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Behind the ADL’s effort to get beyond shouting statistics about antisemitism in America

Asaf Elia-Shalev reports from Los Angeles for JTA

When Matt Williams founded a research centre for the Anti-Defamation League in 2022, he vowed to “ruthlessly and systematically test” what the organization does. Antisemitism was on the rise, and he wanted the Center for Antisemitism Research to scientifically study what could work to stop it.

The creation of the centre, he believed, represented an admission that one of the world’s most prominent voices against antisemitism had been operating with little evidence.

“I would go a step further and say the ADL wants to be a serious nonprofit, measured on our social return on investment, but by a lot of measures, we’ve not been doing well,” Williams said in an interview, citing spiking antisemitism, rising extremism and the erosion of democratic norms around the world. 

The ADL established the new centre amid mounting pressure from funders and trustees, he added. “The level of tolerance for having no solutions is low right now,” Williams said. “Our Board of Trustees is very serious about ruthlessly holding us accountable to whether or not we’re solving the problems that we set out to solve.”

Here’s how the person recently elected as ADL’s board chair put it: “Flagging and monitoring and measuring antisemitism is important, but by itself will not reverse trends towards extremism, bias and radicalism in American or global society,” Nicole Mutchnik said in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

Now, with a staff of nine and about 70 affiliated researchers at universities around the country, the research program overseen by Williams is starting to flex its scholarly might. It recently unveiled, for example, the first scientific study in decades that focuses on anti-Jewish discrimination in hiring.  

Previous studies by the centre showed that antisemitic attitudes are more strongly correlated with conspiratorial beliefs than any other factor. So, now, it has partnered with a team of university researchers to examine whether correcting misinformation can make a difference.

“We’ve found that we have a better shot at reducing antisemitism by teaching people how to deal with misinformation and disinformation than we have with much of the anti-bias work that we’ve done previously,” Williams said. “Thinking of antisemitism as a digital literacy problem as opposed to a civil rights problem is a big change for ADL.” 

Alarm about antisemitism in recent years has driven a doubling of donations to the ADL, topping $100 million in 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available. It has also sparked the creation of dozens of new organizations and initiatives, including some that are directly critical of the ADL’s approach or are trying to fill perceived gaps.

Many, including Bari Weiss, author of How to Fight Antisemitism, prescribe embracing Judaism and Jewish pride. Others are looking to tech for solutions. At least one group focuses on naming and shaming alleged antisemites online. Author Dara Horn says the answer lies in deemphasizing the Holocaust and educating the public about living Jews and their culture. Jewish communal organizations have also poured millions of dollars into physical security measures at schools, synagogues and other Jewish institutions.

The Biden administration in 2023 published a plan featuring hundreds of detailed recommendations, many of which are modeled on ADL’s platform. The plan proposes, for example, streamlined hate crime reporting at all levels of law enforcement and more accommodation for Jewish religious observance in the workplace. 

On the right, the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther proposes a government crackdown on anti-Israel groups once Donald Trump returns to the White House. 

Meanwhile, left-wing groups like Diaspora Alliance and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice say that effectively responding to antisemitism requires building solidarity with Palestinians and other groups they view as oppressed.

Even as viewpoints and tactics vary, there’s a consensus in the Jewish community that fighting antisemitism must mean more than sounding the alarm about the issue. As a result, the search for evidence-based solutions, grounded in social science research, is starting to gain traction. 

“We need to be moving more research resources into what’s working and what’s not working,” Holly Huffnagle, the U.S. director for combating antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, said in an interview. “Many of us in the Jewish world are talking about this.”

Huffnagle said the AJC, considered a peer to the ADL in terms of size and legacy, doesn’t currently sponsor academic, peer-reviewed research, but that such a program could transform the work of her organization.  

“If we find that our interventions aren’t working we need to be comfortable and competent to move away from what we were doing in the past,” she said. “Do we have information about what’s actually changing hearts and minds?”

