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I’m an Israeli advocate for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. We’re still in this together.
KIBBUTZ HANNATON, Israel (JTA) — One of my son’s close friends was fatally wounded fighting Hamas in Gaza this week. Yair Nafusi was his name. He would have been 21 next month. He was born on Hanukkah, thus his parents chose the name Yair, to “light up.” Indeed, he lit up many lives.
As we said goodbye to Yair’s physical presence and buried his body, I felt deep reverence and gratitude to this young man who gave his life to protect me and the more than 1,000 people standing around his grave, as well as the diversity of people living in this country and Jews around the world. They count on Israel to be a safe haven. Especially in times like these. Violent anti-Jew hatred is very much alive.
The Oct. 7 “Black Sabbath” Hamas massacre triggered a deep fear for our survival as Jews — and justifiably so. What reinforced our fear was the hailing of that massacre by much of the world, including the progressive (even Jewish) left, as a necessary step towards “freeing Palestine.”
Like many of the thousands of victims of this massacre (some who died, some who were wounded, and some who will suffer trauma for the rest of their lives) and of the almost 250 hostages taken by Hamas, I am an activist who believes in a vision of Jews and Palestinians living on this land in partnership and peace. I devote much time and energy towards building a shared society among Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, especially in the Galilee, where I live. And I continue to believe in this vision.
I also believe terror and war are not the solution to the ongoing conflict. Only once we all (Palestinians and Jews) recognize one another’s suffering, acknowledge the truth in both our narratives, and take responsibility for the conflict and its solution, will we be able to have a true and lasting peace. I recognize Israel’s contribution to this conflict, and I hold our current government partly responsible for the ‘“success” of Hamas’ attack, although certainly not for its brutality.
The events that have unfolded since Oct. 7 have been eye-opening. My work building Palestinian-Jewish coexistence has always assumed partnership: a belief in the humanity and rights of both the Palestinian and Jewish peoples. That is why my novel, “Hope Valley,” about the friendship between a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli woman, is told from their alternating points of view.
And yet, when I watch the pro-Palestinian protests by “progressives” from London to New York to Washington, I see activists crossing a line from struggling for peace and Palestinian rights into promoting a hateful, terrifying, dangerous anti-Jewish agenda.
It is a line crossed when they blame the conflict on Israel and Jews alone; when they call Hamas “freedom fighters” who were justified in using barbaric violence to achieve their goals; when they distort the complicated history and present reality of Israel-Palestine into a black-and-white story of white colonialist Jews invading Palestine to commit genocide on an indigenous Palestinian population.
It’s the same dangerous line crossed by those who say innocent Israeli citizens deserve to be butchered, burned, raped, maimed; who glorify Hamas as a progressive humanitarian group when its covenant specifically calls for wiping Israel and the Jewish people off the earth; who call Israel’s retaliation against Hamas “genocide” — as if the IDF’s intention is to wipe out the entire Palestinian nation.
Hamas is no good for Palestinians and no good for Jews. It wants a fundamentalist Muslim dictatorship on the land from the river to the sea, devoid of all Jews. And Christians. And LGBTQ folk. It is no good for anyone who believes in democracy. It is simply no good for humanity. What Israel faces now in Gaza is a moral dilemma. Hamas wanted the IDF to retaliate so it could make Israel look bad. It worked. What Israel is doing is bad — killing thousands of innocent people, including children. But not evil. Hamas is evil. And while so many across the globe who promote Palestinian rights don’t want to see the difference, I do.
I do spiritual companion work for clients around the world, including liberal rabbinical students and rabbis. They report among some of their peers a lack of knowledge of historical and political facts about Israel-Palestine, as well as about anti-Jewish tropes and their underlying theories, that concerns me immensely. I grew up Orthodox Jewish Zionist in New York, where the Palestinian narrative was omitted from my education. That was highly problematic. But so is teaching only the Palestinian narrative, or not balancing the progressive world’s bias towards the Palestinian narrative with the Jewish one. Future Jewish leaders especially need to understand both narratives, and not simply go with the tide of the times.
