Tag Archives: Jews

The War Against Jewish History. Will Come For Jews

Posted on by
Reply

A lecture on the archaeology of ancient Israel and Judah was supposed to take place at the British Museum this month. Instead, it was postponed after organizers learned that protesters intended to disrupt the event.

The subject was not the Gaza war nor settlements nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was archaeology.

It has happened before. In 2014, UNESCO canceled an exhibition on the Jewish people’s 3,500-year history in the Land of Israel after objections from Arab states. More recently, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly denied that the Jewish Temples stood in Jerusalem, at one point claiming they were actually located in Yemen.

These episodes share a common thread. The dispute is no longer simply about the modern State of Israel nor its policies or actions. It is increasingly about the history of the Jewish people themselves.

Yet the evidence is overwhelming. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah are among the best-documented societies of the ancient Near East. Their existence is attested through inscriptions, seals, coins, manuscripts, monuments, and the records of neighboring civilizations. The British Museum itself houses artifacts that tell this story.

Seal of King Hezekiah found in Jerusalem, around 700 BCE

That is why archaeology poses such a problem for those who seek to portray Jews as foreign interlopers – colonizers – with no ancient connection to the land. Artifacts cannot be pressured into changing their testimony. Every discovery points in the same direction: the Jewish story in the Land of Israel stretches back thousands of years, before the births of Jesus and Mohammed.

Few people would tolerate a museum debating whether ancient Egypt existed or whether Rome stood in Italy. Yet Jewish history is increasingly treated as uniquely negotiable.

Curiously and alarmingly, the protest at the British Museum had a much more immediate backdrop than the current war. This talk was to take place during Jewish Culture Month and the protestors were assembled by an anti-Israel group called “Jewish Artists for Palestine.” The museum’s efforts to highlight Jewish history in the land of Israel during a period of focus on Jewish culture brought out Jewish anti-Israel protestors.

Institutions are backing away from Jewish history and culture with the backing of fringe extremist Jews and anti-Israel Arabs. So basic history becomes debate, and the debate has moved from the policies of the Israeli government to Jews themselves.

The Nazis physically annihilated the Jews of Europe as it sought to place their culture as historical artifacts in museums. Now, museums and institutions seek to erase Jewish history and culture as a prelude to eradicating Jews in the Middle East.

The United Nations and International Law are Antisemitic

Posted on by
Reply

The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews have ended prayers with the hope of returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding what once stood there. It is the location of the First and Second Temples. Jewish longing for Jerusalem is woven into daily prayers, holidays, weddings, and mourning rituals.

Yet major international bodies have passed resolutions referring to the site primarily through its Muslim names while minimizing or omitting its central place in Jewish history. Imagine a resolution discussing the Vatican without mentioning Christianity, or Mecca without mentioning Islam. The absurdity would be obvious.

The issue extends beyond language.

Official United Nations map labeling the Temple Mount as holy only to Muslims

The international community supports a protocol under which Muslims may pray freely on the Temple Mount while Jews are restricted from praying at Judaism’s holiest site. The result is extraordinary: the world’s only Jewish state is expected to enforce a policy under which Jews do not support a basic human right at their holiest location in favor of members of another faith.

The Temple Mount is not merely a religious site. It sits at the heart of a larger question: whether the Jewish people are entitled to the same rights afforded to every other people.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reconnecting with ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and preserving cultural traditions. Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does a return to the place where their civilization, language, religion, and national identity were born become a form of “colonialism.“

International institutions routinely describe the Temple Mount and the Jewish Quarter as part of “occupied Palestinian territory.” Yet these are the very places where Jewish civilization was born, where the ancient Temples stood, and where Jewish communities lived for centuries.

Jordan’s capture of eastern Jerusalem in 1948 resulted in the expulsion of its Jewish population and the denial of Jewish access to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Jewish Quarter for nineteen years. It granted citizenship to residents as long as they weren’t Jewish. The UN seemingly liked this. International discussion of the Old City of Jerusalem begins after the expulsion of Jews, as though their absence were the natural condition and their return the disruption.

The same pattern appears in discussions of territory.

The Green Line was never intended to be a permanent border. The 1949 Armistice Agreements explicitly stated that the line was not a political boundary and would not prejudice future negotiations. It was a military ceasefire line drawn after a war.

Yet decades later, much of international law treats that armistice line as though it were a sacred border whose crossing transforms ordinary Jews into international criminals.

A Jew who moves across that line becomes a “settler.” An Arab who moves into the same building does not. The geography is identical. The identity of the resident is what changes.

