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.

J. launched a project last fall that maps antisemitic incidents in Northern California K-12 schools that are confirmed by official investigations, our reporters or other news outlets. 

We were initially able to verify 20 incidents that took place between Oct. 7, 2023, and the map’s launch. Since then, we have added another 17. The map is a work in progress, as we learn of and confirm more incidents.

Related: Explore J.’s interactive map of antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools

The purpose of this project is not to claim that we know of every antisemitic incident at every school across the region. Before the map’s launch, we were sure that there were many incidents we weren’t aware of. So we created an email address — k12antisemitism@jweekly.com — to centralize the tips we receive.

We want to ensure that the map is as complete, accurate and informative as possible, so we invite the public to continue telling us about incidents.

Since we launched this project, we have received many questions about how we update the map. Here is a glimpse into our process:

When we receive a tip, journalistic standards require us to verify it as extensively as we are able. 

If a source tells us about an incident that has already been investigated by a school district according to the Uniform Complaint Procedures or has been appealed to the California Department of Education, we ask for copies of the official reports. 

If the incident has not yet been investigated by these institutions, we will look into it ourselves and add it to our antisemitism map if and when we nail down the facts. This usually requires speaking with people who were directly involved or finding evidence to verify the claim.

As a first step, we respond to the source to assess several things: their proximity to the incident (whether they or their child experienced it themselves, or whether they heard about it secondhand), what pieces of evidence they can share with us (such as photos, emails and documents), what other sources they can connect us to, and their comfort level as a source of this information. 

We also seek comment from the school or district where the alleged incident occurred. 

Reporting on incidents involving minors requires particular sensitivity. Oftentimes, sources speak to us on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy or the privacy of their children. 

While we do work with anonymous sources, it’s important that the source is not anonymous to us. We also request an explanation as to why the source is speaking on the condition of anonymity. 

In this process, we also discuss how we can refer to a source without using their name so that their credibility on the matter is clear to the reader (for example: “a parent of a student at the school,” “a teacher in the school,” “a district employee,” etc.). When we grant anonymity, it applies to the entire reporting process.

If you have tips or questions about the map or our reporting process, please reach out to us at k12antisemitism@jweekly.com.

Updated at 3:27 p.m. March 19

UC Berkeley will make changes to its nondiscrimination policy and pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit alleging the university allowed antisemitic harassment to go unchecked.

The settlement agreement was announced Thursday. 

Cal will clarify that the word “Zionist” cannot be used as a “proxy” for Jew or Israeli, according to the settlement, and will “rigorously evaluate” discrimination claims for that purpose.

Bylaws adopted by law school student groups in 2022 that banned outside speakers who support Zionism must also be rescinded, according to the agreement. However, student groups may continue to restrict whom they invite to speak, according to the law school dean.

Unlike other allegations of antisemitic discrimination brought against universities in recent years, the claims central to this lawsuit predate the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the Israel-Hamas war.

The primary claims originated with the adoption of the anti-Zionist bylaws, first reported by J., by a number of student affinity groups at Berkeley Law.

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed the lawsuit in November 2023 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alongside a group called Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education. The law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher joined the suit last year on behalf of plaintiffs. The $1 million will cover outside attorneys fees and litigation costs, according to the Brandeis Center.

After the war began on Oct. 7 and pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism proliferated on campus, the plaintiffs amended the complaint to include additional incidents.

In a statement, the university said it welcomed the settlement agreement and noted that strides already had been made to address antisemitism.

“The settlement reflects UC Berkeley’s long-standing values and objectives when it comes to combatting abhorrent antisemitic expression, harassment, and discrimination when it occurs on the Berkeley campus,” according to a statement by Cal spokesperson Dan Mogulof.

Mogulof pointed to the recent release of the Anti-Defamation League’s 2026 Campus Antisemitism Report Card, which gave UC Berkeley a “B,” an improvement from previous years. According to the ADL, the “B” indicates that the university is doing “better than most” to combat antisemitism, due in part to Cal’s increased antisemitism education for new students and its clarification of rules governing campus protests.

Central to the lawsuit was the claim that, for many Jews, Zionism is a fundamental part of Jewish identity and that excluding individuals from campus events for supporting Zionism is discriminatory. It also alleged that after Oct. 7, 2023, the discrimination against Jews accelerated, in part linked to a weeks-long encampment protest at Sproul Plaza where students voiced support for “resistance” against Israel and flew a banner with symbols associated with Hamas. 

The settlement, which “denies all liability and wrongdoing” on Cal’s part, requires that the anti-Zionist bylaws adopted by the law school student groups be withdrawn, and that going forward, the bylaws and constitutions of registered student organizations “may not include prohibitions on speakers.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law who has both acknowledged widespread antisemitism on campus and defended the free-speech rights of law students to ban Zionist speakers, sent a statement to the law school community about the settlement. 

In it, Chemerinsky, who is Jewish and has described himself as a Zionist, stood by his view that banning Zionist speakers falls within students’ “First Amendment right to choose speakers based on their views.” He added that he personally opposes doing so. “I believe that these Bylaws are inconsistent with the Law School’s commitment to be a place where all ideas and views can be expressed,” Chemerinsky wrote.

Chemerinsky also noted the new rule specifying that groups cannot “state a policy” in their bylaws restricting who may speak at events. Student organizations can continue to have such policies, but cannot write them into the group bylaws.

The settlement also requires Cal to add language to its website about antidiscrimination rules. 

On the question of whether discrimination against Zionists is “pretextual,” or falsely providing cover for antisemitism, the rules must state that the “use of tropes, slogans, or stereotypes that are understood to relate to Jews … do not cease to be ‘based on’ or ‘because of’ someone’s Jewish identity simply because the word ‘Zionist’ has replaced the word ‘Jew.’”

The website must also state that UC Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination will consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism when investigating claims of discrimination or harassment against Jews and Israelis. The IHRA definition has become controversial, in part, because it suggests that some criticism of Israel, like comparing Israelis to Nazis, can be antisemitic depending on the context.  

The settlement also requires UC Berkeley to communicate campuswide that discrimination against Jews and Israelis is not tolerated; to maintain and fund Cal’s Antisemitism Education Initiative; to conduct an annual survey that includes questions about the climate for Jews and Israelis; to prepare an annual written report on the university’s response to discrimination claims; and to commit to “training regarding prohibited discrimination based on Jewish and/or Israeli” identity.  

Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth Marcus, an alumnus of UC Berkeley, said in a statement that the settlement is a “victory for Jewish American students and for all Americans who care about free speech and fairness.”

He added, “What began as a ban on Zionist Jewish voices, regardless of the subjects they wished to address, and mushroomed into a widespread hostile environment will no longer be tolerated.”

Update at 3:27 p.m. March 19: More details about the settlement and responses to it have been added.

(JTA) — Jake Lang has burned a copy of the Talmud, performed a Nazi salute outside AIPAC’s headquarters and repeatedly declared that “Christ is King.”

But those antisemitic displays have not earned him an in with his fellow far-right personalities. Instead, after Lang’s anti-Muslim rally in New York City earlier this month was derailed by bomb-throwing counterprotesters, they ramped up a campaign against him.

“This f—cking r—tard larping as a white Christian is jewish,” wrote social media personality Dan Bilzerian, who has increasingly embraced antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories, in a post on X to his 2 million followers. “This is what jews do, they pretend to be white to spread white, black and Muslim hate only to later separate themselves later by saying oh but I’m not white I’m jewish.”

Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic livestreamer at the center of a growing divide at the Republican party, quickly piled on.

“This guy is a Jewish operative and his entire campaign is a psyop to instigate conflict between Whites and Muslims to gin up support for escalation against Iran,” Fuentes tweeted. “Couldn’t be more transparent yet all of you people are falling for it.”

In far-right corners where antisemitism is a currency, it was an explosive allegation. But it was also rooted in truth about Lang’s Jewish heritage.

In November, after Lang staged another anti-Muslim protest in Dearborn, Michigan, photos circulated online of him holding a bar mitzvah certificate with his name on it at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He quickly denounced Judaism but soon disclosed to Nick Shirley, the far-right YouTuber, that his mother is “Russian Jewish.”

The disclosure gained new attention within the far-right ecosystem after Lang’s demonstration outside Gracie Mansion, the New York City mayor’s residence. And Lang, a pardoned Jan. 6 protester who is currently vying for a Senate seat in Florida, offered more details about his background.

During an appearance on a podcast hosted by right-wing Jewish activist Laura Loomer, he again said his mother is Jewish. But he was baptized as a child, he said, while contending that his mother isn’t among the kind of Jews whom far-right antisemites, including himself, view as pernicious.

“We have these false Jews that Jesus warned us about, that are in control of the banking in different places, but they’re not the average Jew,” Lang said. “We have amazing, patriotic, white Jews, which my mother is one of them, who exemplify everything it needs to be an American.”

Lang’s mother, Sari, participated in a press conference in January 2025 calling on President Donald Trump to issue blanket pardons to Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protesters, including Lang. Lang spent four years in federal custody in Washington, D.C., after being charged for allegedly beating a police officer with a bat during the protest.

Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice who studies extremism, said the backlash against Lang reflects a form of racialized antisemitism found in Nazi ideology, in which Lang’s Jewish ancestry remains disqualifying despite his adoption of far-right causes, including antisemitism.

“Here you have this guy, Jake Lang, who seems like a real scumbag in and of himself, but is affirming Nazi ideas,” said Taylor. “But that his Jewishness is still a knock against him amongst these other white supremacists and Nazis, and even his espousal of Christian theology doesn’t cleanse him of that issue in their mind.”

On the Loomer podcast, Lang shared his views of Jewish identity and influence, attempting to draw a distinction between Jews he considered allies versus enemies while invoking antisemitic conspiracy theories.

“I have to give an unequivocal, real deal talk to the American people here, we have been psyop-ed into blaming everything on the Jews, that’s ridiculous,” said Lang. “But on that same hand, I will be the first one to call out this liberal, woke Jewish mafia that controls Hollywood and is brainwashing the white women to all fall in love with black men, and they’re poisoning and they’re not real Jews.”

The episode also ties into a widening rift on the far right, one that has sharpened in recent weeks over the war in Iran. While Fuentes has vehemently opposed the U.S. strikes in the country, Lang has praised the conflict as a “war with Islam” and a display of “Christian dominance in the Middle East.”

