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Mike Pence and the Jews: What to know as he begins a presidential campaign
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Until the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mike Pence made sure to stay on the same page as Donald Trump — except, sometimes, when it came to the Jews.
Both men delighted the pro-Israel establishment — Trump by fulfilling a long wishlist of Israel’s right-wing government, Pence by proving himself as a stalwart Christian Zionist through years in elected office. But just weeks after Trump assumed office, the difference in how each man approached Jewish anxieties was already stark.
Jewish community centers and other Jewish institutions were getting bomb threats, and a Jewish journalist asked the president what he planned to do about antisemitism. Trump lashed out, accusing the reporter of lying and quipping, “Welcome to the world of the media.”
A week later, Jews in St. Louis were reeling after a vandal knocked over over 150 tombstones in a Jewish cemetery. Pence was in town and took the opportunity to condemn the bomb threats and the vandalism as “a sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.” Then, he headed over to the cemetery, picked up a rake and helped clean up the mess.
Pence’s bid is the longest of shots. He polls in the low single digits, while Trump leads in the polls. The former president routinely depicts Pence as a traitor for not trying to hand him the election when Pence presided over the certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6, 2021. Pence, meanwhile, has said Trump’s behavior that day endangered his family. If Pence does succeed in unseating his old boss, it will be because he’s tapped into a deep thirst among some Republicans for a more conventional candidate to wean the party off Trump.
No matter how he does in the race, here’s what you need to know about Mike Pence and the Jews.
He has been pro-Israel from the get-go
First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as an Indiana Republican in 2000, Pence made clear from the outset that defending Israel was among his priorities.
“My support for Israel stems largely from my personal faith,” he told Congressional Quarterly in 2002. “God promises Abraham, ‘those who bless you, I will bless, and those who curse you, I will curse.’”
In his autobiography published last year, “So Help me God,” he credits his interest in Israel and in Jewish issues to his late sister-in-law, Judy, “an elegant, sophisticated young woman from a prominent Jewish family in Milwaukee” who married his brother, Thomas, “a pickup-driving, dirt bike-riding, banjo-playing country boy from southern Indiana.” Pence wrote, “She made him a better man.”
For years, he has placed a quote from the Biblical book of Jeremiah above the fireplace in his personal and then his official residences — in the governor’s mansion in Indiana and then in the vice president’s residence in Washington, D.C: “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope, and a future.”
“They’re words to which my family has repaired to as generations of Americans have done so throughout our history, and the people of Israel through all their storied history have clung,” Pence told a conference of Christians United for Israel in 2017.
In Congress, Pence took the lead in advancing pro-Israel legislation, especially in defending the barrier Israel built cutting through portions of the West Bank to shield Israel and some of its settlements from terrorist attacks. Together with Rep. Ron Klein, a Florida Democrat, and the late Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who was the only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress, he co-founded the House’s antisemitism task force.
Lantos, Pence said in his autobiography, had a profound influence on him. “He and I almost always disagreed on politics, but I was always inspired by his moral clarity and courage,” he wrote. Klein now chairs the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
As Indiana governor in 2016, Pence enacted the first state law banning state business with firms that support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting Israel, known as BDS. The bill also applied to businesses that boycott Israel’s settlements — one of the first pieces of legislation to erase the line between Israel and the West Bank.
Later that year, the Republican Jewish Coalition effusively praised Pence’s selection as Trump’s running mate, calling him “a critical leader and important voice regarding Israel during his time in the House and as governor.”
He attended every policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee during the Trump administration; Trump avoided all of them.
His evangelical beliefs shape his domestic policy
One of the most prominent issues of the 2024 election will be abortion, following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade last year. The decision gave states the authority to determine reproductive rights and led to the swift narrowing of abortion access in many states. On abortion and other issues including LGBTQ rights, Pence departs from most of the Jewish community, where support for abortion access and LGBTQ issues are high.
A number of Republicans — chief among them Trump — believe that the party should take the win and not pursue further abortion restrictions, arguing that the decision last year contributed to Republican losses in the midterm elections.
Not Pence: he wants to ban abortion nationwide. “Having been given this second chance for life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land,” he said after the court’s decision.
Pence also has a long career of opposing LGBTQ rights. When he was governor, he sought to exempt Indiana from a Supreme Court ruling recognizing same-sex marriages. As a congressman, he opposed funding for outreach to HIV patients that he said promoted gay lifestyles. (His handling of an HIV outbreak in Indiana is understood to have worsened it.)
As Indiana governor in 2015, Pence signed one of the most far-reaching state laws allowing businesses to decline to serve LGBTQ customers. Businesses threatened to boycott the state, and he soon signed modified legislation that increased protections for LGBTQ people.