To help answer that question, a pair of political scientists specializing in a field they call “deep canvassing” are using a grant from the ADL to research what kinds of narratives about Jews, when presented to people, can be effective at reducing prejudice. The researchers, David Broockman from the University of California, Berkeley and Josh Kalla from Yale University, have previously demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique in the context of bias against transgender people. 

For their new study, the researchers made two-minute video clips featuring eight types of narratives about Jews and showed them over the internet to an audience of about 23,000 survey respondents. 

Watching all eight narrative types led to a drop in prejudice, but some had a much stronger effect than others. For example, bipartisanship—a video showing both Donald Trump and Joe Biden condemning antisemitism—proved more impactful than a video depicting a fictional Jewish character suffering, but far less impactful than a video that presented the suffering as the result of discrimination.

Another sign of the awakening underway is the spate of new university programs focused on the study of antisemitism. Gratz College, a Jewish institution for higher education in Philadelphia, now offers a master’s degree in the topic. New York University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toronto have all made recent investments in the field of “antisemitism studies.”

Ayal Feinberg, a political scientist and the creator of the antisemitism master’s degree at Gratz, believes that many more such programs should have been in place long ago. What made the need suddenly apparent to many more people, he said, was the wave of anti-Israel protests and the spike in antisemitism in the United States after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. 

“Post 10/7, many people in this space were caught with their pants down, and they’re rushing to invest in meaningful interventions that reduce antisemitism,” Feinberg said in an interview. “But those interventions don’t really exist because there hasn’t been a field that has been systematically devoted to developing them.”

As Feinberg, whose quantitative research is sponsored by the ADL’s new centre, builds out the field through a dedicated discipline, there’s also a crop of professors from established academic areas such as economics, political science, and sociology who are newly interested in studying antisemitism.

The number of scholars has sharply increased and so has their caliber, according to Williams.  He gave the example of Dean Karlan, a prominent economics professor at Northwestern University and former chief economist of the United States Agency for International Development. 

“That’s the quality of research we’re getting as a partner nowadays, which frankly, is not what it would have been five or 10 years ago,” Williams said. 

The ADL’s sponsorship of individual academics comes amid a contentious time for the group’s relationship with institutions of higher education. As college campuses have become the epicenter of the activist movement seeking to end U.S. military aid to Israel and cast Israeli actions in Gaza as a genocide, the ADL has assertively involved itself in hot-button debates about where to draw the line on free speech. The group says it wants to protect Jewish students from harassment and threatening behavior from pro-Palestinian protests. As part of that mission, it’s been adversarial with universities, accusing administrators of failing to stand up to antisemitism and putting out a contentious “report card” grading schools on their response to it.

But through Williams and his team, the organization has also been trying to better understand what exactly is happening on campuses and why the situation there seems worse than in other contexts. An ADL-sponsored study by a University of California, Irvine professor concluded that increased antisemitism on campus is found where there are fewer allies on campus—and not necessarily where there are more antisemites or where there’s a campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.  

“There’s more tacit allowance for antisemitism in public because there are fewer bystanders who are willing or disposed to intervene,” Williams said. “The perceived social cost of it is much lower than elsewhere and that’s more predictive for us than the presence of an SJP on campus.”

Any perceived gaps between ADL’s messaging and its research findings can leave Williams’ program—and scholars it partners with—vulnerable to questioning and criticism. That’s partly the reason that many observers are viewing what he’s doing as daring and risky, even if they are supportive. 

“There is a risk of blurring the line between advocacy and scholarship in a moment in which institutional credibility is low and society is very polarized and everything politicized,” said James Loeffler, a historian and the director of the Jewish studies program at Johns Hopkins University. “And then the research won’t be accepted—it will be seen as advancing a political point of view.”

Williams’ own career as a scholar might have gone in a different direction if he weren’t convinced of the pressing danger of recent antisemitism. 