“Now the Zionists have started amplifying anti-immigration, anti-Muslim rhetoric to distract Right Wingers from the Iran War,” Fuentes wrote in a post on X earlier this month. “Probably the best way to prevent Muslim immigrants from coming here or attacking us is to stop killing them and destroying their countries for Israel.”

During the conversation with Loomer, she and Lang decried what they perceived as support for Muslims from far-right influencers like Fuentes.

“While patriotic Jews and Christians unite to save our country from the threat of Islam, compromised influencers are actively radicalizing vulnerable youth on behalf of their foreign handlers in Qatar, Russia and Iran,” Loomer wrote in a post on X alongside a clip of the interview.

In a post on X, Fuentes, once a staunch Trump supporter who urged his supporters to attend the Jan. 6 protests, accused Trump of sidelining anti-war voices and embracing pro-Israel allies, including Loomer.

“Trump turned against Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Greene for their opposition to the Iran War and Epstein Coverup,” wrote Fuentes. “Now, he surrounds himself exclusively with Israel First Zionists like Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, and Jared Kushner. We didn’t leave MAGA, MAGA left us.”

While Lang, who was identified as a “Christian Crusader” onscreen during the podcast, acknowledged his Jewish heritage during the conversation with Loomer, he has simultaneously worked to distance himself from it.

In response to Bilzerian’s post, Lang posted a photo of him as a baby during his Catholic baptism, writing “JESUS IS LORD & GOD.”

In November, after the Western Wall pictures first circulated, Lang wrote, “You’re a f—cking idiot I denounced all ties to Israel and Judaism days ago…Jesus is King,” alongside a video of him burning the Quran, the central religious text in Islam, the Talmud and a book on Christian Zionism titled “Standing With Israel” by David Brog.

“Jesus is King, no Talmud, no Quran, America’s a Christian country,” Lang says in the video. “Lord Jesus, we pray your spirit over America. We pray that you would bring back white Christian America. We are being replaced, there is a white replacement and genocide happening and it is because of these two books, the beliefs of these people.”

In a December interview with YouTuber Nick Shirley, whose video on alleged fraud by Somali-run day cares in Minneapolis preceded a federal immigration crackdown, Lang explained that his visit to the Western Wall had been on a family vacation.

“That was over 10 years ago. Nowadays, it’s seen as a symbol of fidelity towards Israel and towards, you know, this kind of shadow government that’s seemingly overseeing America,” said Lang. “So nowadays, if I were to go as a Christian influencer, right, as a conservative, I would never show that type of fidelity because the optics behind it have basically been completely perverted.”

Riffing on a phrase that has come to express disdain for politicians who take photographs at the Western Wall, Fuentes denounced Lang last week as having been “kissing the wall, making out with the wall, with the f—cking cube on his head and everything.”

Calling Lang a “big, disgusting, revolting Jewish douchebag,” Fuentes connected Lang to the allegations, amplified this week by the U.S. counterterrorism director in a resignation letter, that Jews had lured the United States into conflict.

“They tricked us into going and fighting their wars by convincing us that their enemies were our enemies too, and now we’re doing it all over again,” said Fuentes. “And then you’ve got Jake Lang in New York, inciting Muslims to attack him again … antagonizing them to achieve that desired result.”

The attacks on Lang from Fuentes and Bilzerian are revealing, according to Taylor, the extremism scholar.

“Here you have a guy who wants to be a card-carrying white supremacist, who wants to be a card-carrying Christian nationalist, and who wants to kind of prove his bona fides by hating on Muslims, and the white supremacists are rejecting him because he has an underlying Jewish ethnic identity,” he said. “There’s no other word for that than just racism, right? And antisemitism.”

(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.

Jewish organizations and security experts in the Bay Area have reintensified their focus on community safety following the violent attack on a Detroit-area synagogue on Thursday. 

Across North America, Jewish security officials are warning of the “most elevated and complex threat environment the Jewish community and this country has seen in modern history,” according to the Secure Community Network, a nonprofit that monitors threats to Jewish organizations.

The FBI identified the armed attacker as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon. 

Ghazali drove his pickup loaded with fireworks through the doors of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and into a hallway before he was confronted by armed security guards, according to the FBI. His pickup got stuck in the hallway, and Ghazali shot himself to death after a gunfight with guards, the FBI reported. One security guard was hit by the pickup. None of the 140 children at the synagogue’s preschool were injured.

Tensions have already been high in the Bay Area Jewish community. The attack came days after a daytime assault on two Israeli American men outside an upscale restaurant in San Jose. 

Bay Area Jewish community officials emphasized there is no immediate threat to the local Jewish community following the Michigan attack. The fact that the incident resulted in only the attacker’s death highlighted for many the importance of preparedness.

In an email to the community, Jewish Silicon Valley CEO Daniel Klein said Thursday that his organization was boosting security following the Michigan attack.

“While there have been no direct or active threats surrounding this incident to our building community,” Klein wrote, “out of an abundance of caution, we are elevating our security presence across our facility and increasing police presence across our Jewish ecosystem.”

Rabbi Jason Gwasdoff of Temple Israel in Stockton — a synagogue that shares a name with the one attacked in Michigan — told J. that his congregation doubled its security personnel after that incident. Gwasdoff also spoke to local police about increasing their presence around the synagogue, KCRA3 reported. 

Synagogues and Jewish organizations have made similar security adjustments following violent attacks, such as the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia on the first night of Hanukkah in December. The specific methods used in the West Bloomfield attack, however, raise additional concerns about the potential car rammings. 

“It’s really about — as security people say — expanding the perimeter,” said David Goldman, executive director of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El. “Making sure that whatever threat level it is, you’re always constantly pushing it out, out, out.”

In the past five months, two other attacks on the Jewish community involved car rammings. In October, a man drove his car into a group of Yom Kippur worshippers outside an Orthodox synagogue in Manchester, England. In January, a man repeatedly drove his car into an entrance of the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn.

Car rammings are a “very valid concern,” said San Francisco Police Department Commander Amy Hurwitz, the department’s liaison to the Jewish community. “These things are happening. They’re real. We are great as a community because we learn from what happens around us, and we take action.”

The best way for safety officials to determine how to fortify a building, Hurwitz said, is on a case-by-case basis. She encouraged organizations in San Francisco to take advantage of the free on-site surveys conducted by SFPD’s Neighborhood Safety Team. Surveys can be requested via email at neighborhoodsafety@sfgov.org. 

The Jewish Federation Bay Area also offers vulnerability assessments, trainings and consultations to Jewish organizations.  

“Vehicular attacks are one of the threats we consider when we conduct vulnerability assessments,” Rafi Brinner, Jewish Federation Bay Area’s senior director of community security, told J. via email. “Depending on the site, bollards, jersey barriers, planters, or decorative boulders can mitigate the threat from vehicular attacks.”

In 2024, California’s nonprofit security grant program awarded Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon a $250,000 grant, which the synagogue is using for projects such as additional lighting around its building’s exterior, according to executive director Gordon Gladstone. 

Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley also received a state grant, which it will use to replace doors and gates on its building and install features to reduce visibility into the interior, according to a Friday email announcement. The congregation also asked for donations after notifying its congregants that increased security measures will strain its budget. 

A shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since mid-February has halted the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, administered through DHS, helps nonprofits, including religious institutions, pay for security guards, cameras, reinforced doors and other protections.

Updated March 16 at 4:45 p.m.

Felony and misdemeanor charges have been filed against three men in the daytime beating of two Israeli Americans in San Jose, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office announced Monday.

Bruneil Henry Chamaki, 32, of Morgan Hill, Roma Akoyans, 20, and Ramon Akoyans, 18, both of San Jose, were arrested and charged, although the specific charges were not released. The DA office’s statement characterized the March 8 incident as both a “violent assault” and a “brawl.”

“The charges reflect the gravity of a violent assault in public between strangers, and the dangerousness of hitting and kicking someone while they are down,” according to the statement from the office of District Attorney Jeff Rosen. 

The DA’s office added that the “charges do not reflect allegations of a hate crime at this time. However, this remains an active investigation.” San Jose police originally said they were investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.

Video of the Sunday afternoon incident, outside an upscale restaurant on San Jose’s Santana Row, circulated widely on the internet and drew condemnations from local and state officials. The victims said they were assaulted after speaking Hebrew.

Two videos obtained by J. show three men with dark hair and dark shirts repeatedly punching two men on the ground, while witnesses shout for them to stop. The three men then run out of frame, their faces exposed.  

Initial reports on social media portrayed the incident as a targeted antisemitic assault, and one of the victims said in an interview with J. that an assailant uttered “f***ing Jew” during the attack. The video footage quickly caught the attention of public officials. 

“Antisemitism and all acts of hatred have no place in San José,” Mayor Matt Mahan, who is running for governor, posted on X on March 10, adding that he was in touch with law enforcement and Jewish community leaders about what he called a “deeply disturbing incident.” 

“This is disgusting,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office posted on X on March 11, sharing a video of the assault. “Thank you, San Jose PD, for investigating.”

The two Israeli Americans are Lior Zeevi, 47, and Daniel Levy, 48, who are originally from Haifa.

Rosen denounced the attack in Monday’s statement.

“We won’t tolerate pummeling a victim on the ground in front of a restaurant or anywhere, and we will hold the perpetrators fully accountable,” Rosen said. “Our public spaces have to be safe for all to enjoy without fear.”

The suspects “self-surrendered” to San Jose police on Monday, the statement said. An arraignment for the three men is scheduled for May 12.

Update: The charging information from the DA’s office has been added.

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.

(JTA) — The man who attacked a Michigan synagogue on Thursday was the brother of a Hezbollah commander who oversaw efforts to shoot rockets into Israel before being killed earlier this month, the Israel Defense Forces announced on Sunday.

The mayor of Ayman Ghazali’s city, Dearborn Heights, said in a statement following his attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, that members of Ghazali’s family had recently been killed “in an Israeli attack on their home in Lebanon.”

Israel is targeting Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon that attacked Israel in retaliation against the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, in a conflict that escalated on Monday into a ground operation. Ghazali’s family members were killed in a Hezbollah stronghold where Israel had recently warned civilians to evacuate.

