Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
This episode is sponsored in honor of Dr. Andrew and Marci Spitzer.
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Manhattan has always been a pretty, pretty, pretty good city for spotting Jews. The Hasidim of the Diamond District. The Modern Orthodox singles of the Upper West Side, living out a kosher, or not that kosher, version of Sex and the City – or maybe Fiddler on the Roof. And then, of course, there are the Jews you wouldn’t know are Jewish – the ones who fly under the radar until you spot their Jewish star necklace, or somehow it emerges that their great-grandfather was a kosher butcher on the Lower East Side.
What I’m saying is: on any given day, there are lots of Jews in New York. But there’s one day each year when we really show up in droves (meaning we, the Jewish people) packing Fifth Avenue with over one hundred thousand strong. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was there: tatted-up Israeli expats, Modern Orthodox schoolkids, local politicians, Upper East Side moms in athleisurewear (by the way, also my favorite outfit, shoutout to Upper East Side moms, I just want to be one of you), LGBTQ+ Jews waving a rainbow flag with a star of David, septum-pierced hipsters… it’s a cornucopia of every kind of Jew, singing and dancing and waving giant Israeli flags.
I’ve mentioned my experiences at the parade before. I don’t expect you to remember that, but listen, it might be a little corny to admit it, but the Israel Day Parade was among my favorite days of the year in the past. There’s just nothing like it. There’s so much enthusiasm. There’s Hebrew-language pop blasting in the streets. There are signs, there are flags, energy, elaborate floats bedecked in blue and white balloons.
And of course, there are protestors. Everyone knows about the protestors. As kids, we were warned each year, and here’s how it sounded, something like this:
Don’t engage. Don’t argue. The best argument is singing louder in obnoxiously American-accented Hebrew. (sing) Acheinu kol beit yisrael
Or, am yisrael chai…
To be honest, I never paid much attention to the protestors, with their keffiyehs and their Palestinian flags and their catchy little chants. And I need to give a little bit of an explanatory comma here. You can have Palestinian flags, all good. You can have keffiyehs. That’s a thing. All good. But bringing those to an Israel Day parade is a little bit of a different sort of thing. I was riding the vibes, having fun, celebrating and singing with my friends.
But the parade of 2007, it hit different.
I was 21 years old, full of vim and vigor and energy. And I had just met an awesome girl. She was funny and cool and all the good things, and I was already half-smitten. Until I saw something that made my blood boil, driving all thoughts of romance from my mind.
Mixed in with your typical protesters screaming about Zionism and Nazism were… Jews. The most stereotypically Jew-y Jews you can imagine. I’m talking the whole getup: Beards, sidelocks, long black coats, even a shtreimel or two. And of course, the season’s hottest accessories: keffiyehs, Palestinian flags, and signs calling Israel a “cancer.”
Ah, the Neturei Karta, the extremist Haredi, aka ultra-orthodox sect, whose name translates to “Guardians of the City,” a reference to the Jerusalem Talmud – Hagigah 1:7, if you’re counting score.
Every religion has them: what do I mean, “them”? Here’s what I mean. The fringe that 99.99% disavow. Muslims have the Taliban, Christians have the Westboro Baptist Church, and we, the Jews, have the Neturei Karta, a Haredi sect so vocally anti-Zionist that even the most hardcore anti-Zionist haredim want nothing to do with them.
No one is 100% sure how many Neturei Karta there are, but everyone agrees it’s no more than a handful – low thousands, max, mostly split between the US and Israel. But even in New York, a city famed for its weird characters, they stick out like a sore thumb.
These were the people our teachers always warned us about. Non-Jewish protestors? Whatever. Par for the course. And sure, Jews argue and debate and disagree all the time. Like, we love, love, love, disagreement. I’ll even give you a quote from Rabbi David Wolpe, former head Rabbi at Sinai Temple. He said, “What kind of tradition insists both on the rightness and wrongness of the other? A tradition that, in the words of scholar Moshe Halbertal, codifies controversy. A student of Talmud is a student of argument. On almost every page of that massive series of tomes is an argument. That is what it is to be Jewish.” We love it. We love disagreements. Across all sides of the spectrum. But the way I was raised, Jews just don’t show up to a Jewish event with signs blaming, quote “the Zionists” for “ignit[ing] the fire” – in other words, blaming Jews for the troubles in the Middle East.
When you’re a Jewish kid, it’s really strange and off-putting to see Jews echoing that kind of anti-Jewish rhetoric. It’s almost like self-internalized projected hatred that you’ve internalized for yourself. And no one seemed to have any explanation other than “they’re crazy. Just ignore them.”
And I had ignored them. At least, until now, and by now I mean 2007. At 21 years old, I was more or less an adult. No one was reining me in or redirecting my attention. No one was there to stop what happened next.
Friends, maybe I’m embarrassed to say this, maybe I’m not, I’m not sure. I lost my gosh darn mind. I’m talking a primal response, half righteous anger over their betrayal of the Jewish people, half yo-momma-style insults. No, I’m not proud of it.
If you’ve been listening for a while, you know I’m not really a “lose it in public, insult a group of strangers at the top of my lungs” kinda guy. But when a group with the audacity to call themselves, and I’m putting this in quotes, “Torah Jews” give cover to the nastiest, hateful anti-Israel rhetoric that is probably the least nuanced thinking of all time, yeah, I get a little twitchy. You wanna protest Israel, by all means, go right ahead. But don’t fight Israel’s existence under the guise of representing “authentic Judaism,” whatever the heck that even means. And maybe also don’t hang out with Hamas or Hezbollah or Ahmadinejad, which is what the Neturei Karta like to do when they’re not heckling Jewish kids at a parade. (If you’re like, wait, what? Don’t worry, we’ll get there soon, I’m telling you a story.)