Months later, Pence was facing questions about why he pushed through the law from the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group that trends moderate on social issues and whose director said members had “a lot of questions” about the legislation. His tone was apologetic. “Ultimately we adopted a few reforms and made it clear this was a shield, not a sword,” he said of the bill.
He was the Trump administration’s top trauma whisperer for the Jews
During his time as vice president, Pence was often the favored spokesman when tragedy befell the Jews.
In 2018, at a Trump administration religious freedom event, Pence singled out the threats of violence faced by Jews in Europe, including in countries seen as allies by Trump.
“While religious freedom is always in danger in authoritarian regimes, threats to religious minorities are not confined to autocracies or dictatorships,” he said “They can, and do, arise in free societies, as well — not from government persecution but from prejudice and hatred.”
The same year, he said he was “sickened and appalled” at Nazi graffiti on an Indiana synagogue he knew well.
In 2019, he and his wife visited the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, after a deadly attack by a white supremacist. “We had to come,” he told the rabbi.
The same year, he toured Auschwitz and the next year, he attended the Fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
Some efforts to mark Jewish tragedy went awry. In 2018, when Pence marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish figures chided him for imbuing Christian imagery in his celebration of Israel’s founding in the wake of the Holocaust. “A few days ago, Karen & I paid our respects at Yad Vashem to honor the 6 million Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust who 3 years after walking beneath the shadow of death, rose up from the ashes to resurrect themselves to reclaim a Jewish future,” he said on Twitter.
It was not the last time a Pence event would bring Christian themes into Jewish mourning. Pence was scheduled on Oct. 29, 2018, to campaign in Michigan for a Jewish Republican running for Congress, Leah Epstein.
Two days earlier, a gunman massacred 11 Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the worst-ever attack on Jews in U.S. history. Epstein invited a Messianic Jewish leader to deliver a prayer. Messianic Jews, who call their spiritual leaders rabbis, believe in the divinity of Jesus, and Jewish groups took offense. That led Pence’s folks to scramble to tell reporters that he was unaware that the rabbi was not, in fact, Jewish.
Pence was not among the many Trump administration figures and supporters who urged the president to walk back his “very fine people on both sides” equivocation after a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 in which a counter-protester was killed. The vice president defended his boss: “I stand with the president,” he said when asked about Trump’s statements.
Trump-Pence vs. Trump
Pence, increasingly at odds with his former boss since their Jan. 6, 2021, falling-out, has a unique way of distinguishing Good Trump from Bad Trump: He portrays the administration’s wins as “Trump-Pence” policies, while the not-so-salutary stuff is Trump’s alone.
That dynamic was in evidence last November at the annual conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, when Pence was among an array of presidential prospective candidates to speak, including DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Trump himself.
Moving the embassy to Jerusalem? “Trump-Pence.” “It was the Trump-Pence administration that kept our word to the American people and our most cherished ally, when we moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the state of Israel,” Pence said.
As for Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election? Pence didn’t directly name the former president, but differentiated himself from him.
“The American people must know that our party keeps our oath to the Constitution even when political expediency may suggest that we do otherwise,” Pence said then. “We must be the leaders to keep our oath even when it hurts.”
Will he get Jewish funding?
Until filing papers on Monday, Pence’s main vehicle for fundraising has been a 501(c)4, a political advocacy group that is not required to reveal donors or extensive financial information. Advancing American Freedom has said its aim is to raise tens of millions of dollars to promote Pence’s favored conservative causes.
Now that he’s in the race, it will be interesting to watch where Pence draws Jewish support. One clue may be in a plane ride: Last year, Pence went on a campaign style tour of Israel and Ukraine. Loaning him the plane was Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate and Republican kingmaker Sheldon Adelson.
Adelson has since said she’s not planning to get involved in the GOP primaries.
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The post Mike Pence and the Jews: What to know as he begins a presidential campaign appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Congress thinks my college is failing on antisemitism. My Jewish students disagree
When the House Education and Workforce Committee released its report on campus antisemitism last month, I learned about it from a news alert on my phone. That surprised me. The college at which I teach Jewish studies — Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal arts school in Bronxville, New York — is named in the report as one of five schools the committee investigated for failures to address antisemitism. Yet I never encountered anyone involved with this investigation.
I teach Jewish and non-Jewish students — bright, inquisitive young people eager to learn about Jewish history, Jewish thought and Jewish identity. I have worked with Jewish student groups. I am, professionally and personally, someone whose entire working life is oriented around Jewish life on this campus.
If this investigation was as thorough as Congress would have us believe, I probably should have heard about it at some point before it was released — or even, just possibly, been asked some questions as part of it.
