There’s an organization based in Midtown Manhattan that trains and organizes more than 2,000 rabbis and cantors across North America. It uses the language of Torah and invokes human dignity. It has a section on its website dedicated to fighting antisemitism. And it runs a program called “(re)thinking Zionism(s),” designed specifically for clergy because the people standing on the bimah shaping how Jewish communities understand Israel aren’t just a constituency. They’re the target.
T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights was founded in 2002 as Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, originally a sister organization to an Israeli human rights group by the same name. It rebranded in 2013. Its CEO, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the staff is largely Jewish.
Funding comes from within the Jewish philanthropic world. Its website is professional, the cause framing is impeccable, and if you only read the surface, it looks like a Jewish organization performing social-justice work.
But the substance is much more specific than that.
T’ruah’s Israel-related campaign work is organized under the heading “Ending the Occupation.” It offers tours of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) for clergy members. It has a dedicated issue page on what it describes as “free speech and the right to boycott,” which in this context means the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the State of Israel. It runs Communities of Practice, ongoing training and relationship-building programs for rabbinical and cantorial students and ordained clergy. One of those communities is explicitly organized around “(re)thinking Zionism(s).”
That program isn’t a debate seminar. It’s a clergy-formation track. The people who go through it aren’t random participants; they are future rabbis who will write sermons, run religious schools, counsel families and lead High Holiday services for decades. T’ruah is in the business of moving those clergy toward an alarmingly specific position on Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state. And it’s doing it through the institutional access that comes with being a recognized Jewish organization, incorporating the vocabulary of Jewish law and tradition.
A non-Jewish organization calling for the dismantling of Zionism from the outside would be recognized for what it is. When that same entity is conducted by ordained rabbis invoking tikkun olam and the Hebrew prophets, it’s harder to name without being accused of attacking religious speech. Jewish institutional credibility is the method, and Jewish institutions are the point of entry.
In 2013, more than 800 rabbis and cantors organized by T’ruah signed a letter opposing what the organization calls “unilateral annexation” of the West Bank. Its current student programming is designed to show future rabbis the consequences of what it calls “perpetual occupation.”
It took the position during the Trump administration that detaining immigrant children was a Jewish moral issue requiring rabbinic mobilization, while at the same time running campaigns to restrict how American Jewish institutions engage with Israel. The domestic work and the Israel work aren’t parallel tracks. They share a political framework, and that framework isn’t neutral on Jewish statehood.
T’ruah’s most recent public activity includes condemning a bill that would have imposed the death penalty on Hamas and Palestinian Arab terrorists who slaughtered 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 others hostage into the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023. It was also focused on publishing a piece by one of its rabbis on what it describes as “Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians.” That same week, it held its 2026 gala on June 2 at B’nai Jeshurun on New York City’s Upper West Side, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave a speech.
The domestic work and the Israel work aren’t parallel tracks.
Mamdani, who revoked New York City’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism on his first day in office, was presented at the gala as an ally in the fight against antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League launched a dedicated monitoring project for Mamdani’s tenure that same week.
The people who fund T’ruah are, in most cases, Jews who believe that they are supporting a human-rights organization that happens to be Jewish. Some of them know exactly what the Israel programming involves and support it. But a meaningful number of donors in the Jewish philanthropic world write checks to organizations with “Jewish” in the mission statement without examining what the programming actually does. T’ruah benefits from that habit.
What makes it distinct isn’t that it holds left-wing positions on Israeli policy. Jewish communities have always contained robust debate about the occupation, settlements and the peace process.
What makes T’ruah worth examining is that it’s not running a debate. It’s running a training program. It’s recruiting clergy before they have congregations; shaping how they read the relevant texts and understand the relevant history; and placing them in Jewish institutions where their authority is religious, not political. The communities that receive these clergy don’t necessarily know their rabbi was trained by an organization whose stated campaign goal is ending Israeli control of Judea and Samaria, or that the same rabbi completed a program designed to interrogate the foundations of Zionism.
Transparency would require T’ruah to disclose that to the synagogues and rabbinical schools that partner with it. It does not.
There’s a longer conversation to be had about how the Jewish philanthropic infrastructure keeps funding organizations whose work undermines the Jewish community’s stated interests. T’ruah is one piece of that, not the whole picture. Still, it operates specifically inside Jewish institutions, using Jewish language, with Jewish clergy as both its product and its delivery vehicle.
The question is whether Jewish communities are aware that a well-funded organization has been systematically cultivating anti-Zionist positions in their rabbis, which are then imparted to the congregation, and Sunday-school and Hebrew school students. And what they want to do about it now that they know.
