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A Jewish gun club teams up with the NRA, in pursuit of self-defense
Capitalizing on heightened anxieties and surging Jewish interest in gun ownership, the National Rifle Association this week announced a partnership with a national Jewish gun club, in a move the mega gun lobby group says will help in the fight against antisemitism.
“People are scared,” said Gayle Pearlstein, the Chicago firearms instructor who launched Lox & Loaded, the Jewish group the NRA is teaming with. “You can see it in their faces. People see history repeating itself.”
The arrangement will give Lox & Loaded access to NRA resources — and give the NRA a foothold in a burgeoning demographic as its core membership wanes. It is the first partnership of its kind between the NRA and a Jewish group.
“When people think of the NRA, they don’t necessarily think of Jewish populations, right?” Justin Davis, director of public affairs for the NRA, said. “To help bridge that gap between never having touched a firearm, getting world class training, comfortability and proficiency in firearms, I think it’s a great opportunity for the community.”
Lox & Loaded, a for-profit company founded last March, is one of several Jewish gun groups that has emerged in the U.S. since the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, with many targeting first-time gun owners. Pearlstein says it has attracted more than 1,000 members and established 49 local chapters nationwide.
The rising Jewish interest in gun ownership is also prompting concerns, and not just among gun violence experts who stress risks to gun owners. Security experts working with Jewish institutions are also forced to plan for unpredictable scenarios involving concealed weapons.
A national brand
After the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, Pearlstein started offering discounted pistol lessons to the Chicago Jewish community. “I really wanted to do something to help the community,” she said, “and I didn’t want to just give tzedaka (charity) or just send money over to Israel.” Then she started giving concealed carry classes through the Chicago Jewish Alliance, a local pro-Israel group.
Eventually she joined forces with a similar group in Cleveland to form Lox & Loaded,whose members pay $118 a year for training, monthly shooting practice and other events.
Many of those members, she said, are seniors — and quite a few are longtime gun skeptics turning to firearms for self-defense after personally experiencing antisemitism.
The partnership comes amid an uptick in antisemitic violence and in the wake of multiple high-profile antisemitic terrorist attacks that were both carried out and stopped with guns. In the Temple Israel attack in West Bloomfield, Michigan, last month, a man armed with a rifle rammed a truck loaded with explosives into the synagogue before he was shot dead by a security guard.
And it points to a spillover effect from the increased focus on security — a developing interest in firearms not just in synagogues, but also in domestic life.
Historically, American Jews have among the lowest rates of gun ownership in the country. Just 10% of Jews owned guns according to a 2005 report, compared to 26% nationwide at the time; in 2018, a survey found 70% of American Jews said gun control was more important than protecting gun rights.
But newer data points to a change in tune; for example, NYPD reports show a spike in concealed carry permit applications after October 2023. Whether an increase in Jewish gun ownership actually makes American Jews safer, however, is hotly contested.
Pearlstein, who is a longtime NRA member, said the partnership came about after she introduced herself to the organization’s executives at a national trade show in January.
Davis, who was one of the people she met that day, said the NRA had been paying attention to the rise in antisemitic attacks and was eager to help.
“Meeting with folks from Lox & Loaded has been incredibly eye-opening,” Davis said, “to see the transformation that’s happening — the community of folks who are realizing that they have to take their safety into their own hands.”
That newfound Jewish enthusiasm comes at a ripe moment for the NRA, which has been beset in recent years by government efforts to break it up and declining revenue overall. Its former chief executive was found guilty of financial misconduct. And the organization filed for bankruptcy, only for a judge to block its petition.
For Pearlstein, the benefits were clear: the NRA still has the resources to throw behind additional training and club recruitment, as well as safety courses that are considered the industry standard. Pearlstein emphasized that Lox & Loaded “does not push guns in people’s faces.”
A promotional video released by the NRA about the new partnership highlights Jewish vulnerability. In the two-minute spot, news coverage of the Temple Israel attack rolls on screen — including an image of the suspect brandishing a rifle — followed by video of college protesters chanting “globalize the intifada.”
“Today, Jewish families face unprecedented threats, simply for who they are,” a voiceover intones. “Many thought they’d never need to defend themselves — until now.”
Through the scope
Pearlstein’s club is part of a “material increase” in Jewish gun groups since Oct. 7, many catering to first-time gun owners, according to Michael Masters, national director of the Secure Community Network, an organization that provides safety guidance to hundreds of Jewish institutions. Some of those groups now provide neighborhood patrols, first response and armed security outside synagogues.