But while images purporting to show Ghazali’s brother in Hezbollah garb circulated on social media almost instantly after attack, the IDF’s announcement marked the first official allegation tying him to the terror group.

“Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali was responsible for managing weapons operations within a specialized branch of the Badr Unit. The unit is responsible for launching hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians throughout the war,” the IDF said in a statement on Sunday, adding, “Ibrahim was eliminated in an IAF strike on a Hezbollah military structure last week.”

An unnamed Hezbollah official denied the allegation to The New York Times.

The IDF’s statement did not suggest that Ayman Ghazali was affiliated with Hezbollah. The New York Times reported that he attended a memorial service for those killed in the strike, who included Ibrahim’s young children, at a Dearborn Heights mosque on March 8 that was attended by hundreds of people, many from the Ghazalis’ town.

Ghazali’s ties to Lebanon have prompted a sharp discourse about news coverage of the Michigan attack, with some alleging that focusing on his brother’s death, especially without any confirmation of his brother’s Hezbollah affiliation, runs the risk of suggesting that attacking a Jewish institution in the United States is an appropriate response to grief during wartime.

Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun rejected that notion during a press conference alongside the local police chief on Friday.

“We do know that the individual had recently suffered a devastating and personal loss overseas due to an Israeli airstrike on his family’s home in Lebanon, leaving two children dead. The grief is real and it’s heartbreaking, but let me be clear: That is not an excuse,” Baydoun said. “There is never an excuse for violence, especially violence directed at a sacred space.”

Meanwhile over the weekend, authorities in Michigan said Ghazali had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after driving his fireworks-laden truck into Temple Israel. They had previously indicated that the synagogue’s security staff, which worked immediately to neutralize the threat, might have fired the fatal shot.

Temple Israel held Shabbat services in multiple locations over the weekend, including at the Chaldean country club, Shenandoah, that welcomed children evacuated from its preschool and at a nearby Jewish country club, Tam-O-Shanter, where a bat mitzvah took place as planned. The synagogue announced on Sunday afternoon that extensive damage to the building meant it would be “closed to us for the immediate future.”

(JTA) — A string of recent synagogue attacks across North America and Europe has left security officials sounding the alarm bells.

“We are in the midst of the most elevated and complex threat environment the Jewish community and this country has seen in modern history,” said Kerry Sleeper, chief of threat management and information sharing for the Secure Community Network (SCN), a Jewish security organization.

Sleeper’s comment came during an SCN webinar on Friday, held in response to the previous day’s attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where an assailant rammed into the synagogue armed with rifles and smoke bombs.

Though the attack was successfully thwarted by existing security measures, Mitchell Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative, said in an interview that Jewish institutions may now need additional layers of protection.

“This might be a bit of a tipping point where we’ve gone to a new level, where really what’s required to secure a Jewish institution in the U.S. starts to look like almost a Europeanization of security,” Silber said.

That would include posting multiple armed guards outside entrances and requiring increased screening before entry, he said. Many European synagogues also require attendees to go through security screening at some distance from the building, rather than at their doors.

“Unfortunately that seems to be where we are right now — the Jewish community has to up its game in terms of the external security of its locations,” he said.

Currently, a shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, constraining the ability of Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups to upgrade their security infrastructure.

The Temple Israel attack came within two weeks of attacks in Austin, Texas, and at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Those other attacks were not on Jewish institutions, but Sleeper, a former FBI assistant director, said the “various motivations of the attackers appear to be affiliated with the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran.” He added that the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and President Donald Trump’s stated desire to facilitate a regime change, have “contributed to the extremely high threat environment.”

Meanwhile, things have escalated outside the United States. Three Toronto-area synagogues were hit with gunfire over the last couple of weeks, and a synagogue in Rotterdam was targeted by an arson attack early Friday morning, allegedly by a group that has also claimed credit for an explosion at a synagogue in Belgium.

The flurry of attacks has the entire Jewish world on edge going into Shabbat — and some watchdogs say things could soon get worse.

“It is not entirely shocking to those of us who’ve watched this space for a long time,” said Mike Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau. “I would think things would continue to ratchet up again, at least in the short term.”

He pointed to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ activation of sleeper cells — their agents lying in wait until called to action to commit an attack — across the West, as a danger to vulnerable targets, which includes Jewish communities.

Another source of danger, Jacob said, comes from copycat attacks.

“There’s also this mix that makes it really hard to sort out in the initial stages, where you’ve got people, not only who may be directly tied to Iran, but people who are so-called ‘inspired’ by this,” Jacob said. “Those are often really hard for law enforcement to get advance notice on.”

Not always does the threat come from direct orders from Iran, he said. “It’s often difficult to tell: Is this something that is directly tied to the organization, or is this something that is more by someone inspired [by the IRGC]?”

He added, “They are trying to inflict pain in as many directions as they can.”

As security organizations encourage increased caution and awareness of suspicious activity, they are also emphasizing that those measures shouldn’t come at the expense of gathering in communal Jewish spaces.

“We’re not going to let the terrorists take away our confidence or the ability to embrace our religion,” said Michael Masters, SCN’s national director, during the Zoom webinar.

Masters’ sentiment is also shared by congregational leaders like Rabbi Adam Roffman, of Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas.

“Sure, security is something we think a lot about, and we’ve done our best to protect ourselves,” Roffman said. “And at the same time, the life of this community goes on.”

At Temple Israel, Shabbat services are being streamed from the nearby country club that served as a reunification center for families after the attack. The synagogue wrote on Facebook: “We’re so glad you’re joining us tonight as our community comes together to welcome this much needed Sabbath.”

(JTA) — Nearly everybody called out Tucker Carlson at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s symposium on antisemitism. 

Attendees clapped when Sen. Ted Cruz called Carlson “the single-most dangerous demagogue in the country,” and speakers praised President Donald Trump for recently casting him aside as “not MAGA.” 

There was no such praise for Vice President JD Vance, however, who has made no decisive statement on Carlson, nor on Candace Owens. The two media personalities have come to represent an emerging, anti-Israel wing of the Republican party that indulges in antisemitic conspiracy theories and is anathema to the RJC and its rank-and-file. Vance’s silence has drawn skepticism and growing impatience from some Jewish Republicans.

But no speakers offered direct criticism of Vance on Tuesday and, after the event, a top RJC official said in an interview that he has no concerns about the vice president.

“I have a concern about Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, but not JD Vance,” said Norm Coleman, national chairman of the RJC and a former U.S. senator from Minnesota.

Coleman said he has known Vance for “many, many years” and has had discussions with him about Israel and supporting the Jewish people. He pointed to Vance’s 2024 speech at the Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank, on why supporting Israel is in America’s national security interest.

“So he’s been there, he’s spoken out publicly, he’s walked into the lion’s den and kind of stood with the Jewish people and stood with Israel,” Coleman said. “He’s always done that in my conversations with him, and I got to believe it’s the same in his conversations with President Trump.”

Coleman did not mention Vance in his public remarks on Tuesday, which included heaps of praise on Vance’s boss.

In fact, the only direct mention of Vance on stage came from Ted Cruz, which came in the form of neither approval nor criticism. In an address focused on rising right-wing antisemitism and its spread among young people, Cruz recalled a pair of Turning Point USA events where students asked questions about Israel and made conspiratorial remarks about Judaism.

“There was one Turning Point event that JD Vance was at, at Ole Miss, where a kid gets up and asks this wildly anti-Israel question,” Cruz said. “And what happened next was extraordinarily revealing: Spontaneously, a third of the students burst into applause. That was their immediate reaction to that question.” What Cruz excluded was that Vance sidestepped the question without pushing back.

Cruz also blasted Republicans who haven’t explicitly condemned Carlson, saying, “Nick Fuentes is easy to denounce. And I actually think it’s a tell among Republican politicians if they’ll denounce Fuentes but they’re scared to say Carlson’s name.” But Cruz stopped short of naming any such politicians.

Later, Shabbos Kestenbaum, the high-profile critic of campus antisemitism who sued Harvard, cheekily addressed anyone who “is planning on running for president in 2028, and you are part of the Trump administration right now, and you want to — I didn’t say anyone’s name! — but you want to sort of nod and wink to this terminally online groyper base?”

Kestenbaum, who works for the conservative media organization PragerU, stopped short of naming names and joked that he doesn’t “want to get in trouble.” But he offered a clear message: “If our nominee is someone who, as I said, is winking to that online space, then we will lose elections and quite frankly we will deserve to lose elections.”

When asked after the event who he was referring to, Kestenbaum said he was addressing “anyone, whether you are a Republican or Democrat, who is trying to acquiesce to a radical anti-American and antisemitic base.” 

He added, “I think President Marco Rubio has a really nice sound to it.”

Unlike Tuesday’s speakers, conservative personality Ben Shapiro has explicitly called on the vice president to condemn Carlson. 

“I’d like to see Vice-President Vance change tack on a lot of this; I hope that he will,” Shapiro said last month in a New Yorker interview, when asked about who in the conservative world “would cast out the kind of characters that Tucker Carlson and company are encouraging.” 

Shapiro’s comments, and his monthslong stand against right-wing antisemitism, have signalled a heightened urgency in how Jewish conservatives are approaching Trump’s potential successors amid fears that the party will cede ground to antisemitic right-wing figures. Similar to Kestenbaum, Shapiro said he would “likely” support Rubio in a primary over Vance.

Arlene Ross, who traveled from New York to attend what she said was an “outstanding” symposium, said she likes Cruz and Rubio. As for Vance, she believed his name would have come up on Tuesday if there were a Q&A session because the “Jewish community is not too keen on him” being “a little too cozy with the extreme right.”

Instead, Vance’s name was left out of the conversation, which Ross chalked up to speakers — a number of whom were elected officials — not wanting to cross the White House.

“I think they didn’t want to badmouth Vance because they were afraid of Trump’s reaction if they did that,” she said.

(JTA) — WASHINGTON — Some speakers struck a hopeful note during an antisemitism symposium on Tuesday morning hosted here by the Republican Jewish Coalition and National Review. 

Ted Cruz was not one of them.

“Norm [Coleman, chair of the RJC] just said that we are winning. And I applaud him for that, because I want us to be winning,” Cruz said. “But I’m not sure it is accurate as a descriptive matter that we are winning right now.”

Cruz was referring to an ongoing battle within the Republican party over figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, conservative influencers who’ve spread antisemitic conspiracy theories.

