“In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt.” —Passover haggadah

On April 1, 1977, the eve of Passover, San Francisco’s identity as a city of peace and love was tested. Just steps from a synagogue in the Outer Sunset, a neo-Nazi bookstore opened its doors, named for Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz. 

Holocaust survivor Tauba Weiss z”l confronted the shop owner and asked if the murder of millions of Jews had not been enough. He answered coldly: “No, it was not enough.” 

Tauba picked up a rock and threw it through the storefront window. Her act of courage sparked a protest, and she was soon joined by other survivors, including her husband, Morris, who hurled the store’s inventory into the street.  

This moment galvanized the city’s Jewish community, and within two years, the Holocaust Library and Resource Center, now the JFCS Holocaust Center, was born. 

The anniversary of this watershed moment falls on Erev Passover again this year, and I find myself reflecting on the connection between the values of the haggadah and what I’ve learned as both a Jewish mother and a professional dedicated to countering antisemitism through education. 

Antisemitic incidents have risen sharply in the United States and around the world, affecting schools, Jewish institutions, online spaces, and many of us personally. Educators are increasingly called upon, and at times compelled by legal action, to recognize and respond to antisemitism, often without sufficient preparation. 

I find hope in those who show up ready to lead. 

Recently, 147 teachers, school leaders, and district administrators from 29 California districts joined the JFCS Holocaust Center at the School Leadership to End Hate and Inspire Courage Institute in Sacramento. These educators are committed to building schools where antisemitism and all forms of hate are recognized, interrupted, and addressed with care and accountability. 

They also understand something essential: how we teach matters. 

When Holocaust education is taught within the broader context of Jewish history, identity, contributions, and contemporary antisemitism, it is a powerful tool. Research shows, through effective lessons students develop a positive perception of Jews, greater empathy for others, and a stronger sense of civic responsibility. We see young people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, become powerful upstanders. 

This is how we move from pain to progress. 

Passover reminds us that Jewish identity is not defined by suffering, but by resilience, by the ways we carry our history forward, and by the choices we make as Jews in the present. 

At my seder table this year, that lesson will be front and center. My husband and I have made intentional choices about our daughters’ Jewish education, from preschool through weekly religious school, and I do not waver in that decision. Each week, I greet the security guards at the entrance of our synagogue with gratitude and walk in with pride, not fear. 

These choices shape how my daughters see themselves — not only as inheritors of history, but as participants in a vibrant Jewish future.  

At Congregation Rodef Sholom, while my daughters are in class, I have worked alongside clergy to support parents through a series we created together called “Responding to Antisemitism: Supporting Jewish Identity and Belonging in K-12 Schools.” It offers a space to share experiences and practical tools to partner with school leaders in creating environments that are not only safe, but truly welcoming. 

We don’t have to choose between fighting antisemitism and building Jewish identity. We must recognize that one cannot succeed without the other. 

This is what it means to live the haggadah’s charge of “in every generation.” It is not only about remembering, but about taking responsibility for what comes next, preparing ourselves to respond to hate with knowledge, partnership, and resolve. 

Tauba Weiss said it simply and powerfully: “Education brings understanding, and that is my biggest dream.”  

The work she started in 1977 is not finished. The need has only grown. 

Last year, the JFCS Holocaust Center reached 165,000 educators and students, with more than 85% of our programs taking place beyond our walls. Demand continues to exceed what we can meet. As we work to expand the Holocaust Center into Northern California’s central destination for Holocaust and genocide education, we are guided by a clear responsibility: to ensure that every generation has the tools to build a proud Jewish community and a more just future for all. 

As we gather around our seder tables, we are reminded that our story is not only one of suffering, but of transformation and resilience. The haggadah does not end in despair; it tells the story of the Israelites, who led with courage and faith, guided by the belief that the future holds freedom, hope and opportunity.   

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J. 

(JTA) — In 2010, I said something I thought was unremarkable — that the government of Israel’s actions directly affect me as a Jew living in London. “When they do good things it is good for me; when they do bad things, it’s bad for me,” I said, noting that Israel lies at the heart of my identity.

My comments ignited a firestorm. Some called me a self-hating Jew or said I was giving succor to Israel’s enemies. More maddening, both then and now, were those who told me, in private, that they agreed but that such things should not be said in public.

I have heard every variation of this refrain for over 15 years but have continued to speak out. If Israel were something only Israelis can comment on, it would not be the Nation-State of the Jewish People — but just a state like any other.

Two years ago, I co-founded The London Initiative with Mike Prashker to give structure to our feedback. Our goal was to strengthen partnerships between Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, and Diaspora Jews who share a commitment to what we call the Triangle — mature liberal democracy, societal fairness for all Israel’s citizens, and the pursuit of secure peace. These are neither fringe propositions nor partisan policies. They are the values of our Jewish state as laid out in its Declaration of Independence. They are Israel’s operating system.

When these foundational values come under threat, we believe that Diaspora Jews have a responsibility to speak out, in partnership with likeminded Israelis asking for our support.

In August last year, The London Initiative sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, signed by over 6,300 Jews from 20 countries.  We raised urgent concerns about humanitarian aid, the hostages, Jewish-extremist violence and incitement from within his own government. It was measured, principled and rooted in Zionist values. And it was ignored. The Diaspora, it seemed, was expected to keep its wallets open and its mouths shut.

Last week, in the face of unprecedented levels of violence by Jewish extremists in the West Bank, we wrote to President Isaac Herzog. We cited the IDF chief of staff’s condemnation of Jewish-extremist violence as a strategic threat and called on the President to demand an end to this terror and the impunity that enables it. Almost 4,000 have signed so far.

Then something remarkable happened.

The president neither ignored nor scorned us but replied, sharing the conviction that such violence “contradicts Jewish ethical tradition and the values upon which Israel was founded.” He confirmed he has demanded that all available means be used to bring perpetrators to justice. He acknowledged that this violence “plays directly into the hands of Israel’s detractors, fuelling hatred that weakens us as a nation and jeopardises Jews everywhere.” And he thanked the signatories for their concern and mutual responsibility.

Israel’s head of state publicly acknowledged the partnership between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, recognized that Jewish-extremist violence damages both Israel and Jews around the world, and thanked Diaspora Jews for engaging. He validated that Diaspora Jews not only have a right to speak, but a duty. President Herzog’s response — principled and courageous in the fractured political climate he navigates — is an outstanding act of leadership.

This seminal moment should encourage Diaspora Jews to engage constructively with Israel, with humility for the challenges Israelis face but clear-eyed too that Israel’s direction of travel affects Jews everywhere.

I have defended Israel against those who delegitimize it. We cannot be quiet when Israel’s enemies demonize it and our connection to it. But nor should we remain silent when the actions of some of Israel’s politicians run counter to our values and its own founding ideals. When we speak out, we are not using the language of our enemies, but voicing the call of an ancient people for justice and fairness. We should never flinch from doing so. It strengthens us.

In contrast, when violent Jewish extremists carry out attacks on Palestinians, when their protectors in the Knesset turn a blind eye, while passing outrageous legislation like the death penalty law, it weakens Israel and weakens all of us. And it does more damage to the reputation of Israel and the Jewish people than a thousand protest letters ever could.

Sadly, many communal leaders we approached to sign either ignored the request or explained why it was not convenient or why the timing was wrong.

We know all too well that there is an explosion of antisemitism facing our communities. But staying silent when we see our values violated, in this instance by thugs rampaging in the West Bank, does nothing to help the fight against antisemitism at home. We also understand that Israel is at war, Israelis are again under fire and our solidarity is with them. But here’s the thing: if our Israeli friends and colleagues can stand up for their democratic values even as they shelter from Iranian missiles, we should be able to muster the courage to sign a letter. When we stand up for our values, confident in who we are, we will be stronger in facing our myriad challenges.

Diaspora Jewry needs the confidence to work in partnership with Israelis for the Israel envisaged in the Declaration of Independence. That confidence must be underpinned by forthright leadership from our communal institutions. Staying silent when things are going wrong is not protecting the community — it is abandoning it.

Israel’s president showed moral courage — many of our own communal leaders need to find theirs. The “keep your wallets open and mouths shut” era is over. The stakes are too high, the values too precious, and the partnership too important to be surrendered to silence.

Our own leaders should realize that when faced with a moral crisis speaking up is not an inconvenience, but an obligation, and now is the time.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J. or JTA, which distributed it.

I want to set the record straight about San Francisco State University, which recently received a “C” on the Anti-Defamation League’s “Campus Antisemitism Report Card.”

Historically, SFSU has been viewed as a bellwether for antisemitism on college campuses not just nationally, but internationally. During a 2024 trip to Israel for Hillel leaders, we met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

Upon hearing about my role as executive director of San Francisco Hillel, he rolled his eyes and remarked that SFSU was a “tough one.” I took the opportunity to explain how much the campus had changed. Today, I would argue that SFSU is a model for addressing antisemitism on college campuses.

ADL’s “C” grade, while an improvement over last year’s “D,” does not fully reflect the administration’s efforts or its impact on Jewish student life. Because the ADL assessed hundreds of campuses with a one-size-fits-all methodology that combines unrelated criteria into a single grade, it fails to capture the supportive environment for Jewish students at SFSU.

In 2019, SFSU was among the first universities to join Hillel International’s Campus Climate Initiative, which trains university administrators on how to respond to antisemitism on campus. Our administration is much better prepared than it once was. In a 2024 presentation to administrators nationwide, Hillel International general counsel Mark Rotenberg pointed to SFSU as a leader on this issue.

As a result of the Campus Climate Initiative, SFSU has established a committee of faculty, staff and students, along with representatives from SF Hillel and Hillel International, to track progress toward meeting a long list of goals.

Shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, SFSU President Lynn Mahoney and state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-S.F.) met with Jewish students to hear their experiences. Both listened intently to each student. While there are few easy fixes, the students felt heard and supported.

In December 2024, while SF Hillel staff attended a conference, the Hillel building was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti. Though our building is not located on campus and no SFSU students were involved, the university coordinated with law enforcement officers to remove the graffiti. Mahoney issued a public statement condemning the act, which was also signed by leaders from several other nearby schools served by the Hillel, including the heads of the University of San Francisco, UC Law San Francisco and UC San Francisco.

Following the success of a $9.2 million capital campaign, for which Mahoney was instrumental in cultivating donors, SF Hillel needed temporary space during construction. The university graciously lent us space in the campus library.

“Combatting campus antisemitism and partnering with Hillel should be priorities for every university president,” Mahoney said when asked about the importance of Hillel. “SF Hillel provides critical support for our Jewish students, as well as serving as a key resource for the university’s work. Together, we are working hard every day to make SFSU a welcoming space for Jewish students.”

Professor Marc Dollinger of SFSU’s Jewish studies department, who wrote a forthcoming book on campus antisemitism, told me that S.F. State stands as a model for universities nationwide. “While no college administrator can control the actions of bad actors, ours has created the systems and approaches to respond when they do,” he said.

Student leaders agree. Maddux Eckerling, SF Hillel student president, told me the university has made a lot of progress toward supporting students. “I am grateful for President Mahoney’s leadership and responsiveness towards our community,” Eckerling said. “Each time I email her or meet with her, the response time and care in the response blows me away.”

SFSU and SF Hillel continue to strengthen their partnership. Students say the university takes their needs seriously and addresses issues as they arise. Ultimately, campus climate is defined by student experience. Their respect for President Mahoney and the administration only confirms general counsel Rotenberg’s comment: Look at SFSU to see how to do it right.

The Torah column is supported by a generous donation from Eve Gordon-Ramek in memory of Kenneth Gordon. 

Tzav
Leviticus 6:1−8:36

I was 13 years old when I witnessed the birth of the milk cow Annabelle. I looked on with rapt attention as I leaned on a corral fence at a summer camp.

The counselors told us to be quiet as Annabelle’s mother labored. Even though we were generally rambunctious kids, it was easy for us to stay silent. We all understood that there is something sacred about birth.

When Annabelle finally emerged from her mother, she fell to the ground, coated in the placenta.

She didn’t move. I had never seen a birth of any kind before, and my first thought was that Annabelle hadn’t survived, that something tragic had happened.

But eventually she started moving. 

I returned to summer camp for six more summers. One year, Annabelle was a creature about my size. The next, she was a massive animal that we were allowed to brush. She then became a cow that would happily munch on hay as children milked her.

