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‘An epidemic of hate’: Biden administration officials meet with Jewish leaders to tackle rising antisemitism
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Top Biden administration officials launched a roundtable on antisemitism on Wednesday by describing a “rising tide of antisemitism” and likening the atmosphere in the United States to that of Europe, where Jewish worship is held under lock and key.
“Right now, there is an epidemic of hate facing our country,” said Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish second gentleman, who convened and chaired the 90-minute session.
Jewish officials represented at the meeting were impressed by how comprehensive the meeting was, saying it went beyond the white supremacist threat that the Biden administration has focused on in the past to other sources, among them attackers who target the visibly Orthodox and Jewish students on campuses.
The meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, comes on the heels of weeks of antisemitic invective spewed by rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, and the dinner attended last month by West, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and former President Donald Trump at Trump’s Florida residence. The discussion also follows alarming spikes in antisemitic invective on Twitter and other platforms.
“In my experience, there’s nothing more vicious than what we’re seeing today,” said Susan Rice, President Joe Biden’s top domestic policy adviser, who described growing up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
Ten years ago, Rice said, when she was defending Israel against its many enemies as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she did not imagine a threat to Jews domestically. Now she says she hears antisemitic expressions coming from elected officials, public figures and entertainers, calling it an “incredible rising tide.”
Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department envoy to monitor antisemitism, said she no longer has the luxury of her predecessors, who traveled abroad to assess antisemitism in foreign countries. Now, she said, she had to treat the problem as a domestic and a foreign one.
“I can’t go to these countries and say ‘You have a problem,’” she said. “Now I have to say ‘We have a serious problem.’”
After multiple attacks on synagogues stateside in recent years, she said, Jewish places of worship were becoming more visibly fortified than they were for years when security, if it existed, was unobtrusive and synagogues were welcoming.
“For decades, when we traveled in Europe, we used to identify synagogues by gendarmes,” she said. “Now we see police cars, now we lock the doors in the United States.”
The Kanye West episodes evidently helped spur the convening of the meeting. George Selim, the Anti-Defamation League senior vice president who was present, said the meeting came together within a week, unlike similar events which can take months to organize.
“The urgency was clear, the meeting needed to be convened, it needed to be in person,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview.
Representatives of the dozen or so groups that attended were impressed by the level of attention: in addition to Emhoff, Rice and Lipstadt, there were officials from the National Security Council, the Officer of Public Engagement, and the Office of Faith-based Partnerships.
The representatives were impressed by how personal Emhoff, who is married to Vice President Kamala Harris, made the battle. He described how moved he has been by American Jews who are proud of him — the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president. “I’m in pain right now, our community is in pain,” he said.
Emhoff’s unabashed identification with the Jewish community helped elevate the issue of combating antisemitism, said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad).
“He and I might see Jewish ritual and practice a little differently. But one thing Jewish people will remember forever in our history is that when the time came for him to make his decision, he decided to identify unequivocally as a Jew,” Shemtov said.
Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, the group that underwrote successful lawsuits against the neo-Nazis who organized the deadly 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, said the officials closely listened to every presentation. (The media was present for opening remarks by government officials, and was ushered out so the representatives of Jewish groups could speak freely.)
“We were watching them take copious notes, they were genuinely listening,” she told JTA.
The range of invitees and the topics addressed also extended beyond the threat posed to Jews from the extreme right, an area that has until now been the Biden administration’s focus, through a summit on extremism in September and a speech Biden gave in Philadelphia last summer.
Speakers addressed antisemitic attacks on the visibly Orthodox which, particularly in the New York area, are most often not carried out by white supremacists. And there were officials from at least three groups that represent the visibly Orthodox: The Orthodox Union, which is Modern Orthodox, along with Agudath Israel of America and American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), which are haredi Orthodox.
Speakers also were sensitive to the plight of Jewish students on college campuses, who often face hostility from peers whose sharp criticism of Israel can sometimes manifest as antisemitism.
“On college campuses, the supposed bastions of liberal ideas and ideals, many students believe it better to camouflage their Jewish identity,” Lipstadt said. One of the speakers was Julia Jassey, a senior at the University of Chicago who is the CEO of Jewish on Campus, a student group that tracks antisemitism on campuses.
