The Department of Justice has filed its second lawsuit of the year alleging rampant antisemitism at UCLA, where I teach.

The suit is a repetition of the same old string of allegations that President Donald Trump’s administration first made in the summer of 2025, when it froze $584 million in research funds and then tried to extract an additional $1.2 billion from UCLA. Those assertions are based on a mix of self-reporting and hearsay, assembled to make the case that the UCLA campus is awash in antisemitism.

A small number of the allegations I know or believe to be true. But the overarching claim made in the federal complaint is so partisan and partial as to be comical.

The new suit alleges that UCLA tolerated antisemitic expression and acts on campus — especially at a short-lived pro-Palestinian encampment that took place in April 2024.

It accuses UCLA of tolerating an “appalling hostile educational environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.” The fact that UCLA’s chancellor, Julio Frenk, has made the fight against antisemitism one of the pillars of his administration — and makes constant reference to the recent recommendations of a campus Initiative to Combat Antisemitism — seems not to have registered. The feds are clearly suffering from a bit of UCLA Derangement Syndrome.

This latest federal suit against UCLA succumbs to the Trumpian instinct to alter the facts to fit one’s political proclivities. In this worldview, every instance of support for Palestinians or criticism of Israel is cast as antisemitic; there can be no legitimate form of pro-Palestinian expression.

Even more remarkably, there can be no admission that the greatest display of violence that unfolded on our campus amid pro-Palestinian protests was not against pro-Israel students. Instead, it was perpetrated by pro-Israeli hooligans against the pro-Palestinian encampment activists on the evening of April 30, 2024.

Yet true to form, the complaint describes the events of that night as a battle between equals: “the occupiers and counter-protestors attacked each other with pepper spray, blunt objects, and even fireworks.” In fact, what took place was a vicious assault by one group against another — those in the encampment — that went on for more than four hours without police intervention.

This reshaping of truths seen as inconvenient betrays a tendency by Trump and his associates to adopt an exceptionally narrow lens of observation that allows for shameful distortion and denial. That tendency showed up in a farcically named 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which sought to erase any trace of racial prejudice from the annals of this country. And it continues to be present in Trump’s astounding revisionist account of January 6, 2021, which casts the violent insurrectionists as American heroes betrayed by their country.

Sadly the Justice Department’s misrepresentations in its latest complaint are founded not only on Trumpian denialism, but also on UCLA’s own antisemitism initiatives.

Both the taskforce and a subsequent action group charged with investigating on-campus antisemitism have advanced a decontextualized and one-sided story of what took place at UCLA. They have failed to acknowledge the relational nature of anti-Israeli and anti-Palestinian expression; blurred the distinction between hate speech and legitimate, albeit harsh, political expression; and left the concerns of the pro-Palestine side almost entirely unrecognized.

Paradoxically, the singular focus on antisemitism dilutes the very effort to combat it by ignoring the wider ecosystem of hate in which antisemitism operates.

I know members of the taskforce and the action group, as well as Chancellor Frenk. They are colleagues and friends of mine. But I disagree with the way they have gone about the work of combatting antisemitism at UCLA.

To begin with, none of the six UCLA scholars who hold chairs in Jewish studies and whose work touches on antisemitism — myself included — were part of the taskforce that issued its report, or the action group that followed in its wake. Some were initially invited to be part of the taskforce but chose to step down because they did not feel in sync with its direction.

Why?

Because that direction was grounded in a flawed equation of antisemitism with anti-Zionist and anti-Israel expression.

The UCLA action group’s most recent recommendations call for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which largely advances this understanding. The recommendations give lip service to the assertion that not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but neither the taskforce nor the action group has ever indicated when, if ever, criticism of Israel is not anti-Israel — a category so capacious as to leave little room for criticism of any sort.

An additional concern: many of the recent action group recommendations focus on “time, place, and manner” restrictions on campus debate. While ostensibly intended to promote a safe campus environment, in practice they seem to be largely aimed at inhibiting pro-Palestinian forms of expression.

What about an alternative strategy that leverages what we do best at universities: education?

Restricting conversation has never led to positive social change. What could is a major new educational effort devoted to a multi-disciplinary analysis of antisemitism, perhaps alongside Islamophobia. The university could investigate more deeply the interconnected nature of hate in our time by supporting research efforts like those of the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate — which, full disclosure, I direct.

A more expansive tack like this stands a better chance of being effective in bringing various campus stakeholders, including students, into the fight against identity-based hate — which includes but is not restricted to antisemitism. That, rather than narrowing space for free speech, should be the goal.

Unfortunately, our own campus’ efforts to combat antisemitism move in another direction, a choice the Trump administration is working hard to reinforce with their ill-intentioned weaponization of antisemitism. I fear that UCLA will suffer for this — and that, at the end of the day, little will be done to reduce hatred and prejudice against Jews.

