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Texas school board that banned Anne Frank book invited Messianic ׳rabbi’ charged with sexual assault to open meeting with prayer
(JTA) – On Monday, the board of Keller Independent School District in Texas introduced that evening’s prayer leader as “Rabbi Griffin.”
A man wearing a suit and kippah then approached the podium and recited the priestly blessing in Hebrew. “Grant us, Adonai, your mind tonight so we can be a blessing to our community, to our children,” he continued. “Bring ‘Shalom,’ nothing missing, nothing broken, to this meeting tonight.”
But this was not an ordinary rabbi, nor an ordinary school board meeting. Keller is the district that, earlier this year, had ordered its libraries to remove all copies of a 2018 graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary from shelves. And “Rabbi Griffin” is Mark Aaron Griffin, a Messianic Jew who last year was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault.
“Last night we were shocked but excited when we saw a man who said he was a rabbi come up to pray,” Laney Hawes, a parent in the Keller district who regularly sounds off about the board’s policies, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But, she said, “a quick Google search” revealed Griffin’s true identity.
Griffin, who heads a congregation in nearby Saginaw, Texas, that blends Christian beliefs and Jewish practices, is currently awaiting trial on four counts of sexual assault. According to reports of the indictment, he is accused of using his stature as a “rabbi” to sexually assault a woman in March 2020 after coercing her to become his “concubine” and citing Abraham and Jacob as examples of spiritual figures who enjoyed multiple partners. The victim claimed she had been assaulted in Griffin’s congregation, including in his office, which DNA samples seemed to corroborate, a warrant said.
First indicted in late 2020, Griffin faces trial next month, local county records indicate.
A spokesperson for the school district did not return a JTA request for comment. The district had ordered the removal of “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” this summer, resurrecting a months-old parental challenge to the book following a new school board election. The new board then launched an effort to revise its policies around book challenges and bans — which have become a major rallying cry among right-wing parent activists in public schools.
Keller returned “Anne Frank’s Diary” to circulation a week later following massive public outcry.
Griffin’s congregation, Sar Shalom Synagogue, says its adheres to “Yeshua Centered Judaism,” using a Hebrew name for Jesus. Mainstream Jewish denominations consider the movement to be Christian and hostile to traditional Jewish beliefs, although Messianic Jews often advertise themselves using Jewish signifiers: On its website, Sar Shalom (which identifies “Rabbi Aaron” as its founder) claims to have “the very first kosher mikvah [or Jewish ritual bath] built for a Jewish community centered on Messiah Yeshua in modern history.”
Keller’s board reportedly began its opening convocation policy after its most recent members, several of whom were backed by right-wing groups, were elected in May. According to Hawes, they have never invited spiritual leaders from non-Christian faiths to lead the convocation.
“We then realized why the school board was letting [Griffin] pray, because he was praying to Jesus,” Hawes said.
Hawes claimed that after the meeting, she asked two board members if they had known about Griffin’s indictments, and that their response was that he had not yet been convicted.
Hawes also said she asked the board “why they weren’t allowing members of other faiths and beliefs to participate” in the opening prayer, and said she was told that the prayer was intended only for the school board trustees, who all believe in Jesus.
Later at the same meeting, a Jewish student at Keller High School spoke out against what she said were “rather offensive and antisemitic comments” she received after wearing a Hanukkah sweater to her school’s Ugly Sweater Day.
“Unfortunately, these incidents will only become more common with minority students of diverse backgrounds when you actively seek their removal in educational settings,” the student, who identified herself as Allison Perlman, said while holding a “Nazis Banned Books” sign, accusing the board of “removing all possible books and curricula that don’t align with your narrow-minded Christian nationalist views.”
