Uncategorized
Universities Must Be Forced to Address Antisemitism
University of California, Santa Barbara student body president Tessa Veksler on Feb. 26, 2024. Photo: Instagram
JNS.org – “Never would I have imagined that I’d need to fight for my right to exist on campus,” laments Shabbos Kestenbaum, a student at Harvard University who is suing the school because “antisemitism is out of control.”
Jewish students have suffered an unrelenting explosion of hate on American higher education campuses—so far with little relief. They have endured antisemitic rhetoric, intimidation, cancellation and violence. But those charged with keeping campuses safe—whether administrators who govern student and faculty behavior or federal agencies responsible for ensuring that schools adhere to civil rights protections—are failing in their jobs.
Many Jewish students have complained to their colleges’ administrators about the injustices. But instead of responding with measures to ensure Jewish students’ safety—like stopping pro-Hamas protestors from hijacking campuses or expelling militants who incite Jew-hatred— administrators have largely shown indifference. In some cases, college authorities have made things worse for Jewish students by appeasing the riotous, pro-Hamas mobs who have been primary perpetrators of Jew-hatred on campus.
Snubbed by college administrators, Jewish students and their supporters have appealed for federal protection, filing Title VI complaints with the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the body tasked with enforcing protections under the Civil Rights Act. Unfortunately, the OCR, which has the power to levy severe financial punishments against colleges that neglect students’ Title VI rights, has so far rewarded negligent universities with little more than slaps on the wrist.
Until college and university boards of trustees begin hiring administrators committed to Jewish students’ safety—and until the OCR begins seriously punishing antisemitic perpetrators—we can expect no respite. Safe to say, colleges and universities run by arrogant, apathetic administrators will not change until their jobs and schools’ survival are threatened.
College/university administrators don’t take antisemitism seriously. Their reactions to Jewish students raising concerns about Jew-hatred range from indifference to outright hostility. For example, when Mohammed Al-Kurd, who the Anti-Defamation League says has a record of “unvarnished, vicious antisemitism,” came to speak at Harvard, Shabbos Kestenbaum and other Jewish students complained to administrators.
Rather than cancel Al-Kurd’s appearance, which would have been the appropriate action, the administrators ignored the students’ complaints. “Harvard’s silence was deafening,” Kestenbaum wrote in Newsweek. Kestenbaum said he “repeatedly” expressed concerns to administrators about the antisemitism he experienced, but as his lawsuit alleges, “evidence of uncontrolled discrimination and harassment fell on deaf ears.”
Administrators at Columbia University reacted to Jewish students’ complaints about antisemitism even more cynically. In fact, during an alumni event, several administrators exchanged text messages mocking Jewish students, calling them “privileged” and “difficult to listen to.”
When Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania if calling for genocide against Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct, none could say “yes.” The presidents of Harvard and UPenn have since resigned. Good riddance.
Some college/university administrators have outrageously granted concessions to pro-Hamas students. For instance, Northwestern University agreed to contact potential employers of students who caused campus disruptions to insist they be hired, create a segregated dormitory hall exclusively for Middle Eastern, North African and Muslim students, and form a new investment committee in which anti-Zionists could wield undue influence. Brown University agreed to hold a referendum on divestment from Israel in October.
Similar appeasements were announced at other colleges and universities, including Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota and the University of California Riverside.
So far, OCR has failed to take concrete action against antisemitism on campus. This is evident in recent decisions involving the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Michigan. CUNY was ordered to conduct more investigations into Title VI complaints and report further developments to Washington, provide more employee and campus security officer training, and issue “climate surveys” to students.
The University of Michigan also committed to a “climate survey,” as well as to reviewing its case files for each report of discrimination covered by Title VI during the 2023-2024 school year and reporting to the OCR on its responses to reports of discrimination for the next two school years.
