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When Jews really did wage a ‘war on Christmas’
(JTA) — On a frigid winter’s day in 1906, tens of thousands of Jewish parents in New York’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn kept their children home from school.
It wasn’t a snow day, but a protest: Activists and the Yiddish press had called for a boycott of the Christmas assemblies and pageants that they knew Jewish children would be obliged to attend on the day before the holiday.
“Jews Object to Christmas in the Schools,” blared the New York Times. The Brooklyn Eagle warned that “agitators” sought to rob Christian children of their traditions. The boycott was, depending on the source, a valiant cry for religious freedom, or the first shot in the 100-year-plus “war on Christmas.”
The episode is the subject of historian Scott D. Seligman’s new book, “The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906,” which reconstructs how a seemingly local dispute in one Brooklyn school exploded into a test case for religious freedom and civic belonging.
More than a century later, Seligman suggests, the issues it raised — over religion in public schools and the boundaries of church and state — remain strikingly familiar.
“As soon as I stumbled on the story, I knew there’d be a book,” said Seligman, who grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1960s, when schoolchildren were still made to recite the Lord’s Prayer. “I was that kid in public school who always wondered why we were praying like Christians, and even why Christmas was a legal holiday.”
The book is the third installment in what’s become a trilogy about Jews engaged in mass action during the first part of the 20th century. “The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902” (2020) recalled a successful consumer uprising led by Lower East Side Jewish women fed up with the high cost of beef. In “The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral” (2024), Seligman explored how a vicious anti-Jewish riot on the Lower East Side led the city’s fractious Jewish community to organize as never before.
In practical terms, the Christmas boycott accomplished little, and even led to an antisemitic backlash. But it set a precedent for Jewish civic activism — and for a broader national debate about religion in public education that would stretch into the 21st century.
The spark came a year earlier, in December 1905, at Public School 174 in Brownsville. The Brooklyn neighborhood was a dense warren of immigrant Jews, many newly arrived from Eastern Europe, who eagerly sent their children to the public schools that were being filled nearly as fast as they could be built or renovated.
“The Catholics gave up on the public schools as irredeemably Protestant. The Jews loved public schools — they were a ticket to acculturation and advancement in a way they’d never had in the old country,” said Seligman. “All they wanted was to get the religious influence out.”
In a school assembly the day before Christmas, F. F. Harding, the school’s Presbyterian principal, read aloud from a text called “Gems of Wisdom from Bible Literature and Proverbs” and then addressed his 500 pupils, nearly all Jews.
“Now, boys and girls,” he said, “at this time of year I want you all to have the feeling of Christ in you. … Be like Christ.”
That message did not sit well with Augusta (“Gussie”) Herbert, a 14-year-old seventh grader. The daughter of a Jewish lawyer, Herbert stood up in front of the assembled students and asked why the Christian religion was being taught in a public school.
Her boldness shocked classmates and administrators alike. But she wasn’t alone. Dozens of Jewish children went home and told their parents that Christmas hymns and Bible readings had been part of their school day. Within days, Brownsville’s Jewish community was in an uproar.
Herbert’s father, Edward Herbert, brought the matter to Albert Lucas, a 47-year-old English-born activist who served as secretary of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.
Lucas, born Abraham Abrahamson in Liverpool, was already a veteran of Jewish communal battles. He had led campaigns against Christian “settlement houses” that sought to convert Jewish children with free meals and holiday gifts. To him, the creeping Christianization of public schools was a subtler but equally serious threat.
“Lucas believed the schools were the front line in preserving Jewish identity in America,” Seligman said. “He saw it as his duty to protect children from being made to feel like second-class citizens.”
Lucas wrote to the city’s superintendent of schools, William Henry Maxwell, who had already issued a circular in 1903 reminding principals that “hymns containing reference to the tenets of any religious sect are out of place in unsectarian schools.” But enforcement was lax, and many teachers — Jewish and Christian alike — ignored the rule.
When word of Harding’s assembly reached Lucas, he pounced. Within two days, a petition circulated in Brownsville accusing the principal of “systematically Christianizing” Jewish children. The Hebrew Standard and Jewish Comment denounced the “proselytizing” in public schools, while the Brooklyn Eagle, the borough’s popular daily, defended the principal as merely promoting “good morals.”
In an unprecedented move, the Board of Education held a public hearing to weigh charges that a school principal had promoted religion. It drew a raucous crowd of 1,500.