That silence is not incidental. It is the heart of everything that is wrong with this report, which insists that Jewish students on campuses like mine are living under siege. The committee’s account of my institution was assembled without consulting, as far as I can tell, the faculty members best positioned to speak to Jewish life on campus or the range of Jewish students whose experiences directly contradict the report’s conclusions. What was assembled instead appears to be a file of curated incidents, selected to support a predetermined conclusion.
To be clear, antisemitism on campus is a serious problem. It takes forms both crude and subtle — casual conflations of Jewish identity with Israel, occasional slurs and social pressure on Jewish students to renounce affiliations or loyalties with Jewish groups seen as friendly to Israel. My own students have come to me with these issues, which are deeply troubling, and which campuses have yet to come up with clearly effective strategies for combatting.
But what the Education and Workforce Committee has produced is not a serious accounting of antisemitism. It is a political document dressed in the language of civil rights enforcement. It is yet more evidence that, when it comes to the federal government’s efforts against antisemitism, Jews are being spoken over, not spoken for.
Overlooked Jewish diversity
At Sarah Lawrence, I teach Jewish students who are passionate Zionists. I also teach Jewish students who are members of Jewish Voice for Peace, participate in pro-Palestinian organizing, and have complicated, evolving relationships to Israel shaped by family history, religious tradition and their own moral reasoning.
I teach students who grew up in Orthodox communities, students who grew up entirely secular, students for whom Jewishness is a daily religious practice and students for whom it is primarily an ancestral identity activated by encounters with bigotry. I teach Israeli students who came to Sarah Lawrence specifically because American higher education offered them an open intellectual environment that they value.
What these students seem to agree on — despite their many political differences — is that they do not recognize the picture of campus life being painted by this committee.
They broadly do not experience their Jewish identity as something requiring constant protection from their classmates. What many of them do experience, and what they have told me plainly, is profound discomfort at having their identity conscripted into political arguments they did not choose.
The committee’s report is such a conscription. It tells Jewish students what they are supposed to feel. It tells them who their enemies are. And it erases, wholesale, the significant portion of the Jewish campus community whose views on Israel, Palestinian rights, and the politics of campus speech do not fit the narrative the committee has advanced.
This is not how you protect Jewish students. This is how you exploit them.
The IHRA problem
The report specifically criticizes Sarah Lawrence for not adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, in a case study of this kind of overreach. As the single faculty member at Sarah Lawrence wholly committed to Jewish studies — making my scholarly expertise the most directly relevant to this question of anyone on my campus — I want to be unequivocal. The Jerusalem Declaration, which we have adopted instead of the IHRA definition, is the better tool.
The Jerusalem Declaration’s core definition of antisemitism — developed by an international group of scholars working in Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies — explains that antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence that targets Jews as Jews. It is accompanied by 15 detailed guidelines for understanding antisemitism, drawn up because the field recognized that context and nuance are not optional when identifying and addressing hatred.
This is how scholars in my discipline are trained to think, and it is the approach our students deserve.
The IHRA definition, by contrast, was drafted primarily as a data-collection instrument for European monitoring organizations. Kenneth Stern, the definition’s lead drafter, has said repeatedly that it was never intended to become part of disciplinary codes. He has even testified before Congress against legislation that would enshrine the IHRA definition as enforceable policy on campuses. Stern writes that the definition “was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.”
When the person who wrote the definition is sounding the alarm about how it is being used, perhaps Congress should listen.
The specific problem with the IHRA definition, as scholars in my field have documented extensively, is that seven of its 11 illustrative examples involve the state of Israel with language broad enough to characterize legitimate forms of political speech and academic inquiry about Israel as antisemitic.
I know from my own work that the chilling effect of IHRA on academic freedom is not theoretical.
One of the definition’s most contested illustrative examples declares that it may be antisemitic to draw comparisons between Israeli policy and the Nazis. I regularly teach the Israeli Orthodox scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the most important Jewish and Israeli thinkers of the 20th century, who warned persistently after the 1967 Six-Day War that the logic of military rule over another people would corrupt Israeli institutions and dehumanize both the occupied and the occupiers. He used the term “Judeo-Nazis” to describe what he feared that Israel risked becoming.
If Sarah Lawrence operated under the IHRA definition, my students would not have the opportunity to debate Leibowitz’s findings. Nevermind that he was eulogized by Israeli President Ezer Weizman as one of the greatest figures in the intellectual life of the Jewish people; his concern about his own country’s direction would make teaching him taboo, in turn making my students’ education in the full landscape of Jewish thought less complete.