International institutions frequently oppose changes to the “demographic character” of eastern Jerusalem. But demographic character relative to what date?

The answer is effectively 1949, the year after Jordan captured eastern Jerusalem and expelled every Jew from the Jewish Quarter and surrounding areas. Why should the demographic baseline for justice be the moment immediately following the ethnic cleansing of Jews?

Why not 1980? Why not 2000? Why not today?

Human beings move. Cities evolve. Neighborhoods change.

The only way to preserve a specific demographic snapshot forever is to decide that one particular population must be prevented from returning.

In Jerusalem, that population happens to be Jews.

Then there is the question of refugees.

The same international system that opposes Jews moving into neighborhoods beyond the Green Line frequently endorses claims that millions of Palestinian refugees and descendants should be allowed to settle inside Israel.

Movement in one direction is described as a right. Movement in the other direction is described as a violation of international law.

The asymmetry is impossible to miss.

Every era develops its own vocabulary for antisemitism. In medieval Europe it often spoke the language of theology. In the nineteenth century it spoke the language of race. Today it increasingly speaks the language of international law.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reclaiming ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and restoring cultural traditions.

Jews have done all of those things.

They returned to the land where their civilization was born. They revived Hebrew from a language of prayer into a language of everyday life. They restored Jewish sovereignty to the city that has stood at the center of Jewish life for three millennia. They reestablished communities at many of their most ancient holy sites.

Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does this story become one of colonialism rather than return.

The Covenant and the Constitution

Posted on by
Reply

As America approaches its 250th birthday and Jews prepare to celebrate Shavuot, two anniversaries separated by more than three thousand years arrive together.

One commemorates the acceptance of a covenant at Sinai. The other celebrates the creation of a constitutional republic in Philadelphia.

Different eras, different peoples, different purposes. Yet both rank among history’s most successful experiments in ordered liberty. Each rests upon the belief that freedom flourishes when people willingly bind themselves to enduring principles.

Shavuot marks the giving of the Torah. According to Jewish tradition, an entire nation accepted a shared framework of law, responsibility, and purpose. The defining moment of Jewish history centered on a covenant that applied equally to shepherds, merchants, judges, priests, and kings. Every Jew inherited both privileges and obligations. Every Jew stood beneath the same law.

America’s Founders pursued a similar aspiration. They sought to create a republic governed by laws rather than personalities, sustained by citizens willing to shoulder responsibility for the common good. The Constitution would provide the framework. The character of the people would determine whether it endured.

For American Jews, those two traditions have complemented one another for nearly two and a half centuries.

A Nation Built on Obligations

The Torah places responsibility at the center of communal life.

Parents teach children. Judges pursue justice. Business owners conduct themselves honestly. Communities support widows, orphans, and the poor. Neighbors help one another. Citizens participate in communal affairs. The Hebrew word mitzvah means commandment, reflecting a worldview in which obligation occupies a central place.

Jewish life developed around institutions that required participation and commitment. Synagogues, schools, charitable organizations, burial societies, study groups, courts, and community councils depended upon ordinary people investing time, resources, and energy into a shared enterprise.

Across centuries and continents, Jewish communities learned how to govern themselves, educate their children, care for vulnerable members, settle disputes, raise funds, preserve traditions, and maintain communal cohesion across generations. Those habits became deeply ingrained. They traveled wherever Jews traveled.

A constitutional republic depends upon many of the same qualities. Elections require voters. Courts require jurors. Communities require volunteers. Public institutions require trust. Civil society depends upon citizens who contribute more than they consume.

The connection between liberty and responsibility appears throughout Jewish tradition. The Exodus brought physical freedom. Seven weeks later, the Israelites arrived at Sinai and accepted the responsibilities that would transform a collection of former slaves into a nation. Freedom acquired meaning through purpose, discipline, and commitment.

That lesson remains profoundly relevant in every generation.

Why America Worked

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish communities navigated a recurring dilemma. Security often required accommodation. Opportunity frequently depended upon the goodwill of rulers. Rights expanded and contracted according to the decisions of monarchs, church authorities, political parties, and shifting public sentiment.

The American republic introduced a different model.

Rights flowed from citizenship.

The promise appeared almost immediately.

In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, home of Touro Synagogue, offering a vision unlike anything Jews had encountered in centuries of Diaspora life. The government of the United States, Washington wrote, gave “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” More importantly, he described Jews as possessing “alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”

Those words represented far more than tolerance. Tolerance implies permission granted by those in power. Washington described Jews as citizens whose rights derived from the principles of the republic itself.