Human rights include Jewish human rights. It is possible to believe in human rights for both Jews and Palestinians. It is possible to cry for the innocent Palestinian lives lost in this war (from Israeli bombs, Hamas and Islamic Jihad missiles and Hamas using their own citizens to protect their terrorist cells) while believing in Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas’ attempt at the annihilation of Israel and all Jews.
It is even possible to demand from Palestinians truthful examination of their leaders’ culpability.
Devoting time and energy towards building Palestinian-Jewish partnership and fighting for equality, justice and peace, I have had to hold many truths. I have had to find a way to deal with feelings of guilt over Jewish Israelis’ part in the injustices inflicted upon innocent Palestinians (blame that must also be shared with Arab countries and Palestinian leaders) without losing my sense of self, self-respect and a belief in my right to live here, and even exist.
It has not been simple, but it is possible. I expect my Palestinian and progressive Jewish counterparts to go through a similar process. Some have, but not all, and unfortunately the voices of those who have not are reverberating loudly throughout the world (ironically, less so in Israel, where advocates for Palestinian rights and a lasting peace more often hear and heed the voices of the “other” side).
I do believe if we remove Hamas and replace our leaders — the Palestinian and Israeli leaders who stand in the way — with worthy ones who will talk and be willing to compromise, we can build a lasting peace. Then no more soldiers like Yair, or victims of terror, or casualties of war, will have to pay the price for our inability to do so.
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The post I’m an Israeli advocate for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. We’re still in this together. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Administration Announces New Antisemitism Investigations Into 55 Universities
Linda McMahon, US education secretary, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on Feb. 26, 2025. Photo: Al Drago/Pool/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The US Department of Education has added dozens of colleges and universities to the list of institutions it will investigate for civil rights violations stemming from their alleged failure to address campus antisemitism.
“The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said on Monday in a statement. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers. That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”
McMahon named 55 institutions, public and private, in total that were not included in the administration’s February announcement of five investigations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The new schools include: Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, and Princeton University — all of which have struggled with antisemitic anti-Israel activity and pro-Hamas agitation, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.
Since Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Harvard has seen its law school student government issue a resolution which falsely accused Israel of genocide; its students quote terrorists during an “Apartheid Week” event held in April; and dozens of its students and faculty participate in an illegal pro-Hamas encampment attended by members of a group that shared an antisemitic cartoon.
Additionally, many Harvard students openly cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which included sexual assault and child abduction, and a mob led by the president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review followed, surrounded, and intimidated a Jewish student, screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears.
After these incidents and more, Harvard fought tooth and nail to discredit lawsuits which alleged that its response to campus antisemitism amounted to the enabling of discriminatory behavior in violation of federal civil rights law. Harvard eventually settled multiple complaints out of court, but at least one plaintiff, Harvard alumnus Shabbos Kestenbaum, refused to be a party to the agreements, arguing that they allowed the university to evade accountability for its alleged indifference to antisemitism.
At Swarthmore College, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) recently raided and occupied the college’s Parrish Hall dressed like Hamas fighters, their faces wrapped with and concealed by keffiyehs. By the time the college formally warned the students that their behavior would trigger disciplinary measures, they had shouted slogans through bullhorns, attempted to break into offices that had been locked to keep them out, and pounded the doors of others that refused to admit them access. Meanwhile, SJP collaborators reportedly circumvented security’s lockdown of the building to smuggle food inside. Several students then grew impatient and attempted to end the lockdown themselves by raiding the building, and in doing so caused a physical altercation with security, whom they proceeded to pelt with expletives and other imprecations.
The Swarthmore administration responded to the incident by barring SJ from operating on its campus while school officials investigate the incident.
In May, a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” installed at Drexel University in Philadelphia forced school officials to lock down the campus to protect it from a flood of non-students who joined the demonstration. The previous month, the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life was vandalized, with agitators removing large channel letters spelling out Perelman’s name from a brick structure near the entrance to the building. The disturbing act, perpetrated by masked individuals, occurred amid an explosion of antisemitic hate crimes across the US.