So I lost my cool. I yelled. Pretty, pretty, pretty aggressively. And, okay, yes, there was a part of me that was trying to impress that girl I had just met. Don’t take romantic advice from me, guys. Or maybe do: Two years later, we were standing under the chuppah, the Jewish wedding canopy. So maybe Neturei Karta were kinda my wingmen? Thanks for the assist, fellas!
But here’s the craziest part of that story, even crazier than the fact that I had just locked down a wife. It’s not the tantrum I threw that day. It’s the fact that almost 20 years later, I still feel the exact same way.
I’m not proud of it, by the way. I’m really not. You know me: I like to be the nuance guy, the empathy guy, the “let’s steelman this” guy. And yes, I believe in these things with my full heart, like, fully.
But not when it comes to the Neturei Karta. Not when it comes to them. To this day, they tick me the heck off.
So you can imagine how angry I got when the Neturei Karta showed up on my Instagram feed several months ago, courtesy of Humans of New York.
Humans of New York, or HONY, is exactly what it sounds like: a social media account dedicated to highlighting, well, humans of New York – from unhoused folks to office workers on their lunch break to delightful weirdos in eccentric getups. The creator, Brandon Stanton, also includes mini-interviews in the captions, in which the subject talks candidly about their life, their struggles, their triumphs, their hopes and dreams. The entire project is a really beautiful way to humanize the people who share our world. I truly believe HONY helps promote grace and understanding between people.
Which is why I was so blindsided by the post from the morning of May 30th, 2025. They were the Neturei Karta, those same folks, back again to torment me, this time, on my Instagram feed.
In the photos, they’re standing in a line, decked out in their usual getup: black suits, black hats or shtreimels, keffiyehs, and angry signs decrying Israel’s existence.
The caption was even worse. Because instead of giving an interview about their personal lives, maybe explaining what it’s like being a Haredi Jew in New York City, or what it feels like to be hated by, ya know, the vast majority of other Jews, the Neturei Karta expounded at length about the war in Gaza and claiming that they represented, quote, “the masses of Jewish people worldwide.”
And again, I need to make this clear. This episode is not about what’s happening in Gaza today, which is tragic, complicated, and something we have spoken about and continue to speak about. This is about something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, at the moment.
All of a sudden I found myself time-traveling to that memorable Israeli Day Parade. Same sputtering rage. Same desire to start yelling about people’s mothers. I may have actually screamed at my phone: “You do not represent the Jewish people, you pathetic liars!”
And
“Brandon, dude, what are you doing? You’re absolutely ridiculously spotlighting the wrong random Jews of New York!”
But I’m not going to blame Brandon right now. This episode isn’t about him. It’s about the Neturei Karta. And it’s also a little about me.
I’ll explain.
I started this podcast in part to help people – including myself! – to understand Israeli history, and the things around Israeli history. The good, the bad, the ugly. I’ve tried to see and share as many perspectives as I can. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.
And you can tell by now: steel-manning the Neturei Karta is going to be hard for me. Honestly, I debated whether I even wanted to do this episode. I didn’t want to give the Neturei Karta more air. They don’t need me to do their PR.
Which is one reason we didn’t invite a Neturei Karta representative to give their views. I thought about it. I really did. In the end, we decided not to give them a platform – for reasons I’ll explore in this episode.
But I also didn’t want to just echo the same line that had been fed to me when I was a kid: they’re crazy, look away. Because we shouldn’t, we can’t look away. We should look closely, under a harsh and disinfecting light, until we understand. Until we banish the darkness. Because there is darkness here – not just in the Neturei Karta, but in my reaction to them. They’re not the only Jewish sect that opposes the modern state of Israel on theological grounds. And still, I would never in a million years lose my mind at any other group of haredi Jews, even if I disagree with them about most things. And I want to understand: why them?
So in this episode, we’re gonna try to understand what the Neturei Karta are all about by learning their history and understanding where their hatred of Israel comes from.
So why the Neturei Karta?
Chapter 1: Culture Clash
The Neturei Karta are not the only religious anti-Zionists around. And they definitely were not the first. Before 1948, religious anti-Zionism wasn’t the exception; it was often the rule. Pretty much all Haredim from the Ashkenazi world were adamantly opposed to the creation of a Jewish state (including the ones who lived in the Holy Land!).
To quote Professor Shaul Magid:
“…ideological commitments against Zionism are not new, but part of a much longer trajectory of traditional anti-Zionism that stems back to the early 20th century… This anti-Zionism was also shared by much of the prewar ultra-Orthodox world, from Lithuanian rabbinic giant Elhanan Wasserman…to Yitzhok Zev Soloveitchik…; and much of the Soloveitchik dynasty; and the Lubavitcher Rebbes Shalom Dov Schneershon… and Yosef Yizhak Schneershon…, among many others.”
That’s quite a list of luminaries. Hasidic movements, like Satmar and even Lubavitch, side-by-side with non-hasidic branches of Judaism, like the Neturei Karta. (We can’t get into it here, but let’s just be clear – hasidic and haredi are not the same. True: most hasidim ARE haredi. But not all haredi people are hasidic – kinda the way that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Yeah, I killed it in 10th-grade geometry.)
Anyway. The point here is: the haredi opposition to Zionism was both well-established and intense. And if the Zionists were going to organize politically, then so would the anti-Zionist haredim. When the Tenth Zionist Congress struck down a motion to fund religious schools, the anti-Zionist Haredi community knew they had to act.
In 1912, they established Agudas Yisroel, a worldwide movement to strengthen Orthodox Judaism and separate it from this new Jewish nationalism as they saw it. The Zionist movement, they claimed, was a danger to Torah-observant Jews.
