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As Israel urged caution, these Syrian Jews lobbied the U.S. to lift sanctions on Syria
(JTA) — “Mouaz, what do you think, should I go?”
The day after Henry Hamra learned that Islamist rebels had ousted Bashar Assad from power — ending more than six decades of Ba’athist rule over Syria — he was on the phone with his friend Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
The unlikely alliance — a Syrian-American son of Palestinian refugees and a Syrian Jewish cantor whose father was Syria’s chief rabbi — would drive a yearlong campaign to lift punishing sanctions that Moustafa had helped bring about.
It would also place prominent Syrian American Jews opposite Israel’s government, which remains intensely wary of the new regime in Syria.
Hamra fled Syria with his family in 1992, after the Ba’athist government lifted the ban on Jews traveling abroad. Ba’athist restrictions on one of the largest and oldest Jewish communities in the Middle East forced the displacement of more than 30,000 Jews.
Hamra, speaking in a thick Brooklyn accent, recounted how he had watched his country fall apart. There was little he or his family could do from their exile. Henry’s father, Yosef Hamra, was a rabbi and leader of the Damascus Jewish community, and his uncle, Rabbi Avraham Hamra, who settled in Holon, Israel, after leaving Syria, served as the country’s last chief rabbi until 1994.
Moustafa, the son of a Palestinian refugee father and a Syrian mother, had wasted little time before heading back to Syria. By the time Hamra called, he was already there. Moustafa’s reply was immediate, he recalled: “Absolutely, I was just there, and I’m going back. You need to come with me.”
Moustafa founded the Syrian Emergency Task Force in March 2011 in response to the Assad government’s war on civilians in the wake of Arab Spring protests. Over the 14 years of civil war, the SETF became a mainstay of the Syrian opposition in exile, and Moustafa became a well-regarded political operative working on behalf of the Syrian people in Washington.
In 2014, Moustafa was put in touch with a Syrian military police photographer who fled the country with a flash drive containing evidence of systematic torture and mass executions in Assad’s prisons. The whistleblower, known publicly as “Caesar,” was First Lieutenant Farid al-Madhhan, a name he kept hidden for years to protect himself and his family, and only revealed after Assad’s fall in December 2024.
“The pictures were reminiscent of the worst moments of history,” Moustafa said. “Emaciated, tortured bodies, eyes gouged out, men, women, children, elderly, on a massive scale.”
The images set off a five-year lobbying campaign led by Moustafa, culminating in the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, signed by President Trump in December 2019, which sanctioned Assad regime officials and cut Syria off from the international financial system.
“When we drafted the Caesar Act,” Moustafa said, “we took all of that to pass a law that very specifically addressed the machinery of death of the Assad regime and how it needed to stop.”
After Assad’s ouster in December 2024, the Caesar sanctions, so effective at strangling his regime, threatened to do the same to Syria’s new government. So Moustafa enlisted Hamra’s help.
Moustafa had known Hamra since 2013 through his friendship with Abraham Hamra, Henry’s uncle. They had connected through Moustafa’s efforts to save Judaica from the Jobar Synagogue after it was bombed by forces loyal to Assad.
The friendship would result in Hamra, who still resists describing himself as a political person, running for parliament in Syria’s first open elections since the Ba’ath party seized power in 1963. It would bring his father to recite a blessing over Ahmad al-Sharaa, the Islamist rebel commander who now serves as Syria’s president. And their relationship, and the efforts that followed, would help pave the way for the lifting of the U.S. sanctions regime that had cut Syria off from the global economy.
“Would Caesar have been lifted without the Syrian Jewish community? I don’t believe it would have been,” Moustafa said.
President Donald Trump officially lifted the Caesar sanctions on Dec. 19, 2025, when he signed the FY 2026 NDAA into law, a year after Assad’s ouster. By May 2025, the Treasury had already issued a 180-day waiver on the other sanctions, but the Caesar sanctions remained in place, only to be repealed by an act of Congress.
This was Moustafa’s target, and the first step, as Moustafa recalled, was to help get the Hamras back to Syria. But there was much work to be done between that initial phone call and the moment Hamra set foot in Syria for the first time in more than 30 years.
As Moustafa recalled, he and Hamra spoke by phone every day in the weeks leading up to the trip. Hamra had a list of demands they had to work through, including an official letter from the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcoming the group, meant to ease fears after decades of persecution under Assad.
“They just liberated it. There’s no staff, there’s nothing set up yet. How can I get you a paper?” Moustafa recalled telling him.
