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Exposed: Anti-Israel Group Under Fire for Using Name of Raphael Lemkin, Zionist Who Coined the Term Genocide
Raphael Lemkin being interviewed on Feb. 13, 1949. Photo: Screenshot
Members of the family of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and pushed for the passage of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, say they are outraged that a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit organization is using the Lemkin name to pursue an agenda of extreme anti-Israel activism.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention was initially registered as a Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation on Aug. 19, 2021, and won US federal tax-exempt recognition in September 2023. In recent months, it has veered into strident anti-Israel political advocacy, supporting anti-Israel campus protests and reaching millions of viewers with social media posts that falsely accuse Israel of genocide.
Less than one week after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, the institute released a “genocide alert” calling the onslaught an “unprecedented military operation against Israel” while decrying the Jewish state’s actions against Hamas as “genocide.” The Oct. 13 message came before Israeli launched its ground offensive in Gaza.
Then on Oct. 18, 2023, the Lemkin Institute called on the International Criminal Court “to indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the crime of #genocide in light of the siege and bombardment of #Gaza and the many expressions of genocidal intent.” The social media post accumulated 1.3 million views, according to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The institute’s vocal anti-Israel advocacy has continued unabated for the past year. In September, for example, it described Israel’s war against Lebanese Hezbollah as “terrorism” and “the slaughter of Arab peoples” leading to “the wanton slaughter of all mankind.” The post did not mention that Hezbollah is an internationally designated terrorist organization that began firing rockets at Israel the day after the Oct. 7 attacks.
‘Totally Outraged’: Lemkin Family Disavows Institute
Joseph Lemkin, a New Jersey lawyer who is related to Raphael Lemkin, said he was unfamiliar with the institute until being informed of it by The Algemeiner.
Lemkin, who represented the family at a UN event marking the 65th anniversary of the genocide convention, described himself as “totally outraged” to see his late relative’s name used to push an anti-Israel agenda. His father was Raphael Lemkin’s first cousin.
“Members of our family were killed in the Holocaust, and Rafael Lemkin would be outraged by the use of his name and the abuse of the word genocide,” Joseph Lemkin said in a statement to The Algemeiner that was copied to eight of his family members. “Our family fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself and are fully in favor of US policies to support Israel. Indeed, we have many family members in Israel; family members who have served in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and others that have been impacted by the terror of Hamas.”
The family is discussing possible steps ranging from a joint public statement to a cease-and-desist letter aimed at getting the Philadelphia organization to drop the name.
The co-founder and executive director of the institute, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, was previously an assistant professor and director of the masters program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.
Joeden-Forgey did not respond to two emails and two cellphone voicemail messages from The Algemeiner left both last and this week seeking comment. Her co-founder, Irene Victoria Massimino, told The Algemeiner that Massimino is no longer with the Lemkin Institute and “cannot speak on its behalf.”
A Pathbreaking International Lawyer Dedicated to Zionism
Lemkin was born in Poland in 1900 and eventually escaped the Nazis to America, where he joined the War Department, documenting Nazi atrocities and preparing for the prosecution of Nazi crimes at the Nuremberg trials. He dedicated much of his life to making the world recognize the horrors of the Holocaust and designating mass murder as a crime which could be prosecuted through international law. Forty-nine members of his family, including his parents, were killed in the Holocaust. He died in 1959 in relative obscurity.
Raphael Lemkin’s grave, Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, New York. Photo: Oberezny, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
A 2017 article by James Loeffler, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, described what he called “the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin.” Loeffler noted that while “dead international lawyers rarely become celebrities,” Lemkin “has emerged as a potent symbol for activists and politicians across the world.”
Scholarly and popular attention to Lemkin has blossomed in recent years, with his story featured everywhere from the alumni magazine at Duke University, where he taught, to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” A search of one database of academic articles, JSTOR, turned up 1,515 references to Lemkin, of which 1,133 were from 2005 or later. Samantha Power, a Harvard professor who served as UN ambassador during the Obama administration and administrator of the US Agency for International Development during the Biden administration, highlighted Lemkin’s story in a 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning book; she is said to have kept a framed portrait of Lemkin on her office wall while serving as a White House staffer.