He completed his doctoral training as a behavioural social scientist at Stanford University in 2012, and after working on various research projects he ended up at the Orthodox Union. As the largest kosher certification agency in the world, the Orthodox Union generates millions of dollars in revenue, most of which is allocated to charitable causes. Williams crafted a data-driven research program to help the organization spend those funds more impactfully.

He had also long maintained an interest in the study of prejudice, which Williams traces in part to his uncommon family background: His paternal grandfather, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, married a Sephardic Jewish woman from Morocco. 

In 2019 Williams, who grew up in an observant Jewish family in Atlanta and had always been aware of how his background set him apart, encountered data showing that Americans were becoming less tolerant of difference. Two recent events underscored this finding: neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, followed by the deadly attack the following year on Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh.

After each of those events, the ADL sprung into action, tapping its roster of experts to explain the outbursts of violent antisemitism to the public. But in private conversations Williams was having with the group, one of the world’s most prominent organizations fighting hate and extremism was coming to a realization that would have been awkward to publicly acknowledge: It didn’t understand antisemitism or how to combat it nearly well enough. A new paradigm was needed. 

“We were under-resourced when it came to actually thinking about antisemitism,” Williams said. “The ADL had sort of become more of a civil rights organization, and we started, especially after Charlottesville, realizing we need more resources on antisemitism. And the person who hired me was sort of like, ‘It’s bizarre that we don’t have this.’”

That person was Adam Neufeld, ADL’s chief operating officer, who “saw the need to develop new theories of change and test them empirically,” Williams said.

When the Center for Antisemitism Research was launched about two-and-half years ago, the name alone was enough to pique the attention of historians who study antisemitism and American Jewish history. In the initial decades after World War II, American Jewish groups, including the ADL, invested heavily in academic research into the sources of antisemitism. 

“There was a sense back then that social science would be able to improve people’s lives — that humanity could be perfected by applying scientific research models to social problems,” said Pamela Nadell, a historian at American University and the author of the forthcoming book, “Antisemitism, an American Tradition.”

With the help of grants from Jewish groups, social psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars investigated how antisemitism was connected to totalitarianism, religion and other forms of racial and ethnic stereotyping. It was an organized attempt to understand the psyche of antisemites. 

To that end, the ADL commissioned public opinion research hoping to understand the nature of bias—whether it was correlated, for example, to age or education. 

Historians don’t really know why or when exactly the investment in such research ended, in part because the ADL has not yet made its archives especially accessible to scholars, at least compared to groups like the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and B’nai B’rith International, which have either handed off materials to a library or created their own open repository, in some cases even digitizing large parts of their collections.

According to Williams, the ADL’s research program petered out by the 1980s because the threat of antisemitism was seen as declining. “Most people generally had positive attitudes about Jews, incident rates were—by most accounts—much lower, the clamouring for real, tangible solutions was less,” he said.

At the time in the United States, the older the average person, the more likely they were to have antisemitic attitudes. There was no stronger demographic correlation than that of age and antisemitism, and a 1992 ADL study noted “the steady influx of younger, more tolerant Americans into the adult population” as the main factor driving declining antisemitism since 1964. It almost seemed like the country was aging out of the problem.

By 2014, in Williams’ telling, the kind of intense antisemitism that was thought to belong to the past was rearing its head once again and, eventually, accelerating so much that the ADL needed to revisit its old strategy around social science research.

“I would say that the major distinction is that we’re working on interventions more than describing the phenomenon,” Williams said, comparing his generation to the researchers of the post-World War II boom. “But, also, you can’t really do one without the other. We do stand on their shoulders.”

In responding to a press inquiry from JTA, the head of the ADL rejected the idea that the ADL founded the Center for Antisemitism Research out of a new or reawakened commitment. 

“At ADL, we always have sought to ground our work in evidence and to shape our approaches based on research,” the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a written response to a series of questions. “We have been tracking antisemitism for decades, measuring attitudes and tracking incidents, and the insights gleaned from this work has helped to inform and shape policies and programs.”

