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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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Why I already miss Rev. Jesse Jackson
I first met Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. in 1979, not long after I joined the staff of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs (JCUA). Rev. Jackson was an early friend of the organization, which was founded in 1964 by Rabbi Robert Marx out of the Civil Rights Movement to combat poverty, racism and antisemitism. Jackson and Marx met when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. moved to Chicago with the goal of bringing the Civil Rights Movement north.
Rev. Jackson was an aide to Dr. King. He subsequently founded Operation Breadbasket, later renamed Rainbow PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). JCUA’s early work in Chicago was focused on building partnerships throughout Chicago with groups predominantly in the Black and Latinx communities and among the most oppressed in Chicago. Since those early years, Rainbow PUSH and JCUA have worked together, organizing communities and building coalitions, tackling rampant racism in housing, schools, businesses and the police, all while working to try to end political corruption, ensure voting rights, and explicitly envision a just city and world.
My introduction to Rev. Jackson came at a shaky time for the Black and Jewish coalition. As minorities in America, the Black and Jewish communities, having experienced systemic discrimination, had forged common ground during hard-fought campaigns for civil rights, winning new rights and protections for all minorities with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Our communities’ bond is often remembered and personified by the courageous work of three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Black and Jewish, who tragically were murdered by the KKK while traveling together to work on behalf of voting rights.
By 1979, however, breaches in the communities’ relationship were visible and tensions had emerged. Some in the Jewish community were angry that Rev. Jackson had met with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, in Chicago, leaders and residents from the Black community were angered by conditions facing Black families newly arrived to the south and west sides of Chicago following the exodus of Jewish families from these same communities. Some of the new Black residents were particularly incensed by former Jewish residents who retained control as landlords, shop owners and political bosses.
With all this as a backdrop, Milt Cohen, then JCUA’s Executive Director, and Rev. Jackson convened a meeting in our then-tiny offices, inviting leaders from both communities to air their grievances, find common ground, and renew the alliance. Jackson and Cohen sought to identify joint actions for local social justice issues where there remained strong agreement.
A press conference followed the meeting, where we announced our plan to strengthen Chicago’s Black and Jewish coalition and jointly tackle inequities involving schools and housing. I was in awe, overwhelmed by Rev. Jackson’s powerful presence. Even though I was the youngest person at the press conference, both Milt and Rev. Jackson pushed me forward to speak. This was just the first of many occasions when Rev. Jackson would encourage my participation, leadership, visibility, and partnership.
After that first up-close experience almost 50 years ago, I enjoyed many opportunities to answer Rev. Jackson’s invitations as he exhorted me to speak, participate in programs, and join him and PUSH in actions. In engaging me, he was also consciously choosing to include JCUA and bring a Chicago Jewish presence to the work.
I spoke at PUSH’s weekly Saturday forums and served as a panelist on Rev. Jackson’s Upfront cable show. With JCUA members and diverse coalitions from across Chicago’s communities, we marched through the streets of Chicago and Washington D.C. We joined Rev. Jackson when he took on the corrupt Chicago political machine, then led by Mayor Jane Byrne, and as he launched a raucous and successful boycott of Chicagofest, the Mayor’s favorite lakefront festival, and lucrative gift to her political cronies.
We spoke of the dangers of Reaganomics that threatened the elimination of schoolchildren’s lunches, we got out the vote and elected Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black and progressive Mayor. We spoke out against the Trump administration and MAGA’S attacks against hard fought and won civil and human rights.
Rev. Jackson magnetically built alliances across faith, race and ethnicity. Untiringly, brilliantly, he literally changed the face, policies and politics of Chicago, the nation and the world. He sought to overturn injustices, shatter obstacles to change and non-violently revolutionize the social order. He galvanized millions to act. He commanded every room. His astute in-depth analyses turned meetings into classrooms and calls to action.
