California voters did what was widely expected and elected Rep. Adam Schiff, a Jewish Democrat, in the senate race to replace the late Dianne Feinstein, another Jewish Democrat, who died while in office last year after serving in the role for more than 30 years. 

Schiff, who currently represents parts of greater Los Angeles in the U.S. House of Representatives, defeated Steve Garvey, a former star baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who had hoped to beat the odds and become the first Republican to be elected to a statewide office in California in 18 years. 

Schiff’s victory elevates a lawmaker who largely fits the typical mold of a Jewish Democrat with his pro-Israel politics and an endorsement from the political action committee affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Considered a hawk on national security issues, he made his name the same way Feinstein did — serving on a congressional intelligence committee.

The person appointed to serve out Feinstein’s term, Sen. Laphonza Butler, did not run herself. 

Schiff became one of the most prominent politicians in the country by confronting Donald Trump during the former president’s impeachments, over which Schiff helped preside, and by formally investigating the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Trump in turn has treated Schiff as a major nemesis, including by coining for him a nickname which strikes many as antisemitic: “Shifty Schiff.” Trump used the moniker as recently as Monday while vilifying him at a rally in Pittsburgh for his own presidential campaign.

“Adam Shifty Schiff is one of the truly unattractive people,” Trump said. “I call him, ‘watermelon head.’ He’s got the largest head and the smallest neck. He’s not a stupid person but he’s an evil kind of person. He’s likely going to be a senator, unfortunately. This scum is going to be a senator.”

Previously, Trump has called Schiff an “enemy from within” and threatened to jail him once in power. He has made similar threats against other members of the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riots.

With Schiff’s victory, California will be represented by two men in the Senate, the other being Alex Padilla, after many years in which the state counted at least one woman senator.

Because Schiff was so heavily favored to win, the Los Angeles Times described the race as “sleepy, bordering on dull.” Schiff spent considerable time stumping for the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris and raised significant funds for Democrats in various battleground races. 

Garvey, who ran a largely low-key campaign, traveled to Israel over the summer to signal his stance on an issue that has assumed increased prominence as a result of the ongoing war initiated on Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel.

There were black and white cookies and herring at an election results watch party in the Upper West Side synagogue social hall. What there wasn’t: pretty much anyone watching.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Lauren Grabelle Herrmann, the rabbi at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a Reconstructionist synagogue in New York’s Upper West Side, felt she was in a unique position to provide comfort to her congregants during a particularly fraught political moment.

In addition to emailing out blessings and prayers for voting in this election, leading her community in postcard campaigns to get delisted voters back on the voter rolls, and delivering sermons addressing the polarized American electorate, Grabelle Hermann thought a community election watch party might be a salve for her congregation on a tense night.

But by 7:30 p.m, an hour after the event began and an hour before it was slated to end, only two guests had arrived: one congregant and a reporter from Italy who had arrived in New York City to run Sunday’s marathon and was looking for a place to immerse in the American tradition of watching polls close well before their results would be clear.

Under a historic socialist mural titled “Old and New Elements in Modern Palestine,” which depicts Jewish kibbutzniks working the land and Orthodox men and women praying, was a long table featuring a spread of classic New York Jewish foods, like black and white cookies, lox, and herring — all mostly untouched.

In a city packed with options, synagogues can struggle to turn out a crowd in the best of circumstances. For the Upper West Side’s left-leaning Jews, Tuesday night was not the best of circumstances. While polls showed a tossup nationally between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, the majority of states set to report during the event itself were virtually assured of going Republican.

As a religious organization, SAJ and its leadership doesn’t endorse candidates, but Grabelle Herrmann, who voted early last week, said the synagogue takes action in a nonpartisan way. For example, the congregation has a reproductive justice committee and a legal clinic for immigrants seeking asylum — meaning that it’s active on some of the issues dividing the electorate.

“We’re involved in a lot of issues, including the issue of democracy itself,” Grabelle Herrmann said. “We have 36 times in the Torah where we say, ‘to love the stranger,’ ‘to take care of the stranger.’ So to be involved in social justice issues, to me, is a manifestation, expression of Judaism.”

Grabelle Herrmann said she wasn’t deterred by holding an event that went effectively unattended. She said she would spend the night watching what unfolds “and thinking about my community, how people in my community are impacted and affected, and thinking about what we need to do to support our congregants going forward.”

Exactly when the race is over isn’t yet known. In 2020, news organizations didn’t officially call the election between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden until Saturday morning, five days after the election and in the middle of Shabbat morning services for synagogues in New York City. Anticipating the uncertainty, another Upper West Side synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun, located just blocks from SAJ, is hosting a prayer service “for the Neshamah [soul] of our Nation” on Wednesday evening.

Grabelle Herrmann said she would try again to bring her community together after the election is called, when it is time to process the results.

“The tone of that event may vary depending on what happens and where people are sitting with everything,” she said. “But when people are anxious and worried, they need each other and they need community to get through.”

Josh Stein, North Carolina’s Democratic attorney general, is projected to become the state’s first Jewish governor after defeating Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate who once called himself a “Black NAZI.”

The race was closely watched both because of Robinson’s inflammatory comments denigrating Jews, LGBTQ people and others, and because North Carolina is one of seven swing states that could determine the campaign for president.

