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You Can’t Promote Hate Against the Majority of the World’s Jews and Just Call It Politics
“Show Your Jewish Pride” rally at George Washington University G Street Park on May 2, 2024. Photo: Dion J. Pierre
The recent decision by the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice v. MIT has been widely mischaracterized as a judicial declaration that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” It was not that.
The court did not issue any sweeping statement about the nature of anti-Zionism. Rather, it affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and a pro-Israel group, focusing narrowly on the legal threshold for harassment under Federal civil rights law (Title VI).
The First Circuit held that campus protests and anti-Zionist rhetoric, however offensive, are generally forms of political speech protected by the First Amendment. It concluded that the plaintiffs’ allegations failed to show “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” harassment or “deliberate indifference” by MIT — emphasizing that the university had taken steps to address the situation. In doing so, the court avoided the broader debate over when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism.
That legal restraint is understandable. But the case highlights an urgent cultural and moral failure: the persistent unwillingness of elites, including some in the Jewish world, to recognize and address anti-Zionism for what it is — the latest mutation of the world’s oldest hatred.
Anti-Zionism as the Heir to Older Hatreds
As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and one of the foremost moral philosophers of our age — warned, “The greatest mutation of antisemitism in our time is the denial to the Jewish people alone the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.”
Antisemitism, Sacks wrote, never disappears; it mutates — from religion to race to nation.
Anti-Zionism borrows from each earlier form. From Christian antisemitism, it inherits the charge of Jewish moral corruption — the idea that Jews act with singular malice. From racial antisemitism, it takes the belief in a people collectively tainted and unfit to belong among others. From modern Henry Ford style antisemitism, it adapts the conspiracy that Jews secretly control governments and media — projected now onto Israel instead of individuals.
The same libels that once fueled pogroms — Jews poisoning wells, murdering children, or orchestrating global cabals — now reappear in “human rights” reports and social media threads. “Jews rule the world” has become “Israel controls Washington,” a trope embraced by overt Jew-haters like David Duke as “ZOG” (Zionist Occupied Government). The medieval libel that Jews “murder children for their blood” has become “Zionists murder children.”
The Globalization of an Obsession
The First Circuit’s failure to see how this ideological continuity operates in practice leaves Jewish citizens vulnerable in an environment where anti-Zionism functions as socially acceptable antisemitism.
Before 1948, antisemites were obsessed with Jews as a source of cosmic evil. Today’s anti-Zionists display the same fixation — only now it is directed at the one Jewish state. Israel, smaller than New Jersey and home to less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population, faces opprobrium with an intensity no other nation faces.
China can imprison a million Uyghurs without prompting global boycotts. Russia can annex Crimea and level Mariupol without igniting campus “divestment” campaigns. Yet Israel alone — the world’s only Jewish state — becomes the singular object of global condemnation. The United Nations has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined. That is not mere “criticism.” It is pathology.
A Movement Against the Majority of Jews
This obsession also targets most Jews themselves. Surveys consistently show that over 80% of Jews worldwide identify with Zionism — the belief that the Jewish people have the right to a national home in their ancestral land. Nearly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel.
To be anti-Zionist, therefore, is to oppose the national aspirations of most Jews and the existence of the state that is home to roughly half of them. The claim that anti-Zionism is merely “political” collapses under this reality. Imagine a movement dedicated to dismantling Italy while insisting it is not anti-Italian, or one demanding the abolition of Armenia while professing no hatred of Armenians. No other nation’s legitimacy is contested this way. Only the Jewish State — and by extension, the Jewish people — is told its existence is conditional.
Old Tropes in New Garb
Haviv Rettig Gur, senior political analyst at The Times of Israel and a brilliant commentator on Jewish history and identity, has written that antisemitism “does not persist because it hates Jews; it persists because it needs Jews — as a canvas on which societies project their anxieties and hatreds.” Anti-Zionism performs precisely this role today. It allows movements and governments to define their virtue by condemning Israel, recasting Jews once again as the world’s moral scapegoat.