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The post Texas school board that banned Anne Frank book invited Messianic ׳rabbi’ charged with sexual assault to open meeting with prayer appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Tlaib Condemns Israel for Retaliatory Strikes Against Hamas After Staying Silent on Gaza Ceasefire
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), one of the most vocal opponents of Israel in the US Congress, has condemned the Jewish state for supposedly continuing a so-called “genocide” in Gaza after remaining silent on the recent ceasefire agreement between Jerusalem and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Tlaib lambasted Israel on X on Sunday, saying that the “apartheid regime” has continued “raining down” missiles on Gaza despite striking a ceasefire agreement days prior. She insinuated that Israel has used the ceasefire agreement as cover for carrying out a slaughter campaign against the Palestinian people and urged the US federal government to impose sanctions to the Jewish state.
“The genocidal apartheid regime is once again raining down bombs across Gaza and calling it a ‘ceasefire.’ They will never stop until there’s a total arms embargo and economic sanctions. The US must stop the genocide,” Tlaib posted.
On Sunday, Israel launched a wave of strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza after two Israelis soldiers were killed in a Palestinian attack.
Notably, Tlaib remained largely silent regarding the ceasefire and hostage-release deal to halt fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that went into effect last week. Tlaib did not release a statement acknowledging the release of Israeli hostages on any of her official platforms.
Tlaib has also been a fierce critic of Israel’s war against the Hamas terrorist group, relentlessly accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide” against the Palestinians in Gaza. Tlaib has also accused Israel of attempting “ethnic cleansing” and erecting an “apartheid” regime in Gaza and the West Bank.
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Maine Senate candidate comes under fire for Nazi-style tattoo
A Democrat running for the Senate in Maine is facing backlash after acknowledging that a black skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest resembles a Nazi symbol.
Graham Platner, a 41-year-old Marine veteran and oyster farmer, confirmed the tattoo’s existence on Monday, in an effort to get ahead of rumors sparked by an opposition research group after Platner was seen on video singing shirtless at his brother’s wedding.
“I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner said on the Pod Save America podcast, claiming to instead be “a lifelong opponent” of Nazism and antisemitism. Platner said he got the tattoo in 2007 while stationed in Croatia with fellow Marines.
“We picked a terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall,” he said, implying he was unaware of any specific historic implications to the symbol. “It was a standard military thing.”
But a former acquaintance who knew Platner while attending George Washington University more than a decade ago told Jewish Insider that Platner himself identified the tattoo as a “Totenkopf,” the death’s head emblem used by a Nazi SS unit that guarded concentration camps during World War II. That acquaintance said Platner used the term during a 2012 conversation at a Capitol Hill bar where he then worked and socialized.
Platner insisted that he wasn’t aware the tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol until reporters began to recently ask him about it. “I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that, and to insinuate that I did is disgusting,” he said in a statement to Jewish Insider. “I am already planning to get this removed.”
However, his former political director, Genevieve McDonald, who resigned from his campaign last week, wrote in a Facebook post that she thought the candidate knew about the “antisemitic tattoo on his chest” before rumors began. “Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it,” she added, “but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”
McDonald resigned after Reddit posts surfaced in which Platner made incendiary comments, including by defending a man with a Nazi SS lightning bolt tattoo who impersonated a federal officer at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas in 2020.
Platner is competing in a 10-person race against the longtime Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, and is backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Independent from neighboring Vermont.
Platner, who described himself as a “working-class populist,” enlisted in the Marines in 2003 and served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He later returned to Kabul for six months as a State Department security contractor with Constellis.
After that experience, he became outspoken in his criticism of United States defense spending, arguing that it served as “a mechanism for transferring taxpayer dollars into the private bank accounts of defense companies.” He said that his experience overseas “uniquely prepares him to fight back against the broken and corrupt foreign policy that consumes Washington.”
The candidate is also a strident critic of Israel. “There is a genocide happening in Palestine,” he wrote on X in August. Marking the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Platner wrote that the war in Gaza was “the moral test of our time” and said he is “committed to ending this U.S.-funded genocide in Palestine.” He also ran Facebook ads rejecting AIPAC.
His chief Democratic rival is Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who was endorsed on Tuesday by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The post Maine Senate candidate comes under fire for Nazi-style tattoo appeared first on The Forward.
