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Biden plan to combat antisemitism demands reforms across the executive branch and beyond
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden unveiled a multifaceted and broad strategy to combat antisemitism in the United States that reaches from basketball courts to farming communities, from college campuses to police departments.
“We must say clearly and forcefully that antisemitism and all forms of hate and violence have no place in America,” Biden said in a prerecorded video. “Silence is complicity.”
The 60-page document and its list of more than 100 recommendations stretches across the government, requiring reforms in virtually every sector of the executive branch within a year. It was formulated after consultations with over a thousand experts, and covers a range of tactics, from increased security funding to a range of educational efforts.
The plan has been in the works since December, and the White House has consulted with large Jewish organizations throughout the process. The finished document embraces proposals that large Jewish organizations have long advocated, as well as initiatives that pleasantly surprised Jewish organizational leaders, most of whom praised it upon its release.
Among the proposals that Jewish leaders have called for were recommendations to streamline reporting of hate crimes across local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, which will enable the government to accurately assess the breadth of hate crimes. The proposal also recommends that Congress double the funds available to nonprofits for security measures, from $180 million to $360 million.
One proposal that, if enacted, could be particularly far-reaching — and controversial — is a call for Congress to pass “fundamental reforms” to a provision that shields social media platforms from liability for the content users post on their sites. The plan says social media companies should have a “zero tolerance policy for hate speech on their platforms.”
In addition, the plan calls for action in partnership with a range of government agencies and private entities. It says the government will work with professional sports leagues to educate fans about antisemitism and hold athletes accountable for it, following instances of antisemitic speech by figures such as NBA star Kyrie Irving or NFL player DeSean Jackson.
The government will also partner with rural museums and libraries to educate their visitors about Jewish heritage and antisemitism. And the plan includes actions to be taken by a number of cabinet departments, from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the USDA.
“It’s really producing a whole-of-government approach that stretches from what you might consider the obvious things like more [security] grants and more resources for the Justice Department and the FBI,” said Nathan Diament, the Washington director of the Orthodox Union. “But it stretches all the way across things that the Department of Labor and the Small Business Administration can do with regard to educating about antisemitism, that the National Endowment of the Humanities and the President’s Council on Sports and Fitness can do with regard to the institutions that they deal with.”
An array of Jewish organizations from the left to the center-right echoed those sentiments in welcoming the plan with enthusiasm, marking a change from recent weeks in which they had been split over how the plan should define antisemitism. Still, a handful of right-wing groups blasted the strategy, saying that its chosen definition of antisemitism diluted the term.
Despite the relatively united front, there are elements of the strategy that may stoke broader controversy: Among a broad array of partner groups named in the plan is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose harsh criticism of Israel has led to relations with centrist Jewish organizations that are fraught at best. The call to place limits on social media platforms may also upset free speech advocates.
Biden recalled, as he often does, that he decided to run for president after President Donald Trump equivocated while condemning the neo-Nazis who organized a deadly march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“Repeated episodes of hate — including numerous attacks on Jewish Americans — have since followed Charlottesville, shaking our moral conscience as Americans and challenging the values for which we stand as a Nation,” Biden wrote in an introduction to the report.
The administration launched the initiative last December, after years during which Jewish groups and the FBI reported sharp spikes in antisemitic incidents. The strategy was originally planned for release at its Jewish American Heritage Month celebration last week, but was delayed, in part because of last minute internal squabbling over whether it would accept a definition of antisemitism that some on the left said chilled free speech on Israel. Some right-wing groups were deeply critical of the new strategy for not accepting that definition to the exclusion of others.
Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad) praised the breadth of the plan, and said the delay seemed to produce results.
“The White House has taken this very seriously. The phrase that something is still being worked on can often be a euphemism for a lack of concern,” he said. “In this case, it seems to have resulted in an even more comprehensive and hopefully more effective result.”
Some of the initiatives in the plan focus less on directly confronting antisemitism and more on promoting tolerance of and education about Jews.The Biden Administration will seek to ensure accommodations for Jewish religious observance, the accompanying fact sheet said, and “the Department of Agriculture will work to ensure equal access to all USDA feeding programs for USDA customers with religious dietary needs, including kosher and halal dietary needs.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League CEO who was closely consulted on the strategy, said promoting inclusion was as critical as fighting antisemitism. “Is FEMA giving kosher provisions after disasters going to solve antisemitism?” he said in an interview. “No, but… it’s an acknowledgement of the plurality of communities and the need to treat Jewish people like you would any other minority community, and I think I’m very pleased to see that.”
