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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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From the Editor: The Audacity of the Jews to Survive
The annual ‘March of the Living,’ a trek between two former Nazi-run death camps, in Oswiecim and Brzezinka, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: Maciek Jazwiecki/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
History has returned for the Jews. For 78 years following the end of World War II, the Jewish people enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace and calm globally. There were rocky periods over this time and plenty of instances of antisemitic violence, from the Munich massacre to the AMIA bombing, but Jews overall were not suffering anywhere near the same pervasive persecution of previous eras. Then came Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel and perpetrated the biggest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, broadcasting their savagery for the world to see. The Oct. 7 atrocities awoke a dormant beast: What followed, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, was a ferocious surge in antisemitic incidents — harassment, intimidation, and violence — around the globe.
Many observers, including Jewish leaders, have described this rise in hostility as a new phenomenon, with antisemitism reaching record levels. But the cold truth that Jewish communities need to recognize is that the world is returning to its pre-1945 norm, when bigotry against Jews was a far more common element of daily life. Of course, now there’s Israel, serving as a place of refuge with a standing military to protect Jews. And today most societies, both elites and the masses, don’t want to be seen as overtly antisemitic, unlike past eras when blatant prejudice and discrimination were more socially and culturally acceptable — often even a point of national pride. But make no mistake: Antisemitism will continue to be normalized and tolerated in a way that no other bigotry would be, including in the West.
If 2023 was the year history returned for the Jews and 2024 was when antisemitism began to normalize once the initial shock went away, then 2025 marked the moment the intifada went global. From Washington to Boulder, from Manchester to Sydney, calls from anti-Israel activists to “globalize the intifada” came to fruition with murderous antisemitic attacks.
Despite the gravity of this moment, discussions of Jews, Israel, and antisemitism, even among friends, have missed key fundamentals about the underlying dynamics of what led us here. Specifically, few people seem to understand what antisemitism really is and why it has proven to be the most enduring form of bigotry in the history of civilization. The answer illuminates why Jews must remain vigilant, practical, and appropriately cautious on one hand while simultaneously maintaining and sharing a deep sense of pride and comfort in the fact that they have faced much worse before and will endure this too. The Jewish people will live on, as their opponents of today fade into the distance.
Israel’s First Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (C) stands under a portrait depicting Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, as he reads Israel’s declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948, in this handout picture released April 29, 2008, by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO). Photo: REUTERS/Kluger Zoltan/GPO/Handout
An Unprecedented Story
The rabid opposition to Israel and steep rise in antisemitism we’ve seen worldwide over the past two years serve as a reminder that a sizable chunk of humanity deeply resents the will of the Jewish people both to survive and thrive in the face of intense persecution.
Indeed, a key reason for the persistence of antisemitism through millennia is that the story of the Jewish people seems too improbable to believe without invoking the conspiracy theory of the all-powerful Jew.
For the last 2,500-plus years, at least since the Babylonian exile, Jews have been expelled, slaughtered, and scapegoated in such a consistent and widespread way that is unique to the human experience of persecution. In short, antisemitism is civilization’s oldest, most entrenched hatred.
And yet, the Jewish people have endured and survived, collectively forming much of Western civilization’s moral, legal, and spiritual foundation with their ideas and teachings. More than that, Jews have thrived amid unparalleled adversity, becoming disproportionally successful in fields as diverse as law, medicine, and the arts.
To drive home the point, Jews have won about a quarter of all Nobel prizes, despite making up less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
How can such a tiny spec of humanity be so extensively persecuted but somehow, despite the obstacles, excel to such a degree? It doesn’t make any sense.
Israel’s story is similar. Only in the Jewish state are the same people worshiping the same God and speaking the same language that they did 3,000 years ago. Many people simply cannot understand that the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 was the ultimate decolonization project, the return of an ancient people to their homeland in which they always maintained a presence and to which they never gave up deep connection.
Everything about the Jews and Israel seems to defy possibility and common sense: Such countries are not resurrected in history, and dead languages such as Hebrew are not revived.
And then consider the land itself: a tiny sliver of earth with a limited supply of natural freshwater, surrounded by larger enemies bent on the Jewish state’s destruction.
But rather than die, Israel survived to become the vibrant democracy, military juggernaut, and high-tech hub that we know today — a mini superpower surpassing its neighbors (and most of the world) in virtually all aspects of state power and quality of life.
The stories of Israel and the Jewish people are puzzles, and the pieces do not fit according to the typical rules of history. For too many people, antisemitic conspiracy theories provide a comforting answer to fill in the blanks to these mysteries.