The hearing revealed sharp divisions even within the Jewish community. Some defended Harding as a well-meaning educator; others accused him of deliberately blurring the line between civic virtue and Christian faith. In the end, the board gave Harding a slap on the wrist, in what Seligman calls “an early Easter gift.”
For Lucas and the Orthodox Union, the Harding verdict only confirmed that quiet lobbying wasn’t enough. They began to organize Jewish parents directly.
Their campaign reflected the broader social tensions of the time. Progressive reformers such as Superintendent Maxwell believed that public schools were engines of “Americanization,” meant to instill not only English and arithmetic but also civic and moral values. For many teachers, “being a good American” was synonymous with “being a good Christian.”
At the same time, America’s Jews were divided along class and ethnic lines. Uptown, German-born Jews — who had arrived decades earlier — feared that the noisy protests of their Yiddish-speaking coreligionists would jeopardize their own fragile acceptance. Downtown, newer immigrants saw those elites as assimilationist and out of touch.
By December 1906, with no change in policy, the Orthodox Union and the Yiddish press decided to act. Two newspapers — the Morgen Zhurnal and the Yidishes Tageblatt — called on Jewish parents to keep their children home on Dec. 24, when schools would hold Christmas exercises.
By most accounts, the response was overwhelming. In the Lower East Side and Brownsville, entire classrooms emptied out. Contemporary estimates suggested that between one third and twothirds of Jewish students were absent from heavily Jewish districts — perhaps 20,000 to 25,000 children citywide.
Anti-Jewish letters to the editor poured in, accusing the protesters of trying to “Judaize” the schools and “destroy” America’s Christian heritage. Protestant ministers accused Jews of ingratitude. Editorials described them as “latecomers, tolerated guests in a Christian country.”
Not all Jews supported the boycott. Abraham Stern, a German-Jewish member of the Board of Education, called the protesters “agitators” and said their actions lacked “the support of the more intelligent Jews of the city.”
Julia Richman, the city’s first female district superintendent — herself a Jewish reformer — said Christmas was both “religious and national” and should not be barred from schools “so long as it is not sectarian.”
Even some Reform rabbis dissented, including Judah L. Magnes of Temple Emanu-El, who favored cultural coexistence over confrontation.
But among the Yiddish-speaking press, the boycott was a point of pride. “Never before,” wrote one editor, “have Jewish workers stood up so boldly for their rights as Americans.”
Lucas and the boycotters were able to point to the New York State Constitution, which explicitly prohibited the use of public funds for schools teaching “the tenets of any religious sect” — a legacy of the long conflict between a Protestant establishment and Catholics.
But if law was on the side of the Jews, Seligman said, “the politics was not.” The Board of Education, caught between outraged Christians and emboldened Jews, eventually let the matter drop.
“At the end of the day, if you’re pushing for minority rights, you’re not going to get a lot of help from elected officials. Your best bet is always going to be the courts,” said Seligman.
By 1907, with no appetite for another boycott, the Orthodox Union’s activism around the issue waned. Hymns with religious themes were discouraged but not banned. Trees and wreaths returned to classrooms.
“The hot potato,” Seligman said, “remained in the laps of the school principals.”
It would take until the 1960s, with the Supreme Court’s Engel v. Vitale decision, for school-sponsored prayer to be declared unconstitutional. Even then, Seligman notes, “Christmas programs persisted, largely unchallenged.”
Seligman ends his book by drawing a line from 1906 to today. America’s Jewish population, he notes, is more assimilated and less religious than it was in Lucas’s day. But even as the number of self-identified Christians has been shrinking, Christian nationalists are louder and more politically powerful. And the Supreme Court, increasingly sympathetic to religious expression, has eroded some of the wall between church and state that figures like Lucas fought to preserve.
Jews, writes Selgiman, “are ostensibly in more or less the same position in which the New York Board of Education left them in 1907: forced to accept celebrations of a holiday in which they do not believe in the public schools attended by their children, paid for in part by their tax dollars.”
For Seligman, the lesson of 1906 is less about Christmas than about vigilance. The false accusation of a “Jewish war on Christmas,” he writes, “is as inevitable today as it was in 1906 — if not more so.”
And Gussie Herbert’s defiant question — “Why are you teaching the Christian religion in a public school?” — still echoes, more than a century later, whenever Americans debate where faith ends and the public square begins.