In the months since Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, convened a roundtable to launch the initiative, the Biden administration has pivoted from focusing on the threat of antisemitism from the far-right to also highlighting its manifestation in other spheres — including amid anti-Israel activism on campuses and the targeting of visibly religious Jews in the northeast. Those factors were evident in the strategy.
“Some traditionally observant Jews, especially traditional Orthodox Jews, are victimized while walking down the street,” the strategy said in its introduction. “Jewish students and educators are targeted for derision and exclusion on college campuses, often because of their real or perceived views about the State of Israel.”
The proposal that may provoke controversy beyond American Jewry is the Biden Administration’s calls to reform the tech sector, which echo bipartisan recommendations to change Section 230, a provision of U.S. law that grants platforms immunity from being liable for the content users post. Free speech advocates and the companies themselves say that if the government were to police online speech, it would veer into censorship.
“Tech companies have a critical role to play and for that reason the strategy contains 10 separate calls to tech companies to establish a zero tolerance policy for hate speech on their platforms, to ensure that their algorithms do not pass along hate speech and extreme content to users and to listen more closely to Jewish groups to better understand how antisemitism manifests itself on their platforms,” Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Biden’s top Homeland Security adviser, said during a 30-minute briefing on the strategy on Thursday. “The president has also called on Congress to remove the special immunity for online platforms and to impose stronger transparency requirements in order to ensure that tech companies are removing content that violates their terms of service.”
Neo-Nazis and white supremacists encircle counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 11, 2017. (Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In the weeks before the rollout, a debate raged online and behind the scenes amid Jewish organizations and activists about how the plan would define antisemitism. Centrist and right-wing groups pushed for the plan to embrace the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition. Among its examples of anti-Jewish bigotry are those focusing on when Israel criticism is antisemitic, including when “double standards” applied to Israel are antisemitic.
Advocates on the left say those clauses turn legitimate criticism of Israel into hate speech; instead, they pushed to include references to the Nexus Document, a definition authored by academics that recognizes IHRA but seeks to complement it by further elucidating how anti-Israel expression may be antisemitic in some instances, and not in others. Others sought to include the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which rejects IHRA’s Israel-related examples.
In the end, the strategy said the U.S. government recognizes the IHRA definition as the “most prominent” and “appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”
A number of the centrist groups pressed for exclusive reference to IHRA, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Those groups praised the strategy and focused only on its embrace of IHRA. So did the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Herzog.
“I would like to congratulate the Biden administration for publishing the first ever national strategy to combat antisemitism,” Herzog wrote on Twitter. “Thank you, @POTUS, for prioritizing the need to confront antisemitism in all its forms. We welcome the re-embracing of @TheIHRA definition which is the gold standard definition of antisemitism.”
Some center-right groups like B’nai Brith International, StandWithUs and the World Jewish Congress, praised the strategy while expressing regret at the inclusion of Nexus. Right-wing groups, such as the Republican Jewish Coalition and Christians United for Israel condemned the rollout.
RJC said Biden “blew it” by not exclusively using the IHRA definition. The Brandeis Center, which defends pro-Israel groups and students on campus, said the “substance doesn’t measure up.”
Groups on the left, however, broadly praised the strategy. “We call on our Jewish communities to seize this historic moment and build on this new strategy to ensure that the fight for Jewish safety is a fight for a better and safer America for all,” said a statement from six left-leaning groups spearheaded by Jews For Racial & Economic Justice.
Greenblatt said it was predictable that groups on the left would take the win and that groups on the right would grumble — but that it was also beside the point. IHRA, he said, was now U.S. policy.
“This document elevates and advances IHRA as the way that U.S. policy will be formulated going forward and across all of the agencies,” Greenblatt said. “That is a win.”
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The post Biden plan to combat antisemitism demands reforms across the executive branch and beyond appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Cyber Threats Spike 150% Since Oct. 2023, Israeli Healthcare Most Vulnerable
A hooded man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. Photo: Reuters / Kacper Pempel / Illustration.
i24 News – Four years after the cyberattack that crippled Hillel Yaffe Hospital, the vulnerabilities of Israel’s healthcare system remain glaring. Since the outbreak of the war in October 2023, Israel’s digital domain has turned into a front line: by year’s end, authorities recorded 3,380 cyberattacks, a 150% surge compared to previous years.