The Jewish participants said they benefited from hearing how others experienced antisemitism. Abba Cohen, Aguda’s Washington director, said he found receptive listeners when he described an increased effort by local councils to limit the building of Orthodox communities. He and Nathan Diament, the Washington director of the Orthodox Union, also described the threat to the visibly Orthodox.
Their accounts moved others present who do not live the Orthodox lifestyle. “We all have different experiences with antisemitism and clearly for someone who’s Orthodox, it might feel different than for someone who’s not,” said Sheila Katz, the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women.
Katz said the meeting was a relief because she often has difficulty explaining to her progressive allies why antisemitism persists as a threat.
“I feel like in the last, you know, year, I’ve been saying over and over again, this is getting worse. This is getting amplified, people are emboldened,” she said. “And there are a lot, particularly in the progressive community that would say, ‘No, no, that’s not what’s happening.’”
Some practical proposals were discussed, including a letter this week from a bipartisan slate of lawmakers advocating for a cross-agency “whole of government” task force to combat antisemitism, and an expansion of federal funding that currently underwrites security upgrades for Jewish institutions to include paying for extra police patrols.
The meeting did not result in concrete decisions, but participants said they left with the impression that the federal government was ready to dive deep into finding practicable solutions.
“For me, this is not the end. This is just the beginning of this conversation,” Emhoff said.
Other groups represented included the American Jewish Committee, Hillel International, the Jewish Federations of North America, the Reform and Conservative movements, and Secure Community Network, the security consultancy for the Jewish community.
“It sends a very important message that the sort of rampant antisemitism we’re seeing is unacceptable and that the highest office in the country is doing something about it,” Spitalnick said.
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Can this LGBTQ+ Jewish organization navigate these turbulent times?
Nonprofit Keshet has been a leading advocate for Jewish LGBTQ+ rights for nearly three decades.
This year, however, longtime CEO Idit Klein stepped down, while at about the same time, the Trump administration was ramping up its policy assault on the LGBTQ+ community. (It recently mandated that U.S. passports for transgender people must now reflect the sex on their original birth certificate, reversing a decades-old policy.)
The question was not whether Keshet would plot a path through this challenging period, though. It was how.
The organization’s latest educational offering, the Shivyon Project, offers a window into its evolving priorities, as it contends with this less-than-agreeable federal administration and, in select pockets of the country, a recrudescence of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.
Shivyon, as it’s known, provides Jewish organizations — JCCs and synagogues are Keshet’s most frequent clients — with an “action plan” aimed at improving an institution’s LGBTQ+ policies. It’s a collaborative and customizable endeavor, so the specifics can vary. “This is not one size fits all,” said Rabbi Micah Buck, Keshet’s Director of Education and Training. Once a blueprint is agreed upon, Keshet’s trained professionals provide coaching and guidance over the course of a year, by the end of which — all having gone smoothly — the plan has become reality.
Thoughtful and soft-spoken, Buck acknowledged that this was hardly a straightforward moment for the organization. “We are living in a time in which LGBTQ+ identities, especially transgender and non-binary and gender expansive identities, have become inappropriately politicized,” he told me.
Demand for Keshet’s services in general, and for Shivyon in particular, has duly shot up. “For so many LGBTQ+Jews, safety and belonging in our Jewish communities feels more urgent and needed than ever before,” said Buck.
Though Shivyon grew out of the ‘Leadership Project,’ Keshet’s first foray into general community education more than a decade ago, it is “drastically different” from any of the organization’s previous cohort-based programs, Buck said. After all, Shivyon has been rolled out against a somewhat unusual split backdrop: On the one hand, recent political turbulence; and on the other, a sustained effort by the mainstream Jewish community to embrace LGBTQ+ Jews.
“Organized segments of Jewish life have made tremendous progress celebrating LGBTQ+ identity,” Buck said. “And we are seeing greater and greater numbers of the LGBTQ+ community in positions of leadership and influence.” The non-orthodox rabbinate, for example, is often cited as both an incubator for and testament to the improving integration into mainstream Jewish life of the LGBTQ+ community; the sheer number of LGBTQ+ students attending rabbinical school has, in fact, become something of a phenomenon in its own right.
With Shivyon, then, Keshet had to strike a fine balance: gesturing sufficiently at the dangers of the current political moment, while also recognizing and incorporating into its curricula the advances of LGBTQ+ Jews during the previous decade.
One solution, Buck told me, was to talk about belonging rather than inclusion, a shift in emphasis that has shown up in ways both grand and unassuming.
