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I believed diverse coalitions would benefit Jewish women. Now I fear we were all alone.
(JTA) — I am the executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance and a lifelong feminist. I advocate for Orthodox Jewish women’s representation and inclusion in all areas of life. Before joining Jofa in 2019, I spent 20 years working with faith groups, women’s advocates and other social justice organizations. We worked in coalition towards social change by sharing awareness raising campaigns, in-person gatherings and through the legislative process.
I once found it meaningful when people set aside differences to build bridges towards positive change. It was not always easy to be in these spaces because of political or religious differences, sometimes related to Israel/Palestine, and sometimes because I was the only Orthodox Jewish woman in the room. But I really believed that the more diverse the coalition, the more likely we could reach success.
These days I’m so sad. Sad for the tremendous losses all around. And on a personal level, I’m also sad that I devoted so many years of my life to groups that don’t seem to care about me or my pain.
I’m used to being uncomfortable; my work at Jofa presents an uphill battle. I am constantly fielding criticisms from rabbis who accuse me of ruining Orthodoxy by including women in rituals, positions and spaces they think should be reserved solely for men, and from pluralistic Jewish people who accuse me of upholding the patriarchy. It can be lonely to be an advocate for Orthodox Jewish women. Working with diverse advocacy groups gave me solace as I considered them to be a safety net when the resources in my own community fell short.
I worked with many groups for years on areas of shared interest. We collaborated on reproductive justice, sex trafficking, prison rape and obstetric fistula prevention. We released resources for our communities, created awareness raising campaigns, including marching together at the Million Mom March, the March for Women’s Lives and Save Darfur. So after partnering for years, I expected my sister feminist groups to share their outrage about Hamas’ war crimes against Israelis on Oct. 7. After all, it is clear that kidnapping civilians of all ages, and brutally attacking women, men, children, babies and the elderly, all the while viciously raping women, is abhorrent.
Instead, I’m shocked and horrified by too many national and global women’s and children’s advocacy groups – none worse than UN Women. After remaining virtually silent since the Oct. 7 atrocities, on Nov. 25 it published an Instagram post condemning the attacks and calling for the release of all hostages only to replace it with one that says they “remain alarmed by the reports of gender-based violence on October 7 & call for rigorous investigation, prioritizing the rights, needs & safety of those affected.” An investigation? What happened to “believe women”?
There is video footage and survivors’ testimonies that bear out the claims of rape — so when did it become OK for women’s groups to become rape apologists? Surely women’s organizations shouldn’t be allowed to continue to exist while they ignore or second-guess hundreds and hundreds of Israeli women who were slaughtered in their homes, in the streets and at a music festival.
To be sure, I know many are worried about the death and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. I am, too, but does this mean that they cannot express sympathy for the Israeli women who were brutalized and murdered, and for those of us who grieve for this devastation?
This conflict is personal. My family and I were in Israel when the war started. My children, extended family and hundreds of friends live in Israel. My relatives, my friends, my friends’ kids and my kids’ friends all serve in the Israeli military. From the moment the war broke out, t not a single person in there — myself included — was immune from the horror and loss. Between death tolls and injuries, every single person in Israel attended funerals, shiva houses and made hospital visits. My worry for my loved ones there keeps me up every night.
Israeli women protest outside UN Headquarters in Jerusalem, Nov. 27, 2023. (Flash90)
When the groups I’ve worked with over the years fail to speak out against these atrocities committed against women, I take it personally. I hope my former colleagues’ hearts will open up. I hope my own heart will heal. I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful they will come around and try to reconcile.
As a Jewish person of faith, and an activist who looks for the good and seeks out justice, my work in this space to fight for a fairer world for all girls and women is not complete. But 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. 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 needs to end — or they will become irrelevant.
We are people who are worthy of care. Full stop. At this moment I am reevaluating my relationship with the people and organizations I engage with. I can say with certainty that we can and will recreate a community of coalitions that will not deny our humanity and our Jewish and Zionist identities. Either way, their silence will neither erase me nor deter me from fighting the good fight.
