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Here’s how Jewish life changed (for now) after Oct. 7
(JTA) — “Everything changed after Oct. 7.” It’s an axiom being heard around Shabbat tables, in rabbis’ sermons and in countless opinion pieces after the Hamas massacre in southern Israel plunged the country into war. At an emotional level, it refers to the despair and shock felt among people in mourning – for the 1,200 victims of the initial attack, for the soldiers lost in battle and perhaps for a vision of Israel as a country that could at least “manage” its conflict with the Palestinians and continue to flourish.
But for many observers, it refers to a series of ruptures in Jewish life whose effects are only just beginning to be felt. They include seismic shifts in their relationship to Israel, how they form political alliances and their way of being Jewish in a world that feels scarier, lonelier and, in some surprising ways, more Jewish than ever.
Below are some of the major themes of change, culled from the writings of analysts, activists, rabbis and pundits. Because it has only been two months since the war began, some of their insights and predictions are provisional and perhaps premature. Some contradict each other. But together they capture a moment when old assumptions appeared to have died in the kibbutzim, villages and fields of the “Gaza envelope,” and new ones are taking their place.
“We are alone”
In the days immediately after the Hamas attacks, President Joe Biden pledged America’s support for Israel and its right to defend itself and root out Hamas. That promise has mostly held, even as the deaths of as many as 15,000 Palestinians has caused growing unease among some in his administration, and within factions of the Democratic Party.
Yet the backing of superpower didn’t alleviate a sense of betrayal for many Israelis and their supporters in the west.
“In my conversations with college students, rabbis, business leaders, Jewish professionals, and others, the sentence that everyone seems to circle around, spoken or unspoken, is ‘We are alone,’” wrote Bret Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist, in an Oct. 10 column for Sapir, the Jewish thought journal he edits. “That’s despite clarion statements of solidarity from President Biden, Republican leaders in Congress, prominent TV anchors, and millions of ordinary Americans. Because beneath that, we sense that something is badly amiss,” including inadequate statements from university leaders and the support for Hamas among college students and the left.
The historian Sara Yael Hirschhorn also predicted that by the time the war ends, “Israel will have lost the war for world opinion. What happens on college campuses, media desks, or street protests won’t stay there — it has already eroded support for Israel within the Democratic Party, the US State Department is in revolt, the military brass are frightened of a regional war, while the chattering class [is] demanding absolute condemnation of Israel. Most Western governments are watching restive populations marching through their streets (occasionally stopping to smash glass and beat Jews on the street in a 21st century Kristallnacht) while its legislators choose their jobs over moral clarity and their representatives can’t even pass UN resolutions that use the words ‘Hamas,’ ‘Israel’ or ‘hostages.’”
Betrayal by the left
Numerous liberal Jewish activists have written about being “abandoned” by social justice allies who embraced the Hamas narrative or saw Israel as solely responsible for the attacks and criminally culpable for its response. As Gal Beckerman wrote in The Atlantic, “many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian — templates made of concrete.”
Haviva Ner-David, an Israeli-American peace living in northern Israel, wrote in a JTA essay that “the hailing of that massacre by much of the world, including the progressive (even Jewish) left … triggered a deep fear for our survival as Jews.” Watching pro-Palestinian protests by progressives, she saw “activists crossing a line from struggling for peace and Palestinian rights into promoting a hateful, terrifying, dangerous anti-Jewish agenda.”
Orthodox Jewish feminist Daphne Lazar Price wrote in JTA that she was shocked by putative feminist allies who refused to show outrage over Hamas’ sexual crimes against Israeli women on Oct. 7.
“I can’t continue to work with those who don’t see me in the same light, as someone deserving of love and respect, no matter how they feel about my Judaism or Israel,” she writes. “My attempts to engage former colleagues have been hurtful and fruitless because of their unwillingness derived from ideological differences or a defensiveness of long-held views. Those groups’ attempted mind games to decide who is worthy of care and who is entitled to protections need to end — or they will become irrelevant.”
A realignment among liberals
This fracture in the left has also led to predictions that the liberal American Jewish majority will modify its embrace of aspects of the social justice agenda it has traditionally supported.
Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, writes that for some liberal Jews, a re-engagement with their Jewish selves “may reflect a real existential transformation away from those exact liberal values and commitments they held dear for a long time. It is something of a replay of the prior generation’s anti-Communist turn in the 1960s and 1970s, a journey inward from the universal to the particular.”
