israeli government today fund services outside in a city square in different places, some services that are more open and traditional, not necessarily not necessarily religious, the way with the Israeli government today understand that people will connect one way or another and there is a need to reconnect people in a way that’s going to be more set and going to give them the opportunities.

It’s not like a funding. It’s not when, especially when we look at the Chief Rabbinate or even at the Kotel, we don’t talk about the same the same amounts. I mean, the the gap is horrible.

Ellie Gettinger

I mean, it’s not even in the same ballpark.

Rakefet Ginsberg

You’re right. You can’t really compare like like, like group that plays in them in their backyard.

Like you’re going to give them something, but you won’t really give them the real money.

Ellie Gettinger

Maybe a flat ball.

Rakefet Ginsberg

Okay, I’m going with that. But it’s not. It’s definitely not what we want to see. It’s not an equal funding. We can’t even talk about it yet, but we’re talking about funding. It’s hard

Ellie Gettinger

And that’s new. Just being able to talk about it.

Rakefet Ginsberg

I’m not sure it’s totally new, but we’re saying that more and more out loud. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen tomorrow with this government. It’s not going to be easy. I’m not sure that any other government going to do the change dramatically. It’s a process, but it’s a process that we have to believe in. And eventually I don’t think there is an other option.

Eventually, we will live in a country that will be democratic, Jewish, pluralistic, and we must make it like this. And even though we are going to expect and we should expect some of disappointments along the way, it’s still something that we have to hope for and still something that we have to fight for. Good to have small winnings here or there, but eventually it’s going to happen.

A meshiah will come.

Ellie Gettinger

It was really great to hear from Rakefet Ginsburg today. She drew amazing mental pictures of what pluralism in Israel can look like. Just consider a busy day at the egalitarian section of the Kotel, which has hosted 40 different services in one day, or the thousands of Israelis gathering in a public square for Neila. I appreciated the opportunity to explore what pluralism could look like and does look like in Israel.

Expanding the Conversation: Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

onlinelearning@jtsa.edu — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:40:20 +0000

What does it mean to be both a witness and a bridge in a time of war?

In this powerful episode, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib—a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Palestinian American raised in Gaza—shares his story of survival, loss, and conviction. Speaking at the Israel at a Crossroads convening, Ahmed explores the personal and collective traumas that shape Palestinian life today, including the impact of the current war on his own family.

Refusing the binaries that dominate public discourse, Ahmed pushes for a third space—one grounded in mutual empathy, moral courage, and an unflinching commitment to truth. His vision for Gaza’s future goes beyond reconstruction; it is a call to transformation rooted in justice, dignity, and pragmatic hope.

Discussion Questions

Trauma and Politics
Fouad Alkhatib describes the impact of personal and collective trauma in Gaza and emphasizes the importance of healing. How can trauma—both individual and communal—shape political realities? What might it mean to include healing as part of a vision for peace?
Making Space for Complexity
Throughout the episode, Fouad Alkhatib resists aligning with rigid ideological positions and instead calls for a “third space” rooted in empathy and complexity. What makes it difficult to hold space for multiple truths in today’s discourse around Israel and Palestine?
Diaspora and Responsibility
Fouad Alkhatib speaks openly about his frustration with Palestinian and Arab diaspora communities who engage in rhetoric but avoid practical action. What role should diaspora communities play in shaping the future of Gaza and Israel? What does responsible engagement look like?
Barriers to Dialogue
The episode concludes with a challenge to consider what barriers exist within the Jewish community that prevent meaningful dialogue. What assumptions or structures might limit these conversations—and how might we begin to dismantle them?
A Vision for Gaza
Fouad Alkhatib outlines a bold vision for Gaza’s future—one that prioritizes autonomy, dignity, and opportunity. Which aspects of his vision resonated most with you? What would it take to move from reconstruction to transformation?

Show Notes

Video

speaking at Israel at a Crossroads

Further Reading

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. “.” Haaretz (April 30, 2017)

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. “” The Atlantic (March 15, 2025)

Dahlia Scheindlin. “” Haaretz (May 5, 2025)

Transcript

Ellie Gettinger

In this episode, I talk with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a senior fellow at The Atlantic Council. He spoke in this session, “Collective Trauma as Drivers of Conflict among Israelis and Palestinians.” In this session, he addressed his personal trauma growing up in Gaza and reflected the communal trauma, citing the scope of violence his family had experienced since the war began in Gaza.

As a warning. This episode includes in stark descriptions of death and violence.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

Two things real quick: First is that I am not a trained psychologist, nor am I coming at this from an official lens. I am coming at this as an average individual with speaking from a background that steeped in lived experience growing up in Gaza, having had family in Gaza that suffered immensely during this current war and lost immensely.

And number two is that I’m speaking for myself. I have never once claimed to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people or speaking for them or above them. And I would encourage you to be very wary of anybody who claims to speak for the Palestinian people, even if they have a group or they have an organization.

My unusual lived experience was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it created a kind of physical end point for the trauma. The curse is that it didn’t actually end that for my family and loved ones. And what do I mean by that? So I’m 34. I feel like I’m 64 and a 34 year old body. I came to the United States when I was 15.

I came here in 2005 as a 15-year-old exchange student with a State Department program. It was a one-year high school exchange, live with a host family, and then go back to your respective homelands and build cultural bridges. It was a post-9/11 initiative to repair some of the damage, if you will, from 9/11. But upon completing the program, I was stuck in Egypt, unable to go into Gaza when Hamas abducted Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, and that resulted in a border closure.