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The post I believed diverse coalitions would benefit Jewish women. Now I fear we were all alone. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children
Palestinian fighters from the armed wing of Hamas take part in a military parade to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, July 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
Hamas has quietly removed thousands of names from its official casualty reports in Gaza, prompting fresh scrutiny of the accuracy of the death toll figures that have been widely cited by media and international organizations since the start of the Palestinian terrorist group’s war with Israel.
An analysis, conducted by Salo Aizenberg of the US-based nonprofit Honest Reporting and first reported on by the Telegraph, revealed that 3,400 individuals listed as killed in earlier updates released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health in August and October 2024 no longer appear in the March 2025 report. Among those missing from the latest list are 1,080 children.
“Hamas has manipulated the number of fatalities they report since the start of the war, overcounting civilian deaths and concealing combatant losses,” Aizenberg told The Algemeiner.
“I took all the unique deaths and ID numbers from the August and October lists. I combined them. I removed duplicates and then compared it to the March list. And there were 3,400 names that didn’t appear,” he said. “In my mind, the 1,080 children are particularly notable.”
Aizenberg said the systematic inflation of civilian death tolls by Hamas is not a new phenomenon. “They have done this in every round of conflict. For example, in 2009’s Cast Lead, Hamas initially claimed that 1,300 Palestinians died and only about 50 were combatants. Months later Hamas admitted that in fact 600-700 were their fighters,” he said.
The casualty lists compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health are distributed as downloadable PDFs and include personal details such as names, identification numbers, and dates of death. These lists have been widely cited by international media and relied upon by humanitarian groups and United Nations agencies monitoring the toll of the war. The health ministry is under the control of Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip.
The discrepancy in figures has raised questions about the continued reliance on these data sets, especially given mounting evidence of inconsistencies.
“The evidence is now all out there in the public domain,” Andrew Fox, a former British paratrooper who has worked with Aizenberg on data-verification projects in the past, told The Algemeiner. “These Hamas numbers are error-strewn and clearly manipulated.”
Aizenberg built databases by converting the PDF lists into spreadsheets, allowing for comparative analysis across different time points. That process revealed the March 2025 report included significantly fewer names than earlier versions. The findings cast doubt on previously unchallenged casualty estimates.
Hamas has claimed that more than 50,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it has killed 20,000 Hamas combatants during that time and maintains that it takes extensive precautions to avoid civilian casualties. “The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children,” the IDF said in a statement.
According to a December report authored by Fox and published by the Henry Jackson Society, nearly half of those killed in Gaza are combatants, directly contradicting claims that the vast majority of casualties are civilians. The report also pointed to demographic inconsistencies, including the repeated listing of women and children to support allegations of indiscriminate attacks, and the lowering of adult men’s ages to inflate the number of minors reported killed.
“You can’t say it’s a genocide when half the people that have died are combatants who are still fighting,” Fox told The Algemeiner at the time.
The debate over casualty figures was intensified by a February 2025 article published in the medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that Gaza’s true death toll could be as high as 64,000. That estimate was based on a statistical extrapolation using “capture-recapture” methods applied to a subset of the ministry’s data. The researchers behind the study said they only used what they called “hospital-recorded deaths” from June 2024 and asserted that these records were the most verified.
But Aizenberg said that claim does not hold up to scrutiny. He reviewed the same June dataset used by the Lancet study and found that 881 names in that core group were later removed in the March update. In his view, this undermines the foundation of the statistical model used to estimate excess mortality.
“They do this very careful statistical analysis, taking three lists and doing capture, recapture from vetted lists of hospital recorded deaths,” Aizenberg said. “And then I took their June list that they used again [in the February report] and I found 881 were also removed from the March list. So even after a really careful study [its] core data sources are not valid.”
Past reports have noted that the casualty forms used to populate the lists could be submitted online by anyone with access to a Google Form, raising concerns about verification protocols.
Despite these issues, some international entities, including the United Nations, and news outlets have continued to cite the figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, occasionally with the disclaimer that the numbers could not be independently confirmed.
Fox said such caveats are insufficient and that the deletions from Hamas’s own published records have, in his view, stripped away any plausible justification for continuing to rely on the ministry’s figures. “It is malpractice and deeply irresponsible on the part of any media organization still using them. There is simply no excuse for repeating them as credible,” he said.
