On October 4, 2026, as Jews marked Simchat Torah and the third Jewish-calendar anniversary of the Hamas-led massacre that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, Britain’s Green Party voted to declare Zionism a form of racism.
By 1,022 votes to 813, the party formally declared itself anti-Zionist and endorsed replacing Israel with a single Palestinian state throughout the pre-1948 region of Palestine.
An earlier vote at the same conference was even more revealing about the party’s attitude towards Jews.
Jewish Green member Sam Alston proposed an amendment protecting Jewish members from being pressured or disciplined because they belonged to synagogues and other Jewish institutions associated with Zionism. He warned that without such protection the policy could result in “indirect religious discrimination.”
The Greens rejected his safeguard, 1,026 to 684.
So at this same conference, Jewish members were provided a safe room because some feared for their safety during the debate about Jews and the Jewish State, while rejecting their proposed protection from its new racism policy.
“We continue to see antisemitic sentiment appearing with increasing frequency,” – Laurence Taylor, the head of counter-terrorism policing
There may also be a legal problem.
Adam Wagner KC, a prominent British human-rights barrister, has warned of a “strong risk” that the resolution contravenes the Equality Act 2010. British law protects qualifying philosophical beliefs, and Wagner argues that Zionism is likely capable of qualifying for that protection.
There is already precedent from the other direction. David Miller, the former University of Bristol professor, successfully established before an employment tribunal that his anti-Zionism qualified as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. Greens for Palestine cited the Miller case in defending anti-Zionist beliefs before the conference.
British law may already protect both the anti-Zionist and the Zionist.
The Green Party is no longer a fringe environmental entity. Membership has surged above 200,000, tripling its total in a single year.
Their electorate also looks markedly different from Britain as a whole. Analysis of the 2024 Green vote found an average age of 42 compared with 49 across the electorate. Green voters were more female, much more likely to be university graduates and less likely to own their homes. They were also twice as likely to be Muslim – 6 percent versus 3 percent nationally – and considerably more likely to have no religion.
The two conference votes reveal something more troubling.
While the voters against Zionism and protection for Jews stayed roughly the same – 1,022 and 1,026, respectively – 16 percent of those supporting Israel did not vote on protections for Britain’s Jewish community.
That leaves a question extending well beyond this conference: As hostility to Zionism moves deeper into the politics of the alt-left, who will insist on protecting Jews whose religious and communal lives remain connected to it?
Two Iranian men – Salam Ahmadyan, 36, and Rahman Salehi, 34 – charged with attempting to bomb a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur 2026, one year after other Jews were stabbed to death in the city
The Trump administration, he writes, has demanded “what amounts to D.E.I. for Jews.”
What he means is antisemitism training and measures intended to ensure that Jewish students can attend classes, use campus facilities and participate in university life without harassment or intimidation.
That is not D.E.I. It is equal protection.
D.E.I. programs may use identity-conscious policies to pursue representation or other preferred outcomes. On the other hand, civil-rights law imposes a simpler rule: institutions receiving federal funds may not discriminate against students because of their race, ethnicity or shared ancestry.
Preferred outcomes and equal protection are not just not the same thing.They are opposites.
If Black students are targeted, the law protects them. If Muslim or Arab students are targeted, the law protects them. If Jewish students are targeted, the law protects them. Applying the same rule to Jews does not create a Jewish preference.
Loeffler nevertheless describes Jews as having been selected for special protection. That is absurd. Title VI has long covered antisemitic discrimination, just as it covers comparable discrimination against other groups. Whether a particular penalty is proportionate is a separate question from whether protecting Jewish students constitutes D.E.I.
Loeffler avoids that basic distinction by reducing the conduct surrounding Gaza protests to “excesses.” But the issue was not criticism of Israel or a few offensive placards. Jewish students faced ongoing intimidation, exclusion, celebrations of Hamas murderers and rapists, and chants invoking violence while universities failed to enforce their own rules.
The relevant question is whether universities tolerated treatment of Jewish students that they would have confronted had another minority been targeted. Instead, Loeffler makes the government’s response the scandal. His essay moves away from the students suffering harassment toward theories about Trump, demographic change, white panic and “Jewish donors.” The people seeking protection disappear into an argument about the motives of those enforcing the law.
That this comes from a professor of modern Jewish history is difficult to understand. Loeffler is not an uninformed commentator stumbling over the difference between a preference and a right. His credentials rest on Jewish history, antisemitism and civil liberties. He is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute which promoted the article on its website.