It wasn’t the Texas senator’s first time speaking to the RJC crowd with grave warnings about right-wing antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric. He called antisemitism “an existential crisis in our party” at the RJC’s annual summit in November, which was held shortly after Carlson gave a friendly interview to avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes. 

Four months later, Cruz’s speech served as a sobering follow-up: “This is the beginning of a battle where our nation, our beliefs, our Constitution, the principles that built America, are under assault. And we need to gird ourselves for battle and defeat this garbage,” he said Tuesday.

Cruz was far from the only speaker stressing the importance of rooting out right-wing antisemitism at the half-day symposium. The 100 or so attendees at the Museum of the Bible heard from speakers on how antisemitism is spread via social media, on policy responses to antisemitism,  and why American exceptionalism is said to be inextricable from Jewish exceptionalism.

Cruz seemed to contradict Coleman’s assertion that “we are winning and they” — that is, “prominent polemicists” like Carlson, Owens and younger figures like Fuentes and Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, who traffic in “ancient hatred” — are “losing.” 

Nonetheless, Coleman said in an interview after the event, he and Cruz are on the same page.

“First of all, I’m an optimist. Second of all, I could understand Sen. Cruz’s concern,” said Coleman, suggesting that Cruz didn’t want to leave the impression that the GOP’s internecine battle over antisemitism was over and “this isn’t a fight that has to be fought.

“It has to be fought tooth and nail because it’s so critically important,” said Coleman.

He added, “We haven’t won the fight. I think we’re winning the fight — and by the way, that’s shown in the fact that 85-90% of Republicans are on our side.”

OPINION: Stanford emails show the right has a campus antisemitism problem too

Still, Coleman — who said in his public remarks that they are “not fringe figures whispering in dark corners,” and that they “have large megaphones” — later dismissed Carlson, Owens and Fuentes as being “fringe voices on our side.” Cruz, on the other hand, said during his remarks that antisemitism “is gaining real purchase, especially with young people.”

“I don’t want to wake up in five years and find myself in a country where both major political parties are unambiguously anti-Israel and unapologetically antisemitic,” Cruz said. “And I think that is a real possibility. If Tucker and his minions prevail, that will happen.”

To stop that from happening, Cruz said Christian pastors need to fight Carlson “on theological grounds” by dispelling the replacement theory that Carlson “aggressively” pushes. He also said there should be an effort to “follow the money” because he suspects that “many of these influencers are cashing a check” from countries like Qatar, Russia and China, as part of “an operation to destroy America.”

Cruz was far more explicit in his condemnations of Carlson than he’d been in November, when he held back from using the former Fox News personality’s name.

“I believe Tucker Carlson is the single-most dangerous demagogue in this country,” Cruz said on Tuesday, drawing applause. 

“And I’ll tell you,” he said, “I’ve made the decision that I’m going to take him on directly.” 

The debate over antisemitism and figures like Carlson and Owens has roiled the American conservative movement. More Republicans have weighed in over the last few months, including Trump, who said last week that Carlson is “not MAGA” after the commentator criticized American and Israeli strikes on Iran. Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance has not publicly denounced Carlson, drawing skepticism and growing impatience from some Jewish Republicans. 

Cruz blasted his fellow Republicans who have not publicly condemned Carlson.

“Nick Fuentes is easy to denounce,” he said. “I actually think it’s a tell among Republican politicians — if they’ll denounce Fuentes but are scared to say Tucker’s name, that tells you a great deal.”

Cruz did not name any such politicians. 

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. 

(JTA) — The arson in December at Beth Israel Congregation didn’t just damage the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. It also threw into disarray the operations of a Jewish nonprofit that aims to serve the entire American South.

The Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life is housed at the opposite end of the Beth Israel building from the library where the fire started. Most of its activities take place off site, in the small Jewish communities scattered across the region, and much of its archives had been digitized before the fire.

Still, the arson attack struck an institution that, since its founding in 2000, has linked far-flung congregations across the South and imbued generations of Jewish leaders with an appreciation for Jewish life in a region where community is often small, deeply rooted and hard-won.

“This is sort of the hub of where things happen, so we’re still assessing what is truly lost, what can be repaired, what can’t be,” Michele Schipper, the organization’s CEO, said ahead of the synagogue’s first Shabbat since the attack.

Even as the institute embarks on the long road of repairing its brick-and-mortar headquarters, its core mission of connecting and sustaining Jewish communities across the South remains unchanged.

“It will be important for my communities this winter and spring to be with me, to hear from me about what’s going on,” said Rabbi Salem Pearce, who is officially ISJL’s director of spirituality but unofficially “the traveling rabbi of the South.” She roves from her home in Durham, North Carolina, across 70 congregations throughout a 13-state region that extends from Texas to Florida.

Following the arson attack, Pearce said she believed the communities she serves had taken the attack personally because “they identify strongly, both with the ISJL and with the idea of being vulnerable being a small Jewish community in the South.”

“I always want to ground what I do in Torah and in Jewish tradition, and I think that both of those things have a lot to say about the power of community and resilience and being together and survival,” said Pearce.

For years, the institute also placed early-career Jewish educators in Southern communities through its flagship fellowship program. The program ended in 2022, but the network of dozens of former fellows scattered across the country say their work supporting Jewish life in the South left lasting impressions on their own Jewish identities.

Rabbi Lex Rofeberg, an ISJL fellow from 2013 to 2015, was attending a gathering of clergy from the Jewish Renewal movement in Philadelphia when he first heard the news of the arson.

“I felt in my body like a deep pain, and I immediately flashed to the incredible experiences I had as part of that synagogue community,” said Rofeberg.

He wasn’t the only one at the conference to feel that way. “I was with people that had a shared connection to the space and who I had met through this incredible community, and I thought all that was helpful,” he said. “So it was heartbreaking, and it was meaningful to see in that space a couple hundred people looking to be supportive of this community.”

Molly Levy, ISJL’s director of education, said one of the reasons why the institute shifted away from the fellowship program was that the communities were so strong that they needed more than temporary fellows could provide.

“They’ve all used the curriculum, they’re very familiar with it, and they want to do things that are more experiential, and looking at making their schools fit the students that they have today, as well as having these big conversations around antisemitism, around safety, making sure that their students feel safe,” Levy said.

The communities in the network also bond with each other. For Beth Israel Congregation’s first Shabbat service following the arson attack, the congregation used a Torah borrowed from Temple B’nai Israel, located about 90 miles southeast along Route 49.

“We’re just down the road in Hattiesburg. So people immediately wanted to know, OK, how can we help?” said Rabbi Debra Kassoff of Temple B’nai Israel, who became the ISJL’s first director of rabbinic services in 2003.

During her stint as the ISJL’s resident rabbi, Kassoff traveled across the region to offer rabbinic services to congregations.

“It was an honor, it was fascinating and overwhelming,” said Kassoff. “When I first came here I felt really embraced, people seemed excited to have me, and were glad that I was wanting to be there and be a part of this kind of corner of the American Jewish landscape that is so often overlooked.

In the wake of the attack, rabbis from several Southern congregations quickly voiced their dismay and solidarity with the institute.

Rabbi Jeremy Simons, a former director of the rabbinic department at the ISJL and incoming rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, recalled his time in Jackson in a post on Facebook and appealed to his followers to donate to the synagogue’s recovery fund.

“While I have plenty of fond memories in that building and in that library, there are so many who call Beth Israel their spiritual home and are feeling a pain neither you or I will ever know (God willing),” wrote Simmons. “I know you don’t have to have spent time in that building, or even know of its existence, to be shaken by this news. I try to remind myself they can destroy our buildings, but they can never destroy our faith. If anything it will only strengthen it.”

Rabbi Raina Siroty of Temple Beth-El in Knoxville, Tennessee, wrote in a post on Facebook that the ISJL had “connected and strengthened Jewish communities from Texas to the Florida Panhandle,” adding that “Southern Jewish communities are woven deeply into the fabric of their cities. They deserve to worship without fear.”

Rabbi Jason Holtz of Temple Kehillat Chaim in Roswell, Georgia, wrote in another post that he had attended the ISJL’s conference within a few weeks of moving to Georgia.

“I remember leaving with a sense of enthusiasm but also amazement at the wonderful people that provide such resources and leadership for Jewish communities all over the South,” he wrote. “When people think of Jewish life, places like Jackson probably don’t immediately come to mind. But Jews all over the South, my congregation included, have benefited so much from the tireless and dedicated people who call Jackson home.”

Schipper said many past fellows and staff of the ISJL had also shared messages of support.

“There’s such powerful messages that they are sharing and remembrances of their time here in Jackson and at Beth Israel, because for many, this was their first non-parent home synagogue,” she said. “I’m overwhelmed in the best possible way of the outpouring of support from the local community to the Jewish community worldwide. It really makes me proud to be Jewish.”

Rofeberg said his two years at the ISJL, which included hosting a “Purim-gras,” or a Mardi Gras-Purim combo at a Louisiana synagogue, were “pivotal” in setting him on a path to seek rabbinic ordination.

“I think I went down thinking I was doing this grand service as somebody who had learned in college about Judaism,” said Rofeberg. “And I really quickly learned how wrong that was, and how so many of these communities I was visiting and the community I was living in had way more to teach me than I had to teach them.”

Megan Roberts Koller, an ISJL fellow from 2007 to 2009 who grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, said her time with the institute deepened her own understanding of her identity as a Jew in the South.

“I think being in an environment with lots of different types of people helped me realize how special the Southern Jewish experience was,” she said. “It was interesting to be part of something so new and something so different.”

Roberts Koller recalled the fellows going on trips to the Neshoba County Fair and local blues concerts to experience a “slice of life” of Mississippi.

“Especially over the summers, when we were traveling less and we were onboarding new people, there was quite a push to have us experience that authentic Mississippi summer and help people feel both out of their comfort zone and comfortable in Mississippi,” she said.

While Roberts Koller, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, no longer works in Jewish communal life, she said her experiences at the ISJL had inspired her to continue pursuing Jewish involvement in her own community.

“The experience of working for the Institute of Southern Jewish life and seeing congregational life all across the South and cities large and small, I think, really made an impact and made it a priority to be part of a congregation here in Nashville,” she said.

In recent years, Levy said the ISJL had created a “catalogue” of lessons about Jewish pride and information on teaching students about antisemitism.