But it’s unclear what safety benefits come from the prospect of increased Jewish gun ownership itself — and some say the trend introduces new safety concerns.
Lately, Masters has been fielding lots of questions from synagogues whose members want to bring their guns to services. Last year his organization released a white paper detailing best practices for concealed carry in houses of worship.
Complicating the picture is that Jewish gun groups, like gun groups in general, vary in their adherence to standardized training curriculums or certification requirements — meaning not everyone who joins them comes away equally prepared.
“Those distinctions between different groups can result in inconsistencies for the community,” Masters said, “all of which can have significant impacts on life, safety and liability.”
Gun violence researchers also point to ripple effects that accompany gun ownership.
Deborah Azrael, director of research of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said that decades of studies have consistently shown that access to guns is associated with substantially increased risk of suicide for both a gun owner and their family.
“There isn’t really any compelling evidence of a countervailing benefit in terms of homicide reduction,” Azrael said. “And on the contrary, there’s evidence that you increase your risk of dying, and the people you love dying, if you bring a gun into the home.”
Davis, the NRA spokesperson, said that if someone wants to harm themselves, they will do it whether they have a gun or not. The bigger issue, he said, was a national mental health crisis that had gone unaddressed — and which factored into the violent threat American Jews now face.
“It’s an old adage, but when the seconds count, police are minutes away,” Davis said. “You have to be able to be your own first responders.”
Azrael said research undercut the notion that armed crime victims could reliably help themselves. When guns are used in self-defense, she said, the people who use them aren’t significantly less likely to be injured or to lose property than people who fight back in other ways, or run.
And she was suspicious of the idea that firearms training would prepare an amateur to act in a worst-case scenario. “You’re asking people to take on a role that police officers often don’t do that well,” she said.
Masters, too, was conscious of a possible disconnect between firearm ownership and capacity to respond safely in those scenarios. Lately, he said, he has begun advising law enforcement that active threat scenarios in Jewish spaces may feature armed civilians trying to help.
And he was also aware that not everyone in a synagogue felt comfortable or safe with more guns around them.
“This is perhaps a transition for many members of the community in how they feel about this issue, but it’s a reality that people have an option and are exercising it,” Masters said. “As security professionals, we have to deal with that reality.”
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Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to build a case to strip Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her citizenship and eventually deport her.
It is my hope that American Jews — even those who do not like Omar and can recite every questionable comment she has made over the past 15 years to illustrate why — will understand this as offensive and outrageous not only because they are Americans, but because they are Jews.
The Trump administration may claim that it is building a case against Omar due to paperwork (reports suggest that they are interested in whether her father listed her age as 17 on her citizenship application when she was really 18). It is similarly filing dozens of lawsuits attempting to denaturalize citizens by trying to prove they lied in the process of gaining citizenship. However, that this is happening now, ahead of the midterm elections against a sitting member of Congress, a high-profile progressive whom the president has said should “go back” to her country of origin, suggests that it is, to put it mildly, politically motivated.
Evidently, the Trump administration sees citizenship not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward, one that can be taken away if that is seen as useful to the president and his adherents. That use could be silencing political opposition or something as simple (and callous) as an opportunity to brag about the sheer number of attempted denaturalizations.
Jews, too, have found themselves on the wrong end of political denaturalization. I do not mean to compare the Trump administration to the Nazis, but the stubborn fact is that Jews were indeed stripped of their citizenship as part of a political project in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And in the early 20th century in the United States, it was Jews who politicians claimed were incapable of assimilating, of ever really being a part of the United States. These arguments culminated in legislation that kept out Jews who could have found refuge here. The threat of denaturalization and the experience of perpetual otherness is a grievous part of modern Jewish history; we should be offended by its presence in our political present.
Jewish tradition as well as history encourages us to stand up to authority when that authority is wrong. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman; Nathan yells at King David for sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband killed; Moses famously urges Pharoah to change his oppressive ways. Even God is on the receiving end of pushback when Abraham pleads and negotiates to spare Sodom.
I do not think one needs to be Jewish to be outraged by the attempt to denaturalize Ilhan Omar. I think it is also bone-chilling as an American who believes we, including our elected officials, have the right to openly oppose our president, and I am worried as a person who thinks it would be good to continue to live in a democratic republic. And I am sure that there are Jews who will say that Omar deserves to lose her citizenship because she has said things about Israel they do not like.
