Illustrative: Police officers block a street as pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in protest against Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plans to proscribe the “Palestine Action” group in the coming weeks, in London, Britain, June 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy

Police in central London arrested an unnamed woman, 32, on Thursday and began an investigation into a potential hate crime after she allegedly attacked employees and patrons at a Reubens Cafe and Bakery, a Kosher establishment, after yelling antisemitic statements.

In a statement, law enforcement described how the woman’s remarks “related to the conflict in the Middle East.” They suspected her of racially aggravated criminal damage and assaults before later releasing her on bail.

An X user with the name “Akiva” and the handle “@kivafein” shared a video of the encounter on Sunday which reached more than 100,000 views as on Monday, writing that “while sitting at a bakery in London, a friend of mine was assaulted in an antisemitic attack just for being Jewish and eating at a kosher bakery. This isn’t history. This is now. If you’re still pretending antisemitism isn’t real, just watch. Don’t look away. Don’t stay silent.”

The blurry, 1-minute and 20-second video starts from the perspective of the victim and shows the alleged attacker bellowing at her incoherently. The phone perspective rises from capturing the bowl of golden fries – or “chips” to use the local vernacular – on the table. The woman approaching has long brown hair, wears a dark gray baseball cap, black tank-top, and yells “terrorist” before flipping over the fries and smacking the phone down onto the ground.

The perspective shifts for 10 seconds to provide a view of the underside of the table before pink fingers emerge to pick up the phone and the victim continues filming her assailant who has walked over to another cafe table to loudly express her feelings about Jews. “She threw my phone on the floor, it’s broken,” the young woman behind the camera says in a British accent.

The view then returns to the suspect lecturing people at the other table, her words out of earshot. She jabs her finger in the air multiple times, pointing at people in the cafe. Then the woman suddenly points toward the camera and yells “I ask them!” She then shifts her attention back and swears at her interlocutors in the cafe with whom she had argued.

While sitting at a bakery in London, a friend of mine was assaulted in an antisemitic attack just for being Jewish and eating at a kosher bakery.

This isn’t history. This is now. If you’re still pretending antisemitism isn’t real, just watch. Don’t look away. Don’t stay silent. pic.twitter.com/qSB8N4eoXJ

— Akiva (@kivafein) July 20, 2025

“In general, we couldn’t understand half the things she was saying,” Yael Isaac told Jewish News. “But at one point during her tantrum, I asked her, ‘What if I don’t support Israel?’ She said she didn’t care and that I was Jewish, so that’s all that mattered to her.”

Instagram creator Moriel Lee Shviki witnessed the attack and said, “Unfortunately, it took the police quite a long time to get there. She went on to harass a lot of other people.”

The UK-based watchdog group Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) shared the video and wrote, “Now it seems that they are freeing Palestine by throwing food over Jews at a kosher restaurant. Do you recognize our country anymore? Thuggery is commonplace and the people of the solidarity movements and anti-racism awareness initiatives have gone awfully quiet.”

CAA shared the statistic that “fewer than half of British Jews (43%) feel welcome in the UK” and asked, “With attacks like these, is it any wonder?” The group noted that “police have made an arrest and are reportedly treating this as a hate crime. Those responsible for any attack must face the full force of the law.”

Akiva followed up the video with a post where he praised the cafe staff, writing, “If you’re based in London or the area, please show love and support to Reubens Bakery. They made sure my friend and all those affected were comforted and safe. They called authorities right away and took care of the scene. They need and deserve the support.”

Reubens provides customers “a taste of NYC in the heat of LDN.” The menu offers a wide variety of bagel options and New York deli staples, while also listing London classics like fish and chips with tartar sauce for £24.

On Monday, meanwhile, the UK’s National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) shared a report with The Jerusalem Post which polled 138 Jewish teachers. The research showed that approximately 51 percent of respondents said they experienced antisemitism at school in the last year. Seventy-eight percent of those who reported such incidents said it occurred against them personally while 37 percent said they witnessed the hate and 38 percent heard about the abuse.