Currently, the ISJL’s antisemitism curriculum begins in the eighth grade, but Levy said she was working on starting antisemitism education in the earlier grades.

“When I go into a community, I usually meet with the teens, and will usually have conversations on being the only Jewish kid in your school or being a small population of Jewish kids in your school,” said Levy. “When I ask, ‘Have you heard something antisemitic, or have you had an incident in your school?’ It’s very rare when someone doesn’t raise their hand.”

Looking ahead, Schipper said the institute’s focus will be on building on a firm foundation, not just in its physical space but in the messages it delivers across the South.

“If you look at our curriculum, it already had information on how to be a proud Jew,” said Schipper. “So I think, can we strengthen that message? Can we let people know a little bit more about what we are doing, so that they’re well aware that this organization is providing support to these communities in so many ways.”

For Levy, the aftermath of the attack has underscored the strength of the organization’s broad spanning community.

“It’s only shown us how incredibly powerful our network and how incredibly important these connections are, just because of all of the outpouring of love and support that’s come from our other ISJL communities and how much they want to support Beth Israel,” she said. “It’s been really hard and really sad and really challenging, and we were incredibly ready to activate our network and activate the support that we needed to give.”

Schipper said she could see an upside to the bleak circumstances that brought national attention to her work this year.

“This is not how I would love more publicity,” she said, referring to the arson. “But if somebody else learns about who we are and what we do and goes, ‘Oh my gosh, my cousin’s in Kentucky, and they could really use your resources,’ then great.”

A man accused of scrawling “F*** the Jews” and other antisemitic and homophobic messages on a San Francisco church was in custody on Thursday after city prosecutors charged him with multiple hate crimes.

The San Francisco district attorney’s office charged Sadat Mousa, 51, with two counts of felony vandalism with hate crime enhancements; two counts of felony vandalism of a place of worship with hate crime enhancements; one count of felony placement of a swastika; and one count of misdemeanor vandalism, according to a press release from the DA’s office.

“This is one of the more disturbing incidents that I have seen,” DA Brooke Jenkins said at a press conference Wednesday.

Mousa was scheduled for arraignment Thursday afternoon but a judge “declared a doubt as to his competency to stand trial,” the DA’s office told J. in a statement. Mousa’s next court date was scheduled for March 12 when an expert would be appointed for a psychological evaluation, the statement said. 

Around 7:45 a.m. on Feb. 28, according to the DA press release, Mousa used gold spray-paint and markers to draw antisemitic and homophobic messages on the facade of the Central Seventh Day Adventist Church. The messages said “F*** the Jews God” and “Hamas” and included anti-gay slurs, according to officials. The church is located on California near Broderick streets in Lower Pacific Heights.

Mousa also allegedly wrote “Hitler Hero” on the church and scrawled “similar antisemitic and homophobic messages” on a nearby mailbox, utility box and parking meter, the press release read.

Jenkins said prosecutors are asking the court to detain Mousa without bail pretrial, citing a public safety risk. She said police conducted a search of his home and reviewed his online conduct. 

J. obtained a copy of a detention motion prepared by the DA’s office that included additional antisemitic and homophobic statements found on the mailbox, including “Kill Jews and F***s” (a homophobic slur).

Jenkins said the suspect’s online communications about the Jewish and LGBTQ communities were concerning.

“Prior language that he uses through social media and other means really gives us pause as to what level of danger he poses to both of these communities,” she said.

The DA’s motion cited several statements made by Mousa in social media videos, including that Jews and gay people are “not real or normal human beings. Those are the real devils on planet Earth.” In at least a couple of other examples, Mousa’s statements appear to target residents in Pacific Heights specifically, calling them “European colonizers.” Another video shows “Mr. Mousa making a beheading gesture,” the DA’s office said.

According to the detention motion, in 2009 police responded to an incident at his family home, where he allegedly threatened members of his family.

This was also not the first time Mousa targeted a property in Pacific Heights, according to prosecutors.

In June 2025, Mousa walked into a convenience store in the neighborhood and announced he intended to “go to a synagogue and shoot all the Jews and then shoot all the gays in San Francisco,” according to the detention motion.

At the press conference, Jenkins spoke to heightened public safety concerns since Israel’s conflict with Iran broke out on Feb. 28, the same day the graffiti was reported. Secure Community Network, an organization that monitors threats to Jewish communities in North America, reported a 95% increase in “violent online posts targeting the Jewish community globally” since the military conflict began, according to an SCN press release sent to journalists Thursday.

“We have to take these types of situations much more seriously … given the heightened emotions of what is going on abroad,” Jenkins said. “When we have incidents of hate in San Francisco that are criminal, we will react immediately to make sure that appropriate charges are filed. We will seek detention when we believe that somebody is a true risk to these communities.”

(JTA) — The first time Iris Hefets was detained by German police, she was standing alone on a street corner in Berlin with a sign that read, “As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza.”

That was October 2023. Hefets, a 60-year-old psychoanalyst who moved from Israel in 2002, was standing by herself because Berlin authorities had barred activist groups from holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. By carrying a sign alone, she believed she was circumventing the ban on assembly.

But the police said her sign itself was an offense. Since then, Hefets has been detained four more times while protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, all for the language on her signs. The offenses were logged in police reports as hate speech and included on the surging list of antisemitic incidents in Germany since 2023.

For Hefets, the penalties carry an obvious irony.

“It made me feel like a Jew,” she said. “This is the first time in my life that I really felt what it meant to be a Jew, and in the minority being persecuted.”

Germany has cracked down on speech and demonstrations that assert support for Palestinians and accuse Israel of atrocities, even since Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in October 2025. Hefets’ detainments were part of a national policy toward antisemitism, defined over decades in the shadow of the Holocaust and sharpened recently under the helm of Felix Klein, the first federal commissioner for combating antisemitism.

Klein announced last month that he will leave his post, which he has held for eight years, this summer to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. He leaves behind a proposal to criminalize chants that could be interpreted as calling for Israel’s destruction, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The proposed legislation is currently being reviewed by the Ministry of Justice, and its future may rest in the hands of the next antisemitism commissioner, who has yet to be announced.

Whoever is chosen for the role will face down a fraught debate over Germany’s historic allegiance to Israel and the legal boundaries of pro-Palestinian speech. Many Jews say they feel safer under such bans, including the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which recommended Klein for his appointment as antisemitism czar. Some human rights groups and pundits have objected, however, saying the bans limit free speech and criminalize legitimate expressions of support for the Palestinian cause.

The next commissioner will also have to grapple with Jewish intellectuals, artists and activists like Hefets, who say that Germany’s antisemitism enforcers are suppressing Jewish voices that don’t fall in line.

The first swell of dissent from Jews came soon after Oct. 7. In an open letter published in the German newspaper “Die Tageszeitung” on Oct. 22, 2023, 121 Jewish writers and artists living in Germany condemned Hefets’ arrest and bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

“Virtually all of the cancellations, including those banning gatherings organized by Jewish groups, have been justified by the police in part due to the ‘imminent risk’ of ‘seditious, anti-Semitic exclamations,’” said the letter. “These claims, we believe, serve to suppress legitimate nonviolent political expression that may include criticisms of Israel.”

Emily Dische-Becker, the Germany director of the international group Diaspora Alliance and a Jewish German-American from Berlin, said Klein’s proposal to outlaw slogans like “From the river to the sea” could cement a sacrifice of free speech, ultimately harming Jews and other minorities.

“I do not think that treating antisemitism as a state of exception to our democratic laws and constitutional rights is going to help combat antisemitism,” she said.

For Klein, there is no contradiction in a German officer arresting a Jewish person for antisemitism. “It doesn’t really matter who is the person who spreads antisemitism,” he said in an interview. “Although it sounds odd at first sight, antisemitism can also be spread by Jews.”

Klein also dismissed efforts to distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

“In Germany, we hardly ever talk about anti-Zionism. The political notion hardly exists,” he said. “We talk about Israel-related antisemitism. When someone says, ‘I’m only anti-Zionist, I’m not antisemitic,’ I think in most of the cases, anti-Zionism is also a form of antisemitism. They say Israel, but they mean Jews.”

Germany’s grip on speech about Israel is rooted in a decades-old effort to expunge the taint of its Nazi past. During the 1980s and 1990s, the country formalized a process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or reckoning with the Nazi era through memorials, education and narratives about German identity. Key to this identity — and to Germany’s rehabilitation — was a special responsibility toward Israel.

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up this bond in 2008. Speaking to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, she said Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsräson,” or the reason for the existence of the state.

Now deeply ingrained in German politics, that concept has become a tool in the prosecution of pro-Palestinian protesters accused of antisemitism. Last year, immigration authorities ordered the deportation of three European nationals and one U.S. citizen over their alleged activity at pro-Palestinian protests. Three of the orders cited “Staatsräson,” although the protesters’ lawyer said the word had no legal standing.

Disputes over Israel recently erupted at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, as both Israel’s critics and its defenders claim the Holocaust for their terrain. The anti-Zionist group Kufiyas in Buchenwald announced a demonstration at Buchenwald on April 11, the anniversary of its liberation, in protest against a German court’s decision that the site could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh.

The court said it was “unquestionable” that wearing a keffiyeh to send a political message “would endanger the sense of security of many Jews, especially at this site.” Meanwhile, the protesters argued that their campaign encompasses the “descendants of Holocaust survivors,” including Buchenwald inmates, and said the site has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial.”

The group also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel, including the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, who was slated to give a commemoration speech at Buchenwald last year. Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, was disinvited after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.

The planned Buchenwald protest was condemned by the European Jewish Congress, and Klein said it marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”

Klein’s office, titled in full the “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism,” was created in 2018. Germany has since produced a web of antisemitism commissioners, with 15 installed at the state level and others assigned to universities and cultural institutions. The only Jewish state czar, Stefan Hensel of Hamburg, resigned at the end of 2025. (Hensel, who cited rising antisemitic threats in his decision to step down, converted to Judaism shortly before he started the job in 2021.)

According to Klein, the chief target of this antisemitism-fighting bureaucracy is clear: the pro-Palestinian movement. “The most common and most dangerous form of antisemitism in Germany, like in other countries, is Israel-related antisemitism,” he said.