I think of Annabelle this week as our Torah portion Tzav outlines the routine use of animals in the sacrifices to God made in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Of the five types of sacrifices we read about, four of them use animals. In Tzav, we read detailed instructions for sacrificing pigeons, turtledoves, sheep, goats — and cows.

As this week’s Torah portion makes clear, there are currents in our tradition that advocate for taking animal lives. There is also a current of thought in Judaism that looks hesitantly on doing so. 

In the Garden of Eden, God tells the first two humans that they should eat plants: “God said, ‘See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food.’” (Genesis 1:29)

God makes no mention of eating animals. Some in our tradition, including Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, believe this means that the ideal way of being is not to eat meat or animal products. According to this understanding, people eat meat only in the imperfect world we inhabit after banishment from the Garden of Eden. Greenberg further teaches that the laws of kosher eating offer us a way of limiting a practice that is flawed.

I think about the value of refraining from eating meat precisely because it is idealistic. In this era, it’s difficult for everything we do to be in line with our values. Many of us shop online in ways we’re not proud of. We buy products that were made overseas in bad labor conditions, and we use gasoline despite knowing it harms the planet. These small decisions that each of us make add up to collective wrongs, contributing to problems such as global warming, income inequality and the large-scale harm we do to animals.

In laying out the rules for different sacrifices, our portion this week outlines what should happen when the community as a whole makes a mistake.

Tzav continues the Book of Leviticus’ detailed descriptions of the chatat, the sacrifice made as expiation for the community’s collective sins. 

Of course, what is proposed is to offer an animal sacrifice, so we have to read this text with an acknowledgment that it emerges from one of the threads of the Jewish tradition that is OK with taking animal lives.

Still, it is moving to consider that this ancient text was open to the idea that the entire community could sin collectively.

Perhaps we can learn from this that it’s possible for an entire community to err — that we should heed that small voice of conscience inside of us that wonders about the ethics of a widespread community practice. 

For me, a turning point in listening to this voice took place the last time I saw Annabelle.

I returned to camp for a weekend when I was in my mid-20s. It was early summer, before the campers arrived. Annabelle had stopped producing milk like she used to, and the decision had been made to call a butcher.

As someone who ate meat at the time, I wanted to witness a slaughter to make sure I was comfortable enough with the practice.

The butcher arrived in a worn truck that carried a refrigerator for the eventual meat and a set of poles and wires that would lift the cow’s carcass for butchering.

Annabelle stood in the same corral where she was born. I wondered if Annabelle knew what was coming. I felt an instinct to comfort her.

The slaughterer acted quickly and professionally. He pulled out his rifle and pointed it at Annabelle. The man shot. Immediately, Annabelle dropped to the ground.

I didn’t know what to make of what I had seen, but I knew it was jarring to watch life leave Annabelle so quickly. 

Gradually over the next year, I decided to stop eating meat. I felt that listening to the small voice inside of me that wished to comfort Annabelle could make a difference for animals — and also for me. Not eating meat could be a practice. Every time I decided not to eat meat I would be choosing to believe in a better world, choosing to believe in a world where we do listen to that faint voice of conscience.

As we go about our everyday lives, I think it’s good to make as much room as we can for our voices of conscience.

It makes sense to be skeptical of what one consumer can accomplish. Does recycling a bottle do much to stop pollution? Does one person going to a co-op instead of a chain grocery store make a big difference? Does one person not eating meat matter in the grand scheme of things? 

One sometimes hears that these small actions add up to make a difference. That every recycled soda can matters. I honestly don’t know about that. What I do know is that we need to make as much room as we can in our souls for our sense of what’s right.

Not eating meat is one thing we can do to help build up this muscle of compassion. However we choose to do it, it’s upon us to make sure this muscle doesn’t atrophy. So much is at stake.

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Politico in an interview on Tuesday that he regretted using the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel earlier this month, I wasn’t at all surprised. Anyone who cared to listen to the podcast in which he supposedly made the accusation could understand that his critics were twisting the meaning of his less-than-articulate wording. (Israel, he said, is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state.”)

That’s what happens when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes, in the public eye, less about working toward a solution and more about scoring political points or drawing eyeballs to endless social media feeds.

Who cares what someone really said when I can score a point for my side? Who cares what a person really means when I can spin it to boost likes?

As Newsom explained on Tuesday, he used the term “apartheid” in reference to a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, who warned that if Israel continues down the parth of annexing the West Bank, it runs the risk of becoming an apartheid regime.

“And that is a legitimate concern I have, that I share with Tom,” Newsom told Politico.

That is not a radical idea. It is, to borrow a cliche, an inconvenient truth that too many American Jews who are supportive of Israel refuse to confront.

Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank, advancing a longstanding goal of many members of the current Israeli government, would result in a state whose boundaries contain about 7 million Jews and 7 million Arabs. That would mean the loss of Israel’s Jewish identity, if all incorporated Arabs are given full rights. If they aren’t — at this point the much more likely scenario — it means apartheid.

The vast majority of American Jews, and Americans, support Israel as a Jewish democratic state. The “democratic” part of that is not optional. Apartheid nations, aside from being immoral, are pariah nations.

You know who else knew that?

David Ben Gurion, for one. Israel’s founding prime minister, right after the 1967 Six-Day War, got on the radio and said that Israel must not take control of the Palestinian territories, “or it risks becoming an apartheid state.”

Yitzhak Rabin reiterated that point in a 1976 interview, during his first term as prime minister. ​​​​“I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, if we don’t want to get to apartheid, a million and a half Arabs inside a Jewish state,” he said.

Many other more contemporary Israeli leaders share that concerns. Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, said on Israeli TV in 2015 that “in the Palestinian arena,” Netanayhu’s “policy will lead … to apartheid.”

I understand that “Newsom calls Israel an apartheid state” is an alluring headline — both for some Israel-supporters, who’d prefer a 2028 Democratic presidential candidate who treats the “A” word as verboten, and for Israel haters looking to pile on. It certainly has more dramatic appeal than “Newsom’s thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are identical to Rabin’s.”

Yes, the governor could have expressed his views more coherently from the beginning. But anybody who spent a second parsing his word salad would know what he meant — and that he was dead on.

Unfortunately, we live in a world that monetizes rage. That’s why, even when Newsom set out to repair the damage from his first interview, he refused to identify as a Zionist.

“I revere the state of Israel,” he answered when asked if he considered himself a Zionist. “I’m proud to support the state of Israel. I deeply, deeply oppose Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership, his opposition to the two-state solution and deeply oppose how he is indulging the far-right as it relates to what’s going on in the West Bank.”

The word “Zionist” itself has become rage-bait, as much if not more so than “apartheid,” and Newsom refused to take it.

To some, “Zionism” refers to the current policies of the current government, which in fact many Israelis and American Jews find anathema to, well, Zionism. (That sense may be part of why only a small fraction of American Jews identify with the word “Zionist,” despite maintaining a strong sense of investment in the state of Israel.) To others it means nothing less than the expulsion and oppression of Palestinians.

To others still it means Jewish sovereignty “from the river to the sea,” or the right of Jews to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

Better to describe what you think about Israel than adopt a label that will be defined for you. And what Newsom was saying was exactly what needs to be said: if you support Israel, you must oppose the creeping annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, which Meir Dagan, the former Mossad director, said would spell, “the end of the Zionist dream.”

Too bad that all the chatter around what Newsom believes obscured the eminent reasonableness of what he actually said.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward, where this story was originally published.

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

When the young women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sat down before their Singer sewing machines on Saturday, March 25, 1911, they could not know that their lives would soon be extinguished because of a lit cigarette.

At around 4:40 p.m., a worker flicked a still-smoldering cigarette butt into a bin filled with paper patterns and fabric scraps. The contents ignited instantly. Someone threw a bucket of water to douse the flames — to no avail. Eighteen minutes later, 148 people were dead: 123 women and 25 men, many of them teenagers, most of them immigrants.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which remains the deadliest workplace disaster in New York City and one of the worst in the country, not only shocked the nation, it transformed American labor law. Locked doors, unsafe conditions, and the exploitation of young workers came to symbolize an industrial system that all too often treated human beings as expendable. Public outrage led to sweeping workplace reforms and helped launch modern labor protections.

Now, 115 years later, those hard-won safeguards are eroding.

Across the country, child labor violations are rising. Teenagers are working longer hours and, in some cases, dangerous jobs like working in industrial freezers, on construction sites, and in meat-processing facilities. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, the number of children employed illegally nearly quadrupled between 2015 and 2024; meanwhile, the companies that hire them often face minimal penalties.

The lesson of Triangle was clear — when economic pressure meets diminished regulations, minors become the most vulnerable workers. Today’s legislative rollbacks and declining enforcement risk recreating the very conditions reformers fought to eliminate.

Few understood those stakes better than Pauline Newman, one of the most influential labor organizers of the early U.S. labor movement. Born in Lithuania, Newman immigrated to the United States with her mother and sisters after her father’s death. By age nine, she was climbing dark factory stairs to work in a hairbrush factory. Later, she rolled cigars, and by 12, she found work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, laboring 14 hours a day in what workers called the “kindergarten,” trimming loose threads from finished garments. Shirtwaists arrived piled in cases taller than some of the children themselves.

“We were too young to do anything else,” Newman later recalled.

In one of several pieces she wrote for The Forward, she chronicled her experience working at The Triangle and what she described as her “own drab existence,” wondering “dear God will it ever be different?”

Although Newman had left Triangle before the fire, the disaster changed her life. The deaths of former coworkers propelled her into a lifetime of labor organizing and fighting to protect workers, especially minors, from exploitation. Her activism helped reshape public understanding of workplace safety and child labor, showing that reform comes only when society decides certain risks are unacceptable.

Throughout the 19th century, reformers had pursued piecemeal protections. Religious leaders fretted over working children who couldn’t read scripture, while secular advocates argued democracy required an educated citizenry. Early laws limited hours or required factory owners to provide basic education, but enforcement was inconsistent and protections varied state-by-state. When Newman arrived in New York City in 1901, meaningful safeguards were largely absent.

The Triangle fire changed that calculus. By 1913, Newman and her fellow organizers, including Rose Schneiderman, Clara Lemlich and Frances Perkins, helped push legislation that moved thousands of children from factory floors into classrooms and introduced workplace safety standards. The culmination came in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing nationwide rules governing wages, hours and child labor.

Now many of these protections are being undermined. Since 2021, at least 17 states have rolled back child labor protections, while others have introduced legislation to diminish existing safeguards.

In Florida, proposed legislation would remove limits on working hours for 16- and 17-year-olds, potentially allowing overnight shifts during the school year. In 2023, Iowa passed laws permitting minors to work in previously restricted environments, including meat coolers. Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio and other states have pursued similar measures.

Supporters argue the changes provide flexibility for families and help businesses facing labor shortages. Opponents warn they expose minors to injury and undermine education.

Many young workers entering hazardous jobs today come from immigrant families struggling with rising living costs. Some are recent arrivals, including unaccompanied minors particularly vulnerable to exploitation. For these families, work isn’t an extracurricular activity; it means economic survival. But hardship does not make dangerous labor safe, nor should it justify dismantling protections.

Families facing financial instability often feel they have little choice but to send children into the workforce. But no family, however, should face the choice Pauline Newman once did: education or survival.

Nostalgia often shapes today’s political arguments. Lawmakers recall babysitting, shoveling snow, or scooping ice cream as teenagers. But many modern violations occur not in safe, supervised settings but in industrial workplaces where injuries can be life-altering or fatal; as was the case when in 2023 a 16-year-old Wisconsin boy died in a cotton-packing machine.

Weakening protections risks reversing more than a century of progress, undermining not only individual futures but an economy and democracy that depend on an educated workforce.

Preventing a return to early industrial exploitation doesn’t require reinventing labor law. It requires enforcing and modernizing protections already proven to work.

States can strengthen work-permit systems, as Illinois did in 2024, improving oversight and reducing violations. Civil and criminal penalties must increase so illegal child labor is not treated as a routine business expense. For example, New York has expanded enforcement authority and centralized employment records for minors, enabling fines upwards of $50,000 for serious and repeat violations. Policymakers should eliminate subminimum wages for young workers and tighten prohibitions on hazardous work, particularly in agriculture and manufacturing. Colorado has taken steps allowing injured minors to pursue private legal action, strengthening employer accountability.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire compelled Americans to confront what happens when profit outweighs protection. Reformers like Pauline Newman spent decades ensuring children would no longer bear the cost of unsafe workplaces. Reform was hard-won, and progress is never inevitable. More than a century later we ought to remember why those protections exist.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward, where this story was originally published.

