Searching for the Jewish Future in South Florida

In September 2023, I met Gabriel Groisman at a “health and wellness” café called Pura Vida, just across Indian Creek from the Miami Beach village of Bal Harbour, where Groisman—a genial 43-year-old lawyer and father of five—served as mayor from 2016 to 2022. We drank smoothies in white wicker chairs under spiky seagrass lampshades, and he told me why Miami is the best place in the United States to be Jewish.

“Just in the Bal Harbour area, there’s five synagogues, and if you count the minyans, there’s even more,” he said. “I could walk into the Syrian synagogue or the Moroccan synagogue or the Chabad or the ultra-Orthodox meeting at the hotel here, and it’s the same response. They’ll invite you to their homes. If you’re single, they’ll find you a girlfriend. It’s a very welcoming community.”

What also sets Miami Jews apart, Groisman told me, is the uniformity of their support for Israel. “If you travel to other Jewish communities, you could find some people who work against Israel,” he said. “Here, it’s de minimis. Within the Jewish community, it’s different shades of pro-Israel.” Groisman’s shade of pro-Israel involves spending a lot of time in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “There’s huge, beautiful cities there,” he told me. “A lot of thriving Jewish life.” He’s friends with many of the mayors of those cities. He even has a street named after him in a small settlement near the Palestinian city of Jericho. A longtime adviser and “Jewish whisperer” to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, he was in attendance at the 2019 West Bank ceremony where DeSantis signed a Memorandum of Understanding to promote research collaboration between Florida Atlantic University and Ariel University—the first such agreement between an American public university and an Israeli university in a West Bank settlement.

Groisman’s support for the settlement project puts him at odds with the majority of American Jews; in the Pew Research Center’s 2020 study of Jewish Americans, 63% said they supported the existence of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. But in Miami—by all accounts, one of the country’s most conservative, staunchly Zionist Jewish communities—he may be less of an outlier than elsewhere. For Groisman, Miami’s devotion to Israel has cemented its communal influence. “Miami today is the epicenter of Jewish life in the United States,” he told me with confidence. “It was New York, and today it’s Miami. Fifteen years ago we had to beg people to come here and speak. Now, whether it’s members of the Israeli Knesset or officials from all over the country—when they want to speak about Israel, they come here.”

I went to Miami last fall, just a few weeks before Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s ensuing assault on Gaza, speaking to rabbis, lay leaders, fundraisers, educators, and business owners in an attempt to understand Miami’s unique brand of Jewish life and politics—and what it might mean for the future of Jewish life in the rest of the US. As I heard from Groisman and others, Miami appears to be bucking many of the trends that have prompted handwringing in other communities, including disaffiliation from Jewish institutions, intermarriage, and, of course, visible Jewish dissent around Israel. In its most recent study of the Miami-Dade County Jewish population, from 2014, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation reported that 71% of households included at least one member who had visited Israel and 62% of Jewish Miamians felt “extremely” or “very” attached to Israel, higher numbers than any other community at the time.

The study showed that Miami stood out in other areas, too: 74% of respondents said that being Jewish was “very important” to them, compared to 46% nationally. Miami had the country’s lowest rates of marriage outside of the Jewish community, with just 16% of couples intermarried, compared to 61% nationally. Thanks to decades of immigration from Latin America, Israel, and the former Soviet Union, Miami also had the highest proportion of foreign-born Jews, comprising a third of all Jewish adults. “We are the most dynamic, the most diverse, and the most Zionistic Jewish community in the diaspora,” Paul Kruss, a Venezuelan Jew and co-owner of Mo’s Bagels and Deli, told me. (“Zionistic” seems to be a common Miami-ism.)

“So many other communities are shrinking, but ours is growing,” said Lily Serviansky, board chair at the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. Not only that—it seems to be getting younger. “The beaches used to be retirees from New York. It’s a young Orthodox community now,” said Ira Sheskin, a demographer at the University of Miami. And growth isn’t limited to the Orthodox community; both The Shul of Bal Harbour (Chabad-Lubavitch) and Temple Beth Am in Pinecrest (Reform) have just completed multimillion-dollar expansions. “People stay here,” said Suzanne Harper, until recently the Florida executive director of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO). “If you went to Beach High, then your kids go to Beach High. Most of my donors, their [adult] kids are all here.” (Serviansky, who grew up in Mexico, attributes this to “the Latin influence,” which puts more of an emphasis on children staying near their parents into adulthood.)