Hamas had already won the infamous 2006 elections. And then there was a mini war after Gilad Shalit. And then I was in Egypt and came back to the United States. Thanks to the support of allies and human rights and peace activists and applied for and received political asylum status. And the very day of my asylum interview was June 14, 2007, which is the very day that Hamas violently took over the Gaza Strip and ejected the Palestinian Authority while I was in the Gaza Strip.

You know, I grew up with the very, very ubiquitously taught sense of collective trauma when it comes to the Nakba, when it comes to the sense of displacement, when it comes to the idea that we are displaced, dispossessed people that have been wronged by the Arabs, by the Ottomans, then by the Brits, then by the Arabs and Muslims, then by the Israelis, then by our own leadership.

And there was a crossroads, if you will, with the Palestinian Authority. I experienced the tail end of Oslo in the nineties where we ditched the Egyptian travel documents. Gaza had a short-lived airport that I flew into in ‘99 and in 2000 we had an ID card. So there was like collective trauma was gradually giving way to a sense of collective sovereignty.

We were sovereign, we were here, we had IDs. We had slight control of our destiny, of our territories. And then unfortunately, in Camp David in 2000, things didn’t work out too well. When Arafat walked away from that. The second intifada, the militarization of the second intifada, then that was the first experience, I would say for me viscerally for me of direct physiological trauma.

There were multiple horrendous experience. But one particular near-death experience that planted the seed for me to leave the Gaza Strip was in 2001. It was actually two months after 9/11 at the age of 11. In 2001, when I was going home from school with some friends and happened to pass by in a building that was hit by an air strike.

And I’ve actually written about this in Haaretz and Times of Israel that actually mattered to me to be able to talk about it to in Israeli Jewish audience the selection of Haaretz as a vehicle to publicly talk about that experience as part of the pursuit of healing was very deliberate. And so so it killed two of my friends and rendered me largely deaf in my left ear.

That’s why I tend to yell. I can’t hear myself. And the concussive blast from the wave caused me a TBI on my left side. And it was then that I really was determined to get out of Gaza. And I turned to English as a tool to try and maximize my opportunities to leave the coastal enclave. And thankfully, four years later, I was able to depart.

So again, that was a physical endpoint to my own trauma. But my family, I have two brothers, two sisters. My father who passed away five years ago. He was an UNRWA director. He was a doctor. The Jabalya refugee camp up north. My oldest brother is currently in Gaza. He runs a British medical NGO. My baby sister left Gaza in 2016.

She’s in Jerusalem. She’s a cancer researcher and I have a sister in the UAE and my middle brother, he was a doctor for UNRWA. He ran the beach camp and he left and went over to Germany like one year before October 7th. I mean, they experienced the collapse of Gaza basically under Hamas’s rise with all the wars, with the blockade, with all the restrictions, with the poverty, with the horrendous degradation of the quality of life, the worsening of not just the conditions, but basically the stalemate that hit the Palestinian national project as a whole and all the associated trauma that became ten x, what it was when I lived there.

So these competing tracks where I worked on myself when I came here, my U.S. host mother was a former Catholic nun turned Buddhist atheist guru. She was very San Francisco. She was the oldest of 14 from Louisville, Kentucky. But it was it was wonderful for me in this. I mean, I was I grew up in a very devout Muslim family.

You know, I’m spiritual about Islam, but I’m not I’m certainly not very ritualistic in my commitment to Islam. And so I learned meditation. I learned that Buddhism is actually a philosophy and that you don’t. So that helped me in addition to therapy, in addition to Zoloft, in addition to everything else in addressing my trauma as my family’s trauma was worsening.

Ellie Gettinger

In listening to your talk, you know, it’s clear that you’re coming. You have this perspective. You understand the trauma of the Palestinian people, of your family. You’ve been there, and at the same time, you have this kind of sense of there middle grounds to be had. This is you know, and I’m not saying that they’re not other people with this perspective, but it seems like in this moment of super divided life that there’s not much in the world of the middle. So where do you find spaces of comfort and how do you build more middle grounds?

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

You’re very perceptive to ask that because that is basically my raison d’être right now is to and that’s the beauty. And the challenge of it is to create that space. It ultimately doesn’t exist precisely because it’s sexy to be on either end of the spectrum. Within one’s camp, within a particular issue, within the pro-Palestine camp, unfortunately, there is enforced conform any and forced cohesion when it comes to issues around the war, around Hamas and opposition to Hamas’s terrorism. October 7th, the practices of the organization right now, the decisions not to accept earlier conditions for the cease fire, for the end of the war, for the release of the hostages. I have tried regularly to operate within a lot of these traditional off the shelf pro-Palestine spaces, if you will.

I consider myself pro-Palestine, and to me, being pro-Palestine is something that should entail a lot more than just being anti-Israel. I want us to be defined by what we stand for, what we’re for more than what we’re against.

On the other hand, with the pro-Israel spaces, there is definitely an interest in a lot of my anti Hamas messaging. It was definitely an interest in a Palestinian who is self engaging in self-critique. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of the current government as it relates to the war, when it comes to speaking about the casualties in Gaza and how even if you want to weaken Hamas, the current strategy isn’t going to cut it. This is not working.