Stein, 58, is a centrist Democrat who is the son of a prominent civil rights lawyer. He previously worked as a high school teacher and state senator, as well as in the state Justice Department.

“Tonight the people of North Carolina resoundingly embraced a vision that’s optimistic, forward-looking and welcoming, a vision that’s about creating opportunity for every North Carolinian,” Stein said in his victory speech on Tuesday. “We chose hope over hate, competence over chaos, decency over division.”

The governor-elect is active in Temple Beth Or in Raleigh, a Reform synagogue, and has invoked his Judaism publicly. He once coached a kids’ JCC soccer team.

“Our Jewish faith obliges us to do our part to make the world a better place, better than we found it,” he tweeted to mark Rosh Hashanah in 2022. “This principle guides me as your attorney general.”

Stein’s margin of 54% to 42% over Robinson at 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time was much wider than the presidential vote in this battleground state, where Vice President Kamala Harris was neck and neck with former President Donald Trump. Democrats hoped that Stein’s success would buoy Harris to victory there, after Joe Biden lost the state to Trump by a narrow margin in 2020.

Roy Cooper, the state’s term-limited Democratic governor, tapped Stein to succeed him. Robinson was boosted by Trump’s endorsement.

For the state’s Jewish Democrats, the joy of seeing Stein win may be overshadowed only by the relief of seeing Robinson lose. A newcomer to politics before he won the lieutenant governor’s race in 2020, Robinson has a history of offensive posts, including on adult websites, that emerged in a litany of revelations over the last year.

In one post, he wrote that “Black Panther,” the blockbuster Marvel movie, was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist” and that it was “only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets.”

And besides calling himself a “Nazi,” Robinson has written dismissively about Nazis, posting on Facebook in 2017, “I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were. NEWS FLASH PEOPLE, THE NAZIS (National Socialist) ARE GONE! We did away with them.”

Robinson worked to tone down his image once he entered political office, and says he apologized to local Jewish leaders, though he did not do so publicly. At one point, the Republican Jewish Coalition called his comments “clearly antisemitic.”

Robinson conceded on Tuesday.

“I can tell you this: I’m not going to stop here, folks. We don’t stop here,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work still to do for the people of North Carolina.”

For an energetic subset of supporters, the promise of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement centers on increasing the influence of Christianity in American life and returning the country to what they see as its founding Christian ideals. 

Scholars say that through their devotion to Trump, these Christian nationalists have claimed a prominent, mainstream place in Republican politics —  a phenomenon that has alarmed Jews and other religious minorities. 

And regardless of the result of the presidential election, they aren’t going away, said Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida. 

“One of the reasons they’ve been successful is they focus on the long-term. To give just a couple of examples: It took them 49 years to overturn Roe v. Wade and they’ve been working on dismantling public education for the same length of time. We can see the impact of that effort all over the country,” she said. 

Christian nationalists left their fingerprints all over Project 2025, the controversial proposed 900-page blueprint for a second Trump administration published by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups. They also run for office at every level of government, turn out in large numbers for campaign events, and are proving to be a powerful voting bloc in many places. A little more than half of Republicans are “adherents or sympathizers” of Christian nationalism, according to a survey of 22,000 Americans in all 50 states that was carried out last year by the Public Religion Research Institute. 

Opposition to the separation of church and state, abortion and LGBTQ rights are among the principles that unify the Christian nationalist movement, but it has no central leadership or theology.

As the movement grows more confident about the prospect of a Christianized America, leaders representing different streams have made some specific proposals. Some want to shutter the Department of Education, seeing it as an obstacle to religious schooling, while others target the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because they see vaccines as a danger. To crack down on abortion, some suggest using the death penalty as a deterrent. At least one pastor suggested repealing the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. 

In contrast to these concrete plans, Christian nationalists have spoken more vaguely about what would happen to Jews and other religious minorities if they were given the chance to enact their vision for the United States, according to interviews with scholars who track the movement. 

“I’m scratching my head to identify any specific policies or even comments that have been proposed from these groups that speak to the status of Jews in a realigned Christian nationalist America,” Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, said in an interview.

Taylor said the lack of specificity is not an oversight. 

“They know that it won’t be popular to describe such an end state as being exclusive and dominated by Christians, so they tend to pitch it in more vague terms about Christianity triumphing or Jesus being glorified and lord over the United States, leaving the rest implied at best,” he said. 

The most specific articulation found by Chelsea Ebin, a Drew University professor who studies the Christian right, is one she recently extracted from an influential pastor in an interview. She documented the exchange in a draft of a forthcoming academic paper, which she shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

Ebin asked Ken Peters, the pastor of Patriot Church ministry, for his position on repealing the 14th Amendment, which was enacted to guarantee citizenship and equal protection under the law to formerly enslaved Americans following the Civil War, and was at the heart of the federal abortion protections guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision overturned in 2022. Peters said that ending slavery was the right thing to do but that the amendment had otherwise moved the country away from God. He opposes birthright citizenship and protections for immigrants and LGBTQ people. 

Ebin asked him how felt about ending protection from religious discrimination under the 14th Amendment. “I’m cool with that,” Peters said. 