More than 800 of them carried “significant damage potential,” according to ynet.
Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report places Israel as the world’s third-most targeted country after the United States and the United Kingdom. It is also the leading target in the Middle East and Africa, absorbing more than 20% of attacks in the region.
Iran remains the most aggressive adversary, directing roughly 64% of its cyber activity at Israel in attempts to gather intelligence, disrupt services, and spread propaganda.
The techniques used are familiar but highly effective: exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities, using leaked or stolen credentials, and launching basic phishing schemes that grant direct access to internal networks. Despite the prominent role of state-linked actors, financial gain still drives most activity: data theft accounts for 80% of attacks, and more than half involve ransomware.
For Amir Preminger, CTO of the Israeli critical-infrastructure security firm Claroty, the scale of the threat can no longer be ignored. His team has tracked 136 claimed attacks over the past three years, including 34 aimed at essential infrastructure and eight targeting healthcare systems. “Hospitals face the same risks as any organization, but their rapid digitalization leaves them uniquely exposed,” he warns.
The exploited weaknesses are often depressingly basic: weak or reused passwords, overdue software updates, and outdated systems. Preminger identifies two main types of state-sponsored operations: high-impact attacks designed to cause maximum shock, potentially endangering patients, and long-term infiltration efforts intended to quietly siphon off sensitive medical data.
Artificial intelligence is amplifying the threat. “AI tools are enabling inexperienced attackers to scale up quickly,” Preminger says. Some autonomous agents can already execute complex sequences of cyber operations, while healthcare institutions adopt AI faster than they can secure it.
Despite the escalating danger, Preminger argues that regulation has fallen behind. The state possesses advanced cyber capabilities but has limited authority to enforce standards or assist private-sector organizations.
The path forward, he says, must include education, awareness programs, financial support, and mandatory baseline security requirements, before the next major attack hits the core of Israel’s healthcare system.
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Exclusive: DOGE ‘Doesn’t Exist’ with Eight Months Left on its Charter
Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw onstage during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, US, February 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard/File Photo
US President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump’s pledge to slash the government’s size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings.
“That doesn’t exist,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE’s status.
It is no longer a “centralized entity,” Kupor added, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE.
The agency, set up in January, made dramatic forays across Washington in the early months of Trump’s second term to rapidly shrink federal agencies, cut their budgets or redirect their work to Trump priorities. The OPM, the federal government’s human resources office, has since taken over many of DOGE’s functions, according to Kupor and documents reviewed by Reuters.
At least two prominent DOGE employees are now involved with the National Design Studio, a new body created through an executive order signed by Trump in August. That body is headed by Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Trump’s order directed him to beautify government websites.
Gebbia was part of billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE team while DOGE employee Edward Coristine, nicknamed “Big Balls,” encouraged followers on his X account to apply to join.
The fading away of DOGE is in sharp contrast to the government-wide effort over months to draw attention to it, with Trump, his advisers and cabinet secretaries posting about it on social media. Musk, who led DOGE initially, regularly touted its work on his X platform and at one point brandished a chainsaw to advertise his efforts to cut government jobs.
“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” Musk said, holding the tool above his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, in February.
DOGE claimed to have slashed tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, but it was impossible for outside financial experts to verify that because the unit did not provide detailed public accounting of its work.
“President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment,” said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston in an email to Reuters.
TRUMP OFFICIALS HAVE BEEN SIGNALING DOGE’S DEMISE
Trump administration officials have not openly said that DOGE no longer exists, even after Musk’s public feud with Trump in May. Musk has since left Washington.
Trump and his team have nevertheless signaled its demise in public since this summer, even though the US president signed an executive order earlier in his term decreeing that DOGE would last through July 2026.
In statements to reporters, Trump often talks about DOGE in the past tense. Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason, whose background is in healthcare tech, formally became an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy in March, according to a court filing, in addition to her role with DOGE. Her public statements have largely focused on her HHS role.
Republican-led states, including Idaho and Florida, meanwhile are creating local entities similar to DOGE.