This is wrong with what happened with my family that quickly turns into, well, now you’re just you’ve outlived your usefulness and we don’t have any space for you here. And quite frankly, I have no interest in operating in a quote unquote, purely pro-Israel space. So I’ve been really invested in creating something in the middle, a third way, if you will, a third space that can be inviting of folks from both camps, the pros from both sides who want to see the humanity of both Palestinians and Israelis, who want to build a new discourse that is steeped in and mutual empathy and kindness, who want to acknowledge the reality of multiple truths beyond maximalism, beyond overly simplistic narratives, black and white reductionist views that really don’t help either people

Ellie Gettinger

Returning to his talk. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib talked about what he was noticing in Gaza before October 7^th.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

And unfortunately, I was volunteering, helping young people in Gaza learn English, helping young people try to develop computer skills, try to develop something to avoid radicalization. And I saw what was happening in Gaza.

I saw people turning to what little options they had. And it was sad and it was heartbreaking. Fast forward to October 7, and unfortunately, as soon as the disaster started unfolding, I immediately knew that Gaza as we knew it would cease to exist and that my family, like millions of people in the Gaza Strip, would pay a heavy price for Hamas’s suicidal nihilism.

I had been tracking different developments in the lead up to October 7th that made me concerned about Hamas trying to sabotage the prospects of Saudi Israeli normalization, about the fact that Hamas was actually their popularity was in the toilet and their popularity. There were mass protests against them. In July and August of 2023. The unemployment was 70% for youth, 8 hours of electricity a day, horrendous suffering.

And still, Gaza was a beautiful place that meant so much to its people that did not need to be destroyed at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I was horrified by not just Hamas’s actions, but by the traumatizing of the communities all around Gaza. The kibbutzim, that like the stories that you hear of folks in in Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Nahal Oz and all those areas helping out the Gazans with cancer patients and whatever.

That’s not some Ha’aretz propaganda that was actually like my dad, who UNRWA did nothing for him when he was sick and he was getting treatment entirely for free at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and folks from Kibbutz Be’eri were helping him out for free, entirely, selflessly. And Kibbutz, Be’eri was one of the worst hit by Hamas’s violent, horrendous attack.

And so for me, it was there was just so much hurt in terms of trauma. One of the things that I wanted to do that was different is that I wanted to connect with survivors and their families and families of hostages as a way to build bridges, to say, I’m terribly sorry for what happened to your loved one, to be that one Gazan voice, that certainly, while it’s not my responsibility per say, I did feel a sense of a broader collective responsibility, even as I was furious at the fact that the war, just as I had predicted, ended up killing dozens of my immediate and extended family members, my childhood homes.

But two of them were destroyed in Gaza City up north. My brother that I told you about is in Gaza right now. I took my mom and his wife and four children out on October 13th. Our family home was destroyed and my brother was in the house when it was hit and he and his wife and four children pushed their way out of the rubble.

My uncle Riad was my dad’s youngest brother was was killed and he spoke perfect Hebrew. He used to work in Israel. My 12-year-old niece was killed. Farah, She was survived by her twin identical twin. who was badly disabled. My cousin is from my uncles, my first cousin, my uncle, my dad’s niece. She was thrown out of the building, a concrete slab fell on her, crushed her, and turned her into a quadriplegic. And she survived that. And then on December 14th, 2023, a massive Israeli airstrike in Rafah before the invasion of Rafah, killed 29 of my mom’s family.

My second home wiped out, all of my aunts and uncles and that home destroyed that house. The New York Times, Amnesty International, Foreign Policy. All the investigations and high profile pieces. And asked the IDF asked the Israeli military, I gave them coordinates. I gave them times. I gave them like everything said, just did you know why was this hit? And the Israeli military had no answers whatsoever, despite the fact that I had been ferociously anti-Hamas through and through and remain so to this very day.

I was at a crossroads trauma-wise and decided that, you know, trauma-wise and when it comes to my commitment to peace, my commitment to healing and reconciliation, and that’s no kumbaya, this is hard work. This takes a daily commitment to this ethos to not give up and to lead by example, because you have an entire population in the Gaza Strip right now that are completely, horrendously traumatized at every conceivable level.

If just 1% of this population was incited to seek revenge, we are screwed. There will never be peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Our work is cut out for us in terms of how are we going to sustainably absorb some of those energies, work with some of the grievances. Forget we’re talking about historical traumas and the Nakba. I mean, numerically speaking, over 2 million people were displaced internally in this in a way that far surpasses the numbers of the Nakba.

Ten years ago, I tried to build an internationally-run Israeli approved airfield in Gaza to facilitate the freedom of movement in and out of Gaza. Because part of my series of change for Gaza and how do you de-radicalize is Gaza’s always been isolated, always stuck between, has like an unhealthy codependency on Israel and Egypt to get in and out.

But anyway, what that experience did was I developed an army of volunteers and informants and allies and people on the ground. And what they’re telling me right now is the amount, the abuse that the children are experiencing, both physical in terms of beatings, the sexual abuse that the children, the displaced children are experiencing, the children who are regularly separated from their family members and have to sell, beg, go fetch food, go fetch water, etc., Again, in a war zone with no adult supervision, completely vulnerable to exploitation.

Number two, Secretary Blinken came to the Atlantic Council, where I work on his second to last day and gave that speech where he infamously said, Have we assessed that Hamas has been able to recruit as many fighters as it has lost during the war? Now, you look at a lot of the images. Those fighters look like a bunch of children.