This vigor was evident in the sheer volume of Jewish programming on offer during the one week I was in South Florida, much of it Israel-related. Over those few days, I could have attended a concert to benefit WIZO, a boxing class to benefit Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF), the Israeli Consulate’s Rosh Hashanah party, a Young Jewish Con­servatives dinner party, a showcase for Israeli tech startups, and a “reverse tashlich” beach clean-up for young adults.

The community is not only growing, but growing more conservative. According to the 2014 population study, Jews in the area under 50 are much less likely to identify as Democrats than those over 50. There’s an old idea of Miami as an island of blue in a red state, but “I think that’s less true than it’s ever been,” said Janu Mendel, a mixed-race Jew from Jamaica who works for the Jewish social justice organization Repair the World. “The place feels a lot more red than blue these days,” he told me, in the Jewish community as much as any other.

As Jewish communities around the country have seen their commitment to Israel ​​come into direct conflict with otherwise liberal politics, Miami may represent one way to resolve this contradiction—in Israel’s favor. Does the future of American Jewish life, if the most pro-Israel elements remain in control of its institutions, look much like Miami? Or is Miami so unique as to be exceptional within a wider Jewish community still attached to liberalism? These questions have only become more relevant since October 7th, with mainstream Jewish institutions doubling down on Zionism while Jewish dissent reaches a fever pitch.

Groisman, for his part, believes that Miami Jews are the vanguard for American Jews writ large. “Every strong Jewish community today also has a strong connection to Israel,” he told me, and eventually, he claimed, Jews who actually care about “living a Jewish life” will come to see the importance of advocating for “Biblical Israel,” also known as “Greater Israel”—in other words, for unfettered Jewish rule from the river to the sea. “That’s the future of American Jewry,” he said.

In the last few years, Florida has often been described as a laboratory for conservative politics. Under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, bans on books, abortion, and trans health care have provided a model for other conservatives around the country to copy. The state—and particularly South Florida—have served the same function for pro-Israel politics, testing out strategies for curbing pro-Palestine advocacy and exporting them to the rest of the nation. Groisman has been at the forefront of this movement from his perch in Bal Harbour, a village of 3,500 people on one square mile of land, best known for the ultra-luxury Bal Harbour Shops. In 2015, as a member of the Bal Harbour Village Council, Groisman passed and implemented the first municipal anti-BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) ordinance in the US, preventing the city from entering into contracts with companies that are boycotting Israel. Similar legislation had just begun to pop up at the state level, including in South Carolina that June. (Today, 38 states have anti-BDS laws or executive orders on the books.) But the BDS movement saw momentum that year, too: Also in June, the mainline Protestant denomination United Church of Christ (UCC) voted overwhelmingly to divest from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation.

When the UCC resolution passed, Groisman knew there was a UCC congregation in his backyard, The Church by the Sea, that would soon have business before the Village Council: After the church sold their building to the neighboring Bal Harbour Shops, the council needed to approve the subsequent redevelopment deal. So he called up then-State Representative Alan Clemmons, sponsor of the South Carolina bill, to ask for advice, then wrote his own ordinance for Bal Harbour, which passed unanimously. A few months later, when the deal came before the council, Groisman was ready for it. After meeting with Groisman, the church publicly repudiated and rejected the UCC’s resolution and withdrew nearly $3 million of investment funds from the national organization. Bal Harbour approved the deal, the Shops expanded, and worship is now held every Sunday in the Astor Ballroom at the St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort.

All this made Groisman something of a celebrity in the pro-Israel world. He went on a “whirlwind tour around the country” speaking at conferences and colleges, and advising other municipalities about his success. “Dozens of mayors reached out to me to try to understand how to do it,” he told me. He was invited to speak at the United Nations by Danny Danon, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, where he made the case for his ordinance to hundreds of legal scholars at an anti-BDS conference convened by the World Jewish Congress.