The post ‘Patently Falsified’: Hamas Deletes Thousands From Gaza Death List, Including Over 1,000 Children first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Most Americans Agree With Deporting Mahmoud Khalil, Foreign Students Who ‘Support’ Terror Groups, Poll Finds
Mahmoud Khalil speaks to members of media about the Revolt for Rafah encampment at Columbia University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, in New York City, US, June 1, 2024. Photo: Jeenah Moon via Reuters Connect
About two-thirds of the American people support the deportation of non-citizen students, such as Mahmoud Khalil, who indicate support for internationally recognized terrorist groups, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.
The poll — conducted from March 26-27 among registered US voters — was released amid ongoing furor over the Trump administration’s sweeping arrests and detainments of non-citizen students who have allegedly expressed support for terrorist organizations, primarily Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in many cases participated in raucous, often destructive and unsanctioned anti-Israel demonstrations on university campuses.
According to the newly released data, most Americans, 63 percent, believe that the Trump administration should “deport” foreign students who “voice support” for terrorist groups like Hamas, while a slightly higher 67 percent want such deportations for non-citizens on campuses who “actively support” such terrorist groups. About one-third of voters in each case said they believe the students should stay in the US.
Meanwhile, the data showed that 63 percent of Americans believe the Trump administration should revoke permanent resident status for “pro-Hamas activists like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University,” compared to 37 percent who indicated the government should not be able to revoke one’s green card in such circumstances.
Khalil, who was born in Syria and came to the US in 2022, was one of the leaders of the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University last year, when activists illegally seized parts of the campus and refused to leave unless the school boycotted the world’s lone Jewish state. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him early last month for what the Department of Homeland Security alleged to be leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Khalil, who became a permanent US resident last year, is fighting his deportation in court and arguing the government is violating his civil rights.
However, a striking 69 percent of respondents in the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll said the federal government should “have the authority to revoke the green card of a permanent legal resident and deport them if it can prove that such a person actively supported a terrorist organization like Hamas.” By comparison, 31 percent said the government should not have such authority.
Republicans overwhelmingly support the deportation of non-citizens who indicate support for terrorist groups, with 83 percent claiming that those who “voice support” for terrorist groups should be removed from the country and 84 percent responding that non-citizen students who “actively support” terrorist groups should be deported.
In contrast, only 42 percent of Democrats said they endorse deportation for foreign students who voice support for terrorist groups, compared to 58 percent who want them to stay on US spoil. Meanwhile, a slight majority, 51 percent, indicated the government should deport those who “actively support” such extremist organizations, while 49 percent oppose deportation in such circumstances.
As for green card holders such as Khalil who allegedly support Hamas, 82 percent of Republicans said the Trump administration should be able to revoke their permanent resident status, compared to just 48 percent of Democrats. Only 18 percent of Republicans oppose the revocation of green cards in these cases, just a fraction of the 52 percent of Democrats who feel the same way.
More broadly, a striking 86 percent of Republicans believe the government should have the authority to revoke the green card of a permanent legal resident and deport them if they actively supported a terrorist group like Hamas, while 14 percent oppose such a measure.
By comparison, just 55 percent of Democrats support deportation and the taking away a green card in such a situation, compared to 45 percent who oppose it.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has detained several non-citizen anti-Israel activists on university campuses for participating in often destructive demonstrations while allegedly supporting Hamas, the US-designated terrorist organization that has ruled Gaza since 2007. Some of these arrests, particularly of Khalil, have sparked significant backlash, with critics accusing the White House of undermining free speech rights.
During the 2024 US presidential election, as part of a broader effort to entice Jewish voters, Trump vowed to deport foreign supporters of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas if elected to office.
“We will deport the foreign jihad sympathizers, and we will deport them very quickly. And Hamas supporters will be gone,” Trump said during a “Stop Antisemitism” event in August. “If you hate America, if you want to eliminate Israel, then we don’t want you in our country. We really don’t want you in our country.”