I literally looked at dozens and dozens of hours, but there’s this trauma, this untreated trauma in a society that has historically been very reluctant to dealing with mental health and been told, you don’t need no Zoloft or pill or therapy, just say a couple of prayers. So we have our work cut out for us in understanding this from a clinical point of view and then feeding that understanding into a comprehensive political plan for addressing the Gaza in the day after.

What’s interesting is that there is an entire dynamic in the diaspora that I understand why our folks are having a hard time in the land. There’s a war, there’s suffering, there are hostages. I am willing to understand why it’s difficult, even though I understand that there are actually conversations still happening. The thing that’s frustrating for me is that those of us who have let’s just call it diaspora slash Western privilege and safety here and are creating all of these unnecessary barriers to having these conversations such that we can build up these resources for our respective peoples.

That’s the part that really gets me, especially on the Palestinian side and the number of times I’ve been in conversations where I have attempted to create said spaces. Let me just speak on the Palestinian side. I’ve had U.S. officials in Washington. That’s where I live, where like I want to be briefed by Palestinian Americans and Arab Americans and Muslim Americans.

I want to hear the raw story of what’s happening in Gaza. And I want and this was more true with the last administration. No offense to fans of the current administration. That’s fine. You know, I’m I’m nonpartisan I’m bipartisan. But he was like, I can’t have people yell at me every time. I would try to have folks brief me.

They would yell at me. Second of all, every other word would be genocide, this Zionist, that. And third of all, like the only policy recommendation that existed was cut off all funding to Israel. And he’s like, that’s not a tenable policy recommendation. He’s like, Tell me, allocate this funding for one, two, three, four, five for this medical clinic.

And yours truly was a key player in pushing for the establishment of the food drops and the maritime corridor. And I had some of the most ferocious attacks against me as a Zionist sellout traitor or whatever because of that work. But what folks didn’t understand is that there was a much bigger play here, which is that Gaza’s airspace went from being, sorry I’m deviating I’m going to come back to this, I promise. There was that the airspace over Gaza went from being under the exclusive control of the Israeli airspace for over 24 years to all of a sudden we had the air forces of ten different countries operating freely over Gaza, I mean, in full coordination with Israel. But I humbly was able to prove that if you coordinate with Israel, all the relevant security matters, Gaza’s airspace and Gaza’s territorial waters can be open for business.

So that’s what I’m desperately trying to get the folks in the diaspora to do with a whole host of other issues, including but not limited to mental health issues, the think tank world. Do you know that most wealthy Arab and Palestinian Americans don’t have a clue what a lot of think tanks do in Washington? They complain about AIPAC, they complain about the ADL, they complain, complain, complain.

And I’m like, okay, I’m at the Atlantic Council. Let’s set up a program at the Wilson Center, at this, at that, and come up with policy recommendations. Start designing programs, start designing specific things that help Gaza, that help the youth, that de-radicalize our youth, that do one, two, three, four. So that’s the thing that frustrates me the most.

Ellie Gettinger

In our conversation, we talked more about frustrations and anxieties in the current political landscape.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

There are going to be multiple parties in Gaza and potentially in the current Israeli government that might want to keep some form of a low intensity war going on in perpetuity. And that would be a disaster because it would keep not just that the suffering ongoing, but it would keep all the associated incitement abroad, all the hate, all the anti-Semitism, all the crazy protest.

All the strain on Israel’s economy, all the strain on the Palestinian economy, all the checkpoints, all the risks for terrorism, all the settler violence in the West Bank, all of that would be bolstered and enabled by the sustainment of the war in Gaza. And it is my hope that inshallah, that does not happen.

Ellie Gettinger

What does a lasting peace or cohabitation look like for people of Gaza? And what does that feel like in terms of your sense of Israeli security? You have a sense that you have a vision of what you want to see. I want your vision?

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

Certainly. First of all, I’m totally fine to acknowledge that there may very well be a need for separation between the two people and like where relevant and possible and necessary, they’ll be cooperation and needs to be cooperation as it relates to security where necessary.

There will also be separation between the two. Like I don’t think we should seek forced cohabitation between the two beyond just Gaza, no longer forming any kind of a threat to its Israeli neighbors after this horrendous experience in the Gaza Strip, after the horror, the suffering, the hunger. No one in Gaza, including even remnants of Hamas, are going to be thinking about war or conflict any time soon for a long, long, long time.

My interest, however, isn’t just in reconstructing Gaza, which is necessary. I want to transform Gaza. I want to reconstitute Gaza. Gaza has been reconstructed three or four times already over the last 20 years. This is not a good use of resources to rebuild it, only for Hamas to be lingering somewhere in the background and unilaterally be able to effectuate the decision to launch a war or to launch conflict.

What I want to see Gaza transformed into is a semi-autonomous zone that is part of the umbrella of a future Palestinian state. And what I mean by semi-autonomous is that I don’t know that the future of Gaza is going to entail a government in Ramallah. Gaza is geographically separated from the West Bank and it needs to be politically and administratively separated, even though they should ultimately be connected one way or another.

And they should be a part of like some kind of a federal system. But I want Gaza to become the pride and joy of the Palestinian people. I want Gaza to benefit from its location overlooking the Mediterranean to be a kind of an opening for the Palestinian people to the rest of the world. I want Gaza to benefit from the small gas field that it has to supply itself and potentially the West Bank with gas for a power generation plant.

I want Gaza to have connectivity with the outside world through an artificial peninsula. This is a project that I’m working on to take all the rubble from throughout the Gaza Strip and dump it off the coast, off the central coast, and build a small airstrip and a small seaport there. Open Gaza up to the outside world to break its codependency on Israel and Egypt.