For less forthcoming Christian nationalists, parsing their public statements requires an understanding of how they differ in their theological frameworks. The spectrum of possibilities can result in a wide variety of attitudes toward Jews: Some are traditional antisemites, but many proclaim a love for Jews while actively trying to convert them as part of an eschatological prophecy that also undergirds their support for Israel. 

Calvinist theology and the Baptist church are the origin point for a strand of Christian nationalism known as reconstructionism. This movement sounds obscure — and it is, said Ingersoll, a scholar of reconstructionism. But the admittedly small number of reconstructionists has been extraordinarily impactful, she said. 

“They’ve had a lot of influence shaping our broad evangelicalism because of the fact that they got Christian schools — and then Christian home schools — going, and they shaped what those schools look like,” Ingersoll told JTA. 

Reconstructionists envision a society based on biblical law and would support whatever form of government is able to enact it. “If a monarch does that, fine. If a democracy or republic does it, that’s fine, too. Or a dictator — they don’t care about the structure,” Ingersoll said. 

Regardless of the structure, Jews and other religious minorities must be marginalized in this vision of America. 

“These folks say that pluralism is heresy, and they argue that in a biblical society, people who weren’t Christians could still be there, but they would clearly be second-class citizens,” Ingersoll said. 

One of the most prominent pastors in this camp is Joel Webbon, the head of Right Response Ministries and the senior pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Austin, Texas. He promotes hatred as virtuous when aimed at the enemies of God, including other religions. 

“I hate Judaism, but I love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity,” he said in a social media post on X on Saturday. 

Webbon’s directness and his explicit attack on Judaism are characteristic of his type of reconstructionist Christian nationalism. There’s another major strand of the movement where such talk is not typical. Scholars refer to it as“charismatic,” meaning that adherents believe in the power of spiritual gifts such as divine healing, miracles, and speaking in tongues. 

With their focus on the End Times, these nondenominational Christians are usually not very specific about what the country would be like if they held sway. They tend to talk about politics through biblical analogies, such as the prophecy that Trump will defeat Kamala Harris like the warrior king Jehu vanquished wicked Jezebel in the book of II Kings, and then proceeded to reverse the moral decay in the Kingdom of Israel. 

Charismatics are Taylor’s primary subject of scholarship and he says that it’s clear enough they too would prioritize Christianity in the public square and in policy-making, especially around questions of abortion and gender and sexuality. As for their treatment of minorities, he said, it’s a little complicated. 

“I would separate out the question of what happens to Jews from what would happen to other religious minorities,” Taylor said. “The way that these folks talk about Muslims is different from the way they talk about Jews. The way they talk about Hindus is different from the way they talk about Jews.”

They are sentimental about Christianity’s origins in Judaism; the fact that Jesus and his apostles were Jews is front of mind for them. There’s even a fondness for Jewish ritual, which is why rallies organized by charismatic groups such as the New Apostolic Reformation tend to feature the blowing of shofars and Christian men wrapped in Jewish prayer shawls. In and near this camp are many people who identify as Messianic Jews, meaning they believe that practicing Judaism and worshiping Jesus are compatible, a belief rejected by all major Jewish denominations. 

Jews by the ordinary definition of the term, however, would likely be relegated to a protected second-class citizenship akin to the dhimmi status of Jews under Islamic law, Taylor said. 

“There’s a sense of recognition that they are, that Jews are, contiguous with Christian belonging in some way, but that definitely would not give them an equal voice in terms of policy-making or setting the political agenda or having civil rights,” he said. 

Muslims, meanwhile, would be treated far worse.

“The charismatic world views Islam as a demonic religion,” he said, referring to the fringe belief that the Muslim faith was inspired by evil demons. “And so I think they would seek to curb, if not eradicate, some Islamic prayer and practices, at least in the public square, if not also destroying it in private.”

There’s a third major category: Christian nationalists who are Catholic. Their handiwork can be found in the work of Project 2025, according to Ingersoll. 

“The basic tenor of it and the underlying assumptions, especially the pro-family politics, are drawn from Catholic natural law theology,” she said. Project 2025 is considered perhaps the most mainstream articulation of Christian nationalism. It’s controversial enough that Trump distanced himself even while dozens of his former staffers were involved in drafting its proposals.

There’s less attention paid to Jews and Israel by the Catholics than by the other two groups, which are Protestant, because their theological framework is different and they have different beliefs about the end of the world.  

Historically, divisions among the different strands of Christian nationalism have been bitter, but they have made common cause in their support for Trump. Taylor predicted the fissures would reemerge if Trump takes office and the different visions compete for influence. 

“They are drawn to Trump for different reasons, but they are all unified in supporting him, which has given at least a veneer of unity to the movement,” Taylor said. 

But even if Christian nationalists don’t ultimately agree on exactly what a Christian America would look like, they are working to pull the country in the same direction — one that scholars agree isn’t very hospitable for Jews. 

In one vision for the country that has allowed Jews to thrive, what it means to be fully American is ever-expanding. But pluralism isn’t this country’s only political tradition.  

“There’s a growing movement that thinks what being American means should be held tightly,” Ingersoll said. “Held tightly by Christians.”

