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The Situation at Colleges and K-12 Schools Is as Bad as It Has Ever Been for Jewish Students
Demonstrators march in support of Palestinians, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, US, Feb. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/David Ryder
University administrations continue to grapple with legal challenges to their handling of antisemitic protests. A series of lawsuits filed by the higher education industrial complex seek to reverse all the Trump administration’s initiatives to control costs, limit foreign students with radical pasts, and protect Jewish students.
University presidents are also being pressured to reverse the trend of institutional neutrality and to resume making statements on political issues. The lawsuits and the renaming and hiding of DEI initiatives indicate that universities are simply waiting out the current administration, but the structural changes being forced by economic conditions including Federal funding and broader demographics will be more enduring.
Reports indicate that the Trump administration is reworking its “compact with higher education” to make it acceptable to more universities, but in the meantime, a number of Federal investigations are ongoing. The University of Pennsylvania, however, has balked at a demand for employee records from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission as part of an investigation into discrimination aimed at Jewish employees.
The US Department of Education has also chosen not to challenge a Federal court ruling that prohibits it from requiring universities to remove all race based curriculum, student aid, and student services or risk losing funding. The move was represented by DEI advocates as a victory and reflects the industry’s efforts to wait out the Trump administration before restoring DEI as its central pillar.
Data from a new Department of Education website has again showed that Qatar is the leading funder of American universities with $6.6 billion in contracts and gifts. Cornell University received $2.3 billion, while $1 billion was given to Carnegie Mellon University, and more that $900 million each to Texas A&M University and Georgetown. Overall 1223 individual transactions involving Qatar are recorded, pointing to that country’s vast influence buying within the higher education industrial complex.
The influence of foreign funding has always been disputed by universities. A new lawsuit, however, alleges that Qatari funding directly shaped Carnegie Mellon’s neglect of antisemitism and discrimination directed at a Jewish faculty member.
In that case, the school was required to consult with the Qatar Foundation International before hiring the assistant vice provost for DEI and Title IX coordinator, while other DEI officials visited Qatar as part of their work. This pattern of support and collusion with Qatar through DEI is likely replicated across a vast scale across the higher education industry.
A new report has again detailed the manner in which the City University of New York systematically purged all Jews from its leadership and dramatically reduced the number of Jewish students. The university’s move appears to be a deliberate, top down marketing strategy focusing on New York’s Muslim community rather than Jews, which privileged partnerships with CAIR and endorsed BDS supporters within the faculty union.
Finally, in a significant move, the United Arab Emirates has banned scholarships for students studying in Britain. The stated rationale was fear of radicalization by the Muslim Brotherhood, which dominates British campuses.
In an interesting rhetorical shift, Harvard president Alan Garber blamed “faculty activism” in the classroom for chilling free speech on campus. He also stated that “there is real movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
The incorporation of explicitly anti-Israel terms such as “Israel Occupation Forces,” “Apartheid Wall,” and “Zionist regime” into academic papers has expanded immensely since 2019 and has created a self-reinforcing web of citations that gives the additional appearance of legitimacy to anti-Israel standpoints.
As has long been the case, this new guise conveniently aligns with broader left-wing opposition to the West, capitalism, and whiteness.
Faculty also continue to organize conferences on campus that emphasize anti-Israel activism, often without a guise of scholarship or pedagogy.
In one recent example, a conference at the University of Washington was reported to have promoted pro-Hamas activism and included faculty members and activists who defended Hamas, Iran, and campus property destruction. The university recently lifted suspensions on students who had caused over $1 million in damages to an engineering building during a pro-Hamas takeover.
In another example, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies will host a Gaza Lecture Series featuring a number of prominent defenders of Hamas and other terrorist groups, as well as deniers of October 7th sexual violence.
Institutionally, academic associations continue to be besieged by anti-Israel members. In January the executive council of the American Historical Association vetoed a resolution accusing Israel of scholasticide and the silencing of protests regarding “the U.S.-sponsored genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.”
The council stated, “As worded the two resolutions fall outside the scope of the American Historical Association’s chartered mission,” adding that “Approving them on behalf of the entire association would present institutional risk and have long-term implications for the discipline and the organization.” Supporters of the resolution complained the move reflected anti-Palestinian bias. The Modern Language Association also approved a similar resolution.
