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A rabbi answers her congregants’ question: Why do they hate us?
(JTA) — When I asked Rabbi Diane Fersko why she decided to add to the growing list of recent books written about antisemitism, she referred to Passover.
On the holiday, Jews tell and retell the familiar story of the Exodus, she explained, and often add to it. The reasons for and solutions to antisemitism must also be told again and again, in ways, she said, that “connect to the past, and talk about what’s happening now.”
Her new book, “We Need to Talk About Antisemitism,” also has a Passover motif. So much of contemporary antisemitism, she writes, is about “narrowing” – the same way that the Israelites’ identity in Egypt (Mitzrayim, or “The Narrows,” in Hebrew) was restricted to a “specific, inflexible, and incomplete Jewish stereotype.” She sees such narrowing in the way even well-meaning people expect Jews to look or behave. “Narrowing” is what leads the far right to assign Jews to a conspiracy to undermine the West. And the left “narrows” Jews when they slot members of a diverse, complex community as white people who are leveraging their privilege to oppress others, especially Palestinians, and who themselves have no claim on victimhood.
Fersko is the senior rabbi, since 2020, at the Village Temple, a Reform congregation in Manhattan. She began at the start of the coronavirus epidemic, and her efforts to engage congregants despite the lockdown were the subject of a piece in The New Yorker.
Her 10 years in the rabbinate have also coincided with a rise in reports of antisemitic incidents, from vile social media campaigns to the killing of 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018. She wrote the book in part as a response to the questions she has gotten from members of her congregation.
“I’ve been having to preach about antisemitism for the decade or so that I’ve been a rabbi,” she told me. “Congregants started telling me their stories, and asking me their everyday questions. I felt like my congregants were asking amazing questions that I couldn’t answer on the fly. They deserved more serious answers, longer answers, and they deserve a book that hopefully helps them with the everyday antisemitism that they faced.”
In a conversation last Monday, we spoke about the climate for Jews on American college campuses, why one editor turned down the book and why physical violence from the right is the greatest threat facing Jews.
The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
You catalog a lot of recent incidents of antisemitism in your book, but I want to compare what is happening now in America to, say, the middle of the 20th century. My parents and their generation remember having to change their last names to get a better job, there were certain clubs you couldn’t belong to, there were schools that wouldn’t allow you in. What are the main ways people are feeling antisemitism today, in your experience?
The answer depends on your life stage. If you are a teen, the answer is what is happening on social media, or at school. What I’ve seen is that there is almost no teen who has not experienced or witnessed some level of direct and personal antisemitism. So for them, I think it’s meteorological, it’s atmospheric, it’s just out there. And it’s something they encounter all the time on TikTok, on Snapchat, in the hallways, etc.
I’ve also seen it come up in the workplace, as our society is more and more reliant upon identity, and having a focus on that in our professional setting. It comes up when Jews are asked to sort themselves in a category that they’re not fully comfortable with, or being denied the chance to organize and gather as Jews where you see other groups organizing and gathering and having a desire to share with people that have similar experiences.
And yes, I have heard from some of my older congregants kind of, “You know, it’s not so bad.” I hope that’s true, but this could get quickly worse. And I think we really need to be quite active to make sure it doesn’t.
When you talk about people being denied the chance to organize, you tell that story about the parents in a New York City private school who wanted to form a Jewish affinity group, but the administration told them, “Now’s not the time.” What was in the mind of the administration? What were they so nervous about?
I’ve heard this story many times, from multiple people and different versions. The Jewish parents wanted to gather, like the other affinity groups in school, where their identity would be honored and celebrated. The administration, in many of these cases, has pushed back and said, “The optics don’t look good.” I think the idea there is the false idea that Jews are privileged, Jews have proximity to power, and that Jewish gatherings somehow take away from other types of justice — which I just find very upsetting because of course Jews have always been so closely tied to the idea of justice.
That reminds me of another point in your book, when you write that a book editor rejected the manuscript because it “centered Jews.” What do you think they meant?
I took this to mean that Jews don’t have the right to tell our stories. Or by telling our stories, it diminishes the pathway to justice for other groups, which I don’t believe is true. I certainly believe in the growing fight towards justice [for all groups], and a growing awareness of injustice that we’re struggling with in all our communities. But I think antisemitism is a part of that awakening. We need to acknowledge that antisemitism is real, that it’s back and in many troubling and tricky forms. And I think Jews have a right and an urgency and a need to tell our stories.
