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Beyond the ‘Day of Hate’: The best strategy to keep American Jews safe over the long term
(JTA) — My synagogue sent out a cautiously anxious email yesterday about an event coming this Shabbat, a neo-Nazi “Day of Hate.” The email triggered fuzzy memories of one of the strangest episodes that I can remember from my childhood.
Sometime around 1990, in response to local neo-Nazi activity, some Jews from my community decided to “fight back.” I don’t know whether they were members of the militant Jewish Defense League, or perhaps just sympathetic to a JDL-style approach. When our local Jewish newspaper covered the story, it ran on its front cover a full-page photo of a kid from my Orthodox Jewish high school. The photo showed a teenage boy from behind, wearing a kippah and carrying a baseball bat that was leaning threateningly on his shoulder.
As it happens, “Danny” was not a member of the JDL, he was a kid on his way to play baseball. Sometimes, a baseball bat is just a baseball bat. But not for us anxious Jews in America: We want to see ourselves as protagonists taking control of our destiny, responding to antisemites with agency, with power, with a plan. I’m sorry to say that as I look around our community today, it seems to me that we have agency, and we have power — but we certainly don’t seem to have a plan.
The tactics that the American Jewish community uses to fight back against antisemitism are often ineffective on their own and do not constitute a meaningful strategy in the composite. One is that American Jews join in a partisan chorus that erodes our politics and fixates on the antisemitism in the party they don’t vote for. This exacerbates the partisan divide, which weakens democratic culture, and turns the weaponizing of antisemitism into merely a partisan electoral tactic for both sides.
Another tactic comes from a wide set of organizations who have declared themselves the referees on the subject and take to Twitter to name and shame antisemites. This seems to amplify and popularize antisemitism more than it does to suppress it.
A third common tactic is to pour more and more dollars into protecting our institutions with robust security measures, which no one thinks will defeat antisemitism, but at least seeks to protect those inside those institutions from violence, though it does little to protect Jews down the street. Richer Jewish institutions will be safer than poorer ones, but Jews will continue to suffer either way.
A fourth tactic our communal organizations use to fight antisemitism is to try to exact apologies or even fines from antisemites to get them to retract their beliefs and get in line, as the Anti-Defamation League did with Kyrie Irving, an approach that Yair Rosenberg has wisely argued is a no-win proposition. Yet another tactic is the insistence by some that the best way to fight antisemitism is to be proud Jews, which has the perverse effect of making our commitment to Jewishness dependent on antisemitism as a motivator.
And finally, the most perverse tactic is that some on both the right and the left fight antisemitism by attacking the ADL itself. Since it is so hard to defeat our opponents, we have started beating up on those that are trying to protect us. What could go wrong?
Steadily, like a drumbeat, these tactics fail, demonstrating themselves to be not a strategy at all, and the statistics continue to show a rise in antisemitism.
Perhaps we are too fixated on the idea that antisemitism is continuous throughout Jewish history, proving only that there is no effective strategy for combating this most persistent of hatreds.
Instead, we would do well to recall how we responded to a critical moment in American Jewish history in the early 20th century. In the aftermath of the Leo Frank lynching in 1915 – the murder of a Jewish man amid an atmosphere of intense antisemitism — Jewish leaders formed what would become the ADL by building a relationship with law enforcement and the American legal and political establishment. The ADL recognized that the best strategy to keep American Jews safe over the long term, in ways that would transcend and withstand the political winds of change, was to embed in the police and criminal justice system the idea that antisemitism was their problem to defeat. These Jewish leaders flipped the script of previous diasporic experiences; not only did they become “insiders,” they made antisemitism anathema to America itself. (And yes, it was the Leo Frank incident that inspired “Parade,” the forthcoming Broadway musical that this week attracted white supremacist protesters.)
For Jews, the high-water mark of this strategy came in the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. It was the low point in many ways of the American Jewish experience, the most violent act against Jews on American soil, but it was followed by a mourning process that was shared across the greater Pittsburgh community. The words of the Kaddish appeared above the fold of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. That is inconceivable at most other times of Jewish oppression and persecution. It tells the story of when we are successful – when antisemitism is repudiated by the general public. It is the most likely indicator that we will be collectively safe in the long run.