Car in New South Wales, Australia graffitied with antisemitic message. The word “F**k” has been removed from this image. Photo: Screenshot
What Antisemitism Actually Is – and Why the Jews Are so Hated
Antisemitism isn’t bigotry as we typically understand it. Bernard Lewis, the late and preeminent historian of the Middle East, explained how “it is perfectly possible to hate and even to persecute Jews without necessarily being antisemitic.” How? Because “hatred and persecution are a normal part of the human experience.”
Antisemitism has two special features, Lewis argued, that make it a distinct form of bigotry. First, “Jews are judged by a standard different from that applied to others.” Second, and more importantly, is the “accusation of cosmic, satanic evil attributed to Jews,” the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else. The latter point is why, historically, it was rarely enough just to subjugate the Jewish people and force them to submit to a certain authority. No, the Jews had to be either expelled or slaughtered — after being scapegoated for society’s ills.
While racism is emotional, antisemitism is explanatory, an epistemic failure of the highest degree using a veneer of logic to promote a false version of reality. This is why podcasters and university professors get away with antisemitism but not racism: They can portray the former as a serious intellectual exercise. What they don’t say is that the lies of blood libel and Jewish control are what have always led to pogroms and even genocide.
Antisemitism is a virus of the mind that has gone through three historical mutations. In the Middle Ages, hatred and persecution of Jews were based on their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, hatred and persecution of Jews were based on their race. Today, hatred and persecution of Jews are more often based on their nation-state, Israel. As the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks argued, “anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism.” With each new phase, antisemitism adapted to what became morally and intellectually acceptable — religious persecution fell out of fashion during the Enlightenment, and the same happened to racial persecution in the mid-20th century. Persecuting the Jewish state, however, is perfectly acceptable today, especially among cultural and political elites.
In the ancient world, Jews were initially hated for introducing monotheism to the world, practicing a system of laws and values requiring a level of discipline to which others were, frankly, unwilling to commit. And then through the years, Jews continuously refused to conform to the ruling empire of the day, maintaining their identity and practices. Naturally, this built resentment.
At the same time, Jews never sought to proselytize; they were content with their own community, happy to live among others but not particularly interested in expanding the tribe. This too built resentment.
To the gentile, Jews were an exclusive club — one could say a chosen people — which would neither submit to nor express much interest in outside forces. The former is a prime explainer for the prevalence of Islamic antisemitism; the latter helps explain the endurance of Christian antisemitism, with Jews never accepting Jesus.
After thinking about these issues for years, I have come to the simple conclusion that antisemitism is so persistent because people believe Jews are the “chosen people,” and they see in Israel that same chosenness. And they resent them for it.
There is a striking moment in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, when the Nazi leader concedes that the Jews might just be the chosen people — and seems to fear that his antisemitic plans may be doomed to fail.
“When … I scrutinized the activity of the Jewish people,” Hitler wrote, “suddenly there rose up in me the fearful question whether inscrutable destiny, perhaps for reasons unknown to us poor mortals, did not, with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory of this little nation.”
Whether Jews actually are a chosen people isn’t the point. The antisemite sees the Jewish story and doesn’t express admiration but rather resentment and paranoia. To them, there is something particular about the Jews that simply defies explanation. They are worthy of unique hatred and scorn. Yes, Jews are often hated in specific situations for their God, or for being a successful minority, or other reasons that are often put forward. But underneath these explanations, often subconsciously, is the fear, hatred, and awe that the Jewish people have a divine spark. Many groups, from the West to East Asia (for example, China calling itself “the Middle Kingdom”), make a claim to chosenness, but bigots only single out the Jews for scorn as a result. Because deep down, they believe it.
If this argument sounds a bit vague and irrational, that’s the point. There’s a supernatural element of antisemitism that can’t be explained by logic, reason, or history. As Sacks wrote, antisemitism “is not a coherent set of beliefs but a set of contradictions. Before the Holocaust, Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung tenaciously to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.”
Because antisemitism is not simply about hatred of Jews but, rather, reflects an even more irrational belief that Jews are responsible for all the world’s ills, antisemites apply their views in such absurd, contradictory ways. It’s a shape-shifting virus that reveals more about the host than the Jews. As the journalist Vasily Grossman observed in his book Life and Fate, “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of — I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
The Line Between Criticism of Israel and Antisemitism
Anti-Zionists — those who either outright call for Israel’s eradication or, more cleverly, advocate policies that would ultimately lead to the same result — like to argue that people accusing them of antisemitism are simply trying to stifle their right to free speech in order to advance a political agenda. Therefore, it’s worth taking a moment to clarify that criticizing Israel is not antisemitic. Contrary to what certain dishonest voices may say, no Jew or Israeli or Zionist has actually made that argument. It is 100 percent fair game to oppose the actions and rhetoric of the Israeli government.
