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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 Israeli government wants you to stop calling Oct. 7 a ‘massacre.’ Yes, really.
The Oct. 7 attack was a massacre. But Israeli authorities would prefer you not call it that.
The Prime Minister’s Office demanded that a bill establishing a national memorial for the incursion remove the term “massacre” from its title, with Minister Mickey Zohar explaining that since Israel is “strong,” no one can “massacre the people of Israel.”
In other words: To accurately describe what happened when Hamas struck Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 —killing almost 1,200 and kidnapping 251 hostages — is unpatriotic, signals weakness, and is, somehow, leftist.
This is not really a matter of semantics. It’s an attempt to control language in order to distort reality. And it’s tied to the Netanyahu government’s vast project of evading accountability for the many military and political failures that contributed to the horrors of Oct. 7.
Their method is time-tested. Early versions of it appear in classical sources, in which rulers often rename actions to soften their meaning.
King Saul masks disobedience as a religious act. King David cloaks the fact that he planned the death of his romantic rival Uriah in the language of war.
Ancient Greeks observed that political conflicts alter not only reality but also the meaning of words. Thucydides described how during civil strife, recklessness was called courage, moderation was branded as weakness, and caution was treated as betrayal, illuminating how language could be inverted to serve passion and polarization.
In ancient Rome, the phenomenon assumed a more formal character. The emperor Aurelian gave himself the title restitutor orbis, meaning “restorer of the world”; he framed a series of brutal conflicts he embarked on to reunite the Roman empire as an act of correction, rather than conquest. It was a formulation that wrapped violence in a mantle of legitimacy and proper governance.
As political systems evolved, so did linguistic sophistication. During the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror was overseen by a body called the Committee of Public Safety. The Nazi regime called its deportations of Jews to concentration camps “resettlement” and described some executions as “special treatment.” Stalin did not cause famine; there were “grain procurement difficulties.” Mao Zedong did not preside over catastrophe; he launched a “Great Leap Forward.”
George Orwell identified this mechanism with unmatched clarity in his novel 1984. His fictional government’s “Ministry of Truth” serves the function of degrading language until truth becomes inexpressible, with the slogan “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
The contradictions are deliberate. Their purpose is to train citizens to accept inversion and surrender their independent grasp of reality.
Orwell’s deeper insight was that the corruption of language precedes the corruption of politics. When words lose precision, accountability dissolves. Reality becomes malleable, and loyal followers will believe whatever they are told. If aggression is always “defense,” repression always “order,” and censorship always “responsibility,” there is little limit to what rulers can do.
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut put it even more sharply — beautifully, even — in 1973’s Breakfast of Champions: “In nonsense is strength.”
This phenomenon is not confined to totalitarian regimes. Democracies, too, are tempted to soften language when confronting failure. Even — and perhaps especially — in Israel.
Thus, the killing of civilians becomes “harm to uninvolved civilians,” phrasing that distances attention from human reality. Torture becomes “moderate physical pressure.” Extrajudicial killings become “targeted prevention.”
Set aside the question of whether these measures are ever justified: It’s essential to note that the language itself undergoes distortion for political ends.
The Netanyahu government has a specific goal behind this approach. Avoiding the word “massacre” in describing Oct. 7 fits into its broader strategy of evading responsibility for the disaster itself.
Netanyahu has refused to accept any blame since the first hours after the attack, including by arguing that no investigation into his actions could take place during wartime, while prolonging the war as much as possible. At the same time, his allies attacked the Supreme Court to justify avoiding a state commission of inquiry with real authority.
To refuse to call Oct. 7 a massacre is to suggest it was somehow less brutal or devastating than it was. So let us dispel the nonsense.
A massacre involves the deliberate killing of a large number of defenseless people. It does not imply permanent strategic defeat. It does not preclude a military response afterward. It does not suggest inherent weakness. It describes a specific act: the intentional slaughter of civilians under circumstances in which they cannot defend themselves.
On Oct. 7, 2023, armed Hamas militants invaded Israel and committed a massacre, almost unopposed by Israeli security forces, in a crushing national collapse. Families were shot in their homes. People were hunted down, executed, or burned. Hostages were taken. Most of the victims were civilians. It was hours before the public heard anything from the shell-shocked Netanyahu.
Call it what it was. Truth combined with moral clarity, over time, are a nation’s deepest source of strength. Resistance to accurate language serves to dull the recognition that something profoundly shocking occurred — something that demands deep reckoning and change, not a continuation of the morally bereft and misleading status quo.
The post The Israeli government wants you to stop calling Oct. 7 a ‘massacre.’ Yes, really. appeared first on The Forward.
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ADL retracts Tumbler Ridge shooting antisemitism claim
The ADL published and then retracted a claim that the alleged mass shooter at a school in Canada maintained a social media account with antisemitic posts, a day after it posted the erroneous information on its website.
The organization wrote Thursday at the bottom of an updated page about alleged Tumbler Ridge Secondary School shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar that it had incorrectly concluded that an X account containing the posts belonged to the alleged shooter. Nine people were killed in the shooting, including Van Rootselaar.
“A preliminary investigation uncovered an X account appearing to belong to the shooter. Upon further investigation, that X account has been found not credible. References to it have been removed,” the correction read.
Authorities in British Columbia said they could not speculate on the motive of the shooter.
The ADL, the most prominent U.S. antisemitism research and advocacy organization, had posted the claim Wednesday on its website. The Forward has reached out to the ADL for comment.