Stephens had his doubts: “My guess is that a few will make a clean break, like the brave ex-Communists of ‘The God That Failed,’ who made public their disillusionment with the Soviet Union in the famous 1949 book of that name,” he writes in the same Sapir essay. “Most others will use the pretext of Israel’s retaliation to return to their delusional sleep. People who adopt the politics of the extreme tend to double down: Rationalizations and moral equivalences come easy, and notoriety is easier than contrition.”
An embrace of the right
While some Jewish liberals complained of abandonment, others worried about Jews and Israelis embracing a hawkish, militaristic response to the Hamas attacks that makes no room for disagreement, dissent or eventual compromise. “This is leaving those of us who are committed to shared spaces, shared resistance, and a shared future grounded in equality very much alone,” writes Haggai Matar, in the leftist Israeli magazine +972. “It is, in many ways, a condensed microcosm of the rifts that have emerged within the left globally over the past month as well.”
In an essay for The Cut, a left-leaning American Orthodox Jew identified as “R.B.” writes that in their community, “Everyone is a haunted mess, and jingoism appears to be the defense mechanism of choice.”
“It is painful to watch people around me whom I have known for their inquiring minds and strong sense of morality become uncritical flag-wavers, watch them dismiss massacres as disinformation, watch them advocate more and more violence. They treat cease-fire as a dirty word,” writes R.B.
In Jewish Currents, the left-wing journal, Raz Segal criticized fellow Holocaust and genocide scholars in Israel, North America and beyond for signing a statement condemning Hamas terror and denouncing the rise of global antisemitism that he said “completely dehumanized Palestinians and made no mention whatsoever of any form of Israeli mass violence.”
The (further) poisoning of the discourse
Social media has become a toxic battleground in the war of ideas — “Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech has surged across the internet since the conflict between Israel and Hamas broke out,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 15. Rarely a safe space for enlightened discourse, the vitriol on X and Instagram since Oct. 7 has forced many longtime users to weigh the necessity of engaging on social media against their mental wellbeing.
Lior Zaltzman, the deputy managing editor of Kveller, has worked in Jewish social media since 2014, and writes that “I’ve also never seen it this awful, this polarizing, this … honestly, unhinged.”
She adds: “People are so stuck in their ‘side’ and binary that they’re willing to share anything — without fact-checking, without making sure they’re not getting in bed with people whose worldview is dangerous, without asking themselves for a small second, wait, is this Islamophobic? Antisemitic? Completely detached from reality? Wondering if they sound like a conspiracy theorist, or if they’re just being cruel for cruelty’s sake?”
Reengaging as Jews
Kurtzer and others also see Jews reclaiming a sense of Jewish belonging — or having that sense of belonging forced upon them. Prior to Oct. 7, the perennial concern among the Jewish mainstream was that the politically and religiously liberal majority of American Jews “was at risk of exiting from the Jewish community,” he writes. “Now I see signs of reengagement, reflected in higher turnout at synagogue, Hillel and Chabad events, and expressed on social media as a response to a sense of alienation from a gentile world that does not take Jewish pain and trauma seriously. This is happening at all ages.”
Boutique store owner Susan Korn and jewelry designer Stephanie Gottlieb both told the New York Times that sales of Star of David necklaces spiked after Oct. 7. In November, a Chabad poll found that the vast majority of of its U.S. emissaries were reporting increased attendance at their events.
Steven Windmueller, who researches Jewish communal trends, sees signs of both retreat and engagement. “[W]e wonder about our status, even our safety,” he wrote in the Jewish Exponent. “Some of us are withdrawing from public Jewish places, uncomfortable being in those spaces where Jews gather. Others are removing the physical symbols of Jewishness, both personal and communal.
“At the same time, for instance, at the grade-school level, we are seeing a transformational moment. Now we have reports of parents moving kids from public educational settings into Jewish parochial schools.”
Solidarity around an Israel at war
In the year leading up to the war, Israel was torn apart over the government’s plan to overhaul its judicial system and, its critics said, undermine its democracy. The weekly mass protests were taken up by Jews in New York and beyond. The era of street protests ended on Oct. 7. “The judicial reform and protests of the past year had led many Israelis to start asking whether the country even had a future,” David Hazony, the Israeli-American writer and editor wrote on Nov. 1. “In the last three weeks, however, Israelis have come together with a strength and focus far beyond what anyone thought possible. When a true crisis came, politics fell away and the nation united.” One of the groups organizing the North American protests, UnXeptable, changed its motto from “Saving Israeli Democracy” to “Saving Israel.”
