Close to 30 Jews met recently at a private home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, sitting on borrowed folding chairs to hear Karin Loevy, an Israeli legal scholar at New York University. She spoke about President Trump’s “absurd and immoral” idea of emptying Gaza of its beleaguered residents and turning it into what he called the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Loevy’s talk was a mostly in-the-weeds survey of how international law applies in Gaza and the West Bank, and it was her personal story that seemed to most animate the audience. She recalled attending a secular public school in Jerusalem where “racist slurs” — including “death to the Arabs” — were heard regularly. In her teen years she rebelled against her upbringing and became active in a joint Israeli-Arab youth movement. When she joined the IDF, she was part of a group that declared they wouldn’t serve in the occupied territories.
She became a lawyer, Loevy explained, “out of my academic and intellectual interest in law as a language of change in Israeli society.”
It was the kind of talk you could hear in any of a number of progressive Jewish settings, where questioning Israeli policy and society is uncontroversial and even encouraged. But Loevy’s audience were members of a loose group of Modern Orthodox and self-described “observant” Jews who have been gathering to listen to speakers and perspectives they say they seldom encounter in their synagogues and around their Shabbat tables.
Since June, a group of American and Israeli-born Jews have been meeting every few weeks in New York for a salon-style series of talks that include the perspectives of Palestinians, and of Jews sympathetic to their cause. Frustrated that the trauma of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war has stifled disagreement within their traditional circles, they have heard from scholars and activists who challenge their neighbors’ — and sometimes their own— views on the conflict. The speakers have included Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University professor and author of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”; Hassan Jabarin, the founder of Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel; and Amira Hass, who covers Gaza and the West Bank, where she lives, for the Israeli daily Haaretz.
“The conversations have become so right-wing on the Modern Orthodox side. You haven’t been hearing a counter voice from within the religious community,” said Esther Sperber, an architect and one of the organizers of the salons, in an interview. “The trauma of the Oct. 7 attacks made us instinctually give as much support as we can to family and friends in Israel. What was lacking is a deeper understanding of the conflict and the occupation, which is not productive if you are the kind of person who wants to see a more peaceful existence for Israel.”
The success of the parlor meetings — between 30 and 70 people have shown up for the events, and there are over 800 people on the mailing list — has encouraged Sperber and her fellow organizers to think bigger: On Sunday, March 30, they’ll hold the inaugural Smol Emuni US Conference at Manhattan’s B’nai Jeshurun synagogue. The day of panel discussions was moved from its original location, Baruch College, after sign-ups exceeded the college’s 200-person capacity.
Sperber calls Smol Emuni (the “faithful left” in Hebrew) “a movement, not another nonprofit.” Baruch College co-sponsored the conference, small donors picked up the airfare for speakers, and attendees are being charged $36 for the talks and a kosher lunch.
The name Smol Emuni aligns the group with the Israeli organization of the same name, a group of hundreds of left-leaning Orthodox and religious Jews that held its own inaugural conference in early 2023 and gained strength with the antigovernment protests that swept the country before the Oct. 7 attacks. Mikhael Manekin, a religious Zionist and organizer of the Israeli group, will speak at the Smol Emuni US conference.
Sperber, one of the leaders of the Hostages’ Family Forum in New York, was born in Jerusalem and raised there in what she called an “open-minded Modern Orthodox family.” (Her father is Daniel Sperber, a British-born professor of Talmud at Bar-Ilan University; her mother, Hannah, is originally from Highland Park, Illinois.) She moved to the States in 1997 and attends Darkhei Noam, an Upper West Side “partnership” minyan in which women lead certain parts of the prayer service.
The impulse behind Smol Emuni, she said, is not just political but religious. While few in the group question Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas, they are seeking a religious community response to what the conference website calls “the staggering Palestinian civilian death toll in Gaza and the ongoing occupation of 5 million people.”
“We need the ability to speak about these things with an ethical, moral voice that comes from within our Jewish tradition,” she said. “How do we respond when innocent people are killed, or what does it mean to stop humanitarian aid to Gaza as part of a war effort? I would have really wanted our community rabbis and teachers to speak in a much clearer voice about our values as Jews and a faithful people.”
Those who have attended the parlor meetings also say that their communities’ rabbis and teachers rarely question the Israeli military or political leadership, at least publicly.
“I don’t presume to be an expert on military strategy,” said Meylekh Viswanath, 70, a finance professor at Pace University who belongs to a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey and attended the Loevy talk. “But whatever it is, I was expecting that there would be a little bit more feeling among religious Jews for what people are going through over there and the number of people that are being killed.”
Modern Orthodox Jews, unlike many Hasidic and haredi Orthodox communities, are distinguished not only by their accommodations to the secular world but by their often enthusiastic Zionism. In Israel, the “national religious” camp is identified with Modern Orthodoxy, and provides much of the ideological underpinning for the settler movement.
Elana Stein Hain, the rosh beit midrash and a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, says the Modern Orthodox community’s reluctance to question Israel’s military or government is based in religion, politics and — for the many Orthodox Jews who have children and siblings living in Israel and serving in the military — family.
“We see it as a religious duty to support Israel, and even to live there,” she wrote in an email, when asked to characterize the community’s discourse. “We don’t necessarily focus overtly on questions that are considered ‘political’ or on developing a stance of critique.”
Moreover, she wrote, “the more critical the outside world is of Israel, the more Orthodox communities want to be protective of Israel and its decisions as part of this basic commitment.”