A few years later, another Haredi organization emerged, this one headquartered in Jerusalem. The Eidah Chareidis was the haredi community’s answer to the Zionist institutions cropping up all over the region. They didn’t even trust the city’s Chief Rabbi, who had been appointed by the British, preferring instead to create an explicitly anti-Zionist haredi movement to protect and promote their religious interests without having to deal with the Zionists.
At first, both the Agudah and the Eidah were equally anti-Zionist. As Agudah leader Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman put it, quote: “Anti‑Semites want to kill the body, but Zionists kill the soul. Better to die than consort with the Zionists.”
When I read that, I instinctively recoil. Especially because I know how Rabbi Wasserman’s story ends: in 1941, with a firing squad and an unmarked mass grave. And my lizard brain doesn’t know how to react to that fact without screaming and wanting to cry.
But this whole episode is about letting my more measured side take the wheel. So let’s ask Why? Why did Rabbi Wasserman, and many others, prefer to die rather than quote “consort with the Zionists”?
Well, for two reasons.
Number one: The Zionism of Israel’s founding fathers was largely secular. The movers and shakers who built the Jewish state weren’t interested in kosher or Shabbat. They were trying to create a modern society with western, democratic liberal values, and religious practice was not really part of the equation.
But it went a lot further than just not being religious. Many early Zionists were flat-out opposed to religion, believing Judaism to be backwards, primitive, and embarrassing, passive – a Diaspora religion for an exiled people. Now that they were finally home in Palestine, they no longer needed Judaism.
So the secularism of many early Zionists wasn’t neutral. It was actively anti-religious, as though by shaking off Jewish tradition they could shake off all the traumas of the past. And now, they had brought that heresy to the Holy Land, where they worked on Saturdays, mocked religion, and served non-kosher food in their kibbutzim. The region’s Haredim were appalled. A Jewish state that didn’t observe Shabbat? A Jewish state without Torah at the center?
No thanks, said the Haredim. We’ll take the Ottomans or the British or whoever else, rather than live in a Jewish state in name only.
But honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered if Ben Gurion and Co. had worn kippot and studied the Talmud for ten hours a day. Because the Haredim had a second reason to oppose the Zionists.
And that is The Three Oaths. Sounds like a fantasy novel, right? Harry Potter and the Three Oaths. Has a nice ring to it.
If you’re like what are the Three Oaths, I’ve never even heard of them, well, you’re in good company. The Three Oaths are a relatively obscure concept mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud, specifically Ketubot 111a. Despite their relative obscurity, in the modern period, these three oaths emerged as a frequent topic of debate among religious scholars with some viewing these oaths as constituting a contract between God and the Jewish people.
So, what are these oaths? Well, thanks for asking. I’ll tell you.
Oath #1: The Jews must not return to Israel en masse.
Oath #2: The Jews must not rise up and rebel against the nations of the world.
Oath #3: The nations of the world must not subjugate the Jews excessively.
Look, I’m no lawyer, that’s no job for a nice Jewish boy, but even I can see that if you were gonna take these oaths to a court of law, the judge would laugh you out of there. How do you enforce such an ambiguous set of promises? And that is why these oaths were typically more seen as aggadic or lore in Judaism, and not decisive or legal, or halakhic to use a Jewish term.
To some, and this is much more prevalent in the Haredi world, Oaths 1 and 2 boil down to this: Jews aren’t allowed to facilitate their own redemption. They must wait until God sees fit to bring the messiah and end the Jewish exile. And if they don’t, well…
The Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, had some harsh words for the Zionists who had the chutzpah to preempt God. Be real, he told his followers. Why would God choose anti-religious heretics as the vehicle of our ultimate redemption? Direct quote. OK, not actually, though that would be awesome. This is the direct quote:
“How could anyone imagine that Hashem would perform miracles for idolators? Such a notion is pure heresy. The only possible explanation is that this is the work of Satan and his minions… Satan is sparing no effort to deceive the world through these events, for in this trial our redemption is at stake.”
In other words, the Satmar rebbe was reminding his flock that resisting Zionism was a holy obligation. If they fell prey to its lure, they might never be redeemed. And if you think that someone is messing with your people’s ultimate redemption, which you’ve spent millennia waiting and praying and longing for, well, you’d probably be pretty salty too.
Of course, to the Zionist movement, Zionism was the redemption, the culmination of 2,000 years of yearning. And that, to many haredi sects, was precisely the problem.
Zionism was a Golden Calf to them – a false idol that replaced authentic Judaism. As Neturei Karta member Hayim Katzenellenbogen wrote after the Six Day War, quote: “During the first week after the conquest [side note: he means the Six Day War] the Sages forgot their wisdom; the trail of successes and ostensible miracles, as well as their own blindness, led them to dance around the Golden Calf. Perfectly pious Jews looked catastrophe in the face and could not cope with it.”
What Katzenellenbogen called catastrophe, the vast majority of Jews around the world called miraculous. Because whether they were religious Jews or dyed-in-the-wool secularists, the Zionists understood their odds. They were doing something big and bold and maybe even insane. They were wrenching back their history at last. And though much of the Zionist movement worked overtime to curry favor with the Ottomans, the British, and later the United Nations, in an attempt to build a state that the rest of the world would accept, at the core of the movement’s ideology was self-sufficiency. Why should the Jews care what other nations had to say, when other nations had utterly failed to protect or integrate them?
Even Ben Gurion, who had mostly cooperated with the Brits, once noted that it doesn’t matter what the world will say. It matters what the Jews will do. And the Jews did quite a lot to show the Brits they were done relying on the wishy-washy promises of imperial powers. Link in the show notes for more on that.
As for oath number three, the Zionist movement had no interest in relying on the nations of the world to show mercy to the Jews. They were building a New Jew: strong and decisive, with muscles for days.