The distinction proved historic.

America offered Jews something extraordinary: equal citizenship while allowing them to remain fully Jewish.

By the early twentieth century, American Jews had produced judges, industrialists, labor leaders, scholars, entrepreneurs, military officers, and public servants. No figure better embodied the synthesis of Jewish identity and American citizenship than Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

At a time when some questioned whether Jews could maintain a distinct identity while remaining devoted Americans, Brandeis dismissed the concern entirely.

“To be good Americans, we must be better Jews.” – Louis Brandeis

Brandeis understood that Judaism and American citizenship drew strength from many of the same sources. Both relied upon educated citizens. Both depended upon moral self-restraint. Both valued participation over passivity. Both asked individuals to contribute to a larger community.

He also celebrated America’s ability to unite diverse communities while preserving their distinct identities.

“America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress.” – Louis Brandeis

That insight echoes one of the Torah’s earliest political arrangements. The tribes of Israel maintained distinct identities, histories, and responsibilities while participating in a common covenant. Judah remained Judah. Levi remained Levi. Ephraim remained Ephraim. Diversity existed within a framework of shared purpose.

America has often operated in much the same way. Citizens arrive from every corner of the globe carrying different languages, traditions, and family histories. They become Americans through allegiance to constitutional principles and civic participation. Unity emerges through commitment to a common enterprise.

America’s Founders understood the importance of civic character as well. John Adams famously observed that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious People.”

The statement reflected a practical reality. Institutions matter. Laws matter. Their effectiveness ultimately depends upon citizens capable of exercising self-restraint, accepting responsibility, and participating in public life.

Those qualities occupy a central place in Jewish tradition.

The Miracle of Compatibility

The story of American Jewry reflects something deeper than economic opportunity or social mobility.

America and Judaism developed complementary understandings of freedom.

Both traditions place law above rulers. Both value education. Both encourage active participation in communal affairs. Both rely upon citizens capable of governing themselves. Both recognize that liberty carries responsibilities.

The partnership has been extraordinarily successful.

American Jews have served in every war, sat on the Supreme Court, led major corporations, founded universities, advanced scientific discovery, built charitable institutions, served in elected office, and contributed to nearly every aspect of national life. At the same time, Jewish communities have built thousands of synagogues, schools, charities, cultural institutions, and communal organizations across the country.

The result has been one of the most successful relationships between a religious minority and a democratic republic in modern history.

As Shavuot approaches and America prepares to celebrate a quarter millennium of independence, the convergence feels especially meaningful.

At Sinai, freedom became joined to responsibility. In Philadelphia, liberty became joined to constitutional government.

Both moments reflected the same enduring insight: freedom survives when citizens willingly accept obligations to something larger than themselves.

Three millennia later, Jews celebrating Shavuot and Americans celebrating 250 years of independence continue to draw from that same well. A covenant and a Constitution, each in its own way, call upon free people to govern themselves, serve a higher purpose, and build a society worthy of being passed to the next generation.

Mamdani’s False Charge And the Echo of the Soviet Union

Posted on by
Reply

New York City Mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani accused a synagogue hosting a West Bank real estate expo of facilitating “illegal land sales” and “displacing Palestinians.” It was an explosive accusation, wrapped in the language of international law, designed to sound precise and morally settled. But the facts—and the law—are far more complicated than that charge suggests.

The first fact Mamdani skips is the most important one: the buyers are Americans.

Not Israelis being relocated by the State of Israel. Not civilians transferred by military order. Not part of a government-directed demographic campaign. Americans, acting on their own, voluntarily exploring whether to buy homes.

That distinction is the legal center of the argument.

The international legal objection to “settlements” rests largely on Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. The theory is about state conduct: a government moving its own people into disputed land.

That is not what is happening here.

Whatever one thinks of “Israeli settlements,” an American family independently choosing to buy an apartment is not the same legal act as a state transferring its civilian population. It is a private decision, made voluntarily, by people acting on their own behalf.

Brochure from Great Real Estate Event at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City in May 2026

The second problem with Mamdani’s accusation is historical.

Much of the outrage centers on homes in the West Bank neighborhood of Gush Etzion, as though it were simply land taken from Palestinian Arabs after 1967. That telling requires erasing inconvenient history.