Princeton University has drawn scrutiny for, among other reasons, what it teaches students about Israel. In 2023, the International Legal Forum (ILF), a nonprofit organization based in Tel Aviv which advocates for equality in Israel and the Middle East, noted that a syllabus for a course taught at Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies included a book that accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “maiming” Palestinians and harvesting their organs — a claim that critics described as a disturbing blood libel which serves no other purpose than to promote antisemitic conspiracies and tropes.
The Trump administration has moved rapidly to address campus antisemitism since taking office in January.
On Friday, it canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia University as punishment for the school’s alleged harboring of antisemitic faculty, students, and staff and shielding them from disciplinary sanctions. Prior to that, US President Donald Trump issued a highly anticipated executive order which calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
A major provision of the order authorizes the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses. That policy is currently being challenged in the courts, as a federal judge in Manhattan has halted its application to the case of a male alumnus of Columbia University who was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being identified as an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover, which took place during the closing weeks of the 2023-2024 academic year.
Trump has defended the attempted deportation and argued that more are forthcoming.
“This is the first of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitism, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Trump Administration Announces New Antisemitism Investigations Into 55 Universities first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Supreme Court Decision Reopens Family’s Efforts to Recover Nazi-Stolen Painting Worth Millions
The US Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, May 17, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
A ruling by the US Supreme Court on Monday has restarted a fight over the ownership of artist Camille Pissarro’s 1897 oil painting “Rue Saint-Honoré, in the afternoon. Effect of rain,” a work stolen by the Nazi regime and now hanging in Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza museum.
Citing a new California law, the justices reversed the decision of lower courts which sided with the Spanish museum against the descendants of German Jewish art collector Julius Cassirer, who purchased the painting from Pissarro in 1900 and whose daughter-in-law Lilly Cassirer Neubauer was coerced into selling the work in order to obtain exit visas for herself and her husband to flee Germany.
The painting is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. It features a gray image of a street scene with impressionistic renderings of carriages. The Thyssen-Bornemisza museum describes the painting as part of “a series of fifteen works that Camille Pissarro painted in Paris from the window of his hotel in the place du Théâtre Français during the winter of 1897 and 1898.”
The Nazis auctioned the painting in 1943, and it ultimately ended up in the possession of the Spanish government in the 1990s following a purchase from Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. The museum says it did not know of the painting’s provenance when buying the work. Heirs of the Cassirer Neubauer family first sued in 2005 upon learning of the art’s survival in 2000 and failing to come to an agreement with the museum.
David Cassirer, great-grandson of Cassirer Neubauer, praised the Supreme Court “for insisting on applying principles of right and wrong.” He said in a statement that “as a Holocaust survivor, my late father, Claude Cassirer, was very proud to become an American citizen in 1947, and he cherished the values of this country.”
When California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law now cited by the Supreme Court, he said that “for survivors of the Holocaust and their families, the fight to take back ownership of art and other personal items stolen by the Nazis continues to traumatize those who have already gone through the unimaginable.” Newsom called it “both a moral and legal imperative that these valuable and sentimental pieces be returned to their rightful owners, and I am proud to strengthen California’s laws to help secure justice for families.”
The legislation mandates that California law must apply in lawsuits involving artwork or other personal property that was stolen or looted during the Holocaust due to political persecution, like in the case involving the Cassirer family. The legislation builds on existing California law that aids the state’s residents in recovering stolen property, including property stolen during the Holocaust.
Previously, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum was not obligated to return the artwork to Cassirer’s heirs in California, applying Spanish law to the case as opposed to California law.
Cassirer’s lawyers, David Boies and Sam Dubbin, said in response to the Supreme Court’s overriding decision that “we hope Spain and its museum will now do the right thing and return the Nazi-looted art they are holding without further delay.”