That solidarity is also being seen in the Diaspora, perhaps most notably at a pro-Israel rally in Washington that drew an estimated 290,000 people. Federations are seeing a surge in donations, groups are planning solidarity trips to Israel both to volunteer where needed and to bear witness, and even the North American haredi Orthodox sector — many of whose leaders and followers keep an arm’s distance from the secular Jewish state as a matter of theology — are demonstrating what JTA called an “outpouring of support for Israel and its military at a level not seen in decades.”
Rabba Sarah Hurwitz, president of the feminist Orthodox yeshivah Maharat, says that kind of solidarity offers a glimmer of a brighter future.
“This is what we do. In times of tragedy, we rally,” she writes. We find ways to support one another with comfort, food and supplies. These acts of chesed, kindness, cannot undo the tragic loss of life. They cannot bring home the hundreds who are held hostage. They cannot heal the thousands of wounded. But digging into our humanity reminds us that there is light in darkness….
“Then, because we don’t have a choice, we will get back to the work of learning, teaching, and serving. It’s the Jewish way.”
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The post Here’s how Jewish life changed (for now) after Oct. 7 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Withholds Another $450 Million From Harvard University Coffers
US President Donald Trump attends a press conference in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, DC, US, May 12, 2025. Photo: Nathan Howard via Reuters Connect.
The Trump administration has impounded another $450 million in taxpayer funded research grants and contracts previously awarded to Harvard University, citing the school’s history of fostering anti-Zionist extremism and practicing racial preferences in admissions and hiring.
“Harvard University has repeatedly failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and antisemitic harassment plaguing its campus,” the multi-agency Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, created by US President Donald Trump in February, said in a statement. “This is just the latest chapter in Harvard’s long standing policy and practice of discriminating on the basis of race as recognized by the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, where the court rebuked Harvard for its unlawful race discrimination in admissions.”
The task force went on, coupling the issue of racial preferences with anti-Zionism in higher education, which conservative activists have said is necessary for reforming what they describe as a hub for far-left radicals who name both Israel and Western civilization as targets for subversion and deposition.
It said, “Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement. There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support.”
Harvard University continues to draw criticism over its campus culture.
Earlier this month, a new “preliminary” report published by nonprofit watchdog NGO Monitor said the institution has ties to anti-Zionist nongovernmental organizations and other entities acting as proxy organizations for terrorist groups that warrant scrutiny and reproach.
Titled, “Advocacy NGOs in Academic Frameworks: Harvard University Case Study,” the report presents copious evidence that Harvard’s academic centers, including Harvard Law School, have come under the influence of Al-Haq and Addameer — two groups identified by the Israeli government as agents and propaganda manufacturers for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization. The NGOs, the report added, influence research and institutional culture, tilting the ideological balance of the campus toward anti-Zionism.
“The report demonstrates the major contribution from prominent advocacy NGOs to the atmosphere of propaganda and antisemitism at Harvard, particularly through frameworks claiming human rights agendas,” Professor Gerald Steinberg, who authored the report alongside Dr. Adi Schwartz, said in a statement. “The close cooperation between prominent NGOs and Harvard academic programs warrants urgent scrutiny. The blurred lines between scholarship and advocacy threaten academic integrity and risk further inflaming campus tensions.”
In April, the Trump administration impounded $2.26 billion in Harvard’s federal funds following the institution’s refusing to agree to a wishlist of policy reforms that Republican lawmakers have long argued will make higher education more meritocratic and less welcoming to anti-Zionists and far-left extremists. Contained in a letter the administration sent to Harvard interim president Alan Garber — who subsequently released it to the public — the policies called for “viewpoint diversity in hiring and admissions,” the “discontinuation of [diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives],” and “reducing forms of governance bloat.” They also implore Harvard to begin “reforming programs with egregious records of antisemitism” and to recalibrate its approach to “student discipline.”
Since then, Harvard has admitted to being irresponsive to the concerns of Jewish students and the public.
Several weeks after sparring with the Trump administration, as well as suing it in federal court, Harvard released its long anticipated report on campus antisemitism which said that one source of the problem is the institution’s past refusal to afford Jews the same protections against discrimination enjoyed by other minority groups. Garber apologized for the inconsistent application of policy.