In 2017, with Groisman now mayor, Bal Harbour again made history as the first municipality in the US to adopt a uniform definition of antisemitism. (He used the US State Department’s working definition, nearly identical to the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, which critics say conflates anti-Zionism with anti­semitism.) The idea of codifying a definition of antisemitism into local law had been floating around in Jewish advocacy circles, Groisman told me, but he was motivated to take action in Bal Harbour after “BDS” was spray-painted near a number of Jewish-owned stores in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District. The police initially treated this as a minor case of vandalism—a misdemeanor—but Groisman believed it should have been classified as a hate crime, and therefore tried as a felony. He decided to lead by example. Though the offenders in the Wynwood graffiti case were never found, Groisman was later invited to speak to the Miami-Dade County Chiefs of Police Association, which then directed police departments in 34 South Florida cities to adopt Bal Harbour’s definition.

Given that he lives in what he described to me as “the best, safest place for Jews to live outside of Israel,” I asked Groisman why the issue of antisemitism was so important to him. “In the Talmud, it says, ‘Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh’: Every Jewish person has the responsibility to stand up for one another,” he said. “I don’t put up with the image of Jews as weak people. I think we have to fight back. I was raised not to put up with anyone who tries to hold our people down.”

Groisman’s parents met in Miami, where they had each fled from Argentina in the 1970s during the “Dirty War,” in which tens of thousands of people suspected of dissident political activities or socialist sympathies were killed or disappeared by the country’s military junta. Groisman says his parents weren’t involved in politics at all, but nevertheless decided to leave after close encounters with the military; his mother’s best friend was among los desaparecidos.

Groisman’s family story is not unusual in Miami, where in 2016 the American Jewish Committee estimated 35% of Jews—nearly 30,000 people—were Latino, a number that has likely only grown since. Since the arrival of Cuban Jews—frequently called “Jewbans”—in the 1960s following the Cuban Revolution, there have been significant migrations of Jews from Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and, more recently, Venezuela. These migrations have contributed not only to the growth of Miami’s Jewish community, but also to its politics. Frequently, those who experienced violence or dispossession under Latin American leftist regimes reject the American left—especially in Miami, which swung 23 points toward Trump in 2020 thanks in large part to the Cuban and Venezuelan vote. But even Groisman, whose parents fled a right-wing dictatorship in Argentina, sees American autocracy only on the left. When I asked him whether he had any concerns about the erosion of democracy in DeSantis’s Florida, he dismissed the question out of hand and quickly pivoted to criticize the criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump: “Going after political rivals, as someone with a Latin American background, that’s something that is scary to see.”

For many Latin American Jews, it seems that being only one generation removed from the experience of exile reinforces their view of Israel as a necessary source of security. In Groisman’s case, his connection to the state has also been reinforced by his family’s close commercial, philanthropic, and political ties to the Jewish state. He married into the Falic family, also of Bal Harbour, which owns and operates Duty Free Americas, a company with more than 200 stores at airports and borders in 10 countries. In addition to their Duty Free empire, the Falics are major investors in Psagot Winery, whose vineyards are planted on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. (Groisman represented Psagot in the winery’s ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against the government of France to prevent its wines from being labeled as settlement products.) The Falic family has given generously to American pro-Israel charities like WIZO and FIDF, but has also poured its wealth into right-wing causes in Israel. Between 2009 and 2022, the Falics gave some $6.4 million to Israeli settlement organizations and at least $200,000 to right-wing Israeli politicians. In addition, they have donated at least $100,000 to Benjamin Netanyahu’s political campaigns over the course of his career—making the family his biggest financial backers. Over the last 15 years, they have also donated around $2.6 million to pro-Israel politicians and PACs in the US—mostly Republicans, but also Democrats like Chuck Schumer and even Joe Biden.

The Falics have shunned publicity outside of their own social and political circles. But their activities have drawn the attention of the small but increasingly active South Florida chapter of the anti-Zionist Jewish group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP-SF). In recent years, JVP-SF has campaigned to make the Falics a notorious household name, like that of the late casino mogul and pro-Israel megadonor Sheldon Adelson. They kicked off their campaign in June 2021 with an action at the Duty Free Americas corporate office in Hollywood, north of Miami. Protesters from JVP-SF and partner organizations dressed up as movers carrying cardboard boxes to symbolically “evict” the Falics from their offices, and draw a connection to how their money supports the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. They passed out leaflets at local street fairs and protested at the sign marking the entrance to Bal Harbour. I asked Groisman if he was aware of this campaign. “Of course,” he said. “I think it’s a small group of complete losers. They don’t impact any of our lives at all.”

