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In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, residents volunteer and keep kids at home as streets and supermarket shelves empty out
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Al Hambra Deli, a neighborhood cafe and wine bar in Jaffa, would usually expect to be bustling on this Thursday night, the beginning of the Israeli weekend. Located on Jerusalem Boulevard., one of the city’s main arteries, it’s right on the path of Tel Aviv’s recently opened light-rail system, and not far from a soccer stadium.
But this week, its doors have been shuttered. A sign greets passersby: “Beloved neighborhood, half of us are in the army and half are protecting our homes. We love you and are waiting to return, Staff.”
It’s a mood felt throughout the city and others in Israel’s crowded central region: Five days after an attack by Hamas killed and wounded thousands in the country’s south, streets in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are chillingly quiet aside from sirens warning of incoming rockets. Schools are closed and residents are yearning for ways to help as they cope with the physical and emotional fallout of the massacre and the war Israel is now fighting against Hamas in Gaza.
Earlier this week, supermarket shelves emptied out as authorities recommended that Israelis stock up on three days’ worth of food. Shufersal, the country’s largest grocery chain, set limits on purchases of bread, bottled water, milk and eggs.
Details of the atrocities in the south continue to emerge, and 300,000 Israelis have been called up for reserve duty. Rockets continue to target Israeli cities, and Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza, as the country girds for what will likely be a prolonged conflict.
“We live in a permanent state of fear,” said Inès Forman, 29, a French-Israeli writer, describing the last week in Tel Aviv. “I feel anxiety and fear in my body every second that I am awake.”
Forman has committed herself to spreading news on social media about Saturday’s massacre. Many of the Instagram posts on her profile are about art or literature, but the images she’s shared over the past 24 hours are of a different kind: widely circulated clips of reporters describing the scenes they’ve encountered in towns on the Gaza border, and photos and video condemning Hamas and its supporters.
“We are working on fighting fake news… basically all day” she says of her new routine, keeping a schedule that involves waking up and starting at “five or six until very late at night. Yesterday, I finished at around one” in the morning.
On Thursday, Forman attended the afternoon funeral of her friend’s younger sister, Shira Eylon, 23, who was presumed captured until her body was discovered in the woods on Wednesday amongst those who were murdered at the massacre at the music festival outside Kibbutz Re’im.
“My beautiful and pure fairy — today you received wings. I love you forever,” her older sister wrote on Instagram, announcing her death.
“There is not anyone who doesn’t have a loved one who’s either been killed, someone who they know, a friend or a loved one, or injured, or taken captive” said Melanie Landau, a 50-year-old Australian-Israeli therapist living in the Baqa neighborhood of Jerusalem. “So many people are on the front line and just worried about their loved ones.”
Many residents have left Tel Aviv, traveling abroad or to an area of Israel farther from Gaza, and have listed their apartments on spreadsheets coordinating housing for refugees from areas in Israel’s north and south that have been evacuated. Several people described the normally crowded city as a “ghost town.”
Some Tel Aviv residents have relocated within the city. Lotte Beilin, a 30-year old British-Israeli news producer, is staying in a friend’s apartment because her own building is older and doesn’t have a bomb shelter. The city streets are “so quiet you can hear a pin drop.”
There are more “uplifting” moments too, Landau said, adding that “the sort of resilience and strength of the human spirit” has been on display this week.
Throughout the country, many efforts are underway to collect needed supplies for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who arrived at their bases lacking some critical resources.
Lee Mangoli, a 32-year-old Canadian-Israeli yoga teacher in Tel Aviv, recalled that “on Sunday we started to come out of shock and I realized I needed to take action to help myself.” She met with a friend and started collecting food and other “basic amenities” like shampoo and socks for soldiers.
Very quickly, she says that their small project “exploded with money coming in from abroad… and we are dealing with a lot of requests from a lot of different bases that cost money.”
While there have not been any issues raising funds, her group has run into difficulties sourcing the supplies. “We are not finding the goods anymore. UPS and Fedex are not delivering to Israel” and certain much-requested items like Leatherman utility knives have been nearly impossible to locate. “I could buy 200 and have soldiers to give them to but nobody has them,” she said.
For others such as Becky Schneck, 36, a physical therapist and mother of four young children, the burden of her husband’s call-up to reserve duty on Saturday, in addition to the closure of schools until further notice, has been too overwhelming to consider volunteering for the war effort.
“I am so busy, I don’t even want to think about it too much,” she said. “I do not have the emotional capacity to deal with everything going on in my house and also everything going on in the country.” Neighbors in her community of Tzur Hadassah, outside Jerusalem, have stepped up to deliver food to families like hers.