But Greenblatt also acknowledged that recent events are forcing deep changes in the ADL. 

“Nothing will ever be the same after 10/7,” he said. “And so, at ADL, it forced us to step back, look in the mirror and ask hard questions about how we reached this point—and what we are going to do differently in response.”

He continued, “In all honesty, I think every Jewish organization should be undertaking this kind of process in light of 10/7. For ADL, that meant taking a beat and examining our policies, evaluating our programs, endeavouring to measure the efficacy of our activities, and making hard decisions based on what we learn. The Center for Antisemitism Research has helped us to do this.”

The ADL’s introspection over the past few years has come amid growing criticism that mainstream approaches to fighting antisemitism aren’t working. And attacks on the ADL have come from both the right and the left. 

The right has tended to blame the ADL for being too soft on the pro-Palestinian movement or for getting distracted from its core mission of defending Jews by progressive ideas about race and identity. 

The ADL has also been affected by a distrust washing over society of legacy institutions, especially ones perceived by the right as having a left-wing bias. Founded in 2018, an organization called StopAntisemitism has positioned itself as a grassroots alternative to the establishment. Diving head first into the chaotic fray of social media, the group quickly amassed followers whom it sicced on a flurry of targets it accused of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel behavior. 

In some regards, the mainstream has shifted to the right when it comes to fighting antisemitism. When Kenneth Marcus and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law began using aggressive legal tactics to fight antisemitism on college campuses years ago, many Jewish communal leaders rejected his efforts. Nowadays, they are far less likely to tell Marcus that his tactics are counterproductive or that he’s conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism—instead, they are starting to partner with him on lawsuits. 

Meanwhile, on the left, the ADL is often accused of caring about antisemitism mostly insofar as it can be used as a weapon for its pro-Israel advocacy. Rooted in the concept of intersectionality, the left argues that all forms of oppression are intertwined and therefore must be resisted in tandem. One result of that thinking is a critical focus on a certain type of rhetoric from the ADL — for example, when Greenblatt morally equated anti-Zionist groups with white supremacists or when he seemed to liken the Palestinian keffiyeh to the Nazi swastika, though he later clarified that he doesn’t think the keffiyeh is a hate symbol. 

A group that exemplifies this critique is the Diaspora Alliance, which says that Jewish fears are being exploited for pro-Israel purposes at the expense of democratic norms protecting civil society and free speech. Emma Saltzberg, an activist with the group and a critic of the ADL, accuses Greenblatt of engaging in rhetoric that often undermines what she sees as the valuable expertise of the organization’s technical staff. She anticipates the same dynamic with the ADL’s new research agenda. 

“I think it’s possible for good things to come out of research funded by actors with questionable political agendas,” Saltzberg said in an interview. “At the same time, Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s spokesperson and leader, has demonstrated consistent disregard for the organization’s own in-house experts, so academics who associate themselves with the organization do risk damage to their reputation as serious researchers.”

Williams defended Greenblatt, rejecting the notion that his public statements served to undermine the organization’s technical work. Williams said he works with a range of researchers who don’t agree with the ADL on everything and that he doesn’t lose sleep over people whose opposition to the group is intractable. He also said, however, that given how challenging Greenblatt’s job is, there’s always room for the ADL to improve.

“There’s absolutely work that we could do to acknowledge — just to give you one example — the reality that there are a lot of people who take up anti-Israel positions out of a real humanitarian commitment and dedication,” Williams said. “Acknowledge it, and at the same time present the evidence that many people are being hurt in ways that single them out as Jews because of presumed support, let alone overt support, for Israel.”

Williams’ work at ADL has only just begun, but he’s already reached one profound conclusion in the fight against antisemitism. 

“The big takeaway,” he said, “is that we can actually reduce it.”

Ben Sales contributed reporting to this story. 