By the time I brought this up, I’d been talking to Groisman for more than an hour, and this was the first time he appeared to get emotional. “The hardest thing for me personally is where you have Jews that are working against the state of Israel and fighting against their own people—the IfNotNows and the J Streets of the world,” he said. He blames this betrayal on their parents: “that generation of American Jews that were so comfortable being here, they forgot to teach their kids what it meant to be Jewish.” Though he was not raised with much religious practice, Groisman has become more observant as an adult. He now believes that the Land of Israel was given to the Jewish people by God in the Torah, and if you don’t believe in the Torah, “then being Jewish means nothing.” Eventually, he believes, the “cultural” Jews will intermarry into oblivion, and the Jews agitating to change the community’s Israel politics will meet their own grim fate: “In generation after generation, it never works out well for Jews who have worked against their own community. They’re never accepted by other groups like they think they will be,” he said. In this regard, he said, Miami’s relative lack of dissent is not just a “breath of fresh air” but a “sign of things to come for the rest of the country.”

These days, there’s a new wave of migrants that could again reshape South Florida’s Jewish community. After successive arrivals of World War II veterans, Jewish retirees from the Northeast, and immigrants from Latin America, today’s huddled masses are conservatives, fleeing other parts of the US in search of sun and political fellowship.

“Florida’s been amazing to me,” the writer, lawyer, and pundit Josh Hammer told me. “One of the best decisions I’ve made in my entire life.” Hammer, 35, is senior editor-at-large at Newsweek magazine and hosts a weekly podcast and syndicated radio show, where he comments on Republican politics, rails against the left, and interviews conservative luminaries like anti-woke crusader Christopher Rufo and Senator Ted Cruz.

I met Hammer at a coffee shop in an outdoor mall next to a casino. For someone who trashes DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) for a living, he praised the diversity of the Miami Jewish community just as ardently as everyone else I talked to: “It’s just like a beautiful medley. It’s a tapestry of Jewish life.”

Hammer grew up in Westchester County, New York, but has moved around a lot. After stints in DC, Chicago, Texas, and Colorado, he came to Florida in August 2021. A lot of friends in his overlapping bubbles of Jews and right-wing politicos moved down around the same time. “This has become a real hub for people of my political orientation—fleeing to freedom, no taxes, blah blah blah,” he said, conscious of how common this story has become. He was attracted to all those things, too. But he was also 32 and going through a breakup—“you might say, looking for a fresh start.” It worked. He found a community, and a wife (she’s Israeli American). “For a long time, people said Miami was like an intellectual wastebin. It was where you had all the yachters and the trust-fund babies and the cocaine cowboys. But there really has been an influx of talent over the past few years,” he said, naming fellow conservative commentators and recent Floridians like Karol Markowicz, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Buck Sexton. “I spend a lot of time on social media, and you’re constantly feeling like you’re in a daily battle. So sometimes it’s nice to just hang out with friends and re-ground yourself.”

Hammer was raised in a vaguely Reform household—he dropped out of Hebrew school and his parents hired a “hippie-ish” rabbi to preside over his bar mitzvah in their backyard. But he says he’s been politically right-of-center since middle school. “9/11 was like my moment. I saw the smoke from the Twin Towers down the Hudson River. You realize there is evil in this world. You need guardrails in place,” he said. He started reading conservative political philosophy. “And then you start asking yourself, ‘Well, if there’s all this wisdom embodied in tradition, why am I not looking at my
own tradition?’”

He has increased his Jewish practice gradually over the past decade. Before he moved to Miami, he was eating “kosher-style.” But when he met his now-wife, “she said she was kosher, and I was like, ‘Alright, this seems like a sign from Hashem. I should probably step my game up.’” (The growing number of local kosher restaurants—many of them high-end—has been helpful.) This embrace of religious observance is, at least in part, a reaction against the Reform Jewish community he grew up in, which he describes as “just an outpost of the Democratic Party.” “When you’re so vehemently anti-tradition that driving to synagogue on Shabbat is fine, that eating a cheeseburger at a synagogue event is fine, you’re not going to have any attachment to conserving tradition. It’s really tragic. Because I don’t see how the Jewish people survives without Judaism itself,” he said, echoing what I had heard from Groisman.