Take Congregation Beth Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Dallas, and one of Shivyon’s participating congregations. It recently became the first Conservative synagogue to march in the Dallas Pride Parade — a milestone made possible, said its executive director Katie Babin, by Shivyon’s success in making Beth Shalom’s “queer community feel fully included and embraced.”
Yet no less significant were the “small but intentional changes” Beth Shalom instituted, Babin told me over email — most notably updating the language on its membership applications. This kind of attention to the fine print is an integral part of Shivyon, too, the substance to go along with the symbolism.
Textual analysis has been Shivyon’s other calling card, Buck told me, an excellent source of community and common interest. “We can find clear indications of LGBTQ+ Jewish presence forever,” said Buck. “For so many people in our community, one of the moments that can be really beautiful is encountering that sense of: My ancestors have always been here.”
As for the present political challenges, Keshet has opted to double down on its values-based approach. “For all the weaponization of people’s identities,” Buck said, “the basics of access, dignity and celebration are not fundamentally sites of division within the Jewish community.”
The post Can this LGBTQ+ Jewish organization navigate these turbulent times? appeared first on The Forward.
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The Silence on Tucker Carlson’s Rhetoric Is Dangerous
Tucker Carlson speaks at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Oct. 21, 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
For the better part of the last two months, I have sat across the table from senior officials at the US State Department and the Department of Justice. Our conversations centered on one issue: how to confront the alarming rise of antisemitism in the United States.
As Chairman of the World Jewish Congress, this work is central to my mission, and what I witnessed in Washington was both serious and heartening. The meetings reflected an administration that, at least within the departments I visited, is approaching antisemitism with an intensity and clarity of purpose that has not always been present in Washington.
At the State Department, for example, officials briefed me on their efforts to address antisemitism on university campuses and in other sectors of American society. For years, as a member of the Conference of Presidents, I visited that same building and left with the unmistakable impression that hostility toward the Jewish community still lingered in its halls. This time, the shift was unmistakable. The institution is changing, and that change matters.
It is precisely because of this progress that the current silence regarding Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric is so troubling.
In my view, Carlson has increasingly embraced themes that echo extremist or white-nationalist narratives, including giving a platform to figures such as Nick Fuentes, whose openly antisemitic positions are well documented.
Carlson has questioned the loyalty of Jews and Christian Zionists, and has — in my assessment — amplified sentiments that undermine the safety and standing of Jewish Americans. These are not merely policy disagreements; they are messages that, intentionally or not, legitimize bigotry.
What concerns me even more is the reluctance of political leaders, many of whom have long been genuine friends of the Jewish people, to call this out with the urgency it deserves.
Carlson’s influence on the political right is significant, and ignoring this trend risks allowing antisemitic tropes to migrate from the fringes into the conservative mainstream. If that happens, it will do profound damage not only to American Jews, but also to the conservative movement itself.
The fight against antisemitism cannot be selective. It cannot stop at the water’s edge of partisan convenience. If government officials are prepared to confront antisemitism within international institutions, academia, or foreign governments, they must also be willing to address it when it emerges from figures with large domestic audiences.
Elie Wiesel wrote, “We must always take sides.” My own family — grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles — were murdered in the Holocaust while too many remained silent. The consequences of silence are not abstract to me.
America is not Europe in the 1930s. But history teaches that hateful ideas take root when they go unchallenged. Carlson’s rhetoric, in my judgment, crosses a line that no one committed to the security of the Jewish people — or to the health of American democracy — can afford to ignore.
At a moment when the Federal government is showing a renewed seriousness in combating antisemitism, it is time for political leaders across the spectrum to speak with equal clarity. “Never again” must be more than a memory; it must be a principle we are prepared to defend in real time.
J. Philip Rosen is chairman of the World Jewish Congress, American section. He has been a Jewish activist for most of his life and is currently a Board member of Yeshiva University and JINSA, and is Vice-Chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
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What’s Really Behind Attacks on AIPAC?
AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr speaking at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2020. Photo: AIPAC.
In the age of websites tracking “pro-Israel money” and politicians questioning American support for Israel, one claim has become a rallying cry: AIPAC should register as a foreign agent. It’s repeated so often that many accept it as fact. But repetition doesn’t make something true, and this claim reveals more about the accusers than about AIPAC.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires registration by those who act “at the order, request, or under the direction or control” of a foreign entity while engaging in political activity on that entity’s behalf.