The museum’s lawyer, Thaddeus Stauber, countered that “today’s brief order gives the Ninth Circuit the first opportunity to examine if the new California Assembly Bill is valid and what, if any, impact it may have on the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation’s repeatedly affirmed rightful ownership.” He said that the foundation, “as it has for the past 20 years, looks forward to working with all concerned to once again ensure that its ownership is confirmed with the painting remaining on public display in Madrid.”
Other descendants of Jews forced under duress during World War II to part with their artworks have continued efforts to recover paintings to differing degrees of success.
Heirs of Paul Leffmann have sought to acquire Pablo Picasso’s “The Actor” from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two American courts have disagreed with the family.
In Amsterdam in June 2024, a museum returned “Odalisque” by Henri Matisse to heirs of Albert and Marie Stern.
In October 2024, the family of Adalbert Parlagi received Claude Monet’s “Bord de Mer” from a Louisiana family who attempted to sell the painting to an art gallery, triggering an alert to the FBI.
Months earlier, in July 2024, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr. announced the return of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele’s “Seated Nude Woman, front view” to the family of Fritz Grünbaum. The descendants of Gustav “Gus” Papanek repatriated the work, unaware of its theft when the family purchased it in 1938.
“The history behind Nazi-looted art is horrific and tragic, and the consequences are still impacting victims and their families to this day. It is inspiring to see both the Grünbaum and Papanek families join together to reflect on their shared history and preserve the legacy of Fritz Grünbaum,” Bragg said at the time. “I want to commend the Reif family for harnessing Fritz Grünbaum’s legacy to create a better world by using the funds from their auctions to support underprivileged artists.”
Grünbaum relative Timothy Reif said at the time that “the recovery of this important artwork — stolen from a prominent Jewish critic of Adolf Hitler — sends a message to the world that crime does not pay and that the law enforcement community in New York has not forgotten the dark lessons of World War II.”
The post US Supreme Court Decision Reopens Family’s Efforts to Recover Nazi-Stolen Painting Worth Millions first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Former Hostage From Nova Music Festival Massacre Invites Trump to Dance With Survivors at Memorial Concert
An Israeli soldier stands during a two-minute siren marking the annual Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, at an installation at the site of the Nova festival where party goers were killed and kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, in Reim, southern Israel, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
The second annual memorial concert honoring the victims killed at the Nova music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, will take place in June, and US President Donald Trump has been invited to attend.
The Tribe of Nova community announced on Tuesday details about the “Nova Healing Concert” scheduled for June 26 at Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park. Former hostage Mia Schem, who was abducted by Hamas terrorists at the site of the music festival, addressed the media in Israel on Tuesday to talk about the upcoming concert while also sharing a message with Trump.
“Thank you, President Trump, for everything you’re doing to release the hostages,” she said. “I invite you to dance with us in Yarkon Park and celebrate the moment when everyone finally returns home.”
“My vision, and that of everyone’s, is that this year should be different,” Schem added. “A year when we won’t have to shout but embrace. Let’s dance not just for them but with them. This is the strength of our community – it heals, it strengthens, it is our home.”
The setlist for the concert includes Benaia Barabi, Berry Sakharof, Mosh Ben-Ari, Sasi and Rita. The event on June 26 will also feature activities such as therapeutic workshops and spaces for dealing with trauma. Tickets are open and available to the general public, and admission is free for survivors of the Oct. 7 massacre and members of the bereaved families. All profits from ticket sales and event sponsorships will be used by the Nova Tribe Community Association to support the physical and mental healing of Oct. 7 survivors and members of their families, as well as commemoration for those murdered during the Hamas terrorist attack. Last year’s memorial concert was attended by tens of thousands of young people, according to Ynet.
Hamas-led terrorists from the Gaza Strip who infiltrated the music festival in Re’im during the early morning of Oct. 7, 2023, killed 370 people and abducted 44 hostages. Overall, the terrorists killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 captives during their rampage across southern Israel.
The post Former Hostage From Nova Music Festival Massacre Invites Trump to Dance With Survivors at Memorial Concert first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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