For Hammer, conserving tradition isn’t just a religious principle, it’s a political one. “If you take conservatism seriously—trying to conserve the best of tradition and all of that—then what good are you if you’re not doing it?” He is an acolyte of Yoram Hazony, the Israeli American political philosopher (and onetime Netanyahu speechwriter) whose 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism has provided the foundation for the National Conservatism movement, which calls for the state to take an active role in enforcing traditional values. To stem the tide of what Hammer sees as rampant social decay and debauchery, he told me that “idiosyncratic claims of individual freedoms are increasingly going to have to be curtailed in the name of the common good.” Who gets to decide what’s in the common good? “That’s what the whole political arena is for,” he said.

Yet in practice, national conservatives, including Hammer, have advanced a somewhat less democratic vision. Before an audience at the third National Conservatism conference, held in Miami in September 2022, Hammer cited George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, English common law, and himself to make the case that conservatives should “go on offense” to enforce their image of a virtuous society. Where the law is ambiguous, conservative jurists should reject “deference to legislative majorities” and put “a muscular thumb on the scale” in favor of their desired outcomes. He concluded the speech with a conventional appeal to the Christian right: “We must get the Bibles back in schools, God back in the public square, and the liberal misnomer of so-called separation of church and state back where it belongs: the ash heap of history.” This may seem paradoxical for someone so committed to Jewish particularism, but the national conservatives’ Statement of Principles holds that “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision,” while Jews and “other religious minorities” should be “protected,” free to practice and educate their children however they see fit, so long as they don’t challenge majority rule (i.e., Christian supremacy) in the public realm. It’s no accident that Hazony sees in Israel the model for his ideal ethnostate.

Hammer, for his part, sees Florida as a prototype for the rest of the United States. “What you see in Florida is a willingness to get your hands dirty and actually implement an intellectual vision, even if that means wielding state power,” he said, pointing to DeSantis’s ban on local mask and vaccine mandates as well as his limits on instruction about gender, sexuality, and race. “The threat we are facing now,” Hammer explained to me, “is a sprawling cultural metastasis. That is going to necessitate using some power to push back. I think DeSantis grasps that better than any other Republican official in America.”

Though it’s possible that new transplants like Hammer are changing the numbers, a majority of Florida Jews are still Democrats. A 2020 Brandeis study estimated that 59% of Jews in Florida identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared to 65% of Jews nationally. Yet what it means to be a Jewish Democrat in Miami is not exactly the same as in other places. “I think there’s a perception across the country that Jews are liberal, and I’m not sure that that’s so true in South Florida,” Adam Schwartzbaum, 39, told me, “particularly when it comes to Israel.” Florida’s Jewish Democrats in Congress often vote like Republicans when it comes to Israel: Of the 22 Democratic House representatives who joined the GOP majority to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib last fall for using the slogan “From the river to the sea / Palestine will be free,” four were representatives from South Florida, three of them Jewish.

Schwartzbaum’s lonely role as the liberal Zionist within increasingly illiberal Jewish institutions can sometimes make him defensive. “I’m a David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, Labor Zionist. Okay? I am not anti-Israel, I am pro-Israel,” he said. “But if you’re pro-Israel, it means you need to be concerned about the conflict with Palestinians, because it’s an existential problem for Israel.” I met Schwartzbaum, a class action lawyer, at a hip Israeli restaurant nestled among diamond dealers in the atrium of a downtown Miami office building. He had just returned from his ninth Burning Man. For a millennial without children, Schwartzbaum is unusually active in his synagogue, Temple Menorah. Like his father and both sets of grandparents before him, he serves on the board—the youngest member by at least a decade.