In the first month of the new semester, job fairs and individual corporations were be targeted by pro-Hamas protestors. In one example, the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine chapter organized a walkout to demand the university sever ties with Palantir, which it accuses of “enabling genocide” and profiting from “ICE raids, police violence, and mass surveillance at home.”
The Yale University “Endowment Justice Collective” also demanded that the university divest from investments in Palantir and other firms. The university rejected the demands. The University of Alabama SJP chapter made similar divestment demands.
Student sponsored events in support of Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations also continue to be held. The University of Virginia Law School hosted International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf for a “conversation” about Gaza. In another, the University of Chicago’s pro-Hamas groups promoted an International Week of Action to secure the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, the imprisoned general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
At the University of Washington, the presence of the Tariq El-Tahrir Student Network, “an international network of Palestinian, Arab, and Internationalist youth, students and organizations,” associated with terrorist organizations including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has provided the local pro-Hamas SUPER UW (Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return at University of Washington) group with continuing support. This includes webinar series featuring terror supporters from Samidoun and other groups. SUPER UW remains banned on campus but the Tariq El-Tahrir provides them with an effective alter ego.
Finally, in a move that demonstrated how the Holocaust is being actively divorced from and turned against Jews, the University of California at Irvine student government passed a motion commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day but stripped it of all reference to modern antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
The K-12 sector continues to be manipulated by anti-American and pro-Hamas teachers unions and infiltrated by foreign influence operations. Pro-Hamas pedagogy inside and outside the classroom have now become commonplace, often piggybacked on holidays and commemorations.
In one example, pro-Hamas teachers held a NYC Educators For Palestine MLK Day Teach-In. The organizers are among the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers. A number of participants are also linked to pro-Hamas welfare organizations such as the Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund and ANERA. Teach-ins for “Palestine” were also held on Martin Luther King Day for students in Philadelphia and for teachers in Oakland.
Teachers and parents from the Berkeley Families for Collective Liberation were involved in organizing a student walkout at Berkeley High School to participate in a pro-Palestinian teach-out held on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Organizers claimed the timing was purely coincidental. Speakers also criticized California’s new law addressing antisemitism in public schools.
The complicity of school administrators in permitting and organizing pro-Hamas events inside and outside classrooms is well documented. One recent example is the decision by the Michigan Department of Education to accept teachers’ participation in a professional development seminar about “how to teach about Palestine” organized by the Arab American National Museum, in association with Rethinking Schools, and Visualizing Palestine.
New evidence continues to emerge regarding foreign influence operations, including initiatives by the Qatar Foundation International to insert Arabic language and social justice curriculums into Georgia schools. Both the language and social justice materials are deeply suffused with anti-Israel and antisemitic themes.
British primary and secondary schools provide a roadmap to how teachers and foreign powers reshape curriculum and how demographic change among students have made antisemitism and anti-Israel bias foundational.
British teachers unions are resolutely anti-Israel and have adopted numerous resolutions of condemnation. This has translated into classroom hostility towards Israel, as well as towards Jewish students and teachers, some of whom are told by colleagues that Israel simply does not exist, which is amplified by the growing number of Muslim students.
In one recent case, a school barred a Jewish Member of Parliament from visiting after protests from teachers. The educational oversight authority Ofsted later cleared the school of wrongdoing without speaking to the Member of Parliament. In contrast, reports indicate that Hussein Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, routinely tours British schools.
The Holocaust has also been co-opted and inverted as an anti-Israel and antisemitic tool. British teachers have begun presenting Israeli actions in Gaza as “genocide” and inverting Holocaust memory into an anti-Jewish concept. Reports also indicate that half of British schools have stopped marking Holocaust Memorial Day for fear of offending Muslim students.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a different version of this article appeared.
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Mamdani appoints Phylisa Wisdom, progressive Jewish leader, to run Office to Combat Antisemitism
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has picked Phylisa Wisdom, the executive director of the progressive New York Jewish Agenda, to lead the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. This announcement comes as the city grapples with a sharp rise in antisemitic attacks and as the Mamdani administration faces scrutiny from the Jewish community following a divisive election that turned, in part, on Mamdani’s positions on Israel.
Wisdom, 39, has aligned herself with some of the positions Mamdani has taken on countering antisemitism, including opposition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Mamdani has thus far declined to say how his administration will define antisemitism when determining which cases to investigate or pursue. Wisdom has also called for more sympathy towards Palestinians, and in November 2023, Wisdom’s organization, under her leadership, spearheaded a statement by liberal Jewish elected officials calling for a bilateral ceasefire in Gaza.