However, it is antisemitic to argue that Israel is an illegitimate entity whose very existence is a crime. Jews have always defined themselves — and historically were defined by others — as a people, not just a religion. To deny this reality and Jewish self-determination, to oppose Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation, is to attack the heart of Jewish identity. Unfortunately, this is the core message of the pro-Palestinian movement, whose leaders do not preach two states for two peoples but instead describe the world’s lone Jewish polity as a cancer to be eradicated.
To be more specific, criticism becomes bigotry when it involves demonizing and delegitimizing Israel. Accusing Israel of genocide or running an apartheid state is a demonstrable lie that can’t be labeled legitimate criticism. The same goes for describing Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, as a human rights abuser on the level of China and North Korea.
Those who support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel employ such rhetoric as part of their campaign of economic warfare against the country. Such efforts seek to destroy the Jewish state through international pressure, undermining Israel to the point that it effectively ceases to survive. Think about the implications for Israeli Jews, who live in a region in which most governments and peoples have shown indifference to if not support for slaughtering Jews.
Moreover, now that the Jewish people have Israel and are not prepared to surrender it after 2,000 years of exile and persecution, the only way to replace Israel with Palestine is by forcibly taking it. That would mean killing or expelling millions of Jews. Those who know this but continue to advocate the anti-Zionist cause are antisemitic. And those anti-Zionists who do not realize this reality shouldn’t simply be able to plead ignorance and absolve themselves.
Imagine if someone demonized and sought to de-legitimize another country — say, Ireland — with the same obsessive hatred that the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Ilhan Omar, Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, and the leaders of Iran show Israel. Would they not be bigoted against the Irish? Of course they would.
But no one targets Ireland, or any other country, like so many people target Israel, despite its love of life, democratic system, commitment to freedom, and equal treatment under law. That’s the double standard of antisemitism in action.
Separating antisemitism from criticism of Israeli policy is not difficult. As with pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
But if that’s not enough, there are two simple tests to help decipher the difference.
A good rule of thumb is that, if you can take a statement and replace the words “Israel,” “Israeli,” and “Zionist” with “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Jewish people,” and that statement then sounds like it came straight out of the Dark Ages or Nazi Germany, it is probably antisemitic. The same goes for replacing “Zionism” with “Judaism.” Just try it and see if that person calling to eliminate “vermin Zionists” or using the term “zio” or “israeli” — both always lowercased — is really just critical of Israeli policy.
Another test is to ask the following question: Is it just a coincidence that Israel happens to be the world’s only Jewish state? When someone accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza but pays little attention to any other conflict in the world, ask this question. When someone claims Israel has no strategic value to the US as an ally and should be cut off, ask this question. And when someone repeatedly promotes conspiracy theories involving Israel without evidence, ask this question. Eventually, it will become obvious when it is not just a coincidence.
Pro-Israel rally in Times Square, New York City, US, Oct. 8, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
The Will to Endure
The Jewish people have overcome great empires seeking to destroy them for millennia. Today, they have both reestablished their ancient homeland in the Land of Israel and thrived in the diaspora.
In short, Jews are no longer victims, which much of the world has become accustomed to and known them to be. This reality triggers bewilderment, which can lead to admiration. “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” Mark Twain wrote with wonder in an 1899 essay. Often, however, bewilderment with the Jewish story is combined with envy and resentment, paving the way for antisemitism.
The post-Oct. 7 world, one in which virulent opposition to Israel and rampant attacks on Jews have surged, marks the latest chapter of an old story.
Tragically, Jews around the world must face a harsh reality: The alarming surge of antisemitism over the past two years is not a new phenomenon but rather a return to the historical norm.
Education and exposure to Jews in one-on-one or small group situations can help combat antisemitism on an individual level, but ultimately there is no cure for the larger virus. Jews have always been, and continue to be, a scapegoat for the full spectrum of radicals — from Islamists, to far-right white supremacists, to far-left activists who blame Israel for all problems.
But the Jews will once again have the audacity to survive. And Israel, the haven for history’s most beleaguered people, isn’t going anywhere.
What does all this mean? In a sentence, antisemitism will endure, and so too will the Jews.
Aaron Kliegman is the executive editor of The Algemeiner.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
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Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.