JTA — When Mickey Gitzin arrived in New York last month with two young daughters and a few winter coats hastily packed in Israel, he was stepping into a role that once would have seemed improbable for the organization he now leads.

Gitzin, 44, was named interim president and CEO of the New Israel Fund in December, as its longtime CEO, Daniel Sokatch, begins a year-long sabbatical. Gitzin takes over at an organization that funds progressive Jewish and Arab organizations in Israel that are often at odds with the Israeli government. As a result, it has been vilified by Israel’s right and their allies in the United States as dangerously radical, even traitorous.

And yet today, as Israel is led by its most right-wing government ever and anti-Zionism is growing on the American left, NIF finds itself in a different, if no less precarious, position: defending a space in the Jewish mainstream that is fiercely critical of Israeli policy while affirming a version of Zionism that aligns with democratic equality.

“NIF was always in the forefront when it came to the liberal progressive ideas that were later on absorbed by the mainstream,” said Gitzin, the first Israeli to lead the organization, in a Zoom interview. “We are not there to be the mainstream. We’re there to push the mainstream, but in order to push the mainstream, you need to be in touch with the mainstream and not give up on it, which is a very, very fine line.”

That position leaves NIF open to criticism from both sides. To some on the American left, Zionism of any stripe is incompatible with democracy and human rights for Palestinians and other minorities. In many parts of the Jewish center, NIF’s grantees reveal political and social ills in Israel they’d rather not see, and definitely do not want broadcast to the rest of an already hostile world.

Yet Gitzin argues that NIF reflects where many American Jews actually are: horrified by the Hamas-led invasion of October 7, 2023, devastated by the destruction in Gaza, and alienated by a discourse that demands total allegiance to one narrative or another.

“People want to act in ways that fit with their values,” he said. “I think that we have a very powerful story to tell, that the story of Israel is being able to care about the state of Israel and fight for it and care about the notion of equality for Jews and Palestinians.”

Born in Israel to immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Gitzin grew up in Azor, a working-class development town in Israel’s center. His first rebellion, he said, was against the politics of his right-leaning parents. His political awakening came late, sharpened by his service as an intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces, where he worked on Palestinian affairs during the Camp David negotiations and the Second Intifada.

That “allowed me to understand the complexity of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, the role that Israel plays, and the missed opportunities all through the way,” he said.

Later, as a Jewish Agency emissary in South Bend, Indiana,........

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