The post When Jews really did wage a ‘war on Christmas’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere takes a detour into antisemitism
“LOUIS IS A DIRTY J-E-W.”
This comment features during Inside the Manosphere, a new Netflix documentary from Louis Theroux, during a conversation between Theroux and podcaster Myron Gaines, host of Fresh and Fit Podcast.
It’s not the only time someone calls Theroux a Jew; Harrison Sullivan imitates Theroux, tenting his fingers conspiratorially and leering as he says the documentarian “just sat there with his Jew fingers.”
Theroux, however, is not Jewish. He has also made several edgy documentary specials for the BBC interviewing extremist settler groups in Israel, which have received acclaim from Israel’s critics and hostility from its supporters. And either way, the focus on Theroux’s supposed Jewishness seems off topic for a documentary on the manosphere, the generalized term for the world of podcasters, YouTubers and online streamers who cater to men.
The manosphere includes both mainstream creators like Joe Rogan as well as extremists like Andrew Tate, who was arrested in Romania for sex trafficking. Most creators in this world are anti-LGBTQ and endorse traditional gender roles, often familiar stuff about how women should be the primary caregivers for children and men should be breadwinners. Sometimes, however, on the fringes of this world, there are more extreme beliefs, like that women should not have the right to vote or need to be hit as a form of discipline by men; there are even open endorsements of rape.
Theroux spends most of the documentary talking to a few of the more extreme figures in the manosphere, including Gaines, the streamer Sneako, and Sullivan, who goes by the cringe handle of HSTikkyTokky. He follows them to their gyms, meets their girlfriends and watches as they produce content, largely by accosting people — mostly young women — on the street to slut-shame them. He speaks to the adoring young men who greet them in public. He gently asks follow-up questions, such as whether they all hate women. (The content creators, to a man, insist they love women, offering as proof their desire to have sex with as many of them as possible.) He wonders aloud whether young men can actually make any money off of the get-rich-quick courses hawked by many of the manosphere influencers.
Still, none of this obviously connects to antisemitism. The manosphere generally directs its ire at women, not Jews. Why, then, was Theroux accused — because it is, clearly, an accusation — of being a Jew?
In the current world of online extremism, it can sometimes be difficult to draw connections between different extremist ideologies. There’s not a clear throughline between antisemitism and the violent misogyny of, say, incel, (involuntary celibate) forums. Nor is there an obvious connection between the pseudoscientific skepticism of the anti-vax world and hatred of Jews. And giving disillusioned young men advice on how to be more manly and succeed in the world — or at least grifting off of their desire to do so — has little to do with Jews.
But for the most part, the main reason antisemitism springs up in the manosphere or in other extremist spaces is simply because it, too, is an extremist belief, and beliefs on the fringes tend to bleed into each other. There are sometimes distorted ideas that can connect the two, like an offshoot of the age-old antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews control world governments, which feeds into some anti-vax groups who believe that Jews are unleashing secret poison in the form of vaccines. But once you’ve decided one crazy thing is true, like that women are biologically only suited to be the property of men, so many other seemingly crazy things start sounding just as reasonable.
The comment about Theroux being a Jew came when he objected to a bit of pseudoscience Gaines presented during Fresh and Fit Podcast, asserting that women retain DNA from every man they’ve had sex with, genetic material they then pass on to children they have with a different partner. Theroux called this misinformation — because it is — and users in the chat trashed him by calling him a Jew.
Later in the documentary, Sneako gave an unprompted rant on camera about the Antichrist, Satanic symbols on magazines in a store window and the “one world government” causing it all, which, the influencer says, was started by the Rothschilds. Theroux finally pushed on the antisemitism.
“Is it Jewish in character?” he asked. “Because that does have some of the hallmarks of an antisemitic conspiracy theory.”
Sneako denied that a Rothschild-run world government had anything to do with Jews. But plenty of other influencers — including, outside the documentary, Sneako himself — have been more open. “Fuck the Jews,” HSTikkyTokky chants in a clip. In others, manosphere creators blame Jews for “feminism,” “homosexuality,” and “vibrations that are going to negatively bring you down.”
Theroux’s signature mild British mien allows him to blandly ask questions and let the influencers say whatever they want and allows the audience to observe alongside him.
He does little to explain either the antisemitism or the misogyny. That’s a strength; conspiracy theories do not operate by logic, and trying to force them into a rational framework can backfire, allowing proponents to proffer their own evidence, however faulty.