His grandfather, Samuel, was a successful businessman in Cuba in 1959 when Fidel Castro took power and began to nationalize the Cuban economy. According to Schwartzbaum family lore, a friend connected with Castro offered to make Samuel the manager of a plantation, but he declined, saying, “I refuse to manage stolen land.” “To me, that’s Jewish values,” Schwartzbaum told me. Instead, his grandfather gave up everything he had and left the country with his wife and two children, joining the 200,000 Cubans, including 10,000 Cuban Jews, who resettled in the US between 1959 and 1962. The wider Miami Jewish community first reacted to the arrival of Cuban Jews with prejudice, but many families like the Schwartzbaums found a home at Temple Menorah, which accepted so many new Cuban Jewish congregants that Rabbi Mayer Abramowitz reinterpreted the Hebrew song “Hava Nagila” as “Havana-gila.”

A local landmark in Miami Beach, partially designed by famed Jewish “Miami Modern” architect Morris Lapidus, the synagogue has a belvedere tower that looks like a cheese grater, flanked by five Modernist arches with stained-glass installations that were recently replaced with storm windows. Schwartzbaum described Temple Menorah as “Conservadox.” In fact, the congregation disaffiliated from the Conservative movement several years ago because they believed it had become too lax on theological questions like kashrut and interfaith dating. What hasn’t changed is the synagogue’s commitment to Israel: Temple Menorah makes the largest annual purchase of Israel Bonds of any congregation in the US. Every year, on Yom Kippur, the customary annual appeal for member donations is devoted instead to entreating congregants to purchase Israel Bonds. That plea is always delivered by Oscar Feldenkreis, CEO of clothing empire Perry Ellis International and a prolific local philanthropist.

Adam Schwartzbaum has been immersed in Jewish and Zionist institutions all his life: he went to Jewish schools and Jewish camps; he started the Student Alliance for Israel at his high school and later co-founded the Israel Bonds Young Investor Society. All the while, he saw no conflict between his pro-Israel activism and his liberal ideals. “I’d always been a believer in the two-state solution, and I never thought that belief was incompatible with Israel’s right to defense,” he said. That changed in college, when he traveled to Israel as part of an advocacy mission co-sponsored by Hillel and AIPAC, and found that no one was willing to discuss the problem of settlements or the occupation. When the trip leaders brought a group of West Bank settlers to speak to the students, Schwartzbaum stood up and challenged them: “I essentially said to them, ‘Aren’t you guys a barrier to a two-state solution? Isn’t that a problem?’ People were shocked that I had the temerity to ask such a question.”

His senior year of college at Brandeis University, Schwartzbaum produced and directed a play called Crossing Jerusalem, by Jewish British writer Julia Pascal. The play, which takes place during the Second Intifada, depicts a dramatic encounter between a Jewish Israeli family and Palestinians who work at a restaurant in East Jerusalem. “It’s a beautiful piece of art,” Schwartzbaum says. “It’s nuanced, and it presents every point of view.” At Brandeis, it was a “huge success.” A decade later, the theater director at the North Dade’s Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center (JCC) called Schwartzbaum to say he was putting on a production of Crossing Jerusalem, and offered him a lead role.

“This play was read and vetted by members of the board of the JCC,” Schwartzbaum told me. “This was not a surprise.” Still, as the February 2016 opening night approached, some board members became squeamish. At their urging, the director agreed to add an insert in the program with selective “facts” about the conflict from a pro-Israel perspective and to bring someone from the David Project—a group dedicated to building support for Israel on college campuses—onstage for a Q&A after every performance. But it wasn’t enough. During the Saturday night show on its opening weekend, a group of activists started heckling and booing the actors—led by one of the same JCC board members who had approved the play. Two days after the Sunday matinee, the JCC president announced that all remaining performances of Crossing Jerusalem would be canceled. On Facebook, Schwartzbaum called the cancellation a “heartbreaking capitulation to the forces of fear and ignorance” that “exemplifies how a minority of extreme voices is . . . using bully tactics to manipulate the conversation about Israel.” Eight years later, he’s still angry about what happened: “If you have a different point of view, then you’re an enemy, which is insane. I am not an enemy of the Jewish community! I am a pillar of the Jewish community! But people like me have been demonized.”

