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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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How Dealing with Difficult Challenges Leads to Spiritual Growth and Leadership
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
They say that “the devil is in the details,” and nowhere has that been more evident than in the corruption scandal currently shaking Ukraine — even as the deadly war with Russia continues to rage.
Over the past couple of weeks, Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators have been drip-feeding the world with information: wiretaps, redacted court testimony, and sordid specifics of a large bribery saga. The cast of villains includes prominent businessmen and contractors pressured for hefty “commissions,” high-ranking ministers abruptly resigning, and one of President Zelensky’s former business partners fleeing the country just hours before the police raided his home.
The entire scheme exploited a wartime loophole — a rule under martial law preventing contractors from collecting debts in court from companies providing essential services. Energoatom fits that definition perfectly, as it supplies more than half of Ukraine’s electricity.
But more fascinating than the scandal itself is the sheer level of detail — the way this scheme evolved from small to big to overwhelming, unfolding slowly, piece by piece, person by person, until you finally step back and see the broad contours of the entire sprawling disaster.
And oddly enough, all of this brings me straight into the heart of Parshat Vayeitzei, which was my late father’s bar mitzvah parsha. He would always say — with an unmistakable twinkle in his eye — that Vayeitzei was “the most important parsha in the Torah.” We’d nod and smile, convinced he was just having a laugh.
I mean, yes — Vayeitzei certainly has its blockbuster moments: Jacob’s ladder stretching toward heaven, the extraordinary promises God makes to him, his first encounter with Rachel at the well — one of the great love stories in Jewish history — followed by his marriages and the birth of 11 children who would become the founders of the tribes that became the Jewish people. All of these events are unquestionably consequential, to say the least.
But then you hit the middle of the parsha — the part everyone secretly hopes the baal koreh will speed through. It’s long, it’s intricate, and it’s bewilderingly detailed: the astonishing saga of Jacob’s business dealings with Lavan.
Wage agreements — and disagreements. Livestock negotiations. Contract revisions. Endless sheep rearing. Sheep with spots, sheep without spots, sheep with speckles, stripes, dark patches — every possible permutation of sheep coloration you can imagine. It’s the Torah’s version of a regulatory audit: too many technical notes, too many procedural details, and far too much information.
Most of us, understandably, wonder what all this sheep drama is doing in a sacred text. Why did the Torah — normally so concise — zoom in on this business relationship from hell? Why give us this level of detail? And whatever the answer might be, surely this story doesn’t belong in “the most important parsha in the Torah.”
But my father always insisted that Vayeitzei’s business section wasn’t a pointless, transitional interruption in the narrative — it was the narrative. And perhaps, as the revelations from Kyiv remind us, the line between spiritual greatness and moral disaster is drawn not in grand theological enterprises like ladders reaching heavenward or celestial dream sequences, but in the slow, grinding, unglamorous world of day-to-day commerce: negotiations, promises, deals, and the quiet ethical temptations that shadow every decision we make.
If you think about it, this strange middle section of Vayeitzei is the Torah’s earliest and most elaborate case study in business ethics — or, more accurately, business un-ethics. Lavan is the Biblical version of a man who smiles broadly to your face while his hand is quietly stealing your wallet.
He is charming, generous-sounding, and utterly unscrupulous. He cheats at negotiations. He alters contracts retroactively. He weaponizes hospitality. He manipulates family loyalty. If there were a Biblical Consumer Protection Bureau, Lavan would be its full-time subject of interest.
And Jacob — the bookish, scholarly son of Isaac — finds himself thrown into a years-long masterclass with one of the greatest Machiavellian businessmen of the ancient Near East. The holy patriarch of the Jewish nation, the spiritual heir to Abraham and Isaac, sits across the table from a crook arguing over sheep markings.
But that’s precisely the point. Spirituality is easy when you live a monastic life of solitude and separation. Show me how spiritual you are when you need to negotiate with a scoundrel — that’s when your character is truly revealed.
Judaism doesn’t believe in the mystique of the cloister. Our greatest spiritual heroes aren’t monks; they’re shepherds, merchants, craftsmen, farmers — even warriors and kings. Jacob’s true greatness emerges in the trenches of real life, in the dense and morally dangerous world where money, power, opportunity, resentment, and desperation mingle with our aspirations to become the people God wants us to be.
What Vayeitzei shows, in deliberately excruciating detail, is that Jacob absolutely refuses to become Lavan. Yes, he negotiates, he strategizes, he outsmarts. But he does not become Lavan. He maintains his integrity.
And here’s the deeper insight — the one my father, with his mischievous grin, seemed instinctively to understand: the Jewish mission from the very outset was never to escape the world; it was to elevate it — from the inside out.
If Jacob had spent 20 years in a desert cave meditating on the divine, he might have produced beautiful insights — but there would have been no tribes, no family, no nation, and no legacy. Instead, Jacob becomes the spiritual father of Israel the nation even as he ran a household, raised children, and navigated a business partnership with a morally bankrupt relative.
