(Jewish Group) Israeli PM Bennett to American Jewish leaders: 'We have to redesign our relationship'

The first thing Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, facing a room full of the leaders of the American Jewish community: “I wish my mom were here.”

The son of Americans who immigrated to Israel from San Francisco, Bennett, like his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, speaks a fluent, nearly accentless English, and spent years living in the United States as both a child and an adult.

But in other crucial ways, Bennett sounded different from Netanyahu in his first public address to American Jewish leaders as prime minister. The speech, delivered in Manhattan a couple hours after he addressed the United Nations Sept. 27, was given to dozens of heads of the Jewish federation system, leading rabbis and other organizational bigwigs. It was the first time many of them had seen each other since the start of the pandemic.

They received him warmly. In recent years, the relationship between Netanyahu and major American Jewish groups had soured, particularly after he froze an agreement to expand a non-Orthodox prayer space at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2017. A month before Netanyahu left office, one of his closest aides said at an Israeli conference that Israel “should be spending a lot more time doing outreach to evangelical Christians than you would do to Jews.”

Bennett struck a different tone. Just like he did at the U.N. earlier that day, Israel’s current prime minister drew a contrast in style from his predecessor without mentioning his name. He talked about how much Israel could learn from American Jews, and how important it was for the two poles of the global Jewish community to have a mutually respectful conversation.

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