Loeffler traced Lemkin’s work as an editor and columnist of a Jewish publication, Zionist World. “The task of the Jewish people is … [to become] a permanent national majority in its own national home,” Lemkin wrote in one such column.
“It is not enough to know Zionism,” Lemkin wrote in another column quoted by Loeffler. “One must imbibe its spirit, one must make Zionism a part of one’s very own ‘self,’ and be prepared to make sacrifices on its behalf.”
‘A Genocidal State That Is Completely Out of Control’: The Institute’s Relentless Critique of Israel
The Lemkin Institute’s social media account has been persistent in defending anti-Israel activists that the US government defines as antisemitic. For example, the American ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, posted on Oct. 29, “As UN Special Rapporteur Albanese visits New York, I want to reiterate the US belief she is unfit for her role. The United Nations should not tolerate antisemitism from a UN-affiliated official hired to promote human rights.”
The Algemeiner has reported extensively on how Francesca Albanese has used her position as the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’s attacks on the Jewish state.
Nonetheless, the Lemkin Institute’s account jumped into the replies of Thomas-Greenfield’s post with a defense of Albanese and an attack on the American diplomat.
“Your attack on UN special Rapporteur Albanese is so clearly intended to hide your criminal complicity in an ongoing genocide that you truly should be embarrassed,” the institute wrote in a post which, according to X, garnered 294,000 impressions. “Is there any trick from the genocidaire’s playbook that you will refuse to carry out?”
The post continued, “Francesca Albanese is an upstander. She will be remembered as a hero. You will be remembered as a perpetrator and an apologist. As experts on the crime of genocide, we can say this with certainty.”
The institute’s 2023 annual report listed only $10,300 in revenue. Yet in addition to the outsized social media footprint, the institute has also generated press mentions, with coverage and placements in media outlets including Newsweek and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Its website lists a seven-person leadership team that includes personnel devoted to outreach, education, research, communications, and operations.
A Facebook post from September by the Lemkin Institute accused Israel of “sexualized violence,” asserting, “This sexualization alone is indicative of genocidal violence, as it indicates a desire to destroy Palestinians as such by desecrating symbols of generation and undermining the ability of Palestinians to reproduce biologically and culturally.”
An August post from the organization criticized the elimination of Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh. “The Lemkin Institute strongly condemns this attack … We condemn Israel’s decision to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh, which sends a clear message that Israel is not interested in any peace, much less the ongoing peace process,” the institute said.
In April, the group issued a statement expressing solidarity with anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University and criticizing the Columbia administration for calling in police to clear a pro-Hamas “encampment.”
“Expressions of opposition to the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s apartheid policies are not the same as expressions of antisemitism or hatred of Jews and the Jewish faith,” the statement said. “What is being labeled as ‘antisemitism’ is, in large measure, the visceral outrage that many young people feel toward the State of Israel and its military for the deadly occupation of Palestinian land and the mass-murder genocide they see every day in the news.”
When Israel in September targeted Hezbollah terrorists by exploding their pagers and other communications devices, the Lemkin Institute issued a post with more than 700,000 views condemning what it called “Israel’s terrorist attacks against Lebanese people.”
“Hezbollah, the ostensible ‘target’’of the attacks, is not a simple ‘terrorist organization’ engaged in criminal activity. It is also a political party and a service provider for southern Lebanon, so it includes civilian doctors, nurses, teachers, and so forth. Are they terrorists?” the post asked. “What we see is a genocidal state that is completely out of control and supported by a Western world that is, in large measure, too racist and Islamophobic to care.”
“Shame on you for appropriating the Lemkin name to spread propaganda,” replied the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, Robert Silverman.
Silverman’s reply, seen by only a few hundred users, raised a cutting-edge legal question: Who has the right to use the Lemkin name?
“In the USA, in most states, people have rights of privacy and/or publicity based on common law or statute to the use of their own name or likeness or identity,” said Anita Allen, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on postmortem privacy rights.