Or as you write in the book, “The liberal world has not embraced the notion that Jews have a meaningful history to tell. They are surprised that instead of being associated with victimhood, Jews are becoming increasingly associated with words like ‘privilege.’”
Yes. It seems shocking, because we don’t follow the same patterns as other minorities in our culture, right? It’s not necessarily that we’re a racial minority. We’re not a religion only. We are also an ethnicity and a history and a people and culture. We don’t fall into the kind of sorting that the wider culture likes to do. And so we’re misunderstood. I think there needs to be a fair amount of education about how Jews are a people, and just demonstrating to people that actually Jews today in the U.S. are less safe than we’ve ever been here.
You feel that? That American Jews have never been less safe in America?
I recently went to a briefing with different organizations and backgrounds in New York City where we spoke with the commissioner of police. And every Jew there had a story about a concern of physical violence — like me. I’ve received threatening postcards in the mail on multiple occasions over multiple years. Or someone in Brooklyn who was talking about the change of tone in his neighborhood and feeling concerned about doing everyday tasks like walking down the street. I think there is a lot of anxiety and tension over the freedom to be Jewish in public ways. And I think that’s scary.
I want to get back to the older congregant who says, “Things are not so bad compared to when I was a kid.” And certainly Jews have, in general, freedoms and material comfort in this country that they never had before.
When I first started talking about antisemitism from the bimah, that was the main piece of pushback that I got. I completely agree: What’s happened to us has been remarkably successful. And I think that’s wonderful. And I want it to stay that way. I want Jews to be able to be Jewish, in public and in private, and I want Jews to be able to be represented in cultural institutions, in academia, in medicine, in media and in any field you can think of.
“I think there needs to be a fair amount of education about how Jews are a people, and just demonstrating to people that actually Jews today in the U.S. are less safe than we’ve ever been here,” said Rabbi Diane Fersko. (Susan Rosenberg Jones)
And I think that we need to be aware that this has happened before. Jews have been successful before — not just in Germany, but in the Golden Age in the medieval period, when Jews were thriving and living with Christians and Muslims in the same area. But guess what? It didn’t last and it ended horribly on the Iberian Peninsula. So I don’t think we can fool ourselves and say, “Oh, look, you know, we’re over represented in a certain field, and therefore, we have nothing to worry about.” But it’s a wonderful fantasy.
You write at length and powerfully about right-wing extremism and the violent threat it poses, from the Tree of Life murders in Pittsburgh to the “Jews will not replace us” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s a big part of the book and I don’t want to diminish that in any way. But I detect – and if I am wrong, tell me so – that the antisemitism of the moment that you find particularly confounding is on the left, perhaps because it comes from a world that includes your political allies on so many other issues.
First of all, I want to say I’m not trying to make an equivalence. Physical violence is the worst thing. Physical violence is the greatest threat and the greatest harm, and I see that from the neo-Nazi consortium more than any other group in the United States. So I just want to be clear about that.
When I write about the liberal world — and I don’t even mean politically liberal, I just mean broadly — that’s what I know. That’s who I am. And frankly, that’s what I love. Those are the values, ideas and people that I really want to be at home in. And I want the Jewish community to feel at home and welcomed and understood in those circles. And when I see an expansion of antisemitism in that world, it causes me grave concern, and I feel obligated to speak out as a liberal leader.
What Jewish groups might call antisemitic, left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups might defend as harsh but justified criticism of Israel’s human rights record. How do you tell the difference?
There’s no perfect answer, but what I tell people is to focus on the outcome of the conversation. If there’s a real outcome that would affect either Israelis or Palestinians, then I tend to be interested in it. Maybe this is a real conversation, if we want to learn from each other. If the outcome is only to create antisemitism on a college campus, then I do not think that conversation is worth having.
I hear a growing number of people that are just very uncomfortable being publicly Jewish on college campuses. And that’s wildly unacceptable.
How do you suggest they respond?
I tell kids and their parents, find a Jewish community when you get to campus. The first week, march yourself into Hillel or some other Jewish body and plant yourself there and make yourself known, because these conversations are not easy. And you will need the support and feedback of your community in order to know where you stand, to figure out your ideas.