The post Behind the ADL’s effort to get beyond shouting statistics about antisemitism in America appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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US Sens. Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham Unveil New Resolution Demanding Iran ‘Dismantle’ Nuclear Program

US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson

US Republican Sens. Tom Cotton (AK) and Lindsey Graham (SC) on Thursday unveiled a new resolution demanding Iran completely “dismantle” its nuclear program.

The resolution was introduced as the Trump administration continued to engage in talks with Iran to negotiate a deal to curb the latter’s nuclear activity, which Western countries believe is ultimately geared to build nuclear weapons. Iran has claimed its nuclear program is for civilian energy purposes.

“Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon; that’s off the table,” Graham said during a press conference on Thursday.

The resolution calls on the White House to pursue the “complete dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, cautioning that Tehran would use a nuclear warhead to “carry out one of the most extreme religious ideas on the planet” — a reference to the Islamist ideology of Iran’s rulers.

The senators called on their colleagues in Congress to support the resolution.  

Graham warned that if Iran, a predominately Shi’ite country under its current theocratic system, ever acquired a nuclear weapon, then the Sunni Arab countries of the Middle East would then attempt to obtain one themselves, sparking “a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.” Graham also cautioned that Iran would use a nuclear weapon as an “insurance policy” and a tool to destroy its enemies, including Israel. The senator demanded that Iran completely scrap its nuclear program, arguing that anything short of “complete dismantlement” would be “non-negotiable.”

“The ayatollah [Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei,] and his henchmen are virtual religious Nazis,” Graham said. “They openly talk about destroying the state of Israel. They write it on the side of their missiles, and I believe them.”

Graham claimed that Iran has likely enriched enough uranium to produce at least six nuclear weapons. 

The South Carolina senator predicted that Iran would also use nuclear bombs to “take over” Muslim holy sites and push the United States out of the Middle East. 

“A nuclear Iran makes for a far more dangerous world,” Cotton said. 

Cotton argued that Iran would use the security provided by a nuclear weapon to aggressively advance its terrorism campaigns throughout the globe. The senator cited several terror attacks tied to Iran, including the assassination attempt against US President Donald Trump last year. Cotton also cited Iran’s continued operation of proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis — all internationally designated terrorist organizations backed by Tehran.

The Arkansas senator added that an Iranian nuclear weapon would present “an existential threat to our good friend Israel,” which Iran’s leaders regularly threaten to destroy.

Israel has been among the most vocal proponents of dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arguing that the US should pursue a “Libyan option” to eliminate the possibility of Tehran acquiring a nuclear weapon by overseeing the destruction of Iran’s nuclear installations and the dismantling of equipment.

Both Graham and Cotton stated that they would be supportive of Iran obtaining a true civilian nuclear energy program. However, the senators argued that allowing Iran to enrich uranium or maintain centrifuges itself would inevitably lead to Tehran building a nuclear weapon.

As the US continues to negotiate a potential nuclear deal with Iran, the Trump administration has drawn criticism from some traditional allies who fear the White House could make too many concessions to Tehran. Critics have argued that elements of Trump’s negotiations with Iran mirror parts of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the 2015 deal which placed temporary restrictions on ‘nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of major international sanctions.

The 2015 deal, which the Obama administration negotiated with Iran and other world powers, allowed Iran to enrich significant quantities of uranium to low levels of purity and stockpile them. It did not directly address the regime’s ballistic missile program but included an eight-year restriction on Iranian nuclear-capable ballistic missile activities. Trump withdrew the US from the accord during his first presidential term in 2018, arguing it was too weak and would undermine American interests.

The White House has also received scrutiny from other Republicans in Congress. In a comment posted on X/Twitter, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), for example, lamented, “Anyone urging Trump to enter into another Obama Iran deal is giving the president terrible advice.” Urging the White House to reverse course, Cruz added that Trump “is entirely correct when he says Iran will NEVER be allowed to have nukes. His team should be 100% unified behind that.”