“In some instances such rights descend to heirs or assignees after death. The details of a particular case would determine whether the organization in question is subject to civil liability,” she said. “They could be.”
A Burgeoning Field of Anti-Israel Critique
The Lemkin Institute’s use of the Holocaust as a weapon with which to critique Israel is not an outlier. Rather, it reflects how the rapidly expanding genocide and Holocaust studies fields, much of it funded by gifts and endowments from well-intentioned Jewish donors, have veered away from the facts and the law and toward, instead, anti-Israel activism.
In one case from earlier this year, a doctoral student at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies reportedly confronted a visiting Israeli reservist and publicly accused Israel of genocide. Months later, in August, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University wrote in an article for The Guardian that it was “no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions.”
That same professor, Omer Bartov, joined other Holocaust and genocide studies scholars in declaring in the New York Review of Books that “Israeli leaders and others are using the Holocaust framing to portray Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza as a battle for civilization in the face of barbarism, thereby promoting racist narratives about Palestinians.”
The post Exposed: Anti-Israel Group Under Fire for Using Name of Raphael Lemkin, Zionist Who Coined the Term Genocide first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran Accused of Targeting Jews at Home and Abroad as 14 Nations Condemn Assassination Plots
People walk near a mural of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, amid the Iran-Israel conflict, in Tehran, Iran, June 23, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Britain, the United States, France, and 11 other allies issued a joint statement on Thursday condemning a rise in Iranian assassination and kidnapping plots in the West, as a new report warned Tehran has been intensifying efforts to target Jewish communities abroad.
On Tuesday, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released a report detailing Iran’s systematic violations of religious freedom, both domestically and through operations targeting individuals abroad.
Within Iran, despite officially recognizing Judaism, the Islamist government also “publicly demonizes Jews as enemies of Islam, denies and distorts the history of the Holocaust, [and] surveils Jewish houses of worship,” the report said.
By promoting such antisemitic views and permitting assaults on Jewish sacred sites throughout the country, “authorities have nurtured a hostile environment in which Iranian Jews feel increasingly threatened.”
According to the report, Iran is also “directly engaging criminal networks abroad to carry out attacks against Jewish targets and make Jews in Europe unsafe,” especially in the aftermath of the recent 12-day war with Israel.
The study revealed that the Iranian regime continues to promote and incite antisemitism abroad — through criminal networks, social media, and online platforms — and has actively recruited gangs across Europe “to carry out attacks on Israeli embassies and Jewish sites, including houses of worship, memorial centers, restaurants, and community centers.”
On Thursday, Western allies condemned a surge in assassination, kidnapping, and harassment plots by Iranian intelligence services targeting individuals across Western countries, urging Iranian authorities to immediately halt these illegal activities.
“We are united in our opposition to the attempts of Iranian intelligence services to kill, kidnap, and harass people in Europe and North America in clear violation of our sovereignty,” the joint statement read.
The new report and joint statement came as Iran continued to defy international demands regarding its nuclear program, facing mounting pressure and new US economic sanctions aimed at compelling a return to nuclear talks.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that “the road to negotiation is narrow” in the wake of the recent conflict with Israel and the United States.
Araghchi also insisted that Washington must agree to compensate Iran for the losses suffered during last month’s conflict if it hopes to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table.
“They should explain why they attacked us in the middle of … negotiations, and they have to ensure that they are not going to repeat that [during future talks],” the top Iranian diplomat said. “And they have to compensate [Iran for] the damage that they have done.”
However, Araghchi also reaffirmed that a deal would be off the table as long as US President Donald Trump continued to demand that Iran commit to zero uranium enrichment.
“We can negotiate, they can present their argument, and we will present our own argument,” Araghchi said. “But with zero enrichment, we don’t have a thing.”
On Wednesday, the United States announced a new round of economic sanctions targeting Iran and entities tied to its oil trade, as part of continued pressure on the Islamic Republic “until Tehran agrees to a deal that promotes regional peace and stability, and abandons all aspirations for nuclear weapons.”