By 1984, Rev. Jackson was a leading national and global figure. Barack Obama said that Jackson’s two presidential runs in 1984 and 1988 laid the groundwork for his own election. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, as part of the Harold Washington Favorite Son delegation, we listened carefully as Rev. Jackson delivered his convention speech, one that resonated so powerfully that it would become known as the “Peace Speech.” He regaled, quieted, then inspired thunderous roars from the room.
“Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black and white, and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” Rev. Jackson said. “America is not like a blanket, one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt, many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the Black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.”
Rev. Jackson’s speech was among the most profound, insightful and powerful addresses I had ever heard. He offered an extraordinary vision, calling upon our better selves to rise to the occasion and illuminating the roads we could take together. Inspired by his outreach and challenge, I was deeply moved. I was grateful for the opportunity to express my choice and to stand with our delegation to vote for Rev. Jesse Jackson for president.
As Rev. Jackson became a global celebrity, a position he used strategically and effectively to wield exceptional influence and carry out extraordinary actions such as negotiating the freedom of political prisoners around the world; he exhibited warmth and kindness to strangers and the powerless. He famously made the children of local neighbors feel seen and appreciated; he listened to their stories and took them to baseball games.
When I brought Yingxi, one of my students who was visiting from Mainland China, to Rainbow PUSH, Rev. Jackson noticed her and warmly welcomed her. He invited her into his office, took time to get to know her and to listen, responded thoughtfully to her questions. Yingxi has told me that, to this day, she still treasures the time she spent with him. On so many occasions, I saw the light in his eyes, from afar and up close, as he greeted young people and old, engaging them, ensuring they were seen. I felt that same connection even as I was just one of many thousands of activists who crossed his path.
In March 2021, Rev. Jackson’s and my friend, Rabbi Robert Marx passed away. I asked Rev. Jackson to speak at a memorial, even though I was aware that this would not be easy, as he was already showing signs of the Parkinson’s-like illness that made his once booming, eloquent voice more difficult to hear. However, he enthusiastically accepted the invitation, and shared heartfelt memories at the service. “We have always been together. I love him so much. I miss him already,” he said of Marx.
In recent years, I grew increasingly fond of Rev. Jackson as he never stopped fighting for justice and acting with compassion. Even as he found it difficult to speak, he kept drawing all of us in.
A few years ago, Rev. Jackson asked me to bring a busload of people to the annual reenactment of the march in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He didn’t give me much time to get a bus together, but I was able to get a carload of religious and community leaders, including an imam and a Baptist minister. We sat in the Brown Chapel AME Church, where services were reenacted, and we protested, prayed and sang before we marched together across the bridge. Rev. Jackson led, pulling me upfront to join him. With the diverse crowd from across the country, we marched, all astutely aware that the job is not yet finished.
Rev. Jackson grew from a student with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to a global leader, gaining followers while infuriating leaders and the status quo. But he could not be ignored, would not be ignored. He was somebody, and made sure you knew you were somebody, too.
While movement leaders have courageously fought and sacrificed over the years, many in time moved to the background. Rev. Jackson, on the other hand, passionately, powerfully, brilliantly and strategically, stayed the course. Even in his last weeks, he persevered from his wheelchair, determined to remain a force, to continue the fight and , famously, to Keep Hope Alive.
I have much to be grateful for in reflecting on the life and work of Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. including the friendship he extended, his outsized impact on our lives, on our communities, our country, and, given his legacy, into the future.
I already miss him.
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Senate rejects effort to rein in Trump’s power to fight Iran alongside Israel
(JTA) — The Senate late Wednesday rejected a measure that would have required President Donald Trump to get congressional approval to continue fighting against Iran.
The measure was initiated by Democrats, who have raised questions about the process by which Trump initiated the war alongside Israel on Saturday. The War Powers Act requires U.S. presidents to seek congressional approval for wars in advance or shortly after their start unless there is an imminent threat to the United States. Trump and his administration officials have given mixed signals about whether a threat was considered direct and imminent.
The vote took place along largely partisan lines, with two exceptions. Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky, who tends to oppose international intervention, backed the measure. John Fetterman, the pro-Israel Democrat from Pennsylvania, voted no.