And that is precisely why the Torah dwells on the sheep. Because the sheep are not a distraction — they are the arena. They are the battlefield where Jacob’s greatness is forged. They are the proof that holiness is not found in what we avoid, but in how we behave when we can’t avoid what we would much prefer to have nothing to do with.
And as it turns out, in the final analysis Jacob was not transformed by his dream of angels — he was transformed by his years in business with Lavan. What we learn from Jacob and the sheep is that building a family, maintaining integrity in business, and dealing with difficult people are not obstacles to spiritual growth; they are spiritual growth.
Which only goes to prove that my father’s twinkling assertion wasn’t a joke at all. He understood something the rest of us tend to overlook. Maybe Vayeitzei really is the most important parsha in the Torah — not despite the details, but because of them.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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The Dangerous Legacy of the 1840 ‘Damascus Affair’ Blood Libel (PART TWO)
Smoke rises from a building after strikes at Syria’s defense ministry in Damascus, Syria, July 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Part One of this article appeared here.
Worldwide Reaction and Coordinated Jewish Response
Western Jews in Europe and America were incensed at what was happening in Damascus. Europeans and American Jews lobbied their governments to intercede on behalf of the Jews in Damascus. In what was then an entirely novel approach, 15,000 Jews in six American cities gathered and protested on behalf of their fellow Jews in Syria.
In response to the advocacy, government leaders condemned the libel and attempted to intervene on behalf of the accused Jews. Among them were Queen Victoria, Lord Henry Palmerston, US Secretary of State John Forsyth, and, as previously mentioned, Klemens von Metternich of Austria.
Among the Jews who were advocating on behalf of the Damascus Jews, Sir Moses Montefiore stood out.
He, along with French lawyer and future French Justice Minister Adolphe Cremieux, Louis Loewe, and Solomon Munk, traveled as a delegation to Egypt to appeal to Muhammad Ali. They requested that the investigation be transferred to Egyptian or European judges to consider the case. Their request was denied, but as a result, Muhammad Ali decided instead to have the Jews released without acquitting them. The liberation order was issued on August 28, 1840. The prisoners who had survived the investigation were freed.
Seeing that the charges would not be dropped and the libel would continue, Montefiore and Cremieux chose to turn to Sultan Abdul Mejid of the Ottoman Empire, since he was the actual leader over the region, albeit largely powerless. They asked the Sultan to issue a decree proclaiming blood libels as false and prohibiting prosecuting Jews based on such accusations.
The Sultan acquiesced and issued his ruling on November 6, 1840. In a noteworthy act, he condemned the blood libel, stating clearly that it was utterly false and that “Muslim theologians had examined Jewish religious books and found that the Jews are strongly prohibited not only from using human blood but even from consuming that of animals. It therefore follows that the charges made against them, and their religion, are nothing but pure calumny.”
Nevertheless, for years to come, and on antisemitic websites until today, the Catholics of Damascus would continue to tell the story of the friar murdered by Jews for his blood, and that the Jews had only been let free due to the influence of powerful Jews from other countries.
What was France Thinking?
In the aftermath of the Damascus Affair, numerous questions arose. How could France, a country that gave civil equality to the Jews in 1791 and gave its Jewish population the most legal rights, openly support the patently false blood libel accusation and even allow torture to be used to extort confessions?
Most historians conclude that the answer was national self-interest. France’s leaders saw it as beneficial to maintain their foothold in Syria, and felt that supporting the accusers against the Jews would work for them. By the same token, countries hostile to France seized the opportunity to denounce France for its actions, as they sought to increase their control in the Middle East and diminish French influence there. So, Metternich, not known to be a friend of the Jews, denounced the blood libel charges, as did the leaders of Great Britain.
The Damascus Blood Libel, which might otherwise have passed unnoticed in Europe, garnered international attention because of the rivalry of Europe’s great powers in the Middle East.
The Jewish Reaction
The Damascus Affair has been described as a turning point in modern Jewish history, particularly for French Jews, who were among the most vocal supporters that traditional Jewish nationalism was a thing of the past. They were patriotic citizens for whom religion was a private matter, if it was relevant at all.
Yet, when they were exposed to the antisemitism that France displayed in the Damascus Affair, French Jews were completely shaken up. In fact, all of world Jewry was shocked that the blood libel accusation — a throwback to the antisemitism of the Dark Ages — was initially accepted as fact by almost the entire press in Europe. How could it be that educated citizens and modern leaders could believe and support this baseless and ridiculous accusation? No reassuring answer was forthcoming.