Also on Hamra’s list: He wanted at least 10 Jews on the first trip, so his father Yosef could pray with a quorum at the Faranj Synagogue in the heart of Damascus’s Jewish Quarter, the same synagogue where Yosef had prayed as a child and where he last led services before the family left Syria in 1992.
Syrian Jews in America had for years sought to maintain civil relations with a regime that still housed remnants of their family, and their properties. A delegation visited the regime in 2004 as Syria sought to head off a sanctions regime, and some in the community marked the death in 2000 of Hafez Assad with a black sash mourning.
That demand proved impossible to meet. As Moustafa and Hamra sought to fill the spots, security concerns led most prospective travelers to back out in the days before departure. The question of whether the trip would happen at all remained unresolved until the day before, when Hamed Khanatri (then the head of Syria’s foreign ministry) called Henry to say: “We’re waiting for you,” he recounted.
“The Syrian Jewish community has suffered enormously, both before the 2011 conflict and throughout it,” Moustafa said. “Like so many Syrians, they suffered under the regime.”
Having seen firsthand what the Assad government had done to Syrian Jews, including property confiscations and travel bans, Moustafa wanted them to see for themselves whether the transitional government meant what it was telling the international community about leaving behind its jihadist past and severing ties with designated terror groups.
In the year between Assad’s fall and the repeal of the Caesar sanctions in December 2025, the SETF organized three trips to Syria, bringing members of both the Syrian and American Jewish communities to meet with high-level Syrian officials and visit Jewish historic sites in the country.
Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, who joined the first trip in February 2025, said the engagement felt real, even if the motivations behind it were pragmatic.
“I think it was genuine,” he said. “Let’s be realistic. They were setting up an attempt to get into good relations with Syrian Jews, and they needed American help.”
For Schiffman, the motivations of the transitional government mattered less than what it was actually doing, including efforts to document lost Jewish property and begin a process of restitution and restoration for the Syrian Jewish community, according to Hamra.
“Syrian Jews here are partly intentionally serving the same role that certain Jewish organizations served in visiting the UAE and Saudi Arabia, softening the ground before official [state] visits,” Schiffman said. “We did not negotiate with them. We were there to learn what their views are. It was a goodwill mission.”
Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, head of the Ashkenazi community in Istanbul and a key contact for Syria’s Jewish community during the civil war who helped facilitate kosher product deliveries to Damascus, joined another trip. He recalled walking through the lanes of Damascus’ souk wearing his kippah without incident.
“I walked through Damascus freely,” he said. “We did not feel or experience any hostility.”
The culmination of their efforts, as both Moustafa and Hamra described it, was their visit to Washington in November 2025, the final push before passage of the defense authorization bill, into which they sought to insert a provision repealing the Caesar sanctions.
In a one-on-one meeting with South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, Henry recounted that it was his father’s words that Wilson later said had changed his mind. When Wilson asked whether the new Syrian leadership would be good for Syria, Rabbi Hamra’s answer was simple: “I think everybody deserves another chance.”
A spokesperson for Wilson confirmed the meetings, “Wilson met with Rabbi Yosef and Henry Hamra on multiple occasions in the lead-up to the vote. Their perspective did give the Congressman encouragement,” the spokesperson wrote to JTA. “He mentioned the Rabbi’s stance on multiple occasions when advocating to colleagues.” Wilson has become an outspoken critic of Israel’s post-Assad regime incursions into the country, saying it is inhibiting the country’s rehabilitation.
Henry Hamra said Wilson carried as his message throughout the sanctions fight. Moustafa also said it was the Hamra family’s testimony and meetings that helped bring around Rep. Gregory Meeks, the New Yorker who is the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. French Hill, an Arkansas Republican, two other figures who had stood in the way of sanctions relief.
Hill did not comment on the role of the Syrian Jewish expats in relieving the sanctions but said in in a statement to JTA that the relief was necessary.
“The Trump administration is doing the right thing by re-engaging diplomatically and taking steps to help Syria rejoin the community of nations,” he said. “I will continue to work with my colleagues and stakeholders to ensure that American support advances responsible governance and lasting stability for the Syrian people.”
Meeks did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Al-Sharaa was also in Washington during that period, working to build goodwill with the Trump administration. It was not al-Sharaa’s first meeting with Trump. In May 2025, al-Sharaa met with the president in Riyadh on the sidelines of a Gulf Cooperation Council summit.
Al-Sharaa had himself been designated a terrorist by the United States — a designation that was unwound only after Assad’s fall, with the bounty on his head lifted in December 2024 and the full designation removed in July 2025.
Ahmad Sharawi of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy said that meeting may have been the turning point for Trump’s decision to lift sanctions, which he did by executive order, though only those he could repeal unilaterally.