But the Jewish lens through which I see this is that it is right to challenge power when it is abused, and it is wrong for the powerful to make a show of trying to cast their opponents out of the country.
The point is not whether Trump can make good on the threat to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her, but that it is obscene to use denaturalization as punishment for being a high-profile political opponent in the first place. If he is trying to make it more dangerous to speak out while being from the “wrong” country, then the rest of us need to say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an American citizen.
We should do this because we are Americans and we should do this because we are Jews. We should do this because of the ways in which our American and Jewish identities bleed into one another. And, we should do this because we may not know exactly whether it is as Americans or as Jews that we know we have to protect the right to speak truth to power, but we know we need to do it all the same.
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Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s?
Herding political opponents into prisons and concentration camps, suspending civil liberties, and sending SA thugs to destroy newsrooms and beat up journalists were among the means used by Adolf Hitler to game Germany’s parliamentary election of March 5, 1933, won by the Nazis.
As much as Donald Trump might fantasize about deploying such brutal tactics to subvert our midterm elections, he hasn’t done so — yet. But his objective is the same: Detonate constitutional barriers standing in the way of his lust for power. “Cheat like hell,” Trump told the GOP’s midterm convention last month.
Historian Timothy Ryback has just published a book about the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, titled 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled A Democracy. The 53 days begin when Hitler becomes chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, and end with the Reichstag’s March 23 passage of the Enabling Act, which gave him absolute power.
For our own perilous time, there is another number to take note of: 652 — the number of days between Trump’s second inauguration and our Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Hitler’s long march to despotic power occurred over 3,422 days — from his failed Beer Hall Putsch on Nov. 8-9, 1923, up until passage of the Enabling Act.
After spending less than a year of a five-year sentence for the failed 1923 coup, Hitler returned to a Nazi party that was in utter disarray. But the Great Depression turned the Nazis’ fortunes around, as jobless and disaffected Germans flocked to Hitler with his promises to make Germany great again. In parliamentary elections in 1930, the number of Reichstag seats held by the Nazis rose dramatically from 12 to 107, and more than doubled that in elections in 1932, making them the largest party. After some backroom political wheeling and dealing, President Paul von Hindenburg offered the chancellorship to Hitler, which he accepted on Jan. 30, 1933.
Even though Hitler was chancellor, his coalition wasn’t dominated by Nazis. When the Reichstag went up in flames on Feb. 27, 1933, der Führer had the pretext he needed to begin dismantling the last remnants of democracy. The Nazis’ first targets were Communists. More than 4,000 were arrested in the initial hours after the fire. It didn’t take long for Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jews to also face raids, arrests, beatings and terror, as Hindenburg — at Hitler’s urging — issued a decree that suspended Germans’ civil liberties.
There was still a barrier standing in Hitler’s way: the Reichstag. But Hitler had a scheme for getting rid of it: calling for a new election and ultimately engineering a vote by the Reichstag to abolish itself.
In the days and nights before the national election, set for March 5, Nazis carried out a campaign of repression and menace across the country. Brandishing firearms, storm troopers ruled the streets. Homes of Hitler critics were raided. His campaign speeches were blasted from loudspeakers. Voters were offered rides to the polls in transports organized by the Nazis, an unsubtle hint at which party they should vote for.
In the election, the Nazis and their Nationalist allies won a majority of seats in the Reichstag but fell short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution. But Hitler had a workaround: Convene the Reichstag to vote on a measure that would allow him to declare laws without the approval of the federal legislative body. With Communist delegates of the Reichstag either in hiding or in custody, Hitler already had a structural advantage; they wouldn’t be there to vote. With the Reichstag building destroyed, the delegates convened on March 23 inside the Kroll Opera House, which swarmed with armed storm troopers and members of the SS who harassed and threatened delegates who were either on the fence about giving Hitler absolute power or were known to oppose it.
In the end, weeks and months of trying to tilt elections through terror and intimidation gave Hitler his ultimate prize: of 538 delegates in the Kroll Opera House, only 94 — all Social Democrats — voted against the Enabling Act. In effect, German democracy was steered by Hitler into committing suicide.
In an essay for Literary Hub, Timothy Ryback noted parallels between Hitler’s election victory on March 5, 1933 and our midterm elections and cataloged them.