We were lucky that this move to partner with the establishment was successful. I felt this deeply on a recent trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Seeing the memorials to Black Americans persecuted and lynched by and under the very system that should have been protecting them from the worst elements of society is a reminder that not all minorities in America could then — or today — win over the elements of American society that control criminal justice.
Visitors view items left by well-wishers along the fence at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on the first anniversary of the attack there, Oct. 27, 2019. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
A strategic plan to defeat antisemitism that must be collectively embraced by American Jews would build on this earlier success and invest in the infrastructure of American democracy as the framework for Jewish thriving and surviving, and continue the historic relationship-building that changed the Jews’ position in America. It would stop the counterproductive internecine and partisan battle that is undermining the possibility of Jewish collective mobilization.
It means more investment, across partisan divides, in relationships with local governments and law enforcement, using the imperfect “definitions of antisemitism” as they are intended — not for boundary policing, but to inform and help law enforcement to monitor and prevent violent extremism. It means supporting lawsuits and other creative legal strategies, like Integrity First for America’s groundbreaking efforts against the Unite the Right rally organizers, which stymie such movements in legal gridlock and can help bankrupt them.
It means practicing the lost art of consensus Jewish collective politics which recognize that there must be some baseline agreement that antisemitism is a collective threat, even if any “unity” we imagine for the Jewish community is always going to be be instrumental and short-lived.
It means supporting institutions like the ADL, even as they remain imperfect, even as they sometimes get stuck in some of the failed strategies I decried above, because they have the relationships with powerful current and would-be allies in the American political and civic marketplace, and because they are fighting against antisemitism while trying to stay above the partisan fray.
It means real education and relationship-building with other ethnic and faith communities that is neither purely instrumental nor performative — enough public relations visits to Holocaust museums! — so that we have the allies we need when we need them, and so that we can partner for our collective betterment.
And most importantly, it means investing in the plodding, unsexy work of supporting vibrant American democracy — free and fair elections, voting rights, the rule of law, peaceful transitions of power — because stable liberal democracies have been the safest homes for minorities, Jews included.
I doubt we will ever be able to “end” individual antisemitic acts, much less eradicate antisemitic hate. “Shver tzu zayn a Yid” (it’s hard to be a Jew). We join with our fellow Americans who live in fear of the lone wolves and the hatemongers who periodically terrorize us. But we are much more capable than we are currently behaving to fight back against the collective threats against us. Instead, let’s be the smart Americans we once were.
The real work right now is not baseball bats or billboards, it is not Jewish pride banalities or Twitter refereeing: It is quiet and powerful and, if done right, as American Jews demonstrated in the last century, it will serve us for the long term.
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A famed rabbi’s yeshiva reopens for students for the first time since World War II
(JTA) — Dovid Hofstedter was visiting Belarus five years ago when he discovered that a historic Jewish school had turned into something else.
Hofstedter, a Canadian rabbi, was joining a group of rabbis from around the world at the Radin Yeshiva, nestled in the small town of Radun in western Belarus. The school was founded in 1869 by the famed Lithuanian rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, known as the Chofetz Chaim, and housed 300 students before World War II.
As Hofstedter delivered a lecture in the building, he was surprised to see it fill up with locals, who then gradually wandered out. He realized they didn’t know the building had once housed a yeshiva in a town where no Jews live today.
Instead, people had walked in expecting a play — and left when they didn’t get one.
The Radin Yeshiva had been converted into a theater, with a stage and red seats, Hofstedter told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Like many Jewish sites across Eastern Europe, where the Nazis’ annihilation was followed by decades of Soviet rule that stifled Jewish memory and communal life, the school’s history had been buried.
“In other places that I’ve been to in Eastern Europe, some yeshivas were used as a post office,” said Hofstedter. “Some were used as government buildings.”
This month, Hofstedter and another group of 100 international rabbis filled the building again, this time to inaugurate the reopened Radin Yeshiva, now fully restored to serve Torah students as a functioning school.