The post Most Americans Agree With Deporting Mahmoud Khalil, Foreign Students Who ‘Support’ Terror Groups, Poll Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Harvard Sanctions Pro-Hamas Group Over Unauthorized Demonstration Led by Reinstated Students
Harvard University students Prince Williams and Kojo Acheampong leading unauthorized demonstration at Harvard Yard on April 1, 2025. Photo: The Algemeiner.
Harvard University has imposed disciplinary sanctions on the pro-Hamas student group Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) following its staging an unauthorized demonstration, placing it on probation and suspending its privilege to hold campus events until long after the end of this academic year.
The measure, announced on Wednesday, brings PSC operations to a halt, The Harvard Crimson reported, as the group planned to hold eight events in the month of April alone. Harvard told the paper that PSC’s own actions prompted the severe response from the administration. The group, it said, used “amplified sound” during Tuesday’s protest outside University Hall, obstructed university business, and invited an unrecognized group, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP), to participate in the demonstration.
PSC lambasted Harvard on Wednesday, arguing in a statement posted on Instagram that the administration “sanctioned PSC without clarifying what relation, if any, it had to the rally.”
It continued, “We call on all student organizations to stand with the movement for Palestine — silence will not save us. Demand that Harvard: defend academic freedom, protect its students from [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and divest from genocide.”
Harvard’s swift sanctioning of PSC came just days after the Trump administration announced that $9 billion in federal contracts and grants awarded to the school will be considered for termination because of allegations that it has failed to meaningfully respond to the campus antisemitism crisis.
PSC’s cheering of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities across southern Israel, which included sexual assault and murder, are in part responsible for placing the university at the center of the debate on antisemitism and left-wing extremism in higher education
Beyond sanctioning the campus group, Harvard has recently taken other steps that appear driven by the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy for campus antisemitism. Last month, it fired a librarian whom someone filmed ripping posters of the Bibas children, two babies murdered in captivity by Hamas, off a kiosk in Harvard Yard and denounced him as “hateful.” Additionally, it paused a partnership with a higher education institution located in the West Bank, a move for which prominent members of the Harvard community and federal lawmakers had clamored in a series of public statements.
However, an Algemeiner investigation has uncovered that Tuesday’s demonstrations at Harvard were made possible by steps the university refused to take after PSC convulsed the campus with disruptions and occupations of school property during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Two ringleaders of the protest — Prince Williams and Kojo Acheampong — are among several undergraduates who the university suspended and then promptly reinstated for their roles in organizing a November 2023 unauthorized demonstration in which Williams led a chant of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely recognized as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Williams also participated in the May 2024 occupation of Harvard Yard, which he attended while his disciplinary case was being processed.
A recipient of a full scholarship to attend Harvard, Williams announced his reinstatement to good standing in July 2024, proclaiming: “When I rejoin my peers in the fall, we must understand that our movement is working, that our momentum is growing, and that Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”
His partner, Acheampong, previously participated in a “Student Intifada” event, in which he heralded Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel as “a really pivotal moment in the struggle” that pro-Hamas activists should “prepare” to welcome again. Acheampong added, “The broader task is to make Zionism untenable for the ruling class.”
Since the Oct. 7 atrocities, Harvard students and faculty have quoted terrorists, shared antisemitism cartoons, and mobbed a Jewish student, screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears. Such incidents have led federal lawmakers, Jewish civil rights activists, and others to argue that Harvard has not done enough to combat a surge in antisemitism on campus amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Williams, for example, has promoted a conspiracy theory which links Israel to lingering inequalities affecting African Americans in the US. Writing in November 2023 for the Crimson, for which he worked as an “editorial editor,” he said, “Black and Palestinian liberation go hand in hand … when we see repression for Black lives in places like Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army.”
In another op-ed published by the Crimson, Williams endorsed the self-immolation and suicide of Aaron Bushnell in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, arguing that students should “remember him” and “join the mass movement for Palestine that is working each day on the right side of history.”
Harvard’s harboring of extremists is harming its image, US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon explained on Monday in a statement which announced the Trump administration’s review of its federal contracts and grants.
“Harvard has served as a symbol of the American Dream for generations” McMahon said. “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious jeopardy. Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Harvard Sanctions Pro-Hamas Group Over Unauthorized Demonstration Led by Reinstated Students first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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