Trump has threatened military strikes, additional sanctions, and tariffs if an agreement is not reached to curb Iran’s nuclear activities. However, when asked by a reporter on Wednesday whether his administration would allow Iran to maintain an enrichment program as long as it doesn’t enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, Trump said his team had not decided. “We haven’t made that decision yet,” Trump said in the White House. “We will, but we haven’t made that decision.”

Western countries believe Iran’s nuclear program is ultimately meant to build nuclear weapons. However, Iran has claimed that its program is for civilian energy purposes.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, reported last year that Iran had greatly accelerated uranium enrichment to close to weapons grade at some of its nuclear facilities.

The UK, France, and Germany said in a statement at the time that there is no “credible civilian justification” for Iran’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”

The post US Sens. Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham Unveil New Resolution Demanding Iran ‘Dismantle’ Nuclear Program first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Prevost Surprises as First US Pope, Takes Name Leo XIV

Newly elected Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Prevost of the United States appears on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican, May 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane

Cardinal Robert Prevost, a long-time missionary in Latin America, was elected as the surprise choice to be the new leader of the Catholic Church on Thursday, becoming the first US pope and taking the name Leo XIV.

Pope Leo appeared on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica after white smoke billowed from a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, signifying the 133 cardinal electors had chosen him as a successor to Francis, who died last month.

“Peace be with you all,” he told the cheering crowd, speaking in fluent Italian. He also spoke in Spanish during his brief address but did not say anything in English.

Prevost, 69 and originally from Chicago, has spent most of his career as a missionary in Peru and has dual Peruvian nationality. He became a cardinal only in 2023. He has given few media interviews and is known to have a shy personality.

President Donald Trump swiftly congratulated him on becoming the first US pope. “What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!”

However, the new pope has a history of criticizing Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s policies, according to posts on the X account of Robert Prevost.

Massimo Faggioli, an Italian academic who has followed the papacy closely, suggested the tenor of the Trump presidency might have influenced the cardinals to choose a pope from the US, who could directly rebut the president.

“The international upheaval of the rhetoric of the Trump presidency, paradoxically, made possible the impossible,” said Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University in the US.

“Trump has broken many taboos, the conclave now has done the same — in a very different key.”

PRAISE FROM PERU

The appointment was welcomed by the Peruvian president Dina Boluarte.

“His closeness to those most in need left an indelible mark on the hearts of Peru,” her office said in a post on X.

Prevost becomes the 267th Catholic pope following the death of Francis, who was the first from Latin America and who ruled for 12 years.

Francis had widely sought to open the staid institution up to the modern world, enacting a range of reforms and allowing debate on divisive issues such as women’s ordination and better inclusion of LGBT Catholics.

Leo thanked Francis in his speech and repeated his predecessor’s call for a Church that is engaged with the modern world and “is always looking for peace, charity and being close to people, especially those who are suffering.”

He had not been seen as a frontrunner and there was a brief moment of uncertainty when his name was announced to the packed St. Peter’s Square, before people started to clap and cheer.

Unlike Francis, who spurned much of the trappings of the papacy from the day he was elected in 2013, Prevost wore a traditional red papal garment over his white cassock as he first appeared as Leo XIV.

SNAP, a US-based advocacy group for victims of clerical sex abuse, expressed “grave concern” about his election, renewing accusations that Prevost failed to take action against suspected predatory priests in the past in Chicago and in Peru.

“You can end the abuse crisis — the only question is, will you?” it said in a statement addressed to the new pope.

In an interview with the Vatican News website in 2023, Prevost said the Church must be transparent and honest in dealing with abuse allegations.

CHICAGO CELEBRATES

A crowd of clergy and staff members at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union erupted in a joyful cheer as Pope Leo walked out onto the Vatican balcony, some four decades after he graduated from the South Side school.

It was an “explosion of excitement and cheers that went up in the room … many of us were just simply incredulous and just couldn’t even find words to express our delight, our pride,” said Sister Barbara Reid, president of the theology school.

Pope Leo graduated from the school in 1982 with a master’s degree. Reid called Leo intellectually brilliant, saying he has an extraordinarily compassionate heart.

