Yaakov Menken

Originally published in Israel National News

When Tucker Carlson described the Book of Esther as celebrating a “genocide of Persians,” he did the world a favor. Not because his perspective was correct or well-informed, but just the opposite. His obvious lie, so clearly detached from reality, unwittingly revealed the true nature of the more contemporary charges of genocide leveled at the same People of Israel.

The Book of Esther offers no possibility for error regarding who was responsible for the violence. It tells us that Haman convinced the Persian king, whose empire stretched to the very limits of the civilized world, to issue a decree seeking annihilation of the Jews. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, the king was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves. The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

The text emphasizes this in the same verse that tells us that 75,000 were killed (Esther 9:16). It tells us that, contrary to Carlson’s delusional retelling, the dead were neither Persians nor members of any one nation or faith. Instead, the casualties are described as “from those who hated them.” Their one unifying characteristic was that they had come out to kill Jews.

Yet in Carlson’s twisted version, all of this context was erased. The initiating threat vanished. The murderous mob disappeared. All that remained was a single statistic reframed as evidence of Jewish aggression, self-defense recast as “genocide.” Carlson only found the Book of Esther “controversial” after he had deprived the sacred text of both meaning and value.

This was no innocent misreading of the Bible. On the contrary, it exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people. The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability of those that launched the attack is ignored. The mechanism is simple: remove chronology, agency, and intent. Reduce everything to a single, emotionally charged statistic, and then use that casualty figure to invert reality.

And that brings us to the recent conflict in Gaza.

Here, too, numbers were presented without the events that produced them. The initiating attack was omitted, along with the stated intent of the attacking party. The distinction between targeting civilians and combatants was blurred or erased. And what remained was a false narrative in which the party responding to violence was portrayed as the aggressor, while the party that initiated the violence was treated as a passive backdrop.

To be clear, the parallel is not between Esther and Gaza as historical events, but between the use of the same rhetorical mechanism to distort them. In both cases, context is erased in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain. Numbers alone determine guilt, while history is deemed irrelevant.

Reality, of course, does not work that way, but all too many political and media figures routinely partner with Haman’s ideological descendants to demonize Jews.

It is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Moreover, once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit such crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To take a specific example, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, CNN reported upon the “outrage” that Israel bombed a hospital and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

The Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune-the oppressed rising up against their would?be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter.

When Carlson stripped away that context, he was not offering a “new interpretation” but a grotesque distortion. He took a story of self?defense and deliverance and turned it into a false tale of aggression.

The lesson of Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, is not that numbers are irrelevant, but that numbers without context are dangerous. They can reverse victims and villains. They can invert the moral order of a story. And they can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers practical lessons as applicable today as at any time in the past.

Image Credit: Book of Esther by Anita Gould with CC BY-NC 2.0 license on Flickr

Originally published in The Daily Signal

As both President of Princeton University and the immediate past Chair of the Association of American Universities Board of Directors, Chris Eisgruber has a powerful voice in the academic world. And at least thus far, Princeton has been only a minor target of government investigations of antisemitism.

This has positioned Eisgruber to lead the pushback from university administrators and faculty against demands from the Trump Administration and Congress that they do more to combat Jew-hatred if they wish further federal funding. And he is guiding America’s most elite educational institutions along a predictable path to failure.

Princeton historically prided itself on excellence, and shaped my understanding of political movements, public policy, and technology in ways that influence my work every day.

This is why I find Eisgruber’s monotonous drumbeat of cries for “academic freedom” so disappointing.

Academic freedom is valuable when it enables pursuit of truth, not as cover for bigotry. The ability to spout hate does not obligate the American taxpayer to support it. Stripped of high-sounding verbiage, Eisgruber is advocating for the “right” of antisemites to inculcate hatred in America’s future leaders, free from the pesky burdens of America’s civil rights laws.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits an institution receiving federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

The Trump Administration clarified that Jews do not lose this protection for also sharing religious practices. A university that supports denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, characterizing Zionism as a racist endeavor, or otherwise judging Israel by arbitrary standards applied nowhere else, is rightly ineligible for government funding.

It is that simple.

History provides a sobering precedent.