As for negotiations with Europe, Araghchi said during the interview that Tehran would walk away from the talks if European powers continued on their current course, accusing them of failing to honor their obligations under the 2015 nuclear agreement.
“With the Europeans, there is no reason right now to negotiate because they cannot lift sanctions, they cannot do anything,” the Iranian diplomat said. “If they do snapback, that means that this is the end of the road for them.”
Under the terms of the UN Security Council resolution enshrining the 2015 accord — which imposed temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for large-scale sanctions relief —international sanctions could be reimposed on Iran, restoring all previous UN economic penalties including those targeting Iran’s oil, banking, and defense sectors, through a “snapback” mechanism that would take about 30 days. France, Britain, and Germany have warned they would reinstate UN sanctions on Tehran if no new agreement is reached by the end of August.
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ADL Files Civil Rights Complaint Against Baltimore City Public Schools, Alleging Rampant Antisemitism
Baltimore City Hall is seen in Baltimore, Maryland, US, May 10, 2019. Photo: Stephanie Keith via Reuters Connect
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has filed a Title VI civil rights complaint against Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS), alleging that officials refused to respond to allegations of antisemitism in a manner consistent with US federal law.
“All schools have a fundamental obligation to maintain a learning environment that protect students from discrimination,” ADL vice president of litigation James Pasch said in a statement announcing the action. “On this essential measure of keeping its Jewish students safe from harassment and intimidation, Baltimore City Public Schools have failed.”
Jewish students allegedly experienced relentless bullying in BCPS, where students pantomimed Nazi salutes, treated campuses as a canvas for Nazi-inspired and antisemitic graffiti, and sent text messages threatening that the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas will be summoned to kill Jewish students the bullies do not like. Teachers behaved even worse than students, the complaint said. At Bard High School, an English teacher performed the Nazi salute three times and later admitted to administrative officials that he did so intentionally to harm “the sole Jewish student” enrolled in his class. Following the incident, he suggested that the student unregister for his class because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be discussed in it.
In every case, according to the complaint, BCPS officials “slow-walked” investigations, deflecting parents’ inquiries into their status with bureaucratic spin even as they denied Jewish students justice. Moreover, the ADL continued, BCPS was first notified of an antisemitism problem on its campuses over a year before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel stoked anti-Jewish hatred. The ADL alleged that the school system’s refusing to take action constituted a textbook example of a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids public schools receiving federal funding to treat students unfairly on the basis of race, ethnicity, or shared ancestry.
“Parents of Jewish students in Baltimore have pleaded repeatedly with BCPPS to take decisive action to stop the harassment of and discrimination against their Jewish children. Their pleas have been ignored,” the complaint said. “Jewish students and parents have filed more than a dozen reports with BCPS. In each case, the schools have labeled these weighty allegations as ‘inconclusive’ and appear to have taken action against the perpetrators.”
The ADL is calling on the school system to take imminent, remedial steps to address antisemitism, including adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, requiring BCPS officials to undergo trainings on the history of antisemitism and how to fight it, and additions to school curricula which educate students about the history of anti-Jewish bigotry and its harms.
Antisemitism in K-12 schools is receiving increased attention, notably in California, after years of falling under the radar.
In April, a civil rights complaint filed by StandWithUs and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition alleged that the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California allows Jewish students to be subjected to unconscionable levels of antisemitic bullying in and outside of the classroom.
The 27-page complaint, filed with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), described a slew of incidents that allegedly fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students after Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities set off a wave of anti-Jewish hatred across the US. SCUSD students, the compaint said, graffitied antisemitic hate speech in the bathrooms, vandalized Jewish-themed posters displayed in schools, and distributed stickers which said, “F—k Zionism.” All the while, district officials enabled the behavior by refusing to investigate it and blaming victims who came forward to report their experiences, according to the complaint.