“What I think happened is that during President Trump’s visit to Riyadh, Mohammed bin Salman spoke with him, and convinced him in what I believe was a single conversation,” Sharawi said. “That’s when al-Sharaa met with Trump as well.”
He added, “I do think they [Syrian Jews] played a role with Congress when it came to the Caesar Act specifically, because it required congressional approval.”
Even with Saudi Arabia lobbying for sanctions relief, and, according to The New York Times, an intensive push by Syrian expatriates in the Gulf with stakes in development contracts and real estate in the rebuilding country, Congress still had to sign off on the repeal. Trump is a fan of al-Sharaa, calling him “attractive” and a “tough guy” when they met in Riyadh in May, Reports have already emerged of a Trump Tower planned for Damascus.
Moustafa knew that one of Syria’s other central challenges would be its relationship with Israel, a conflict that had never been formally resolved since Israel seized the Golan Heights in 1967. In the days after Assad’s fall, Israeli airstrikes destroyed up to 80% of Syria’s strategic military capabilities.
Moustafa vividly recalled the moment a missile struck outside the building where he had just finished a four-hour meeting with President al-Sharaa.
“About an hour after I left that meeting, Israel struck the front door of the presidential palace,” he said. “I heard it and watched it happen.” He added: “The Syrian president said to me, ‘I don’t want to go back to war for 7,000 more years.’”
Israel has maintained a harsh posture toward the new Syrian government since Assad’s fall. Netanyahu declared that Israel would not allow forces loyal to Syria’s new rulers to operate in southern Syria, and demanded full demilitarization of the provinces of Quneitra, Daraa, and Sweida.
An Israeli official told the Times of Israel that Netanyahu personally asked Trump not to lift sanctions on Syria during a visit to Washington, citing fears of a cross-border attack similar to Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault. Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s close aide and minister of strategic affairs, was widely reported to have lobbied Congress to keep the sanctions in place, or at a minimum, to preserve conditions that would allow them to be reimposed.
Others in the Israeli security establishment are similarly skeptical. Sarit Zehavi, the founder and president of the Alma Research and Education Center in Israel, sees the new Syrian government as Islamist in all but name.
Zehavi’s family is originally from Damascus. As she recounted to JTA, her family of jewelers, among the wealthiest in the city, lived in the historic Beit Lisbona in the Harat al-Yahud, the old Jewish quarter.
When Bashar Assad was finally ousted in December 2024, Zehavi was eager to return and see her family’s home for the first time. Her own staff had to talk her out of it. “My research staff had to convince me that there is no chance that I am going to Damascus in the near future to see my father’s house because things are not going to get better,” she said.
She was hopeful at first, but reports of massacres committed against Alawites on the coast, and then against the Druze in Sweida, soured her faith in the new government.
“It took a while until I understood that what is happening in Syria is far from liberation,” she said.
Zehavi said she was surprised by the lobbying undertaken by her fellow Jewish expats. “It seems counterintuitive that Syrian Jews living in Brooklyn would try to get the sanctions lifted on someone who was in Al-Qaeda. He’s a jihadist,” she said, while reserving her sharpest criticism for the Trump administration’s decision to lift the Caesar sanctions without conditions.
“You need timed demands and benchmarks that would indicate that Ahmed al-Sharaa is truly what we all hoped he would be,” she said. “They lifted it without any conditions. That’s the main problem.”
Zehavi is skeptical that the Syrian Jewish community’s goals will be served by the move. “If what they said is true, that this way they can reestablish Jewish institutions in Damascus, that’s a very nice goal, and maybe they’re right,” she said. “But in the bigger picture, I’m not sure it will lead in a positive direction.”
Yosef Hamra had been scheduled to testify before the Helsinki Commission, the U.S. branch of the multiparliamentary human rights monitor, during his visit to Congress in November 2025, but the hearing was canceled. In a copy of his prepared remarks obtained by JTA, he wrote: “It is a shame that today the Caesar Act punishes the Syrian people, Muslims, Christians and Jews, Arabs and Kurds, for the crimes of a regime that has been deposed.”
Before he met with Trump, Yosef Hamra — wearing a kippah — recited a blessing over Ahmad al-Sharaa.
It was an ending fit for such an improbable alliance: a Palestinian-Syrian activist and a Syrian Jewish cantor working together to reopen a country ripped apart by 14 years of civil war. For the Hamras, the blessing was more than a public declaration of faith in the new government — it was proof that something had shifted. But whether Syria’s future would bring democracy and equality for its multi-ethnic population was a question neither Hamra nor Moustafa could answer.
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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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