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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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The post Beyond the ‘Day of Hate’: The best strategy to keep American Jews safe over the long term appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook.
I have seen NAZA and I am shook. Not simply because of what the film reveals about how Israel is waging the war in Gaza, but because of what it reveals about how a society becomes capable of doing this at all. And as I’ve watched the reaction in Israel since the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, I’ve come to see that the reaction itself reflects the very systems the film exposes.
There are two systems at the center of NAZA, which opens Sept. 30 in New York City. The first is the technical one: the surveillance, targeting, artificial intelligence and military technologies that allow the Israeli army to identify and kill people at enormous scale. The second is the psychic and narrative system that makes the first one possible. It allows people inside the military to participate in this machinery, and journalists, filmmakers, politicians and ordinary people outside it to absorb what is happening, rationalize it, defend it or simply carry on.
The reaction to the film has become part of the evidence. That is what has shaken me.
The film, by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, takes us inside the systems of surveillance, targeting and killing used by the Israeli military in Gaza. But it is also an investigation into the people inside those systems and the stories they tell themselves about what they are doing.
Some of the officers interviewed are members of Israel’s elite military and intelligence units. They speak about their work with an almost surreal normalcy. One talks about coming home after his work and continuing to work on his Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Another talks about going to Poland on a Holocaust trip in high school, being taught that the Nazis were pure evil, and now understanding them.
Abraham asks those they interview whether anyone questions what they are doing. No one.
This blindness doesn’t stop with the military.
It lives in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are defending, whose lives we are responsible for, and whose suffering can be pushed outside the frame. It lives in the deep Israeli and Jewish memory of vulnerability and annihilation, in the knowledge that Jewish safety is not an abstraction. It lives, too, in what happens when that memory becomes so consuming that another people’s suffering becomes something we can only see through our own fear.
I have watched that dynamic reveal itself over and over since Venice.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked the film and announced plans to pursue legislation that could strip citizenship from Israelis who “defame” Israeli soldiers abroad, explicitly citing NAZA and its filmmakers. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called Abraham and Szor traitors and sought to have their citizenship revoked.
Protesters have gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home for multiple nights, chanting “death sentence for traitors.” Demonstrators have sought out the offices of Local Call, where Abraham works, and activists have threatened to track down the filmmakers and their families. Graffiti depicting the filmmakers as traitors has appeared on the streets.
And all of this is happening before almost anyone in Israel has even seen the film. The film has not even been released in Israel — but the fury has not waited for a screening.
I cannot get past that.
The reaction is not some separate story happening around NAZA. It is part of what NAZA is showing us.
Attack the person asking the question. Question their loyalty. Invoke existential danger. Change the subject. Make the person holding the mirror into the threat.
This is where Oct. 7 enters the story.
Of course Oct. 7 happened. Israelis were murdered and kidnapped. The trauma is real. The responsibility of journalists to verify serious allegations is real.
But there is a difference between acknowledging Oct. 7 and requiring every critique of Israel’s military actions to pass through it before it can be heard.
I watched veteran journalist Raviv Drucker’s interview with Abraham and found myself increasingly disturbed by the frame. The questions repeatedly returned to whether the film was sufficiently balanced, whether Abraham had sufficiently accounted for Oct. 7, whether his sources could be trusted.
These are not illegitimate questions. But when they become the ritual through which every serious critique of Israel’s military actions must pass, something else is happening. The burden keeps shifting onto the person asking the question: Prove that you understand us. Prove that you see our pain. Prove that you are not erasing us. Prove that you are still one of us.
Only then can we begin to talk about what Israel is doing.
And then there was something that happened to me personally. The head of one Israeli film forum told me it would be better not to defend Abraham and Szor publicly because it could cost “us” the elections.
I understood exactly what she meant. And that is what frightened me. Don’t make things harder. Don’t give ammunition to the other side. Don’t jeopardize the political outcome. Don’t defend these two young filmmakers too loudly. The instinct is the same: don’t disrupt the story that allows us to keep going.
