These Modern Orthodox and observant Jews want to change their community’s conversation around the Gaza war
By: Anderw Silow-Carroll
JTA, March 25, 2025
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.