You write about the dual loyalty charge, that Jews are suspect because of their attachment to Israel. Similarly, you cite cases in which liberal Jewish students are blocked from progressive coalitions on the assumption that as Zionists they can’t be “objective” not just on Israel but other things of concern to progressives. How do you explain, let’s say to a non-Jewish audience, that many Jews want their kids to identify very closely with Israel but that closeness does not imply dual loyalty?
You know, you can love a family member and still think about other things at the same time. It’s not a hard concept. When somebody comes to you, and accuses you of not being able to be objective because you’re a Jew, then that’s your opportunity to say “actually, what you’re accusing me of, it’s dual loyalties, here’s the history of dual loyalties, and here’s how you’re diminishing my role as a civic participant in student government, climate change, whatever sort of organization it is, based on the fact that I’m Jewish.” I don’t see a conflict at all in being a Zionist and being objective.
You talk about a certain kind of Christian antisemitism in the book, which could be described as appropriation — it’s not about killing Jesus, but almost the opposite: “You’re just like us,” which can be its own sort of denial of Jewish legitimacy.
Christian antisemitism historically has been about polarization: You are nothing like us, we are good, you are bad. But the Christian antisemitism of today is much different. And it often says that we’re the same as Christians. Growing up in Connecticut, I got so much of this: “What are you doing for Jewish Christmas?” There was a sort of pervasive identity denial, where there was a disbelief that I actually didn’t participate in any Christian rituals.
That’s so much better than the Christian antisemitism of the past, but I also think it needs to be talked about because it is reducing who we are as a people and eliminating our voices from public discourse.
The resurgence in antisemitism and intolerance in general of the past few years has coincided with the rise and presidency of Donald Trump, although a lot of people disagree whether he is the cause or the symptom. Trump’s name barely appears in your book. What do you think has changed in the past few years that has led to antisemitism’s comeback?
I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer that, but what I’ll say is that in my book, I interviewed third generation survivors. And one of them answered that question, and what she said was that all hate has basically risen as part of social media expression, where it has become normal to say horrible, hateful things online or see them said about you. I don’t think that’s the best answer to your question, because I really don’t know. But the truth is, I also am fighting what I see every day.
You are in New York City, which has a huge and growing haredi Orthodox community and the largest Jewish population in general outside of Israel. Do you see common ground among Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews in combating antisemitism, or are they fighting this on two different tracks?
I think we need to fight antisemitism on all levels. There are a lot more levels than just liberal Jews and haredi Jews. Liberal Jews too can be divided and subdivided. I would love to see more coming together of the Jewish people, but I actually think that we’re on our way. And I see signs of hope, and community and positivity from many of my rabbinic colleagues across the denominational spectrums, that we understand that this is a serious threat. And we’re willing and eager to organize with each other to fight it.
You’re book is titled “We Need to Talk About Antisemitism.” I sometimes feel there is already a lot of talk about antisemitism – admittedly, Jewish conversation is my fulltime job — and I have heard others say that by concentrating on the threats against them Jews are ignoring, and failing to educate young people about, the ways Jewishness is flourishing or could flourish on its own diverse, creative terms.
I do very much appreciate the Dara Horn argument [in “People Love Dead Jews,” her 2021 book about antisemitism], which is basically, we need to celebrate Jewish life. And I think that is one of the best ways to fight antisemitism. I’m very interested in Jews doing Jewish things in a very assertive, active way. And I think that will only serve to strengthen our community, which will help us to stand up as Jews when we need to.
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Swiss Ambassador to Israel Criticizes Fencers for Disrespecting Israeli National Anthem at European Championships
Swiss athletes refuse to face the Israeli flag during the playing of the Israeli national anthem at the European U23 Championships in Tallinn, Estonia, on April 26, 2025. Photo: Team Bizzi
Switzerland’s Ambassador to Israel Simon Geissbühler on Sunday sharply criticized the actions of the Swiss fencing team, which showed disrespect when the Israeli national anthem played at the European U23 Championships in Tallinn, Estonia, this past weekend.
Israel’s under-23 men’s epée team took home the gold medal at the international competition while Switzerland won silver, followed by Italy, which won bronze. The Israeli fencing team included fencers Alon Sarid, Feodor Khapersky, Yehonathan Messika, and Itamar Tavor.
During Saturday’s medal ceremony, Israel’s national anthem “Hatikvah” played, in honor of the gold medal winners. Both the Israeli and Italian teams turned toward the Israeli flag while the song played, but the Swiss team remained facing forward. The Swiss team was comprised of fencers Ian Hauri, Théo Brochard, Jonathan Fuhrimann, and Sven Vineis.