The kind of collective psychosis allows my people, including my people in Tel Aviv, to go about their lives as if things are normal while Gaza is being destroyed is not separate from what NAZA describes. It is part of it.
I am my grandfathers’ granddaughter. One was killed in 1948 fighting for the creation of Israel. The other survived the Holocaust and became a human rights activist. I have spent my life carrying these two parts of Jewish history inside me: the absolute necessity of Jewish safety and the absolute necessity of human rights. I don’t experience those things as contradictions.
What NAZA has forced me to confront is what happens when one of those truths becomes a shield against the other.
That is what shook me about NAZA. Not only what it shows us about Gaza. Not only what it shows us about the technology that makes killing possible, or the people who learn to participate in it. But what it shows us about the stories we need to tell ourselves in order not to see what is happening in front of us.
And what happens when someone holds up a mirror and refuses to let us look away.
The post I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook. appeared first on The Forward.
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In a legal settlement, UC Berkeley offers a dance scholar a position it denied her because she’s Israeli.
(JTA) — (J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — For more than nine months, UC Berkeley has failed to honor a legal settlement with an Israeli dance scholar who was denied a teaching position due to her nationality.
In response to a J. inquiry, a university spokesperson said the delay was caused by “internal miscommunication.” The university now promises that the scholar, Yael Nativ, will receive the job offer she was guaranteed in the December 2025 settlement “no later than the week of Sept. 28.”
“We deeply regret this unfortunate delay and look forward to welcoming Dr. Nativ back to our campus,” UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said in a statement.
Nativ said she received an apology for the delay and the promise of an imminent job offer in a Sept. 21 email from a university administrator.
“It’s always a surprise when I get emails from them because the correspondence was so little to none,” Nativ said. “I’m so tired of this case.”
Nativ, a sociologist specializing in Israeli dance, taught in UC Berkeley’s dance department during spring 2022 as a visiting professor through the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. Her course focused on contemporary dance in Israel through social, political and cultural perspectives.
The institute invited Nativ to reapply for another year of teaching. But after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, SanSan Kwan, chair of the dance department, informed Nativ that she would not be rehired. In November 2023, Kwan told Nativ in a WhatsApp message: “My dept cannot host you for a class next fall. Things are very hot right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
The university’s civil rights office investigated the matter and concluded that Nativ was discriminated against based on her Israeli identity.
Nativ sued the university, with representation from the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, in August 2025. When the two sides settled the lawsuit in December 2025, the university acknowledged its wrongdoing and committed to apologizing to Nativ and inviting her back to campus.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons apologized to Nativ over Zoom on Feb. 3, but no job offer arrived.
The lapse was publicized by Malcolm Feeley, a retired UC Berkeley Law professor, who wrote about Nativ’s case in a Sept. 16 article in the Jewish Review of Books.
“Justice delayed is justice denied. This is justice delayed in the extreme,” Feeley said in an interview. “It takes a concerted effort of badgering to get [the university] to move an inch.”
In a statement to J. following the publication of Feeley’s article, Mogulof said the university hadn’t sent Nativ a job offer due to a misunderstanding among administrators about who was responsible for doing so.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermalin will personally ensure the offer will come within the next two weeks, according to Mogulof.
Nativ went on to work as a research fellow at Ben-Gurion University in Israel after she left Berkeley. She said her main goal since the lawsuit has been to hold UC Berkeley accountable, not to land a job.
“It wasn’t urgent for me to go [back to campus]. It’s more about making a point, getting my justice,” she said. “But if they invite, I will consider.”
This story was first reported by J. The Jewish News of Northern California and is reprinted with permission.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In a legal settlement, UC Berkeley offers a dance scholar a position it denied her because she’s Israeli. appeared first on The Forward.
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The choice in Michigan between El-Sayed and Rogers is one all American Jews have to make
Sometimes the most important part of making a decision is articulating what the decision actually is. What are the choices?