The New Jew would be fearless, because there would be nothing to fear. The New Jew would be free, because no one could wall him up in a ghetto. The New Jew wouldn’t rely on the whims of a Czar or a Sultan to protect him. The New Jew would defend himself. The New Jew would speak his ancestral language and work his ancestral land, building a Jewish utopia by the sweat of his brow. And he would do it all while rocking the world’s dumbest hat. (Nerd corner alert: Israel’s iconic bucket hat, you know, the kova tembel, soon became a national symbol, associated with pioneers, kibbutznikim, and anyone else who spent their days toiling under the sun. In Hebrew, tembel is slang for “dumdum,” like dummy, which means that the national symbol of the Jewish state is literally a dunce cap. You can’t make this stuff up, so good.)
Anyway, if the Zionist movement had its way, their new country would be chock-full of New Jews in stupid hats. There would be no room for the old Jew, the weak Jew, the passive, pathetic victim who had spent the past two thousand years letting himself be pushed around. The early Zionists’ secularism and constant attempts to scrub themselves of the Diaspora were directly at odds with the Haredi emphasis on tradition. In short, they disagreed hugely about what constitutes a Jewish state – a fight that’s playing out in the Knesset to this day.
Now, at this point, you might be asking uh, Noam? There are a lot of religious Zionists. Like, for example, you, kinda. Are you gonna tell me that Religious Zionists don’t hold by the Three Oaths?
In fact, that’s exactly what I’m gonna tell you.
We don’t have the time to get into theology – though of course, we’ve included links in the show notes for anyone who wants to learn more. But suffice it to say that the religious Zionist movement didn’t lose much sleep over the Three Oaths.
Professor Mordecai Breuer, one of the leading Torah scholars of the 20th century, pointed out that, quote:
Traditional Jewish thought understood the three oaths as landmarks for the people in exile, not as proscriptions addressed against those who wished to go up to Zion. Hence, the oaths did not contradict the ascent of Jews to the land of Israel, even in large and organized groups, so long as the Jewish dispersion remained in exiled…We have not found the three oaths explicitly cited as an ongoing halakha…
He then goes on to cite historical precedent, quote…
Even with the organization of large and cohesive groups of immigrants, from the aliyah of R Judah the Hasid, who came to the land of Israel at the head of a thousand jews in 1700, through to the aliyah of hasidim and disciples of the Gaon of Vilna – the question of the three oaths did not arise as a practical halakhic one.
For the religious Zionist world, it’s not that they thought the Oaths were wrong or bad or stupid, or that anti-Zionist haredim were dummies. They had the same text, but they just had a different perspective on it all.
Religious Zionists were just as jazzed as haredim for the ultimate redemption. They too were waiting desperately for the Messiah.
Zionism was simply how they prepared for his arrival. God was sending them an opportunity, in a strange and unlikely form, perhaps, but didn’t that just make it more obvious that the ultimate redemption was at hand? The entire nation of Israel – religious, secular, and everything in between – would be an active part of the redemption process, because the redemption would not come only for the pious. It would come to every Jew, no matter how far they stood (or thought they stood) from God.
Surprisingly, Agudas Yisrael, or Agudat Yisrael, depending on the accent you use, agreed. Sort of. OK, very sort of. OK, not actually, but not not, either. That makes sense, right?
Let me explain.
Remember, the Agudah is the big Haredi group, with branches in the US and Europe. Which meant that many of their members had a front-row seat to the Nazis’ takeover of Germany – and they were sounding the alarm.
By the mid-30s, Agudas Yisroel had softened their stance. They still weren’t thrilled about this whole secular state thing. But a secular state was preferable to a gas chamber. Seriously. A Jew was a Jew, no matter how heretical, and if the Zionists could provide an alternative to “being slaughtered in Europe,” well, salvation comes from unlikely places. Jewish lives were clearly at stake. If saving them meant cooperating with heretics, then that’s what the Agudah would do.
And so, under the leadership of Rabbi Moshe Blau, the Agudah began cooperating with the secular Zionists they had once hated so much, downgrading from anti-Zionists to non-Zionists. See what happened there?
But this was a pragmatic relationship, not a love match. The Agudah saw which way the wind was blowing. Someone needed to protect Haredi interests from the Zionists’ secularism. Someone needed to secure funding for yeshivas and military exemptions for yeshiva students and control over matters like Shabbat and marriage and kosher certifications. Someone had to make sure that these Haredi Jews could live their lives fairly and squarely, as Haredi Jews. So the Aguda took on the job, and the uneasy balance they’ve struck with the Zionist movement persists to this day.
But not everyone agreed with the Aguda’s decision.
And to make matters even spicier, the Agudah’s bitterest and most vocal opponent was none other than Rabbi Moshe Blau’s younger brother, Amram. That’s right – the guy who had reshaped the Agudah’s policy towards Zionism was now being publicly and angrily undermined by his younger brother.
Political intrigue and sibling rivalry? Call me, HBO – I think I have an idea for a really niche new series.
The younger Blau wasn’t gonna sit around and let his big brother lead the Haredi community astray, no way. In 1938, he and his friend Rabbi Aharon Katzenellenbogen (maybe my favorite Jewish last name, and that’s saying something – like just pick one – it can be katzen, it can be Ellen, it can be bogen…but all three? Just feels like a lot.) So, he established the group that would become known as the Neturei Karta. The name comes from a Talmudic passage that says that the true protectors of a city are not its policemen, or politicians, but its scholars and scribes.
NGL, gotta respect their branding – that name goes hard. But so did the group’s tactics. And that brings us to the next chapter in our story.
