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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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The real Holocaust history behind ‘Papillon,’ the Oscar-nominated short about a star Jewish swimmer
(JTA) — At first glance, “Papillon” (Butterfly), the 15-minute Oscar-nominated animated short by veteran French filmmaker Florence Miailhe, may appear like a meditative journey through water and memory. An elderly man swims in a hand-painted sea, flashing back to childhood memories of being bullied and a loving mother who makes it all right.
As he cuts through the water and moves through time, the fuller context emerges: The sun-soaked beaches appear to be North Africa, the boy becomes a champion swimmer, a swastika tells you that he is competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the soundtrack echoes with taunts of “Jew” and “kike.”
The film is based on the extraordinary real life of Alfred Nakache, a Jewish athlete whose story of resilience under Nazi persecution has previously been told in two French documentaries but is seldom remembered today.
Born in 1915 in French Algiers (his family immigrated from Iraq), Artem “Alfred” Nakache became one of France’s most celebrated swimmers in the 1930s, specializing in the butterfly stroke — a full-bodied lunge that looks like a bird, or butterfly, in flight. His success brought him to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he competed under the shadow of rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany (and was part of a freestyle relay team that didn’t medal, but finished ahead of the Germans).
Under Vichy, the Nazi puppet regime, Nakache was stripped of his French nationality and forced out of Paris. He joined the resistance underground while still competing for Vichy. On Nov. 20, 1943, Nakache and his wife and daughter were arrested by the Gestapo, and the family was separated at Auschwitz. Only Alfred survived. He later endured the death march to Buchenwald before liberation.
Despite these unimaginable losses, Nakache returned to swimming after the war, competing at the 1948 London Olympics. (He, gymnast Agnes Keleti and weightlifter Ben Helfgott are the only known Jewish survivors to have competed in the Olympics after the war.)
Nakache remained a swimmer the rest of his life, and died of a heart attack after a swim in the sea near the Spanish-French border in 1983.
Miailhe, a 70-year-old animator known for her labor-intensive oil and pastel on glass technique, has a personal connection to Nakache’s legacy. As a child, she took swim lessons with his younger brother Bernard and heard stories of his triumphs long before she understood their full historical weight. The end credits explain that her father also knew Alfred, whom he met in the resistance during the war.
“I hope people will be moved by Alfred Nakache’s story and rediscover it, because it’s not well-known in France,” Miailhe said in an interview with Deadline. “Also, we are living in some very troubled times in a world where racism and antisemitism are back.”
Produced by Oscar-winning animator Ron Dyens alongside Luc Camilli for Sacrebleu Productions and XBO Films, Papillon took roughly 100 days to animate — a testament to the craftsmanship that makes every frame an essay on the various qualities of water. The film has earned a César nomination (the French Academy Award) and a nomination at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and won the International Competition for best animated film at the Grand Prix at Stuttgart.
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the animated short also depicts the camaraderie among the athletes who swam — and stood — by Nakache’s side before and after the war.
“Some people denounced the Nakache family [to the Gestapo], but others saved Alfred when he returned from the camps,” Dyen told Deadline. “The whole tragedy of human duality is ultimately reflected in Nakache’s story.”
The post The real Holocaust history behind ‘Papillon,’ the Oscar-nominated short about a star Jewish swimmer appeared first on The Forward.
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Laura Loomer and other Jewish conservatives sound alarm over Tucker Carlson’s White House access
(JTA) — Jewish figures on the far right are increasingly expressing concerns about President Donald Trump’s handling of an antisemitism rift among the Republican party, after its instigator Tucker Carlson reportedly visited the White House for the third time in weeks on Monday.
The visit, reported by Punchbowl News journalist Jake Sherman, came days after his combative interview with Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, ignited antisemitism allegations and a diplomatic row with Arab leaders.
After the interview Carlson also appeared on Saudi state-owned TV, during which he called Israel’s Gaza war a “land grab” and repeated his past claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “evil and destructive.” Carlson has ties with both Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where he has said he intends to buy property and has hosted high-profile events.
