By Andrew Silow-Carroll
(JTA) — 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.
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: 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.” 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.”
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.
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.
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.”