Chapter 2: Crossing the Line
Blau and Katzenellenbogen weren’t always considered extremists. At first, their movement was a respected branch of the Eidah Charedis – the Jerusalem-based organization that looked out for the city’s haredim. Unlike the Agudah, the Eidah Chareidis remained – and remains! – fiercely anti-Zionist. To this day, they turn down state funds, prohibit their community from voting in Israeli elections, and of course, refuse to serve in the military. Which, you know what, at least they’re consistent – both politically and theologically.
But even they were and are far less fiery than the Neturei Karta. Because almost immediately, Blau and Katzenellenbogen began making waves.
Like officially branding the Zionists as quote “apostates,” functionally “revoking” their status as Jews. Of course, that declaration was symbolic, and ridiculous. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew, no matter what anyone says. But I want to linger on this point for a second, because it’s important: to the Neturei Karta, secular Zionists are not Jews, and so-called “real” Jews are obligated to cut them off.
Again, my lizard brain is going haywire again.
But the Neturei Karta took their criticism of their fellow Jews a step further. As Jews around the world grappled with the Holocaust, looking for a reason, for comfort, for God, the Neturei Karta issued a statement.
The Holocaust was a direct result of the Zionist movement, they said. Divine punishment for the hubris of the godless rabble who had dared to preempt Hashem by building a state before the arrival of the Messiah. The price of His anger at the Zionists, they said, was six million Jews. That’s right. Six million Jews were killed, theologically, because of the Zionists.
The Neturei Karta aren’t the only sect that believes this, by the way. The Satmar Hasidim, led by Rabbi Teitelbaum, who we’ve talked about in previous episodes, agree with them. But it’s a minority opinion, and, if you’re asking me, not a very good one. Blaming Jews for their own murder is not a new tactic, but it’s especially low coming from fellow Jews, particularly those who were lucky enough to escape, some because of the Zionist movement, including Rabbi Teitelbaum.
It’s also just a strangely simplistic way of seeing the world – especially coming from people who spend their days wrestling with the complex arguments of the Talmud.
I prefer the approach of Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who wrote: “The Nation of Israel is a single unity which arrives at its wholeness only after a continuum which spans all ages…A perspective of the Nation of Israel which divides the whole into parts (religious and secular, Zionist and anti-Zionist), without sensitivity to the overall oneness of the Nation, is a narrow-minded perspective that brings many divisions and crises in its wake. All of Israel’s millions are bound together, in one body, in one soul.” In other words, we need to understand the Holocaust in context of the full sweep of Jewish history, as an event that affected and was shared by the entire nation of Israel.
But the Neturei Karta did not agree.
The Zionists weren’t Jews to them, but heretics, responsible for the worst atrocity against Jewish people that the world had ever seen.
And so they felt perfectly comfortable begging anyone who would listen to, quote: “rescue us from the Zionist regime.” When the UN Secretary General ignored their pleas, they turned to the British. I’m about to read this quote to you, but as I do, I want you to ask yourself, who do you think Rabbi Blau is talking about? Ready, here it is. Here’s the quote:
“have mercy upon us and do not cause the peaceful and loyal Jewish haredim to be devoured, G-d forbid, at the hands of those who are taking control over us and who are sweeping away by force our future, which we fear will be terrible and frightful.”
So, who was Rabbi Blau claiming was taking control, devouring haredim, sweeping away their future? Was it the Arabs of Palestine, who had killed hundreds of Jews between November of 1947 and January of 1948? The other Arab countries, gearing up to attack the Jewish state as soon as it would declare itself? Nope, of course not! He was referring to the Zionists: the only thing that stood between the Jews of Palestine and the enemies that surrounded them.
Like the UN Secretary General, the Brits never wrote back. By May of 1948, Ben Gurion had declared independence, an existential war was raging, and the Neturei Karta had lost.
But they didn’t give up! You gotta give them respect for that, right?
In 1950 – roughly a year after an existential war that claimed one percent of the Israeli population – Leib Weissfish (another great name!) slipped across the border into Jordan. At the time, Jordan and Israel were sworn enemies. A year before, Jordanians had butchered over 100 Jews in their homes and ethnically cleansed roughly 10,000 more from Jerusalem and the West Bank. (We go into more detail about this in our episode on The Convoy of 35, about the four Jewish communities in the West Bank who were collectively wiped off the map in 1948 and then rebuilt after 1967, you should really check out that episode.)
To make matters worse, after their takeover of East Jerusalem, the Jordanians sealed off access to Jewish holy sites, demanding baptismal certificates from tourists to make sure a rogue Jew could not sneak into the Kotel. And they hadn’t yet done a thing to crack down on the constant and deadly raids of the fedayeen, which I talk about in lots of episodes, check them out.
So of course Leib Weissfish decided to sneak into Jordan. Why wouldn’t he? (Sarcasm, guys. That was sarcasm.) Weissfish’s ultimate destination was Cairo, the HQ of the Arab League. As in, a collection of states who were, at the time, all sworn to Israel’s destruction. But that was kind of the point, because Weissfish wanted to petition the Arab League to supply the Neturei Karta with weapons so they could rise up against the Zionists. I mean, I almost have to laugh. Are you starting to see why the Neturei Karta are not exactly within the Jewish Overton Window?
And let me spell it out. It’s not just that they are ideologically and theologically opposed to the existence of the State of Israel. That’s not a position I hold, but I get it. Like I said, I disagree with the Satmar Hasidim on this too. And yet, I would never in a million years lose my mind on them in public.
In fact, I recently had a little conversation that illustrated exactly why.
I was out having dinner with my wife and our friends. (By the way, why does every one of my stories lately seem to start with me publicly embarrassing my wife? Sorry, Raizie, sorry!) When I saw a bunch of Satmar guys at the next table, I couldn’t resist. I went up to them, introduced myself, and asked what they thought about the Neturei Karta, always a classic opening line for me.