Germany stood at the pinnacle of academia for nearly two centuries. But then, even before but especially after the First World War, ancient and pernicious hatred rebranded itself as a meritorious academic discipline: “Anti-Semitism.” This gave Hitler’s genocidal evil an intellectual veneer; half of the architects of his Final Solution held doctorates from Germany’s, and the world’s, finest schools.

When the Nazis purged Jews from government positions and universities in 1933, they cast prejudice as beneficial, calling their edict the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”

The truth was precisely the opposite: the brain drain of scholars like Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Lise Meitner permanently ended Germany’s status as the global leader in scientific research. German universities ruined their own reputation by prioritizing bigotry over scholarship.

The parallel is obvious.

Today America’s elite universities demand “academic freedom” to teach “Anti-Zionism” instead. And the brain drain is already happening, on Eisgruber’s watch and under his nose.

When Princeton joins other leading schools putting antisemitic mythology on the curriculum, giving tenure to hateful professors, and supporting student organizations that back Hamas terrorism against Jews, Jewish students rightly choose to go elsewhere.

American academia suffers the consequences.

Today we are seeing hesitation in the face of harassment, equivocation where there should be enforcement. Formerly elite universities, in and beyond the Ivy League, now substitute antisemitic indoctrination for anthropology, archaeology, history, religion, sociology, and a host of other academic disciplines.

To claim that this comports with the reputed priorities of the Ivy League is laughable.

If academic freedom means tolerance for anti-Jewish discrimination, its schools will follow Germany’s in reputation and authority. Yet learned professors obfuscate, blaming government control rather than hatred for Germany’s lost academic prowess.

They have it backwards.

The Nazis put university-grown hatred into practice; President Trump and Congress are fighting to save American academia from that same bigotry. Their demands are as simple as they are morally proper: enforce Title VI. Protect Jewish students as they would any other group. Draw the line between free expression and harassment. And ensure compliance with the law that is a core prerequisite of federal funding.

As an alumnus, I am not condemning the university, but “speaking up,” in the words of its recent campaign, for what it is supposed to represent. The Ivy League should be leading the way in upholding civil rights, rather than fighting against what is both necessary and right.

Princeton University Graduate College by Zeete, via Wikimedia Commons with CC BY-SA 4.0

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post

By Rabbi Yaakov Menken and Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag

As we prepared this piece for submission, Israelis were repeatedly forced to seek shelter, while gunmen attacked Jews in both Israel and the United States. We pray for all of our safety.

We also find it particularly distressing to discuss attacks upon the layout and usage of the Western Wall prayer area, which was recently closed due to missile threats, at this time. Yet even with Israel at war, American Reform leaders and allies are delivering speeches and interviews warning of “radicals” in Israel who wish to uphold traditional practice at the Western Wall. At a moment when Israel faces immediate and existential danger, this is more than a needless distraction.

Efforts to alter the character of the Kotel rest upon the false premise that there are millions of Jews, primarily in the Diaspora, whose support for Israel will wane if longstanding Jewish tradition is not abandoned. But portraying sincere Jewish religious expression as hostile to Israel’s future perfectly inverts reality. Right now, we need more prayer, not challenges to Jewish tradition outlining how prayer is appropriately done.

The Western Wall is not a civic square or public park. It is the last accessible remnant of the Beit HaMikdash (Holy Temple) and the spiritual center of Jewish memory for nearly two millennia. Ever since Israel gained control of the site in 1967, restoring religious freedom to Jews and all others, prayer arrangements at the wall have been conducted according to halachic (Jewish legal) practice.

How this came to be, and why there is a dignified and welcoming plaza there at all, is no mystery. Construction was not driven by political horse trading in the Knesset, nor was the plaza the brainchild of a functionary in the Religious Services Ministry. People voted with their feet, coming to pray there every day, rain or shine, throughout the year – and the space was built to serve them.

No matter how meaningful other uses may be, the primary purpose of the Western Wall site is not to be an archaeological garden or a place to swear in new IDF soldiers, but to be a sanctuary for heartfelt prayer and devotion.

This framework has been maintained by Israeli governments of the Left, the Center, and the Right. And thus, the Knesset initiatives under discussion do not introduce a new religious order at the wall. Neither do they submit the plaza to extreme or arbitrary standards, as Reform leaders claim. And to portray them as a plan to imprison Jews for prayer, as some have done, is simply beyond the pale of rational discourse. To the contrary, the proposed legislation responds to threats by progressive activists against the very things that make the Western Wall plaza appealing to those anxious to pray there.