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office records the political origins of antisemitic crimes. In 2024, it said that antisemitism driven by left-wing extremism rose a dramatic 172%, from 40 incidents the previous year to 109. Another category titled “foreign ideology” was reported to spur 1,940 incidents, a 63% increase from 2023.

But by far, right-wing extremism drove the most antisemitic crimes, a total of 3,016. Though that figure fell slightly from 2023, the office said that right-wing extremism also constituted the majority of offenses “in every previous year.”

The publicly available statistics do not break down responsibility for different types of antisemitic incidents, from hate speech to property damage to violence, and how many were reported to have Jewish victims.

Nevertheless, Dische-Becker criticized Klein’s office for “decoupling” its focus from far-right activity. She noted that the nationalist Alternative for Germany party or AfD, which has welcomed neo-Nazis to meetings, is rapidly becoming one of the country’s most popular parties and could win in some state-level elections this year.

Klein has support from the Central Council of Jews in Germany, a representative body whose 100,000 members comprise about half of the total Jews living in Germany. The group has said that “From the river to the sea” means “the annihilation of Israel and the expulsion and destruction of the Jews living there,” adding that Germany has an “urgent duty” to clarify that definition. The Central Council did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

Israel is an “existential concern” for many German Jews, according to A. Dirk Moses, a scholar of genocide, memory studies and modern Germany at the City College of New York. The Central Council emphasizes that it views the well-being of Jews in Germany as “dependent on the robustness of the Israeli state,” Moses said.

Even when German Jews do not fully align with the Central Council’s platform, he added, they often weigh language about Israel against the risk of undoing Germany’s progress in confronting the Holocaust.

“It’s the fear that you will give ammunition to antisemites in Germany, who will say, ‘Ah, the Jews are committing genocide too, just like our grandparents did, so we don’t owe them anything,’” he said.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany represents a population of Jewish families who largely arrived as refugees from Soviet countries and rebuilt Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust. Many came in poverty and depended heavily on community structures, including the Central Council, which is state-funded. Today, Jewish retirees still depend on basic social security at 10 times the rate of the average German, said Dische-Becker.

Many of these Jews also carry the memory of Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns, which employed antisemitic propaganda, shut down Jewish life and targeted Jews as ideologically suspect.

“The communities that are part of this umbrella organization are overwhelmingly older, post-Soviet migrants,” said Dische-Becker. “They have an experience of Soviet anti-Zionism that was antisemitic, and oftentimes they lean very right-wing.”

Johanna Vollhardt, a social psychologist at Clark University affiliated with the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, grew up in Germany’s Reform Jewish movement. She experienced the marginalization of Reform Judaism, which was born in Germany in the early 19th century and destroyed there by World War II, only gaining formal recognition by the Central Council and state funding in the early 2000s.

She viewed the Reform movement as part of a vast, diverse ecosystem of Jewish ideas that was stamped out, and remains stifled by policies like Klein’s proposal.

“To me, it’s important to emphasize this pluralism that was destroyed in the Holocaust and not allowed to rebuild,” said Vollhardt. “This is part of the lack of support for the expression of anti-Zionist Jewish thought, or any other non-Zionist, non-mainstream Jewish thought.”

Over recent decades, younger, richer and more politically liberal Jews have moved to Germany, particularly Berlin. Among them are up to 30,000 Israelis, including some who left Israel out of frustration and anger at their government.

Many of the Jewish artists and intellectuals who came from outside Germany have been caught in the clampdown on alleged anti-Israel or antisemitic expression.

According to data compiled by Diaspora Alliance, Jews were involved in 25% of the performances, exhibits and artistic expressions canceled in 2023 for allegations of antisemitism — despite making up less than 1% of the country’s population. (Palestinian, Muslim and Arab communities were penalized the most.)

Candice Breitz, a Jewish South African artist who has lived in Berlin since 2002, had an exhibition canceled by the Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery in November 2023. The exhibition centered on sex workers in Cape Town and was unrelated to Israel. Organizers said she had signed a letter from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and had not condemned the Oct. 7 attack.

Breitz denied both claims. She said she was not a supporter of BDS, and wrote on Instagram before the museum’s decision, “It is possible to fully condemn Hamas (as I do, unequivocally), while nevertheless supporting the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom from oppression, discrimination and occupation.”

Deborah Feldman, the Brooklyn-born ex-Orthodox Jew and author of the bestselling book “Unorthodox” who moved to Berlin in 2014, said she saw invitations to promote her latest book canceled in 2023. The book, titled “Judenfetisch” or “Jew Fetish,” argued that Germany’s guilt over the Holocaust had distorted its relationship to Jews and Israel.

Other Jewish intellectuals who don’t live in Germany say they have been shunned from coming. The Russian-American writer M. Gessen had a prestigious award from the Heinrich Böll Foundation pulled in December 2023, following an essay in The New Yorker comparing Gaza to a Nazi-era Jewish ghetto (and criticizing Germany’s constraints on pro-Palestinian views). Gessen ultimately received the award after the original ceremony was canceled.

In 2024, Nancy Fraser, a philosophy professor at the New School in New York, was disinvited from a visiting position at the University of Cologne over her signature on a letter titled “Philosophy for Palestine.” The university said that Fraser’s job offer was rescinded because the letter called into question “Israel’s right to exist as an ‘ethno-supremacist state’ since its foundation in 1948.”

Iris Hefets is a founding member of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East), a pro-Palestinian organization roughly comparable to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States. It is much smaller, with membership in the hundreds, and counts only Jews as members, unlike the U.S. group. But membership surged after Oct. 7, 2023, said Hefets.

In 2024, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution declared Jüdische Stimme an extremist organization. (The same agency designated the AfD as an extremist group in 2025.)

As a result, newer Jewish immigrants have peeled off from Jüdische Stimme. They don’t want to risk being questioned about their role in an extremist organization while applying for citizenship, said Hefets.

She called it “perverse” to see “Jews being accused of antisemitism by Germans who have Nazi grandparents.” Through her detainments, she believes, German officers were signaling that their “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” was complete; they had finished reckoning with the past.

“What Germany is saying now is actually that Germany worked through its past, and now Germany can go back to business as usual,” said Hefets. “‘We were punished by the Allies, but now it’s over, we are good again, because the Jews forgave us.’ And the Jews, for them, that’s Israel.”

(JTA) — During Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, both men made considerable waves with their takes on history and theology.

Huckabee sparked a diplomatic row by citing the Bible to argue that Israel had a divine right to claim all of the Middle East — even though he didn’t back doing so politically.

But Carlson’s own interpretation of Israeli sovereignty was also notable, as the far-right pundit insisted that Israelis should undergo genetic testing to determine if they have a rightful claim to the land.

“Why don’t we do genetic testing on everybody in the land and find out who Abram’s descendants are?” Carlson asked Huckabee at one point, using the name Abraham used before he made a covenant with God to become the first Jew. “It’s really simple. We’ve cracked the human genome. We can do that. Why don’t we do that?”

At another point, Carlson singled out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specifically as an illegitimate Israeli.

“What you’re saying is that certain people have a title to a highly contested region. They own it, in some deep sense,” he told Huckabee. “So I think it’s fair to ask, who are they, and how do we know? So the current prime minister’s ancestors weren’t from here within recorded history. He has no deed. Bibi Netanyahu, on one side, his family’s from Poland, they’re from Eastern Europe. So how do we know he has a connection to the people who God promised the land to?”

The line of questioning made little sense to many Jewish listeners, who understand Judaism as a blend of religion, ethnicity and community in which converts have always been accepted. For Jewish listeners, too, the idea of tracing bloodlines is often associated with the Nazis, who chose their victims based on how many Jewish ancestors they had.

But both Carlson’s critics, and supporters across the ideological spectrum who have agreed with his views on Israel, understood what he was getting at. They identified his line of questioning as a variation on the “Khazar theory”: the belief that Ashkenazi Jews, like Netanyahu, are genetically descended from a Turkic minority that converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages rather than from the 12 tribes of Israel. 

“The people currently occupying Israel are Khazarian Turks,” far-right pundit Candace Owens, a promoter of many antisemitic conspiracy theories, wrote on X.

“He has ZERO ancestral connection to the land. He’s Polish,” the far-left influencer Shaun King wrote on X about Netanyahu in praise of Carlson’s interview. “His real last name is Mileikowsky.”

The theories as to why the Khazars, who were a real people, would have converted en masse to Judaism have varied according to the teller; one tale holds that a Khazar royal held a debate between representatives of Judaism, Islam and Christianity to hold the best religion, and Judaism won out. But no matter how it happened, the theory goes, Jews who trace their genetics to Eastern Europe should not be considered rightful heirs of Israel, and should instead claim the Caucasus as their ancestral home.

The Khazar theory has a long history but was largely discredited with the advent of DNA analysis. Yet it has grown in prominence among antisemitic circles since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel and ensuing Gaza war, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League. 

“Antisemites suggest that if Jews are descended from people not native to Israel (i.e., Khazars), then they have no legitimate claim to the land,” the ADL’s own description of the theory’s popularity notes. “In addition, because Nazis sought to expel Jews and others from their homes in Europe in order to obtain lebensraum (‘living space’) for ‘Aryan’ people, antisemites have argued that Jews are doing the same thing because they have no historic claim to the land of Israel.”

The ADL also notes that, setting aside the validity of the theory, most Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi but rather trace their roots to North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The origins of the Khazar theory date back centuries and have always had some promulgation from Jews; Hungarian Jews in the 19th century latched onto the theory, according to researchers. The Khazar theory has also been promoted by some Jewish and Israeli scholars in more recent years, including Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book “The Thirteenth Tribe”; Shlomo Sand, a historian at Tel Aviv University who identifies as “post-Zionist,” in his controversial 2008 book “The Invention of the Jewish People”; and Israeli geneticist Eran Elhaik. 

This has further boosted the theory’s seeming validity among proponents: Owens, for example, has cited Sand’s book on X as evidence for the theory.

But such studies are largely refuted by established historical scholarship. “This claim, pardon my chutzpah, is nonsense,” Shaul Stampfer, an emeritus history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has said about the Khazar theory in college lectures.

In Stampfer’s own research into the Khazars, he said that while there were a few Jews among the Khazars, he has found no genetic links between the ancient Central Asian tribe and modern Ashkenazi Jews (whose own genetics have been thoroughly studied owing to a preponderance of genetic diseases in the population). There are, however, genetic links between Ashkenazi Jews and ancient Palestine, as well as to North Africa, he says. 