This was not Schwartzbaum’s last brush with cancellation. Later that same year, he wanted to help the two-state solution lobby J Street make inroads in Miami by staging an event featuring New York Times columnist Roger Cohen. They struggled to find a Jewish communal organization that would host; they were invited by the rabbi at a Conservative synagogue in South Dade called Bet Shira, but after pushback from its board members, the synagogue shut down the event a week before it was supposed to take place. (Not long after, the rabbi was forced out.) Schwartzbaum’s own Temple Menorah refused to help. In the end, J Street had to rent an event space from a public park, but the show went on—and it was standing-room only. To Schwartzbaum, the energy at the Roger Cohen event proved that “there is a hunger in the community” for critical discussion of Israel and Palestine, but that it’s “suppressed” by leadership and ultra-wealthy donors. (A longtime leader at J Street, who requested anonymity to speak freely, was less optimistic when we spoke: He told me the organization has effectively “no presence” in Miami “because there’s no point.”)

A few days after I first met Schwartzbaum, he picked me up in his Audi convertible and drove me to Temple Menorah for the Slichos service, held the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah. In the back of the social hall, there were pastelitos and churros for the assembled congregants, mostly middle-aged and older. Before the service began, Rabbi Eliot Pearlson projected a few YouTube videos onto a large screen above the stage. The last was an Israeli short film called “My Brother,” in which a secular Israeli rebuffs the familiar greeting of a religious man—“achi,” brother—only to be taught a lesson about Jewish unity when the man lifts his sleeve to reveal himself to be a Holocaust survivor. “I had a very good teacher who taught me that all Jews are brothers,” he tells the younger man. “Adolf Hitler.” When another young man approaches the bus stop, dressed in the unmistakable uniform of radical settlers—long straight sidelocks, a knit kippah, a ratty t-shirt over tzitzit—our protagonist addresses him as “brother.” Roll credits.

I heard a version of this message over and over again during my time in Miami. As Jews, we have more in common than we have differences. Respect the settler as you do the survivor. Don’t let “politics” distract you from what’s important. Schwartzbaum has tried to live this maxim, despite the difficulties. In 2018, he threatened to quit the Temple Menorah board when Feldenkreis, in his yearly Yom Kippur Israel Bonds appeal, criticized J Street as a “pro-BDS group.” (J Street has always opposed BDS.) The synagogue’s president spent two hours convincing Schwartzbaum to stay on, saying the board needed perspectives like his. Schwartzbaum agreed, and he’s glad he did. “I think the Jews have to stick together. I think we have to be as united as possible. We are one Jewish family,” he told me. “I’d rather us be looking each other in the eye and respectfully disagreeing than not seeing each other at all.” Given everything else he’d told me, I confessed to some skepticism. Does anyone in his community actually listen to his perspective? “Some people absolutely do,” he told me. “But I’m not going to name names.”

When Donna Nevel, 68, was growing up in Miami Beach in the 1960s, the Jewish community looked very different—and so did internal dissent. At the time, South Beach was home to a community of older Jewish retirees, many of them Holocaust survivors. Donna and her father, Joe Nevel, would visit the neighborhood often, and she would hear the old-timers yelling at one another in Yiddish. “I’d say, ‘Dad, what are they yelling about?’ And he would say, ‘It’s the socialists and the communists and the anarchists, and they’re fighting as if they’re back in the old country.’” Joe, a Yiddishist, reveled in the scene. “‘They love each other,’ he told me.”

The Nevels belonged to the large Reform congregation Temple Beth Sholom, which called itself “the Liberal congregation on the beach.” But even then, her family’s values cut against the grain. As other Jewish families became wealthier, they adopted a more materialistic sensibility, Nevel told me: “You had to look a certain way and dress a certain way.” She didn’t fit into the “Miami Beach girl scene”; she felt more aligned with her parents than many of her peers. “I couldn’t wait to get out.”

Nevel left Miami as soon as she turned 18, and spent four decades in New York City, making a life working in social justice. She identified as a Marxist Zionist until 1989, when she worked directly with Palestinian organizers (including the late Edward Said) to stage the historic “Road to Peace” conference at Columbia University. She later co-founded Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and the anti-occupation group Jews Say No! But she often visited Miami to see her family. In 1984, her father bought Wolfie’s Restaurant, a landmark Jewish delicatessen, which he ran more like a community space than a business; even as his elderly clientele dwindled, their kitchenless rooming houses upgraded to boutique Art Deco hotels, he never got rid of the famous “early bird special.” When he died in 2002, more than a thousand people attended his funeral.