In classic Williamsburg Satmar fashion, they kind of went meh, which is their way of saying we don’t love them, but we’re not gonna talk smack. I pressed a little harder. But you agree with them, right? Theologically? And again, that little shrug: sure, agree, don’t agree, whatever. But we don’t like their methods.
My ears perked up.
Their methods? I asked innocently.
They go against Jews. They side with our enemies, they told me.
And you guys wouldn’t do that? I asked.
They were shocked. Of course not, they said. Even Zionists are Jews. We don’t go against Jews like this. Especially after October 7. Jews don’t fight Jews. We protect each other even if we don’t agree with each other.
That was a horrible accent, I’m sorry. But that’s it. Those guys that Raizie and our friends didn’t want me to approach actually hit the nail on the head.
Disagreement between Jews is not only FINE, it’s part of our tradition. But the Neturei Karta’s activism goes way beyond disagreement.
And that is why they trigger me so freaking hard, in the way that no other group ever will. They have turned their back on the Jewish people, throwing in their lot with groups who advocate for the dismantling of the Jewish state and could not care less about the safety or unity of the global Jewish community.
In fact, the Neturei Karta have a long and ugly track record of teaming up with Israel’s enemies, echoing Islamist rhetoric, and actively campaigning for the erasure of the state – all under the guise of “Torah Judaism.” As far as I’m concerned, when you start rubbing elbows with our enemies, when you start looking for weapons so you can rise up against fellow Jews, you lose the right to speak for us.
Weissfish’s little gambit failed, by the way. He was caught almost immediately by Jordanian authorities, who promptly imprisoned him. After seven months, they returned this baffling prisoner to his home in Israel, where he was promptly arrested. But Weisfish served only four months in jail, despite literally committing treason.
It turned out later that the judge shared one of Weissfish’s interests: Nietzsche. Yes, the German philosopher whose ideas about “uber” and “untermenschen” inspired the Nazis. Seriously, history is so much weirder and wackier than anything I could make up.
For the next couple of decades, the Neturei Karta confined themselves to protesting the state from within. You know, picketing mixed-gender swimming pools and preschools. Instituting “modesty patrols” for women, who would harass women who didn’t follow the dress code that Neturei Karta co-founder Rabbi Amram Blau himself had written up. Demonstrating, sometimes violently, when they felt that Shabbat had been violated.
And then came the Six Day War. Six Arab armies against puny Israel. Israelis digging mass graves, just in case.
You know how that story ended. Israel won, tripled its size,
Jews around the world began to see the hand of God, etc. etc. etc.
But where religious Zionists spoke of miracles and divine intervention, the Neturei Karta mourned. Of course they did. We’re all primed to seek confirmation of what we already believe, and the religious scholarship that came out after the Six Day War reflects this perfectly.
Religious Zionists believed that the creation of the State of Israel was the first step towards the ultimate redemption. So of course they saw the miracle of the Six Day War as God’s way of confirming that they were on the right path.
But the Neturei Karta and the Satmar thought exactly the opposite. And of course the unlikely victory only further proved that Zionism was an act of Satan, a Golden Calf, flashy and tempting but ultimately false. The Satmar Rebbe even condemned the victory as Satanic – a trap from the so-called “other side” meant to ensnare pious Jews.
But the Neturei Karta took their activism a step further.
Actually, several steps. And this is where it all falls apart, for me.
In 1969, they started burning Israeli flags in Jerusalem and outside the UN. A year later, they were joined in New York by members of the PLO. Yes, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group whose member organization the PFLP ambushed an Israeli school bus that very same year, murdering 12 civilians, most of whom were children under 10. Yes, the PLO, the same folks who brought us the Munich massacre in 72, the Maalot Massacre of 74, and the Coastal Road Massacre of 78.
By the 1980s, they were rubbing shoulders with the Chairman of the PLO himself: Yasser Arafat.
This was a controversial move, even for the Neturei Karta. Their self-appointed so-called “foreign minister,” the American-born Moishe Hirsch, had been trying to cultivate friendly relationships with Arab countries for a few years. But Arafat was a big fish. To most Jews, he was a barracuda, or a piranha, or one of those other scary fish with too many teeth. Even Hirsch’s father-in-law, Neturei Karta co-founder Aharon Katzenellenbogen, cautioned him against meeting with the PLO chairman. In a shocking departure from his usual approach, Katzenellenbogen alerted the Israeli authorities about his son-in-law’s plans. But Hirsch would not be deterred, and in the end, all his deranged work paid off, in the form of an honorary post as Minister of Jewish Affairs in Arafat’s cabinet.
Again, it would almost be funny if it weren’t so upsetting. My lizard brain is in overdrive. International headlines called Hirsch “Arafat’s Rabbi.” Photos of the two smiling and embracing each other made the front page. And the world ate it up. Of course they did, of course they did.
For the Neturei Karta, that was the point. Say what you want about these guys, but they’re not idiots. I mean, I have no idea what their IQs are, but they understand the power of propaganda and the specific power of a photograph. And they know what so many Jews seem to forget: most of the world knows next to nothing about us. They see a guy with a beard and a shtreimel, and they assume that he’s the most authentic representative of religious Jewry. When the Neturei Karta call themselves “real” Jews or “Torah” Jews, the rest of the world takes them at face value. Well, not the rest of the world, but a lot of the world. And that’s why you get ignorant folks assuming that real Jews aren’t Zionists. The Neturei Karta said so.
Both Hirsch and Arafat got a lot out of this relationship. Hirsch got a stupid amount of money and probably some kind of bizarre power trip. Arafat got a token Jewish friend that gave him cover for his crimes against the Jewish people. What are you talking about? I’m not an antisemite. My Jewish friend Moishe agrees with me!