Jews legally purchased land in Gush Etzion in the 1920s and 1930s. Jewish communities were established there before the State of Israel existed. In 1948, those communities were attacked, destroyed, and their survivors expelled. These neighborhoods were not owned privately by Palestinian Arabs.

Even more, almost every single presenter at the event was marketing real estate inside Israel. As the event advertised on its opening page “from Jerusalem to Netanya, from Haifa to Eilat,” this was an event showcasing homes inside of Israel.

This event was not about “displacing Palestinians” as Mamdani charged. This was selling homes in the Jewish homeland to American Jews.

That 3,300-year old bond is at the heart of antisemites loathing Israel, much like Mamdani’s mentors in the Soviet Union attacking Zionists decades ago.

Normalized Violence

Posted on by
1

This was the third assassination attempt against Donald Trump. He survived but the deeper story lies elsewhere. By the third attempt, the country barely pauses. The first attack should have shaken a nation to its core; the second should have deepened the sense of alarm. By the third, something more dangerous has taken hold: familiarity. Political violence begins to feel woven into the atmosphere, another storm system passing through.

That is the shift in American life. Political violence has moved from rupture to expectation. The country has grown accustomed to the possibility that power will be contested through force.

The evidence stretches across the last several years. There was the attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer, where executive authority itself became the target. There was the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, where proximity to political authority was enough to invite violence. There was the arson attack on the home of Governor Josh Shapiro. There was the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Each attack carried its own political coloration. Different grievances, different ideologies, different enemies.

Yet they share the same underlying grammar. The human being is transformed into an idea.

The governor becomes the state. The executive becomes capital. The politician becomes the regime.

That transformation is the hinge upon which violence swings. A person who stands as an abstraction for a hated system becomes easier to strike. Violence acquires moral clothing. The blow feels righteous because the target has already been converted into a symbol.

That is why the public reaction to United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killing mattered so much. The killing itself was one event. The social response revealed the deeper current. The alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, became a hero in corners of the internet. Memes spread. Fundraisers appeared. Admiration followed. A killer became an instrument of vengeance against a hated system.

It felt like the movie Joker come to life. In Joker, an unstable man carries the plot forward, but the real engine is the crowd waiting to celebrate him. The mob grants moral legitimacy to the violence. The killer becomes a vessel for collective resentment.

That is the deeper American drift. Violence increasingly invites sympathy, reinterpretation, and applause. The act becomes secondary to the story society tells itself about why the victim represented something worth destroying.

This can be seen in the Middle East as well.

Palestinian political culture offers a longer and starker example of how this process unfolds. For roughly twenty-five years, polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has repeatedly shown majority support for violence against Jewish civilians inside Israel. This stretches back before the Gaza blockade and before the present war. The permission structure came first.

PCPSR poll from October 2003 asking whether Palestinian Arabs supported armed attacks against civilians in Israel

Then politics followed.

In 2006, Palestinians elected Hamas to a parliamentary majority, fully aware of its openly antisemitic and eliminationist charter. October 7 emerged from that political soil. The massacre fit within a culture that had long accepted the killing of Jewish civilians as part of political struggle.

That is why it was celebrated.

And the celebration reached far beyond Gaza. American campuses, Western cities, and activist spaces erupted with demonstrations that folded the massacre into broader narratives of liberation. The same reduction had already taken place. Jews had been recast as symbols of systems: colonialism, finance, whiteness, Western power, institutional dominance.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) goes on antisemitic rant at Democratic Socialists of America conference, invoking Nazi imagery of Jews “operating behind the curtain… to make money off of racism.”

This is the ancient machinery of antisemitism. Jews become the human face of structural resentment.

The FBI hate-crime statistics show the physical consequences of that social logic. Americans often picture hate crime through property damage: a swastika painted on a synagogue, a church defaced, a mosque vandalized. Yet for more than a decade, the majority of hate crimes in America have been crimes against persons.

In 2019, 62.6 percent of hate-crime offenses targeted people. In 2020, the FBI recorded 7,750 crimes against persons, with nearly half involving direct physical assault. The figures jumped to over 11,000 in 2023 and 2024, with Jewish accounting for the vast majority of hate crimes by religion.

The reason sits in plain sight. Jews occupy a permanent place in political imagination as concentrated power: finance, media, institutions, influence. Even when stated softly, the accusation remains the same: too much influence, too much reach, too much control.

Once power itself is treated as morally suspect, violence against those imagined to embody it starts to feel cleansing. Society begins teaching itself that rage against elites is a form of justice. Institutions become enemies. Authority becomes corruption. Violence becomes political purification.