“Personally, but also on behalf of Swiss Fencing, I deplore the behavior of our athletes,” Geissbühler wrote in a letter on Sunday, as cited by several news outlets. “An award ceremony must under no circumstances be misused for political statements – despite every athlete’s right to have their own opinion on political conflicts and wars.” He added that the actions of the Swiss team were “not discussed with anyone in advance,” and said the Swiss Fencing Association will speak to the athletes when they return home “and then decide on the next steps.”
The Swiss Fencing Association said in a statement on Facebook that the Swiss athletes “abused the victory ceremony for a political manifestation.”
“In principle, Swiss Fencing is of the opinion that sporting competitions are not suitable for political opinions, even though athletes are allowed to have their personal opinions on world events,” the association further noted. “Swiss Fencing will discuss with the U23 team after the athletes return from Estonia and then decide on necessary measures. We regret that this behavior hurts the feelings of the Israeli delegation and discredit the sporting achievements of the Swiss team with three medals at this U23 European Championship. We congratulate the Israeli team for winning the gold medal in the team competition.”
The federation pointed out that the Swiss team did congratulate the Israeli winners after the final. The Swiss athletes reportedly shook hands with their Israeli counterparts.
Ambassador of Israel to Switzerland Ifat Reshef also commented on the ordeal that took place at the European U23 Championships. In a post on X, she congratulated Team Israel on their win and added, “We definitely expected from our Swiss friends better sportsmanship (and better knowledge of facts and understanding of the real situation).”
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said the Swiss athletes are an “embarrassment” to their home country. He wrote in a post on X: “Shame on the Swiss team for their disrespectful behavior. you [sic] don’t know how to lose and behaved in a manner which is an embarrassment to you and the country you’re supposed to represent.”
Israel Olympic Committee chairwoman and International Olympic Committee member Yael Arad also reportedly condemned their behavior in a Facebook post. She described their actions as a “provocation” that contradict Olympic values and Switzerland’s position on terrorism, after the Swiss parliamentary committee voted to ban Hamas following the deadly Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in 2023.
“The Swiss under-23 team chose to cope with the loss on the podium as the anthem was being played with provocative losing chutzpah that utterly contravenes not only Olympic values, but also the fact that Switzerland declared Hamas an illegal murderous terrorist organization after Oct. 7,” Arad, who is the first Israeli to ever win an Olympic medal with her silver in judo in 1992, reportedly wrote.
“Their failure to respect sportsmanship speaks volumes about them as athletes and young people,” she added. “I would expect them to set aside differences and show mutual respect, especially after such a decisive loss.”
The Israeli fencing team that competed in the European U23 Championships was coached by Alexander Ivanov. The team ranked seventh when they entered the competition, and their win is Israel’s first team gold at the European U-23 Championships since the 2022 win by Dar Hecht in the women’s division.
The Israeli women’s fencing team that competed in the European U23 Championships was also victorious this weekend. The women’s épée fencing team —comprised of Mihal Shukurov, Viki Ossipov, Yuval Yizhaki, and Tamara Lando — won bronze on Sunday.
The post Swiss Ambassador to Israel Criticizes Fencers for Disrespecting Israeli National Anthem at European Championships first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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At Israeli Summit, Gaza Ceasefire Rejection Sparks Broad Support for Continued Pressure on Hamas
A picture released by the Israeli Army says to show Israeli soldiers conducting operations in a location given as Tel Al-Sultan area, Rafah Governorate, Gaza, in this handout image released April 2, 2025. Photo: Israeli Army/Handout via REUTERS
Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer vowed at a policy summit on Monday that Israel would defeat Hamas and bring home the hostages still being held by the Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza.
His remarks came amid reports that Israeli officials had formally rejected an Egyptian-brokered proposal for a five-year truce between Israel and Hamas in exchange for the release of 59 hostages still held in Gaza.
“We are going to dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities and end its rule in Gaza. We will ensure that Gaza can never again pose a threat to the State of Israel. And we are committed to bringing all our hostages home. These are the goals we have set, and we fully intend to achieve them,” Dermer vowed.
An Israeli senior official was cited earlier in the day as saying that Jerusalem had rebuffed a five-year truce that would see Hamas able to “rearm, recover, and continue its war against the State of Israel with greater intensity.”
The sentiment was echoed by several civil society leaders at the Jewish News Syndicate policy summit in Jerusalem, which brought together largely conservative policymakers, diplomats, academics, and journalists.