Avoiding clergy burnout

Thank you to Laura Stein for her excellent opinion piece on clergy burnout and how seminaries might better prepare clergy for their own self-care in the field (“We know how to prevent Jewish clergy from burning out. Why aren’t we doing it?” March 9).

While it is important that seminaries prepare us for the field and that we as clergy advocate for our own well-being, the other key partners in this equation are the institutions and organizations that have contractual agreements with clergy. 

After living in the Bay Area for a number of years, I relocated to Los Angeles to study rabbinics, eventually returning to the Bay as an ordained rabbi. For the past 14 years, I have worked in various clergy roles. I have found my passion in my current work as a visiting rabbi to Bay Area congregations, partnering with leaders to prevent clergy burnout.

I tell congregational members that when I show up in their communities, it means that their clergy is resting, taking a break. When lay leadership understands and takes action to support these efforts, it helps to make clergy roles sustainable in our communities. Lay leadership tuning into organizations like Rest of Our Lives (restofourlives.org), which invest in the well-being of nonprofit professionals through rest and rejuvenation, could be transformative for us all. 

Our communities would greatly benefit from a broader and long-overdue conversation with lay leaders and clergy across the entire Jewish ecosystem about how to make our Jewish institutions and organizations the most desirable places to work. And, by the way, it is not just a clergy issue. We also experience a shortage of educators, executive directors and other key staff who help to make for a thriving Jewish community.

Rabbi Susan Leider | Sacramento

A better word than ‘apartheid’?

I’m writing in response to the article “Newsom staff meets with Jewish leaders after ‘apartheid’ comment about Israel” (March 6).

As reported, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently agreed with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times that Israel’s actions in the West Bank are leading Israel down the path of apartheid. Friedman is not wrong. Newsom is not wrong. Israeli settlers, supported by the IDF, are indeed terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank and chasing them out of Palestinian villages. The IDF is demolishing Palestinian homes at an alarming rate, pushing Palestinians into geographically disconnected towns that are separated by IDF “checkpoints.” This has resulted in the creation of disjointed and economically deprived Palestinian towns — a situation that is strikingly similar to South African black townships during the apartheid era.

You may not like the word “apartheid.” But if this is not the correct word for Israel’s illegal and immoral acts in the West Bank, then what is? And no matter what word you use, does it make these acts any more palatable?

Joel Gerston | Los Altos

Letter on AIPAC was wrong 

I am responding to the totally wrong-headed letter regarding AIPAC (“Newsom highlights AIPAC failure,” letters, March 5).

I have been a member of AIPAC for over 40 years, and I can honestly attest to the fact that AIPAC has not changed its bipartisan, unbiased approach to Israel. AIPAC’s mission statement clearly states that it is bipartisan and that its only objective is to support the strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Roberta Zucker | Tiburon

No ‘blood libel’ at Sonoma State

Regarding your Feb. 18 article “Holocaust and Genocide lecture series at Sonoma State adopts new subject: Israel,” I am a longtime Holocaust educator and currently serve on the board and education committee of the Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, a group which supports the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide at Sonoma State and its annual lecture series. We also provide Shoah survivor and second-generation testimony to Bay Area schools. We are proud to support the work of SSU professor Stephen Bittner, who is the director of the center. His bravery in the face of threats, harassment and cowardly doxing inspires us all.

One of your interviewees, Lev Luvishis, describes as a “blood libel” Sonoma State’s academic research into the possibility of genocide in Gaza. Reference to this medieval horror emerges whenever a critic of Israel tries to talk about the death of Palestinian children. I think instead we need to remember the voices of two young girls: Noya Dan, an Israeli killed with her grandmother on Oct. 7, 2023, and Hind Rajab, a Palestinian killed along with many in her family and the ambulance workers trying to rescue her, in the beginning of 2024. We have recordings of both of these girls’ voices shortly before they were killed. Those are the voices that can lead us back to peace and justice in this world infatuated with violence.

Jim McGarry | Pacifica

Iran campaign is justified

Regarding the March 3 article: “CA Dems slam Trump for war against Iran without congressional approval”: What if it is called an undeclared war or a military action instead of war? Is the action of the U.S. and Israel judged on the merits, or judged on hate of President Donald Trump and his supporting Republicans?

To oppose the U.S. and Israel is in effect to support Iran. Iran has been killing Americans, Israelis and oppositional Iranians for 47 years. Iran has supported the proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza; both have fired thousands of rockets into Israel and are cruel, brutal terrorists.

The U.S. and Israel are trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that could reach the U.S. Iran now has fired at many nearby Arab nations. If the U.S. and Israel are successful, regime change could lead to a long, lasting peace for the entire Middle East. The example is the aftermath of World War II: Unconditional surrender, reconstruction and temporary control of the governments resulted in Germany and Japan becoming long-term peaceful allies of the U.S.

This is a historic time to make a choice, and opposition to the U.S. and Israel may become shameful and embarrassing for a lifetime.

Norman G. Licht | Palo Alto

(JTA) — As the executive director of a synagogue, I read the daily security briefs from Secure Community Network and engage in regular security updates with my colleagues and friends in Jewish communal spaces across the country.

I never imagined that the security risks we talk about every day would literally be at the entry to our spiritual home.

On Thursday, our synagogue, Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, was attacked by an individual with the intention of causing harm to our community.

As my friend Rabbi Brian Stoller of Temple Beth-El of Great Neck shared in his sermon the next evening, “This is a scary time for Jews in America. And sadly, it can feel like a scary time to work in a synagogue.”

Our houses of worship — Jewish or otherwise — should never feel that way.

At Temple Israel, we say that every staff member is part of our temple family. We are extremely fortunate that all of our staff and community members — along with more than 100 children in our early childhood center — returned to the warm embrace of friends, family and the greater community after Thursday’s events.

And we pray for and express great gratitude to our security team, who bravely responded and ran towards the attacker. Their training and experience saved lives that day.

Our temple, like those across the United States, has spent countless hours and dollars in recent years focused on security. At times, the threat facing our synagogues and Jewish community spaces feels abstract. But our experience Thursday is an important reminder that security preparedness is essential to ensuring the safety of our community members, and it is time and money well spent.

Security preparation can alter your instincts and equip you to respond effectively in critical situations, preventing you from freezing when action is required.

Our temple staff faced many different challenges Thursday. We were spread out in different locations, some in groups, others isolated and some so far away that they did not hear the disturbing sounds.  However, we all executed our training protocols to protect ourselves and those around us, including the precious children under our care.

Just over a month earlier, the FBI conducted a training session for our staff. These trainings are common culture, and I have sat through dozens of them over the years. The FBI facilitator discussed active shooter scenarios, emphasizing the “run, hide, fight” strategy. Our preschool faculty had undergone similar training in recent months.

Our security personnel also undergoes regular group training, even using federal holidays, when the rest of us are off, to practice their skills and response tactics in our sacred spaces with no one  around to watch. It’s one of the many unseen preparation efforts our synagogue takes.

Another essential preparedness tactic is the sacred partnership we have built between Temple Israel and our neighbor, Shenandoah Country Club.

The club’s executive director, Hassan Yazbek, was literally the first person to call me as I was struggling to breathe in the temple parking lot after evacuating due to smoke inhalation. Hassan offered to house, feed and provide shelter for our faculty, staff and children. The country club also served as the initial staging ground for local law enforcement and hosted our Shabbat services this past weekend.

But our community relationships extend much further. The local FBI officials, Department of Homeland Security team members, county sheriffs and township police are all familiar with me and our security team. The same goes for our local West Bloomfield Township leadership and two state legislators that call Temple Israel “home.”

When I was taken into the command center at Shenandoah Thursday afternoon while the events continued to unfold across the street, I realized there was not a top official in the room from the dozens of local and national law enforcement agencies who did not know our security team members.

These are not fleeting relationships; they know us, our building, and our people. These local law enforcement professionals help us navigate special events, keep us informed when we need to be and are present in our community.

We are deeply saddened when any of our communities are affected by hate events and Thursday was our turn at the front of the line.

In Jewish tradition, we hold the sacred value of pikuach nefesh— the sacred responsibility to protect and preserve life. On March 12, our staff, faculty, security team, and the entire community lived out this value.

We are grateful for the security preparedness and the partnerships that enabled us to put our values into action when they were needed. The combination, as we now know first-hand, proved to create the best possible outcome in a situation and for that, my family and others involved in Thursday’s events are grateful.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

This story was originally published in the Forward.

America’s antisemitism watchdogs are committing institutional malpractice.

While antisemitism explodes on the right, including throughout the Donald Trump administration and popular right-wing online spaces, anti-antisemitism organizations are disproportionally focusing on left-wing anti-Zionists and Muslim politicians, minimizing if not ignoring white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and Christian nationalists — many of whom are active in Republican political circles.

And now, with the release of the latest batch of Epstein files and the start of the Iran war, what was already an epidemic has become a plague. As the Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld has discussed at length, the incoherent rationales for the war have led many to the conclusion (mostly incorrect, in my view, though not without some basis) that America has been pushed into fighting Israel’s war — a view that slides quickly into antisemitic conspiracy theories on both the right and the left, as well as antisemitic ” revenge” attacks by Islamists, Muslims and other Arabs, like the attempted murders at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, last week.

Our communal institutions are failing us. Antisemitism can be found all across the political spectrum, yet as the ADL convenes its annual “Never is Now” conference today, its agenda and newsfeed are disproportionately focused on the left. Our community needs to engage in some serious soul-searching. And change course.

Almost two-thirds of young conservatives hold antisemitic views

It is shocking to learn how pervasive antisemitic views are among young conservatives, including many working for the government.

A November 2025 study by the conservative Manhattan Institute (not some left-wing organization) found that “nearly 4 in 10 in the current GOP (2024 Trump voters plus registered Republicans) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Younger men are especially likely to hold this view (54% of men under 50 vs. 39% of women under 50).” (Interestingly, 77% of Hispanic GOP voters held this view, compared with 30% of white GOP voters.)

In another poll, 64% of young conservatives aged 18-34 agreed with at least one antisemitic statement in a survey. That is absolutely astonishing.

Here’s an even more chilling story. Also last November, Rod Dreher, the post-liberal, far-right conservative thinker, reported on a trip to Washington, D.C. (meeting with Viktor Orban and JD Vance, discussing “the survival of Christianity in Europe”), in his Substack newsletter. After meeting with a number of conservatives in the Trump administration, Dreher wrote:

The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world…. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in antisemitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.

Dreher speculated that a number of factors caused this phenomenon, including the losses of economic opportunity, trust in institutions and “common culture.” He continued:

The issue of antisemitism on the young right is much deeper than I had guessed… [A] lot of this is reaction to how Jewish organizations like the ADL have policed speech critical of Israel, and of anything to do with Jews, so heavily over the decades that they have caused intense resentment among the Gentile Zoomercons. One man told me that for as long as he has been in politics, any criticism of Israel got you tagged as an antisemite, and that was a potential career-killer. So his generation has come to hate that, and to cease caring about the opinions of Jews.

Again, Dreher is not hostile to the right; he is part of it. But what he sees within his own movement shocks him. And this was before the Iran war. Dreher concludes:

The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree…. Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil.

I encourage you to read the whole post. I disagree with almost all of Dreher’s ideological positions, but his serious confrontation with this crisis is a model of honest reflection. I would also recommend reading the work of journalist John Ganz, who has written powerfully of the nihilistic, antisemitic Groyper phenomenon and its significance within the GOP.

To be sure, there is antisemitism on the left as well. But there is absolutely no analogue to the scope of right-wing antisemitism and its proximity to power. Here are a few specific examples.