The Neturei Karta had been tolerated, even embraced, by the Eidah Chareidis and other anti-Zionist Haredi groups, like the Satmar Hasidim. But Hirsch’s friendship with Arafat was simply a bridge way too far for the rest of the Haredi world, which began to distance itself from the Neturei Karta.
Like those Satmar guys said to me in that restaurant: they’re against other Jews. We think you are misguided, Noam, but we’re not against you.
After 2006, no amount of distance was far enough. Because that’s when Neturei Karta reps attended Iran’s “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust,” as guests of former Iranian president and virulent antisemite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
You can read between the lines of that conference name, right? “Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust” is a fancy way of saying “we’re gonna hold a conference about how the Holocaust didn’t really happen and invite some of the world’s most prominent antisemites, including David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the KKK.” While Ahmadinejad and Duke denied that the Holocaust happened, that’s right, the Neturei Karta were there to blame it on the Zionists. But what’s a little historical disagreement between friends? (By the way, shortly after this little display, a group of Haredi Jews in Monsey picketed the local Neturei Karta synagogue, demanding that its members go live in Iran. Not gonna lie: I am here for that kind of petty energy, I like it.)
But if you thought the Neturei Karta couldn’t go any lower than a Holocaust denial conference, you are, sadly, mistaken. After Hamas’ stunning success in the Palestinian elections in 2006, the Neturei Karta officially pledged their allegiance to the terror group. And then (I have to laugh so I don’t cry), in 2018, they presented Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with a gift on behalf of the Jewish people, though, unclear what that gift actually was. (One of my weak spots is not knowing the best gifts to get people, so I really don’t envy them here, what do you get the man who has everything, lovingly provided by the Islamic Republic of Iran? A beeper?? Too soon. Noam, that was too soon! Sorry.)
Unsurprisingly, since October 7th, they’ve been having a field day. Not just at the pro-Hamas conference they attended in Tehran in December of 2023 two months after the terror group slaughtered 1200 Jews in a single day – but at the rallies and protests that have erupted across the world. They’re holding signs that read “Torah true Jews oppose the aggression in al-Aqsa and the occupation of all Palestine” and “Torah demands all Palestine be returned to Palestinian sovereignty.”
Because they’ll do anything if it means weakening Israel. For all of their signs about Palestinian rights, they don’t really care about Palestinians. If they did, if they did, they never would have met with Hamas. Let’s be real: they’d embrace anyone who hates Israel as much as they do.
And they’re getting more extreme by the day. In the past decade or so, a new, even loonier faction of the group has emerged. They call themselves the Sikarikim, or Sicarii, after the Jewish Zealots who fought the Roman Empire – and their fellow Jews – in the first century CE. And they do things like attack Haredi members of Knesset, terrorize local Haredi business owners for crimes like “carrying English-language books,” and harass and intimidate their neighbors.
The Sicarii took their name from the curved daggers they favored as weapons. And though the modern-day Sikarikim haven’t killed anyone that I know of, some Knesset members have called for the government to brand them, and the rest of the Neturei Karta, a terrorist group.
So that’s the story of the Neturei Karta. But we’re not quite done yet, not at all. I promised you a personal reckoning, an investigation into my own biases. Which brings us to the final chapter of this episode:
Chapter 3: What is this Feeling (Shoutout to my fellow Wicked Fans)
By this point, it’s clear that the Neturei Karta trigger me, big time. I stated that, I stated my bias. And I’m gonna tell you exactly why, though you may have picked up on it already from, you know, the past 30 minutes.
I wanna be clear: I’m not telling you why I detest their behavior so much because I want you to detest it too. Like I’ve said again and again: my job as an educator is not to tell you how to think or feel. It’s to ask questions, present facts, and encourage you to come to your own conclusions (and every now and then add snark along the way, which I can’t control in this episode).
Buttt, I actually think my reaction here is important, and not just because it got me a wife. It’s important because it IS so angry. So out of character. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why, and I think I’ve boiled it down to three separate factors.
Number one: representation.
There’s a concept in Judaism that of all non-kosher animals, the pig is the worst. Why? Because there are two physical requirements for a mammal to be kosher: split hooves and chewing its cud. The pig is deceptive. The idea is that it has split hooves, the external sign of being kosher, but it doesn’t chew its cud, which is the internal sign.
The pig is sneaky. Kosher on the outside, treyf within.
And that’s how I feel about the Neturei Karta. From the outside, they look like the most pious of Jews. People who don’t know much about Judaism could be confused. And even though they’re almost universally rejected and scorned by Jews who know anything, they’ve styled themselves as our representatives. And that bothers me.
I’ve always been visibly Jewish, by which I mean: you might see me wearing a kippah and a variety of Jewish-themed t-shirts. When I was growing up, my parents and teachers drilled into me that whether I liked it or not, my appearance made me an ambassador for the Jewish people. It doesn’t matter if that’s fair. It’s just a fact of life, I was told: people see a kid with a kippah behaving badly, they say God, classic Jews. People see a kid with a kippah being a total mensch, they think Aw, that’s nice. It’s not logical, but it’s the way the world works.
And the Neturei Karta exploit that constantly. They’ve weaponized their beards, their tzitzit, those religious fringes, their streimels, their very Jewishness. They know that if they call themselves “Torah Jews,” some of the world will believe them and say “look. Even the Jews don’t want a state. Even the Jews want Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran to wipe Israel off the map. We’re not antisemitic. We’re just following the Neturei Karta’s lead.
And that, that’s inexcusable.
OK, so that’s the first reason the Neturei Karta trigger me.
The second is a little more personal. Let’s call it Religious sentiment, just to keep with the alliterative theme here.