Yad Yisroel, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening Jewish life in Belarus, bought the yeshiva building from the municipality of Radun (or Radin, according to its Yiddish pronunciation) in 2025. That spurred a year of planning and construction, headed internationally by Hofstedter, who founded the Torah study organization Dirshu, and locally by Moshe Fhima, who directs Yad Yisroel’s projects and leads a yeshiva in the southern city of Pinsk.
The restoration team replaced the building’s roof and windows, which had deteriorated over years of neglect. Inside, they installed a new Torah ark and recreated the wooden lecterns and chairs that filled the yeshiva before World War II. A library of books is being transported from Israel to stock the school’s shelves.
The Radin Yeshiva closed after the outbreak of World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied the region and Soviet authorities seized the building. Nazi Germany captured Radun in 1941. Some yeshiva students escaped to Japan, where they received aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Rabbi Mendel Zaks, the Radin Yeshiva’s then-leader and the Chofetz Chaim’s son-in-law, fled in 1941 to the United States and reestablished the yeshiva in New York City. In the 1950s, the new school moved upstate to Suffern, New York, where it remains active.
Meanwhile, more than 2,000 Jews from Radun and neighboring villages were interned in a ghetto; most were killed by the Germans and local police.
Hofstedter believes that the Radin Yeshiva will draw interest from Jewish communities across Belarus. Though the country’s 30,000 to 50,000 Jews today are largely secular, Hofstedter said a subset of the community has shown interest in reconnecting with facets of their Jewish identity that were quashed under the Soviets, and the yeshiva can serve as a focal point for that rediscovery. Many of its students will also come from abroad, as Orthodox Jews make regular pilgrimages to study the Chofetz Chaim’s teachings and visit his gravesite.
The Chofetz Chaim, who lived from 1838 to 1933 and whose sobriquet is the title of his first and most famous book, was widely hailed as the leading Jewish scholar of his generation. His establishment of the Radin Yeshiva brought the town fame in the Jewish world of Eastern Europe, where current-day Belarus and Lithuania were home to many “Litvak” Jews who followed a rigorous, anti-Hasidic religious tradition. He remains influential among Orthodox Jews globally for his works codifying Jewish law and ethics, especially his guidance on refraining from “lashon hara,” or “evil speech” about others, said Hofstedter.
There are recent signs of renewed attention to Belarusian and Lithuanian sites of Jewish heritage, according to Alena Kuliounich, the deputy chair of the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Associations and Communities. The Volozhin Yeshiva, another jewel of Lithuanian Jewish history founded in 1803, reopened as a museum in 2024. Today, no more than a handful of Jews are estimated to live in Volozhin, now in western Belarus.
“Volozhin demonstrates that a historic Jewish site can attract considerable interest even in the absence of a substantial local Jewish community,” Kuliounich told JTA.
Hofstedter, whose parents survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz and Mauthausen before rebuilding their lives in Toronto, had a different vision for the Radin Yeshiva. He explicitly did not want it to become a museum.
“We didn’t want to just have some sort of tribute to the past,” said Hofstedter. “We wanted to be in continuity with the future, the teachings of the Chofetz Chaim for future generations.”
At the Radin Yeshiva’s rededication ceremony, he was moved to watch rabbis from the United States, Israel, Britain, France and elsewhere join to celebrate the Chofetz Chaim. The Lithuanian sage’s teachings are followed by Jews across Orthodox movements. It was rare to see rabbis with a range of backgrounds and beliefs “come together with such a feeling of solidarity,” said Hofstedter.
“There was an enormous amount of emotion at that gathering,” he said. “After almost 100 years, to be able to come back to the Chofetz Chaim’s yeshiva, to rejuvenate it and have the yeshiva functioning — it was just incredible.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A famed rabbi’s yeshiva reopens for students for the first time since World War II appeared first on The Forward.
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Police shoot dead assailant outside Israeli Embassy in Serbia
(JTA) — An assailant with knives attacked a police officer guarding the Israeli Embassy in Serbia overnight before the officer shot him dead, according to Serbian authorities.
Interior Minister Ivica Dačić called the incident a “terrorist attack.” The attacker had two knives and shouted “Allahu Akbar” at the officer 15 minutes after midnight Wednesday morning at the embassy in Belgrade. One knife hit the officer’s face.