The post My university is enabling the Trump administration’s worst fallacies on antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.

In the most recent episode of HBO Max’s critically acclaimed comedy-drama Hacks, Robbie Hoffman, who plays Randi, an ex-Hasidic assistant to agents who represent stand-up comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), says a line in Yiddish. Unfortunately, as any fluent Yiddish speaker will confirm, it’s grammatically incorrect.

In the episode, “The Garden” — referring to Madison Square Garden — Vance’s nemesis Bob Lipka (played by Tony Goldwyn) manages to ruin the comedian’s dream performance at the renowned venue. Luckily, her crew succeeds at securing their boss a stage in Central Park (albeit with free tickets) but they have only a couple of days to convince people to fill the seats. They spread out into the streets of New York City handing out fliers, desperate to get people to come to the ad hoc performance.

Randi does her part by returning to her former community — an apparently Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn — and hands out fliers to the pious passers-by. Since Haredi Jews eschew secular performances of any kind, Randi’s attempts are sure to be futile but it’s a funny scene, so I get it.

Yet, when Randi tries to convince them in Yiddish to “come see Deborah Vance in Central Park,” the verb she uses is grammatically incorrect. For you grammar nerds out there, here’s what the error was: Instead of using the command form, “kumt zen Deborah Vance,” “come see Deborah Vance,” she uses the infinitive, “kumen tsu zen Deborah Vance.”

It’s as if she were to say, in English: “To come to see Deborah Vance.”

Surprisingly, as was reported in Alma, Hoffman had called her mother Connie, who, she says, actually writes plays in Yiddish, to run the line by her. If her mother is indeed a fluent Yiddish speaker, we can only conclude that she may have mis-heard the sentence.

Unfortunately, badly translated or mispronounced Yiddish lines are all too common in TV series and films, from the 1992 film A Stranger Among Us  with Melanie Griffith to the 2019 mini-series Unorthodox. Interestingly, the Israeli show Shtisel, produced in Israel, did a much better job of getting the Yiddish right.

In any case, the correct way for professional studios to get lines translated into a foreign language is not to wing it, but to hire a professional interpreter who can actually come onto the set and rehearse the lines with the actor. It may raise production costs a bit but at least then, the Yiddish dialogue will sound authentic.

 

The post How ‘Hacks’ botched its Yiddish line  appeared first on The Forward.

The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism
By Alexander Lee
Basic Books, 432 pages, $34

When one thinks of Venice and the Jews, the first figure that probably comes to mind is Shylock, literary history’s famous Jewish villain, a moneylender who demands a “pound of flesh” from the titular character in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

In Alexander Lee’s new book, The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, Shylock is mentioned just twice, both times in the introduction, but his ghost hovers over the pages of the book. Much of Lee’s historical account of Jewish life in Venice is devoted to Jewish moneylenders, and the key role they played in keeping Venice’s economy afloat.

The First Ghetto centers on the uneasy and guarded relationship that the Venetian government and its Christian people — first as the Venetian Republic and later as part of the Italian nation — always had with its Jewish population. According to Lee’s account, Venice didn’t want the Jews, but it needed them, largely for their ability to provide credit.

As he tracks the rise and fall of the Venetian Ghetto across more than six centuries, from Venice’s first Jewish visitor in 1315 through the fateful deportation of its Jewish citizens in the Holocaust, Lee’s focus is so narrowly limited to the fluctuations of finance that he very nearly makes the word “Jew” synonymous with “moneylender” or “pawnbroker.”

That’s a pity, because readers can be left with the impression that the primary role Jews played in the life of the city nicknamed  “La Serenissima” — the most serene place — was financial.

“More than once, the Ghetto’s Jews helped keep the Venetian economy from collapse,” writes Lee, an Italian Renaissance scholar at the University of Warwick who has previously published four books, including Machiavelli: His Life and Times. “They founded no fewer than eight glittering synagogues, each a masterpiece of its kind, founded innumerable charities, and administered their own affairs with democratic probity.”

There is, of course, validity to the argument that the Venetian brand of capitalism that emerged in the late Middle Ages and sustained the city through the 20th century was reliant on Jewish labor. Since the mid-12th century, the Catholic Church had prohibited usury, loans offered with interest. But this rule only applied to Christians lending to Christians. They could, however, take out interest-bearing loans from Jewish moneylenders, who were permitted to lend and borrow without, apparently, incurring sin.

The precarious arrangement proved, over time, to be mutually beneficial for the Venetians and the Jews. As long as they were supporting the city’s financial needs, Jews were tolerated — even as they were isolated, overtaxed and frequently attacked. When the Venetians had less of a need for Jewish resources, cruelty against them spiked. They were blamed for most of the city’s woes, including the Black Death, the loss of wars, and various forms of spiritual corruption.