“Kamala Harris supports endless wars in the Middle East,” reads a mailer sent to households in Michigan the day before Election Day, ostensibly imploring voters to support Green Party candidate Jill Stein instead.

“I am reaching out to make sure that you know Kamala will always stand with Israel,” reads an apparent pro-Harris text sent to several pro-Palestinian voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania around the same time.

While one message appeared to be anti-Harris and the other to support her, the mailer and the text messages had a secret in common. They were not backed by the Stein or Harris campaigns, but by Republican-aligned PACs trying to dampen enthusiasm for Harris in key swing states. 

And they demonstrated how, even down to the wire, conservative campaigners have sought to exploit deep Democratic divisions about the Israel-Hamas war — and the Harris campaign’s own vulnerabilities on the issue — in order to tip the scales to Donald Trump.

The latest messaging followed similar efforts mounted by an Elon Musk-affiliated PAC in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In heavily Arab-American areas of Michigan, where disfavor with Biden’s handling with the war is at its highest, purportedly pro-Israel billboards have for weeks trumpeted Harris’s commitment to Israel and featured her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; online ads with the same message have also targeted these constituencies. Meanwhile, the same PAC has also funded mailers sent to Jewish households in Pennsylvania declaring that Harris not pro-Israel enough.

The latest efforts came from different sources. The “Stein” mailers — which include a photo of Gaza devastation, a photo of Harris shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a declaration that “Jill Stein is the clear choice for peace” — are funded by Badger Values PAC, a Houston-based group that has reported more than $1.5 million in pro-Stein and pro-Trump ad spending. Stein herself has been vocal about declaring the Gaza war a “genocide” and has peeled support from Michigan’s Arab-American voting bloc.

The text messages, meanwhile, are secretly backed by Wonder Cave, a North Carolina-based vendor that collaborates with Republican consultants, tech publication The Verge reported. Unlike the Stein mailers, which list their funding source, the texts appear to have been sent anonymously. 

According to screenshots, the texts pose as pro-Israel Harris supporters with names like “Avi,” sending news articles and other items trumpeting her Israel ties to reluctant Harris voters who ask not to see them.  

“Regardless of what you think, it’s clear what Kamala Harris wants — that’s a strong Israel,” one text reads. The sender included links to stories in the Times of Israel and NBC News highlighting her Israel ties.

One voter taken in by the ads was University of Pittsburgh professor and pro-Palestinian activist Kumars Salehi, who reposted screenshots of the texts.

Salehi, who described himself to The Verge as a “pragmatic” Harris voter, initially thought the texts were genuinely sent by the Harris camp.  “Kamala people have been texting me all weekend to make sure I know how much she hates Palestinians,” he wrote on X. “Behold, the Democrats’ final push to win Pennsylvania.”

He later acknowledged that he had been tricked, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, they got me. I apologize for contributing to election misinformation.”

Another pro-Palestinian voter in Michigan told The Verge he had been receiving similar texts “at least once a day” since Oct. 24. Michigan is also the home of the Uncommitted protest movement, founded during the primaries to pressure Biden on Israel. While the group officially ended the election season with a plea not to elect Trump but without endorsing Harris, some people associated with the movement have publicly endorsed her in the waning days of the close race.

While both candidates have pledged to end the war in Gaza if elected, Harris has frequently been caught between her party’s pro-Israel stalwarts and the growing movement on the left to take stronger action against Israel. Actual Harris events and literature aimed at Jewish voters in the same swing states have also emphasized that she is committed to Israel, as have materials sent by liberal pro-Israel groups like Zioness Action Fund.

Two Jews who publicly resigned from posts in the Biden administration over its handling of the Gaza war now say they will be voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a joint op-ed published Monday, on the eve of Election Day, Lily Greenberg Call, 26, and Harrison Mann, 35, expressed anger that the Harris campaign did not publicly call for an arms embargo on Israel. Yet Call and Mann added that — unlike some of their fellow pro-Palestinian activists who may not vote for either major party — they were willing to pull the lever for Harris because they saw it as the best chance to curb violence in the Middle East. 

In part, that’s because they believe members of her party would try to pressure her on the issue, while they believe Trump would embolden Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take more far-reaching steps, including annexing the West Bank. 

“Harris heads a coalition with a growing number of legislators demanding an end to unconditional support for Israel, including several senators co-sponsoring legislation to block weapons transfers to Israel,” Call and Mann wrote in the left-wing magazine In These Times. “Under a Harris administration, we believe there will be a wider gap in the armor that protects Israeli impunity.”

Mann is a former Middle East intelligence officer, and Call is a former Department of the Interior staffer who also campaigned for Harris in her 2020 run for president. Both have been vocal pro-Palestinian activists since they resigned, separately, in order to protest Biden’s lack of pressure on Israel. Both have also cited their Jewish heritage to explain their opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The two former staffers are part of a network of activists across the country that has pushed for Biden and Harris to scale back their support for Israel. With the op-ed, they also became some of the latest pro-Palestinian activists to encourage their allies to vote for Harris despite those disagreements, as the high-stakes race appears to be virtually tied. 

Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American Georgia state lawmaker, announced that she would be voting for Harris — and would “swap” her vote with someone in a safe blue state, who would then vote for a third party. 