Antisemitism is an age-old hatred. Misogyny is nothing new either. That’s all they have in common. But as Inside the Manosphere shows, that’s enough for both to spread.
The post Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere takes a detour into antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Is Netanyahu dead? Has Tel Aviv been flattened? AI videos are dominating the Iran war.
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted an unusual video this week: of himself buying coffee at a Jerusalem-area cafe.
It was hardly typical fare for wartime, when Netanyahu can more often be seen giving recorded addresses or touring missile damage within Israel. But the prime minister had come with an important mission: to debunk viral claims of his death.
The claims, which originated on Iranian state media last week, were picked up by social media users on Thursday after Netanyahu gave his first press conference during the war.
Zooming in on details in the seemingly innocuous address, some claimed that Netanyahu had an extra finger on his right hand and missing teeth, signs they said were key tells of AI-generated content.
“Imagine Netanyahu was actually dead this entire past week,” the pro-Palestinian TikTok influencer Guy Christensen wrote in a post on X. “It’s too good to be true but Israel has been using AI generated videos of Netanyahu ever since. One can only hope.”
From the cafe Sataf, Netanyahu issued his response to the conspiracy, posting a video on Sunday of him ordering a coffee, chatting with baristas and telling Israelis that the wars against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon were going well.
“They say I’m what?” the caption read. Mocking the idea that he had been killed, he joked, “I’m dying for coffee!” Then, alluding to the speculation about the earlier video, he asks, “Do you want to count the number of fingers?” before holding up each hand with his fingers outstretched.
JUST IN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares proof that he is alive after online users started speculating that he was dead.
Netanyahu also showed off how many fingers he has.
“We’re doing things I can’t share right now, but we’re striking hard in Iran today and… pic.twitter.com/5tyD5HImCG
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 15, 2026
But rather than quelling the claims of his death, the Israeli leader’s response instead spurred more speculation, with users on social media calling into question details in the video including the physics of his coffee cup. In another video posted by Netanyahu on Monday, some social media users pointed to a clip where a ring seemingly disappears from his hand in one of the frames.
“ISRAEL: ‘Benjamin Netanyahu is still alive. Here’s another AI video of him as proof. Just trust me, goy,’ the antisemitic podcaster Stew Peters wrote in a post on X.
The churn of conspiratorial claims about the Israeli leader’s death, which also included an AI-generated image of him being pulled from rubble, highlights the growing challenge of combating misinformation in an era of artificial intelligence and viral deepfakes, especially during times of conflict.
The war with Iran has produced an absolute flood of fabricated imagery, from AI-generated clips circulated by pro-Iran accounts purporting to show missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv or the capture of American troops by Iranian forces. The Israeli disinformation detection company Cyabra said it identified networks containing tens of thousands of accounts that generated material garnering 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war — almost all pro-Iranian, and mostly on TikTok. (The company said during the last Israel-Iran war, in June 2025, that Iran’s internet outage had quelled disinformation bot farms located there.)
“The campaign did not spread organically. Clear coordination patterns were identified, including repeated narratives, identical videos and captions, fixed hashtag clusters, and synchronized burst posting,” Cyabra said in its report published Friday. “These tactics allowed the network to rapidly flood the information environment and dominate online discussions during key moments of the conflict.”
The videos have left some of Israel’s critics confident that the country has been battered far beyond what has been officially reported.
But even Israeli television has not been immune, airing its own misinformation too — albeit unwittingly.
Channel 12 News last week aired a night-vision clip that it said showed American B-2 stealth bombers over Iran flying in formation with F-18 fighter jets.
ניר דבורי הציג סרטון של “מפציצי B2 בשמי איראן”
העובדות: מדובר בסרטון שלקוח מתוך משחק מחשב.
בשרשור: הסרטון המקורי שפורסם במרץ 2023 ביוטיוב.קרדיט: @ItayBlumental @manniefabian pic.twitter.com/zJCugreDZM
— בודקים (@bodkim2022) March 8, 2026
Within hours, the clip was identified not as a Pentagon release, as Channel 12 military correspondent Nir Dvori had suggested on air, but as footage from the combat flight simulator Digital Combat Simulator World. Itay Blumental, Dvori’s counterpart at rival public broadcaster Kan, wrote on X that the footage was “indeed incredible, but also lifted from a video game,” sharing the same YouTube clip from March 2023.