It is hardly a secret that Women of the Wall and its American financiers never intended to add to the sanctity of the place. Its leaders openly declared their intent to disrupt the prayers of others, and they bring “a folding table and a megaphone,” not to mention a media entourage, to their every “service.” There is no natural, organic support for their operation; it is not spiritual, but political.

The claim that “millions” are being disenfranchised is thus one that obfuscates rather than clarifies. Jewish life today is extraordinarily diverse, and no movement can credibly claim to speak for the entire Jewish people. But there are no millions occupying seats in today’s Reform and Conservative congregations even on the High Holy Days, much less on a daily or weekly basis. And it is obvious that Jews who rarely engage in Jewish prayer in their hometowns are not deeply troubled by how prayers are conducted by Jews in Israel.

Furthermore, the current division of the Western Wall is nearly sixty years old, and was preceded by another eighteen years during which no Jew was permitted to pray there. Given that most living Jews never experienced anything different, it is specious at best to assert that prayer practices at the wall might explain why younger Jews are joining anti-Israel rallies. Most of them have never set foot in Israel, and could not point to the Western Wall on a map.

There is, of course, one segment of the Jewish community that has only increased its attachment to Israel, and this is reflected in the current composition of the World Zionist Congress, despite entire segments of the Orthodox and Hasidic communities who would not vote in its elections, yet pray at the Western Wall frequently.

For many years, Reform and Conservative leaders, in alliance with left-wing Israeli parties, exercised dominant influence within Zionist institutions. Today, this has been reversed, despite deliberate attempts to minimize the Orthodox vote. Israel would be ill-advised to take steps that only offend the sensibilities and religious precepts of its most ardent supporters.

A site of unmatched holiness should not be subject to political maneuvering, especially at a time when prayers are so clearly needed. The administration of the Western Wall should remain responsive to public demand. This is determined by foot traffic, not PR statements. And the consistent, ongoing disuse of the Ezrat Yisrael section, the “Egalitarian Kotel” created by then-Religious Affairs minister Naftali Bennett in 2013, offers silent testimony (pun intended) to the utter lack of interest in change.

The Kotel carries profound meaning for Jews of every background. That shared attachment should encourage thoughtful and honest debate. Instead, increasingly dramatic claims portray policy disagreements as existential threats and preservation of halachic norms as religious persecution.

The Jewish people have always been capable of serious disagreement about sacred space. But those disagreements should be conducted with accuracy, proportion, and respect for the democratic and institutional frameworks through which decisions about Israel’s most sacred national sites are made – especially at a moment when Israel faces grave external threats, and the Jewish world seeks unity and clarity.

Cover Image: View of an Ancient City by Leon Natan, Accessed via Pexels with CC0 Deed

Originally published in New York Post

This year, the annual “All Peoples Celebration” run by Alliance San Diego (ASD) had a glaring omission: A Jewish religious leader was disinvited, due to his support for Zionism.

ASD decided that Rabbi Hanan Leberman was unfit for participation among “people of all faiths and traditions,” and that to exclude him was the best way to “embody and practice the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Dr. King must be rotating in his grave: If MLK celebrations become spaces where Jews must hide their connection to Israel in order to belong, then his legacy has been lost.

For at least the last 75 years, Zionism has been neither a dream nor a political movement. It has, rather, represented support for Jewish life in the Jewish indigenous homeland.

It is not an ideology expressed in the speeches of Theodor Herzl or the essays of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky; rather, it reflects the fervent prayers of Jews for nearly two millennia: “May our eyes behold Your [God’s] return to Zion.”

There are two primary reasons that Jews move to Israel today: To escape bigotry and persecution elsewhere, and as an expression of Jewish belief. Demanding that Jews reject that belief in order to be welcome at a civil rights celebration is thus not neutrality. It is deliberate exclusion of Jews.

This is something Dr. King knew well; he was not neutral on Zionism. He viewed it as a natural expression of civil and human rights for all.

He spoke warmly of Israel, affirmed its right to exist in peace, and rejected efforts to single out the Jewish state for condemnation. When confronted by a young black student who condemned Zionism, King responded sharply: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking about antisemitism.”

For King, Zionism was a moral cause rooted in history, survival, and dignity. He understood the Jewish longing for a homeland through the same moral lens that shaped his own struggle: A people’s right to live freely and securely.