Activists associated with the pro-Palestinian Uncommitted movement had pushed the Harris campaign to invite Romman to speak onstage at the Democratic National Convention, but were rebuffed. The Uncommitted movement, which had also sought to pressure Biden on Israel, did not endorse Harris but has urged its followers not to vote for Trump.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish and one of the most vocal critics of the Israeli government in Congress, also released a video last week calling on voters who oppose Harris’ Israel policy to support her anyway, making a similar argument as Call and Mann. “We will have, in my view, a much better chance of changing U.S. policy with Kamala than with Trump, who is extremely close to Netanyahu and sees him as a like-minded, right-wing extremist ally,” he said.

In their piece, Call and Mann made clear that their endorsement did not temper their criticism of Israel. They called Israel’s military campaign ”openly genocidal” and wrote that they have unsuccessfully tried to pressure Harris’ campaign to address the issue in a way that would satisfy pro-Palestinian voters. They claimed that, even if she wins, Harris may never put pressure on Israel “before the last Gazan is slaughtered, starved or interned (and before the last hostage dies).”

They also acknowledged that they and other pro-Palestinian activists had failed to budge Biden and Harris from their support of Israel.

“We hoped this election would become a referendum on Gaza,” they wrote. “For us, that hope was premised on the assumption that President Joe Biden, or at least Harris, would reconsider their position on Israel if it looked like it would cost the election, either by alienating voters or instigating a larger war. We were wrong.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, saying he no longer trusted him, a drastic step while Israel is fighting on multiple fronts, faces domestic political turmoil and is contending with regional and global uncertainty.

The decision — the second time in as many years that Netanyahu has announced Gallant’s termination — comes as Iran is threatening to strike Israel in response to a previous round of bombing. It also comes amid a growing investigation into leaks of classified material from a Netanyahu aide, in which the prime minister’s office has denied participating in any leak and suggested that the probe was “arbitrary.”

Gallant’s firing was announced on Election Day in the United States, whose result will determine the next four years of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Gallant was one of the most trusted Israeli government officials in Washington.

In a statement Netanyahu delivered as a video message in Hebrew, he said he could no longer work with Gallant due to irreconcilable differences over the war.

“In the midst of war, more than ever, complete trust is required between the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, even though such trust was present during the first months of the military campaign, and we had a very productive cooperation, during the past several months this trust between myself and the Defense Minister has begun to crack. Defense Minister Gallant and I had substantial disagreements on the management of the military campaign, disagreements which were accompanied by public statements and actions that contravened the decisions of the Government and the Security Cabinet.”

He continued, “I have made multiple attempts to resolve these disagreements, but they became increasingly wider. They were also brought to the knowledge of the public in an inappropriate manner, and what is even worse, they have reached the knowledge of the enemy; our enemies have taken great delight in these disagreements and have derived much benefit from them.”

Netanyahu did not detail those disagreements, but Gallant differed publicly with Netanyahu on a number of issues, including U.S.-Israel relations, the need for a detailed postwar plan in Gaza, and Netanyahu’s efforts to preserve haredi Orthodox men’s exemption from the military draft.

Netanyahu said he was replacing Gallant with the current foreign minister, Israel Katz. Gideon Saar, a politician who has vaciliated between being Netanyahu’s ally and rival, will become the new foreign minister.

Protesters took to the streets almost as soon as Netanyahu made the announcement. Netanyahu last tried to fire Gallant in March of 2023, when the defense minister publicly voiced opposition to the government’s effort to weaken the judiciary. Protests forced Netanyahu to reverse that decision.

Gallant is the minister most trusted by the Biden administration as it has become increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu and his conduct of the war in Gaza. Veteran investigative journalist Bob Woodward said that recently that Biden feels “18 of the 19 people who work for Netanyahu are liars.” He did not specify who the 19th person was, though Gallant has been in almost daily contact with Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary.

That relationship is especially sensitive at this moment, when Iran is threatening to counterattack Israel for its retaliatory strikes last month on Iranian military bases. Netanyahu, at Biden’s request, had held back from striking Iranian oil and nuclear sites.

Netanyahu’s firing of Gallant came just minutes after he released a statement saying that there had been a “flood of criminal leaks” from the Security Cabinet, the Israeli government’s top decision-making body on matters of war, while complaining that police were selectively investigating his office.

That investigation, which has dominated Israeli headlines, centers on a staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office named Eliezer Feldstein, who is suspected of working with people in the security establishment to leak and alter top-secret documents obtained from Hamas. The leaks of purported information, which were published in Bild, a German publication, and in the London-based Jewish Chronicle, reinforced Netanyahu’s claims at a time when he was reportedly obstructing progress toward a ceasefire deal with Hamas that would have seen the group release Israeli hostages.

LOS ANGELES — Avi, a 35-year-old nurse from Los Angeles, has never voted before.

But on Monday, he was headed to a polling station at a synagogue in the Jewish neighborhood of Pico-Robertson to cast an early ballot. What’s driving him to vote this time, he said, was Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year and its aftermath. That’s also why he’s voting for Donald Trump.

“Since Oct. 7 I’ve been paying more attention to things related to Israel, and I care more than I did before,” said Avi, who is Jewish and declined to share his last name. “I haven’t been particularly happy with how the Biden-Harris administration has handled Israel since Oct. 7. In the immediate aftermath it was OK but since then I think they’ve put a leash on Israel.”