Of course, there will be coordination and and collaboration with Israel and Egypt. I want Gaza to be semi-autonomous and completely capable of standing on its own without the aid dependency that Hamas has created on the United Nations and the NGO industrial complex. And without the need for handouts from the international community. I want to put Gaza’s most precious asset, which are its people, its younger people.

I want to put them to work. I want to put them to something productive and constructive. That’s my vision for Gaza.

Ellie Gettinger

Thank you so much for your time. One of the themes that Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib returned to is the difficulty of finding space for productive conversations. He addressed the baggage that prevents discourse on the Palestinian side. It’s important for us to consider what are the barriers that the Jewish community has constructed that limits dialogue.

Expanding the Conversation: Raquel Ukeles

Beth Mayerowitz — Thu, 22 May 2025 19:38:16 +0000

What role can a library play in a time of national crisis?

In this episode of Expanding the Conversation, Dr. Raquel Ukeles, Director of Collections at the National Library of Israel, reflects on how cultural institutions like the library serve as spaces of dialogue, connection, and resilience. Drawing on her experience overseeing one of the most important repositories of Jewish, Israeli, and Middle Eastern culture, Dr. Ukeles shares how the National Library has responded to war, social fragmentation, and political tension—not by retreating from controversy, but by doubling down on its mission to collect, curate, and make accessible the voices of all communities.

This conversation, recorded as part of the “Israel at a Crossroads” convening hosted by 91�첥, challenges us to consider the power of memory work, the ethics of curation, and the library’s potential to shape the public square.

Discussion Questions

The Role of Cultural Institutions
Dr. Ukeles describes libraries as civic spaces that hold and reflect a nation’s complexity. How do you see the role of libraries, museums, or archives in your own society? How do they shape public values or political culture?
Collecting in Times of Crisis
How should institutions decide what to collect during moments of upheaval or war? What are the risks of documenting events too quickly—or too slowly?
Pluralism and the Public Good
The National Library of Israel collects materials across religious, ethnic, and ideological lines. What does it mean for a state institution to be inclusive in this way? What tensions might arise from such a commitment?
Memory as Responsibility
Dr. Ukeles suggests that memory is not only about preservation but about shaping the future. How can remembering—or forgetting—impact a society’s direction?
Libraries as Spaces for Dialogue
Should libraries be places for civic repair or democratic renewal? What would that look like in practice?

Show Notes

Video/Image

speaking at Israel at a Crossroads
Image described in Raquel Ukeles’s presentation

Further Reading

““ eJewishPhilanthropy (November 9, 2023)
National Library of Israel Links:

Return to Expanding the Conversation Page

Transcript

Ellie Gettinger

In this episode, we hear from Raquel Ukeles, the head of collections for the National Library of Israel. She spoke about the role a national library plays, and particularly the roles of the National Library of Israel has taken since October 7th, 2023. She was on the panel, “Israeli Culture: Art, Artifacts and Texts for a Shared Future.” She opened her talk by showing this quote from author Jorge Luis Borges.

“The Universe, which others call the library, is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries with vast air shafts between surrounded by very low railings. She went on to say, Men usually infer from this mirror that the library is not infinite. If it were, why this illusory duplication? I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite.”

Raquel Ukeles

I want to start by introducing a dialectical role of the National Library in general. Libraries are spaces of infinite potential, as Borges beautifully described. The library is a symbol or a reflection of the universe. What’s beautiful about a library is that it can contain almost infinite stories. A library is one of the few places where opposing viewpoints sit very comfortably together on the shelf, and I don’t see that trivially.

It means that a library has a capacity to encompass difference, diversity and conflict all at the same time without choosing sides. When you talk about a national library, there seems to be some kind of paradox or, you know, I want to use the word dialectic because I don’t think it’s resolvable. I think it’s there. And that is the role of a national library is first and foremost not to take on the universal, but to take on the literary heritage of the nation, however construed.

I would even as far as to say the National Library of Israel is a microcosm of modern Israel. And even just in this sentence about the National Library Law that was passed, fun fact, unanimously in the Knesset in 2007 that you see the that the library first and foremost plays to national rules. We are a national library in the geographic sense of the state of Israel, which we interpret as broadly as possible.

And we are a national library in the ethnic sense representing the Jewish people worldwide. And there’s even a third role in the National Library Law, which is that we serve as the premier research library in the humanities. And so I hope you can see right away that all the different tensions in Israeli identity, Jewish and democratic, particularist or universal, are situated in the three missions of the National Library.

That space of inclusion, that Borges is envisioning that, yes, we are collecting the national heritage, but we also are all the time looking for broader and broader ways to collect cultural memory. The fall of 2023, we launched a new era at the National Library. I started working at the National Library at the end of 2010, and from the day I arrived we were planning this move.

And it’s not just a physical move, it was an existential move because the library, which historically was predominantly connected to the Hebrew University as a research institution, has transformed into becoming much more than in an institution of memory, but to be a thriving, open, engaging cultural institution. And the architecture signifies all of these values. The huge windows, the openness.

There are no fences around, around the library, and the public is invited in. We were supposed to open on October 17th, 2023, on October 6, everything was ready. We had been planning for literally years a weeklong extravaganza. There were hundreds of people who were flying in, including the director of the National Library of Morocco. And on October 7th, our world fell apart.