“It’s an unusual blend that makes him a leader who can think critically, but listens to the cries of the poorest, and always has in mind those who are most needy,” she said.

THE NAME LEO

The last pope to take the name Leo led the Church from 1878-1903. Leo XIII was known for his devoted focus to social justice issues, and is often credited with laying the foundation for modern Catholic social teaching.

Prevost has attracted interest from his peers because of his quiet style and support for Francis, especially his commitment to social justice issues.

Prevost served as a bishop in Chiclayo, in northwestern Peru, from 2015 to 2023.

Francis brought him to Rome that year to head the Vatican office in charge of choosing which priests should serve as Catholic bishops across the globe, meaning he has had a hand in selecting many of the world’s bishops.

The post Prevost Surprises as First US Pope, Takes Name Leo XIV first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israel Warns of ‘Severe Consequences’ for Houthis, Vows to Defend Itself After US Cuts Deal With Terror Group

Smoke rises in the sky following US-led airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 25, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Adel Al Khader

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Thursday warned that the Houthis would “suffer severe consequences” if the Yemeni terrorist group continued to attack Israel, emphasizing the Jewish state’s capability to defend itself following US President Donald Trump’s unexpected deal with the Iran-backed rebel militia.

“Israel must be capable of defending itself against any threat or enemy,” Katz wrote in a post on X. “This has been the case throughout many challenges in the past and will remain true in the future.”

“I also warn the Iranian leaders who finance, arm, and operate the Houthi terrorist organization: the balance of power has shifted, and the Axis of Evil has collapsed,” the top Israeli defense official added. “What we did to Hezbollah in Beirut, to Hamas in Gaza, to Assad in Damascus, and to the Houthis in Yemen, we will also do to you in Tehran.”

Katz continued, “We will not allow anyone to harm Israel; and those who do will suffer severe consequences.”

On Sunday, the Houthis, an internationally designated terrorist group, declared they would impose a “comprehensive” aerial blockade on Israel, targeting the country’s airports in retaliation for the Israeli military’s expanded operations in Gaza.

Claiming solidarity with Palestinians in the war-torn enclave, the Iran-backed group took responsibility for a missile strike near Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, marking the latest in a series of attacks.

While Israel’s missile defense systems have intercepted most strikes from Yemen, Sunday’s missile was the first in a series launched since March to bypass the country’s defense capabilities, following a drone strike on Tel Aviv last year.

Alongside Hezbollah and Hamas, Houthi rebels are a key part of Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance” against Israel and the United States.

On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to retaliate against the Yemeni terrorist group, reaffirming that the Jewish state will defend itself against any threat.

“Israel will defend itself by itself,” Netanyahu said in a video posted on social media. “If others join us — our American friends — all the better. If they don’t, we will still defend ourselves on our own.”

In response to the Houthis’ latest attack, Israeli forces launched major strikes on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah and the international airport in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, both facilities crucial to the Iran-backed terrorist group’s ability to operate.

The strikes came as Houthi officials revealed that their agreement with Washington to cease targeting US maritime activity in the Red Sea did not include any commitment to stop attacking Israel or ships linked to the Jewish state.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023, the Houthis — whose slogan is “death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam” — have targeted over 100 merchant vessels in the Red Sea with missiles and drones, causing a massive disruption of global trade.

During an Oval Office appearance on Tuesday, Trump announced that the US would halt airstrikes on the Yemeni terrorist group after it agreed to stop attacking American ships — an agreement that ended weeks of escalating tensions with the Iran-backed group and, according to US and Israeli officials, was made without prior notice to Jerusalem.

Since launching its current operation in Yemen, known as Operation Rough Rider, on March 15, the US military says it has struck over 1,000 targets, killing hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous group leaders.

After Trump announced the deal with the Iran-backed terrorist group, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei praised “the end of the US aggression” on Yemen and thanked Oman for its efforts in mediating the ceasefire agreement.

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