Oct. 7 has changed the lives and feelings of many American Jews — and is shaping how they think about Tuesday’s election in states across the country. In Pico-Robertson, that shift may well take the form of a split neighborhood now leaning more toward Trump. Like voters nationwide, Pico residents said they were feeling anxious about an election they have experienced as divisive. Several would not share their names, and a number of others declined to give interviews at all. And like Avi, many said they expected to vote for Trump because of his Israel policies.

“I think a lot of people just don’t know which way it’s going to go,” said Miriam Mark, the executive director of a Jewish organization doing voter outreach, about the overall election outcome. “I think there’s a healthy dose of fear out there.”

Pico-Robertson is filled with synagogues of multiple denominations, kosher restaurants and other Jewish businesses and institutions. Many residents are Orthodox, but a Conservative rabbinical school recently moved to the neighborhood, which last year was the site of a pair of antisemitic shootings.

How the neighborhood voted in 2020 depends on where its borders lie. According to the Los Angeles Times, Pico-Robertson’s main precinct was nearly split in 2020, with 602 votes for Biden compared to 578 for Trump. A New York Times election map of the area says it went narrowly for Trump, 848 to 751, a red-hued island in blue Los Angeles.

Those numbers make the neighborhood an outlier among Jews nationally, who historically vote in large majorities for the Democratic candidate. But it accords with the country’s Orthodox Jewish community, which has shifted heavily in recent years toward Republicans and Trump.

Area voters understood that no matter which direction the neighborhood goes, it will have zero impact on the national result: Barring a seismic shock, California’s electoral votes will go to Kamala Harris. That hasn’t made voters there any less conflicted, though.

“I’m not sure, so much, that my vote in California matters,” said a 36-year-old lawyer who lives in the neighborhood and declined to share his name. “But in my community I talk to my friends and family about what makes sense and in my view, there’s not a clear choice for Jews in terms of Israel.”

A woman who lives in nearby Beverly Hills, another Republican-leaning area, who was finishing up her grocery shopping at the neighborhood’s kosher Elat Market, said she was also concerned about the vote.

“Everyone I talk to is extremely stressed out by the election,” said the woman, who declined to share her name. “It’s probably the most important election of my lifetime, and I’m 75.”

She is voting for Harris — mainly as a vote against Trump, whom she called “unhinged.” She believes Harris, like past American presidents, will continue to be an ally to Israel and said some of her fellow Jewish voters who support Trump “don’t see beyond” his support for Israel.

The lawyer, however, could not bring himself to vote for either candidate. He voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, but said Oct. 7 had changed the dynamics of U.S. politics.

“The attack on Israel made a lot of theoretical questions more real in terms of the U.S.’ funding for Israel and questions from candidates about whether there should be strings attached,” he said.

While many of his friends are supporting Trump, he said the former president had too many “red flags” — ranging from his character to his 34 felony convictions to his remark that Jews would be partly to blame if he loses.

“People in my community overlook the value of the character of a politician,” he said. “In my community we’re not supposed to respect someone who is so callous like that.”

Of course, Pico-Robertson boasts its share of diehard Trump supporters, not least because it is home to a community of Iranian Jews as well as expats from Israel, where most people prefer Trump. Danny D., a consultant who moved to the United States from Tel Aviv around 10 years ago, voted early for the Republican candidate, who he believes will “fix things” like the economy and U.S.-Israel relations. He said he doesn’t know anyone voting for Harris, whom he called “anti-Jewish.”

“I think if Harris will be elected, I think there will be more antisemitic actions against Jews,” he said.

He also fit squarely into another subset of Trump voters: He said he didn’t think his vote would matter because the election is “set up.”

“I think that Trump needs to be elected but it’s going to be Kamala,” Danny said. Repeating a claim from 2020 that has been thoroughly debunked, he said that he had seen videos on Instagram of voting machines changing people’s votes from Republican to Democrat.

Another voter, a part-time tutor aged 81, said she too was proudly pro-Trump. She said that after four years of each party being in power, she voted for Trump “because things were better under him than under this awful Biden-Harris thing.”

The woman said she used to support Democrats. But she had started voting Republican around 2004, when the Orthodox shift toward the Republicans kicked off. She said most of her friends are supporting Trump this year, too.

“It’s just the liberal secular Jews who are still voting for Democrats,” she said. She pointed to Trump backing an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites as proof of his ironclad support for Israel.

“He says it all there in one sentence, while Kamala runs around in circles,” she said, mispronouncing the vice president’s name.

Josh Kessler, who works in Hollywood, said it was a “tough year for Jews to decide” who to support, but said he was voting for Harris. He accused both sides of pandering to Jewish voters.

“There’s a lot of sensitivity and turmoil going on over the past year, and I think that’s been forced on the Jewish people,” said Kessler, 49. He said he identifies as moderate or center-right, but applauded the Biden administration’s response to Oct. 7. He added that he believed Harris would continue to support Israel if she wins.

“If you look historically, Biden-Harris has done more for Israel than any administration in U.S. history,” said Kessler. “Harris has been painted as a progressive but I feel like in her heart she knows that Israel needs to protect itself.”