On October 8th, we shut down all the parties. We canceled all the happenings. And then we had a question What is the role of a national library in crisis? And after several rounds of discussions, we came to the conclusion that we needed to become available for the public. We opened three weeks later, and since then we’ve been full.

People have come from all over the country. From October 29th onward, when we open, people said that this was the only place in the country where one could breathe. Part of it was the gorgeous architecture, which is the Swiss architects, Herzog & de Meuron. And it’s really I’ve never had a spiritual connection to a building until we moved into the national this National Library, because the library holds the center.

Just look at this picture sitting at one desk. This is a cross-section of Israeli society because the library is one of the few places in Israel where everybody is welcome and everybody finds their place. And that’s, again, goes back to or has this notion of a library being able to encompass universal stories.

Ellie Gettinger

The table pictured in NLI showed three Israelis, one Muslim, one Haredi and one secular sitting and studying.

How did you build that trust in a space which is and in a world not just Israel, but everywhere, we find that people are increasingly divided.

Raquel Ukeles

It didn’t happen on its own. It’s something that we have been working on for a very long time. The library used to be a place that was very highly regarded but very removed from broader society, and the public really wasn’t welcome.

It was a place of scholars. It didn’t have signs of anywhere. So if you didn’t know where you were going, you didn’t belong there. And that was fine for the people who were using it. And it was a kind of Garden of Eden for academics, but it was not a space for the public. Over the last 15 years, we have taken very concrete steps to change the face of a library and to create a welcoming space for different communities in Israel.

One of the ways we worked is that the staff of the library really represents, reflects the populations of Israel, and that’s very important. When you walk in, you see people who look like you. The library speaks in three languages in Hebrew, English and Arabic, both on our websites and also signage in our exhibitions. And that also we’ve developed educational programs for different communities, including Haredi communities.

And that’s been actually even harder than outreach to the Arab community because the library, as a multicultural site with material, not just Jewish material, but also Muslim and Christian material and all different cultures, that was problematic for, you know, do you bring Haredi children into that environment? And so we’ve been moving very, very consciously and carefully in terms of building trust and and the trust happens through language staffing and programing and having dedicated programing for different communities to signal that we are interested in their finding space in the library.

And then the final piece of it is: it’s a gorgeous building. It’s a spacious building that really invites the public. And that was one of the architect’s main principles. They’re huge windows, it’s airy, it’s light of a fabulous cafe. But it’s even I mean, we joke around that success is being defined by we’re cool with teenagers. There are Haredi shidduch updates at the library.

When soldiers are off duty for a few hours, they come to the library. We have East Jerusalem school kids running around all the time and that makes us so happy because that’s what a library can be. A library is a place that connects people to learning texts and other artifacts, and it’s a place of meaning, of cross-cultural understanding and respect. And it’s so needed both in Israel and in any place.

Ellie Gettinger

In her speech, Raquel shared the new roles that the library took on after October 7th.

Raquel Ukeles

After October 7th. We didn’t want to just be available for the public. On October 9th, we got to work. The first work we do is as a library, that our role as the institution for collective memory in Israel and then for the Jewish people worldwide is to start documenting.

And my team and I on October 9th started documenting. And we have built over time, a massive project unprecedented in scale, definitely in Israel. And we haven’t found an example anywhere in the world. All its complicated diversity. What happened to Israeli society on October 7th and since that how that has affected each and every one of you and people around the world.

Our goal is to build an indisputable historical record of the events that took place for our time and future generations. But interesting things happened at the library beyond our traditional library work. We found ourselves crossing a border between documenting and commemorating that the trauma was so deep that we wanted to create space for people to remember in a very active way.

On the Shloshim, 30 days after October 7th, we started to build this memorial wall. And unfortunately, we keep adding and behind the scenes we created an index. All the people in Israel who were killed, soldiers who fell, hostages and didn’t return, and to create what’s called a name authority record to identify each and every person. And we have shared this with institutions and initiatives all throughout Israel. And that is another way of understanding what it means to be the institution for the collective memory of a country.

Another new role of the library that we’re experimenting with is how the library can serve a therapeutic role. You know, our documenting work has a therapeutic function. We find that people, especially people who are in the first circle of what happened on October 7th, when they when they know that their stories and their loved ones’ stories are collected and are preserved and will be preserved for many, many generations, that it allows them to, this eases something in them.

But there are many, many people who have turned their lives upside down. And so we started doing a program we call Ararat: Hosen shel Haruah, Resilience in the Spirit, to help the first responders, the doctors, the therapists, the social workers to allow that library becomes an intellectual, spiritual refuge, a haven for them as well.

And the final role of the library is that we happen to be neighbors with the Knesset. We’re in the national precinct. And as you’ve read, there have been ongoing demonstrations in this neighborhood. We’re watching as that how the demonstrators more and more are incorporating the library into their demonstrations? Just a few days ago, watched as a group of demonstrators who were marching down Rupin Boulevard. They stopped in front of the National Library and they said the library is what we’re fighting for.

The library is the symbol of what is good about this country. And that’s where we’re trying to go, that we are building a society based on culture of learning, of mutual respect. And that’s why we have to keep marching. The National Library is one example of Israel’s cultural institutions that we are working in a very dynamic way to be present in the moment, but also to hold that center and also to build over the long term.

And that’s really what a library can do. And I think there’s something very valuable about analyzing these strategies, as well as strategies of partner institutions for thinking about how to rehabilitate the society.