The pre-1948 demand that Jews prove their loyalty and moral purity has been transferred to the Jewish state. Every Israeli act of self-defense becomes a test of Jewish worthiness. Every imperfection becomes proof of collective evil. It is no coincidence that antisemitic incidents spike worldwide whenever Israel is forced to defend itself. The emotional and rhetorical link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is direct, measurable, and undeniable.
The Need for Legal and Moral Clarity
Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute and author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (2018), writes that, “Zionism is the most audacious attempt in modern times to unite faith and peoplehood, memory and sovereignty.” To deny that attempt its legitimacy is to strip the Jewish story of coherence — to say Jews may exist only as victims, never as a nation capable of defending itself.
The US Supreme Court will likely have future opportunities to address cases like StandWithUs v. MIT. When it does, it should affirm that discrimination does not always come wearing a swastika or a white hood. Sometimes it arrives cloaked in the language of “social justice” or “anti-colonialism.” But its targets are the same, and its logic — denying Jews what it grants all others — is unchanged.
This challenge is not only legal but cultural. It demands that we gain the moral and intellectual clarity to recognize anti-Zionism for what it is: the latest mutation of an ancient hatred.
If Jewish history teaches anything, it is that ideas matter — especially poisonous ones. The Supreme Court now has a chance to affirm that civil-rights protections apply to Jews too — even, and especially, when the hatred against them pretends to be virtue.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
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‘Reminds me of Anne Frank’: Jewish seniors and Holocaust survivors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers
(JTA) — About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments.
“That reminds me of Anne Frank,” Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.”
The seniors were aware of something that is only beginning to dawn on the rest of the country: that in addition to the aggressive immigration enforcement operations underway in Minnesota and elsewhere, the Trump administration has moved to cancel Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from a handful of countries once deemed too unsafe to return to.
Earlier this week, a judge paused the end of TPS for Venezuelans. But barring any 11th-hour changes, about 350,000 Haitians will lose their status on Tuesday — ending their right to live and work in the United States legally and putting them at risk of immediate detention and deportation.
The deadline has sent waves of panic through communities with many Haitian immigrants, including in Ohio — where the Trump team took aim at Haitians in 2024 — and in South Florida.
While the effects will be sharpest for the immigrants themselves, the end of TPS for Haitians is sure to have a ripple effect. At Sinai Residences, for example, 9% of staff members are Haitians with TPS, and they won’t be able to work after Tuesday. (In total, 69% of the center’s staff are foreign-born; caregiving industries are heavily dependent on immigrant workers.)
To make up for the expected losses, the center is redoubling its hiring efforts. Representatives from other Jewish senior living homes say they will need to turn to temp agencies, suggesting a growing inconsistency in senior care. Whatever happens, residents are likely to see their own costs go up as a worker shortage is exacerbated.
But the blows will be felt in other ways, too. Seniors in long-term care facilities develop deep bonds with their staff. Blumberg’s residents, she said, “can relate to not being wanted, to being kicked out and coming to America for salvage and freedom and safety and shelter. And they want to be able to protect the Haitians.”
Temporary protected status for Haitians and similar communities dates back to the Reagan administration. Because it was offered by executive action, it can be undone without congressional approval.
“Temporary means temporary,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said about the administration’s decision to end the status. Late Wednesday a federal judge ruled that Noem had exceeded her authority by ending the status, but additional court intervention would be needed before Wednesday to delay or deter the action.
With a rapidly aging American population, experts say, the country’s seniors will especially feel the effects of restricting immigrant laborers. The policy, to those who come face to face with the workers and those they serve every day, makes no sense.
“We have a workforce filled with people who weathered COVID in a nursing home. This is no small thing. And now you’re saying they don’t deserve to be in this country? I don’t think so,” one Jewish senior living director, who requested anonymity so as not to draw attention to the center and its workers, told JTA. “There will be no caregivers in this country if our isolationist policies are all enforced.”
Some argue that Jews, especially, should be attuned to these dynamics.