Just like the Neturei Karta, I aspire to be religious. Take Israel out of the equation, and we kinda have a lot in common. We pray the same way. We wrap leather around our arms and foreheads every day, because Jewish rituals are so baffling to the outside observer. (Those leather straps are known as tefillin, or phylacteries.) We revere so many of the same great rabbis. We eat – and don’t eat – the same things. We keep the same Shabbat. We’re part of the same minority within a minority: observant, religious Jews. And that should be nice. It should be a relief to see people who share my core values. It should make me feel a little less alone.
But that’s exactly why all this is so painful. We have all this in common – and yet we disagree so violently on such a core Jewish value, to such a degree, that they actively align with people who want my brothers and sisters in Israel (and maybe me?) dead. And that makes me sad and angry at the same time.
And then I remind myself that maybe the Neturei Karta aren’t my siblings. That while they look the part, they actually reject Judaism.
Which brings me to the final reason that the Neturei Karta make me so upset: Rejectionism. In my eyes, the Neturei Karta are distorting and rejecting the essence of Judaism.
I mentioned at the top of this episode that before 1948, religious anti-Zionism was neither rare nor extreme. Great rabbis who I respect and admire, initially opposed the prospect of a Jewish state. One I didn’t mention earlier was the haredi leader and brilliant Torah thinker Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, more commonly known as the Hazon Ish. The Hazon Ish was deeply opposed to secular Zionism. But rather than fight against the Jewish State, he worked with Ben Gurion, fighting – hard – to ensure Israel’s religious future.
It was a complicated, frosty relationship. They agreed on almost nothing. They argued about almost everything. But they prized one thing above all others: the future of the Jewish people. And that shared love for Am Yisrael, the Jewish people, enabled them to put aside their many, many differences and work together to build the Israel we know today.
But the Neturei Karta don’t lead with love. They hate Zionists, whether religious or secular. They don’t see them as Jews, but as heretics. And they’re willing to sacrifice millions of Jewish lives to wipe Israel off the map – even if their signs say they support the “peaceful” dismantling of Israel. Call me crazy, but I don’t think anyone who meets with Hamas and Hezbollah is into “peace.”
So that is the story of the Neturei Karta, and here are your five fast facts.
- Before the founding of the state of Israel, most haredi Jews rejected Zionism on religious grounds.
- After the rise of the Nazis, and certainly after the Holocaust, most (though not all) Haredi groups became non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, in order to ensure that the Jewish state stays Jewish, according to their definition of Judaism.
- Unlike other Haredim, the Neturei Karta want to dismantle the state of Israel at any cost – even if that means allying with terrorists, murderers, Holocaust deniers, and antisemites.
- The Neturei Karta claim to represent the larger Jewish community. And because they look the part, they get a LOT of attention, even validation, from the outside world.
- But the Neturei Karta are anathema to even the staunchest haredi anti-Zionist because they do not understand Jewish peoplehood. They have chosen their enemies over their brothers. And that makes so many of us angry and sad in almost equal measure.
Those are your five fast facts. But here’s one enduring lesson as I see it:
It sounds so odd to say, but our worst enemies understood Judaism and Jewishness better than the Neturei Karta do.
Spicy take, I know. But I think it’s true.
We’ve had a lot of haters over the past few millennia. We, meaning we the Jewish people. But they all had one thing in common. Whether they were Babylonians or Assyrians, whether Seleucids or Romans, Crusaders or Cossacks, Nazis or the IRGC, Hezbollah or Hamas: none of them cared what type of Jew you were. What you believed, how you prayed, whether you kept kosher or believed that the State of Israel should exist. To our enemies, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, and in this one thing, they are correct, and the Neturei Karta are wrong.
Being Jewish means caring about Jews. It means rejoicing when your people rejoice and mourning when your people mourn.
That’s not my idea. That comes from the Tanya, and really much earlier, but also the Tanya, the seminal work of the Alter Rebbe, founder of the Chabad movement. I’m not a huge Tanya guy, but chapter 32 is often considered the “heart” of the text – and not only because the numerical value of “lev,” the Hebrew word for “heart,” just happens to be 32. (Lamed is 30, bet is 2, that’s how it works.)
This chapter is dedicated to the “great principle” of the Torah: love your neighbor. Love your fellow Jew. Because just as your soul is a part of God, so is theirs. Loving your fellow Jew is a way of loving God. And once you recognize that we are all tiny sparks scattered from one Divine source, superficial differences melt away.
Do you know what the non-Zionist haredim of Jerusalem did after October 7th?
They collected donations and food and clothes for fellow Jews who had been displaced. They spent hours hand-tying tzitziot for soldiers who needed them. They donated blood and breastmilk. They volunteered for everything from babysitting to visiting bereaved families to doing laundry for overwhelmed moms whose husbands were on the front lines. They danced in the streets when a female soldier, Ori Megidish, was rescued from Hamas captivity. And some even lined up outside the IDF enlistment office.
Because that is what Jews do for each other. That is what it means to be a family.
The Neturei Karta do the opposite. They see the Jewish people’s pain and suffering – and they sit with the people who caused it. And I don’t see how I could forgive them for that.
They may be loud, visible, attention-grabbing, sensational. But they don’t represent Jews. No matter how big their shtreimels or how long their beards, they have no idea what Judaism really is.
Do they not remember that Judaism isn’t simply a set of religious practices, but a national covenant? That we are a people, as one body, with one heart? Do they truly believe that “authentic Judaism” doesn’t have its own politics and national identity and army and state? Do they truly believe the Diaspora stripped us of this national identity?
I think they do. I think they do believe that. Which means they have fundamentally misunderstood what it means to be Jewish. They simply do not understand. And until they drop their repulsive anti-Jewish hatemongering, they never, ever will.