I also couldn’t teach them about former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s 2026 claim that the ideology of Jewish supremacy now dominant in the Israeli government resembles Nazi racial theory. Or how Yair Golan, the former IDF deputy chief of staff and current leader of the Democrats party in the Knesset, has drawn parallels between trends in Israeli society and the processes that preceded the Holocaust in Europe.
These are Israeli patriots, soldiers, and statesmen engaging in exactly the kind of morally serious, historically grounded reckoning that higher education is supposed to teach students to undertake. Under the IHRA definition, my students would never have the chance to learn from them — or decide, for themselves, what they think about these arguments.
The committee’s report does not reckon with this kind of potential cost. Instead, it flatly recommends that every college across the United States adopt the IHRA definition. Conspicuously, it does not point to a single incident at any institution in its report that the IHRA definition would identify as antisemitic but the Jerusalem Declaration would not. If the committee believes IHRA is necessary rather than merely ideologically preferred, it should be able to demonstrate a gap — a real case in which alternate definitions of antisemitism failed.
The risks of chilling free speech
The absence of any such example is not a minor oversight. It speaks to the report’s failure to contend with the actual lived experience of students on campus.
In talking with students who have experienced antisemitism on my campus — American and Israeli alike — I have found they are not concerned by whether the school will adopt the IHRA definition.
They are not asking for less protection. They are asking for the right kind. What some of them have told me — and I take this seriously — is that they would find it chilling if political speech and classroom debate about Israel and Palestine were suddenly rendered even more risky.
The broader agenda behind this report is not difficult to see. Campus antisemitism is a genuine problem that has, since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, been manipulated by the American right as part of a sustained effort to delegitimize universities.
Jewish students are not the constituency this campaign is designed to serve. They have been made instruments of a broader ideological battle against the liberal values that gain purchase when people are educated in environments that reward independent thought.
Honest intellectual engagement with Jewish experience means studying the history of persecution and survival; the philosophy of identity and belonging; the ethics of memory; and the complexity of diaspora and national identity. These are not safe or comfortable subjects. They require exactly the kind of open, contested, sometimes painful intellectual environment that the House Committee professes to be protecting while actually working to undermine.
Sarah Lawrence is not a perfect institution. No college or university is. But it is one where Jewish life is visible, valued and genuinely diverse. My Jewish students learn by arguing with each other, challenging each other, and engaging across lines of political disagreement. The truth about Jewish life is almost always more complicated than people with clear-cut political aims would have us believe. That complexity is not a problem to be managed or a weakness to be exploited. It is at the very center of what a liberal arts education is supposed to be about.
The post Congress thinks my college is failing on antisemitism. My Jewish students disagree appeared first on The Forward.
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Fate of Iran Peace Talks Uncertain as Deadline Approaches for End of Ceasefire
A view of Iranian-flagged cargo ship M/V Touska as the US Navy Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyer USS Spruance conducts its interception in a location given as the north Arabian Sea, in this screen capture from a video released April 19, 2026. Photo: CENTCOM/Handout via REUTERS
Iran is considering attending peace talks with the United States in Pakistan, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Monday, following moves by Islamabad to end a US blockade of Iran‘s ports, a major hurdle for Tehran to rejoin peace efforts.
However, the official stressed that no decision had been made.
Adding to the uncertainty, a source told Reuters that Vice President JD Vance was still in the US, denying reports that he was already on his way to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad for talks.
With a two-week ceasefire set to expire this week, the senior Iranian official said Tehran was “positively reviewing” its participation but no final decision had been made. The comments conveyed a clear change of tone from earlier statements ruling out attendance and pledging to retaliate for US aggression.
The Iranian official said mediator Pakistan was making positive efforts to end the US blockade and ensure Iran‘s participation.
BLOCKADE POSES A PROBLEM
The ceasefire had appeared in jeopardy after the US said it had seized an Iranian cargo ship that tried to run its blockade and Tehran vowed to retaliate.
A Pakistani security source said Pakistan’s key mediator, Field Marshal Asim Munir, had told US President Donald Trump the blockade was an obstacle to talks, and that Trump had promised to consider ending it.
The US was hoping to start negotiations in Pakistan shortly before the ceasefire expires, with sweeping security preparations under way in Islamabad.
However, Iran‘s President Masoud Pezeshkian said that “unconstructive & contradictory signals from American officials carry a bitter message; they seek Iran‘s surrender.”
“Iranians do not submit to force,” he added on X.
US-IRAN CEASEFIRE SET TO EXPIRE
Trump announced the two-week ceasefire with Iran on April 7, and has not specified when precisely it ends.
A Pakistani source involved in the talks said it would expire at 8 pm ET on Wednesday, which would be midnight GMT or 3:30 am Thursday in Iran.