While Masa Israel, an umbrella group for gap year programs, said shortly after the massacre that none of its 5,700 fellows were harmed, at least one program has closed — the Yahel Social Change Fellowship, which engages its participants in social action and volunteering across Israel.
“With a heavy heart, the Yahel board and staff have made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend the Yahel Social Change Fellowship until things calm down here,” announced Yahel’s executive director, Dana Talmi.
Others are pressing on. At the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, staff “are doing the best we can… [going] into overdrive to support our students as much as humanly possibly,” said Meesh Hammer-Kossoy, the dean of students. “Pardes is pretty serious about running” in spite of the war. Of the approximately 80 students studying year-long, 18 have joined classes via Zoom from abroad.
“We are resolutely gathering for regular prayer and trying to study as best as we can,” she said.
Landau said that many Israelis are engaged in “a battle of consciousness.”
“There are a lot of people getting overexposed to a lot of the imagery and I think that is part of the battle,” she said. “Not to lose faith in humanity and not to be pulled in by that.”
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The post In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, residents volunteer and keep kids at home as streets and supermarket shelves empty out appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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There Is Massive Antisemitism in the Workplace; Here’s What You Need to Know
FILE PHOTO: A man, with an Israeli flag with a cross in the center, looks on next to police officers working at the site where, according to the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., U.S. May 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
Most people think they would recognize antisemitism if they saw it: a slur, a swastika, or someone saying Jews deserved to be attacked on October 7. However, the public rarely hears about such antisemitism permeating workplaces in almost every industry nationwide.
In my work as a non-profit lawyer specializing in workplace antisemitism, I’ve learned that some of the most insidious harm happens and remains behind closed doors.
Since October 7, 2023, there’s been a visible spike in antisemitism worldwide. Jewish students are experiencing a surge in discrimination and harassment, Jewish institutions are being defaced, a patron at a Jewish-owned bar paid for a sign to be held up saying “F*** the Jews,” and Ye (Kanye West) recently released a music video titled “Heil Hitler.”
In workplaces, antisemitism is just as present and egregious, but far less publicized. That is because most workplace antisemitism cases do not end up in headlines. Often, workplace antisemitism cases end in a signature on an ironclad nondisclosure agreement (“NDA”) and subsequent silence.
Since approximately more than half of employment law cases settle at some point before trial, the lack of publicity on Jewish civil rights violations in workplaces is not surprising. Still, the secrecy surrounding how those cases are resolved has devastating ripple effects. Given that most workplace cases settle, employees experiencing workplace antisemitism rarely hear about other similar incidents, which could have empowered them to enforce their rights or set a meaningful precedent in the courts to help them assess their chances of success. Another reason workplace antisemitism cases often do not make headlines is that many employees do not report their concerns out of fear of retaliation.
In my work on employment-related antisemitism matters as Senior Counsel at StandWithUs Legal, a division of StandWithUs, many of our cases involve employees in medicine, education, service industries, and technology who simply wanted to do their jobs. What they experienced instead were hostile comments from colleagues, exclusion from diversity programs, denials of promotions, or even termination. Some were mocked for their Israeli nationality or Jewish identity in team meetings. Others were treated unfairly based on Israel’s military actions, were told that Jews started the California wildfires with laser beams, or were called genocidal by colleagues. One was repeatedly subjected to “Anne Frank” jokes by her supervisor.
Employers rarely know how to handle antisemitism, and since these cases usually settle and involve NDAs, employers often can avoid directly addressing the problem. Jewish identity is frequently treated as invisible or controversial. Some employers encourage political discussions about every global injustice except those affecting Jews, drawing lines around Jewish identity that no other minority group is asked to navigate.
Antisemitism in the workplace remains a largely invisible problem — one that’s growing, unchecked, simmering just beneath the surface. The chilling effect of these settlements, NDAs, and silence is profound. When someone is fired for raising concerns about antisemitism, or pushed out under the guise of “performance” after reporting a hostile work environment, they’re often offered severance in exchange for silence in an NDA. It’s a cruel choice: rebuild your life with some financial security, or speak out and risk everything. Most understandably take the deal, but that means the problem continues to go unaddressed.
Whether guiding an employee through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) process, partnering with firms nationwide to sue, or interfacing with human resources or corporate general counsels to resolve the issue, I’ve seen firsthand how powerful the law can be in the workplace. It can force accountability, restore dignity, and, at its best, prevent future harm.