In her new role, Wisdom will serve as Mamdani’s point person to the Jewish community. Her appointment is another signal that Mamdani’s anti-Zionist posture will continue to factor importantly into his leadership of the city, which is home to the largest concentration of Jews outside Israel. Her challenge will be facilitating dialogue with people who hold widely diverging viewpoints, without overriding a mayor whose positions on Israel are deeply held and long-standing.
Wisdom told Jewish Insider last month that Mamdani’s pledge to tackle the scourge of antisemitism “will require a comprehensive strategy” with input from the diversity of New York’s Jewish community.
The office’s current executive director, Moshe Davis, is a holdover of the Adams administration.
Josh Binderman, a political strategist who handled Jewish outreach during the mayoral campaign and transition, will continue in a leadership role under the agency headed by Wisdom, a City Hall spokesperson said. Binderman was Mamdani’s informal Jewish liaison in the opening days of the new administration. He worked with both allies of the mayor and leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations who are unsettled by Mamdani.
Mamdani’s first month
The appointment comes as antisemitic incidents continue to account for a majority of reported hate crimes in New York City. According to the New York City Police Department, antisemitic incidents made up 57% of all hate crimes reported in 2025. The trend continued into the new year: NYPD data show that more than half of all hate crime incidents reported in January were targeted at Jews or Jewish spaces, including a rabbi who was verbally harassed and assaulted, and swastika graffiti that, two days in a row, appeared at a playground frequented by Orthodox families in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn.
More recently, Mamdani drew praise from Jewish leaders for his rapid and forceful response to the attempted car attack at Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters.
Mamdani said the office, established by former Mayor Eric Adams last year through an executive order, will pursue his commitment to addressing rising acts of hate against Jews. The office is tasked with monitoring antisemitic incidents, coordinating city agencies, engaging with Jewish communities across the city and advising the mayor on policy responses to antisemitism and related hate crimes. Mamdani opted to keep the office open while revoking, as one of his first acts in office, executive orders tied to antisemitism.
Mamdani faced a rocky first month in navigating Jewish communal concerns. His Day One move to repeal the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition, which the office to combat antisemitism pursued as a framework for investigating hate crimes, prompted swift backlash from mainstream Jewish organizations. A week later, he was criticized for his response to protests outside Park East Synagogue. City Hall quietly engaged Jewish leaders to defuse tensions, but Mamdani’s eventual statement that “chants in support of a terrorist organization have no place in our city” came later than many had hoped and was viewed by critics as restrained and overly cautious.
Last week, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who is Jewish, announced a new task force dedicated to combating antisemitism; its co-chairs said the group would take a more assertive legislative role in addressing rising concerns among Jewish New Yorkers. One of its co-chairs is Inna Vernikov, a Republican and Mamdani critic, which could set up potential tension between the City Council and the mayor’s office over how to respond to the rise in antisemitism.
Mamdani also expressed reservations about legislation proposed by Menin to create a 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues and other houses of worship. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said. However, he broadly supports the Council’s five-point plan to combat antisemitism, including $1.25 million in funding for the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the creation of a city hotline to report antisemitic incidents, he said.
Who is Phylisa Wisdom?
Born and raised in San Diego, California, she grew up in the Reform movement, actively engaged in NFTY, and learned advocacy through the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center under Rabbi David Saperstein. Wisdom is a member of Park Slope’s Congregation Beth Elohim, where Mamdani addressed the congregation while running for mayor.
Wisdom’s positions and past work drew scrutiny from some Orthodox leaders as rumors of her possible appointment began to circulate recently. She previously served as director of government affairs for Yaffed, a pro–secular education group that scrutinized private yeshivas in Brooklyn over inadequate secular education.
In 2023, Wisdom was tapped as head of the New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive advocacy group formed in 2020 to be a voice for liberal Jews in New York. On a recent webinar, Wisdom described her group’s mission as advocating, organizing and convening “liberal Jewish New Yorkers to impact policy, politics and communal discourse.”