Laura Loomer, a far-right Jewish activist, has staked out a warpath against Carlson’s continued welcome in the Trump administration.
“It seems like a suicide mission for any Christian or Jew who doesn’t idolize Hitler to keep donating to the GOP,” Loomer tweeted late Monday. In a follow-up, she wrote, “It’s like I woke up one day and 90% of the people I’ve come to know on the right over the last 10 years have morphed into different people.”
Loomer’s explosion of anger and angst is significant because she has boasted of close ties to Trump and has appeared to hold some sway over White House hiring. In the past, when she has targeted administration staffers or potential hires, many have been spiked quickly. Now, as she raises alarms about Carlson and antisemitism on the right, the White House has remained silent.
“It’s shocking that I have to say this, but the GOP has a major identity crisis right now, the GOP has a growing Jew hate and foreign influence problem, and the party seems to be in a struggle session with Neo Nazis who they aren’t explicitly rejecting,” Loomer tweeted. “My advice is for people to not donate at this time till we get clarity from the party on what the party’s position is on these issues.”
Other Jewish figures on the far right, including radio host Mark Levin and pro-Israel activist Sloan Rachmuth, sided with Loomer against Carlson.
“He should be condemned by the White House, not invited to it,” Levin tweeted.
Carlson’s reported White House visit was one of several he has made since increasingly using his show to lean into friendly interviews with conspiracy theorists and white nationalists, including Nick Fuentes. Seen as a bellwether of conservative influence with close ties to Vice President JD Vance, Carlson’s broadsides against Israel and increasing embrace of antisemitic talking points have paralleled a similar rise in such sentiments among younger GOP voters, and caused serious concern among many Jewish conservatives.
Huckabee himself, in damage control following his comments in the interview, has publicly urged the Trump administration to cut ties with his former Fox News colleague.
“I hope they quit letting him into the White House because, quite frankly, this is a person who is doing serious, significant damage to President Trump and to the administration,” the ambassador told the Christian Broadcasting Network, hours before Carlson was spotted at the White House.
At least one other Trump appointee has also spoken out to defend Huckabee and condemn Carlson.
“Am I the ONLY member of the Trump’s [sic] Administration defending AND supporting Ambassador Huckabee?” Leo Terrell, chair of the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, tweeted Monday.
Following the Huckabee interview, the influential Israeli-American conservative activist Yoram Hazony said Carlson’s earlier visits to the White House had come at the invitation of Trump, who Carlson said was worried that the burgeoning antisemitism rift would drive voters to the Democrats in the midterm elections this fall.
Hazony, whom Carlson mentioned in the video of his Huckabee interview, said Carlson had asked him for help mending fences but that he had come away unconvinced that Carlson wanted to make any changes.
“I explained to him that I can’t do much to help him, because just about every Jew I know believes he’s been waging a savage campaign against Jews, Judaism, and Israel for the past 18 months — and that most think his aim is to drive Jews and Zionist Christians out of the Trump coalition and out of the Republican party,” Hazony wrote on X.
Carlson requested Hazony set up a meeting with Netanyahu, Hazony claimed; he declined to do so. While at first Hazony said he was open to conversing with Carlson in the name of “building coalitions,” he has changed his mind.
“In Tucker’s case, the private person turns out to be exactly who we’ve been seeing in public,” he wrote. “Whatever his motives for turning his podcast into what seems to be a circus of anti-Jewish messaging, right now that project is clearly more important to him than helping the administration keep its coalition together so it can govern effectively and win elections in 2026 and 2028.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Carlson and praised Huckabee on Monday. He had previously said Carlson should not be invited to the White House.
“Tucker Carlson has a long history of peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories and lies about Jews and the Jewish state,” Greenblatt tweeted. “His recent interviews continue to amplify hate and launder falsehoods. None of this is new. It’s just pathetic. I appreciate Ambassador @GovMikeHuckabee’s effort to engage in good faith and set the record straight. Unfortunately, I’m not surprised at the outcome.”