That moral structure echoes the French Revolution. The crowd gathers. The elite are marched into the square. Their status dissolves. Their destruction becomes public theater.

That is the destination of normalized violence.

The warning sign is larger than the incident. The warning lies in the crowd, in the cultural ecosystem that grants permission, supplies applause, and tells itself that the target stood for something hateful enough to justify blood.

Society has normalized violence as the media and school systems falsely rebranded America as a deeply unfair caste system. In the masses attempt for a complete redistribution of power and wealth, those with or with perceived power – politicians and Jews – will be open game for the angry mob.

Related:

The Broke-n Generation (December 2024)

When Jews Come Home from India and Are Called Colonizers

Posted on by
Reply

There is something almost miraculous about Operation Wings of Dawn.

This week, Israel began bringing the first members of the Bnei Menashe community from northeast India to Israel, the latest chapter in one of the most improbable stories in Jewish history. These are Jews who have long understood themselves as descendants of the Tribe of Manasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, exiled by the Assyrian Empire nearly 2,700 years ago. Across centuries, empires, languages, and continents, they preserved fragments of ritual, memory, and identity tied to ancient Israel. In modern times, after study, rabbinic engagement, and formal recognition, thousands have made aliyah. Hundreds more are now on their way. For the Jewish world, it is an extraordinary scene: a people scattered to the farthest reaches of the earth still finding their way home.

That is the Jewish story in miniature.

Exile was never meant to be permanent. The Jewish calendar, Jewish prayer, and Jewish memory are saturated with return. From The Hebrew Bible to the modern Zionist movement, the idea of ingathering has been the central thread of Jewish continuity. Operation Wings of Dawn is not an immigration program in the ordinary sense. It is the continuation of that ancient civilizational arc.

It is also a reminder that Jewish peoplehood never fit modern racial categories. Jews came back to Israel from Ethiopia, from Iraq, from Yemen, from Russia, from France, and now again from India. Different languages. Different appearances. Different histories of exile. One people.

That should be a remarkable human story.

And yet, in some corners of the media world, it became something else.

Quds News Network ran a story framing the arrival as a “settlement push” of “new colonizers” in northern “Occupied Palestine”, reducing the Bnei Menashe to instruments of a political project rather than recognizing them as Jews returning to join the Jewish people in the Jewish state. The framing is familiar: Jewish return is recoded as colonial expansion.

This is not an isolated habit of language. Across anti-Israel activist media and parts of the NGO ecosystem, Jewish presence in Israel is increasingly interpreted through a “settler-colonial” framework in “Occupied Palestine,” meaning anywhere in Israel. Amnesty International’s apartheid framework leans heavily on this vocabulary, turning Jewish sovereignty itself into a structural offense rather than a legitimate act of national self-determination. That language then migrates outward, shaping how journalists, activists, and political movements speak about Jews in Israel. The result is a moral inversion in which Jewish return becomes aggression by definition.

And this is where the word colonizer collapses under its own weight.

Colonialism has an actual meaning. It is when an imperial center sends its people outward to dominate foreign land for extraction and rule. Britain in India. Spain in the Americas. France in Algeria.

Operation Wings of Dawn is the reverse movement: A dispersed people carrying an ancient memory of Israel, choosing to gather into the one Jewish homeland.

Calling that colonialism empties the word of meaning.

And the asymmetry is impossible to ignore.

When Palestinian Arabs preserve the memory of villages lost 77 years ago, the world treats it as sacred inheritance, a claim passed from generation to generation. Even when those same Arabs live just a few miles away from their grandparents’ homes, in the same land, with the same people, language and culture, people advocate for their relocation.

Yet when Jews preserve the memory of exile in distant lands and act on it, the same world increasingly calls it colonization.

That difference tells you everything.

The issue has never been whether Jews are European or Middle Eastern, white or brown, indigenous or diasporic. The Bnei Menashe expose how flimsy those categories always were. Indian Jews arriving in Israel should shatter the lazy caricature of Zionism as European implantation.

Instead, the caricature simply repeats the mantra:

A Jew from Poland returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from Iraq returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from Ethiopia returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from India returns as a colonizer.

For those committed to denying Jewish belonging, even a homecoming from India must be rewritten as invasion.

NYC, Now It’s at Your Front Door

Posted on by
Reply

It looked like a technical vote. In New York City, a proposed buffer zone around houses of worship. A few feet of space so people could enter synagogues, churches, and mosques without confrontation.

And the Democratic Socialists of America bloc on the City Council voted no.