The group criticized Adams’ Jewish advisory council in 2023 because it overrepresented the Orthodox community and men.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, NYJA — whose founders include Rep. Jerry Nadler and former City Comptroller Brad Lander, both of whom describe themselves as liberal Zionists — has backed a two-state solution and called for a rights-based and humane approach toward Palestinians living under occupation. It is listed as a member of the Progressive Israel Network. In public statements and on social media, Wisdom has criticized Israeli settlement expansion while also stressing the security and safety of Israelis. Under her predecessor, Matt Nosanchuk, the group advocated for missions to Israel to learn firsthand about the conflict from Israelis and Palestinians. (Mamdani has said he would not continue the tradition of mayoral visits to the Jewish state.)
“We believe that legitimate criticism of policies of the government of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, and those who weaponize it only undermine our efforts and put us in harm’s way,” Wisdom wrote in an op-ed during the mayoral election. “While it is not necessarily antisemitic to criticize Israel, there are those who are antisemitic who use criticism of Israel as a mask for their antisemitism.”
Wisdom was a member of Mamdani’s inaugural committee and hosted him at a Hanukkah celebration for the leadership of the liberal Jewish group. In his remarks at the Hanukkah event, Mamdani said he associates himself with NYJA in “the bringing together of people” on critical issues.
The post Mamdani appoints Phylisa Wisdom, progressive Jewish leader, to run Office to Combat Antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Yiddish theater is revived in Tbilisi, Georgia after 100 years
When Lasha Shakulashvili was a grad student at Tbilisi State University in 2022, he stumbled onto something unbelievable. In the National Archives of Georgia, he found Yiddish posters from 1910 announcing theater performances put on by a grassroots, community-run troupe in Tbilisi in what was then still part of the Russian Empire. The troupe was called the Jewish Division of Musical-Melodrama Art.
The posters were fragile and there were only a few of them. Along with them was a single photo he found in a 1917 copy of The Jewish Daily Forward, found in the archives of the National Library of Israel. The paper had a short dispatch mentioning the Ashkenazi school in Tbilisi and the photo showed a teacher writing the Yiddish word friling — spring — on a chalkboard.
Shakulashvili was surprised. Almost nothing had been written about Ashkenazi Jewish heritage in Georgia because most Jews in Georgia were kartveli ebraelebi or Georgian Jews; ‘Mountain Jews’ (Jewish inhabitants of the eastern and northern Caucasus) and Sephardic Jews. Shakulashvili was eager to find out more.
Born in Tbilisi to Orthodox Christian parents, he was raised in part by a Jewish nanny who taught him Russian and Yiddish. That early exposure set him on his scholarly path – and instilled in him a love for Yiddish and Ashkenazi culture.
Before turning to academia, Shakulashvili, who’s now a Yiddish scholar, Jewish history educator and digital storyteller, worked as a diplomat for Georgia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the Georgian Foreign Ministry. Thanks to this career, he told me: “I look at things as an academic and a diplomat. As a diplomat, you have to be cautious but also persistent. A scholar does that, too.”
That persistence led him to write a dissertation on his findings, and publish some of his early discoveries in the Forward in 2022. His thesis is on the role of Yiddish theater in Georgia in the Jewish enlightenment. “Yiddish theater was groundbreaking at a time when Georgia was a very conservative place,”Shakulashvili said. “There were more actresses than actors, women were leading it, and there were plays that explored arranged marriages and women getting revenge. It was a ‘Belle Epoque’: Ashkenazis had been in Georgia less than a century and they changed the life of the whole community.”
Shakulashvili traced how Ashkenazi Jews began arriving in Georgia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fleeing poverty and pogroms in densely populated communities in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. Before the 1917 Revolution, about 5,000 Ashkenazim lived in Georgia, joining an already diverse Jewish population.
Shakulashvili visited Jewish cemeteries, eventually finding graves of every actor whose name was mentioned on the 1910 theater posters. He conducted oral history interviews with Jewish residents of Georgia from different Jewish communities and learned how interconnected different Jewish populations were: Sephardic and Georgian-Jewish sources told him about their grandmothers being educated at the Yiddish school in a time when many schools didn’t accept girls. In turn, the Sephardic community has taken on the task of preserving the two historic Ashkenazi synagogues.
His journey took him to archives in Tbilisi, Jerusalem and Oxford, England. “I had to bring these stories back to life somehow,” he said. “It’s one thing to find a poster and prove the theater existed, but who played there and where did they come from and how did they learn? My curiosity for the theater led me to find out more about the Yiddish schools. One thing led to another — there was a school, there was a society, a whole culture. I wanted to find a complete picture.”