• Kingsley Wilson has served as the Department of Defense press secretary since May 2025. Less than a year prior, she replied to an ADL post commemorating the lynching of Leo Frank that “Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl,” a noxious lie that circulates in the antisemitic underbelly of the internet — strong evidence that she spends a lot of time in such spaces. Last March, Rep. Ritchie Torres wrote to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth demanding Wilson’s firing, describing her social media posts as a “minefield of antisemitic rhetoric, white nationalist conspiracies, and pro-Kremlin propaganda.” Instead, Hegseth promoted her.
• Paul Ingrassia, currently acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, had been tapped to lead the Office of General Counsel until Politico exposed comments he made in a group chat, including “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” On the social platform X (the post has since been deleted), Ingrassia called Fuentes “a real dissident of authoritarianism.”
• Other examples are the often-nameless staffers running the social media accounts of the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other departments. As has now been well documented, these accounts routinely post images and slogans taken from neo-Nazi and white supremacist communities like “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” posted by the Department of Justice, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” posted by DHS, variations of “Which Way Western Man?” (referring to a 1978 book claiming a conspiracy by “World Jewry” against the “Western Man”) and many posts (too many to be coincidence) exactly 14 words long, a probable reference to David Lane’s white supremacist “Fourteen Words” slogan. (The ADL has a database of such references online.) These are both dog whistles to the extreme right and evidence that these staffers are swimming in the ultranationalist swamp.
• And then there are the Young Republican group chats, which somehow keep turning up across the country filled with abject racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism. For example, a pile of Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont (once again obtained by Politico) included, among hundreds of lines of abject racism, posts like “I was about to say you’re giving national [leaders] to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest” and various jokes about gas chambers.

And that’s not even including Elon Musk, whatever his statements or hand gestures may mean.

To be clear, there are many Jewish voices on the right who have spoken out, including Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro. So has Trump, who after all has many Jews in his family (even as he often traffics in antisemitic stereotypes about money). But they haven’t made the problem go away, and it’s not at all clear that they even represent the Republican majority anymore. What happens after Trump leaves the political stage?

Meanwhile, other Republican leaders have explicitly rejected calls to isolate or condemn the antisemites. Shapiro, for example, has called out Megyn Kelly for refusing to condemn Fuentes and Owens. And when conservative pundit Scott Jennings asked Vance, “Does the conservative movement need to warehouse anybody out there espousing antisemitism in any way?” he replied, “No it doesn’t, Scott.” While Vance did also say, “I think we need to reject all forms of ethnic hatred, whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, anti-white hatred,” that is a toothless statement if he refuses to take any action against those who express it.

So, they remain in office. Carlson, meanwhile, remains welcome at leading conservative institutions like Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation, despite a long torrent of antisemitic rhetoric, most recently blaming Chabad Lubavitch for the Iran war, which would be merely ludicrous were it not also exceedingly dangerous. (For good measure, Carlson has recently platformed not only Holocaust deniers but 9/11 “Truthers” who say that Israel was behind the terrorist attacks.)

Antisemitism is intrinsic to right-wing nationalism

This isn’t just a matter of a few bad apples. This is a massive, systemic trend. It is part of the rise of ethno-nationalism, Christian nationalism, National Conservatism and the triumph of Pat Buchanan-style America First politics. Despite the efforts of people like Loomer and Shapiro, and prominent Jewish NatCons like Yoram Hazony, it is impossible to somehow surgically remove antisemitism from that politics while leaving the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, and racist strands in place — as Hazony appears to have recently found out. (“I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online the last year and a half,” he said at this year’s NatCon conference. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken.”)

Antisemitism is not incidental to the nationalistic worldview that is ascendent in the Republican Party; it is essential to it. As Ilya Somin recently wrote in the Unpopulist newsletter:

Nationalism doesn’t just historically correlate with bigotry — it consistently drives antisemitism and other racial and ethnic prejudices. Indeed, nationalism intensifies preexisting antisemitic impulses. To the degree that today’s conservatives decide to embrace — or even just make peace with — nationalism and dispense with the universalist liberal principles of the American Founding, they will find it difficult to impossible to stem the spread of antisemitism in their midst.

Antisemitism is also an integral part of the right-wing internet. The most popular podcaster of all, Joe Rogan, recently hosted conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, a vicious antisemite who, according to reporting in this publication, “wrote last year that the U.S. was ‘controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of “antisemitism”‘; claimed Jews control the media; and said that Israel had manipulated the Holocaust for its own gain.” (He also platformed Jake Shields, an MMA fighter-turned-far-right commentator who had said the previous month when he was on the show that Jews control America.)

And Rogan is just the tip of the spear. Andrew Tate routinely spouts antisemitic rhetoric with no corollary anywhere on the left. Influencer Nick Shirley just posted supportively of an antisemitic video by fellow influencer Tyler Oliveira. Right-wing conspiratorial antisemitism is taken for granted in the looksmaxxing and incel worlds. The great replacement theory (“Jews will not replace us!”) is routinely embraced on right-wing news media channels. Unambiguous, full-throated right-wing antisemitism is just part of the vibe.

But the ADL has been too busy worrying about Zohran Mamdani’s wife’s political views.

How is this happening?

Why, with an entire Jewish communal infrastructure dedicated to fighting antisemitism, are we failing to focus on the most troubling manifestations of the crisis? Why are our legacy organizations getting it so wrong?

There are several answers to those questions.

The first is obvious: Hard-line pro-Israel donors have distorted organizational priorities, directing resources and attention to what offends them personally, rather than what poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety. Their motivations may be sincere; clearly many organizational leaders are sincerely dismayed by anti-Zionism, and due to their own emotional connections to Israel and Zionism, they may sincerely experience it as antisemitism. But now, much of the Jewish establishment has concluded that harsh criticisms of Israel, and certainly anti-Zionist ones, are not wrongheaded political views but expressions of antisemitic bigotry. And that has warped organizational priorities and resource allocation decisions.

Again, it’s not that antisemitism does not exist on the anti-Zionist left; it does. And of course, there is antisemitic violence perpetrated by anti-Zionists motivated by animus toward the State of Israel; we have seen that this week. But the overwhelming majority of that violence is committed by Islamists and terrorists, not campus protesters or obnoxious writers, artists and publishers. Yet the Jewish establishment continues to paint with a broad brush, lumping together activists with principled objections to Zionism (as they understand or misunderstand it) with murderers and bigots targeting Jews with violence. There is no left-wing equivalent of the world Dreher describes, or the candidacy of James Fishback in Florida, or the popularity of Joe Rogan. And, love him or hate him, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeatedly, vociferously condemns antisemitism even as he holds views on Israel that are well to the left of many American Jews.

Second, obviously, many of the leading donors to Jewish establishment organizations are either Republicans themselves, or so strongly supportive of the Netanyahu government that they would prefer to trade the American Jewish birthright for the porridge of Greater Israel. Yes, they might concede, right-wing antisemitism is a problem, but plenty of Republicans are against it and the benefits of aligning with the Trump regime — for Israel, for their conservative moral values, or for their own pocketbooks — outweigh the costs.

Whether that is correct or not is impossible to say. But I would suggest, broadly speaking, that ethno-nationalism rarely turns out well for the Jews. The neocons and fiscal conservatives are not in charge anymore, and the MAGA movement’s nationalist-antisemitic monster cannot be contained once it is unleashed. I fear that today’s coddlers of the party’s antisemitic wing will, one day, look as misguided as those who minimized the threat of nationalists in the past.

It’s also clear that some of our leaders (mostly Boomers or Generation Xers) are often simply clueless about online culture. They seem not to even know the language. They may now know what a groyper is. But how about goyslop? Agartha? “Noticing”? 14:88? Have these donors ever been on Discord? Scrolled through TikTok? Watched Joe Rogan? Seen what happens to your YouTube feed when you watch a single video featuring conspiratorial content or a manosphere influencer?

Antisemitism is everywhere online, abetted by social media algorithms that are somehow immune to regulation. And if you don’t believe that matters, consider how Gamergate, Pepe the Frog, QAnon, and other online content moved into the mainstream and helped put Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Now imagine that happening with a figure who is closer to Fuentes or Fishback than Trump.

Of course, the ADL as an organization is aware of these phenomena; I’ve cited their own work several times in this article. But if you browse through the speakers at “Never is Now,” or peruse the ADL’s recent press releases, you will quickly see that the threat from the right is given far less prominence than the threat (real and perceived) from the left. The institutional knowledge is there, but the institutional priorities are disordered.

Worst of all, not only is the Antisemitism Industrial Complex failing to focus on the most dangerous forms of antisemitism, many of its efforts are making matters worse — including in the last few weeks.

First, by counting all anti-Zionist protests as antisemitic incidents, the ADL has destroyed its credibility as an objective monitor of antisemitism, making it much harder to track; we no longer have reliable data.

Second, by terrifying thousands, perhaps millions, of Jewish people — including many friends of mine — this emphasis on left-wing antisemitism obscures the more serious threats from white nationalists, Islamists, terrorists, and others who commit acts of violence.

And third, the Jewish establishment has imposed a hyperwoke regime of censorship in which statements in support of Palestinians, or in opposition to Israel, or in opposition to Israel’s role in the Iran war, are deemed to be bigotry that merits permanent cancellation. (I have experienced this myself as well.) As Dreher noted, this only makes matters worse, as both conservatives and progressives can see that political speech is being censored by Jewish elites with significant political power — which is exactly what their antisemitic conspiracy theories tell them.

Obviously, it is not the case that if the Jewish community were to do or say a certain thing, antisemitism would disappear. Bigotry never disappears. But the question is not a binary one of existence or non-existence, but one of scope, size and proximity to power. By way of analogy, racism will also probably never disappear, but when abject racism is espoused by government officials and leading cultural figures, that is measurably worse than when it is consigned to the margins. And that is precisely what has happened with antisemitism.

The anti-antisemitism world has become an echo chamber obsessed with left-wing anti-Zionism, while nationalist antisemitism is now widespread among young Republican activists and online influencers. I only hope our leaders change course before it is too late.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email opinion@forward.com.

This story was originally published on the Forward.

This story was originally published in Antisemitism Decoded, the Forward’s biweekly newsletter that helps you separate the signal from the noise and understand current debates over Jewish safety. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

One of the most striking elements about the war with Iran is how little the Trump administration and its supporters have done to explain their rationale for starting a new war in the Middle East.

There’s no shortage of possible explanations — the Iranian government’s repression of protesters, its sponsorship of foreign terrorist attacks, the threat its missiles or nuclear program poses to the United States or to Israel — but Trump and his advisers haven’t been able to pick one or even to say what the war’s objective is and when it might end.

“You’ve said the war is ‘very complete,’ but your defense secretary says ‘this is just the beginning,’” a reporter asked Trump on Monday. “So which is it?”

“Well, I think you could say it’s both,” Trump replied.

People don’t like this lack of explanation — recent polling has found that the Iran war has lower public approval, at 41%, than any other modern conflict that the U.S. has participated in — and are quick to supply their own reasoning for why their government is willing to sacrifice American lives and hundreds of millions of tax dollars to bomb a foreign country.

Some, apparently fueled in part by an Iranian propaganda campaign, have claimed the war is intended to distract from disclosure of the Epstein files or from setbacks on domestic policy, where presidential powers are far more limited than they are in military action.

Others have pointed to Trump’s longstanding obsession with toppling Iran’s leadership.

But many have zeroed in on a familiar claim: It’s the Jews.

Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, spoke for many in the conspiracy-laden isolationist sphere of the conservative movement — dominated by figures like Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and the Holocaust-denying Nick Fuentes — when she argued this war was the doing of Jewish pundits, donors and, for good measure, the senior senator from South Carolina.

“Mark Levin wanted it, it’s his war, Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, Miriam Adelson — that’s obvious,” she said. “They are the ones who’ve been pushing us into it.”

At least it’s true that the folks Kelly named are hawkish political figures who have long called for confronting Iran. But Jews outside of the political sphere have also come under attack. Carlson suggested that the U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran is a Jewish religious plot intended to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and build the Third Temple — and that it was orchestrated by “Chabad, C-H-A-B-A-D.”

Carlson’s outlandish claim, shared widely on social media, prompted the Lubavitcher Orthodox Jewish movement to boost security at its many remote outposts, which are often the only formal Jewish presence in cities around the world.

This rhetoric echoes what we saw last spring when the far right openly trafficked in antisemitism as influencers voiced opposition to American airstrikes on Iran. “We are done being blackmailed, bribed and killed by Jews,” one prominent conservative said at the time.

And it fits in with a long pattern of scapegoating Jews for death and destruction. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent claimed that Jews “found wealth in the debris of civilization” following World War I, while the celebrity aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh claimed the “British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration” had conspired to drag the U.S. into World War II.