Shahana Hanif (District 39), Alexa Avilés (District 38), Tiffany Cabán (District 22), Chi Ossé (District 36), and Kayla Santosuosso (District 47) held the same line. Protect protest at all costs. Treat any restriction as a threat to speech. Keep the sidewalks open, no matter what is happening on them.

Shahana Hanif (District 39)

On paper, that sounds principled. In practice, it lands somewhere else entirely.

Because in this city, right now, protests are not showing up randomly. They are showing up outside synagogues in growing numbers. The line between Israel and the Jew has been erased, and the synagogue has become a stand-in.

This is where ideology stops being abstract.

For years, the DSA has defined itself through opposition to Israel. That posture has moved from foreign policy into local reality. When Zionism is framed as uniquely illegitimate, and most Jews see it as part of who they are, the translation is inevitable. The target shifts.

No manifesto is needed. The pattern speaks for itself.

Vote against a resolution recognizing hatred against Jews. Argue about the sponsors instead of the substance. Reject a minimal buffer around houses of worship at a moment when Jewish institutions in New York are under visible pressure.

That movement is no longer adjacent to power in New York City; it has the power. With Zohran Mamdani as the city’s new mayor, the worldview is moving from activist circles into the city’s governing core.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a member of the DSA

And the expansion is already underway.

On Tuesday April 28’s special primary day, Mamdani has backed Lindsey Boylan, a member of the DSA to take another seat on the City Council. Jewish City Council Speaker Julie Menin has endorsed Carl Wilson in an effort to stop the radical left gaining even more power in New York.

In the June primaries, NYC-DSA is backing a coordinated slate:

  • Darializa Avila Chevalier (Upper Manhattan/Bronx)
  • Claire Valdez (Brooklyn/Queens)
  • David Orkin (Queens)
  • Diana Moreno

—alongside a broader Assembly slate backed by the same network.

Endorsements from figures like Jamaal Bowman and Mamdani for radical anti-capitalists, anti-west, anti-Israel DSA members like Aber Kawas reinforce the same ideological through-line—where opposition to Israel is no longer one issue among many, but a defining filter.

Aber Kawas has long supported the dismantling of the Jewish State, now running as part of the DSA to gain a seat in the New York State Senate. She is backed by Zohran Mamdani and Jamaal Bowman

This is how local elections stop being local.

When protests move from slogans to synagogue doors in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, who holds the line?

Will NYPD treat intimidation outside Jewish institutions as a line to be enforced—or a situation to be managed?

Power shapes behavior. When activists see their worldview reflected in City Hall and Albany, boundaries loosen. What once felt marginal begins to feel sanctioned. The distance between protest and confrontation narrows.

The question is no longer what DSA believes about Israel where they believe every man, woman and child is a fair target for violence. The question for New York voters is what they are comfortable normalizing here.

On sidewalks outside synagogues. At the doors of people trying to pray. In the space between protest and intimidation.

The City Council vote on buffer zones answered part of that question.

The rest will be answered this coming Tuesday and in June—at the ballot box, and on the sidewalks outside your door.

ACTION ITEM

Support Carl Wilson in the primary on April 28.

Support opponents to the DSA candidates in the June elections.

Related:

Protecting Synagogues Like Abortion Clinics

Three Multinational Antisemitic Arcs, And World Jewry

Posted on by
Reply

Over the past century, pressure on Jews has scaled, shifting from borders to regions to institutions, changing form while carrying a familiar direction.

The story begins in Europe 1938 with the Anschluss. Persecution inside Germany extends outward as Austria is absorbed and its Jewish population is pulled into the same system. Expansion of antisemitic forces follows conquest. Poland, France, Hungary, the Netherlands become extensions of a single design as control spreads across the continent.

An den Fenstern j¸discher Geschfte werden von Nationalsozialisten Plakate mit der Aufforderung “Deutsche, wehrt euch, kauft nicht bei Juden” angebracht.

Policy matures into infrastructure. Collaboration, coercion, and indifference form a landscape in which Jewish survival is unlikely. At the Wannsee Conference, extermination is organized across borders, ministries, and railways. The Holocaust becomes a continental system aligned toward a single end: the genocide of Jews.

That system collapses with the war’s end but the pattern carries forward, reshaped and redirected.

After 1948, pressure reappears across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Jewish communities rooted for centuries in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco and elsewhere begin to unravel with striking speed.