“SCUSD has allowed an egregiously hostile environment to fester for its Jewish and Israeli students in violation of its federal obligations and ethical responsibility to create a safe educational space for all students,” Jenna Statfeld Harris, senior counsel and K-12 specialist at StandWithUs Saidoff Legal, said in a statement at the time. “SCUSD leadership repeatedly disregards the rights of their Jewish and Israeli students. We implore the Office for Civil Rights to step in and uphold the right of these students to an inclusive education free from hostility toward their protected identity.”
In March, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a civil rights complaint which recounted the experience of a 12-year-old Jewish girl who was allegedly assaulted on the grounds of the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino, California — being beaten with a stick, told to “shut your Jewish ass up,” and teased with jokes about Hitler. According to the court filings, one student admitted that the behavior was motivated by the victim’s being Jewish. Despite receiving several complaints about the treatment, a substantial amount of which occurred in the classroom, school officials allegedly declined to punish her tormentors.
“While an increasing number of schools recognize that their Jewish students are being targeted both for their religious beliefs and due to their ancestral connection to Israel, and are taking necessary steps to address both classic and contemporary forms of antisemitism, some shamefully continue to turn a blind eye,” Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement at the time of the filing.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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France, Spain Locked in Diplomatic Dispute Over Removal of French Jewish Teenagers From Flight
A Vueling aircraft approaches landing at Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport, as Vueling employees prepare for strike, in Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 2, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Nacho Doce
The forced removal of French Jewish teenagers from a flight in Spain has triggered political outrage in France, after their group leader was handcuffed by Spanish police and a government minister insulted the teens as “Israeli brats.”
French ministers Aurore Bergé and Benjamin Haddad have sharply criticized Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente’s comments and denounced the Spanish government’s overall response to the incident.
Earlier this week, Puente referred to the group of teenagers as “Israeli brats” in a post on X, which he quickly deleted after it went viral and sparked widespread condemnation.
The French ministers issued a strong rebuke of the remarks for “equating French children who were Jewish with Israeli citizens, as if this in any way justified the treatment they were subjected to.”
“At a time when antisemitic acts have been on the rise across Europe since the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel, we call on Vueling [the airline of the flight in question] and the Spanish authorities to fully investigate and clarify the events,” Bergé and Haddad said in a statement.
“We will never accept the normalization of antisemitism. We will always stand with our fellow citizens who suffer from antisemitic hatred, and we will never compromise,” the French officials continued.
Last week, a group of 50 French Jewish students was forcibly removed from a plane in Valencia — reportedly for singing in Hebrew — an incident that resulted in the arrest of their summer camp director, who has accused Spanish law enforcement officers of using excessive force against her.
According to her lawyer, she was left with bruises on her legs, arms, and body after being harshly handcuffed and placed in an arm lock.
“No action justified the disembarkation or the excessive and brutal use of force by the Civil Guard against the young woman, who has just been notified of 15 days of total incapacity to work,” Bergé and Haddad said in a statement.
The Spanish low-cost airline Vueling denied the allegations, insisting the incident was not related to religion but rather that the group was causing a disruption.
In a statement, the airline asserted that the group was removed because of its members’ “highly combative attitude that was putting the safety of the flight at risk.”
After meeting with the group’s counselor on Tuesday, Bergé and Haddad said she denied the official version of events, emphasizing that the crew was hostile from the beginning and that the group’s removal and the Civil Guard’s response were unjustified.
The children, aged 10 to 15, are members of the Kineret Club — a summer camp for Jewish families run by the Matana charitable association — which had just concluded their trip in the coastal resort town of Sant Carles de la Ràpita, between Valencia and Barcelona.
According to local reports, the children were singing in Hebrew while boarding the plane to return home, which prompted a hostile response from the crew.
Witnesses reported that the group stopped singing at the crew’s request and complied quietly with boarding instructions, yet airport police still intervened and ordered them to disembark.
Other passengers on the plane who witnessed the incident reported that staff made antisemitic remarks toward the group, including one employee who allegedly referred to Israel as a “terrorist state.”
Last week, amid an ongoing investigation into the incident, French authorities reached out to the CEO of Vueling and the Spanish ambassador to France to assess whether the group was subjected to religious discrimination.