A government-wide hiring freeze – another hallmark of DOGE – is also over, Kupor said.
Trump on his first day in office barred federal agencies from bringing on new employees, with exceptions for positions his team deemed necessary to enforce immigration laws and protect public safety. He later said DOGE representatives must approve any other exceptions, adding that agencies should hire “no more than one employee for every four” that depart.
“There is no target around reductions” anymore, Kupor said.
FORMER DOGE EMPLOYEES MOVE ON TO NEW ROLES
DOGE staff have also taken on other roles in the administration. Most prominent is Gebbia, whom Trump tasked with improving the “visual presentation” of government websites.
So far, his design studio has launched websites to recruit law enforcement officers to patrol Washington, D.C., and advertise the president’s drug pricing program. Gebbia declined an interview with Reuters via a spokesperson.
Zachary Terrell, part of the DOGE team given access to government health systems in the early days of Trump’s second term, is now chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. Rachel Riley, who had the same access according to court filings, is now chief of the Office of Naval Research, according to the office’s website.
Jeremy Lewin, who helped Musk and the Trump administration dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department, according to the agency’s website.
Musk shortly after Trump’s election said he had a mandate to “delete the mountain” of government regulations. He made undoing government regulations and remaking the government with AI two key tenets of DOGE, in addition to eliminating federal government jobs.
The administration is still working toward slashing regulations. The White House budget office has tasked Scott Langmack, who was DOGE’s representative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with creating custom AI applications to pore through US regulations and determine which ones to eliminate, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Musk, meanwhile, has reappeared in Washington. This week, he attended a White House dinner for Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
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How Black music brought me closer to Judaism
Once, while my parents were away, my Grandma Min woke my three siblings and me at five in the morning to lecture us on the proper way to squeeze a toothpaste tube. Funny how effective that was. To this day, I can’t pick up a tube of Crest without thinking about how to squeeze it properly.
Toothpaste incident notwithstanding, I loved my Grandma Min. She was a rule-breaker and a rebel. Among the first Jewish women in Minneapolis to march for civil rights, she regularly hosted Black community leaders in her apartment and served them her own brand of soul food: blintzes, kugel, borscht, and mandelbrot. Everyone she touched — including me — was changed for the better. She’s the one who introduced me to the world’s greatest guitar teacher.
One Sunday afternoon, in the midst of a brilliant sun-shower, Lester Williams pulled up to our house in his pale-yellow Fleetwood Brougham. There’s little question that he was the first Black man to park a Cadillac on our block and walk to the door of a Jewish kid’s house for a guitar lesson.
It was Grandma Min’s idea. She’d seen Lester perform at a Hadassah luncheon, singing songs from Fiddler on the Roof with a big archtop Gibson and a tambourine balanced on his shoe. Afterwards, she asked if he’d teach me.
Lester, who was in his mid-70s at the time, wore a high-rise Don King hairdo and played in a style that was equal parts Texas blues and Yiddish theater. He taught me Sam Cooke’s ”You Send Me” and Lightning Hopkins riffs. When he sang, his eyes closed like he was singing for the Lord.
To this day, I’ve never opened my guitar case without thinking of Lester.
Back then, Jewish felt dorky; Black felt cool. In the early ’70s, a newly bar-mitzvahed kid playing funk and blues was an anomaly. Now, of course, the pop charts are built on it, but in the day it was the Eagles and Jethro Tull, not Kanye and Kendrick Lamar.
I was drawn to the groove and gravitas of Black music — Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, John Lee Hooker. It wasn’t only sound; it was a worldview. There was truth in that rhythm: sophisticated, sardonic, somehow sacred. It hovered between sex and Godliness. You could put a record on the stereo and feel righteous about reproducing the human species to it. To play that music, you had to become it, not just imitate it. I developed a lilting accent that slipped in naturally when I sang, like a thing that made down-in-the-bones sense. Every rock musician had done it in some form — Jagger, Van Morrison, the whole British Invasion.
It was a bridge to something larger, a way to escape the confines of white suburbia and begin what would become a lifelong expansion of my creative and spiritual boundaries. In retrospect, it may have been the first step on the path that led me to become an observant Jew.