“The Jewish community employs these populations to care for the most vulnerable among us. And it creates major challenges,” said Reuben Rotman, president and CEO of the Network of Jewish Human Services Agencies. Many Jewish social services agencies also serve immigrants as clients, he noted: “This is part of our Jewish identity and ethos, to serve our full community with Jewish values and welcoming the stranger. So this is all connected.”
Rotman continued: “The Jewish community depends on these populations. And for them to feel so vulnerable that they’re afraid to go to work because they might get picked up and deported, or they might get picked up and sent to a Texas detention center, nobody should have to live with that fear.”
Ruth Katz, president and CEO of the Association for Jewish Aging Services, told JTA that senior living executives have no choice now but to familiarize themselves with the federal immigration system.
“They’re feeling the need to share as much information as possible, get as smart about immigration policy and immigration enforcement as they can,” Katz said. “Because they’re all worried about this.”
Back at Sinai, residents aren’t waiting for careful plans to be laid. Every worker soon to lose their status is receiving “$2,000 and a hug” from the center; many residents are contributing more out of their own pockets.
Residents mounted a letter-writing campaign to Washington (only Rep. Jared Moskowitz, the Florida Jewish Democrat, responded, Blumberg said). They are asking what more they can do.
Some Sinai residents will be attending a weekend protest against ICE being held at a local Home Depot, where ICE agents across the country have been seizing day laborers.
And, of course, there is the Anne Frank offer. Others — including, this week, the governor of Minnesota — have drawn criticism for invoking the Holocaust’s most famous victim in connection with Trump’s immigration policies. But given what awaits those who are deported, Blumberg said, the comparison makes sense.
“The Haitians cannot go back to Haiti. They’ll be murdered,” she said. “The gangs have taken over the country, and it is life-threatening for them. And our residents do recognize and realize that.”
The post ‘Reminds me of Anne Frank’: Jewish seniors and Holocaust survivors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers appeared first on The Forward.
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With the last hostage released, is American Jewish unity over?
When the remains of the last Israeli hostage in Gaza returned to Israel this week, Scott Spindel, a lawyer in Encino, Calif., finally took off the thick steel dog tag he had put on after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
His friend Lauren Krieger, an orthopedic surgeon, did the same. And he pulled down the last of the names of the hostages remaining in Gaza that his wife, Jenn Roth Krieger, had placed in the window of their Santa Monica home.
During the nearly 28 months that Israeli hostages remained in captivity in Gaza, Krieger, 61, and Spindel, 55, consistently argued over Israel’s war in the strip.
“Lauren would say that we probably were a little too extreme,” Spindel, whose daughter serves in the IDF, told me in a telephone interview. “I don’t think we blew up enough buildings.”
But those differences paled beside their mutual concern over the fate of the hostages.
“Unfortunately,” said Spindel, “it took tragedy to pull us together.”
So it was across the American Jewish landscape. Then, the body of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili, the 24-year-old Israeli police officer killed on Oct. 7 and taken by Hamas terrorists back into the enclave, was returned to Israel — the last of the hostages to come home.
Jews from across the political spectrum unpinned yellow ribbon buttons from their lapels, removed the hostage posters from their synagogues, and folded up and put away the blue-and-white flags displayed as a symbol of the missing Israelis.
The marches and vigils American Jews held on behalf of the hostages — small but meaningful echoes of the mass rallies that roiled Israel — came to a quiet halt.
Jewish unity is forged in adversity. Without it, we are apt to find enemies among ourselves. And as painful as the hostage saga was, it unified an otherwise fractious American Jewish community in a time of crisis.
Without that common concern, are even deeper rifts our future?
“As committed and connected as we were,” said Spindel, “it doesn’t change the fact that we also were still divided about solutions.”
A family in distress
Across the United States, synagogues of all religious and political bents regularly joined in the same Acheinu prayer for the release and return of the hostages.
“Our family, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress,” the prayer begins — a wholly accurate summation of the totality of Jewish concern.
Surveys showed that the hostages unified American Jews even when Israel’s Gaza campaign divided them. An October 2025 Washington Post poll found that a plurality of American Jews disapproved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza — but a whopping 79% said they were “very concerned” about the hostages.