Excluding a Jewish leader because he supports Zionism is therefore not a minor scheduling decision. It is abandonment of King’s own moral compass.

Dr. King did not build coalitions by demanding that partners abandon their deepest convictions. He built them by insisting on mutual recognition and moral consistency. His vision of solidarity was expansive. It did not flatten differences. It honored them.

King’s bond with the Jewish community was a true partnership. Jewish leaders marched beside him, and supported the civil rights movement at real personal risk. King drew inspiration from the Hebrew prophets, and saw the Jewish story as intertwined with America’s moral journey.

That history matters.

The “All Peoples Celebration” was organized to involve all and promote unity. Its language is inclusive. Most people involved, we can presume, genuinely want to build bridges. But “unity” that requires that a community reject core elements of its identity is not unity. It is exclusion.

When organizations invoke King’s name while sidelining Jews for holding views King himself affirmed, “inclusion” becomes selective. Belonging becomes conditional. Some are welcome only if they reject fundamental parts of their identity.

At the very least, organizers chose to bow to those who demanded the exclusion of a Jew who affirmed a core Jewish belief. But as Dr. King himself taught, real unity requires courage. It requires the willingness to affirm that different histories, traumas, and hopes can coexist in the same civic space.

King did not ask America to erase differences. He asked it to elevate character, dignity and justice above fear. He believed truth, even when uncomfortable, was the only path to reconciliation.

MLK Day remembrances should embody that principle.

The civil rights movement was never about enforcing a new orthodoxy, much less rejecting one form of bigotry in favor of another. It was about expanding the circle of moral concern to encompass all.

Honoring King in today’s world means resisting the temptation to narrow that circle.

It means remembering that he stood with Jews when it was easier not to. It means acknowledging that Zionism, at its core, is an expression of human dignity. It means recognizing that inclusion is not real if it is conditional.

Dr. King dreamed of a nation where no one would be asked to apologize for their identity in order to belong. The most fitting way to honor him is to ensure that his legacy remains broad enough to include everyone he stood for, including the Jewish people and their right to a home.

Cover Image: Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site by National Parks, accessed via Flickr with CC BY 2.0 license.

Originally published in New York Post

Sometimes it is best to put things simply: Eduardo Martinez, mayor of Richmond, CA, is a Jew-hating bigot unfit to serve in any official position.

Were his hatred against any other minority group, he would have been expelled long ago. But because he hates Jews, other elected officials are wringing their hands.

Martinez recently shared a collection of material blaming Jews for being massacred while celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

The posts included claims that it was a “false flag attack,” part of a “history” of attacks secretly done by Israel’s “paid actors” in order “to manufacture fear and hate.”

Another said that celebrating Hanukkah on a public beach itself involves “performative assertions of dominance.” Yet another blamed Jews for 9/11.

Originally published in JNS

At The Forward, however, schooling in the Orthodox Jewish world, like anything Orthodox, remains a bugbear of choice, even when there is no real story behind a censorious headline. It recently took a serious review of a tendentious film and slapped it with a title that’s pejorative and assumes the conclusion, to misportray one of Jewish education’s shining successes as not merely mundane, but a failure.

If the title of the article, “A new documentary shows what it looks like when Hasidic education fails,” wasn’t bad enough, the page title on their website was far less subtle, declaring that “Hasidic education fails children.”

The propaganda piece to which The Forward refers, however, was devoid of evidence that Chassidic education is failing anyone, much less that it “fails children” overall. Let’s be clear: By every relevant statistic, Chassidic education is markedly superior to anything offered in New York City public schools, and The Forward, like the filmmaker, simply did its level best to obfuscate the truth.

I spoke to the reporter, Jon Kalish, at some length, and the story he told was considerably more balanced than the documentary itself, to say nothing of the title The Forward attached to his work.

He recounts the filmmaker’s discussions with a woman with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and psychology and another with a doctorate in English, both former members of the Chassidic community. The most ardent secularist would hardly call a high school graduate able to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, much less a Ph.D., an educational failure.

Kalish also noted that although Naftuli Moster, who founded the group Young Advocates for Fair Education (Yaffed), makes frequent appearances throughout the film as an advocate for changes to yeshivah education, Moster now concedes his approach was misguided. He even acknowledged to Kalish that the Chassidic community “is thriving despite the chaos and dysfunction surrounding us.” Needless to say, the documentary did not share Moster’s frank assessment of the community’s success.