Baghdad Iraq’s 1941 slaughter of Jews

Each country follows its own path. Laws restrict, property is seized, pressure builds, departures accelerate. In Iraq, the Farhud foreshadows a collapse that soon becomes mass departure. In Yemen, Operation Magic Carpet lifts an entire community into exile. In Egypt, the Suez Crisis accelerates expulsions. Across North Africa, uncertainty and nationalism press communities toward exit. By the 1970s, nearly one million Jews leave and a regional Jewish presence that endured for centuries nearly vanishes completely.

By the 1970s, the arena shifts again. The contest moves from territory into legitimacy itself.

In 1975, the United Nations adopts United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, recasting Jewish self-determination as a moral offense within the central forum of international diplomacy.

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reversing the Zionism is Racism resolution

The repeal arrives in 1991 through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86, yet the framing travels beyond formal votes. It resurfaces at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 and diffuses through NGOs, campuses, and international forums, where evolving language carries forward an enduring challenge to Jewish sovereignty.

From there, the argument migrates into the civic fabric of Western democracies. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, vile ideas become chants in universities, media, and politics.

The mechanisms differ from earlier eras, yet the effects shape daily life. Jewish institutions increase security. Synagogues that once stood open now operate behind layers of protection. Public expressions of Jewish identity carry new calculations. Debates about Israel expand into broader judgments about Jews, blurring lines that once held more clearly.

Across these shifts, the effect becomes visible in the map of Jewish life.

President Joe Biden’s Jewish liaison person suggests that Jews should hide their religious symbols in 2021

A century ago, Jewish communities spanned continents, anchored in Europe and present across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Americas. The destruction of European Jewry removed the largest center. The unraveling of communities across the Middle East and North Africa compressed what remained. Many moved to Israel. Others built new lives in the United States.

Today, roughly 85 percent of the world’s Jews live in those two countries. There are only seventeen countries with more than 25,000 Jews when there used to be dozens just a century ago.

That concentration follows a century in which environments that sustained Jewish life across dozens of countries collapsed, expelled, or eroded. Dispersion gave way to consolidation. Geography followed pressure.

The forces shaping that consolidation continue to evolve. As legitimacy is contested in broader arenas, communities orient toward places able to sustain security, identity, and continuity. The gravitational pull toward Israel strengthens under those conditions, even as the United States remains a central pillar of Jewish life.

While Yom Ha’atzmaut marks Israel’s independence, it also marks the emergence of a center of gravity forged through history rather than theory. Across a century, shifting forms of pressure reshaped where Jews could live, how they gathered, and where they anchored their future.

Three arcs across a century redrew the Jewish map. As the narrative arc is still underway, Israel’s percentage of world Jewry will likely become a majority from a plurality, in just a few years.

NY Times Issues Warning About “Resurgence” of “Far-Right” Jews

Posted on by
Reply

The latest The New York Times piece on a JDL-linked murder plot tells a very specific story—and then stretches it into something much larger than it is.

Start with the facts. One individual in a fringe offshoot movement, often described as a ghost of the old Jewish Defense League, allegedly plotted a murder that never happened because law enforcement stopped it. That is the entire event. Not a movement. Not a wave. Not a trend. A single actor orbiting a marginal group.

And the target was not randomly selected. This was not an attack on “Muslims” or a civilian population. The alleged target was a highly visible anti-Israel agitator who celebrates violence against Jews and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. That context matters. It does not justify anything but explains a motive. Erasing that distinction flattens reality into propaganda.

Yet from this narrow incident, the long article pulls a wide arc—Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, decades-old ideology, insinuations about modern Israel. The reader is led to see not one unstable actor, but a resurfacing Jewish extremism problem.

“apparent resurgence of far-right Zionism” – The New York Times

That framing collapses under the weight of what is actually happening.

2025 saw the highest number of Jews murdered in antisemitic attacks in over thirty years. Not plots—killings, specifically because they are Jews. Across cities and continents. In New York, Jews remain the primary target of hate crimes by a wide margin. Assaults are not hypothetical. They are routine. Visible Jews are attacked on the street, not in theory but in daylight.

So the inversion becomes obvious.

A stopped act by one fringe Jewish extremist becomes a sweeping narrative. A global surge in antisemitic violence becomes less than background noise.

“a disturbing message to New York City: the ideology of the Jewish Defense League has resurfaced.” – The New York Times

This is not balance. It is misdirection.

Every society has extremists at its edges. Jewish communities are no exception. They should be confronted early and without hesitation. But scale matters. Sequence matters. When coverage elevates a single fringe actor into a defining story while minimizing the sustained targeting of Jews, it sends a clear signal about whose fear counts and whose does not.