Neither institution was penalized financially, even though the Department of Education has the power to withhold federal funds, which most colleges and universities depend on. There are now 149 pending investigations into campus antisemitism at OCR. If these investigations yield toothless results similar to those of CUNY and Michigan, it is highly unlikely that colleges and universities will improve how they deal with antisemitism.
Putting an end to skyrocketing antisemitism on campus involves three things.
First, donors and governments at every level should withhold funds from colleges that fail to hire administrators who will take antisemitism as seriously as they take pronoun offenses or racism directed at people of color.
Second, the OCR must mete out serious consequences to Title VI violators in the form of funding cuts. This may require legislation that specifically mandates withdrawing funding from offending parties. A bill recently introduced by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.)—the University Accountability Act—may be ideal, as it is designed to financially penalize institutions that don’t crack down on antisemitism.
Third, if OCR won’t act, Jewish students and their supporters should turn to the courts. Lori Lowenthal Marcus, the legal director of the Deborah Project, a public-interest Jewish law firm, argues that the CUNY settlement demonstrates the futility of going to OCR and that going to court is more likely to produce “a clearly delineated and productive result,” such as punitive and compensatory fines. As of late May, at least 14 colleges and universities are facing lawsuits over their handling of antisemitism on campus since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
As long as college administrators are allowed to ignore antisemitism on campus and as long as OCR and other government institutions fall short in punishing Jew-hatred, antisemitism will continue to plague Jewish students.
The post Universities Must Be Forced to Address Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
Uncategorized
Toronto police say young people are being recruited online to shoot at synagogues
(JTA) — Police in Toronto announced on Tuesday that they believe young adults are being hired and paid online to shoot at local synagogues.
The announcement follows a string of arrests in connection with shootings at a range of targets in the Canadian city, including multiple synagogues.
“What we know is bad actors are using criminal elements in our city to carry out these dangerous incidents,” Toronto Police Service Chief Myron Demkiw said at a press conference. “It is clear that some of the people hiring these criminals want to create a sense of fear in our communities, including the Jewish community.”
Demkiw said the suspects were being recruited through online networks and offered payments if they filmed themselves engaging in the shootings.
“Who’s paying for this?” he asked. “This is what we are trying to determine.”
The methodology and tactics being used in Toronto appear to mirror those laid out in a U.S. criminal complaint against Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an Iraqi man charged last month in New York with orchestrating attacks on Jewish targets in multiple countries on behalf of Iran since the start of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran in late February. (He railed against the United States while pleading not guilty earlier this month.)
Previously, police in Australia, too, said they believed paid criminals, possibly hired on behalf of Iran, were behind a string of non-lethal incidents targeting Jewish communities there.
No one has been injured during any of the shootings on Jewish targets in Toronto, which in addition to synagogues have included schools and at least one restaurant.
Last week, a Canadian police officer was killed while executing a search warrant connected to a March shooting at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto. The criminal complaint against al-Saadi attributed that shooting to his network.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Toronto police say young people are being recruited online to shoot at synagogues appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Feds investigating antisemitism allegations at American Psychological Association
(JTA) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is opening an antisemitism investigation into the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization for mental health professionals, the agency announced Wednesday.
The investigation stems from several complaints by Jewish and Israeli psychologists alleging that the association has promoted or failed to discipline anti-Israel activism among some of its affinity groups. The complaints also allege that the APA has encouraged “decolonizing therapy” methods that attack Zionism.
These allegations are part of a sweeping complaint filed in August by the legal group Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which has frequently filed similar antisemitism complaints against educational institutions that it says are in violation of federal anti-discrimination rules. This is the center’s first complaint against a healthcare organization to result in a federal investigation.
“We want to see the APA brought into compliance with federal civil rights laws,” Rebecca Harris, litigation staff attorney at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We want the APA to stop promoting discriminatory and harmful psychology practices.”
In its August letter to HHS, the Brandeis Center accuses the APA of being “one of the worst purveyors of anti-Semitism and extremist ideology in healthcare.” It adds, “HHS should not fund groups that use taxpayer dollars to engage in anti-Semitic and discriminatory behavior.”