What is most striking, though, is that neither the filmmaker, nor the reporter, nor his editors questioned the false assumption at the film’s heart. A good education is not measured by arbitrary bureaucratic assumptions, but by clear and inarguable indicators of adult success: The ability to hold a job, earn a good and stable income, avoid crime, nourish intellectual interests, demonstrate good study habits and cultivate critical thinking. Yeshivah graduates outperform in each and every one of these areas.

Yeshivahs also teach other skills that produce a happier outcome for students and society, yet remain sadly neglected in American public education. George Washington, Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., all believed, for example, that education should nurture virtue and character, core elements of the yeshivah curriculum.

How to build and maintain a marriage, too, is taught in yeshivahs but not the public schools, despite mountainous evidence of the personal and societal benefits of providing a loving two-parent household to the next generation. Yeshivah students not only learn far more about legal proceedings and transactions, but they also learn the importance of being law-abiding citizens.

One of the best ways to authenticate a falsehood, however, is through accurate but irrelevant statistics. Thus, the film, like anti-yeshivah advocates, paid great attention to the poverty line, a somewhat arbitrary number that swells with family size, but not to income, as the figure that actually correlates with educational success.

On this basis, it misportrayed Chassidic Jews as hapless victims, denied the education they need to support themselves, and not so subtly belittled them for having more children. Though Hasidic neighborhoods are hardly the slums that the word “poverty” implies.

A skewed agenda was obvious throughout. On screen, a supposedly learned professor bemoaned that defenders of Chassidic education had failed to address the criticisms found in The New York Times, instead simply calling the paper antisemitic. As the author of a piece that addressed the Gray Lady’s lies and distortions, I know that his assertion was robustly false; it was the professor himself who ignored inconvenient evidence.

While I certainly highlighted the antisemitic tropes behind the caricature of Chassidim as foreign, money-grubbing, incapable of independent decision-making and worthy of the hatred directed against them, I also detailed how the Times had twisted reality.

For example, it claimed that yeshivahs were “flush with public money” by misrepresenting school bussing, COVID relief and school lunch funding as if they were pilfered from the public till. All of these government programs are or were offered universally, and were acclaimed by the Times and most New Yorkers, until the recipients were Chassidic Jewish schoolchildren.

Only willful blindness could explain a failure to perceive antisemitic bias in that shift. In actuality, parents sending their children to Jewish schools save the public nearly $3 billion a year in New York City alone.

Simply by putting a different title upon the writer’s work, The Forward could have offered a more dispassionate look at a biased film. By asking a few more critical questions, the reporter could have penetrated beyond the one-sided interviews and selected answers.

Ultimately, by conducting interviews with people on both sides of the question, the film could have offered a detailed and balanced assessment of reality worthy of being termed a documentary. All of these, of course, are valid critiques even before considering the abysmal state of New York’s public schools.

There were, indeed, profound failures throughout the process, but none pertained to Chassidic education. The Forward, like the filmmaker, owes an apology to the schools, to the parents and to their readers and viewers. This is especially true at a time when their defamatory portrayal offers antisemites a convenient pretense to rationalize bigotry and hatred against the Jewish community.

Image credit: A school bus for a yeshivah in New York. Oleg Yunakov via Wikimedia Commons.

Originally published in Washington Times

Two recent stories expose a dangerous reality we Americans can no longer ignore. What the world has taken to calling “pro-Palestinian activists” are not merely out to kill Israelis; they are genuine acolytes of the Third Reich. Today, America has the opportunity to prove itself better than 1930s Germany by rejecting a conference promoting hate, but it must now pass that test.

First, consider Ahed Tamimi, a “symbol of Palestinian resistance.” She went viral in 2017 by attacking Israeli soldiers with her bare hands, plus a few kicks for good measure. Shortly after the Hamas terrorist attacks on peaceful communities around the Gaza Strip, she took her “resistance” to Instagram by promising to the Jews of Judea and Samaria: “We will slaughter you and you will say that what Hitler did to you was a joke. … We will drink your blood and eat your skulls.”