In addition, there are very few Turkic origins to be found in Yiddish, while there are extensive Latin origins in Yiddish, further boosting evidence of broader Jewish migration to Europe and decreasing the likelihood of mass migration from Turkey.

There are other practical considerations, too, Stampfer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week.

“Take a look at a map,” he wrote in an email. “Even if the Khazars had converted, they would not have dragged themselves to Poland. It is far away and cold in the winter.”

The National Institutes of Health, too, published an extensive genetic study in 2013 that found “no evidence from genome-wide data of a Khazar origin for the Ashkenazi Jews.” 

The researchers assembled what they called “the largest data set available to date for assessment of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic origins,” as well as available genome sets from the Caucasus. Their conclusion, the abstract notes, “corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations.”

None of the evidence has stopped the Khazar theory from emerging as a lodestar of modern antisemitism, thanks in part to influential right-wing personalities such as Carlson. This is not the first time he has toyed with the idea of genetics testing for Jews, though he previously seemed to be aware that such an ask would carry undesirable connotations. 

“In order to determine who’s actually inherited the land, we would have to conduct global genetic testing to award property on the basis of the results,” he texted right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza months ago, according to D’Souza, who shared the text on a recent podcast. Carlson continued, “Sounds like a Nazi project to me. As a Christian, I reject that.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary any more than it’s necessary to genetically test Indians to make sure their ancestors are from India,” D’Souza, who is Indian-American, responded. “Remember Jews maintained their tribal identity. Very little intermarriage. They didn’t try to convert people, as Christians did.”

D’Souza continued, “Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ conveys the picture very vividly. The Jews don’t mix. So their continuity as a group is generally more secure than virtually any other group.” (“The Merchant of Venice,” which features the Jewish villain Shylock, is generally seen as promoting antisemitic stereotypes.)

Carlson responded by returning to the genetics question — and this time seeming more open to it than when he first called it a Nazi project. “I agree with all that and I admire it. I’m hardly against Jews,” he texted D’Souza. “But if the claim is that Jews have a genetic right to certain pieces of land, it’s going to be necessary to do genetic testing.”

The broader lurch into conspiratorial thinking on the right, exemplified by the views on the Jews and Israel espoused by Carlson, increasingly has some other conservatives worried about losing control of the narrative.

“The most popular digital content on the Right is now ‘Erika Kirk killed Charlie,’ ‘Epstein was leading a pedophile blackmail ring for the CIA’ and ‘Jews are a diabolical power destroying the world,’” Christopher Rufo, an influential right-wing thought leader who helped orchestrate the larger push against diversity initiatives, warned on X. “In these instances, we need to correct public opinion, rather than cave to it.”

For his part after the Carlson interview, Huckabee accused his interrogator of drawing on a “dangerous conspiracy theory” from “some of the darkest realms of the Internet” for his genetic testing line of questioning.

“I do know that the discredited idea that most Ashkenazi or European Jews descended from the ancient Turkic kingdom of Khazaria is bunk,” Huckabee wrote on X. “It’s also been weaponized by people trying to deligitimize [sic] Jews, to strip them of their history, and to call them ‘imposters’ or ‘fake Jews.’”

Stampfer was hesitant to diagnose why the Khazar theory may be growing in popularity today. 

“People who don’t like Jews might be attracted to the idea that this is one more Jewish lie,” he offered. Yet, he added, “Explaining why people believe what they believe is a tough business.”

(JTA) — The Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing the leadership of UCLA of allowing an antisemitic work environment on campus, intensifying the Trump administration’s long-running scrutiny of the Los Angeles campus.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Central District of California, alleges UCLA failed to protect Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff from harassment following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the protests that spread across American universities afterward.

The complaint was filed the same day President Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term, in which he is expected to cite the administration’s broader confrontations with higher education institutions as evidence of its successes. It also comes roughly three months after nine Justice Department attorneys resigned from the government’s University of California antisemitism investigation, telling the Los Angeles Times they believed the probe had become politicized. 

The lawsuit says that antisemitic conduct at UCLA became widespread after Oct. 7 and persisted through the 2023-24 academic year. According to the lawsuit, Jewish and Israeli employees were subjected to threats, classroom disruptions, antisemitic graffiti and, at times, were blocked from parts of campus during protests.

The government places particular emphasis on the spring 2024 Royce Quad encampment, when pro-Palestinian demonstrators established a tent protest in the center of campus. The Justice Department alleges UCLA failed to enforce its own campus rules, allowing protests that disrupted university operations and contributed to what it describes as a hostile workplace.

“Based on our investigation, UCLA administrators allegedly allowed virulent anti-Semitism to flourish on campus,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a DOJ press release announcing the lawsuit. Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, described the alleged incidents as “a mark of shame” if proven true.

UCLA officials rejected the government’s characterization, pointing instead to changes made under Chancellor Julio Frenk.

“As Chancellor Frenk has made clear: Antisemitism is abhorrent and has no place at UCLA or anywhere,” vice chancellor of strategic communications Mary Osako said in a statement. She cited investments in campus safety, the launch of UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, the reorganization of the university’s civil rights office, the hiring of a dedicated Title VI and Title VII officer and strengthened protest policies.

“We stand firmly by the decisive actions we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms, and we will vigorously defend our efforts and our unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive environment for all members of our community,” Osako said. 

Frenk, who is Jewish, has spoken publicly about antisemitism in higher education. In an essay published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last year, he invoked the history of German universities under Nazism, warning that those institutions “never recovered after driving Jews out” and urging American colleges to confront antisemitism while preserving academic freedom and open debate.

The new lawsuit follows earlier legal battles over campus protests at UCLA. In July 2025, the university agreed to pay $6.13 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and a Jewish professor who said demonstrators had blocked access to parts of campus. Under that agreement, UCLA said it would ensure protesters could not restrict movement or access to university spaces.

Campus tensions over speech and security have continued more recently. Bari Weiss, the journalist and founder of The Free Press, withdrew this month from a scheduled appearance at UCLA as part of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture series. Weiss had been invited to speak on “The Future of Journalism” but canceled the event, citing security concerns ahead of the lecture.

Updated on Feb. 26

Jewish parents in California are taking their fight against antisemitism in K-12 public schools to the very top. 

A lawsuit filed Thursday by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Jewish advocacy group StandWithUs takes aim at the state of California and its top education authorities, alleging the state has allowed unchecked anti-Jewish discrimination to proliferate in public schools.

The suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, names as defendants California itself, as well as the California Department of Education and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. 

The 48-page complaint shared this week with J. alleges that the process for filing and investigating complaints of antisemitism is fundamentally broken, leaving Jewish families with little or no recourse against antisemitic discrimination and harassment.

The lawsuit highlights reports of antisemitic behavior in school districts across the state, including in the San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Fremont, San Jose and Los Angeles areas. 

NYC-based law firm Davis Polk and Michael Sherman, a partner at the L.A.-based law firm Stubbs Alderton & Markiles, are also representing plaintiffs.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they filed the suit as a comprehensive approach to combating antisemitism in the Golden State rather than a piecemeal one focusing on specific schools or districts.

“We just came to understand that this was too pervasive of an issue to attack district by district,” Marci Lerner Miller, director of legal investigations at the Brandeis Center, told J. “In California, the state has the obligation to make sure that all of its K-12 public school students receive an equal, fair, equitable education. That includes Jewish students as well. They can’t delegate that responsibility to the districts. The ultimate responsibility lies with the state of California.”

Ilana Pearlman, a mother of three and a leader of the grassroots group Berkeley Jews in Schools, is a named plaintiff in the suit. Other plaintiffs have children in school districts in Santa Clara County, San Bernardino County and the Los Angeles area. 

The children of these families experienced overt antisemitic discrimination and harassment at school from their peers and teachers since the early days of the Israel-Hamas war, according to the lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Pearlman’s then-ninth-grade son was in an art class at Berkeley High School when his teacher displayed his latest artwork, which her son found to be “violent and antisemitic.” It depicted a Star of David over a map of Israel with a giant fist punching through it. The next day, that teacher encouraged the class to participate in a pro-Palestinian walkout, according to the lawsuit. 

As J. reported, some 150 Berkeley High students participated in the Oct. 18 walkout, part of a National Student Walkout for Gaza, co-organized by the San Francisco-based Arab Resources and Organizing Center. AROC, a staunch anti-Zionist activist group, led many protests throughout the Israel-Hamas war, often involving Bay Area teachers.

John and Jane Smith, the pseudonyms of the San Bernardino County plaintiffs who are suing on behalf of their child in the Etiwanda School District, allege in the lawsuit that their daughter, who was a middle schooler, was choked at an after-school program by another student who yelled, “Shut your stupid Jewish ass up.”

After reporting the incident to school leaders, the lawsuit alleges that the school “stonewalled them” and did nothing to provide mental health support to their daughter, who continues to suffer trauma-related anxiety, insomnia, hypervigilance and nightmares.

“While painful, sharing our daughter’s story is necessary so that others can see the pervasiveness of antisemitism and school failures to protect Jewish children,” Jane Smith wrote in a statement provided to J.

AB 715, the state law designed to address antisemitism in K-12 public schools, took effect on Jan. 1. The lawsuit references the new law not as an antidote to the problems it seeks to address but as a recognition of them. Quoting from the new law, the lawsuit states that “discrimination, harassment, and bullying has been so severe and pervasive that it has placed Jewish pupils at risk and limited, or completely impeded, their ability to learn or engage in school programs or activities.”

Amid a surge in antisemitic incidents over the past three school years, Jewish families have filed “hundreds” of Uniform Complaint Procedures (UCPs) and appeals to the California Department of Education reporting cases of harassment, discrimination, bullying and biased teaching materials, according to the lawsuit.

J. has reported several instances when families waited months for a response to their UCP, far beyond the 60-day timeline the state dictates. Their complaints often were denied, or the remedies imposed were “toothless,” according to the lawsuit, even when serious discrimination was found.

“I consider it more of the foxes policing the hen house,” Ivy Chesser, a plaintiff on behalf of her son in the Campbell Union High School District in the South Bay told J. “There’s just no accountability system through the UCP process.”

The California Department of Education told J. that it “cannot comment on pending litigation.”