The work we’re doing to document October 7th feels very, very different from previous attempts, but we have mine’s history extensively because we want to be very thoughtful about how do we how do we craft collective memory. What’s different about this work is we’re in a digital age. For much of Jewish history. It was about gathering the fragments.

It’s about finding a document. There’s the famous Oneg Shabbat archive of Emanuel Ringelblum, blown from the Holocaust. That’s such a treasure trove because he was collecting in real time during the Holocaust and he put three caches in different places, hoping some of them would be found. Two were found. And the reason why it’s so valuable is it was so rare.

You think about stories about the Crusades. We know about them from chronicles, from poems. When it comes to October 7th, we are inundated with material and information. The acts of October 7th were horrifically physical, but the documentation is almost exclusively digital. And there are two aspects of digital that are distinct. The first is the sheer quantity. We’ve collected until now about 50 terabytes of material and we’re we have a lot more to do.

50 terabytes is in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of documents. There’s nothing to compare it to. We’re collecting thousands and thousands of WhatsApp conversations. We have moment to moment unfolding of what happened on October 7th that no one ever had access to that in the past. We have 200,000 videos from Hamas GoPro cameras and from the street cameras, from the different kibbutzim and shuvim.

So that’s on the one hand. On the other hand, digital material, ironically, is much less stable than a piece of paper. And the reason why we got to work on October 9th was because we all watched in real time everybody here, we all got a lesson of why we need to do real time collecting in the digital age, because Hamas uploaded videos on Telegram at the beginning of October seventh.

12 hours later, it was gone. There were websites we collected right after October 7th. Three weeks later were gone, we’re the only ones that happened. And so that’s very distinct. We’re very mindful of what are the ramifications of collecting so furiously, so much so quickly without any perspective. I think a lot about the work that was done after the Kishniev massacres in 1903.

It was a remarkable effort by Bialik and Dubnov and others to go, and they did real time collecting. But they were so horrified by what they found that Bialik used the raw material to write his Be’ir Ha-Haregah, In the City of Murder. That became a seminal moment in the in the beginning of the Zionist movement. And the polemics around that poem brought more people into the Zionist movement than almost anything else, took over from the documentation.

And so for us, that was a kind of warning sign. How do you hold that center? How do you maintain that line between historical record collecting and all the different kinds of agenda driven work that we are surrounded by?

Ellie Gettinger

In my conversation with Raquel, I wanted to get a better idea of how they are collecting and archiving material related to October 7th.

What is the process of both having people get things in and then authenticating pieces? Is I just want to know a little bit more about your process with that? Is there an access point for this collection?

Raquel Ukeles

Of course. And we can talk generally about how we work at the National Library and specifically about how we’re working on this project we call “Bearing Witness,” which is to document October seven, 2023, and its aftermath, both in Israel and around the Jewish world.

When it comes to this project, “Bearing Witness,” we are being challenged to work in very new ways and in particular the need to collect massive amounts of material in real time. The library today collects a lot of digital material, but we’ve never collect WhatsApp messages before.

Ellie Gettinger

Yeah, what does that even look like? Is it screenshots? We don’t want it to be screenshots.

Raquel Ukeles

If it’s a screenshot, you can search it. And today the focus is on how do you create a textual corpus that you can search? Anyone who’s used catch up understands that if the eye can’t get to the material, then the next generation is not going to look for it. I have I have teenage children and they’re my laboratory for how young, younger generations are using textual sources.

And it’s become clear to us in libraries around the world that we need to provide not just the artifact, not just the book or the manuscript or the photo, but the textual information in in that artifact. So when it comes to WhatsApp messages, which really October 7th unfolded on WhatsApp and it’s the most authentic, you asked about, how do you authenticate it’s the most authentic moment to moment description, a real time description of what happened to these people over the course of October 7th and then for some cases into October 8th and ninth.

We are working with a partner called Memorial 7/10. So a group of individuals from primarily from the South who are going person by person, community by community to encourage people to share their WhatsApp’s, which is both the texts and the video and the audio. So it’s photographs, it’s videos, and it’s horrifying. It’s just, it’s heartbreaking every single day.

But it’s so important to collect that raw material, which is the most authentic data about what happened October 7th. That’s thousands of material. We have hundreds of thousands of videos. They are literally going person to person. They tried all sorts of technological methods to automate the process and they didn’t work. We even help them reach out to WhatsApp and we had several rounds with WhatsApp and WhatsApp made certain changes.

Actually, they expanded the amount of material of data that you can download in any one sitting for this project, because as they say, everything we do, we have to make sure works for our several billion clientele. Well, it’s been hard for them to be as responsive as as we need them to be, and so they keep reverting back to manual one by one persons.

But the numbers in terms of where are the terabytes? So it’s a huge amount of material we’ve download from the Web, both news sites for the first few months and also dedicated websites that went up and social media, which is a whole complicated subject because it’s proprietary, you know, it’s not it belongs to companies. And so they’re not so interested in sharing this information and libraries around the world struggle. How can we capture social media? Because as again intuitively, we know, like a lot of culture, a lot of public dialogue takes place there. We have collected a huge amount of a huge number of websites and videos and photographs from October 7th itself, and that was given to us by this remarkable, just inspiring group of people who gathered on October 7th.

And there were about 400 Cyber, AI, Tech people gathered in a hangar outside of Tel Aviv under what was called the civic headquarters, Hahama Ezrahi, you know, for three weeks they worked on culling all the different video and photo material that came from Hamas telegram accounts right at the beginning of October 7th, from street cameras from the different communities, and eventually some material from from the security forces.