“There is absolutely no way that Hamas will give over every piece of its leverage. Even if there is a ceasefire, it will look more like [the one with] Hezbollah, which is not actually a ceasefire,” political commentator Meira Kolatch said, referring to the truce repeatedly violated by the Iran-backed terrorist group.
“The soldiers won’t agree to this,” Kolatch told The Algemeiner.
American influencer and PragerU host Xaviaer DuRousseau warned against “over-negotiating” with a terrorist organization such as Hamas. “Five years is far too long for Hamas to exist. Five days is too long. We need to be much more direct and forceful in doing everything to bring the hostages home and make sure Hamas is wiped off the planet.”
Beyond the Gaza war, a major focus of the gathering was Iran.
In his address at the summit a day earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out a framework for countering Iranian nuclear ambitions. Noting strong US-Israel alignment on preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, Netanyahu called for a deal that would fully dismantle Iran’s enrichment infrastructure and curb its production of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
“A bad deal is worse than no deal,” Netanyahu warned, emphasizing that only the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would eliminate the threat.
“The only good deal that works is a deal like the one that was made with Libya that removed all [nuclear] infrastructure,” he said.
Speaking to The Algemeiner, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon expressed skepticism over the Trump administration’s Oman-based talks with the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program, calling the Iranians “masters of deception.”
Dermer was more diplomatic, telling audience members that he was “confident” that US President Donald Trump would “make a good deal.”
In his address to the gathering, Danon vowed the war against Hamas “will not end with hostages [remaining] in Gaza,” referring to those kidnapped during the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Addressing Trump’s decision to nix the nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) as the American ambassador to the UN, Danon said he was “deeply disappointed” but confident that the president would pick a “strong” candidate for the role and also have a hand in appointing a secretary-general who would be more favorable to Israel than the incumbent, António Guterres.
Danon, who led a delegation of over 30 UN ambassadors to the Hamas-attacked communities of southern Israel as well as to the site of the Nova music festival massacre, said Israel was under “constant attack” at the UN. He pointed to the virulently anti-Israel UN special rapporteur for Palestinian rights, Francesca Albanese, who he said should be barred from entering the US.
Israeli Ambassador the United Nations Danny Danon. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
The Israeli envoy also Trump’s efforts to weed out antisemitism on US campuses and stop “dangerous outsiders who are not even students but who go on campuses to incite.”
Supporters of Israel should be “as engaged as possible in the fight against antisemitism,” Danon told The Algemeiner.
As for the war against Hamas, some experts in attendance argued that Israel also has to alter its approach to Egypt, with which Jerusalem has maintained a peace treaty for decades.
Jonathan Conricus, former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Israel’s approach toward Egypt needed urgent reassessment.
“They hold the keys to the future of Gaza,” Conricus told the Algemeiner, referring to Egypt’s control of the Rafah border crossing, which connects southern Gaza and Egypt.
He criticized Israel’s reliance on diplomatic incentives with its southern neighbor, urging a tougher stance while preserving the peace treaty.
“We’ve been using way too much carrot, and far less than the necessary stick. They are, in many ways, dictating terms that we should be dictating and that’s very regrettable,” he said.
“Every moment that they continue to keep the gates closed at Rafah really makes it close to impossible for us to actually defeat Hamas,” he added.
As for the status of the US-Israel relationship, Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, warned against what he termed the “woke right” of the Republican party.
“The cancer that has taken over the Democratic Party with the woke progressive left – with Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Oman, Rashida Talib, and the protesters on college campuses – we’re starting to see the beginning cells of that cancer start to take hold in the Republican Party,” Brooks told the audience.
Speaking later to The Algemeiner, Brooks said the danger came from rising voices within the GOP advocating American disengagement from the world, led by figures like Tucker Carlson.
“There’s not a lot of foreign policy difference and in some ways economic populist difference between, say, Bernie Sanders on one hand and Tucker Carlson on the other,” he said.
Extremes on both the right and the left were converging in a form of “neoisolationism” that seeks to “withdraw America’s role in the world and shrink it to just to our borders” and that views Israel as a liability rather than a strategic ally, Brooks said.
“It’s a very dangerous place for the Republican Party and for the country to go,” Brooks said.