“If you had told me I was going to move back to Miami Beach, I would have told you you’re off the wall,” Nevel says. And yet, a few years ago, that’s what she did. By 2016, she and her husband, Alan Levine, a civil rights lawyer, were empty-nesters who could do their work from anywhere; they loved living on the ocean, and they quickly became integrated into a vibrant organizing community. In her role as co-director of the social justice research and education center PARCEO, Nevel had been working with Muslim organizers in New York who put her in touch with their peers in South Florida. The former head of the Florida Immigrant Coalition happened to live in their building. And they joined the small local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. (Nevel had previously been involved with JVP’s national organization.) She loved the local leaders she met: “incredible, thoughtful, beautiful people.” In 2021, the chapter launched its campaign targeting the Falic family and Duty Free Americas, which helped it grow from about a dozen active members to roughly double that.

Since Nevel’s formative experience working on the “Road to Peace” conference, she always knew that she didn’t want to do her Palestine work “in isolation, with just Jews.” But despite inroads made over the last several years, Jewish groups and Palestinian groups across the country are often segregated from one another, struggling to find common language and principles. South Florida has been a striking exception. In 2018, a number of groups, including JVP-SF, Al-Awda – The Palestinian Right to Return Movement, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the racial justice group Dream Defenders came together to form South Florida Coalition for Palestine, which meets weekly and closely collaborates on protests and other actions. When asked what makes this kind of coalition possible in South Florida, where it has been elusive elsewhere, Nevel insisted on the uniqueness of the organizing landscape in South Florida. “We don’t think we’re the center of the universe down here,” she said, which contributes to a sense of humility about the work. There are “no egos, no jockeying.” Some of that is a function of size, and the preciousness of each organizing space, whereas in New York, she explained, “there are so many different groups you can join. If you don’t like one, you can move to another.” But it’s also the exigencies of living in a “fascist climate,” which constantly reinforces the stakes. “Our JVP is heavily queer and trans, many of our friends are undocumented,” Nevel said, referring to DeSantis’s attacks on both communities. In South Florida, “we really rely on each other.”

But the focus on coalition work doesn’t mean that Nevel and JVP-SF have abandoned the prospect of reaching more mainstream South Florida Jews. She has written editorials for the South Florida Sun Sentinel and The Palm Beach Post. Though the local Jewish press won’t publish their articles, the chapter has placed paid ads in the one Jewish paper that will accept them (even the ads got hate mail). “Have we transformed any synagogues? No, and I don’t see that happening,” she told me. So instead of trying to break into these institutions, she prefers to focus on building power among Jews outside of them. “I feel confident that there are a lot more Jews who, even if they’re not joining us, are not unhappy we’re out here.”

Three weeks after I left Miami, Hamas fighters attacked the south of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu quickly moved into a luxury villa in Jerusalem owned by Simon Falic, Groisman’s father-in-law. (The Falic villa reportedly has an advanced missile shelter.) Netanyahu’s son Yair now lives in Miami, in an apartment also owned by the Falics. The visual landscape of Miami transformed in the ensuing weeks and months: Israeli flags flew everywhere—on people’s boats, in front of Jewish-owned businesses. Many people wore Jewish stars or dog tags honoring the Israeli hostages. “When you enter Miami Beach on 41st Street, there used to be a big mural there, ‘Welcome to Miami Beach,’” Schwartzbaum told me in late May. “Now, it’s covered head to toe, the entire two stories of the building, with pictures of the hostages.” Outside his window—he was looking at it as we spoke—there was a massive digital billboard that had been running pictures of the hostages 24/7 since October. He told me he found it comforting.

“This community was amongst the strongest in the world in their support for the state of Israel and the victims of October 7th,” Groisman told me. We caught up this spring as he was driving to a meeting at the Israeli Consulate. Since October 7th, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation has organized eight trips to Israel; Miami philanthropists have given at least $30 million to the Israel Emergency Fund, $18 million to United Hatzalah, and $10 million to FIDF. Groisman personally escorted two groups of October 7th survivors and hostages’ families to meet with members of the US Congress and talk to the press. In June 2024, he led a “solidarity mission” to Israel with a delegation of 15 chiefs of staff to US state governors.