A representative for the APA did not immediately return a request for comment. In response to recent Congressional inquiries, from both Republicans and Democrats, into similar allegations of antisemitism at the organization, the APA has stated, “Some of our Jewish members and community organizations have voiced concerns about antisemitism within the broader psychology field and within APA’s divisions. We have taken and continue to take those concerns seriously.”
Jewish mental health professionals have been raising concerns about antisemitism and growing anti-Israel sentiment within the profession since Oct. 7, 2023, including in a letter signed by more than 3,500 mental health professionals last year. That letter, referenced in the Brandeis Center complaint, criticizes the APA for failing to discipline a former division president, Lara Sheehi, for various incendiary comments about Zionism.
In another prominent incident, the psychiatrist and bestselling author Bessel van der Kolk faced discipline and apologized for comments that Jewish attendees at a seminar of his deemed antisemitic. In June 2025, Democratic New York Rep. Ritchie Torres urged the APA to address antisemitism in its ranks, prompting the organization to commit to new listening sessions and “strengthening discourse standards.”
Under the Trump administration, HHS has also mounted several antisemitism investigations at medical schools, pulling millions of dollars in federal funding for medical research over the issue.
The APA’s alleged encouragement of “decolonizing therapy,” Harris said, is harmful to Jews and Israelis. “It’s essentially a pathologizing of Zionism and Jewish identity,” she said. (A past president of the organization has advocated for decolonial psychology, and the organization has offered webinars and other training modules based around decolonizing trauma healing.)
The center also alleges that the APA has put up roadblocks to allowing an official Jewish affinity group to form, while excusing inflammatory language about Zionism from an Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African affinity group.
The news of the APA’s federal antisemitism investigation came as the Trump administration announced it would be moving the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which handles antisemitism complaints, to the Department of Justice.
The move, being done as part of a larger effort to dismantle the education department, drew praise from Brandeis Center chair Kenneth Marcus, himself a former OCR official under the first Trump administration. It also drew criticism from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and other Jewish groups that said the move to the justice department would make it harder for students alleging discrimination to file complaints.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Feds investigating antisemitism allegations at American Psychological Association appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
In Britain, a Jewish Culture Month aims to move the conversation beyond Oct. 7
(JTA) — In the almost three years since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, Great Britain has seen “a relentless focus on everything to do with the Jewish community in the public domain, and it’s about antisemitism or Israel,” said Adam Ma’anit, the communications manager for the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Over the past four weeks, a flurry of performances, lectures and art exhibits has been an opportunity to move past that.
The Board of Deputies, which represents a community of diverse and often competing views under its umbrella, created Jewish Culture Month, a first-of-its-kind series held under the banner of “Less Oy, More Joy.” The month was designed to bolster Jewish communal confidence and to introduce wider audiences to aspects of Jewish life that rarely make headlines.
The month, which wrapped up Tuesday, sought to make clear that British Jewish identity is, and always has been, about far more than conflict. “We’re not defined as a community by pain,” Ma’anit told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’ve got great architects, writers, and musicians as well.”
Those artists were featured in more than 150 events over four weeks across the country at major museums and galleries , including London’s British Museum, Oxford’s Bodlein Library, Bath’s Little Theatre Cinema, Nottinghamshire’s National Holocaust Museum and local synagogues and private homes nationwide.
Among them was The Klezmer Village Band, which introduced Jewish culture to primary schools in Plymouth. “We wanted to bring Jewish culture back into the community,” Plymouth Jewish Community Director Louise Clements said. “This is the first time in many years that something like this has happened here.”
One of the band’s musicians, Ilana Cravitz, also noted after the event that “music is a wordless language. People respond from inside — they stop thinking, they feel. And we really saw that today.”
