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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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Child Pregnancies Surge in Gaza Amid Reports of Hamas Fighters Demanding Sex From ‘Wives of Martyrs’ for Food
Hamas gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
The sexual depravity that Hamas proudly broadcast to the world during its Oct. 7, 2023, rampage across southern Israel has now show up in Gaza, with video testimonies emerging of pervasive abuse, coercion for food, and an increase in both child marriages and child pregnancies.
In a new bombshell report, the Daily Mail presented findings from both the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) into rising child marriages and an anonymous journalist at Jusoor News who filmed Gaza residents reporting on the exploitation of women.
According to the UNFPA, while pre-war numbers of child brides fell to 11 percent in 2022, a decrease from 26 percent in 2009, marriage records from 2025 showed that at least 400 girls between 14 and 16 had become wives. This number likely only counts a fraction of the total as many such religious ceremonies to theologically justify child abuse go unreported.
Nestor Owomuhangi, whose official title is “UNFPA Representative to Palestine,” explained that war and collapsing humanitarian conditions had exacerbated this regression.
“We are witnessing the dismantling of a generation’s future,” Owomuhangi said.
Multiple men told Jusoor News they had seen or heard of Hamas members abusing women, with one reporting that a Hamas charity organization had blackmailed his neighbor and sought to become her pimp. “They wanted her to whore herself in exchange for a food parcel, or an aid voucher, or 100 shekels,” he said.
Exchange rates on Monday placed 100 shekels as equal to $33.48.
A fighter in Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, confirmed the sex crimes, saying that Hamas members took advantage of the “wives of martyrs” in a tent in the Gharabli area in Deir al-Balah. He was told to say nothing but chose to tear down the tent, declaring, “We told them it was an insult to our honor and dignity.”
Another anonymous man in Gaza said “we were contacted by the wife of a friend. She had asked a Qassam Brigades commander to help her, but he took advantage of her. His behavior is disgraceful. We investigated the matter and found her in a tent in the Gharabli area where a bunch of Qassam members were taking advantage of her.”
He also reported that “we informed the leadership, but we were told we had to keep silent about it.”
An unnamed woman said she had experienced sexual harassment from a man at a Hamas charity who appeared religious when she sought help. “I asked him how he could talk to me like that. And he should be ashamed,” she said. “I told him I would expose him. He said, ‘You cannot expose me; I am the government here.’”
One anonymous elderly woman said that “one charity in Gaza is unfortunately the biggest perpetrator. From its chairman all the way down to its doorman, it’s being done by all their employees and members, as though it’s an organization set up for sexual harassment, psychological abuse, and harassing young women.”
Reports of rising sexual abuse against girls and widows come as Hamas continues to resist pressure to disarm in accordance with the US-backed ceasefire and peace plan for Gaza.
On Sunday, the New York Times reported that two Hamas officials had said the Palestinian terrorist group planned to surrender thousands of automatic rifles and small weapons which belonged to Gaza police and other internal security organizations. However, this would not entail full disarmament, which according to the peace plan is a key prerequisite for beginning major reconstruction of Gaza and for Israel, whose military currently controls 53 percent of the enclave, to further withdraw its force.
According to several reports, Hamas recently rejected the Board of Peace’s eight-month phased plan for the terrorist group to disarm. US President Donald Trump proposed the Board of Peace in September to oversee his plan to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, subsequently saying it would address other conflicts.
Meanwhile, Hamas is further tightening its grip on the nearly half of Gazan territory it still controls, where the vast majority of the population lives.
Since the initial ceasefire took effect in October, Hamas has imposed a brutal crackdown, sparking clashes with rival militias as it seeks to eliminate any opposition.
The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) — an Israel-based research institute — released a report last month explaining how the US-Israeli war against the Islamic regime in Iran had disrupted the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, which required Hamas to disarm in order for Israeli troops to withdraw.
Earlier this month, Hamas demanded that the Israel Defense Forces exit first before giving up weapons.
ITIC’s analysts warned that this delay could enable Hamas — which still controls approximately 47 percent of Gaza — to rearm. The Islamist terrorists are reportedly smuggling in guns from Egypt and creating weapons internally.
In late March, Turkey reaffirmed its longstanding support for Hamas when the terrorist group’s senior negotiator Khalil Al-Khaya and its political bureau delegation met with Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın. Kalın had also met with senior Hamas leaders in Istanbul the previous week.
According to the Middle East Monitor, the Hamas delegation “expressed its appreciation to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for Turkey’s efforts to achieve peace in Gaza.”
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Boy George Defends Eurovision Appearance Despite Israel Controversy, Expresses Solidarity With ‘Jewish Friends’
Boy George singing at The SSE Arena Wembley, Dec. 14, 2016. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
British music legend Boy George said he will not turn his back on his Jewish friends in response to those criticizing his scheduled appearance at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, amid controversy surrounding Israel’s participation in the annual competition.
“I played in Israel. I got a letter from [Pink Floyd co-founder] Roger Waters telling me not to go to Israel and I went, because I’ve got a lot of fans in Israel,” the 1980s music icon told Sky News. “Plus, in the UK, I have a lot of Jewish friends — and I know them to be beautiful, good, kind, smart, loving people. So expecting me to turn against my friends is a lunacy, and it’s not going to happen.”
He also told the Daily Mail on Sunday, outside the annual London Eurovision Party: “I have many, many Jewish friends that I’ve had since I was 15 or 16 years old. Are people asking me as a principled human being to turn my back on my Jewish friends? It’s not going to happen; it’s never going to happen.”
Boy George explained that from the start of his career, he has been wearing a Star of David. “Go back and look at pictures of Culture Club,” he added, referring to his band. “I am so affiliated with Jewish people. I am not necessarily affiliated with Israel. I don’t really have an opinion on that. But the job of music is to unite people.”
Boy George and Italian artist Senhit will represent San Marino in the Eurovision this year with their song “Superstar.” The competition will start next month and take place in Vienna, Austria. Boy George and more than 1,000 other members of the entertainment industry signed an open letter recently that expressed support for Israel’s participation in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest.
Late last year, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Slovenia announced they were pulling out of the 2026 Eurovision after its organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, approved Israel’s participation in the contest.
Boy George’s late mother was from Ireland. When asked how he feels participating in the Eurovision this year after Ireland withdrew from the competition, he replied: “Ireland is my mother’s home country. I hope they’re not too angry. But if they are, that’s out of my control.”
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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.
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