Chesser filed three UCPs over the last two years on behalf of Jewish families in her school district whose children experienced antisemitism, she told J. Only one of the UCPs was validated by the state education department, which found after an investigation that two San Jose high school teachers delivered one-sided instruction on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that “discriminated against Jewish students.”

“It took a lot of follow-up and persistence on our part to get it investigated,” Chesser said of the complaint. “The UCP process, I don’t believe, was designed to address discrimination that is ongoing in the classroom.”

The lawsuit against the state seeks to rectify that. 

Among a detailed list of remedies the lawsuit seeks for the plaintiffs is for the state to investigate and address past acts of misconduct; take proactive measures to stop future discrimination; and appoint a “committee of experts” to review all ethnic studies curricula used by schools since 2021 “for compliance with anti-bias and anti-discrimination provisions” in California’s education code. The lawsuit also calls for the state to appoint an “independent monitor or compliance officer with expertise in anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish and anti-Israel discrimination.”

“The California education system is teaching the state’s children that Jewish Americans and Israelis are racists, white supremacists, oppressors, and baby-killers who should be shunned,” Kenneth Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center, said in a statement. “School officials have done little or nothing at all to help these children. It is the state’s legal responsibility to defend and protect innocent children from discrimination and bigotry, not foster hate as California has been doing.”

Update on Feb. 26: The California Department of Education’s response to J. has been added.

For the last four decades, Sonoma State University’s annual lecture series on the Holocaust and genocide has held an important place in Northern California’s Jewish community, preserving the legacy of Holocaust victims and educating students about the horrors of antisemitism and other forms of hatred. 

In the past two years, though, the influential series has taken up a new area of inquiry: Israel.

The spring series presents weekly talks that are free and open to the public. Among last year’s and this year’s speakers are two who accuse Israel of genocide. One, Ussama Makdisi, is a staunch critic who wrote recently that since 1948, Israel has treated Palestinians with “meticulous cruelty that touches every aspect of Palestinian life.” The other, Brown University historian Omer Bartov, gained widespread notice last year after the New York Times published his op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” 

The Sonoma State Holocaust and Genocide Lecture Series is described as the “cornerstone” of the university’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, a multidisciplinary institution. It was founded as the Holocaust Studies Center by John Steiner, an Auschwitz survivor and renowned sociologist who conducted interviews with Nazi perpetrators. The first lecture took place in 1983.

Throughout most of the 1980s and into the ’90s, the center’s stated purpose was to provide “education about the origins, nature and consequences of the Holocaust,” according to its website. A promotional poster in 1984 advertised nine lectures, among them “The Holocaust and the Roots of Evil” and “Catastrophe and the Jewish Experience.”

In 2003, the center changed its name to include genocide studies. “This is not a small move,” an announcement in a university magazine said. “It indicates to the community that the Center is not just focusing on the Jewish experience, but is recognizing the Holocaust as a template for other mass murders.”

Even before the name change, the lecture series had expanded to include genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Americas and elsewhere. The series has welcomed dozens of Holocaust survivors to relate their experiences, as well as survivors of the Rwandan, Cambodian and Bosnian genocides. Particularly over the last 10 to 15 years, the participation of Holocaust survivors has dwindled considerably as their numbers decline. Supporters of the series described it as an institution with deep roots in the Sonoma County Jewish community.

This year, just four of the 15 lecture topics pertain to the Holocaust. Two deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The rest cover Armenia, Native Americans, Guatemala, the Japanese occupation of China during World War II and other topics. 

J. recently interviewed six supporters of the speakers’ series, including family members of Holocaust survivors, community lecturers and donors. Some expressed complicated feelings about the program’s new direction; they support academic freedom but don’t want to see the series politicized. Others expressed outrage, saying the decision to include Makdisi and Bartov was an affront to the original mission to memorialize and study the Holocaust, honor its victims and combat antisemitism.

“Up until last year, it has always been about recognized genocides,” said Miriam Wald, a retired clinical psychologist who is involved with Holocaust remembrance in Sonoma County. “It’s never been about current political situations.” Indeed, Wald said, Holocaust victims would be “rolling over in their mass graves if they knew the direction that things are going.”

“We had these incredible, incredible survivors who historically were very involved in the development of this lecture series, and this relationship to the university,” she said. “It was really precious to the Jewish community, and we cherished it all so much.”

Wald said the changes have led to painful disputes within the local Jewish community. She sits on an eight-member Yom HaShoah committee that organizes an annual commemoration in Sonoma County. This year, the committee voted to stop promoting the lecture series once Bartov was invited.

The lectures are required for about 100 students who take the upper-level course “Perspectives on the Holocaust and Genocide” and also fulfill general-education requirements. Wald said the series is now “indoctrinating” students into anti-Israel positions that make Jews less safe.

The accusation that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza is “a very popular topic right now among people who don’t actually understand the history of Israel,” said Michelle Zygielbaum, who endowed a fund to support the event after the death of her mother-in-law, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps. “They don’t understand the history of Palestine, of Gaza, of Hamas, and who Hamas is.”

Concerned supporters of the series describe the annual event as a beloved and vital institution but wonder about balance — for example, why there was no lecture interrogating Hamas’ crimes on Oct. 7, 2023, when 1,200 people were murdered and 251 were taken hostage in the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.

“They’re criticizing Israel, but not looking at the other side of what’s going on,” said Dennis Judd of Sebastopol, who on Feb. 17 delivered a lecture about his mother’s experience at Auschwitz. 

Judd, who has donated money to support the series, said he had mixed feelings about the inclusion of voices accusing Israel of genocide. For years, he said, the lecture series was “pretty much nonpolitical. It was education about the history of what happened.”

Judd said the inclusion of Makdisi and Bartov suggested a political preference on a hugely controversial topic.

“As soon as it gets political, then it becomes a question of, is this the place for it? I’m not sure it is. Is a Holocaust and genocide program really the forum for this to happen?” he said. “If you’re going to go political, show different viewpoints.”

History professor Stephen Bittner, the academic coordinator of the series, did not respond to an interview request for this story. Speaking with J. last year, Bittner defended the inclusion of speakers known for their harsh criticism of Israel, citing academic freedom. In light of the polarizing discourse around the Israel-Hamas war, he said at the time, sessions dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are vitally important to the series. Whether students agree or disagree with the speakers “does not matter to me,” he said.

Bittner said his decisions were motivated in part by the turmoil that erupted on Sonoma State’s campus during the 2023-2024 school year. Students formed a tent encampment in the spring of 2024 protesting the Gaza war, some explicitly linking their activism to the Holocaust, using phrases like “Never Again for Anyone.” The president of the university, Mike Lee, became a casualty of the political moment; he was placed on leave after acceding to some of the protesters’ demands, and then he retired.

“Anybody who thinks that we don’t have Zionist voices in our lecture series clearly hasn’t looked at our roster of speakers,” Bittner said last year. “We have several speakers who openly identify as Zionist and as sympathetic to the State of Israel.”

Bittner said he was confident that conversations in the series would not devolve into political disputes. “I can’t be certain that that will be true in every other venue on campus,” he said. “What we do in the classroom is not about politics. It’s about learning.”

The lecture series interprets “genocide broadly to mean not just places where accepted genocide is occuring,” Bittner said, “but places where genocide might occur, or where there is some dispute about whether genocide occurred.”

Bittner was responding to questions about Makdisi, a Palestinian American scholar of Arab history and a professor at UC Berkeley who in 2024 was named chair of UC Berkeley’s newly formed Palestinian and Arab Studies program. 

“My invitation is for Ussama to speak regardless of his point of view. I invited him because he’s a respected scholar,” Bittner said last year.

Makdisi delivered his lecture “Atonement at the Expense of Others: Palestinians and the Question of Genocide” on April 15. He said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and argued that the Zionist movement benefited from European guilt about the Holocaust at the expense of Palestinians. Hundreds of people attended online and in person, and Makdisi received a standing ovation. 

This year, the series will host Bartov, an Israeli American genocide scholar who became influential in the public debate surrounding Israel’s actions in the Israel-Hamas war after the publication of his essay. In it, he presented evidence of genocide in statements made by Israeli leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pledged to turn areas of Gaza where Hamas is operating “into rubble” — coupled with the scale of destruction. He will give a lecture on May 5 called “Israel: What Went Wrong?”

The allegation of genocide is firmly rejected by Israel and bitterly disputed among experts. Throughout the course of the war, Israel said the aim of its military campaign in Gaza was to destroy Hamas and free hostages captured by the terrorist group. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, more than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed. A U.S.-brokered agreement in October requiring Hamas to release the last 20 living hostages held by Hamas in Gaza was instrumental in ending the most intense fighting of the war.

Last August, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution affirming that Israel had committed genocide. Some criticized IAGS because of relatively low voter participation and lax criteria for scholars to gain admission to the professional association. Days later, a group called Scholars for Truth About Genocide published a rebuttal to the IAGS statement, saying it neglected Hamas’ role in the destruction in Gaza, including its use of human shields and its refusal to release civilian hostages.

The genocide claim was a “clear misapplication of law history,” the rebuttal said. “Genocide is the gravest offense known to humankind; to dilute its legal standards for ideological ends is a form of moral violence.”

Lev Luvishis, a technology professional in Santa Rosa whose great-grandmother was killed in the Holocaust, is a vocal supporter of Israel. Over the past two years, he led Run for Our Lives events in Sonoma County to raise awareness about hostages held in Gaza. He described the inclusion of speakers who accuse Israel of genocide as a “moral issue.”

Luvishis has attended the lecture series over the years, he said, in part because of his daughter. She met Hans Angress, a Holocaust survivor and a regular presenter at the lecture series, when she was in high school. Angress, who died in 2021, was a hidden child whose father was sent to Auschwitz and killed during the Holocaust. When Luvishis’ daughter went on an organized trip to visit the concentration camps in Poland, Angress gave her a stone to leave at Auschwitz in memory of his father. Luvishis said his family has been closely connected to the series since.

“To me what they’re doing is just diluting that word,” Luvishis said, describing the genocide claim as a “blood libel” and a lie. “They’re basically trying to portray Israel as the worst — as an entity that’s committing the worst crimes in humanity, and calling it genocide. To me that’s just an attempt to dehumanize Israel, delegitimize Israel. And I don’t think it has any place in this series.”