They include Trump’s “brazen attempt to quash negative press coverage” and Hitler’s and Trump’s virtually identical pre-election low approval ratings. Both the Nazi leader and the American president had gone to court to try to have earlier election results overturned, and the German election, like our fast-approaching midterms, was seen as a referendum on the nation’s leader.
“Amidst all the turmoil, everyone understood that the March 5 election was a make-or-break moment not only for the Hitler chancellorship but for democracy itself,” Ryback wrote.
With the midterms just around the corner, this can be said about America as well.
Since Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, he has thrown more effort into trying to rig the midterms for the Republicans than into virtually any other endeavor — other than perhaps misusing his powers to enrich himself and his family, and dreaming up monuments to himself.
Trump’s pardon of 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6 was an early signal that the defeated president had no intention of playing fair during the 2026 midterms. What followed was a barrage of assaults on the election system. Here’s just a partial list: lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data, the gutting of oversight bodies, intimidation of election officials and orders for key GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts — all designed to both undermine Americans’ trust in the election system and manufacture pretexts for contesting any midterm outcomes that displease him.
Amid these relentless attempts to subvert the midterms, the Democrats have had success at blocking some of Trump’s poisoned salvos, such as holding the line against the so-called SAVE America Act and fending off Trump’s attempts to seize voter information. But none of this deters Trump, who just comes back with more schemes. The latest revelations come from documents obtained by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization.
Those documents show that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding state election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of a sweeping federal effort to find alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms,” according to Democracy Docket, which reviewed the documents.
“This is an absolute smoking gun,” said Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.
Trump has openly suggested a federal takeover of election administration, and during the past several months it seems like he’s been laying the groundwork for that to happen if he doesn’t get the results he wants on Nov. 3. It’s all too easy to imagine horror scenarios: Trump claims massive voter fraud, his supporters storm county election offices in protest, the FBI seizes ballots and voting machines, unrest erupts across the country, Trump declares martial law.
If Trump’s schemes trigger the kind of disorder he appears to be preparing for, the question will be whether our courts, our press, our civil servants and our voters stand firm. Germany’s institutions bent until they broke. Ours have bent, but they have not yet snapped. What happens next will reveal whether they still possess the steel that Germany’s lacked.
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Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs
(JTA) — Sally Rooney’s publisher says it will stop supplying her books in the United Kingdom because current legislation prevents it from passing her earnings on to her.
The best-selling Irish writer, whose work includes the novel “Normal People,” which was adapted into a hit BBC drama, has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
Faber said it would no longer supply her books in the United Kingdom because of her backing for Palestine Action, a group that the British government last year proscribed as a terrorist organization, saying it had “orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions.”
“Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work,” the publisher said.
“To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” it said. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”
Faber had no further comment, the statement said.
Yvette Cooper, then the Home Secretary, banned Palestine Action last year following an attack by the group on the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton which caused millions of pounds of damage. It had previously targeted businesses and premises which it said were linked to Israeli defence companies.
Soon after the announcement, Rooney wrote an opinion piece in the Irish Times in which she doubled down on her support for Palestine Action, adding that she would give the proceeds of her books to back the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under British law, so be it,” she wrote.
In a statement following the action announced by Faber, Rooney cited her Irish Times opinion piece as she explained that the publication of her books “could now constitute a serious criminal offence.”
The ban of Palestine Action has proven to be highly contentious in Britain. Back in February, the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori challenged the move in the High Court, with Rooney providing a supportive witness statement. She said at the time that she was “almost certain” her work would be dropped in Britain if the ban persisted.
The court ruled in Ammori’s favor, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in June. The Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal next month.
Rooney said on Wednesday: “After a process of consultation and deliberation, and with my full agreement, my publisher Faber has therefore determined that it can no longer supply my work within the UK.
“I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences.”
Rooney’s support for the Palestinian cause predates the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. In 2021 she declined to sell Hebrew translation rights for her novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” to the Israeli publisher that had previously released her books in Hebrew.
At the time, she said she supported the BDS movement and would not work with an Israeli publisher unless it is willing to “publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
That move prompted backlash in Israel and beyond, including calls to boycott Rooney’s work. Israeli bookstore chains reportedly removed some of her books from shelves.
However, earlier this year she agreed to have her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” published by an Israeli publisher approved by boycott activists.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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