When convenient, Jews have also been blamed for losing wars. The Nazis promoted the stabbed-in-the-back myth to claim Jews were among those who had caused Germany to lose World War I, while President Richard Nixon was obsessed with how many of his Democratic opponents were supposedly Jewish anti-Vietnam peaceniks.

Often these conspiracies have been complete fabrications. But even when there’s a germ of truth — many Jews did, of course, oppose the Vietnam War — the most straightforward rebuttal is that it’s offensive and ignorant to attribute the actions of individual Jews to “the Jews,” as if every Jewish person is part of a vast global conspiracy.

What makes the current uproar blaming Israel or Jews — sometimes the public has a hard time separating the two — for the Iran war is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did seem to play an integral role in convincing Trump to strike Iran.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

And while the American war objectives are clear as mud, Israel faces a far more obvious threat from Iran — as witnessed by the hundreds of missiles fired at the country since the war began — which likely accounts for the widespread support for the war in Israel.

It’s not incorrect or antisemitic, then, to note that Israel encouraged the U.S. to attack Iran and that many of its American supporters have cheered on the campaign.

But assigning the country outsized influence is where one starts to get into dicey territory. The notion that the United States has become subservient to Israel has made its way into the discourse across the political spectrum. “A rogue client state has completely overtaken the host,” James Li, a conspiratorial content creator, wrote on X last week.

This sentiment teeters on the edge of the absurd. Israel may have sought to force Trump’s hand by threatening its own attack, but the U.S. has tremendous leverage over Israel and has stopped Israel from launching similar planned attacks in the past.

And the lack of a more straightforward explanation for why the war was in America’s own interests should not inevitably point to a nefarious Israeli plot. Trump has done a lot of things that either belie logical explanation — like a tariff regime that even protectionist economists have looked askance at — or have been justified in fluid ways, or not at all.

But conspiracies help people make sense of confusing and stressful events, especially in the absence of a more sensible explanation.

And where conspiracies begin, antisemitism almost inevitably follows.

This story was originally published on the Forward.

This story was originally published in the Forward.

The protesters at a January rally I attended in New York City’s Washington Square Park were loud and raw throated as they denounced the brutal Islamist regime in Tehran, then in the midst of slaughtering thousands of their comrades in Iran. A crowd of more than 1,500 called on the United States to make good on President Donald Trump’s all-caps promise that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

I turned to an Iranian friend next to me who was lustily joining cheers calling for the tyrants’ overthrow. Like most of the rest of the protesters, she was also cheering the demonstration’s other prominent images: Israeli flags, the images of President Donald Trump and photos of Reza Pahlavi, the son and self-declared heir of the autocratic monarch Iranians ousted in 1979.

My friend’s parents had once been members of Iran’s leftist Tudeh Party, the country’s official communist faction, which was among the staunchest opponents of Pahlavi’s father. Recalling my own 20-month stay in Iran toward the end of his rule, I asked my friend if she understood the rampant corruption and repression under which Iranians lived during that time.

Was she aware of the role the U.S. played in installing the shah in power, and the torture of dissidents by SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, with support from Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad — a record Pahlavi has never acknowledged?

My dear friend fixed me in her gaze with clear eyes, devoid of illusion.

“Yes,” she said simply. “And it would be better.”

Lowered expectations

Whether the bombs and missiles the U.S. is now raining down on Iran will fulfill the promise Trump held out for protesters remains an open question. But In New York City, back in January, there was no mistaking their desperate faith in him — or the irony of that faith.

It was the U.S., after all, that joined with Great Britain in 1953 to overturn the democracy Iran enjoyed 73 years ago. Twenty-six years of U.S. support ensued for the autocracy that followed.

During the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, it was the U.S. that also supplied Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, with critical intelligence and precursor chemicals that enabled him to manufacture and deploy outlawed chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians, asphyxiating thousands.

Given this history and the woeful fates that befell Iraq and Libya after U.S. intervention, many liberals voice grave doubt that any U.S.-forced regime change could restore democracy to the country. But they may be missing an important point: the extent to which crushing U.S. economic sanctions and the Iranian government’s own brutal repression, corruption and incompetence, have produced economic and political desperation among many Iranians, which radically lowers the bar.

The redemption of ‘Big Satan’

Opponents of Trump can recite a litany of his political and personal depravities, his affronts to democracy here at home, and his unreliability as an international partner in support of human rights and democracy abroad.

But I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that such recitations fall on deaf ears with many Iranians.

Two reasons rise to the top, in my mind, that explain this.

The first is the enormous credibility that Trump and the U.S. have derived from being among the primary hate targets of Iran’s despotic regime. This effect has also benefited Israel, the partner of the U.S. in waging this war. Decades of demonization of “the Big Satan” — and Israel, “the Little Satan” — from leaders so many Iranians despise have performed a miracle of reputational resurrection.

Today, this relentless drumbeat of vitriol has rendered the CIA’s subversion of Iran’s mid-20th century democracy — and Israel’s help in setting up SAVAK — a distant memory. This theocratic regime is the present danger.

Secondly, as a famous saying in Washington goes, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” That appears to be why many Iranians, for now, are turning to Trump. In Iran, the protesters’ own lack of leadership and resistance infrastructure plays into this. There is no Charles de Gaulle or Nelson Mandela waiting in the wings to take charge, with highly disciplined and battle-tested resistance groups to support them.

Another important factor may be the American left’s inability to offer Iranians a compelling alternative vision.

Several liberal members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, have consistently praised the bravery of the protesters and their cause. But they have not proposed any way to hold their killers accountable, and have opposed Trump’s war as the way to do so. Their approach, diplomacy and international law, produced President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2016, which radically constrained Iran’s nuclear weapons development.

Based on my reporting from Iran for the Forward back then, I can attest that vast numbers of Iranians strongly supported this at the time. They saw the JCPOA as a way to open Iran up to greater Western influence over time — the greatest fear of the country’s hardline ayatollahs.

But Trump tossed that achievement into the rubbish heap of history in his first term. And the left’s toolbox has been useless since. In the meantime, outside of government, some on the left have played down or ignored the Iranian government’s killings and abuses — or even attributed January’s protests in whole or part to Mossad agents embedded in Iran.

‘Striving for democracy’

Another friend, still living in Iran, told me recently that his grandson had left him feeling shamed. How is it, his grandson asked, that his generation had allowed the shah to be overthrown and replaced by this cohort of theocratic thugs?

My friend in Tehran had no answer.

My friend’s parents had been ardent supporters of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, the fiercely nationalistic Iranian leader ousted by Britain and the U.S. in 1953. But now, the prospect of a return by the shah’s son as a U.S.-backed autocrat with strong ties to right-wing Israelis didn’t phase him at all.

For his part, Pahlavi has publicly espoused a commitment to secular liberal democracy. But just last month his main support group, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, proposed that Pahlavi should serve as the unambiguous “Leader of the National Uprising” who will be empowered to issue official decrees, install hand-picked executive officials during a “transition to freedom and stability” and act as commander-in-chief of Iran’s military forces.

His supporters, meanwhile, have been widely accused of harassing and viciously threatening opponents who do not accept him in this role.

Would a secular, hopefully more competent, authoritarian dictatorship, whether led by Pahlavi or someone else with U.S. backing, be an improvement, I asked my friend in Tehran?

Even as bombs were falling from the sky onto his city last week, he texted back: “Yes sure!”

“I think this can be a phase towards a better situation for striving for democracy,” he added.

To be honest, I fear he and other like-minded Iranians are betting on moonbeams. But even after Israel bombed Tehran’s oil storage facilities over the weekend, engulfing the city in a poisonous black cloud, he texted me poetry.

“Under the black smoke…I saw trees that were hosting a multitude of blossoms with their thin bodies,” he wrote. “It seemed like they were supposed to remind us of spring….To us, who have been stuck in a rut for years? The ideological Mafia rule of the Islamic Republic of Iran has stolen 47 springs from us.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email opinion@forward.com.

This story was originally published on the Forward.

Some of my earliest concepts of war were shaped by a cassette tape.

On long road trips in the 1980s, my parents would play Paul Simon’s “Graceland” on the car stereo. The album opens with “The Boy in the Bubble,” which includes the line: “These are the days of lasers in the jungle, lasers in the jungle somewhere.”

I did not know what he meant exactly, but the line painted a vivid picture in my mind. War, as I imagined it, took place in jungles: dense green foliage, camouflage patterned in dark greens and blacks, helicopters hovering over tree canopies, soldiers moving through shadowy undergrowth.

Those imagined battlefields stayed with me throughout my childhood. They appeared in movies like “Rambo” and “Predator,” in video games like Contra and Metal Gear, and in the cultural afterimage of Vietnam that hung over the late Cold War years. Even when the stories were fictional, they always seemed to be set somewhere far away, deep in a jungle with lasers cutting through the night.

But the cultural imagery of war shifted as I grew up. By the time Operation Desert Storm began in 1991, the jungle had given way to the desert. The greens and blacks of camouflage were replaced by sand and khaki. War was now a hazy expanse of tan horizons and dust-filled skies, punctuated by armored vehicles crossing endless dunes and soldiers moving through cities half-buried in sand.

Today, as the United States and Israel find themselves in direct conflict with Iran, I am struck by how different the images of this war feel. What fills our screens now often looks abstract: gray radar displays, grainy videos of fighter jets shot down, satellite footage of explosions blooming in the night sky. War appears as streaks of light and flashes on distant horizons, graphics layered over maps.

It is the technological sublime: a spectacle of missiles, drones and interceptors. War is rendered as systems and signals rather than bodies and lives. With each layer, the human beings underneath slip further out of view.

For me, the war with Iran does not feel abstract at all. I think about friends and loved ones in Israel moving in and out of shelters as sirens sound. I think about families mourning those killed in missile strikes. I think about the quiet prayers that the Iron Dome will hold against the next barrage of ballistic missiles, and about the people who remain vulnerable —  in Israel and across the region. I think about all those who feel powerless in the face of faceless weaponry.

At the Brandeis School of San Francisco, where I have been head of school for more than a decade, these events ripple through daily life in another way. For the past two years, we have managed, almost miraculously, to run our annual eighth-grade trip to Israel. Each spring, our students travel across the country, walking through layers of Jewish history they may have only encountered in prayer or in books. This year, once again, we wait.

My middle daughter is among the 50 students scheduled to go. We do not know whether the war will subside enough for the trip to happen. The uncertainty is a reminder that history is not something safely contained in textbooks. It is unfolding in real time, shaping the choices families and schools must make.

Perhaps this is why the timing of this war, arriving as the Jewish calendar turned toward Purim, felt strangely resonant. Purim reminds us that history often moves behind masks. The forces shaping our lives are not always visible, and the visions we are shown about power can obscure as much as they reveal. But Purim also reminds us to teach our children to step forward when history calls them, even when the full picture remains hidden.

Every generation constructs its own imagined battlefield, a landscape where war unfolds in the visual language of its time: jungles, deserts, and now skies and seas filled with “unmanned” drones and interceptors.

From thousands of miles away, it is easy to mistake the spectacle for reality. But beneath those images are people: children waiting in shelters, pilots, sailors, soldiers and their families, parents refreshing news feeds, hoping that the next siren will not come. Communities across the Middle East caught in the crossfire.

At the start of last week, I wrote to the Brandeis community about the letters that Esther and Mordecai send at the end of the Megillah, writing “words of peace and truth.” I will continue to pray that we all can learn to hold space in our hearts for the truth of the human lives behind the images on our screens — and for peace. 

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J. 

(JTA) — During my early years of cantorial school, I noticed a significant gap in my studies. While the coursework included extensive classes on biblical grammar, liturgy and text study, I received only surface-level training in providing pastoral care, and little attention was given to my character development, spiritual formation, or to learning to tend to my own well-being as I prepared for a career in religious leadership.

I was being taught, sure. But was I being formed? That question would later inform my understanding of clergy burnout as structural — rooted not in individual weakness, but in how seminaries are training clergy long before they enter the field.

As a future cantor aspiring to guide community members through meaningful rituals and lifecycle transitions, I felt unprepared both for how to best support congregants on their Jewish journeys and how to protect myself from burnout while doing so. I kept hoping that training would come, but by the end of my second year, I realized I would need to seek additional education outside of the seminary walls.