The goal at that point was to track down what happened to people. On October 7th, there were 10,000 people who went missing on October 7th, and so they spent three weeks using AI to extract data of facial recognition. And after three weeks they were done. But they wanted this to be preserved. They gave a copy to the State Archive, and State Archive has a very stringent policies. They’ll they’ll lock it up for the next 50 plus years. And then they gave it to the National Library. So it will be to some degree in the public. Public art we are moving very slowly in product is going to be to create a dedicated platform where you can search and browse and also develop your own stories. But it’s also just going to be a website.

It can it can be low tech and it can be high tech. But the idea eventually is to make as as much as this material as possible available. And I say that because we’re very mindful of both copyright issues, but really privacy issues, we’re dealing with really intimate, painful moments in people’s lives where they shared a lot of very private information about themselves and others.

And so we’re working very carefully, and that will take a little more time to figure out what we can make available, when and for whom. For example, we don’t want, you know, Hamas horror films showing up on Google when your ten year old is, you know, accidentally searches for Kibbutz Be-eri. Right. And so there’s a lot of issues to take into account.

In fact, one of the ways the library has been working is not just to do direct collecting and working in partnership with both grassroots initiatives and institutions, but we have been working at the meta level. We’ve convened a consortium of the major institutions to think through these ethical issues. So we’re actually writing an ethical code right now of how do you do this work.

Because it’s clear to us that this is unprecedented today, but it’s going to become a precedent for, unfortunately for whatever the next catastrophe, trauma, crisis, war looks like.

Ellie Gettinger

Returning to her speech, Dr. Douglas elaborated on the October 7th project and reflected more broadly on the role of libraries in civil society.

Raquel Ukeles

We’re building an encyclopedic collection of October 7th, and we really want to collect the entire spectrum, including we’ve done dedicated work to collect Palestinian discourse, the experience of Arab Palestinian citizens of the country, and to the best of our ability to to get experiences of people in Gaza, which is definitely an ongoing challenge.

There’s another dimension to this, and that is for us in being a national library. And again, that dialectic is all all the time in front of us. It’s not just about the our choice when it comes to certain communities in Israel that don’t feel part of the national story then. But one of the reasons why we didn’t have archives of Arab cultural figures. It wasn’t just because the National Library wasn’t seeking them out, but also because Arab cultural figures didn’t see the National Library as a trusted repository. That’s this process in we actually built. When I got to the library and I understood the situation we were in, it became clear that it was going to take a decade. An archive of Arab cultural figure and in fact took a decade.

And that was how do you build trust with different communities? And we’ve done similar parallel work with the Arab community, with the Ethiopian community, with Russian community, with Haredi communities. And that’s to me, what it means to be a national library today. How do we in fact, put our arms around the entire kaleidoscope of Israeli culture and society?

Also true for Jewish communities around the world, we do parallel work. We want the mainstream. We want to get the key dominant figures, however defined. But we also want to make sure to encompass and to document Israeli society and culture, Jewish society and culture and of course, Islam and Middle East and humanity as a whole. I would say that there’s a distinction between a library and museum, especially in terms of this, you know, capturing it, documenting the full spectrum that is of a value and a principle with us and the challenge of how do you do that in a way that’s, dare I say, authentic demands that the staff of the library had to change.

And so over the course of the last 15 years, when I started, there was one Arab staff person at the National Library, and now there are over 40. And and that’s the way. So it’s not me trying to learn the language of an other, even though I’ve been studying Arabic for over 30 years. And it was a goal of the heads of the library that the staff of the National Library would reflect the population of the country.

And that has shaped the way we think about a lot. If you were to walk into the the new library with me before we walk through that door, I would turn around in and introduce our neighbors on the other side of the Israel Museum, and that is the Knesset. And I say that I’d like to believe that the people in the Knesset would look at us and it helps remind them what they’re working for.

Libraries and museums are barometers of democracy. When the democracy is healthy, institutions thrive. When democracies are under threat. And we see it all over the States today. Libraries and museums become these battlegrounds. A few years ago, the Minister of Education tried to introduce a an amendment to the budget law in order to take over the library. And very explicitly, he planned to fire the board and install his own.

This is in Israel, and I know that there are echoes and in American there was such an extraordinary groundswell of support throughout Israel that it was exhilarating. Thousands of academics, thousands of writers, all but one of the Nobel Prize winners, almost all of the Israel Prize winners. You’re wondering who was. And there were even people who said, I don’t know what the National Library of Israel is, but I love it.

And it goes back to the symbolic role of our institutions, the broad understanding of of the function that they play in a democracy. I don’t believe in neutrality. I don’t think that it exists and it certainly doesn’t exist in Israel and it certainly doesn’t exist in a national library anywhere. And so the work is not to maintain neutrality.

The work is to constantly aspire to do better and constantly aspire to build richer and more expansive and more authentic ways to document and celebrate our cultures and our societies.

Ellie Gettinger

I enjoyed speaking with Raquel Ukeles. Raquel Ukeles provided insight into the ways in which libraries are bastions of collective memory and the challenge of gathering these pieces in a digital age.

Consider how you would document historical events. How we transmit our Facebook posts and WhatsApp conversations to future historians. I was fascinated by the National Library of Israel’s proactive approach in the face of this incredible trauma and overwhelming magnitude of possible collections.