How does a scholar with that background look at the present condition of American Jews and identify their protection as the suspicious development? How does he see Jewish students threatened and excluded, yet reserve his strongest language for the government finally acting? How does an authority on antisemitism mistake equal treatment for Jewish favoritism?
The New York Times paraded an “As A Jew” with Trump Derangement Syndrome to encourage students coming back to school to come after their Jewish classmates once more and vote against Republicans in the mid-term elections.
Disliking the administration enforcing the law does not transform the law into D.E.I. Equal protection does not become preferential treatment when the people receiving it are Jews.
You can also share your thoughts with the Shalom Hartman Institute for having Loeffler be an ongoing research fellow and promoting his article at 212-268-0300.
In May 2014, Macklemore walked onto a Seattle stage wearing a large prosthetic nose, dark wig, beard and black suit. Then he performed “Thrift Shop,” a song about being cheap.
Macklemore in Jewface in 2014, singing about being cheap
It would be difficult to construct a more recognizable antisemitic spectacle: the exaggerated Jewish nose, the beard, the dark clothes, all while singing about bargain hunting. Actor Seth Rogen mocked Macklemore’s explanation that it was merely a random disguise: if someone were instructed to assemble an antisemitic Jewish costume, Rogen wrote, “they’d have that exact shopping list.”
As criticism mounted, Macklemore apologized. He acknowledged that the outfit could be understood as a Jewish caricature but maintained that no Jewish stereotype had crossed his mind.
Yeah, right. That should have been a simple moment for the Anti-Defamation League to clearly denounce the spectacle.
Instead, the ADL chose absolution.
“We take him at his word that he did not have any ill intent,” then-ADL director Abraham Foxman said, “and unreservedly accept his apology.” And then Macklemore gave the ADL a promotional shout-out. “Through this situation I’ve got hip to some incredible groups like the ADL,” he wrote, encouraging people to check out their “great work.”
The country’s best-known antisemitism organization publicly and “unreservedly” accepted his apology and also his advertisement. It is unclear whether there was a quid-pro-quo and whether the ADL was trying to promote its antisemitism study it released the week before.
As they say in text-land: “WTF?”
Twelve Years Later
It is now 2026, and antisemitism is raging through American public life. Much of it no longer arrives wearing a fake nose and beard. It travels under political banners, frequently through rhetoric about Zionists and Israel.
And Macklemore is back on a concert stage.
Opening for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium, he told tens of thousands of people why he had joined the tour: so that he could stand in stadiums and say, “Free Palestine.” He accused Israel of genocide, performed “Hind’s Hall” against a backdrop of footage from pro-Palestinian campus encampments and turned part of the concert into a political demonstration.
This time, the ADL wasn’t offering absolution.
“They came for a concert, not performative, biased and hateful anti-Israel ‘activism’ from his opener, Macklemore,” the organization declared. It pointed to what it describes as his record of demonizing Israel and Israelis, falsely accusing Israel of genocide and engaging in antisemitic rhetoric and behavior.
When Macklemore was subsequently removed from the remainder of Sheeran’s tour, head of ADL Jonathan Greenblatt applauded the decision, saying that “for years, Macklemore has pushed antisemitic tropes and demonized Israel and Israelis.”
What a difference twelve years makes.
The Permission Slip
The problem in 2014 wasn’t only that the ADL accepted an apology. It was that it seemingly confused forgiving the man with minimizing the act.
America’s leading antisemitism organization effectively told the public that Macklemore’s updated and revised intentions settled the matter. A concocted and forced apology after multiple attempts to satisfy the offended, became another chip on the accused – I’m sorry you were offended, not I’m sorry that I have done something terrible that offended you.
Jews are the subject. Always. The antisemite is a victim of Jewish sensitivity.
The ADL granted a permission slip of sorts to this vulgarity and inanity. Permission for American culture to treat an astonishingly recognizable Jewish caricature as something that could be quickly explained away if the right person said he hadn’t meant it.
Now, the ADL that once took Macklemore at his word is no longer particularly interested in his assurances about what he means. It considers impact. The false charge of “genocide” against Israel in Israel’s defensive war is a common pretext to attack Jews today. Macklemore’s appeal to thousands wasn’t a call for peace but incitement to pogrom.
But that was precisely the lesson the ADL could have taught in 2014.
There is an important role for forgiveness in fighting hatred. People must be allowed to recognize mistakes, apologize and change. That is what the Ten Days of Repentance we are in right now is about.
