It's the Brian Larosho on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

Now how mainstream American Jewish groups that rarely criticize Israel are reacting to

the new law there weakening the judiciary.

And what are the implications for U.S.-Israel relations at the governmental level?

For us for this is Ron Campius, Washington Bureau Chief for JTA, the Jewish Telegraphic

Agency. That's a news organization. Ron, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Can you start by reminding people of what the change in the law actually entails?

Well, the first there's a whole package of laws that are supposed to go through and the

one that just went through a couple of weeks ago removes from the Supreme Court the power

to review laws and decision executive decisions and declare them to be not to meet a reasonable

standard. In other words, to say that they're unreasonable. And this has been exercised,

for instance, most recently in Netanyahu's attempt to make a thrice convicted

tax evader, Arya Derry, the interior minister saying that it's just not reasonable by any sort

standards to allow that person to be in such an influential position. And so he wants that,

he wants the Supreme Court not to have that power in order for him to fill his cabinet the way

he sees fit. Before we get to the American Jewish reaction, that is the American Jewish reaction,

just for a little more context from over there. There've been big protests in Israel. A lot of

people have seen that in the news. How big and are they continuing? Yeah, the protests are continuing

from what I can see. I mean, I think people, you know, Netanyahu certainly hope that they would

Peter off as soon as they started in February. They're how big is like it's hard to say because

you know, police in Israel don't give counts because they don't want to be accused of being

partisan one way or the other, but the protesters say that they're in the hundreds of thousands.

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