I decided to apply to a part-time Master of Social Work program at New York University, which I completed at night and on the weekends, alongside my cantorial studies. My seminary pushed back, saying it was unnecessary, but I felt strongly that if I was going to thrive in the role, I would need both an expansive education and an experience that would tend to my growth.

My experience is part of a wider problem. Atra’s recent report showing widespread burnout in the rabbinate and articles highlighting similar trends among cantors showcase the seriousness of the issue. Meanwhile, seminaries have long expressed confusion over why prospective students are becoming increasingly hesitant to enroll in their training programs.

Burnout is, of course, not unique to clergy. Research comparing clergy burnout with other vocations shows that rabbis and cantors experience burnout at levels similar to other helping professionals —and even lower than police and other emergency responders — yet face a uniquely unbounded role marked by constant emotional labor, blurred boundaries, and around-the-clock expectations that may require unique skills to combat.

And while we may be quick to recognize burnout by only its hallmark of exhaustion and simply propose self-care in response, the research is clear that other dimensions of burnout prevalent among clergy — such as job-related cynicism that emerges over time, or feelings of diminished effectiveness caused by systemic barriers — require solutions centered in personal development, relational health and structural and institutional support.

So then why the confusion? It seems simple to me: to prepare rabbis and cantors to thrive in their roles, graduate-level theological education needs to catch up by grounding clergy training in intentional formation and practical skill-building, both central to preventing these trends and promoting long-term success.

It’s time to move to action. We need to enact evidence-based practices that support clergy during their education and beyond, helping them to build resilience, not just master content or complete degree requirements.

To find those evidence-based practices, we can look to research findings coming out of academia and the ways that other faith communities have implemented the research’s recommendations in their seminary programs.

I can vouch for the necessity of applying these practices and research outcomes. In my social work program, I learned the relational theories, justice skills and psychology chops I knew I would need in order to succeed as a cantor, and which I rely heavily on in my clergy role today. I gained clinical skills that equipped me to explore the personhood of the individual sitting in front of me while also learning to maintain boundaries, protect myself from becoming burnt out as a helping professional, and flourish as a person who loves what she does.

In 2021, I went on to pursue a PhD in Practical Theology with a focus in the Psychology of Religion from Boston University to further deepen my knowledge of this intersection. As a doctoral candidate, I’m part of a research team collecting and publishing data about clergy burnout risks, flourishing potential, formation goals, and the crucial role seminaries play in shaping rabbis- and cantors-in-training.

Our empirical study at a Jewish seminary — the first of its kind — found that students value the formation they already experience through the school’s supportive social and academic cultures, impactful t’filah (prayer) program and processing spaces, and relational growth studying in chevruta (partnered study) and with professors and mentors, among other things. The seminarians also recognized that as the needs of the Jewish community change, their role is changing too, and that developing the relational capacities to facilitate meaningful community is the only way forward.

Students expressed a strong desire to learn more about responsible uses of power, spiritual abuse and t’shuva (making amends). the social sciences and mental health, and how to cultivate personal virtue capacities such as compassion and humility in order to promote their well-being. The students requested training in the kinds of skills I gained through my social work education, citing them as essential both to their effectiveness as spiritual leaders and to their personal sustainability as helping professionals.

These results are encouraging and show us what it can look like when seminary systems are enthusiastic about and invest in their students’ formation — and they must stir us to action. Potential solutions include establishing or building upon already-existing formation programs to shape future rabbis and cantors as whole people — programs that attend to the strengths and vulnerabilities students bring into their training, and which engage in regular evaluation of their growth. Programs must shift from frameworks that approach burnout as an individual problem to one that highlights systemic challenges and prepares students as healthy, holy vessels with capacities to navigate them—from one that simply educates students to one that forms them for leadership.

Relatedly, and importantly, seminaries must adopt an intersectional lens that acknowledges the unique challenges faced by clergy of marginalized social locations (e.g., women, queer people, people of color) and support those students in developing the tools to respond to the additional obstacles they may encounter in the field.

The impact of this will be broad. By supporting future clergy members’ development and well-being, we also help them better serve their eventual communities from places of strength. Research in Christian seminaries shows promising results: when seminarians are supported in their struggles and growth, and studying in institutions that invest in their personal and moral formation along with their knowledge acquisition, flourishing is not only possible, but likely.

We no longer have to wonder about what to do, nor fear that the next generation of Jewish clergy will enter the field without the capacities to thrive in their work. It’s time we integrate the research into clergy training programs and ongoing professional development to address issues of burnout, long-term sustainability, and well-being.

Rabbis and cantors shouldn’t have to pursue additional degrees to flourish in their work and learn to protect their mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Seminaries can be a part of the solution, if they invest in the work.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

A multi-day harassment campaign this week targeted Jewish organizations and student leaders across Stanford University. Originating from an encrypted Proton email address with the moniker “Exposing Stanford Jews,” the messages contained threats of violence, baseless accusations of misconduct levied against Jewish student leaders, calls for student organizations to rid themselves of Jewish members, and threats of rape against Jewish women on campus. As Jewish students at Stanford, we are troubled.

The emails — conspiratorial in tone, targeting an ethnic minority, and invoking genocidal imagery — bear the hallmarks of dangerous fascistic rhetoric. They are a reminder that Jews on college campuses are under attack by the fringes of both the left and the right. 

For much of the past two years, antisemitism on American campuses has been associated with the far left. Hostility toward Jews has often been expressed through the language of anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation. What makes these emails distinctive is their origin on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Right-wing antisemitism, of course, is nothing new, but it has recently resurfaced with renewed visibility in parts of the populist right. As the political “horseshoe theory” foretells, the far right and the far left are now converging in their embrace of antisemitism, even in the uppermost echelons of American society and academia.

The email attacks began on Sunday morning. Six staff members on the Stanford Review, a conservative-leaning student publication, received an email titled “Stanford Moderates & Conservatives: STOP JEWISH INFILTRATION.” The message contained a single link to an article from the Occidental Observer, a white nationalist publication, equating Jews with vampires and alleging they share with the left a hatred of “white men, Christianity, and Western civilization.” Notably, the message was sent only to non-Jewish Review staffers, suggesting an attempt not only to stigmatize Jews but also to recruit their peers. (One of us, Dylan, is managing editor at the Review and did not receive one of the emails.)

At the same time, Jewish students in leadership roles across student life received individualized threatening emails sent from the same address. Multiple students told us the messages were part of a broader harassment campaign. We were able to confirm the details of the emails with those students, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for their safety, saying the emails contained highly personal details. In at least one case, the sender tied a student leader’s Jewish identity to a baseless accusation of financial misconduct. 

Stanford Chabad also received an email threatening a “Holocaust 2.0.” According to Chabad Rabbi Dov Greenberg, a second email sent to Chabad Wednesday afternoon referenced coverage of the incident by the Stanford Daily, the student-run newspaper on campus. The message repeated calls for violence against Jews on campus while claiming the sender had a First Amendment right to issue these threats.

According to Review staff members who received the email and wished to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal, Jew hatred is surging in far right political discourse on campus. In conversations with conservative students, multiple Review staffers told us they noticed a “dangerous convergence” towards identity politics and bigotry.

The messages circulated as international news outlets reported the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei due to American and Israeli strikes. Geopolitical events like these often revive conspiratorial claims that Jews secretly dictate the U.S. Middle East policy. Even thousands of miles removed from the conflict, Jews become convenient stand-ins for forces they do not control.

RELATED: FBI investigating threatening emails sent to Stanford Jewish leaders

Antisemitism cloaked in isolationist rhetoric is not unique to this moment in American history. In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin built a mass audience — estimated at 30 million people, or a quarter of the U.S. population at the time — by promoting conspiratorial claims that blamed Jews for national decline.

Today, demagogues capitalize on a predictable truth: antisemitism is portable. It fits easily into any movement where simplified narratives and grievance politics dominate discourse. On the populist right, Jews are cast as the hidden architects of globalization, war and cultural decline. On parts of the activist left, Jews are recast as embodiments of colonialism or uniquely illegitimate nationalism.

Antisemitism at Stanford has taken multiple forms in recent years, from graffiti supporting far right tastemaker Nick Fuentes to a poster portraying slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a symbol of liberation and martyrdom.

Stanford’s response of stern condemnation and federal investigation may address the immediate threat. The broader challenge is cultural. Across the political spectrum, fringe movements increasingly package extremist ideas alongside legitimate grievances making them harder to dismiss. In an era of soundbite politics, grievances travel faster than productive dialogue. In this environment, antisemitism is again finding fertile ground.

Institutions cannot counter decentralized radicalism through ritual condemnations nor reasoned debate alone, and Jews cannot afford merely to point it out. The solution does not lie in McCarthyist repression, which risks driving radical movements underground and eroding the very freedoms institutions seek to defend. Nor can leaders simply ignore the legitimate material concerns of economically disadvantaged voters.

The instinct in moments like these is often to become defensive about Jewish life. But the stronger response is to become generative. As stated by New York Times commentator Bret Stephens, the solution lies in bolstering pillars of Jewish life to forge a positive and robust Jewish presence in the United States. Importantly, this work must not wait for validation from others and simultaneously refrain from becoming isolationist. Jews will not win on an island; coalition building and allies are ever more important.

For institutions, the task is different: drawing clear red lines and taking decisive action against perpetrators when they are crossed. Father Coughlin was eventually ordered to stand down by his bishop. The Catholic Church eventually drew those lines. In a recent address on the resurgence of antisemitism among self-described Christian conservatives, Catholic public intellectual Robert George argued that Christians must resist what he calls “antisemitic temptations” within their own ranks.

He also modeled what enforcing moral red lines looks like in practice. George himself recently resigned from the board of the Heritage Foundation after President Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s interview of far right political commentator Nick Fuentes.

If the forces fueling antisemitism are left unchecked, the institutions responsible for safeguarding American democracy risk becoming the very platforms from which democracy is undermined. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America’s exceptionalism rests in the enduring defense of its founding principles.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J. 

This story was originally published in the Forward.

“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” said Louis Brandeis, American Jewish leader and Supreme Court justice, in 1915. “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”

For much of the next century, most American Jews stacked their liberalism on top of their patriotism on top of their Zionism. They overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic Party, and overwhelmingly supported both Israel and the United States-Israel alliance.

In recent years, however, many have found it increasingly difficult to deny is that support for Israel is, at present, hard to square with liberalism. And a statement this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the probable 2028 Democratic candidate for president, made clear exactly how profoundly that shift has changed the Democratic party.

Israel is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” Newsom said on a podcast, adding that the U.S. would likely have no choice but to reconsider its military aid to the Jewish state.

Given that Newsom is broadly a centrist, his words made a clear statement: Politicians understand that uncritical support for Israel is no longer compatible with the Democratic mainstream. Democratic voters are pushing politicians to, if not abandon Israel entirely, then at least condition their support for it.

And the future of American Jews and the Democratic Party is now not only up to Democratic politicians who decide how much to give Israel and under what conditions. It is also up to American Jews, who have to decide whether those politicians, in doing so, are moving away from their values or bringing them back into alignment.

Shifting sympathies

A Gallup poll released last month found that Americans’ sympathies now lie more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Up until last year, the opposite had held true. For Democrats, whose sympathies already “flipped strongly” — per Gallup — to Palestinians in 2025, the difference is more stark: 65% said they sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17% said they sympathize more with Israelis.

Those tempted to write the change off as the result of a party captured by a young far left should consider that, last year, Pew found that 66% of Democrats over the age of 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from just 43% in 2022. (For those ages 18 to 49, the number was 71%.) A full 73% of Democrats over 50 said they had “none at all” or “not too much” confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I have no doubt that some will say that the change is because people don’t understand the complexity of the situation in the Middle East; because they have forgotten the lessons of history; or because the Democratic Party is comfortable embracing antisemitism.

These claims ignore a simpler explanation: that the voters who are registered with the one major U.S. political party that still claims to care about liberalism, democracy and human rights watched as Israel, by its own admission, killed some 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

They saw Israel’s leaders make it next to impossible for civilians in Gaza to receive necessary food and humanitarian aid. They see settler violence rising in the West Bank, including against American citizens, amid increased talk of annexation. They hear Netanyahu continue to insist that there can be no Palestinian state, and understand that the alternative he foresees is not one state with equal rights, but either a future of endless wars or an undemocratic state in which Palestinians live under Israeli control without the rights of citizens.