The officer, a member of the Gendarmerie unit who was identified only by the initials D.S., killed the assailant on the spot, according to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade. The attacker, who was dressed in black and whom Dačić described as a minor, has not been identified and was believed to be from the western city of Šabac.
Dačić said he raised Serbia’s terrorism threat level to “red,” the highest degree, triggering heightened security monitoring and increased police presence around infrastructure facilities and places where large crowds gather.
Dačić added that Serbian security services had been monitoring the attacker, who was “known to be a supporter of the Islamic State” and had posted an image of the terror group’s flag on his Instagram account.
Avivit Bar-Ilan, the ambassador of Israel to Serbia, said she was “deeply disturbed and shocked by the terrorist attack.” She thanked the member of the Gendarmerie for “his courage and decisive response.”
The attack was the second on Belgrade’s Israeli Embassy in two years. In June 2024, a man seriously wounded a police officer outside the embassy by shooting him in the neck with a crossbow.
Wednesday’s incident came the day after Israel held parliamentary elections, with preliminary results suggesting that neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the opposition bloc had secured a governing majority.
Serbia had its own pivotal election on Sunday, with the country’s student-led protest movement defeating the bloc led by longtime nationalist leader Aleksandar Vučić. Under Vučić, Serbia deepened ties with Israel, including through a new joint combat drone manufacturing plant.
The victorious Student List movement said in its platform, “We will not be complicit in the systematic attempt to destroy the Palestinian people that Israel is carrying out in the Gaza Strip, and we will intensify the delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestine in order to save lives and reduce the number of casualties.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Netherlands reverses course, will sit out Eurovision again over Israel’s participation
(JTA) — The Netherlands is withdrawing from the Eurovision Song Contest, reversing an announcement that it would join the event and citing “sensitivity” over Israel’s participation.
The Dutch organization that oversees public broadcasting, the Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, or NPO, said on Tuesday that it failed to find sufficient support from broadcasters to ensure a Dutch artist could go to Eurovision.
“We have known for some time that Israel’s participation elicits various reactions in society and causes discussion and division,” said Jurre Bosman, NPO’s media director. “This is also the case among broadcasters and staff, and we understand that sensitivity.”
NPO said last month that the Netherlands would reenter Eurovision in 2027, when the world’s largest music competition will take place in Burgas, Bulgaria. The Netherlands boycotted the contest in May 2026, alongside Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Slovenia, because of Israel’s inclusion.
NPO’s pledge to rejoin Eurovision overrode a decision by the Dutch network Avrotros, which usually oversees the Dutch entry. Avrotros withdrew from Eurovision in August, saying the event “can no longer be considered neutral” with Israel taking part amid “the severe humanitarian suffering in Gaza and the ongoing restrictions on press freedom.”
Initially, NPO believed there was “sufficient support” among public broadcasters to allow the Netherlands to return, said Jet de Ranitz, the chair of NPO’s executive board. But the decision sparked backlash. Earlier this month, about 400 public broadcasting employees signed a letter titled “#NotMyEurovision” to NPO’s management and board, urging the organization to reconsider returning to the contest.
“We only want to send an artist or artists and staff to the festival if they can count on the full support of one or more broadcasters,” Bosman said.
The contest will still be broadcast in the Netherlands by the network NOS, as it was this year.
Eurovision director Martin Green said he was “deeply sorry” that the Netherlands would not participate, adding that the organizers understood the decision and “respect the strength of feeling behind it in the Netherlands.”
Ireland will also remain absent from Eurovision next year. The country’s broadcaster RTÉ said in September that “Ireland’s participation cannot be justified given the appalling and ongoing loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there.” In Spain, the head of broadcaster RTVE also said he favored a continued boycott.
Czechia pulled out of the event this month, but its public broadcaster cited budget cuts as the reason.
The controversy over Israel’s inclusion in Eurovision has prompted mass protests. The 2026 contest drew 131 million viewers, down 35 million from the previous year.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netherlands reverses course, will sit out Eurovision again over Israel’s participation appeared first on The Forward.