During Monday evening’s broadcast, Dvori apologized and said the mistake was “entirely mine,” but did not specify which footage he was referring to, leaving viewers who had missed the earlier segment with little indication of what had gone wrong. The news network also issued an apology, saying it would “examine its procedures.”
The right-wing Channel 14 also aired the clip — more than once.
i24 News made a similar mistake, the Haaretz newspaper reported, airing a video it treated as apparent footage of an American strike on Iran, though the clip was also from Digital Combat Simulator World.
The segments quickly became internet fodder, with social media users lampooning the news networks and posting their own tongue-in-cheek “exclusive war footage.”
Omer Babai, who runs Kan’s social media, posted a GIF on X of shoot ’em up video game Chicken Invaders, saying it showed “American bombers in Iranian skies.”
Another X user quipped: “Nir Dvori: Iran scattered mines across the Strait of Hormuz,” alongside a screenshot of vintage PC game Minesweeper.
A third posted an image of fellow 1990s gaming staple “Digger,” with the caption: “Exclusive footage of Sinwar in the tunnels of Gaza,” referencing the Hamas chief killed by the IDF. Street Fighter and Pac-Man made cameo appearances too.
Channel 14, widely seen as sympathetic towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is no stranger to broadcasting dubious footage. Earlier in the war, the channel aired a video it said showed crowds in Tehran appearing to express support for the Israeli premier with chants of “Bibi joon” — a Persian term of affection translated roughly as “dear Bibi.” But the online Israeli fact-checker FakeReporter later said the chant had been generated with artificial intelligence.
But the B2 gaffes are one side of a much wider phenomenon.
One viral clip, shared across X, TikTok and other platforms, appeared to show missiles pounding Tel Aviv and apartment blocks collapsing under a barrage. AFP and several other outlets found it had been generated using AI, citing telltale distortions in cars, rooftops, smoke trails and even the placement of an Israeli flag sans pole. The Grok AI chatbot on X, however, helped amplify the video, with repeated assurances that “the video is real,” AFP reported.
After the video was exposed as AI-generated, an X account under the name Abdulruhman Ismail, one of the first to share the footage in a post that drew 4 million views, said he would leave it up “because the scene reflects, painfully, what Gaza has endured under Israeli bombardment.” He added, “I am keeping this post for transparency. The video may not be real, but the devastation it evokes is real, and it mirrors what Palestinians have lived through.”
During the June 2025 war, pro-Iran accounts similarly circulated fake videos and images claiming to show strikes devastating Tel Aviv as well as Iranian forces downing Israeli F-35s.
Australian wire AAP debunked several fakes from this round of conflict, including a video claiming that an Iranian strike set a CIA facility in Dubai ablaze, as well as a fabricated image purporting to show late Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dead under a pile of rubble.
A separate fabricated clip that racked up tens of millions of views purported to show the Burj Khalifa engulfed in flames as crowds rushed in its direction.
The Tehran Times also shared false images and false reports of extensive damage to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.
Iran’s embassy in Austria posted an AI image of a child’s backpack, claiming it was taken at the Minab school in Iran that was hit on the first day of the war.
Tasnim, the Iranian state-affiliated news agency, shared an AI-generated image on X purporting to show an American radar installation in Qatar destroyed in an Iranian strike, The New York Times reported. The paper said Iran’s propaganda “appears focused more on swaying international audiences,” portraying the “success of Tehran’s counteroffensive in effusive terms.”
But X’s head of product told the BBC that 99% of the accounts spreading AI-generated war videos were trying to “game monetization,” posting sensational content to rack up engagement and qualify for payments through the platform’s creator revenue program. The social media giant announced that it will temporarily suspend creators from the program if they post AI-generated videos of armed conflict without disclosing that they were fake.
British politician George Galloway posted a video last week containing AI imagery in which he narrates that the “apocalypse is burning Tel Aviv,” that the city “now looks like Gaza,” and that air defenses over Tel Aviv are “no longer operational.” He says his information came from friends on “Sheinkin Street, Tel Aviv, near Dizengoff Square.”
Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy seized on the canard, posting reaction videos of sun-soaked beach scenes and one of himself at Dizengoff Square, casually sipping an iced coffee with the very much intact plaza behind him.