The Jewish teachers also revealed seeing swastika graffiti in schools (44 percent) and hearing Nazi-related comments (39 percent). Teachers working in secular schools experienced antisemitism more regularly (79 percent) compared to faith-based institutions (29 percent).

The post Woman Arrested Following Antisemitic Insults, Spilled Fries, Alleged Assault at Kosher Cafe in London first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs

Israel Studies as an interdisciplinary field is in danger of being crowded out of American higher education by infectious ideologies which are having success in confecting a consensus that it normalizes the existence of a country which undermines progressive values, according to a new report published by The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI).

The report — written by University of Haifa professor Sara Yael Hirschhorn and titled, “Israel Studies at American Studies at American Universities: Is There a Path Forward?” — argues Israel Studies in the American academy is in decline, a downward trend that is being accelerated by a cultural milieu fostered by a consortium of interest groups that are hostile to the existence of Israel as a Jewish nation-state and wish to see their antipathy reflected in college curricula.

“Despite the fact that the field is well-funded, has attracted the interest of both the scholarly and lay community, and could be a constructive intervention in campus debates at this moment of crisis, it is currently epistemologically and pedagogically incompatible with a campus climate since 10/7 [Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel] that is increasingly anti-Zionist, pro-BDS [boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel] and even cheers Hamas,” Hirschhorn writes.

“The prevalence of Ethnic Studies and its associated paradigms, the impact of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI])frameworks that all but exclude Jews and Zionists, the influence of lavish Middle Eastern funding on university programs and politics, and the deterioration of campus culture in the age of ‘cancel culture’ have profoundly constrained the ability of Israel Studies to flourish in the Western academy,” she adds.

Hirschhorn goes on to argue that in addition to being surrounded by enemies, Israel Studies is working through a crisis of identity caused by competing visions of its scope and mission. As an interdisciplinary field serving as a “big tent” for other disciplines relevant to the study of Israel, she says it winds up being open to “almost everyone who wants to affiliate” even as they undertake courses of study that are “haphazardly cobbled together into what has been called a discipline, with its attendant academic conferences, publications, employment, grants, and community that often lack coherence.” Israel studies scholars, she adds, betrayed the field’s nebulous characters themselves during a 2024 conference held at Charles University in Prague where virtually no one delivered a presentation which came remotely near to addressing the conference theme, which was Israel Studies from a “European and international perspective.”

The conference did not present a coherent vision, “nor did there seem to be any hierarchy of priorities between, say national security of Israel or queer histories of mandate Palestine,” she continues. “The awarding of prizes and grants at the conference were decided by closed-door committees based only on a vague set of published qualifications, leaving much of the process opaque. The balance of Israeli scholars compared to other nationalities was all quite evident and may signal a decline in the field in the West. Furthermore, attendance seemed self-selecting — many notable figures who hold chairs in the field of Israel Studies were absent.”

In its weakened state, Israel Studies is vulnerable to attacks by DEI, Hirschhorn later said, connecting the seams of her thesis.

“On its face, one might think that DEI would be beneficial for Jews as a small religious and ethnic minority in the United States, but in practice it has excluded their concerns from its remit and has even been rebuked for both ignoring and fomenting antisemitism on university campuses,” she explains. “The pro-Palestinian agenda was implicitly adopted as a correct manifestation of DEI priorities, which extended support to tent encampments and other student protests. In some cases, DEI administrators themselves were revealed to have engaged in anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity on social media … and in training materials.”

All signs, she concluds, portend Israel Studies’ becoming “administratively homeless” as BDS advocates amass power in campus bureaucracies and the field itself “takes no concrete steps toward self-definition or embraces an opportunity to ring-fence it activities with the support of increased donor funding.” In a worst-case scenario, “it might simply be absorbed into the growing field of Palestine Studies or completely abolished by university administrators.”

JPPI president Yedidia Stern implored the Jewish academic community to take Hirschhorn’s report seriously.