But forgiveness without the party internalizing the matter coupled with contrition is meaningless. It is actually much worse. It is a wink with a get-out-of-jail card. Carry on with spreading antisemitism; we’ll only call it out when the situation becomes intolerable.
Neither October 7, 2023 nor October 8 appeared magically. First One Through has been writing about this phenomenon nearly every day since those same days in May 2014, when it wrote about the UN’s Richard Falk stating that Israel’s “criminal intention [toward Palestinians] is genocidal.”
Does that word have a familiar ring to it? The UN has been using it constantly for well over a decade; before the wars of 2014, 2021 or 2023.
At the Beacon Theatre, Itzhak Perlman offered a reminder that Jewish memory is not only something Jews mourn; it is something they dance to.
Four days after New York marked the 25th anniversary of September 11, and just after Rosh Hashanah ushered in another Jewish year, Itzhak Perlman sat at center stage at the Beacon Theatre and played klezmer.
The concert celebrated Perlman’s 81st birthday and roughly three decades since In the Fiddler’s House, his landmark embrace of the music of his Jewish roots. Perlman said he wanted people “to dance in the aisles.”
Itzhak Perlman, with members of the Klezmatics and Andy Statman at the Beacon Theater September 15, 2026 (photo: First One Through)
That is where klezmer belongs.
The word comes from the Hebrew klei zemer – “vessels of song” – but klezmer was never simply a genre of music. It was music woven into the life of Eastern European Jews, played at celebrations and, most famously, weddings.
It sounds like the world that created it. The violin can plead like prayer. The clarinet can cry, tease and laugh. A melody can begin in longing and, almost without warning, become a demand to get out of your chair.
Klezmer can sound sad without being sad music. It carries memory into celebration.
Even more, klezmer turns Jewish memory into Jewish motion.
Much of the Eastern European Jewish world that created this music was eventually destroyed. Whether Jews fled pogroms of the 19th and 20th century or were wiped out in the Holocaust, the ground which birthed klezmer has lost almost all of its Jewish feet.
But the music crossed oceans and generations. Jewish immigrants carried it to America, where later musicians recovered and revived the tradition. Andy Statman, who joined Perlman on stage at the Beacon, became one of its great modern interpreters. Perlman’s In the Fiddler’s House brought klezmer to audiences who knew him primarily as one of the world’s greatest classical violinists.
That makes the choice itself significant.
Perlman could have celebrated his birthday playing Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. Instead, he gathered klezmer musicians at the Beacon to play the music of Jewish weddings and Jewish celebrations.
And there was something particularly striking about hearing it in New York at this moment in time.
The city outside the Beacon has been experiencing a terrible surge in antisemitism. Jews have been harassed and assaulted on New York streets, while antisemitic incidents have repeatedly represented a disproportionate share of reported hate crimes. America’s youth has largely moved away from Israel and the Jewish State, leaving the future very uncertain.
That was the world outside the theater doors.
Inside was a different New York.
The audience appeared predominantly Jewish and older. For many, these melodies likely carried associations extending beyond a night at the Beacon: to parents and grandparents, weddings and synagogues, holidays and communities. To the Yiddish language rarely spoken anymore – let alone sung by a woman in public.
But the audience was not exclusively Jewish or old. The handful of younger people mostly wore kippahs or were Asian. Some may have come for klezmer; others simply for the opportunity to hear one of the greatest violinists alive.
And then Perlman got his wish. People got out of their seats, filled the aisles and danced.
Crowd at the Beacon took to the aisles and started dancing around the theater as Perlman and the band played wedding music (photo: First One Through)
The scene captured something that yet another speech condemning antisemitism could not. Outside were the streets of a city where Jewish identity has increasingly been met with hostility and Jews hid their identity. Inside, an 81-year-old Jewish violinist who cannot walk himself, was playing unmistakably Jewish music inherited from communities that no longer exist – and Jews and Asians alike were on their feet celebrating it.
Dancing in the aisles at The Fiddler’s House to music by Itzhak Perlman and the Klezmatics at The Beacon in NYC, September 15, 2026
The timing made the scene still richer.
The Jewish year had just begun with the blast of the shofar. Rosh Hashanah demands reflection. Yom Kippur will demand repentance and fasting. But the Jewish calendar does not end there. It moves to Sukkot and then Simchat Torah, when Jews take the Torah from the ark, hold it in their arms and dance.
That progression says something essential about Judaism. It remembers the good and the bad. It prays. It fasts. It builds. It dances.
And it refuses to make sorrow the destination.