The error, from the ADL’s Center On Extremism, comes amid broader changes in the ADL’s approach.
The ADL’s original post said that on Sunday — two days before the attack — an X account connected to Van Rootselaar posted, “I need to hate jews because the zionists want me to hate jews. This benefits them, somehow.”
“The Tumbler Ridge shooter’s X profile photo also featured an image of the Christchurch shooter superimposed over a Sonnenrad, a neo-Nazi symbol, and a transgender pride flag,” the ADL wrote in the original post, referencing an antisemitic mass murder in New Zealand.
It did not link to the profile or include images of it, leaving the claim difficult to verify.
The Center On Extremism is a flagship program that has been overhauled in recent years as the organization has shifted toward a greater focus on fighting antisemitism. In September, it deleted its Glossary of Extremism, which had contained over 1,000 pages of background information on hate groups and ideologies. It said at the time that the entries were outdated.
The post ADL retracts Tumbler Ridge shooting antisemitism claim appeared first on The Forward.
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Can Trump save Israel from itself?
The Israeli government’s latest steps toward annexing the West Bank prove a dismal point: Catering to right-wing extremists has become the cabinet’s top priority — the rest of the country be damned.
In a blitz before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s White House visit this week, Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz announced new decisions that will reverse decades-old real estate laws preventing Jews from buying Palestinian-owned land in the West Bank; expand Israeli authority in vast swaths of that territory; and make it easier for Jewish Israelis to buy land and start new communities in or near Palestinian enclaves there, among other subtle changes.
These changes may seem like bureaucratic rejiggering. But in fact, they mark the alarming development of a deliberate strategy to incrementally expand Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, thus killing the two-state solution once and for all.
None of this serves Israel’s best interest. New laws pushing annexation forward will jeopardize Israel’s relationship with the U.S., damage its already faltering democracy, and eradicate any moral high ground the Jewish state still retains after its devastating military campaign in Gaza.
Yet while Israel struggles with a weakened international profile, an economy still recovering from the demands of war, impending talks with Iran, internal democratic conflicts and a re-emboldened Hamas within the decimated Gaza strip, proponents of the new decisions are celebrating the disaster they herald.
“We are deepening our roots in all regions of the Land of Israel and burying the idea of a Palestinian state,” Smotrich said in a statement.
The Yesha Council — the municipal representative for all Israeli settlements, which wants to expand Israeli sovereignty over the entire West Bank — declared the government’s move was “establishing Israeli sovereignty in the territory de facto.”
Energy Minister Eli Cohen might have put it most plainly, saying the changes “actually establish a fact on the ground that there will not be a Palestinian state,” in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio.
The only emergency brake on annexation Israelis have at this moment is sitting in the White House.
Although President Donald Trump flirted with Israeli annexation early in his second-term, he has consistently opposed such moves over the last few months. Asked on Tuesday about the Israeli security cabinet’s recent decisions, Trump spoke bluntly: “I am against annexation.”
He has powerful incentives to back up that statement.
Since returning to office last year, Trump has branded himself a peacemaker who will reshape the Middle East. He aims to expand the Abraham Accords, the trademark foreign policy achievement of his first term; curb a nuclear Iran; and create peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He will not tolerate any Israeli behavior that threatens those efforts — and these West Bank moves could upend them.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and five other Muslim countries condemned Israel’s new laws as accelerating “illegal annexation and the displacement of the Palestinian people” — a complaint Saudi Arabia previously lodged against Israel as its reason for refusing normalization, something Trump desperately wants.
Additionally, Trump’s peace plan for Gaza hinges on creating stability in the embattled Strip and the West Bank. Most importantly, it involves a commitment to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which these moves in the West Bank may make all but impossible to realize.
All this, as American views of Israel are only growing more antagonistic, with real-world policy changes like conditioning military aid receiving more serious consideration than previously thought possible. Israel also faces domestic consequences over this decision. It has long defended itself against accusations of apartheid by saying that it cannot grant citizenship to the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank because the Jewish state cannot afford to lose its Jewish majority. Until trusted Palestinian partners for peace emerged, the narrative went, Israel would maintain control of the territory.
This is not maintaining control of the territory; this is laying claim to it, an action that demands Israel must treat the Palestinians who live there as full citizens. It is unlikely to do so. Which means Israel’s democracy is closer than ever to crumbling. If it insists on burying the two-state solution and annexing the West Bank without giving citizenship to millions of Palestinians, any defense it had against the argument of apartheid will be gone.
What might the Israeli government hope to gain with these moves, given how extraordinarily costly they could be — and seeing that annexation is widely unpopular in Israeli society, with only about a third of Israelis supporting it?
The answer: Netanyahu is going all-in for his far-right allies. It’s not about what Israel hopes to gain; it’s about what he does.
Smotrich, Katz, and others whose radical messianic conceptions dominate their politics have for years fantasized about expanding Israel’s borders without international or domestic law interfering. Throughout the Israel-Hamas War, far-right leaders routinely spoke enthusiastically about annexing the Gaza Strip.
If Netanyahu were putting Israelis before his own political interests, he would have squashed calls for annexation long before now. But doing so would threaten his political career. Smotrich and other far-right ministers put expanding Israeli control over the West Bank as a dealbreaker when they first entered his coalition; if they leave it, his last hope at retaining power will go with them.
When it comes to choosing between power or his country, Netanyahu has shown he will always choose power. Let’s hope Trump continues to stand in his way.
The post Can Trump save Israel from itself? appeared first on The Forward.