In an act that would reverberate for the next two centuries, in 1846, a two-volume book was published in Paris, written by Achille Laurent (a pseudonym), Relation historique des affaires de Syrie depuis 1840 jusqu’en 1842. It claimed to document the complete protocols of the investigation in Damascus, yet completely omitted any mention of the extensive use of torture and only focused on the Jews as murderers, and that the blood libel was a proven fact.
These protocols were published in German, Italian, Arabic, and Russian in the years and decades to come. This book allowed antisemites to “prove” that the murder accusation had been proven and documented, but that the Jews were released despite their guilt.
In fact, Russian coverage of the Damascus Affair in the media is seen as one of the causes that led to the pogroms of the 1890s. Unfortunately, these protocols continue to be published and publicized, particularly in the Arab-language media.
One of the end results of the Damascus Affair was its awakening of Jewish awareness for the need to cooperate to address Jewish needs and respond to charges and attacks towards Jews around the world. In the following decades, for the first time in modern history, multiple such organizations would form to address these concerns.
One Nation
The subsequent blood libel that made international news was that of Menachem Mendel Beilis in Russia in 1911. The lawyer who headed the defense team, the legendary Oscar Gruzenberg, was sure that the prosecution’s attack would take quotes out of context from the Talmud and use them to accuse the Jews. He had Rabbi Mazeh, Chief Rabbi of Moscow, head a rabbinic advisory team for the defense and prepare answers to the inevitable questions. As Gruzenberg had predicted, at the trial the prosecution quoted the Talmudic statement in Tractate Yevamos 61a, “You (the Jewish people) are called “Adam” (Man), and the other nations are not called “Adam” (Man).”
The prosecutors demanded, “How could the Jews claim only they are called man, and the other nations are not called man?! It must mean that they view non-Jews as subhuman!”
The defense had an answer prepared, provided by Rabbi Meir Shapiro, who was already renowned as a brilliant and eloquent leader of Polish Jewry. He explained that the quote reflects an essential characteristic of the Jews and was not intended an insult to the other nations.
Rabbi Shapiro explained that the Talmud (Shavous 39) teaches that “Kol Yisrael areivim zeh lazeh,” meaning all Jews are responsible for one another. He elaborated that in the court, the fate of a single Jew — Mendel Beilis — was being decided, yet the judgment touched Jewish people all over the world.
Rabbi Shapiro directed the defense team to ask the judge, “If an Italian citizen was arrested in Poland or a Frenchman in Germany, would all of Italy or all of France be praying on his behalf and advocating for his acquittal? Would Italians or Frenchmen all over the world be constantly worried about him and awaiting news of his release? Of course not. Yet, when one Jew in Russia is falsely accused of murder, the entire Jewish nation stands with him, because we are truly one. The Talmud says Jews are called “Adam,” because “Adam” shows the unity of the Jewish nation. We are one, a single unit, just as Adam was one man. The word “Adam” in Hebrew has no plural, and that is why it represents the Jewish people, who are one, and this pronoun is not used to identify other nations, as the Talmud stated.”
This answer was understood, even by the accusers. This message continues to serve as a beacon of light for the connection Jews share with one another. In good times and bad, the Jewish People are one.
Rabbi Menachem Levine is the CEO of JDBY-YTT, the largest Jewish school in the Midwest. He served as Rabbi of Congregation Am Echad in San Jose, CA from 2007 – 2020. He is a popular speaker and has written for numerous publications. Rabbi Levine’s personal website is https://thinktorah.org. A version of this article was first published at: https://aish.com/the-damascus-affair/
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Seven IDF Soldiers Wounded in Counterterrorism Operation in Syria
A damaged site, following an Israeli raid on Friday, according to Syrian state media, in Beit Jinn, Syria, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ali Ahmed al-Najjar
i24 News — Seven Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers were wounded during exchange of fire with Syrian jihadists as arrests were conducted of wanted suspects; two Syrian terrorists were killed.
The incident took place in the village of Beit Jinn in Southern Syria — 8 km from the Israeli border and Mount Hermon, an area where the IDF operates frequently (north of the Druze village of Hader).
The event began around 2 am during an operation to apprehend two wanted members of the terrorist organization Jamaa al-Islamiya at their home. A reserve paratrooper force from the 55th Brigade entered the structure, apprehended the terrorists, and began exiting the building in order to bring them in for questioning.
As the force left the building, it came under short-range fire, wounding seven soldiers — three seriously and four moderately to lightly. The soldiers returned fire and eliminated two additional fighters in the area. The Air Force was also dispatched, but could not engage due to the close proximity between the force and the militants.
Despite the exchange of fire, the operation was successful. The two wanted suspects from Jamaa al-Islamiya (whom intelligence had been monitoring for a long time prior to the operation) were transferred to security interrogation in Israel.
This is not the first time the IDF has carried out an arrest operation in the village: on June 12, soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade captured a Hamas terrorist cell of six operatives who had planned to attack IDF forces in Syria and had based themselves in Beit Jinn. Numerous weapons were found with them.