On a September night in New York, with antisemitism again confronting Jews on the streets outside, an old Jewish musical legend lifted his violin and played old Jewish melodies. And Jews clapped and danced in the aisles.
Itzhak Perlman and Andy Statman at The Beacon in NYC for Itzhak’s 81st birthday (made by First One Through with AI)
On May 21, 2025, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim walked out of a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. They were young Israeli Embassy employees and a couple. Lischinsky had bought a ring and planned to propose.
Alas, Elias Rodriguez, a pro-Palestinian anarchist, fired approximately 20 rounds at the couple shouting “free Palestine.” Inside the museum afterward, he allegedly said, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”
Rodriguez had brought an explanation with him.
His manifesto, Explication, dated the previous day, defended the “morality of armed demonstration.” He wrote that he had considered such violence justified during the 2014 Gaza war, but understood that most Americans then would have found it “illegible” and “insane.”
By 2025, he believed America was different. “I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”
In his mind, the violence had not changed. The audience had.
Rodriguez described armed action as “theater and spectacle.” He had watched enormous demonstrations against Israel, accusations of genocide become commonplace and supporters of Israel portrayed as complicit in mass killing. Yet, he complained, “the rhetoric has not amounted to much.”
The violence would be the spectacle. The manifesto would tell the audience how to read it.
Especially because of the timing: May 20, 2025.
Rodriguez penned his manifesto on the same day that UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours unless aid reached them.
The claim was completely false. The comment was a distorted derivative of a report that approximately 14,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition among young children might occur over the next year. And he placed all of the blame on Israel.
The accusation spread quickly. That afternoon, CAIR issued a call for action after the UN said 14,000 Palestinian babies could die under what CAIR called Israel’s “forced starvation campaign.” Genocide supplied the larger charge.
Shortly before his murder the next day, Lischinsky reportedly shared criticism of Fletcher’s claim that called it a “blood libel.” The blood libel was much more than a charge of accusing Jews of killing children; it gave license to an audience to kill Jews in their defense.
Rodriguez had another word for encouraging the crowds to murder: Legible.
And he was right.
Eleven days later, in Boulder, Colorado, prosecutors say a man attacked a peaceful gathering supporting Israeli hostages with Molotov cocktails while shouting “Free Palestine.” One victim died.
In August 2026, popular pro-Palestinian podcaster Hasan Piker said that if American Jews continued publicly associating themselves with Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” Keep associating with those falsely accused of genocide, and people will come for you.
Anger and frustration are being harnessed through podcasts and manifestos to inflame passions and violence. The audience is all too happy to join the spectacle these days.
Because the violence is legible.
So crowds cheer on the killer of a United Healthcare executive, gunned down in the streets. They listen to their alt-left congressman shout on the streets that the rape of Jewish women never happened, to turn the victims into aggressors. They watch an Ariane Grande video of a frustrated musician cutting old white men to pieces to rapture and applause.
Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan at the alt-left Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral victory party with Hasan Piker and Jamaal Bowman, November 2025. (start at 52:00)
Legible.
Once upon a time – say 2010 – the mass murder by an angry person was viewed through a lens of pity and disbelief. What did we do as a society that enabled isolation and frustration to turn into heinous violence? Pearl Jam’s Jeremy is a cry out of pain – for the victims and the shooter. There are no winners, just anguish.
No longer. The audience has changed. We revel in the spectacle. If the dead are cast as privileged and powerful, part of a caste that keeps people down, the revolution will celebrate the rolled heads.
More, they will want to participate.
There has always been violence, assassinations and terrorism. But we are no longer appalled universally, only selectively. The crowds have read the jihadi-socialist manifestos and they appallingly read “sane.” LEGIBLE.
James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute, spoke to the United Nations in June 2023 – months before the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Gazans – and bemoaned “that a recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favouring armed struggle? That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” He warned that the mob – his own people – had become so twisted that they were itching for Jewish blood.
That same deformity showed itself on American university campuses right after October 7. It has continued to spread outward to American streets as false charges of genocide and mass starvation make the violence “the only sane thing to do.“
And it is no longer just the alt-left drowning in the empathy swamp. All of those little screens that we carry every waking second make us an addicted audience, barraged by posts and podcasts, amplified by bots and armies of American foes. We listen to idiots and lies openly and frequently, and have lost our moral compass in the process.
We have reached a point where the reluctant assassin may become more willing to join the anarchy, believing the crowd might finally understand and appreciate mass murder as a noble cause, rather than a heinous crime.