Lest one think she meant only Israelis, she settled that last month by saying: “Judaism means occupation. … Judaism [should] be presented to the children of Palestine … as occupation, and that we are fighting the Jews, not Zionism.” To her thinking, American Jews are legitimate targets of her murderous “resistance” as well.

Her calls to complete Adolf Hitler’s mission have not harmed her popularity because, despite continuous public relations campaigns to obfuscate evil, Ms. Tamimi’s barbarism is by no means off script for the Palestinian cause. Arab mobs butchered Jews in Hebron in 1929 as they did in communities across Gaza two years ago. Israel’s peaceful founding in 1948 was met with “a war of extermination and momentous massacre” by surrounding Arab armies.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was not created to seek independence from Jordan but to eradicate Israel. Hamas called for genocide in its founding charter, and its leaders promised quite recently to repeat the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres until that goal is achieved. Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of Hezbollah, said Jews’ gathering in Israel saved his terrorist minions the trouble of hunting them down around the globe. Hezbollah, like the PLO, remains responsible for attacks on Jewish civilians far from Israel.

In America, Students for Justice in Palestine does not celebrate thinkers or peace activists but rather those who kill Jews. It commemorates George Habash, mastermind of the Black September airplane hijackings, in which terrorists divided Jews from non-Jews like a selektion at Auschwitz. It lionizes Dalal Mughrabi, who was killed as she and fellow terrorists murdered 38 people, including 13 children. It honors Rasmea Odeh, who killed two Jewish college students and later lied about it when applying for a U.S. visa.

This is the history behind the “People’s Conference for Palestine” planned in Detroit. The State Department is reviewing visa requests because of the sheer number of terrorists and their advocates applying to enter the country. Yes, those invited to address the conference are familiar promoters of genocide.

These include Hussam Shaheen, who spent 27 years in prison for attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Mosab Abu Toha spread antisemitic lies blaming Israel for jihadi terrorism and claimed that although Emily Damari was shot twice, abducted from her home and held by Hamas, she should not be called a hostage. Then there is Omar Assaf, a past member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, best known for the Ma’alot massacre of 25 schoolchildren and their teachers.

For every Jewish American and every American who still cherishes life, liberty and equality, this is deeply personal. When Ms. Tamimi says there is no difference between Jews and Zionists, she tells us what we should already have known. When Messrs. Habash, Mughrabi, Odeh, Shaheen and Assaf committed their crimes, they were not seeking Israelis but rather Jews.

They were seeking me, my family, every Jew sitting in synagogue on Shabbat morning, and every Jewish student who walks onto a college campus. These are the people invited to address the “People’s Conference for Palestine.”

America has no obligation to open its doors to strangers who spread the venom of hate. The State Department denies visas every year to criminals and extremists, and those seeking to poison American civilization with antisemitic bigotry should be treated no differently. To the contrary, although U.S. citizens have the First Amendment right to attend a conference supporting barbarism, the sponsors should be investigated for their vocal and, quite possibly, material support for foreign terrorist organizations.

In Europe and the Islamic world, the rhetoric of this “People’s Conference” led to pogroms, expulsions and the Holocaust. It has already fueled attacks in American towns and cities.

Ultimately, the Jewish nation is given a divine guarantee of survival, but America is not. History proves that there are few better ways to destroy a civilization than to nurse Jew hatred. The visas must be denied, and the “People’s Conference” deserves the people’s revulsion.

Originally published in JNS

The Trump administration unveiled a massive agreement with Columbia University last week, settling numerous complaints regarding the antisemitic environment that the university permitted and fostered on campus. The deal includes more than $200 million in fines, plus a $21 million fund for Jewish and other employees.

Columbia will appoint a senior vice provost to independently review and restructure academic departments where antisemitism has been embedded in the curriculum, and a resolution monitor, appointed in conjunction with the U.S. government, who will track compliance throughout the three-year agreement.

After more than 250 years of building its global reputation as a leading educational institution, and destroying it in just two, Columbia admitted that it needs a nanny to relearn what it means to behave like a civilized school. Its national shame provides a stark warning to the more than 60 other schools currently under investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Some Jewish advocates question whether this settlement goes far enough. It fails to impact the selection of Columbia’s next permanent president, and Claire Shipman remains the university’s interim president, despite texts that she wrote in which she suggested that a Jewish board member should be replaced with a Middle Easterner or Arab. Additionally, one of the school’s most virulently antisemitic professors remains on Columbia’s faculty and will even give a course in Zionism. Skeptics of the agreement also question how much power the vice provost and resolution monitor will truly wield.