The US has maintained its blockade of Iranian ports, while Iran lifted and then reimposed its own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which typically handles roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied gas supply.
Oil prices rose around 5% as traders remained fearful that the ceasefire would collapse. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was at a virtual standstill with just three crossings in the space of 12 hours, according to shipping data.
US MARINES BOARD IRANIAN VESSEL
The US military said it had fired on an Iranian-flagged cargo ship headed towards Iran‘s Bandar Abbas port on Sunday after a six-hour standoff, disabling its engines. US Central Command released video showing Marines descending ropes from helicopters onto the vessel.
The vessel is likely to have been carrying what Washington deems dual-use items that could be used by the military, maritime security sources said on Monday.
Iran‘s military said the ship had been traveling from China and accused the US of “armed piracy,” according to state media. They said they were ready to confront US forces over the “blatant aggression,” but were constrained by the presence of crew members’ families on board.
China, the main buyer of Iranian crude, expressed concern over the “forced interception,” and Chinese President Xi Jinping called for ships to resume passage through the strait as normal and for the conflict to be resolved through political and diplomatic channels, state news agency Xinhua reported.
Trump warned on Sunday that the US would destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran if it rejected his terms, continuing a recent pattern of such threats.
Iran has said that if the United States were to attack its civilian infrastructure, it would strike power stations and desalination plants in its Gulf Arab neighbors.
PREPARING FOR TALKS THAT MIGHT NOT HAPPEN
Pakistan geared up to host the talks despite uncertainty over whether they would go ahead. Nearly 20,000 security personnel have been deployed across the capital Islamabad, a government official and a security official said.
The US and Israel launched strikes against Iran on Feb. 28, in part to prevent the regime from developing nuclear weapons.
Trump said on Monday he believed a nuclear deal the US is currently negotiating with Iran will be better than a 2015 international agreement to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.
“The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER than the JCPOA, commonly referred to as ‘The Iran Nuclear Deal‘,” Trump wrote in a social media post.
During his first White House term, Trump in 2018 withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreed to by Iran, the United States and world powers, calling it “the worst deal ever.”
“I am under no pressure whatsoever, although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!” Trump added in his Truth Social post.
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The Strokes End Coachella Set With Video Montage to Denounce US, Israel Bombings in Iran, Gaza
Part of the video montage shown by The Strokes during their Coachella set on April 18, 2026. Photo: YouTube screenshot
The American rock band The Strokes ended their performance on Saturday night, during the second weekend of the Coachella music festival, by showing the audience a video montage denouncing recent bombings in the Gaza Strip by Israel and joint US-Israel military airstrikes in Iran.
Massive screens behind Coachella’s main stage displayed footage of a controlled demolition of a large building in Gaza and an accompanying caption said the structure was the “last university standing” in the enclave. The footage followed scenes of destruction in the Islamic Republic with the caption “Over 30 universities destroyed in Iran.” The video montage was not included in the band’s set during the first weekend of Coachella.
Before turning to footage from the Middle East, the montage showed images and messages that accused the CIA of being involved in overthrowing governments and assassinating leaders in foreign countries. The video mentioned the separate plane crashes in 1981 that killed Panamanian President Omar Torrijos and Ecuador’s President Jaime Rondos, as well as the overthrowing of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, Guatemala’s President Jacob Arbenz in 1954, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, Chilean President Salvador Alende in 1973, and Bolivian President Juan Torres in 1976.
The video montage also promoted the conspiracy theory that the US was involved in the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The Strokes showed his image and a caption that read: “US govt found guilty of his murder in civil trial.” The mentioned trial, King v. Jowers, took place in 1999, but in 2000, a review by the US Justice Department found no credible evidence to validate the jury’s verdict. The video also showed images of slavery in the US and Black Lives Matter protests.
The video montage was displayed as The Strokes performed their song “Oblivius” for the first time in 10 years and the second time ever in concert. As the clip played for the audience, the band’s lead singer, Julian Casablancas, kept repeating the same lyrics in the song’s chorus: “What side you standing on?”
For those not attending the set in-person, their performance was available to watch live on Coachella’s official YouTube channel. The video montage and the band’s performance of “Oblivius” was not included in the band’s Coachella weekend one performance on April 11.
The Strokes is made up of Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraiture, and Fabrizio Moretti. In 2021, Casablancas signed a “Musicians for Palestine” open letter that asked artists to boycot Israel and publicly express solidarity with Palestinians.
The band will begin a world tour in June, and in August, they will headline the 2026 Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena, California. The festival is produced by Goldenvoice, which also produces Coachella.