In that context, many voters see that unflinching support for Israel is no longer in line with the values that drew them to their party. And since they cannot change Israel, they are trying to change their party.

No more cognitive dissonance

Democratic voters, in insisting that their politicians not walk in lockstep with Israel, are insisting that the party break its cognitive dissonance around Israel. Which means that the future of American Jews in the Democratic Party depends not only on how sensitively Democratic politicians navigate criticizing and checking Israel without elevating antisemitism. It also depends on whether American Jews are willing to admit this dissonance to ourselves.

For some, this is not an open question. There are American Jews who have no relationship to Israel, or whose relationship is an overwhelmingly critical one. Per last year’s Jewish Federations of North America National Survey, a combined 32% of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist.

(Only 7% of American Jews overall consider themselves to be anti-Zionist, and just 8% say non-Zionist. But most don’t subscribe to the label “Zionist” either, with just 37% describing themselves as such.)

In 2021, one poll of American Jews found that a quarter deemed Israel an apartheid state, well before Newsom likened it to one.

There’s also the reality that the vast majority of American Jews do not name Israel as their top issue when they go to the voting booth, and that the Republican Party is undergoing its own schism over Israel.

Still, that same JFNA poll found that most American Jews — 71% — do say that they feel emotionally attached to Israel. And 60% say that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, even as 69% say that they “sometimes find it hard to support the actions taken by Israel or its government.”

What this means: For many American Jewish Democrats, encouraging politicians to break with Israel — or accepting that break is already in process — is likely more emotionally challenging than it is for American Democrats generally.

What Newsom’s comments show is that this is an emotional problem American Jewish voters will need to face sooner rather than later. Democratic voters are forcing Democratic politicians to resolve a disconnect, and they want it resolved quickly. The year is no longer 1915. Democratic American Jews are going to need to decide what it means to be “good Americans and better Jews.” If it can no longer involve being both liberal and staunchly pro-Israel, we will need to decide which of those items we find most important.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email opinion@forward.com.

This story was originally published on the Forward.

Newsom highlights AIPAC failure

Concerning Gov. Newsom’s declaration regarding AIPAC (“Gavin Newsom says he never has and ‘never will’ take money from AIPAC,” Feb. 25), it can only be said that his position reflects a massive failure on the part of AIPAC when a few years ago it turned into another political action committee with a Republican slant.

For generations, AIPAC was a nonpartisan, pro-Israel advocacy organization with great influence in Washington that was respected on both sides of the aisle. That is because it informed politicians about Israel so that they could make decisions based on the facts. 

But recent leadership stole AIPAC and its legacy, perverted it, and now it is only known as another Republican political action committee.

Those in leadership at AIPAC should do teshuvah, repentance, both in terms of acknowledging their self-interested errors and in terms of changing AIPAC back to something worthwhile.

After being a supporter of AIPAC for about 50 years, even when I disagreed strongly with Israeli policies, I resigned in 2022 because I thought AIPAC’s change was wrong and because I felt that AIPAC was in fact not honest in saying that the old nonpartisan AIPAC still existed alongside the new AIPAC political action committee.

For all of those 50 years of my membership, I gave more money to AIPAC than I gave to any other public interest organization, Jewish or otherwise. That is how important I thought AIPAC was. But today, I give AIPAC nothing, which is what it deserves.

Lawrence Grossman | Benicia

J.’s Holocaust series coverage

I want to speak up for the many Sonoma County Jews who applaud the Sonoma State Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide for respecting the sentiment “Never Again” in its current context: Never again genocide for anyone.

As J.’s article details (“Holocaust and genocide lecture series at Sonoma State adopts new subject: Israel,” Feb. 18), the center has in recent years hosted international experts not only in the 20th century German mass murder of Jews, but other state-sponsored genocides, in Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Americas and elsewhere. This year, we are proud the center will hear from respected Brown University genocide scholar Omer Bartov, who is one of many experts who contend that Israel is committing a Palestinian genocide.

Saying that Israel, my own people, are committing genocide, makes me distraught. But it doesn’t make me anti-Israel or antisemitic, any more than acknowledging the American genocide of Native Americans makes me anti-American. Nor does it make me ignorant of history, as those quoted in the article would have it.

In fact, the center’s detractors seem ignorant of history. J. reported that “supporters” of the series “don’t want to see the series politicized.” Yet all holocausts are political. They are designed by politicians, supported by laws and enforced by state power.

When Ussama Makdisi, chair of the UC Berkeley Palestinian and Arab Studies program, spoke at the center last year about the Palestinian genocide, he received a standing ovation from a large crowd. Surely J. could have found one person from that audience to interview.

Susan Stern | Santa Rosa

S.F. Mayor Lurie gets it wrong

I agree with Mayor Daniel Lurie that there is no place for antisemitism or hate directed at any group in San Francisco (“S.F. Mayor Daniel Lurie condemns ‘Tax the Jews’ chant heard during protest,” Feb. 26). But he made a grievous error in attributing an antisemitic chant (“Tax the Jews”) to “a group of individuals” from the Democratic Socialists of America who were chanting “Tax the rich.” The antisemitic chant came from a lone woman, who was not part of the DSA demonstration. This has been confirmed on video and by eyewitnesses, as reported in Mission Local.

Mayor Lurie may have made an honest mistake — he was apparently unable to see the demonstrators from the stage — but he needs to publicly correct his misinformed tweet about the chant. His tweet is now being spread by those who seek to smear our city and attack our democratic rights to express dissent. 

False antisemitism claims power the current attacks on free speech, democracy and diversity by the Trump administration. Universities have lost funding. People have been deported. Mayor Lurie needs to change the narrative he started.

David Spero | San Francisco

Column points to father’s articles

My family appreciated your Feb. 13 archives column “From Jamaica to India to Zimbabwe, Jewish newspapers have held us together,” which examined Jewish newspapers from the “periphery of the Jewish diaspora.” The article both enlightened and enlivened our knowledge of Jews around the world and, specifically, my family’s heritage and why Purim represents something timeless for our people. It also led us to discover articles that my father published in 1935.

The column references the Jewish Guild Journal, published in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) between 1919 and the 1930s. I deduced that my father, Chaim Gershater, who was born in Lithuania and immigrated to Bulawayo, likely published in that journal during the 1930s before assuming the role of editor of the Zionist Record in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1943.

Within minutes, our family discovered that the Jewish Guild Journal archives are accessible and searchable online. We quickly found that my father had indeed published numerous articles in this newspaper over the span of a decade, and was on the editorial board. “Why Haman? Why Purim?” was published in April 1935 and remains pertinent today.

A beneficiary of yeshiva preparation, my father was steeped in Torah, Talmud and Yiddishkeit. He also studied history, English and political science. He had a Sholem Aleichem brand of wry humor. In his article, he writes of the power of Jewish satire: “Haman owes his popularity not to his inglorious ambitions, nor to his ignoble end, He owes it to the humble and anonymous scribe who wrote an immortal satire and gave the Jews an immortal weapon wherewith to fight the enemies: the weapon of ridicule.”

Reading my father’s words from 1935 is a reminder of how Jews have survived the most antisemitic of antisemites, and persevered, through ridicule and humor. Thank you, J. and Maya Mirsky, for your journalistic curiosity.

Aryela Lee Zulman (nee Gershater) | Palo Alto 

Don’t ignore genocide experts

Israeli Consul General Marco Sermoneta says Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza and attributes base motives to those who say otherwise (“Calling the Gaza war ‘genocide’ is a false, dangerous narrative,” Feb. 4). Sermoneta ignores the definition of genocide in international law and the consensus of Holocaust and genocide experts.

The list of those concluding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza includes the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and multiple Jewish and Israeli Holocaust scholars.

Sermoneta is correct that genocide doesn’t just mean killing a lot of people. One also must prove that a government intended to destroy an ethnic, national or religious group “in whole or in part.” 

Israel’s actions fit both tests: Israel has killed a minimum of 70,000 Gazans, according to The Lancet. Some 3,000 Palestinian children have lost their limbs, according to UNICEF. We must also consider means of sustaining life. According to Haaretz, 70% of structures in Gaza are destroyed. Sanitation, water and electricity systems are badly damaged. Agriculture and fishing are nearly impossible. Children are still dying of malnutrition.

Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Knesset, said on X that Israel’s task was “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.” As Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov wrote in the New York Times, Israeli “government and military officials … called for ‘total annihilation.’” 

We are both synagogue-going grandmothers, hardly antisemites or part of a “hostile network of actors,” as Sermoneta characterizes Israel’s critics. We fear that Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari was right when he worried recently that Israel will destroy Judaism.

“If Israel continues on its present trajectory,” Harari said, it will become based on the “worship of what were completely anti-Jewish values for the last two millennia… the worship of power and violence [will be] the new Judaism.”

Susan Stern | Santa Rosa 
Beverly Voloshin | Petaluma

Give Betty Yee a shot

Your coverage of the Feb. 26 gubernatorial forum on Israel and Jewish safety (“Candidates for CA governor vow to keep Jews safe and Israel ties strong,” Feb. 27) omitted a crucial fact: Betty Yee, perhaps the candidate with the deepest ties to Israel and the Jewish community, was excluded despite her recent second-place performance at the California Democratic Convention.

This decision deprived the community of hearing from a longtime ally. Betty Yee has visited Israel numerous times, chaired Israel trips for Bay Area friends, and is married to Rabbi Steven Jacobs.

As a UC Regent, she consistently supported Jewish students facing antisemitism on University of California and California State University campuses. As a former leader within the California Democratic Party, she was a steady, reasonable voice for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and against rising antisemitism. She also delivered sound fiscal policy as a two-term state controller.

Voters who care about Israel and Jewish community safety should give Betty Yee a serious look. Her record shows not just rhetoric, but years of partnership with our community.

Dan Cohen | Raanana, Israel

(JTA) — I have spent much of my life living in, traveling to, and learning about Israel. Like many who care deeply about the Jewish state, I hold strong views on the political, social and geopolitical forces that shape its present and future. And yet, as a Jewish educator, I rarely voice those opinions publicly. Not because I lack conviction, but because conviction alone is not my lane.

My contribution — where I can add value in an already crowded and polarized discourse — is education.

That is why I write now, knowing full well that what follows may unsettle some who read it. The pedagogical implications of the war against Iran — particularly for educators who pose questions and facilitate discussion about preemptive strikes — may be labeled by some as unwarranted or even disloyal to the Jewish establishment (an establishment of which I am proudly a part). But education has never been about comfort. It has always been about courage.

Let me be unequivocally clear at the outset: My heart is with the people of Israel. Like many of you, I have friends, colleagues, and family members who are living under direct threat — running to shelters, enduring fear, exhaustion, and trauma. I am also deeply concerned for the lives of innocent Iranians and others across the Middle East whose lives have been brutalized by dictators for decades and who now find themselves at grave risk once again. And I hold profound respect and gratitude for the Israeli and American air forces, and for the military and intelligence professionals working — hopefully — to bring this conflict to a swift end and restore peace.

I refuse the false choice that demands only one of these hopes. Moral maturity allows us to hold several at once.

And precisely because this moment is so fraught, so emotional, and so consequential, educators — especially Jewish educators — have a responsibility that goes beyond slogans and statements. We must teach. Regardless of our personal views, we must engage our students — youth and adults alike — in serious learning about the moral, ethical, religious and legal implications of preemptive military action.

For those of us raised on the story of Israel’s preemptive strike in 1967 — the heroic opening move that made the Six-Day War a decisive victory — this may feel almost sacrilegious. To question preemption can sound, to some, like betrayal. But education demands that we ask the hard questions: Were the recent preemptive strikes by Israel and the United States lawful? Were they ethical? Under what frameworks — Jewish, international, moral — can they be justified, and where are those justifications contested?

To my Israeli friends, many of whom overwhelmingly support these strikes even knowing they would place their own lives in direct danger of retaliation: I hear you. I honor your courage and your resolve. And still, as educators, we must bring the debate itself into the classroom — not as provocation, but as preparation.

Because if we do not create thoughtful, guided, and humane spaces for grappling with these tensions, our students will encounter them anyway — on social media, in hallways, and on college campuses — where the discourse will be louder, harsher and far less forgiving.

Many communal leaders have already issued firm, unequivocal statements. That is their role. Education is different. Education acknowledges that this is a matter of genuine disagreement and rigorous debate. It recognizes that adults have had decades of learning and lived experience to arrive at their conclusions — and that students deserve the same opportunity.