These are legitimate concerns, but given U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions during his first term and the first six months of this new term, he has earned the benefit of the doubt. Domestically and internationally, the president has pushed back forcefully against antisemitism, and it should be expected that the implementation of this agreement with Columbia will be no different.

Trump hasn’t simply denounced antisemitism in press conferences and moved on. He has acted: defending Israel, protecting Jewish students and confronting enemies of Jews and civilization on multiple fronts. What a difference a new administration makes.

The Biden administration unveiled its “National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism” in May 2023 with great fanfare. However, when the Hamas-led massacre of Jews in southern Israel on Oct. 7 was met with open rejoicing on campus and in major cities across America just months later, the much-vaunted strategy proved meaningless and useless.

It was only under Trump that the Department of Education put schools on notice, as noted above, and the government pulled funding from leading universities that refused to take action. The Justice Department also formed the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism with Leo Terrell at its head. When, on June 1, an antisemitic firebomber attacked Jews rallying for hostages being held by Hamas, hate-crime charges came but hours later. The difference between President Joe Biden’s national strategy and Trump’s task force on antisemitism could hardly be starker.

Internationally, Trump reinstated military shipments to Israel that had been slow-walked or blocked under Biden. He reversed sanctions on Jews living in Judea and Samaria.  And, whereas the State Department under Biden condemned Jewish life in the Holy Land and attempted to limit Israel’s self-defense, Trump applauded the heroism of the Israel Defense Forces and vowed to emulate its effectiveness with a “Golden Dome” at home.

During Trump’s first term, the United States withdrew from antisemitic international organizations like the United Nations’ Human Rights Council and UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Biden rejoined both, but Trump has already reversed those disgraceful actions. And when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials, Trump responded with sanctions; freezing assets, banning travel and declaring ICC overreach a threat to U.S. sovereignty.

Most strikingly, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, also sanctioned U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, deriding the purported human rights investigator for having “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism and open contempt for the United States, Israel and the West.” Not long after, the three members of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory resigned, avoiding similar sanctions; “coincidentally,” of course.

And when Iran seemed on the verge of developing nuclear weapons to drop on Israel, Trump joined Israel’s response without risking a single American. For the first time, the United States dropped the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs that were designed and developed with those Iranian nuclear sites in mind. The bombs were dropped, not once, but 14 times. The message was clear: America is back, and the era of appeasement is over.

Trump also went far beyond defense, working to expand the Abraham Accords, pursuing regional peace not by rewarding terrorism but by forging alliances between nations willing to choose prosperity and tolerance. He introduced a “freedom zone” plan for Gaza that offers a pragmatic alternative to the failed demands of Hamas.

At home, Trump has once again elevated Jewish voices as trusted advisers. He launched a Religious Liberty Commission, featuring an Advisory Board of Religious Leaders, four of whom are Orthodox rabbis, including this writer.

Six months in, America has witnessed decisive action for fairness, tolerance and stability, and Trump is just getting started. In an era of rising hatred and retreating values, Americans have a president who stands against both, not in word alone, but in deeds. Americans should be proud of our president. Hopefully, the administration’s settlement with Columbia University and other actions will prove to demonstrate the moral clarity for the benefit of all students and Americans.

Photo credit: Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore, with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license on Flickr

Originally published in Townhall

From even before her election to Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has targeted Jewish Americans, demonized America’s allies, and apologized for terrorists—only to be shielded time and again by others in the Democratic Party. Now, however, the present Democratic leadership has decided to make matters worse, slandering those who stand up to her bigotry and asserting that this racist is, instead, a victim of racism. This represents a dangerous turning point for America.

Omar ignited her latest firestorm by posting to X, during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most recent visit to Washington, that he is a “war criminal” that Congress should not “platform.” This, of course, is a European slander of the man leading the effort to rescue innocent hostages and eliminate the genocidal threat posed by Hamas.

But when it comes to demonization of Jews, Omar is nothing if not consistent. Shortly after coming to Congress, she claimed that colleagues who support Israel are “all about the Benjamins,” recalling a classic antisemitic trope. Just last year she denounced Jewish students opposing pro-Hamas protest activity as “pro-genocide.” And in an eerie parallel to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, she once argued that Israel has “hypnotized the world.”