Some non-Jewish GOP lawmakers have started to join their Jewish colleagues on the right in condemning Carlson, or antisemitism more forcefully.
“I used to respect Tucker Carlson but after watching his interview of @GovMikeHuckabee I am appalled,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana wrote on X. “Tucker gave ample platform and time to Nick Fuentes to share his anti-Semitic vitriol, but constantly interrupted, was impatient, disingenuous, argumentative and disrespectful to Huckabee.”
Stutzman added, “Carlson suggesting all ‘Jews’ do a DNA test in order to live in Israel is repulsive and smacks of ignorance regarding the oldest faith practice in the world combined with the worst kind of exclusionary prejudice and elitism.”
In a slightly more coded message, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt tweeted Monday, “We must continue to call out and condemn antisemitism at every turn. Proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters at home and abroad.” Britt did not mention Carlson or Huckabee by name. By contrast, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, an established foe of Carlson’s who was also on the receiving end of a tough interview over Israel, has retweeted several pro-Huckabee and anti-Carlson posts following the interview.
The Trump administration has not commented publicly on the interview or its backlash. Trump staffers have reportedly been working behind the scenes to assure Arab leaders that Huckabee’s comments during the interview, in which he suggested Israel has a divine right to much of the Middle East, do not represent official administration policy.
The drama has raised a range of issues beyond the antisemitism rift, including the fact that Carlson’s son works for Vance and about Carlson’s relationships with Saudi Arabia and Russia, both of which are promoting interviews on state media about Carlson’s criticism of the Trump administration.
Carlson is keeping up his streak elevating fringe GOP figures amid the controversy, posting a new interview Monday with outsider Iowa gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn.
“We have a Christian form of government, but we have elected people that are not following that custom and religion in Christianity,” Lahn told Carlson in the interview. “And so you’re going to have a constitutional crisis. You’re going to have fraud all over the place.”
For Loomer, the moment is existential for right wing-Jews. “The GOP has made it very clear over the last few years that Jewish voters on the right are not welcome, we are not appreciated, and we will not be given basic respect,” she tweeted.
“There’s some elected officials in the GOP who would be ok with seeing Jews mass murdered,” Loomer continued, without naming names. “As a lifelong Republican, this is very alarming to me.”
The post Laura Loomer and other Jewish conservatives sound alarm over Tucker Carlson’s White House access appeared first on The Forward.
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Documentary about Jews killed by their Polish neighbors after the Holocaust could be banned in Poland
(JTA) — A documentary about the murder of five Jews in a Polish town is being threatened with a ban in Poland — not because they were killed in the Holocaust, but because they weren’t.
The Jews at the heart of “Among Neighbors,” from California-based filmmaker Yoav Potash, died six months after the end of Nazi occupation. They were among a handful of survivors from Gniewoszów, a town where about 1,500 Jews made up half the population before World War II. When they returned home in 1945, they were killed by their Polish neighbors.
Since premiering at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival in November 2024, “Among Neighbors” has been screened in six countries and qualified for Academy Award consideration. But its release on TVP, the Polish public broadcaster, has prompted uproar from right-wing politicians and a national investigation.
Potash stumbled into making “Among Neighbors” on a 2014 trip to Gniewoszów, where he planned to document a modest rededication ceremony for the Jewish cemetery. As he began talking with the oldest residents, one woman, who has since died, told him that Jews were killed there well after the war.
“That just really struck me as a very different kind of story, because it was not the Germans doing the killing, it was the Poles,” said Potash. “It was not during the war, it was well after, when it should have been a time of peace.”
When “Among Neighbors” appeared on televisions across Poland in November 2025, it was hit with backlash from the office of Polish President Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing historian who led nationalist efforts to rewrite Poland’s Holocaust history. His Law and Justice party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023, promoted historical narratives about Polish victimhood and resistance to the Nazis while delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism or Poles who killed Jews.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk now leads the Polish government with a centrist coalition, but Nawrocki has been a counterweight to Tusk since he was elected last year.