To deny disagreement where it exists is naïve. To avoid teaching it is worse. It is mis-educative.

So I implore my fellow educators: Embrace the challenge. Present diverse perspectives with intellectual honesty and moral seriousness. Model respect. Invite disagreement — not to fracture community, but to deepen understanding. Disagreement, when handled well, is not a threat to education; it is one of its most powerful tools.

Be brave. Do not fear that your students may arrive at conclusions different from your own. That fear has haunted educators for millennia. But the purpose of education is not replication. It is formation. We are not here to create replicas of ourselves, but to help learners become who they are meant to become.

And be better than the adult world that so often surrounds our students. Do not allow name-calling, othering or moral absolutism to replace inquiry and empathy. The sanctity of education depends on this — and so does our hope for a better future.

To communal leaders, funders and supporters of Jewish education: I beg you to set aside partisan instincts for the sake of educational integrity. If one of our core responsibilities is to prepare young people for the world they inhabit, then we must do so precisely when the stakes are highest. And they could not be higher than they are now.

There are serious, credible arguments on multiple sides of the question of whether preemptive strikes against Iran were warranted, legal and ethical. To shut down debate by insinuating that dissent renders someone unfit for communal life or institutional belonging is not an educational posture. It echoes, uncomfortably, the very authoritarian impulses we claim to oppose.

Education is inherently political. It can never be partisan.

As Jewish educators, we have a profound responsibility to stand with the Jewish people and with the State of Israel. But to truly support our youth and young adults in this moment, we must teach them how to encounter complexity, not hide from it. We must teach them “the other side” — whatever form that takes in this painful and unfolding chapter — even when it is uncomfortable.

Especially when it is uncomfortable. Am Yisrael Chai.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

(JTA) — Around me, I see many Jews using the timing in the Jewish calendar to understand the current U.S.-Israel war against Iran in biblical terms. We are Esther, we are Mordecai, we have defeated Haman, they seem to be saying. We have fulfilled the commandment of blotting out Amalek, our ancient and perpetual enemy.

It’s not hard to see what they are saying. On the Jewish calendar, this past Shabbat was Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of remembrance, celebrated each year on the Shabbat right before Purim. The occasion is marked with a reading from the Torah commanding us to remember how Amalekhites, the followers of Amalek, attacked the Israelites on their journey from Egypt to the land of Canaan and that they did so unfairly, picking off the weakest members of the group, those straggling to keep up. The Israelites are then commanded: “When the Eternal your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Eternal your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven!” (Deut. 25:17-19)

From this foundation, Amalek has become an archetype of a certain sort of antisemite, one who is infinitely dangerous, who is always lurking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. In the biblical book of Esther, our source text for Purim, Haman, who seeks to destroy the Jews of Persia, is identified as a descendant of Agag, who was once a king of the Amalekhites. That we celebrate Haman’s overthrowing by Mordecai and Esther — and the Jews’ subsequent rampage against their enemies at the book’s conclusion — reinforces the remember/blot out dynamic of Deuteronomy and ties it tightly to Purim. Shabbat Zachor ensures we don’t miss this point.

And so it seems remarkable, pregnant with meaning, that this Shabbat Zachor was also the first day of a new bombing campaign undertaken by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is modern-day Persia. Furthermore, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the first hours of the campaign, was a hater of the Jewish people and an unfair fighter, sponsoring terrorism that killed the innocent and the weak.

And yet drawing parallels with the Purim story right now is, I believe, a dangerous move that misses essential truths about Purim.

First, the Book of Esther is not a military guide or a guide to defeating one’s enemies. It is a self-contained story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the moment that Esther is worrying whether she has the strength to stand up for her people, we already know the end of the story, we know that she will succeed. But Esther herself does not — just think about her request that all the Jews of Persia fast with her in anticipation of the risk she will undertake. We would do well to remember that Haman, too, does not know the end of the story and ends up being hanged on the gallows he prepared for Mordecai. The more certain one is of one’s plans, the more likely it seems one is to fail. This is a book that teaches us lessons of humility and uncertainty.

Second, the customs of the holiday turn us topsy-turvy, encouraging us to dress in costumes so that we are no longer entirely ourselves, and to consume enough alcohol that we no longer remember who the good guy of the story was and who the bad guy was. These practices suggest that the lesson of the holiday is one of uncertainty, of how easily things can fall apart. Shabbat Zachor, with its push and pull of remember and blot out, only underscores this point: You will never blot out because you will always remember but still you will never remember and will always seek to blot out.

Finally, I think that believing we are living through a time of epic or biblical significance risks becoming license to do whatever we want, to act as though God is working through us, as the rabbis later insisted God was working through Esther. That is the sort of midrashic move one can only make centuries later, not only when the end of Esther’s story is known, but when the persistence of Amalek has made a fantasy of blotting out Amalek all the more necessary.

I am not mourning the death of Khamenei or any of his henchman. But neither do I celebrate it. Instead, I worry about what might be next — for Iran, for Israel, for the region, for the world, and back home, for American democracy. I recognize that there are factors way beyond my control and your control but also beyond the control of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu or anyone else. The middle of the story is not a comfortable place to be. But it is the human place. That is what Purim teaches us.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

It starts with something disarmingly simple: a plastic tube, a few drops of saliva and a click. The promise is connection — to a cousin you never knew, a whole lost branch of your family tree or an unknown chapter of family history. In 2023, nearly 7 million people learned how fragile that promise was.

The hack was not dramatic. There were no flashing alerts, no public panic. Most people learned about it — if they learned at all — through an email they skimmed and forgot. You may have been one of them. Hackers didn’t crash through fortified servers or pull off some cinematic feat. They reused leaked passwords, exploited 23andMe’s own design, and turned a few thousand compromised accounts into a gateway to millions more. 

Hackers harvested names, birth years, birth places, shared DNA connections and ancestry percentages — fragments of information that seemed harmless until they were assembled, packaged and sold. Personal data circulated for years through unknown hands, showing that in the digital age, even curiosity about ancestry can be weaponized, putting the privacy of entire families at risk.

Among the exposed were nearly a million profiles labeled “Ashkenazi Jewish,” along with a large cohort of people of Chinese ancestry. Their heritage — our heritage — was sorted, packaged, and sold on dark-web forums where identity became inventory.

By the time 23andMe forced password resets and rolled out two-factor authentication, the damage had spread through millions of family networks. The public wasn’t notified for months. A $30 million settlement followed, but no financial compensation can undo the reality that once intimate data enters an uncontrolled marketplace, it never comes back.

My mother has a saying from Soviet Russia: ”The less you know, the better you sleep.” Back then, discretion was survival. Today, her warning feels eerily prescient. What seems like harmless exploration — spitting in a tube to learn about your past — can become a portal through which strangers learn far more than you ever intended to share.

Even without raw genetic data, the metadata alone can map a person. A display name, a DNA match, a percentage breakdown — these breadcrumbs reconstruct entire family networks. For small, historically traceable populations like Ashkenazi Jews, this exposure has particular weight. What once lived in stories, rituals and memory is now stored in databases, sortable and sellable. “The most valuable data you’ll ever see,” one hacker bragged. And that is the part that should keep us up at night.

The breach forces questions we’ve largely avoided: When users opt into “DNA Relatives,” are they consenting on behalf of their entire family tree? The DNA Relatives feature allows customers to see genetic matches, shared ancestors and other possible relationships. Should metadata capable of reconstructing lineage be treated like biometric or health data? And when a genetics company is acquired, goes bankrupt or changes its business model, who, exactly, owns that identifying information?

These questions are not academic for Jewish communities, or for any group whose lineage carries cultural weight, historical trauma or modern security concerns. The 23andMe breach isn’t just about cybersecurity.  It underscores the fragility of identity when reduced to data points. Once a profile leaves an individual’s hands, and it’s copied, sold or reanalyzed, the meaning of “ownership” changes. Control becomes an illusion. In a digital world where algorithms can map who people are and how they are connected, loss of that control is no longer theoretical.

Privacy isn’t passive. It’s something you assert at the intersection of ethics, family, culture, and technology — not to reject knowledge, but to understand its cost, and not to fear discovery, but to navigate it consciously.

There’s a dark irony to the whole situation: The same test meant to introduce you to a long-lost cousin might also introduce the identifying information of your entire lineage to a stranger trying to profit off it. Heritage has become tradable. Belonging now has a market price.

And that brings me back to my mother. Like any Jewish mother, she’s always right. Her warning wasn’t about fear, but awareness. Power today does not come from opting out of modernity, but from understanding exactly what you hand over when you send off that tube.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J.

There just aren’t enough Jewish holiday movies or shows.

Actually, there seem to be almost none at all, especially ones for kids.

Sure, Passover has “The Prince of Egypt,” and Hanukkah gets its own “Rugrats” episode. But Purim? No such luck.

Frankly, I don’t understand this. An entire genre of children’s movies about princesses exists, and Purim’s main character is literally a queen. If Jews really ran Hollywood, you’d think Esther would have had her Disney moment by now.

This dilemma became alarmingly apparent when I was searching for a Purim movie or show to watch with my almost 4-year-old daughter last week. The few Esther adaptations I found were either not kid-friendly or just … bad. 

Then I remembered a strange VHS tape from my childhood: VeggieTales’ “Esther: The Girl Who Became Queen.” Miraculously, it is free to watch on YouTube.

If you’ve never encountered VeggieTales, it’s a wildly popular Christian franchise that first arrived on videotape in the mid-1990s and is still producing movies today. It stars anthropomorphic vegetables who live out Bible stories and parody pop culture. I know this sounds bonkers and, trust me, it absolutely is. (It’s actually so much weirder than I remembered.) But hear me out.

Obviously, animated Christian vegetables are not the ideal storytelling vehicle for Jewish kids. However, more than 25 years since its release, the VeggieTales Esther story remains one of the only Purim shows available. The 39-minute cartoon loosely “reimagines” Esther with nods to “The Godfather” and “Casablanca,” which is a sentence I never expected to write.

Immediately, my daughter had very important questions, like “What is she?” and “Where are their arms?” As a kid I thought Esther was a green bean, but upon researching these questions, I found out she’s a leek. Regardless, she is very green.

The plot includes sandwich-related royal drama, a villainous squash (or maybe he’s a gourd?), a pair of pea assassins and exile to the “Island of Perpetual Tickling.”

The movie begins with King Xerxes (Achashverosh) the zucchini in need of a new queen because Vashti (also a zucchini) refuses to make him a sandwich at 3 a.m. 

The next day, Esther the leek is walking with her cousin Mordechai the grape. Haman the squash/gourd comes along to collect all the eligible maidens for the king and demands that Mordechai bow in his presence. Mordechai refuses, and Haman becomes furious. He then takes all the maidens to the palace, where Esther sings a song and is chosen queen.

One day, two peas attempt to assassinate the king by dropping a piano on his head, but Mordechai and Esther save him just in time. Haman banishes the peas to the “Island of Perpetual Tickling” for their crimes. A grim reaper character with a giant feather appears, tickling the peas out the door and scaring my daughter, who clung to my arm as I tried not to laugh.

Though the king believes he is now safe, Haman convinces him he’s actually still in danger through an antisemitic song that has no business being as catchy as it is, with lyrics describing a “sneaky little family who do sneaky little things, who stick their sneaky noses into matters of the king.”

Unaware that Haman is talking about Mordechai and his family, the king authorizes an edict to have them banished to the Island of Perpetual Tickling. Mordecai appeals to Esther to reveal Haman’s evil plans to the king, but Esther is scared.

Mordecai reminds Esther that she never needs to be afraid to do what’s right. Esther is still fearful but eventually redeems herself as she finally embraces her position as queen. She eventually reveals that Mordechai is her cousin and that Haman has been plotting against him and his family, which includes her. 

The king, who respects Mordechai, adores Esther and would never harm either of them, banishes Haman to the Island of Perpetual Tickling, along with anyone else who dares scheme against his queen and her family.

Despite the entirely Jewish plot, Jews are not named at all in the show — a detail I somehow overlooked as a kid. Faith in God comes up multiple times, but the show doesn’t mention Jesus.

The show’s absurdities and omissions aside, its core message reigns: You should never be afraid to do what’s right. That’s a lesson worth teaching, even if it comes from armless, talking vegetables instead of a Disney princess.