“I am sorry for the moments when we failed to meet the high expectations we rightfully set for our community. The grave, extensive impact of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel and its aftermath had serious repercussions on campus,” Garber said in a statement which accompanied the report. “Harvard cannot — and will not — abide bigotry. We will continue to provide for the safety and security of all members of our community and safeguard their freedom from harassment. We will redouble our efforts to ensure that the university is a place where ideas are welcomed, entertained, and contested in the spirt of seeking truth; where argument proceeds without sacrificing dignity; and where mutual respect is the norm.”
Harvard’s contrition has not changed Trump’s opinion about the institution. After the report’s release he announced plans to revoke Harvard University’s tax exempt status, which it enjoys as a nonprofit entity.
“It’s what they deserve,” Trump said.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Trump Withholds Another $450 Million From Harvard University Coffers first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Vows ‘Most Destructive Force’ Iran Won’t Get Nuclear Weapon as Tehran Defends Enrichment Program
US President Donald Trump attends the Saudi-US Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday denounced Iran as the “most destructive force” in the Middle East, accusing Tehran of fueling regional instability and vowing that Washington would never allow the country to acquire a nuclear weapon.
During his visit to Saudi Arabia, Trump also accused Iran of causing “unthinkable suffering in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond,” just two days after US and Iranian officials held a fourth round of nuclear talks in Oman.
Trump’s comments came as Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, described the recent round of talks between the adversaries as productive, but criticized Washington’s new sanctions as undermining the ongoing diplomacy.
“In recent days, they [the Trump administration] issued sanctions on Iran; this is completely incompatible with the process of negotiations,” the Iranian diplomat said. “This will definitely affect our positions.”
This week, the US imposed sanctions on an Iranian oil smuggling network accused of facilitating billions of dollars in crude oil sales to China.
As part of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran — which aims to cut the country’s crude exports to zero and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon — Washington has been targeting Tehran’s oil industry with mounting sanctions.
The fourth round of nuclear talks between Iranian and US officials concluded in Oman on Sunday, with additional negotiations scheduled as Tehran continues to publicly insist on advancing its uranium enrichment.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian declared in Tehran on Tuesday that Iran “will not retreat from its inalienable right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.”
Earlier this month, Iran accused the Trump administration of “contradictory behavior and provocative statements” following remarks by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who warned the country of severe consequences for supporting Yemen’s Houthi militia, an internationally designated terrorist organization.
The Iran-backed group, which controls northern Yemen, has been targeting ships in the Red Sea since November 2023, disrupting global trade, while justifying the attacks as acts of solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
In April, Tehran and Washington held their first official nuclear negotiation since the US withdrew from a now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal that had imposed temporary limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanction relief.
The first and third rounds of talks were held in Oman, while the second round took place in Rome at the residence of the Omani ambassador.
Tehran has previously rejected halting its uranium enrichment program, insisting that the country’s right to enrich uranium is non-negotiable, despite Washington’s threats of military action, additional sanctions, and tariffs if an agreement is not reached to curb Iran’s nuclear activities.
However, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said that any deal with Iran must require the complete dismantling of its “nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.” Witkoff’s comments came after he received criticism for suggesting the Islamic Republic would be allowed to maintain its nuclear program in a limited capacity.
Trump indicated last Wednesday during a radio interview that he is seeking to “blow up” Iran’s nuclear centrifuges “nicely” through an agreement with Tehran but is also prepared to do so “viciously” in an attack if necessary. That same day, however, when asked by a reporter in the White House whether his administration would allow Iran to maintain an enrichment program as long as it doesn’t enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, Trump said his team had not decided. “We haven’t made that decision yet,” Trump said. “We will, but we haven’t made that decision.”
Despite Iran’s claims that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes rather than weapons development, Western states have said there is no “credible civilian justification” for the country’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”
The post Trump Vows ‘Most Destructive Force’ Iran Won’t Get Nuclear Weapon as Tehran Defends Enrichment Program first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New York City Mayor Establishes First-of-Its-Kind Office to Combat Antisemitism
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announcing the formation of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism at a press conference at City Hall on May 13, 2025. Photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced at a press conference on Tuesday morning the creation of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, the first office of its kind to be established in a major city in the US.