The majority of Georgian-born Jews have since emigrated to Israel or the United States. According to his interviews, most of them did so not because of fear or persecution, but simply for better economic opportunities after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Shakulashvili shared discoveries with his students at the Paideia Institute in Stockholm and Tbilisi State University, where he was lecturing. He then began sharing his discoveries on Instagram. One early video he posted showed him offering his mostly non-Jewish students cookies shaped like letters of the alef-beyz (the Hebrew alphabet) — a traditional way of welcoming children into Jewish learning.
When Shakulashvili started speaking publicly about the long-lost Yiddish theater, non-Jewish Georgian actors and directors reached out. Many were stunned to learn that Tbilisi once had a Yiddish stage, shut down in 1926 by Soviet authorities. A question emerged: Could the theater be revived?
Shakulashvili’s discovery and networks forged online brought together Georgian historians, Jewish community leaders and actors of all backgrounds. Ana Sanaia, a prominent Georgian actress, director and playwright emerged as the producer who’d make this dream a reality.
A century after its last performance, the Tbilisi Yiddish Theater reopened in 2023. The first production – performed in Yiddish and old Russian, with Georgian supertitles – was Osip Dymov’s 1907 drama Shema Yisroel (named for a centerpiece prayer in Judaism). Jewish protagonists convert to Christianity to survive, only to be rejected by their families and left stranded between identities.
The reopening in Tbilisi came at a tense time. Since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza, Jewish cultural institutions elsewhere have faced protests and boycotts. Georgia has largely avoided that backlash, something Shakulashvili attributes to the country’s strong identification with its Jewish history.
Still, Georgia is politically polarized, especially as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to shape regional affairs. The theater is self-funded exclusively through independent fundraising, Ana Sanaia, the theater’s producer, told me.
While Shakulashvili has since stepped back from the theater, his research paved the way for recovering the forgotten Yiddish culture of Georgia. He is now based in Israel, where he produces digital content, leads heritage tours and travels for lectures. He still spends the spring semester teaching in Tbilisi.
Meanwhile, Sanaia continues to produce plays, raise funds and recruit actors. She is currently producing her own play in Georgian about the Yiddish-speaking community and their relationship with Abkhaz Muslims in a Black Sea town in 1907.
Shakulashvili’s latest project focuses on online public education about the diverse arts, culture and languages of the Jewish people, through a platform he calls “Jewish Storytelling.” He is also working on a memoir about his discovery and the journey it sent him on.
“I’m proud to be a Georgian Orthodox Christian, and I am proud to work in Jewish studies,” Shakulashvili said. “Everyday I say ‘thank you’ to God that I have been able to do what I love.”
The post Yiddish theater is revived in Tbilisi, Georgia after 100 years appeared first on The Forward.
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US Condemns South Africa’s Expulsion of Israeli Diplomat
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa attends the 20th East Asia Summit (EAS), as part of the 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Oct. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hasnoor Hussain
The United States on Tuesday condemned South Africa’s decision to expel Israel’s top diplomat last week, a State Department spokesperson said, calling the African nation’s step a part of prioritizing “grievance politics.”
“Expelling a diplomat for calling out the African National Congress party’s ties to Hamas and other antisemitic radicals prioritizes grievance politics over the good of South Africa and its citizens,” Tommy Pigott, the State Department’s deputy spokesperson, said on X.
South Africa’s embassy in Washington had no immediate comment.
On Friday, South Africa declared the top diplomat at Israel’s embassy persona non grata and ordered him out within 72 hours.
It accused him of “unacceptable violations of diplomatic norms and practice,” including insulting South Africa’s president.
Israel responded by expelling South Africa’s senior diplomatic representative to its country.
Relations between the countries have been strained since South Africa brought a genocide case over Israel’s defensive military campaign against Hamas in Gaza at the International Court of Justice. Israel has rejected the case as baseless, calling it an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention and noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
The genocide case has also contributed to US President Donald Trump’s attacks on Pretoria, including verbal scolding, trade sanctions, and an executive order last year cutting all US funding.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the South African government has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics, actively confronting the Jewish state on the international stage.
Beyond its open hostility toward Israel, South Africa has actively supported Hamas, hosting officials from the Palestinian terrorist group and expressing solidarity with their “cause.”
In one instance, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa led a crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.