We have crossed the tipping point of moral collapse. Sensing the panic, we point a finger at artificial intelligence as the problem, willfully blind that the toxin is already in the bloodstream. AI is just an accelerant, not the root of the sickness.
We are entering a new year in the Jewish calendar. As we read from the special Rosh Hashanah prayer book and ask God to have mercy on humanity, consider how many people have internalized very different – and deeply evil – texts and messages. Pray that the sound of the shofar will not only reach Heaven, but awaken the audience on earth from the hypnotic spell that has deformed their moral judgment.
Fear of Muslims is called Islamophobia. Hatred of Jews is called antisemitism.
One word announces fear (phobia) while the other focuses on hatred (anti).
Graffiti in London, England blames Jews on the September 11 terrorist attack that was committed by jihadi terrorists, in December 2019 during Hanukkah, or perhaps that terrorism was coming for Jews
Yet much of antisemitism has always been built on fear: fear of Jewish money, Jewish influence, Jewish intelligence, Jewish loyalty, Jewish networks, Jewish control. The classic antisemite does not merely dislike Jews. He believes Jews possess too much power and have things that do not rightfully belong to them.
That makes antisemitism, in a very literal sense, a phobia.
And comparing it with Islamophobia reveals something important about how the two prejudices work.
In Whole or Part
There are roughly 2 billion Muslims in the world and radical jihadists constitute a tiny fraction of them. Yet that fringe has caused extraordinary damage. Nineteen radical Islamic hijackers carried out September 11. ISIS murdered thousands and terrorized millions while representing a small share of the world’s Muslims.
That creates a fear rooted in uncertainty. The danger from jihadists is real; Islamophobia spreads that danger to innocent non-jihadi Muslims.
Antisemitism runs in the opposite direction.
There are only about 15 million Jews in the world. Their tiny numbers become part of the conspiracy. Jews constitute a fraction of one percent of humanity, yet Jews have achieved prominence in business, finance, academia, science, politics, media and culture.
The antisemite sees those accomplishments and converts disproportionate success into disproportionate power. Individual Jews disappear. There is only the Jews, a coordinated power.
Zero Sum Grievance Versus Sporadic Safety
There is a crucial difference between the fears.
Islamophobia begins with the violent actions of some Muslims and enlarges the circle of suspicion. Even the person consumed by fear of jihadism understands that every Muslim cannot be a jihadist. But the Muslim stranger becomes frightening because he might belong to the dangerous subset. There could be an attack at discrete moments in time.
Fear of Jews is about undeserved and evil coordinated power. It has an economic component which makes the fear especially combustible: Jews have something at the expense of others. The view of a zero sum game is that the Jewish power comes at the expense of your power; their wealth is taken from your wealth. If someone believes Jews control banks, corporations, universities, governments or the media, almost any personal grievance can acquire a Jewish culprit.
Movement
That difference in the fears makes its spread very distinct. Those disillusioned with their status in life can find a scapegoat in Jews. Poor or lost a job? Probably the fault of the Jews. Your favorite politician lost? Probably Jewish money and influence. Your culture going in a direction you don’t like? Jews control the media and Hollywood. Don’t have a functioning country? Must be the fault of the Jews.
Antisemitism takes fear and a zero-sum philosophy and allows it to travel to the corners of the world which don’t even have Jews. It is inherently portable.
But Islamophobia is a localized fear. It is not within your mind about everything that makes you upset; it is a tangible fear of your physical safety. It has an address.
Consequent Actions of Antisemitism and Islamophobia
With such orientation, the vectors to attack Jews become multiple. Remove them from positions of power: vote them out of office, get them off boards of directors, expunge them from teaching positions. Make it impossible for them to live nearby through banning kosher meat, circumcision, an eruv. Cast their lobbying group as uniquely nefarious compared to vastly larger and more powerful non-Jewish lobbying groups.
The Islamophobes’ battle against Muslims is not removal of a handful of people but placing a barrier from admitting billions of people. Limit immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Block mosques or Islamic centers from being built in the community. Keep the tsunami at bay before they overwhelm.
Between Fear and Hate
We readily describe fear surrounding Muslims with a word ending in phobia. It inherently carries the meaning “irrational.” There really is no reason to fear Muslims is the embedded argument – despite the global terrorism committed by jihadi terrorists. The language tells us that one’s fear is really a bias.
Antisemitism runs in a different direction.