Even if Jews’ contributions were valued by some, the majority of Venice’s Christians “still harbored a horror of moneylending in Venice itself — and almost all regarded Jews with unconcealed hostility,” Lee writes. To balance this necessity against their antipathy, Jews were permitted to live in Venice, as long as they remained apart. Thus the Venice Ghetto was born.

Beginning in 1516, they were segregated to an island of their own on the dilapidated site of a former municipal cannon foundry, Ghetto Nuovo, surrounded by high walls and an iron gate. They were constrained in cramped conditions, and allowed to associate with Christian residents only for business purposes, in daytime. They were marked as outsiders wherever they traveled within the city by a yellow circular patch on their clothing, and an oddly shaped yellow hat.

“The Ghetto was simply the easiest way of allowing Jewish loans to keep flowing,” writes Lee, “while keeping the spiritual ‘risks’ [of associating with Jews] to a minimum.”

Although Jews had been segregated and harassed in other settings for centuries, Venice’s Ghetto was a precursor of the many Jewish ghettos that would later be created throughout Europe. The word ghetto, borrowed from Venice, later “shed its purely Jewish connotations,” Lee writes, and became “shorthand for vulnerability, poverty and powerlessness,” in the living conditions of any minority group.

The first 150 pages of The First Ghetto track the vicissitudes of the explotive financial partnership between Venice and its largely captive population of a couple thousand Jewish residents. The periods of time when Jewish life could be conducted with some sense of security and ease were offset by periods of blame, harassment, and threats of expulsion. But, as Lee argues, the story of Venice’s Jews is one of resilience and survival.

Shakespeare penned The Merchant of Venice between 1596 and 1598, in a period that Lee describes as the Ghetto’s “Golden Age, 1589-1630.” Yet precisely why the character of Shylock emerged in England in this period or how the play related to the true conditions of moneylending and commerce are unfortunately never discussed.

Culture and humanity are strikingly absent from Lee’s account of the history of the Venice Ghetto. Lee notes that the inhabitants of the Ghetto were “poets and scientists, musicians and philosophers; they put on plays and held festivals; and they transformed Venice into the greatest center for Hebrew printing in the world.”

But, apart from a detailed account of the genesis of the book trade, Lee offers little description of these poets and scientists or philosophers, nor does he provide much insight into the daily life experienced in the Venice Ghetto. I yearned for a more vivid sense of how the Ghetto’s people passed their time, what they ate, how they socialized or practiced religious observance — and how they responded to the discrimination they faced.

The book’s subtitle, Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, suggests that Lee might dive into the genesis of antisemitic tropes or ideas — why did Christian Venetians believe that Jews ate babies, for example? — but this kind of analysis isn’t provided. Instead, Lee seems to regard antisemitism as a given, a force of nature that merely fluctuates depending on the conditions of the time.

“By 1630,” writes Lee, “Venice was the best place in the world to be a Jew.” And, “Anyone could see that the Ghetto was indispensable to Venice.” The bright moment didn’t last long, however, as that same year, the city was hit by a plague that took about a third of its population. Because they were still relatively isolated, the Jewish community lost only about 15% of its residents, but the larger city’s “glory days were now numbered,” Lee writes. “There would be no recovery — only a gradual slide into irrelevance.”

In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte marched into Venice and forced its leaders to abdicate, effectively ending the Venetian Republic, and declared all its residents equal. The walls of Venice’s Ghetto were finally torn down; its gates were carried to the town square, smashed to bits, and burned. A member of the national guard, Raffaele Vivante, jumped up and gave a speech. “Here you have toppled the terrible doors which held our Nation as if locked up in a prison,” he cried, and then, as Lee writes, “The dancing went on till dawn.”

In the 1930s and 40s, under Mussolini’s fascist reign, the Venetians’ long-simmering hatred of its Jews rose to a boil. As the Jewish community was still small and somewhat contained, in spite of early 20th-century integration, it was easy to identify and decimate. The emptying of the Ghetto, handled here in about ten pages, resulted in the removal of around 2,100 people in 1943 and 1944, of whom hundreds were murdered.

In the 21st century, while the waves of antisemitism have once again crested, the notion that to be Jewish is to be linked to moneylending, banking, and usury has, sadly, gained new currency. Although this is not the only issue Lee touches upon, I wondered while reading the book if it was truly useful to hammer home this connection once again.

As I read Lee’s history, waiting for a better sense of the dimensions of humanity in the Ghetto, a line from the Merchant of Venice kept popping into my mind: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” I would have liked to have seen a slightly more sanguine touch on these pages.

The post For the Jews of Venice, an uneasy history of scapegoating and grudging tolerance appeared first on The Forward.