Most of the kids around me seemed content inside their circumscribed worlds of hockey, keggers and Sadie Hawkins dances. I wanted to erase the margins someone else had drawn around my life. The times I could do that were rare, but they happened most powerfully when I was making music. It was then that the world lost its edges. The interplay between musicians could feel like one spirit inhabiting separate bodies. That’s how it felt when I first played with Wynston Robyns.
At my cousin Jeff’s house near Cedar Lake, we jammed in the basement — low ceiling, unused shuffleboard court in the floor, winter coats piled on the Ping-Pong table. Some older Black guys from the North Side brought their gear, a little weed, and some Ripple wine. I’d never tried Ripple before. I drank to excess.
Soon the room came alive: guitars tuned, reeds moistened, drums whacked, a few tentative chords tossed out. First rhythm, then flight. Jeff on the Fender Rhodes, me on guitar, all of us tearing it up. After an hour, the alto sax player, Jimmy, said, “You boys gotta meet Wynston Robyns.”
With Jeff’s parents away and my parents asleep and dreaming back at my house, we piled into Jimmy’s car and drove north, well past the safety of our suburb. By the time we reached Wynston’s place it was close to one in the morning. Dim light spilled from the basement windows, bass and drums rumbled from below. When Wynston finally opened the door, he filled its frame: barrel-chested, magnetic, with a half-smile suspended between welcome and menace.
We smoked more weed and played until God knows when. Some Stevie, some Lou Rawls. It was nearly dawn when Jeff and I became the new members of Wynston Robyns and Soul SearchLyte.
Rehearsals were constant — four nights a week, sometimes after school, sometimes before. Neither of us was old enough to have a driver’s license, so we took the city bus.
It took months for Soul SearchLyte to land just two gigs. The first was a corporate lunch my dad attended in a suit and tie. “Wynston seems like a really nice guy,” he said afterward, which was true…mostly. The second was New Year’s Eve at the Holiday Inn downtown. We were the “headliners,” scheduled for 1:00 a.m. — which everyone in the business knows means the time everybody has gone home to party. The real headliners went on at midnight. It was another North Side band, Champagne, featuring Morris Day, André Simone, and a diminutive guy with a large afro.
Jeff and I watched them in awe. André’s bass ran through a Mu-tron Funk Box that made every note sound like it came from the world’s best wah-wah. Morris Day’s drumming was tight, crisp, unstoppable. Wynston leaned toward me and shouted over the groove, “You see that guy? The way he chops out that rhythm? His name’s Prince. They say he’s got a record deal on Warners. Peter, that’s what you need to do if you wanna be more than just a basement guitar player.”
No offense to Soul SearchLyte, but Champagne was a brutal act to follow. By the time we went on at 3:00 a.m., only my Uncle Sonny and the bar staff were still around, mopping the floor while we played our hearts out.
A few weeks later, during rehearsal, our lead guitarist, Larry Crags, announced he was quitting.
“Wynston, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to leave the snap,” he said.
Wynston stared at him. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Larry shifted his weight. “My wife thinks it’s not a good idea — all this practice when we haven’t got any gigs lined up.”
Wynston stepped forward and jabbed his finger into Larry’s chest. “You sayin’ I’m not a man?”
It was strange. Larry hadn’t said anything of the sort.
Before Larry could answer, Wynston swung and caught him square in the face. Larry, who’d once told me in strictest confidence he was a Kung Fu master, fell hard, then rose, bloodied, into a fighting stance. Having been an ardent viewer of Kung Fu, the TV series, I waited for the mystical retaliation. It never came. Wynston hit him again, a clean right hook that sent him flying into my amplifier.
Larry crawled away, whimpering, up the stairs and out of the house. Jeff, maybe out of shock, started playing ”Rock-A-Bye Baby” on the high keys of his electric piano. From behind the drum kit someone said flatly, “Why don’t somebody shut off that amplifier?”
Wynston, panting hard, looked at me. “Peter, I suppose you wanna quit this snap too, since you’ve just seen a Black man beat up on a white dude.”
“No, Wynston,” I said. “I love being in this band.”
Hell yes, I did. I just became the lead guitarist.
Those nights in North Minneapolis — half teachable moment, half transcendence — were my first real taste of faith: the moment when music, spirit and belonging coalesced into one sound, one rhythm, one funky-ass pulse of Creation.
I’m positive Grandma Min would approve.
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