The House is expected to vote on a similar measure today. The House also has a slim Republican majority.
The votes come as multiple polls have shown that a majority of Americans, about 60%, oppose U.S. participation in the war.
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Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Broadway opus debuts in the U.S. — nearly 80 years late
In 1954, the Oscar-winning composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold staged a European homecoming with a new operetta. How this came to pass — and how his planned comeback failed to materialize — is even more convoluted than the piece’s farcical plot.
Korngold, a wunderkind and Jewish refugee from Vienna, first came to Hollywood to adapt Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Until then Korngold, a piano prodigy who began writing music at age 7 and had his first hit with a ballet he wrote at 11, had mostly composed for concert halls and opera houses. His ensuing career in Hollywood transformed film music by treating motion pictures as if they were “operas without singing.”
Korngold’s work on the swashbuckler Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and later King’s Row (whose fanfare John Williams lifted for Star Wars) created a template for symphonic scores. But by the late 1940s, chafing under the Hollywood system, he set to work writing an original operetta, The Silent Serenade, that he hoped would premiere on Broadway.
The show collapsed. It’s never had a full staging in the United States or even in English.
As chronicled by the Korngold Society, the composer went through a litany of librettists to refine this tale of a love triangle and its improbable political fallout. After passing through a number of hands in English, Korngold returned it to Raoul Auernheimer, Theodor Herzl’s nephew and the original writer of the story on which the operetta was based, to translate it back to German. Korngold disagreed with the excessive demands of the producers, the Schubert Brothers, and left the project, leading the Broadway impresarios to fruitlessly search for a new composer.
Korngold, who with Reinhardt had previous success on Broadway with arrangements of other composers’ work, decided to resume a career in Europe with the piece. After delays owing to his health — a 1947 heart attack — a German version debuted on radio in 1951 and was followed by a staging in Dortmund in 1954. It bombed.
“We’re not exactly sure who it was for,” said Cris Frisco, music director at the Mannes School of Music at the New School, who is conducting the U.S. debut of The Silent Serenade at Mannes Opera. “It seems like it was given to the wrong public.”
That Germans in the post-war weren’t attuned to the piece’s sensibilities speaks poignantly to Korngold’s journey, which began at the center of Austrian high culture, orbiting names like Mahler and Artur Schnabel. “We thought of ourselves as Viennese,”said Korngold, the son of a music critic father. “Hitler made us Jewish.”
His exile in Hollywood realigned his sonic universe. As much as he changed film music, it — and America — left an impression on him.
“It is obviously influenced by Hollywood. It’s obviously coming out of those ’30s and ’40s musicals,” said director Emma Griffin, Mannes Opera’s managing artistic director. “It is a piece that is living between film and theater and opera and musical theater and operetta. It’s so emblematic of Korngold’s life, of how many different pieces of the 20th century he influenced, and this particular show is a crazy quilt of all of those influences.”
The plot of the show is, in Griffin’s words “daffy,” focusing on a Neapolitan actress, her would-be dress designer lover and her fiancé, the prime minister. Singing shopgirls, a tabloid journalist and a media circus round out the cast who perform tuneful numbers imbued with an MGM je ne sais quoi, while remaining rooted in Korngold’s post-romantic, classical mode. While Korngold’s symphonic stylings beefed up adventure films, the orchestration here is sparer, hinting at the Broadway pit for which the piece was devised.
The Mannes staging is part of a resurgence of interest in Korngold in the classical world, following decades of dismissal for his contributions to Hollywood.
It’s ironic that Korngold, who died at the age of 60 in 1957, had in Silent Serenade a profound professional frustration, given how buoyant and frothy the work is.
“It’s heartbreaking to think that he did not fully perceive the massive impact of his artistry,” said Griffin. Though he lived through hard times, Griffin says, his music has been a balm for the performers.
“The students have talked about it several times,” Griffin said, “how happy they are to be working on something where the source is joy.”
Mannes Opera’s production of The Silent Serenade debuts March 13 and 14 with an on-demand recording to follow. Tickets and information can be found here.
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