With the far left not only decrying the war but accusing Israel of genocide and often denying its legitimacy, many religious communities have circled the wagons. Describing this shift in a recent essay, David Hillel Rapp, the principal of Bnei Akiva Schools of Toronto, wrote that for many of his Modern Orthodox colleagues in Jewish education, “it becomes much harder to see a value in engaging or grappling with the ‘other side’ when even the secular version of the other side’s narrative seems ideologically invested in your side’s destruction.” (Nevertheless, he writes, “at some point, Israelis and Palestinians will have to hear each other’s stories, however fanciful and distant that currently seems.”)
Isaac Shulman, who attended Smol Emuni salons at the invitation of a friend, has seen this defensiveness in his Modern Orthodox community in Teaneck. “It doesn’t feel like there is much of a willingness to actually engage with these conversations in a serious way, to hear what the other side is saying, rather than to caricaturize the other side,” he said in an interview.
Shulman, 31, attended day school and Yeshiva University; he was ordained at its seminary. A process that began when he lived and studied at a nationalist West Bank settlement, and that accelerated over the course of the Israel-Hamas war, “led me to a lot of disillusionment with Israel, with the Modern Orthodox community, and more broadly, with Zionism,” he said.
“I think there’s a lot of internalization of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians, whether that takes the form of ‘We are more deserving of this land’ to ‘Palestinians are all violent and terrorists’ to softer forms like, ‘It’s not good that they’re dying, but like, what else are we going to do to defend ourselves?’”
By contrast, the people at the Smol Emuni gatherings “have been willing to come together and explore some of their basic assumptions, or at least think about them and hear other perspectives,” Shulman said. “Just the very fact that this movement exists gives me some hope about the future of what a traditional Judaism could look like.”
Sperber says the parlor meetings have drawn a diverse audience, from people who are “not sure what they think” to those who feel strongly that the “occupation is terrible” and that Israel may be guilty of war crimes. Further to the left, she said, and often a generation younger than the crowd that shows up most consistently, are those who are questioning their attachment to Zionism or Orthodoxy, and sometimes both. These include members of the “Halachic Left,” a group formed in 2024 to “mobilize liberal Zionists, non Zionists, and anti-Zionists” in the observant community. (Sperber said the Halachic Left’s focus on non-Zionist and anti-Zionist identity “did not speak to me.”)
Attendees are willing to listen to the speakers, but not always agree.
The talk by Hass, whose empathetic coverage of the Palestinian story has earned her both awards and, especially from the right, outrage, was particularly challenging for many of the 70 people who came to hear her. “It’s hard for people to make that switch and hear about the pain and horror of what people in Gaza are going through, especially civilians,” said Sperber.
Among those attending the Hass talk was Karen Abrams Gerber, 56, an organizational consultant and leadership coach from Riverdale, New York.
Abrams Gerber describes herself as an “observant Jew”; she belongs to the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale, known as CSAIR, and attends Minyan Kivinu, a traditional egalitarian service that meets there. She also occasionally attends the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, a popular Modern Orthodox synagogue in the neighborhood. Abrams Gerber lived in Israel in her 20s, and holds dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship.
“Within religious Jewish contexts, there can be little to no acknowledgment of Palestinians rights or their suffering,” she said in an interview. “In contrast, in more progressive spaces, there can be limited recognition of the threat to Jewish safety and the deep connection that Jewish tradition has to the land of Israel.”
She was struck by Hass’s perspective as a reporter who has lived in Gaza and Ramallah and who is also the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
“I wanted to be in community and conversation with others who are grappling with real implications of the past and current realities for Palestinians and also care deeply about the Jewish people and the need for having a safe haven.” said Abrams Gerber, who plans on attending the Smol Emuni conference. “It seems as though in our need to protect Jewish safety, much of the religious discourse lacks the necessary nuance that Hass brings.”
Some of the pushback to Sunday’s conference has questioned the right of Diaspora Jews to criticize the actions of the democratically elected Israeli government. “HOW Israel should conduct the war, and the idea that we should organize conferences here in New York to try to influence that, is not something I can ever support,” wrote Shaul Robinson, rabbi of Manhattan’s Lincoln Square Synagogue, in a Facebook post.
Sperber responded, writing, “I want to clarify that while I am concerned about the renewed fighting, the conference is not only about the current war. It is about our moral views, as Orthodox and observant Jews which extend to how we see the occupation, this war, the hostages and a version of Judaism that does believe in the infinite value of every human life.”
Attendees at Smol Emuni events have also heard the criticism that at a time of rising antisemitism and anti-Israel vitriol, when Jewish hostages are still being held and Jewish soldiers are dying in Gaza, empathy for the other side is misplaced and demoralizing. Sperber recalls one attendee saying, “My family is at the front lines and at this time I don’t have the mental energy or patience to hear criticism of my family at war.”
Sperber also rejects objections that the group doesn’t invite speakers from the right.
“I’m not interested in creating a debate between world views — that’s not my project,” said Sperber. “I want to create a community that can speak courageously about our obligations towards other people.”
As for the idea that she and her fellow organizers are giving succor to Israel’s enemies, Sperber counters that Smol Emuni “doesn’t come from a place of hating Israel or hating Zionism but a place of love and concern, and a place — as Israelis and Americans and Jews — that our own standards have to guide our actions. And just because someone else is yelling at us doesn’t mean we are exempt from our own self-reflection.”
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