Notice what’s required: not merely sympathy with a foreign country or advocating for policies that benefit it, but actually operating under its direction or control. This crucial distinction is what AIPAC’s critics ignore.
If the Department of Justice, which has dramatically ramped up FARA enforcement since 2016, believed AIPAC met the legal threshold, it would be an obvious target. Yet the DOJ hasn’t pursued AIPAC. Professional prosecutors evaluating the actual legal standards apparently don’t find the case compelling. But that hasn’t stopped the pundit class.
The claim that AIPAC operates under Israeli government control crumbles under scrutiny. DOJ guidance asks whether an organization acts independently or as “an agent or alter ego of the foreign principal.” The evidence overwhelmingly supports AIPAC’s independence.
When Isaiah “Si” Kenen founded what would become AIPAC in the 1950s, he described the idea that he was an Israeli “agent” as ludicrous, pointing to constant disagreements with Israeli diplomats. When the US planned to arm Iraq, Israeli diplomats wanted to immediately campaign for arms to Israel. Kenen disagreed, arguing that opposing arms to the entire region was the better strategy.
During the Oslo Accords, AIPAC publicly supported the agreement while internally opposing Israel’s request to send US aid directly to Yasser Arafat, insisting instead that it go to Palestinians more broadly with proper monitoring.
These aren’t the actions of an organization under foreign control. They’re the actions of an independent American organization whose members at times disagree with Israeli policy and advocate for their opinion of what’s best.
Organizations like the United States India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) operate nearly identically to AIPAC. Founded in 2002, USINPAC helped secure the landmark 2008 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. Additionally, a 2009 Foreign Affairs article stated that “the India Lobby is the only lobby in Washington likely to acquire the strength of the Israel lobby.”
Yet when you search for “FARA” and “USINPAC” together, you find essentially nothing. Meanwhile, countless articles, entire books, and dedicated websites exist solely to “expose” AIPAC and its alleged foreign agent status.
This isn’t about legal analysis. It’s about targeting one ethnic lobby while giving identical organizations a pass. Irish, Armenian, and Cuban lobbies have all shaped American foreign policy throughout our history. AIPACis targeted because its members are Jews.
What if AIPAC did register under FARA? According to FARA specialist Matthew Sanderson, it would mean filling out a few extra documents with essentially no practical effect.
AIPAC already operates under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, requiring extensive public disclosure: lobbying expenditures, specific issues and officials lobbied, lobbyist identities, funding sources, and political contributions.
Since AIPAC doesn’t accept money from foreign entities, the FARA funding disclosure forms would be blank. Since it doesn’t lobby under foreign control, it wouldn’t need to file interpersonal disclosure documents detailing who it contacted or announce itself as a foreign agent during lobbying calls — requirements that only apply when an organization operates as an extension of a foreign principal. The only potential requirement might be labeling some materials as coming from a “foreign agent,” but in today’s climate, where everyone already has opinions about AIPAC, this would have a negligible impact.
If FARA registration would change nothing practically, why does this matter?
First, truth matters. The claim is false. When bad-faith actors misrepresent AIPAC’s history as sinister subterfuge, often with antisemitic overtones reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, capitulation legitimizes their framing.
Second, selective scrutiny reveals troubling double standards. The vast chasm between scrutiny of AIPAC versus identical organizations, suggests factors beyond legal analysis drive this narrative. When the campaign focuses overwhelmingly on the Jewish State’s supporters while ignoring others, we should call it what it is.
Third, FARA’s ambiguity makes it a potential weapon. A statute so broad it could require registration for “routine business activities” becomes dangerous when applied selectively based on political preferences. This sets a disturbing precedent.
AIPAC is an American organization, funded by Americans, run by Americans, advocating for what its American members believe serves American interests. That some disagree doesn’t make it a foreign agent. It makes it a lobby, like hundreds of others in Washington.
The next time someone claims AIPAC should register as a foreign agent, ask: Where’s the evidence of foreign control? Why don’t they make the same claim about similar organizations? And why aren’t DOJ prosecutors, who’ve ramped up FARA enforcement dramatically, pursuing this supposedly obvious case?
The answers reveal this isn’t about law. It’s about politics — and prejudice.
Alexander Mermelstein, a recent USC graduate with a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Data Science, is an aspiring policy researcher with a focus on Middle East affairs and combating antisemitism.