There have been centuries obsessed with Jewish power, Jewish influence, Jewish wealth, Jewish loyalty and Jewish control without putting fear anywhere in its name. Doing so gives the hatred the comfort of being rational. There are data points – there’s a wealthy Jewish man! – and the cascade of evil thoughts that he must be responsible for anything wrong in your life is not a crazy leap but an endorsed component of a corroding society. The cure for this toxin is being promoted by teachers’ unions and radical politicians: that Jews must be stripped of any wealth, possessions, title, honor or business and their inherently illegal items given to victims of preference.
“Islamophobia” tells us to stop the irrational fear which leads us to hateful actions; “Antisemitism” is wired as an accelerant in a society whose foundation is grievance and victimhood.
We are arriving at the 25th anniversary of the September 11 jihadi attacks on the United States and subsequent War on Terror. It was a battle against the radical Islamic terrorist group al Qaeda, and the various sister organizations such as the Taliban, ISIS and Boko Haram to different extents.
We are also coming to the third anniversary of the October 7 jihadi massacre in Israel and its subsequent multi-front war with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various proxies of Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas.
Lost in these anniversaries and large military battles against global jihadism is the softer war of words. Of civilian fear and hatred taking place on city streets and school campuses. Of the vastly disproportionate attacks on Jews than on Muslims in the English-speaking world.
There is no quick fix to stopping the torrent of attacks on Jews. But perhaps it is time to change the English term for Jew hatred to something like “Jewphobia” which forces people to confront their hatred as both irrational and anchored in fear. And then maybe the United Nations would finally recognize it the way it has elevated the less common “Islamophobia,” encourage governments and institutions to fight the scourge, as well as confront its own deep hostility for Jews around the world.
The Met has promised a replacement. And to go bigger.
Instead of John Galliano, the Costume Institute will honor Kanye West. It is an inspired substitution. Kanye is enormously influential in fashion, globally famous and has expressed considerably more recent thoughts about Hitler and Jews. He brings the Met’s original concept fully into the 21st century.
But fashion is only one artistic medium. The Met will establish the Anna Wintour Center for Antisemitic Excellence, celebrating achievement across the arts, literature, media and public life.
Roger Waters will anchor the music galleries and show clips of “Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Musical.” Inflatable pigs adorned with Jewish stars will be available for purchase in the gift shop.
The children’s wing will celebrateRoald Dahl. Parents can walk their children through an oversized exhibit of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, followed by an interactive display of Dahl’s thoughts about Jews.
The Met’s new Film Department will honor Mel Gibson, ensuring his legacy.
The American Wing will have a permanent exhibit for Henry Ford. Many of the automobiles will remain in Detroit, but the Met will showcase Ford’s other publishing achievement, The International Jew, allowing visitors to explore how an industrial genius helped mass-produce something besides automobiles.
Contemporary media deserves its own galleries.
Candace Owens can become Director of Jewish Studies.
Tucker Carlson can chair the Department of Contextualization.
Nick Fuentes can lead Emerging Voices, introducing younger audiences to one of civilization’s oldest traditions.
Institutional leadership should reflect the museum’s expanded mission.
Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has been asked to join the Board’s Committee on Jewish Community Relations.
The Met should also dramatically expand accessibility.
All United Nations personnel receive complimentary membership. Security Council members receive Patron status. UN Human Rights Council members enter through a dedicated express lane.
And the Met needs an international partner for 2027. Fortunately, Iran has experience.
In 2006, Tehran hosted its Holocaust-denial conference. Two decades later, the Islamic Republic can bring the concept to New York as a special Met partnership: ERASURE: Reimagining Holocaust Memory Presented in partnership with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Anna Wintour Center for Antisemitic Excellence.
Vogue will commemorate each new addition to the Met lineup with a full spread in every international edition. Antisemitism, after all, should never be allowed to suffer from poor distribution.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani cheered the latest Met and Vogue moves and is considering making attendance to the museum mandatory for all public school students.
John Galliano was still disappointed about being canceled but was thrilled to see how the Met stepped up with counter-measures. He has moved on. He is pushing Britain and France to move past their memories of World War II, and reimagine their police uniforms to echo the outfits donned by the military of Nazi Germany.
There is a progression from intimidation and expulsion.
A heckler’s veto prevents you from speaking.
A chilling effect teaches you to remain silent.
Self-concealment teaches you to hide the identity that makes you a target.
Constructive exclusion makes the environment sufficiently hostile that you stay away or leave.
Forced expulsion completes the progression: someone else decides you must go.
American Jews have been moving through these stages over the last decade.