Notables featured throughout the celebrations included British broadcaster and television personality Vanessa Feltz, who spoke at the opening at London’s Freud Museum; comedian Bennett Arron, who performed stand-up routines in Hampstead, London; and acclaimed British artist and vocal Israel critic Anish Kapoor, whose exhibit opening on Tuesday closed out the month.
“Part of Jewish Culture Month is about us celebrating our own culture and being proud, British Jews, and asserting ourselves in an environment where it has been the most challenging to be that very British Jew,” said Ma’anit.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust noted another aspect of the festival soon after it kicked off on May 16. “At a time when division and prejudice continue to affect communities across the country, initiatives like Jewish Culture Month can help build understanding and strengthen social cohesion,” it posted social media.
However, some thought it difficult to focus on social cohesion when discussing contemporary British Jewish identity without discussing how that identity dovetails with British Jews’ relationship with Israel.
It’s something that Jewish Renaissance, the online magazine of Jewish culture, raised ahead of the opening. Freelance writer and former Jewish Quarterly editor Matthew Reisz wrote that while there was definitely diversity in the program, “We seem unlikely to hear much about the deep divisions within the community, not least in relation to Israel/Palestine, or the crucial, though often tense dialogue with other minority communities on both shared and contentious issues.”
Ma’anit insisted that the choice was a deliberate one. “It’s not a rejection of Zionism or distancing ourselves from Israel,” he said. “Quite the opposite. The board’s leadership remains openly supportive of Israel and many of the figures involved in the project have deep personal and family ties to the country.”
Israeli-born Ma’anit is one of those figures. He is the cousin of the Idan family of Nachal Oz, a kibbutz close by the border with Gaza. Eighteen-year-old Maayan Idan was shot and killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 while trying to help her father, Tsachi, hold their safe room door closed. The entire event was livestreamed by the terrorists. Tsachi was abducted into Gaza, where it was believed he was still alive as the war on Gaza raged. It was discovered only later that he had been murdered, with his body finally returned in the hostage deal in February 2025.
Ma’anit, who spent those years lobbying for the hostages’ return, appearing on news programs and organizing hostage vigils in his hometown of Brighton, has been forced to meld the personal with the professional when it comes to the post-Oct. 7 era.
It’s why, he said, Jewish Culture Month is about creating space for aspects of Jewish identity that have been overshadowed post Oct. 7. “The argument is not that Israel is unimportant,” he said, “it’s that Jewish life cannot be reduced to Israel alone.”
Yet even without a focus on Israel and Zionism, the month did not pass without the conflict in the Middle East affecting the program. In May, a culture month lecture titled “Ancient Israel and Judah” at the British Museum had to be postponed, the museum said, because of “security concerns” over potential “disruptions” by protesters who had obtained tickets. The rescheduled event, held June 11, was the best-attended of the entire series, with around 4,000 people joining in person and online.
Ma’anit called the incident “overblown. It was just procedural,” he said. “People fill in the blanks and then it gets out of control.”
However, the speed with which the controversy escalated and elicited angry reactions from many in the community only served to highlight how questions about Jewish visibility and any event with “Israel” in the name — even a reference to thousands of years ago — have become highly charged in the last three years.
“It just shows how on edge the community is,” Ma’anit said.
That has intensified the need for something like Jewish Culture Month in the eyes of many British Jews. Steph Thwaites, head of a group dedicated to helping Jewish publishing professionals navigate an increasingly hostile publishing industry, said after a Jewish Culture Month event on the topic that the professionals felt “a sense of community and a source of comfort,” as well as a space to “combat anti-Jewish racism in publishing and to support Jewish creatives.”
Ultimately, as UK Communities Secretary Steve Reed put it in his speech at the launch of the festivities, Jewish Culture Month “is a time to celebrate Britain’s Jewish community and its contribution to our shared story. It’s a time for coming together. It’s a time for friendship. Jewish experience cannot just be about defending against fear; it also has to be an expression of hope and joy and freedom.”
The post In Britain, a Jewish Culture Month aims to move the conversation beyond Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