“voted for President Trump,” – The New York Times non-sequitur about member of the JDL, seemingly painting all Jews who voted for Trump as a potential extremists

And it feeds something deeper: the growing belief among Jews that institutions—from media to politics—are more comfortable scrutinizing Jewish reaction than confronting antisemitic aggression.

The real story is not that somewhere on the margins there are Jews capable of violence. Every people has that margin.

The real story is that Jews, in New York and across the diaspora, are once again living with a level of threat that is measurable, visible, and rising—and that too many prefer to mock the real security fear of Jews and cast Jews as the crux of the problem.

Campus Jewish Life Needs a Mainstream Voice

Posted on by
Reply

On elite campuses, something more consequential than protest is unfolding. Jewish life is being redefined by extremists.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and “Jews for Liberation” present themselves as the authentic moral voice of Jewish students. They speak in the language of justice, liberation, and equality that resonates with their peers. But strip away the branding and the position is blunt: the Jewish state is illegitimate and cast as a project of racial supremacy, apartheid, even genocide.

That is not critique. That is an argument for erasure.

The danger is not only that these claims are false. It is that they are being laundered into the mainstream through the fig leaf of Jewish identity. When anti-Israel activism is voiced by non-Jews, it is political. When it is voiced by Jews, it is marketed as moral truth. Then the fringe becomes credible and slogans become scholarship. Eliminationist ideas acquire the authority of internal dissent.

That shift matters.

Once Israel is no longer seen as a flawed state – much like others – but as an illegitimate one, every boundary collapses. If the state itself is the crime, dismantling it becomes justice, and whatever follows can be rationalized as liberation.

This is how language is turned into a weapon.

Mainstream Jewish campus institutions have not met this moment with equal clarity. Groups like Hillel are focused, rightly, on building Jewish life: community, ritual, continuity. They create space. They avoid litmus tests. They keep doors open. But when the central attack is not on Jewish practice but on Jewish legitimacy, generality reads as hesitation.

When others define Zionism as racism, it is not enough to respond with programming and belonging. The argument has moved to first principles. It demands an answer at that level.

And so a vacuum has opened.

Into that vacuum have stepped the loudest voices, not the most representative ones. The result is a distorted picture of Jewish opinion, one in which the extremes are visible and the center is absent.

That center needs a voice of its own.

Not a mirror image of the anti-Zionist fringe. Not a reaction that turns legitimate security concerns into collective hostility toward all Arabs. But a clear, unapologetic articulation of what most Jews actually believe, and what a sustainable future requires.

That position is not complicated.

The Jewish people have a right to sovereignty in their historic homeland. Israel must remain secure and capable of defending itself against those who seek its destruction. Terrorism and the glorification of violence are disqualifying, not contextual. No serious political future can be built on a culture that celebrates October 7 or teaches that murder is resistance.

The “two-state solution” is treated as moral doctrine, as if repeating it resolves the conflict. It does not. Self-determination is not a slogan tied to a single map. It can take different forms across different political arrangements. Millions of Palestinian Arabs have held Jordanian citizenship. Others live under varying structures of autonomy. The real question is not whether self-determination exists in theory, but whether any proposed structure can produce stability rather than violence.

A future Palestinian state, if it is ever to emerge, must come after a profound transformation: demilitarization, institutional reform, and an educational shift away from incitement and toward coexistence. Statehood is not an entitlement. It is a responsibility.

This is baseline reality, yet it is rarely stated plainly on campus.

A new kind of Jewish student group is needed, one that is explicit where others are cautious and disciplined where others are reckless. A group that centers Israel not as an abstraction but as a living, embattled state. One that can say, without hedging, that Jewish self-determination is legitimate, that its delegitimization is dangerous, and that moral seriousness requires both strength and restraint.

Such a group would do three things differently.

  • It would reject the language trap. Words like apartheid and genocide would be treated not as serious analysis but as distortions that inflame rather than illuminate.
  • It would refuse the false binary. Supporting Israel does not require abandoning moral judgment. Rejecting terror does not require rejecting an entire people.
  • It would re-anchor the conversation in reality. Israel exists. Threats are real. Peace requires conditions, not just intentions.

The goal is not to win an argument in a seminar room. It is to prevent a generation from being taught that the existence of the world’s only Jewish state is a moral error to be undone.

Campus Jewish life needs a mainstream voice that is willing to speak clearly – and be heard.