Don’t Speak
In 2015, Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal came to the University of Minnesota to lecture on the ethical obligations of militaries to protect civilians. Protesters repeatedly interrupted him, delaying his lecture for about half an hour as police removed them.
It was a classic heckler’s veto: make enough noise and the speaker cannot speak.
Eventually, Halbertal did.
Over time, intimidation becomes more efficient. People learn the consequences of speaking and begin censoring themselves. The expectation of the heckler creates the chilling effect.
Then the intimidation moved beyond speech.
Hide Who You Are
In May 2021, Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel and antisemitic incidents surged concurrently in the United States.
Aaron Keyak had served as Jewish engagement director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and would become the State Department’s deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. His advice to frightened American Jews was extraordinary: “If you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david.”
The Jew walking down the street had given no speech and joined no protest. His Jewish identity itself made him a target.
The response from the highest levels of government was self-concealment: take off the kippah and hide the Star of David.
This was 2021, more than two years before the October 7 massacre.
Stay Out
After the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, the progression took over the Democratic Party.
Dana Nessel is Michigan’s attorney general, the state’s chief law-enforcement officer and its highest-ranking Jewish state official. This June she decided to stay away from the Michigan Democratic Party convention. “I don’t feel safe going,” Nessel said. She feared being chased, harassed, yelled at and booed because, she explained, “it’s been happening to me.”
Consider where the progression had reached: Michigan’s chief law-enforcement officer felt safer staying away from her own political party’s convention out of fear.
And Nessel is not alone.
Earlier in the summer, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht left the Democratic Party and became an independent. Wecht is Jewish, was elected as a Democrat and had once served in the leadership of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “I can no longer abide this.”
Nessel stayed away. Wecht walked away. Revulsed by what they saw happening inside the Democratic Party.
Get Out
The next stage has already begun.
In 2024, anti-Israel artists protesting at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts issued a list of demands. Among them: remove all “Zionist Board members and funders.” While the institution rejected the demand, its Jewish interim CEO, Sara Fenske Bahat, subsequently resigned, saying the climate surrounding Israel and Palestine in the Bay Area had become “untenable.”
The demand itself crossed the line into the final stage: Get them out.
If one needs proof, consider how the alt-left treated one of its own, NYC Mayor-endorsed politician Brad Lander. He was tossed from a far-left political rally in August 2026 because he was a “Zionist,” even though he is highly critical of Israel.
Democratic politician Brad Lander – supported by NYC Mayor, DSA’s own Zohran Mamdani – tossed from a rally because he is a “Zionist”
The heckler’s veto was already an assault on a basic American principle: everyone gets to enter the public square and speak. What has grown from it is far uglier and deeply un-American:
Don’t speak. Don’t be seen. Don’t come. Get out.
This is intimidation being rewarded with territory. Each retreat gives the intimidators another piece of the public square: the microphone, the street, the political convention, the institution itself.
And this poison is now flourishing inside the Democratic Party.
A party that claims to champion minorities and protect people from intimidation now has a Jewish attorney general afraid to attend its own convention, a Jewish state supreme court justice who concluded that Jew-hatred had become sufficiently tolerated that he could no longer remain a Democrat, and an anti-Israel DSA-mayor-endorsed Jewish politician run out of the streets of New York.
That is disgraceful. It is frightening.
The American answer to intimidation is to protect the person being intimidated and confront the intimidator. Nobody should gain control of a microphone, a street, a political convention or an institution by making someone else afraid to enter it.
Leaders of the Democratic Party should understand what is happening inside its own tent. The heckler’s veto has metastasized into something deeply toxic and deeply un-American.
The hecklers no longer simply want to only decide what Jews may say. They want to expel Jews from the room.
Stephen Stills wrote those words sixty years ago for Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. He did not tell listeners exactly what was happening. He told them to notice.
“Stop, hey, what’s that sound?”
For Jews today, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to hear it.
In Britain, years of anti-Israel demonstrations were followed by attacks on synagogues and Jewish institutions, the murder of two Jews at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur and the stabbing of two visibly Jewish men in Golders Green.
Finally, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Britain to “open their eyes to Jewish pain, Jewish suffering and Jewish fear.”
He was even more explicit about a slogan common at anti-Israel demonstrations: “If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews.”
“Everybody look what’s going down.”
Australia had its warnings too. Antisemitism surged after October 7. Jewish institutions were targeted. Then came Bondi Beach.
On December 14, 2025, gunmen opened fire on Jews celebrating Chanukah by the Sea. Fifteen victims were murdered. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it an “act of evil antisemitism.”