There have been other moments in recent Jewish history when calamity created unity. The 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, brought together the vast majority of American Jews in mourning, even those who opposed his policies.
And, of course the brutal Oct. 7 attack, which claimed almost 1,200 lives, created a near-universal sense of shock and sorrow.
But the hostage crisis may have had an even deeper emotional — and perhaps political — impact.
“Even for people who were not affiliated Jewishly, those hostages struck a deep, deep chord,” Krieger told me. “It felt personal. I don’t think we’ve had that level of collective trauma in our lifetimes in that same way.”
And a family divided
The hostage crisis bonded American Jews to one another, and to their Israeli counterparts, at a time when enormous political rifts were opening within their communities.
In the U.S., as in Israel, there were sharp disagreements over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war and whether he was even prioritizing the hostages’ safety.
And the encampments and protests against the war at college campuses — in which many Jewish students participated, and to which many others objected — created even deeper divisions over support for the Jewish state.
But if the hostage issue didn’t erase such differences, it muted them. Krieger and Spindel could frustrate each other in conversations about the conduct of the war, or American support for it. But in the end, they were both in that 79% that the Washington Post poll identified.
What will hold them — and the rest of us — together, now?
The hostage crisis provided something history unfortunately bestows upon Jews with regularity: an external enemy that transcended ideological differences. With it gone, American Jews return to what they’ve always been — a community bound by tradition, and riven by politics.
Krieger and Spindel have already resumed their arguments. But even though the dog tags are gone, they’re both still wearing Jewish stars on silver chains around their necks. When someone admires Krieger’s, he takes it off and gives it to them. He buys his metal stars in bulk on Amazon, and has given away dozens since Oct. 7.
“I want people to feel like I do,” he said, “like we’re a peoplehood worth cherishing.”
Worth cherishing — even though we can’t agree on much else.
The post With the last hostage released, is American Jewish unity over? appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran President Says Trump, Netanyahu, Europe Stirred Tensions in Protests
Amnesty International Greek activists and Iranians living in Athens hold candles and placards in front of the Greek Parliament to support the people of Iran, in Athens, Greece, January 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that US, Israeli and European leaders had exploited Iran’s economic problems, incited unrest and provided people with the means to “tear the nation apart” in recent protests.
The two-week long nationwide protests, which began in late December over an economic crisis marked by soaring inflation and rising living costs, have abated after a bloody crackdown by the clerical authorities that US-based rights group HRANA says has killed at least 6,563, including 6,170 protesters and 214 security forces.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told CNN Turk that 3,100, including 2,000 security forces, had been killed.
The US, Israeli and European leaders tried to “provoke, create division, and supplied resources, drawing some innocent people into this movement,” Pezeshkian said in a live state TV broadcast.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced support for the demonstrators, saying the US was prepared to take action if Iran continued to kill protesters. US officials said on Friday that Trump was reviewing his options but had not decided whether to strike Iran.
Israel’s Ynet news website said on Friday that a US Navy destroyer had docked at the Israeli port of Eilat.
Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Europeans “rode on our problems, provoked, and were seeking — and still seek — to fragment society,” said Pezeshkian.
“They brought them into the streets and wanted, as they said, to tear this country apart, to sow conflict and hatred among the people and create division,” Pezeshkian said.
“Everyone knows that the issue was not just a social protest,” he added.
Regional allies including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have been engaging in diplomatic efforts to prevent a military confrontation between Washington and Tehran.
The US is demanding that Iran curb its missile program if the two nations are to instead resume talks, but Iran has rejected that demand.
Foreign Minister Araqchi said in Turkey on Tuesday that missiles would never be the subject of any negotiations.
In response to US threats of military action, Araqchi said Tehran was ready for either negotiations or warfare, and also ready to engage with regional countries to promote stability and peace.
“Regime change is a complete fantasy. Some have fallen for this illusion,” Araqchi told CNN Turk. “Our system is so deeply rooted and so firmly established that the comings and goings of individuals make no difference.”