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, a mobile voting center was parked outside Dr. Sandwich, a popular kosher restaurant, to encourage Jews to vote.

The “Los Angeles Unites” initiative is a project of the Teach Coalition, an Orthodox Union-affiliated advocacy group focusing on Jewish education that has mobilized Jewish voters across the country. Mark, the executive director of Teach CA, the organization’s California outpost, said the program has engaged tens of thousands of voters across L.A. County.

The mobile vote center, a large van, has traveled across the city since the initiative launched Sept. 19, with an emphasis on educating people about the political process and encouraging them to vote, particularly in local elections. Mark said the initiative is nonpartisan and has worked with nearly 50 local Jewish schools and synagogues to reach voters through Shabbat programming, volunteer phone-banking and outreach events.

Robert Lehan, who is not Jewish but is volunteering as a driver for the mobile voting center, said a lot of people have been asking him who they should vote for.

Lehan said he’s heard distress from members of the Jewish community about “what’s going to happen to our country, and how is it going to affect Israel, and everything else, but primarily the Jewish community.”

Mark said her background is not in politics or advocacy, but that she got involved through an effort, led by the Teach Coalition, to secure funding for Jewish special needs education in California. A court sided with the coalition last week.

Mark pointed to that case as evidence that local elections matter, too, especially for Jews. She said this election was the first time she had filled out her entire ballot. And she suggested that the area’s Jews may have priorities that they can unite on, no matter who wins the White House.

“We really want to make sure that people understand that there’s not just one thing on the ballot,” Mark said. “It’s so important to vote locally, because, again, as a community, if we want change for our community, we have to show local officials that we have a voice and that we have power when we come together.”

When it came time to swear in his new foreign minister, Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, turned to one of his favorite topics: the Torah.

Milei, who is not Jewish, cited the week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, when inaugurating Gerardo Werthein, a Jewish businessman who is assuming the role. Milei fired his predecessor, in part because Argentina voted at the United Nations against the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Werthein had previously been Argentina’s ambassador to the United States.

[AHORA] Milei le tomó juramento a Werthein, el nuevo canciller. https://t.co/mHycLPcwW1 pic.twitter.com/VOKLCCsX8n

— ElCanciller.com (@elcancillercom) November 4, 2024

In public comments during a ceremony this week at Casa Rosada, his official residence, Milei drew a connection between the Torah portion, which describes God sending Abraham to Canaan to create a great nation, and Werthein’s task in steering Argentina’s foreign relations.

“The powers of heaven are sending you signals, Gerardo, because it speaks of the beginnings of Abraham’s travels throughout the world, spreading the messages of the creator,” Milei said in Spanish, according to a video shared online by an Argentine news agency. “God tells him in this parashah that he will have a lot of influence on the nations of the world, and gives him an important responsibility to bring the messages of the Torah, of life and freedom to the entire world.”

A parashah is one of 54 portions of the Five Books of Moses read each Shabbat in synagogue; Jews study and chant the week’s portion according to a fixed calendar.

The Catholic-born Milei has been famously drawn to Judaism and said he intends to convert once he leaves office. (He says it would be impossible to serve as president and observe Shabbat fully, a commitment that involves abstaining from writing, driving and using electricity for a full day.) He studies regularly with a rabbi, Axel Wahnish, whom he appointed as his ambassador to Israel. He has also cited Jewish stories at other events at Casa Rosada, including when he told the Hanukkah story and gave a menorah to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, last year.

Bernie Marcus, the billionaire who co-founded Home Depot and became a Republican megadonor and supporter of civic and political causes in the United States and Israel, has died.

Marcus, 95, died late Monday in Boca Raton, Florida. His death came on the eve of an election into which he had poured millions of dollars to support Donald Trump and Republicans across the country.

In the final political donation recorded publicly before his death, made in July, Marcus gave $1 million to the United Democracy Project, a campaign fundraising group affiliated with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC that Marcus has supported since its creation in 2022.

“The Home Depot is deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved founder, Bernard Marcus,” the company he founded in 1978 said in a statement announcing Marcus’ death. “To us, he was simply ‘Bernie.’”

Over the course of his life, Marcus donated more than $2 billion to various causes, according to Forbes, and he leaves behind an estimated net worth of $11 billion that will mostly go to the Marcus Foundation.

Born to Jewish immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929, Marcus “never lost sight of his humble roots, using his success not for fame or fortune but to generously help others,” the company said.

Among Marcus’ legacies are the transformation of downtown Atlanta with the establishment of the Georgia Aquarium; a massive advance in autism awareness and research thanks to the Marcus Autism Center, also in Atlanta; and the founding of the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, an important think tank focused on governance.

“The State of Israel lost one of its greatest friends, and I have lost my wisest mentor,” IDI President Yohanan Plesner said in a statement.

Toward the end of his life, Marcus, with his wife Billi, became perhaps best known for his staunch support of Donald Trump, second only to Sheldon Adelson among conservative Jewish megadonors. Marcus helped propel Trump into the White House in 2016 by contributing $7 million and gave even more four years later to finance his failed reelection campaign. Last year, he said he intended to support Trump again in this year’s election despite the former president’s felony convictions and his “brash style.”

