By Josh Nathan-Kazis December 19, 2016

Donald Trump’s pick for Ambassador to Israel isn’t just a columnist for the far-right Israeli news site Arutz Sheva — he’s the president of its owner’s American fundraising arm.

The nomination of David Friedman, the bankruptcy attorney Trump plucked from relative obscurity last April, has drawn stiff opposition from liberal Jewish groups.

Opponents have paid particular attention to columns that Friedman wrote for Arutz Sheva. In a June column, Friedman wrote that supporters of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street are “far worse than kapos,” referring to the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis inside the concentration camps.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

Yet Friedman’s deeper ties to the settler news site have drawn little notice.

Friedman is the president of a Queens-based charity called American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva, which sends just under $2 million each year to an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva in the Israeli settlement of Bet El. That yeshiva, now called Bet El Institutions, also runs Arutz Sheva.

Founded in the 1980s as an Israeli pirate radio station transmitted from a ship anchored in the Mediterranean, Arutz Sheva stopped broadcasting in 2003, after Israeli courts convicted the station’s employees of radio piracy. Israeli president Moshe Katsav later pardoned the station’s founder.

Today, Arutz Sheva operates a website and a free weekly newspaper. Based in Bet El, it is particularly popular among settlers. Its English-language edition, israelnationalnews.com, is perhaps the most consistently right-wing English media outlet in Israel with a mainstream audience.

In 2010, Arutz Sheva marked the fifteenth anniversary of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination with a contest soliciting the “most interesting” conspiracy theory about the murder.

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make a Passover Gift Today!

$90 $180

$360

Other amount