She is equally an apologist for terror. In 2019, she lied to protect the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), asserting that it was founded after 9/11, a day when, in her words, “some people did something,” rather than years earlier at the behest of the Muslim Brotherhood. And in 2021, she equated the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban, claiming all have committed “unthinkable atrocities.”

Throughout her time in Congress, Democrats have avoided meaningful discipline, much less expelling Omar from their party. In 2019, they deliberately sidestepped a resolution condemning her antisemitic statements, passing a meaningless alternative opposing not just antisemitism, but “anti-Muslim bigotry” as if it were somehow of equal concern. The resolution was so pathetic that Omar herself voted in favor, while Jewish Republicans either opposed or missed the vote. Democrats refused to address hatred among their own as Republicans repudiated David Duke, or even Steve King, who insisted his offensive remarks were mischaracterized.

From the outset, some, including her colleagues in the infamous “Squad,” used Omar’s own identity characteristics to shield her from criticism. It was always nonsensical: did David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, praise her because she was Black, a Muslim, a woman, or a refugee? No, he endorsed her words because she, like he, spreads hated of Jews. But until now, at least, one never saw leaders in her party so cynically protect her from well-deserved denunciation.

But when Rep. Randy Fine excoriated her bigotry in denigrating terms, House Democratic leadership not only defended Omar, but condemned Fine as if he were the problem. Fine, who calls himself the “Hebrew Hammer,” recently started wearing a Kipah, a Jewish skullcap, in Congress, not because he is particularly religious but because students at too many universities are afraid to wear one today. And when he saw Omar’s hateful attack on Netanyahu, he responded that “I’m sure it is difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists. The only shame is that you serve in Congress.”

Did he exaggerate? Perhaps. But as she serves as one of America’s foremost apologists and propagandists for Islamic terrorists both in the Middle East and here in the United States, calling her a Muslim terrorist isn’t off by much. And it was certainly not an attack on her religion, but her support for the all-too-real phenomenon of radical Islamic terrorism.

Yet rather than focus on Omar’s outrageous slander, House Democrats rushed to condemn Fine instead, claiming his words were “bigoted,” “Islamophobic,” and yet more obscenely, “racist.” Not a word of censure for Omar. No demand for accountability. Just more political theater to protect their own. When a Jew dared to stand up against Omar’s vicious Jew-hatred, Democratic leaders came down firmly on the side of the bigot.

In 2018, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks delivered this admonition in an address before Great Britain’s House of Lords:

Antisemitism, or any hate, becomes dangerous when three things happen. First: when it moves from the fringes of politics to a mainstream party and its leadership. Second: when the party sees that its popularity with the general public is not harmed thereby. And three: when those who stand up and protest are vilified and abused for doing so.

He was not speaking about American politics. Yet the applicability of his statement is obvious.

From the moment Omar was appointed to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Coalition for Jewish Values, which I serve as Executive Vice President, warned then-Speaker Pelosi that her appointment was “tantamount to saying that anti-Semitism is acceptable to the United States House of Representatives.” Only a month later, after Omar’s first antisemitic outburst as a congresswoman, we said that to maintain her appointment was “tolerating this hatred in the Democratic party.” And when, two years later, Omar made accusations against Israel that paralleled the medieval blood libel, we secured hundreds of rabbinic signatures on a letter accusing Pelosi of “acceptance of bigotry and an abdication of leadership.”

With its latest statement, the current House Democratic Leadership has confirmed each and every criticism delivered in our earlier letters. Our statements were in no way overstated or alarmist, they merely foresaw the inevitable result of Pelosi’s silence.

The recent Democratic primary victory of Zohra Mamdani in New York — an open extremist who, like Omar, has refused to condemn Islamic terrorism and parrots anti-Israel propaganda — is further proof that the radicalization of the Democratic Party is no longer a fringe problem. It is the direction of the party: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is considered likely to defeat Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should she vie for his seat in the Senate.

Omar has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with today’s progressive movement: divisive, dangerous, and morally broken. It is long past time for Democrats to reject that movement, its Squad, and all it represents — or for the American voters to reject the party that sanctions such hatred among its elected representatives.

Cover image: Ilhan Omar by Gage Skidmore on Wikimedia Commons with CC BY-SA 2.0 license.