The first task of the new mayoral office will be to immediately establish an inter-agency taskforce that will focus on tacking “all forms of antisemitism,” which include monitoring court cases and outcomes in the justice system, cooperating with the New York City Law Department on cases to bring or join, and advising on executive orders to issue and legislation to propose to address antisemitism. The office will also liaise with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to take action against antisemitism, and it will have the authority to ensure that city-funded entities, taxpayer-funded organizations, and city agencies do not promote antisemitism.
“Anything funded by the city, there are rules and regulations of how you can contract with the city and behave when you contract with the city, and we’re going to make sure that is taken care of in the proper way,” Moshe Davis, the inaugural executive director of the Office to Combat Antisemitism, told The Algemeiner. He explained that the new office will make sure “that these [city-funded] agencies are not doing the wrong thing and if they are, and we have the legal ability, we are going to make sure they are not going to be able to continue doing that.”
“By establishing the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, our administration is taking immediate and concrete steps to address antisemitism at every level of city life,” Davis added during the press conference.
Adams made the announcement about the new initiative amid an unprecedented uptick in antisemitism in New York City and across the nation. In 2024, the NYPD reported that 54 percent of all hate crimes in New York City were against Jewish New Yorkers. During the first quarter of 2025, that number rose to 62 percent.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League’s latest Audit of Antisemitic Incidents revealed a record number of 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the US in 2024. The highest number of incidents were in New York.
New York City has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and Jews make up 10 percent of the population, according to the mayor. New York has 960,000 Jewish residents.
Adams said it is “imperative” to address the increase in antisemitism in New York City.
“We can’t move on with business as usual when we have a population in your city that is overwhelmingly being targeted merely because of their religion or way of life,” Adams said on Tuesday at the press conference. He added that the new Office to Combat Antisemitism will help “send a very clear message in this city that antisemitism cannot live and most importantly cannot grow – cannot grow on our college campuses, cannot grow in our schools, in our work environments … And let’s be honest, it’s not a Jewish issue. Any hate on a group is an issue that we should address. This administration will not remain silent while our Jewish brothers and sisters are targeted.”
“As we continue to see the rising tide of antisemitism here at home, and across the country, this moment calls for decisive action,” the mayor further said in a released statement. “The Office to Combat Antisemitism … will tackle antisemitism in all of its forms, working across city agencies to ensure Jewish New Yorkers are protected and can thrive here in the five boroughs. Antisemitism is an attack not only on Jewish New Yorkers, but on the very idea of New York City as a place where people from all backgrounds can live together.”
Davis’s first course of action as the executive director of the new office will be to form a commission of Jewish leaders from across the city to oversee and advise on the office’s work. The mayor described Davis in a press statement as “a tireless advocate on behalf of Jewish New Yorkers, and he is exactly the right person to lead and build this office.”
Davis joined the Adams administration in November 2022 as Jewish liaison in the Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs. He formerly managed the city’s first Jewish Advisory Council, which the mayor established in June 2023.
“Combating antisemitism requires a sledgehammer approach: coordinated, unapologetic, and immediate,” Davis said. “Mayor Adams has been a modern-day Maccabee, standing up for the Jewish community, and, with the establishment of this office, he is strengthening his resolve to ensure Jewish New Yorkers thrive in our city. I look forward to working closely with Mayor Eric Adams and First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro to continue our forceful response against anti-Jewish hate and discrimination.”
Davis was previously the rabbinic leader at the Manhattan Jewish Experience, a program for young Jewish professionals. He also founded New York Jews in Politics, an initiative that connects Jewish professionals who work in government, advocacy, and nonprofit sectors, and received his ordination from the Rabbinical Council of Jerusalem. As executive director of the Office to Combat Antisemitism, he will report directly to First Deputy Mayor Mastro.
“We are a city that will not tolerate antisemitism,” Mastro said at the press conference on Tuesday.
“The rise in antisemitism in our city, in our country, and around the world is both alarming and intolerable,” Mastro added in a released statement. “Today, Mayor Adams is taking a stand — that in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world — antisemitism is unacceptable, and we have to do more to address it. So, New York City will lead the way as the first major city in America to establish an office dedicated solely to combatting antisemitism.”
New York City also has an Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, which was launched in 2019 and is still active, and the NYPD has a Hate Crime Task Force that addresses bias-motivated threats, harassment, discrimination, and violence throughout New York.
The post New York City Mayor Establishes First-of-Its-Kind Office to Combat Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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