“We must change the current trajectory of the nation and solve the problems created in the last three years,” Marcus wrote in November 2023 in an oped endorsing Trump. “We must also reject calls from some politicians to replace our free market system with big government socialism.”

Marcus also defended former Trump advisor Steve Bannon against charges of abetting antisemitism and extremism. At one point, Home Depot fended off calls to boycott the company over Marcus’ politics.

Unlike Adelson, his peer in philanthropy and Republican politics, Marcus donated money in Israel while making sure to avoid taking sides in the country’s fractured parliamentary politics. In addition to the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute, he gave to causes like health care, including the Marcus National Blood Services Center, established with a $25 million donation.

His philanthropy in Israel was rooted in his sense of identity. “I’m proud of the fact that I’m Jewish and what happened with the Holocaust is not going to happen again if I can do anything about it,” he said in an extensive profile published by Philanthropy Magazine in 2012.

Where some focused on threats from without, Marcus worried primarily about how the country’s own government structures were undermining its viability.

“Until Israel has a constitution and a Bill of Rights, the rule of law is murky. And I’m a great believer in the rule of law,” he said in 2012. Israel still has no constitution.

Born months before the start of the Great Depression, Marcus was raised in a tenement in Newark, New Jersey by immigrant parents from Russia.

A teenager during World War II and its aftermath, he joined his family on trips to the Catskills where he performed magic and hypnotism. The experience of reading and satisfying an audience helped seed a dream of becoming a psychiatrist. But Marcus’ parents couldn’t afford to send him to medical school so he became a pharmacist instead. (He also said he was rejected because of quotas limiting Jewish enrollment.)

He didn’t much care for the technical side of the field, but he took a liking to sales. That realization led him to become a retail manager, taking ever larger roles until he came to a chain of hardware stores in Los Angeles.

At age 49, after leaving the company amid corporate turmoil, Marcus joined Arthur Blank to found a new home improvement retailer with a vision that would transform the industry.

The pair picked Atlanta as their starting point, found investors and quickly opened a number of stores under the Home Depot banner. They tapped into a massive unmet demand among Americans to fix up their own homes. Unlike the old-style of hardware stores, Home Depot offered a massive warehouse space that stocked not only tools but paint and lumber, which had typically required a visit to separate retailers.

In Marcus’ 19 years as CEO, Home Depot became a ubiquitous American brand. He remained chair of the company’s board of directors until 2002 when he left to focus on giving away the wealth he had accumulated.

 

In 2010, Marcus signed the Giving Pledge, the initiative by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage the ultra-wealthy to give away a majority of their money to charity. Then, in 2020, he joined the Jewish Future Pledge, a promise by its signers to earmark most of their wealth to Jewish or Israel-related causes.

He had been raised to give away his money, Marcus said in an interview, pointing to the memory of his mother who sometimes denied him a nickel for ice cream, saying the coin was going toward planting trees in Israel instead.

Marcus took pride in his company’s record of ingraining the value of tzedakah, or charity, in his employees. “Kids come out of working at Home Depot and they all have this feeling of tzedakah. I turned them all into Jews!” he was once quoted as saying.

The largest and most notable acts of charity were not necessarily dedicated to Jewish causes. In Georgia, he was a major patron of civic institutions. In the late 1990s, Marcus and the then-governor of Georgia, Roy Barnes, flew back to Atlanta from a tour of Israel. During the flight, Marcus said he wanted to give a gift to the city of Atlanta, proposing an aquarium that could anchor a redevelopment of downtown. That conversation culminated in one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world, the Georgia Aquarium, which opened in 2005 thanks in large part to a $250 million donation from Marcus.

An employee’s struggles parenting a child with autism spurred Marcus’ interest in the issue, which he championed by founding a world-leading institute, the Marcus Autism Center, and spearheading a research and advocacy group, Autism Speaks.

Also in the realm of heath, he was a major donor to Atlanta’s Shepherd Center for spinal and brain injury rehabilitation, and the founding donor of a neuroscience institute at the Boca Raton Regional Hospital in Florida.

Marcus was also influential in the field of philanthropy itself, modeling a business-like mindset that always sought as large a return on a philanthropic investment as possible. His libertarian ideology and faith in the free market also drove his contributions to advocacy against government regulations.

In his final years, Marcus grew increasingly concerned about antisemitism in the United States and on college campuses, which he said he thought had risen to the levels he experienced as a child and young adult prior to the founding of Israel. In a January 2023 video interview with the Jewish News Syndicate, he said Jews who donated to universities, which he said taught students to hate Judaism and Israel, were “not the brightest people in the world.” In contrast, he said, he was careful to give in ways that advanced his values.

“We are very careful with our giving. And we’ve given away over $2 billion in the last several years, and in the places that we’ve given it, we follow it very carefully,” he said. “We check it. We make sure that the money is being spent the way it should be spent.”

Marcus is survived by his wife and stepson; his children from his first marriage; and grandchildren, for whom he said his 2022 book, “Kick Up Some Dust: Lessons on Thinking Big, Giving Back, and Doing It Yourself,” was intended.

“I haven’t been the greatest grandfather in the world because I’ve been busy doing so many things,” he said in the JNS interview. “I wanted them to know all the things I’m doing.”