“This is more than a crisis of curriculum — it’s a crisis of intellectual freedom,” he said in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “Israel is being silenced in spaces that once welcomed open academic exploration. We cannot allow this erasure to continue unchecked.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Israel Studies Under Attack at US Universities, New Report Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Pro-Hamas activists gather in Washington Square Park for a rally following a protest march held in response to an NYPD sweep of an anti-Israel encampment at New York University in Manhattan, May 3, 2024. Photo: Matthew Rodier/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

US Reps. Rudy Yakym (R-IN) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) have introduced a bipartisan resolution condemning the controversial phrase “globalize the intifada,” a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that references previous periods of sustained Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israelis.

“This is a term that calls for violence against Jews,” Yakym said in a statement last week, when the resolution was unveiled.

Citing the rise of antisemitism and anti-Jewish hate crimes across the United States, Yakym added, “We cannot allow that this type of hate speech to go unchecked in our society.”

The term “intifada,” or uprising, refers to two periods (the first beginning in 1987 and the second in 2000) when Palestinian terrorists ramped up violence targeting Israelis that included suicide bombings, shootings, and stabbings. Critics argue that invoking the intifada in a global context promotes the spread of political violence and implicitly endorses attacks on Jews worldwide.

Jewish organizations and watchdog groups have condemned the slogan “globalize the intifada” as a form of hate speech that blurs the line between criticism of Israeli policy and incitement against Jewish communities, especially amid a rise in antisemitic incidents globally.

House Resolution 588 was introduced to the House on Thursday, and it was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs the same day. Eleven other members of Congress co-sponsored the legislation: Reps. Jack Bergman (R-MI), Thomas Suozzi (D-NY), Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), Tim Moore (R-NC), Gabe Evans (R-CO), Randy Fine (R-FL), Pat Harrigan (R-NC), John Rutherford (R-FL), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Charles Fleischmann (R-TN), Troy Nehls (R-TX), and Andy Harris (R-MD). 

“There’s no two sides to this,” Gottheimer said in a statement, emphasizing that the slogan represents a “call for violence” against the Jewish community.

“There’s no way to look at this from any direction and say, ‘It’s OK to say globalize the intifada,’” Gottheimer stressed. 

The resolution comes amid controversy surrounding New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s recent defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada” during an interview on “The Bulwark Podcast.” Mamdani declined to condemn the slogan, arguing that it has been misinterpreted and represents a “desperate desire for equality and equal rights.”

“I am someone who, I would say am, is less comfortable with the banning of certain words, and that I think is more evocative of a Trump-style approach of how to lead a country,” Mamdani said.

“I think what’s difficult also, is that the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic, because it’s a word that means ‘struggle,’” he continued. “And, as a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which that Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted.”

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an effort by Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland to fight back as they were set to be deported to concentration camps and killed as part of the Nazis’ campaign to exterminate Jewry during the Holocaust.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum subsequently issued a blistering repudiation of Mamdani’s comments, calling them “outrageous and especially offensive.”

However, facing mounting pressure from Jewish community leaders, business executives, and fellow Democrats, Mamdani last week moved to clarify his stance on “globalize the intifada,” signaling he will discourage its use while continuing to back the broader anti-Israel movement it represents.

Since winning the Democratic nomination for the upcoming New York City mayoral general election, Mamdani’s views regarding Israel and the Jewish community have come under intensifying scrutiny. 

In 2021, Mamdani issued public support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel, claiming that support for the effort is growing within New York City. “The tide is turning. The fight for justice is here,” he said at the time.

That same year, the progressive firebrand also called for prohibiting New York lawmakers from visiting Israel, asserting that “every elected [official] must be pressured to stand with Palestinians.”

The left-wing lawmaker has also vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing the Israeli premier of making military decisions while in New York that “killed many innocent people” and citing the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s arrest warrant against Netanyahu.

Mamdani also drew criticism for appearing on the podcast of controversial far-left streamer Hasan Piker—a social media personality who has called for the complete destruction of Israel and has voiced support for terrorist groups.

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