Six days after “Among Neighbors” aired on TVP, Agnieszka Jędrzak, a minister in Nawrocki’s office, attacked the broadcaster on X. Calling the documentary “historical anti-Polish manipulation,” she said “a television station that has ‘Polish’ in its name should not be broadcasting it.”
Jędrzak oversees state awards and Polish diaspora relations. Before joining the president’s office, she spent 15 years working at the Institute of National Remembrance — previously headed by Nawrocki — which gained a reputation for advancing nationalist narratives about the Holocaust. According to Jędrzak’s government profile, she led the IPN as it “responded to defamatory statements which damaged the reputation of Poland and the Polish nation.”
A probe into “Among Neighbors” launched after the Ordo Iuris Institute, a far-right Catholic think tank, filed a complaint with the National Broadcasting Council, comparable to the Federal Communications Commission in the United States.
“The narrative presented in the documentary film ‘Among Neighbors’ clearly undermines values important to Poles, such as historical truth,” the institute said in November. “Above all, the film creates a false image of Poles as a nation co-responsible for the German genocide of Jews during World War II. What is particularly outrageous is the fact that the production was released by Polish Television.”
The National Broadcasting Council responded by opening an investigation into the film.
“Among Neighbors” was made over the course of a decade that largely spanned the Law and Justice regime. In 2018, the country passed a law that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes. The infraction has since been downgraded from a crime punishable with prison time to a civil offense, but the law remains in effect.
For Potash, reactions to the film from right-wing nationalist officials were “not surprising at all.”
“They have adopted this mindset where there’s an almost sacred sense that Poles during World War II were either victims or heroes,” he said. “Any story that anyone tells that contradicts that, or that adds that some Poles were perpetrators, is anathema to that.”
TVP has stood by the film and continues to air it. The network has been backed by the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, whose representatives sent a letter of support to the TVP Program Council’s chair, Barbara Bilińska.
“Among Neighbors” unfolds around a man and a woman who grew up in Gniewoszów. In the last breaths of their lives, they seek to answer questions that have possessed them for 80 years — he as the Jewish child of Holocaust survivors who were killed in their hometown, and she as a Polish eyewitness to the murders.
In a statement, TVP said the reckonings of these two people were neither “anti-Polish” nor “a judgment of the entire Polish nation.”
“We are open to dialogue regarding historical memory and believe that even difficult topics allow society to understand the fuller context of past events,” said TVP. “As a public broadcaster, we have a duty to facilitate such conversation and not shy away from presenting those fragments of history that require reflection and civic courage.”
Beyond Gniewoszów, “Among Neighbors” touches on a wave of murders that struck Jews returning home to cities and towns across Poland after liberation from the Nazis. In the most notorious instance, 42 Jews in the southeastern town of Kielce were killed by a mob of Polish residents, soldiers and police officers in July 1946. The Kielce pogrom convinced many survivors they had no future in Poland, spurring an exodus.
A film dramatizing the Kielce pogrom drew protests from Polish Americans, and the Berlin office of its Jewish producer was destroyed by an arson in 1996, the same year the Polish government formally apologized for the pogrom.
“Among Neighbors” confronts the simultaneous intimacy and violence woven through small towns, where Poles lived and worked with Jews, where their children played with Jewish children, and where some Poles also killed their Jewish neighbors. That complex relationship still rests under the surface of skirmishes over Poland’s history.
Konstanty Gebert, a journalist interviewed in the film, compared the relationship between Poland and its Jews to the phenomenon of phantom limbs — the sensation that a body part remains attached after it has been amputated.
“Poland is still suffering from its Jewish phantom pains, and Jews are suffering from their Polish phantom pains,” said Gebert. “Until those two amputated hands can actually shake — and I don’t know how you do that to amputated limbs — but I know that if you don’t, we’ll be still standing there, swallowing painkillers for a pain that cannot be relieved, because the amputated limb is gone and it still hurts.”
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