The warnings had become bodies.
The question is no longer whether every protester is an antisemite or every criticism of Israel antisemitic.
The question is whether something is happening here.
Britain’s leaders now say so. Australia’s leaders now say so.
American Jews should not need another massacre before believing their own eyes and ears.
America has already had Pittsburgh, where 11 Jews were murdered in synagogue; Poway, where a woman was murdered at Passover services; and Jersey City, where Jews were hunted inside a kosher market.
In 2025, two Israeli Embassy employees were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Days later, Jews demonstrating in Boulder, Colorado, for Israeli hostages were attacked with Molotov cocktails. Hostages were taken in a synagogue in Texas. An armed man rammed his truck into a Jewish school in Michigan.
The ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in America in 2025—17 every day. Antisemitic assaults reached a record high.
Yet some institutions still debate the meaning of the sound.
In 2023, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT were asked before Congress whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ rules. Instead of an immediate yes came answers about context.
The Second Intifada meant suicide bombers on buses and in cafés and restaurants. It meant the deliberate murder of Jewish civilians. Now the slogan is shouted in America while American Jews are assaulted and Jewish institutions require armed guards.
Stephen Stills’s sixty-year-old warning suddenly sounds less like history. “There’s something happening here.”Now.
The university presidents wanted context. The mayor of the American city with the largest Jewish population wanted to explain intifada.
Jews have context. Pittsburgh is context. Poway is context. Jersey City is context. Boulder is context. Washington is context. Britain is context. Australia is context.
Stop. Hey. What’s that sound?Everybody look what’s going down.
Western governments have developed a familiar vocabulary.
“Hate is rising.”
“Religious intolerance is increasing.”
“Antisemitism and Islamophobia must be confronted.”
Every minority deserves protection. But treating victims equally does not require pretending they are being targeted equally.
Country
Anti-Jewish
Anti-Muslim
Jewish / Muslim Ratio
UK (England & Wales)
1,060 per 100,000
120 per 100,000
8.8×
Canada
~274 per 100,000
~13 per 100,000
~21×
United States
~250–300 per 100,000
~5–6 per 100,000
~45–50×
Australia*
~2,185 per 100,000
~38 per 100,000
~57×
*Australia uses community incident reporting rather than a directly comparable national police hate-crime database.
Britain clearly has a religious-hatred problem. Muslims and Jews suffer substantial levels of hate crime, well above that of other English-speaking countries, while Jews are targeted at almost nine times the rate of Muslims. Canada and USA show fewer hate crimes per population, and a wider disparity between Jews and Muslims being attacked.
Then there is Australia.
For the decade before October 7, 2023, Australia averaged 342 reported anti-Jewish incidents annually. That exploded to 2,062 in 2023/24 and remained at 1,654 in 2024/25. In New South Wales, police-recorded hate incidents against Jews rose from 40 in 2020 to 841 in 2025.
Then statistics became bodies.
On December 14, 2025, gunmen attacked Chanukah by the Sea at Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were murdered while celebrating the Jewish holiday.
Australia subsequently established a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which is examining the circumstances surrounding the attack and whether authorities adequately recognized the threat to Jewish events.
Australia had been warned.
It had also begun responding. The government appointed Jewish communal leader Jillian Segal as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism. Her national plan followed extensive consultation with Australian Jews, and the government adopted all 13 recommendations.
Yet Australia continues to struggle with whether antisemitism is a distinct threat or another part of generalized “hate.”
Its Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act puts antisemitism in the title – along with more generic terms of “hate” and “extremism.” There is nothing wrong with fighting all forms of hatred. The question is whether symmetry in government policy reflects the reality on the ground.
Australia’s available community data indicate roughly 38 anti-Muslim incidents per 100,000 Muslims and 2,185 anti-Jewish incidents per 100,000 Jews.
That is roughly 57-to-1.
Indeed, Australia’s Islamophobia envoy (in a federal post strictly devoted to “Islamophobia” and no other forms of hate) has urged the Royal Commission on Antisemitism to approach antisemitism through the broader causes of identity-based hatred and the common roots of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other prejudice.
“antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice share common causes, such as polarisation, online environments and declining trust in institutions. Tackling these underlying factors can strengthen outcomes for all communities.” – Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, June 2026
What? If they were all the same, why are Jews attacked at a 57-to-1 ratio?
Australia does not have a generic hate problem that happens to include Jews. It has an extraordinary antisemitism problem that generic language about hate must not be allowed to hide.