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‘We Stand Together’: UK Professors Call Out Harassment of Jewish Colleague Who Served in IDF
Illustrative: London, Britain, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
Hundreds of professors on Tuesday signed a petition calling for the end of an antisemitic hate campaign aimed at driving a Jewish Israeli professor from his job at City St. George’s, University of London because he served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the 1980s.
The professor, Michael Ben-Gad, has been unrelentingly pursued by a pro-Hamas organization which calls itself City Action for Palestine, the petition says. It has subjected him to several forms of persecution, including social media agitprop, unlawful assembly at his place of work, and even a petition of their own.
“Regardless of diverse views on the recent Gaza war and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we deplore any campaign that seeks to intimidate and drive out lecturers because they are Israeli, Jewish, or members of any other group,” the professors’s petition says. “Academics and students have a right to go about their work at any university without facing harassment.”
It continues, “Attacks of this kind are intimidating, particularly to Jewish students, and set a precedent under which others could be targeted in the future. We wish to make clear to what appears to be a small, if very vocal, group that their mobbing tactics will not succeed. We stand together in support of Professor Ben-Gad and his personal and intellectual freedom as an academic.”
City Action for Palestine is one of London’s most notorious anti-Zionist groups, convulsing higher education campuses across the city with pro-Hamas demonstrations which demonize pro-Israel Jews, attack policies enacted to combat antisemitism, and amplify the propaganda of jihadist terror organizations. Ben-Gad is not its only victim, as the group has targeted Members of Parliament, the Union of Jewish Students, and City University London president Anthony Finkelstein, who is Jewish and the child of a Holocaust survivor.
Jews employed in higher education in Europe and America face an escalating climate of hate and intimidation.
Around the globe, in Alameda County, California, a professor is suing the University of California, Berkeley, alleging that school officials denied her a job because she is Israeli — a claim the university’s own investigators corroborated in an internal investigation. According to court documents, a hiring official allegedly concluded that an Israeli professor working in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies would be unpalatable to students and faculty after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
“My dept [sic] cannot host you for a class next fall,” the official allegedly told Dr. Yael Nativ in a WhatsApp message. “Things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) later initiated an investigation into Nativ’s denial after the professor wrote an opinion essay which publicly accused the school of cowardice and violations of her civil rights. OPHD determined that a “preponderance of evidence” proved Nativ’s claim, but school officials went on to ignore the professor’s requests for an apology and other remedial measures, including sending her a renewed invitation to teach dance.
At George Washington University, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) issued an ominous warning to a professor who created a proposal to resettle residents of Gaza outside of the Palestinian enclave and remake it into a hub for tourism and economic dynamism.
“This notice is to inform you that you are hereby evicted from the premises of the George Washington University,” SJP wrote in a missive it taped to the office door of international affairs professor Joseph Pelzman, who first shared the resettlement plan with Trump’s presidential campaign in July 2024, according to an account of events he described to the podcast “America, Baby!” the following month.
“The reason for the eviction is: your active role in incepting the genocide and planned ethnic cleansing of Gaza,” SJP’s message continued. “Your disgusting plan for the complete destruction and foreign occupation of Gaza and the colonial ‘re-education’ of Palestinians.”
Denouncing Pelzman as an “architect of genocide,” SJP added, “Pelzman’s tenure is only one pernicious symptom of the bloodthirsty Zionism permeating our campus … The proprietors of this eviction notice demand your immediate removal.”
In September, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), released survey results showing that 73 percent of Jewish faculty witnessed their colleagues engaging in antisemitic activity, and a significant percentage named the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) group as the force driving it.
Of those aware of an FSJP chapter on their campus, the vast majority of respondents reported that the chapter engaged in anti-Israel programming (77.2 percent), organized anti-Israel protests and demonstrations (79.4 percent), and endorsed anti-Israel divestment campaigns (84.8 percent).
“Colleges and universities are meant to be open, safe, learning environments where faculty and students alike feel comfortable sharing ideas and having open discourse,” AEN executive director Miriam Elman said in a statement. “It’s disturbing, but perhaps unsurprising, that Jewish and Zionist faculty on campuses across the country are experiencing antisemitic hostility and retaliation for their beliefs.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.