So it is in Michigan, where Jewish Democrats are asked to choose between Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat who is against providing military aid to Israel and who campaigned with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, and Mike Rogers, a Republican and an election denier who would help keep the Senate in the hands of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and who is presenting himself as the choice for Jews offended by El-Sayed. Either Rogers wins; El-Sayed wins without Jewish support; or El-Sayed wins with Jewish support. Those are the only possible outcomes.
Two groups have shown two different ways of dealing with this choice. The first, “Nonnegotiable Michigan,” a group of Jewish Michiganders including rabbis and cantors, has listed five “baseline needs,” or “nonnegotiables,” for their support, which include “Jewish sovereignty in Israel” along with full and safe participation in American life for all Jews including Zionists and a vision for a better Middle East.
The second, Michigan Jews for Democracy, has pledged its support for El-Sayed while noting some reservations and concerns. As one signatory, David Jaffe, put it in a statement released along with Michigan Jews for Democracy’s declaratory letter, “I am a proud Jew. I’m voting for El Sayed despite our disagreements, to support domestic policies that reflect Jewish values. I’m voting against grave threats to the safety of Jews and to American democracy. Rogers unquestioningly supports an authoritarian administration, its arbitrary arrests, its white Christian nationalism, and myriad terrible policies that have never in history been ‘good for the Jews.’”
In other words, one group has said the Democratic candidate cannot count on their support because of their disagreements with him, while the other has said that he has their support despite them. One is trying to get a candidate to say what they want to hear before the election; the other, that they will support him in the election and hope to be a “voice at the table” after.
Jewish groups are, of course, not the only ones who have grappled with such questions (“Nonnegotiable” calls to mind the “Uncommitted” movement to press for a ceasefire in Gaza and to end military aid to Israel from the 2024 presidential election). But to consider these two specific groups together is to consider a choice that an increasing number of Jewish Democrats — which is to say, the vast majority of American Jews — all over the country can expect to be making soon if they haven’t already had to.
Democrats (and younger Republicans) are less supportive of Israel and of US support for it. Candidates will need to speak to their voters and make campaign promises that are aligned with what those voters want to hear. And Jewish Democrats will have to be honest with themselves about the limited options before them and decide for themselves whether they want these candidates to win with or without them.
Per an AP-NORC poll from this summer, about 58% of Democrats think the United States is too supportive of Israel, while roughly half think Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. Not every candidate who makes it out of a primary and into a general election will say the same, but many will, both because of their own conviction and because they want to win Democratic votes.
For some Jewish Democrats, this presents no tension or contradiction; the same poll said that roughly three in 10 Jewish adults agree that Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. There are American Jews for whom El-Sayed’s vision for the Middle East is not threatening but comforting and correct. But about half of American Jews rejected the idea that Israel carried out a genocide. And, as JFNA found, the vast majority of American Jews want Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state (though just 37% now identify as Zionist). Many may feel a tug of war between their support for or attachment to Israel and their liberalism.
There will be some who say that American Jews should reject the idea that this is a choice, that there is no contradiction between being a liberal Democrat and supporting Israel. That is all well and good in theory, but, come election day, voters in Michigan will make a choice between these two men. There is El-Sayed, who does not want to send military aid to Israel and who said “hurt people hurt people” after Temple Israel was attacked, referring to the fact that the perpetrator’s family was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Lebanon (El-Sayed has since apologized). And there is Rogers, who says he loves Israel and also denies the results of the 2020 presidential election (and pushed to ban abortion and opposed marriage equality, to take two examples from his record).
While Jewish Democrats can, of course, try to influence where Democratic candidates and voters are on Israel, they do not get to dictate it. They do not, in the Michigan general election, get to choose a candidate who supports democracy and also talks about how much they love and want to support Israel. They get to choose whether they want El-Sayed to win and Mike Rogers to lose and, if so, whether they want to be a part of making it happen regardless of El-Sayed’s views on Israel. Every Jewish Democrat, like every other voter, will have to make that choice, and can withhold their vote for whatever reason. But they should be clear about the reality of what they are choosing between.
There are only so many choices in Michigan. And outside of Michigan, too.
The post The choice in Michigan between El-Sayed and Rogers is one all American Jews have to make appeared first on The Forward.