Some people responded to the video by cheering Levy on, saying that they, too, were enjoying a beautiful day in a mostly intact Tel Aviv. But others resisted the evidence in front of them. “Cheap Jew propaganda,” one commenter wrote. “It’s basically flattened out.”
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Jews decry UK newspaper for appearing to justify attack on bakery founded by Israelis
(JTA) — A Guardian column that seemed to rationalize the targeting of a popular Israeli-founded bakery has ignited controversy in the British Jewish community.
The March 14 piece in the British daily, by sports and culture writer Jonathan Liew, came days after the newly opened north London branch of Gail’s was repeatedly vandalized, with its windows smashed and red paint and pro‑Palestinian slogans daubed on its doors.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the vandalism, saying that “targeting a business on the basis of alleged or perceived Israeli and or Jewish connections reflects a very worrying trend.”
Liew, meanwhile, described the bakery chain’s expansion into diverse neighborhoods as a form of “aggression,” implying that its presence near a Palestinian-owned cafe was inherently provocative.
Critics, including British Jewish media, communal leaders and online commentators, accused Liew of rationalizing an attack on a business they say is being targeted solely because of its founders’ Israeli heritage. Gail’s was founded in the 1990s as a wholesale bakery by Israeli baker Gail Mejia, who with an Israeli partner opened a storefront bakery in 2005. In 2021, the company, today with close to 200 stores, was acquired by the American investment firm Bain Capital.
“We are a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK,” a spokesperson for Gail’s told the Jewish News. “Our focus right now is on working with the authorities and making sure our people feel safe and supported.”
Although the Guardian piece acknowledges Bain’s ownership, it also notes allegations that the investment firm “invests heavily in military technology, including Israeli security companies.” As a result, wrote Liew, “its very presence 20 metres [65 feet] away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.” High Street is the British equivalent of “Main Street.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators had protested the opening of the branch in the days before the vandalism.
A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in the U.K. told The Daily Mail that Liew’s article was “an astonishing exercise in bigotry disguised as moral commentary.”
“Beneath its surface lies a familiar and ugly trope: the repackaging of anitsemitic prejudice in fashionable political language,” said Alex Grandler.
The debate, playing out in fiery messages on social media, has highlighted broader concerns about Jewish-owned businesses in Britain being cast as proxies in disputes over the Middle East. In 2025, the Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, recorded 20 incidents involving vandalism at Jewish businesses and organizations.
“In the Guardian’s hall-of-mirrors morality, smashing up a shop because it was founded by Jews is just a touching little political tantrum,” Jewish News editor Richard Ferrer wrote in a column.
In the Guardian piece, Liew seemed to sympathize with the Palestinian-owned cafe in the neighborhood, Cafe Metro, for having been the frequent victim of “pro-Israel activists” who “regularly descend on it to slap stickers on its windows reading ‘Stop killing people’ and ‘One of these days you’ll thank us.’” At the same time, he referred to the window-smashing at Gail’s among the “small acts of petty symbolism” that grow out of Palestinian frustration with their failure to exert influence on the Israel-Palestine debate.
Hadley Freeman, a former columnist for the Jewish Chronicle who now writes a column for The Times, called out Liew for applying an apparent double standard.
“So let me get this straight,” she wrote on X. “1. Petty activism against a Palestinian-owned cafe is bad (agreed!) 2. But *violent* activism against a cafe that people associate (wrongly!) with Israel is justified and understandable.
“Update your rule book accordingly!” she added.
CAMERA UK, a media watchdog group that monitors coverage of Israel, said it had contacted the Guardian, asking if Liew’s column met its “editorial standards.”
“We know the answer, but are nonetheless hoping to see how they justify Liew’s latest defense of antisemitism,” CAMERA said in a statement.
A Guardian spokesperson did share a terse reply with The Daily Mail. “Complaints about Guardian journalism are considered by the internally independent readers’ editor under the Guardian’s editorial code and guidance,” the spokesperson said.
The controversy even reached across the Atlantic. “Good grief — Gail’s is just a bakery!” Patricia Heaton, the actress and conservative political activist, wrote on X. Heaton said she ”had no idea it had any connection to Israel or the Jewish people. But now I want to support it even more.”
Public defenses of the article have been limited, though some pro-Palestinian activists online argued that Liew was only describing the motivations of the protesters rather than endorsing vandalism.
Liew hasn’t responded to the criticism of his column, although he pinned the article to the top of his Bluesky social media account, with the message “the war at home.”
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