On the international scene, the director of UK Lawyers for Israel, Natasha Hausdorff, who joined a legal panel at the event, urged private individuals to take a more active role in advocating for the rule of law and equal treatment for Israel in the international arena, particularly in legal forums. She emphasized that civil society actors are often able to speak and act more freely than the state itself, which is constrained by diplomatic considerations.
“I fundamentally believe that we as civil society have a great deal more to contribute to the legal debate. There is currently a deficiency of Israel demanding its equal rights and demanding the proper application of international law in the international space,” she told The Algemeiner.
In Israel’s case, Hausdorff said, international law was being weaponized, resulting in “the erosion of legal terminology like apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, occupation.”
Marcus Sheff, CEO of curricula watchdog IMPACT-se, focused on the role of education in combating antisemitism. He cited Elie Wiesel’s assertion that fighting antisemitism must begin with books.
“Textbooks are uniquely authoritative: they are a key tool in creating the societies of the future that will keep Jews safe,” Sheff told The Algemeiner. “From Saudi Arabia and the UAE to Morocco and Azerbaijan, antisemitism is being eradicated from national school curricula.” He urged Western countries — and even some school districts in the US — to follow the lead of those Muslim states.
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Wikipedia Nonprofit Status Under Scrutiny From US Justice Department Amid Claims of Systemic Anti-Israel Bias
A woman walks past the US Department of Justice Building, in Washington, DC, Dec. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Al Drago
The US Justice Department under President Donald Trump has launched an investigation into the nonprofit that operates the popular Wikipedia website, amid accusations that the online encyclopedia has spread “propaganda” and allowed “foreign actors to manipulate information” while maintaining a systemic bias against Israel.
Edward Martin, the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation on Thursday, warning the organization that its nonprofit status could be jeopardized for possibly violating its “legal obligations and fiduciary responsibilities” under US law.
“[T]he public is entitled to rely on a reasonable expectation of neutrality, transparency, and accountability in [Wikimedia’s] operations and publications,” Martin wrote.
“It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public,” Trump’s top prosecutor in the US capital continued. “Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission.”
Martin noted that top search engines such as Google prioritize Wikipedia results and that artificial intelligence (AI) platforms receive Wikipedia data to train large-language models, arguing that anti-American misinformation pushed by the website could have a widespread insidious effect on large populations.
Wikipedia has been embroiled in controversy over allegations that its editors have spearheaded campaigns to defame Israel, casting doubt over the site’s commitment to providing information on controversial subjects in a factual and neutral manner. A group of high-ranking Wikipedia editors has engaged in an elaborate and systematic effort to depict the Jewish state’s history in an overtly negative light, according to investigative reports by Pirate Wires and Jewish Journal.
The cohort of Wikipedia editors has softened the image of Islamist terrorist groups such as Hamas through removing any mention of their 1988 charter, which calls for the complete massacre of Jews and elimination of Israel. The editors also edited an article on Zionism, describing the movement for Jewish self-determination as “an ethnocultural nationalist movement” which was “pursued through the colonization of Palestine.”
“Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible,” the Wikipedia article on Zionism read.
Though the editors have steadily embedded an anti-Israel bias for years, efforts ramped up shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, according to researchers and investigative journalists. The group, for example, added an article titled “Gaza Genocide” in November 2024, heavily implying that Israel has waged a campaign of ethnic extermination in the Gaza enclave.
“According to a United Nations special committee, Amnesty International, and other experts and human rights organizations, Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people during its ongoing invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip as part of the Gaza war,” the article read.
The site has also published an article titled Israeli Apartheid, which claims that the Jewish state has built “a system of institutionalized segregation and discrimination in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and to a lesser extent in Israel proper.”
Several of the most controversial articles regarding Israel have been placed under “extended confirmed protection” which prohibits anyone, outside of high-ranking Wikipedia editors, from making edits.
Last month, the Anti-Defamation League published a report titled “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality,” which argued that a group of “malicious” Wikipedia editors have inserted anti-Israel bias onto the site, oftentimes violating the organization’s neutrality policies in the process.
“Most readers assume Wikipedia is a reliable online encyclopedia, but in reality, it has become a biased platform manipulated by agenda-driven editors on many topics,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.
The Wikimedia Foundation disputed the findings of the report. “Though our preliminary review of this report finds troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League’s data, we are currently undertaking a more thorough and detailed analysis,” a Wikimedia spokesperson said of the findings.
In his letter, Martin requested documents and information to answer several questions about the foundation’s conduct.
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