Louis Brandeis once said, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” While many of the victories I help achieve remain confidential, the mission is clear: to give voice to those who were silenced, empower employees to enforce their rights, and ensure that silence is no longer the cost of employment.
Deedee Bitran is Senior Counsel and Director of Pro Bono with StandWithUs Saidoff Legal.
The post There Is Massive Antisemitism in the Workplace; Here’s What You Need to Know first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Netherlands Also Has a Campus Antisemitism Problem
Anti-Israel protesters face Dutch police during a banned demonstration in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Nov. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Esther Verkaik
The Netherlands often presents itself as a beacon of tolerance and progress. But in recent years, that image has started to crack — especially in its universities. These institutions, which should champion open discussion and critical thinking, are now becoming known for something else: hostility toward Jewish and Israeli voices.
Recently, the heads of Dutch universities published a “Statement on Academic Freedom.” It’s full of idealistic talk about openness, free debate, and the importance of diverse opinions. But for many Jewish and Israeli academics, these words ring hollow.
Where was this concern for free expression over the past two years, when Jewish speakers were uninvited, Israeli scholars were boycotted, and students of multiple religions were silenced just for expressing support for Israel?
Where was this defense of dialogue when protests took over campus buildings, tried to intimidate and force out Jews, and declared these buildings and institutions were “Zionist-free”?
And let’s be clear — “Zionist-free” isn’t just about Israel; it’s a chilling phrase that echoes a much darker history.
And this isn’t just about silence. In some cases, universities actively supported or ignored clear discrimination against Jews and anyone who supported Israel’s right to exist.
At Wageningen University, for example, staff openly pledged not to supervise Israeli students. That’s not protest — that’s academic discrimination, pure and simple. The administration said nothing.
At TU Delft, a course described Israel as a colonial project and framed all Israelis as colonizers. Some of the people involved had even supported terror groups like Hamas, or downplayed the Holocaust. This wasn’t fringe — it was university-approved.
At Maastricht University, Jewish speakers were denied platforms due to “security concerns,” while pro-Palestinian speakers with long histories of hate speech were welcomed. The university even gave office space to a group known for antisemitic rhetoric and threats of violence. And Jewish professors needed security just to walk through campus.
So when these same universities now suddenly say they care about academic freedom — after ignoring these issues for years if they involved anyone Jewish or who supported Israel’s right to exist — it’s hard to take them seriously. It feels less like a change of heart, and more like damage control.
The truth is, academic freedom only means something when it’s applied fairly — not just to those with popular opinions, but also to those who face criticism and hostility. That includes Jewish and pro-Israeli voices.
If Dutch academia wants to rebuild trust, it must begin with honesty: admit the past failures, recognize the harm caused, and commit to applying its values consistently. That’s the only way forward.
This isn’t just a policy issue. It’s a moral one.
Sabine Sterk is CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
The post The Netherlands Also Has a Campus Antisemitism Problem first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran’s Khamenei Dismisses US Nuclear Proposal, Vows to Keep Enriching Uranium
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday that abandoning uranium enrichment was “100 percent” against the country’s interests, rejecting a central US demand in talks to resolve a decades-long dispute over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
The US proposal for a new nuclear deal was presented to Iran on Saturday by Oman, which has mediated talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.
After five rounds of talks, several hard-to-bridge issues remain, including Iran’s insistence on maintaining uranium enrichment on its soil and Tehran’s refusal to ship abroad its entire existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium – possible raw material for nuclear bombs.
Khamenei, who has the final say on all matters of state, said nothing about halting the talks, but said the US proposal “contradicts our nation’s belief in self-reliance and the principle of ‘We Can.’”
“Uranium enrichment is the key to our nuclear program and the enemies have focused on the enrichment,” Khamenei said during a televised speech marking the anniversary of the death of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“The proposal that the Americans have presented is 100 percent against our interests … The rude and arrogant leaders of America repeatedly demand that we should not have a nuclear program. Who are you to decide whether Iran should have enrichment?” he added.
Tehran says it wants to master nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and has long denied accusations by Western powers that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
‘MAXIMUM PRESSURE’
Reuters reported on Monday that Tehran was poised to reject the US proposal as a “non-starter” that failed to soften Washington’s stance on uranium enrichment or to address Tehran’s interests.
Trump has revived his “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran since his return to the White House in January, which included tightening sanctions and threatening to bomb Iran if the negotiations yield no deal.
Trump wants to curtail Tehran’s potential to produce a nuclear weapon that could trigger a regional nuclear arms race and threaten Israel. Iran’s clerical establishment, for its part, wants to be rid of devastating sanctions.
During his first term, Trump ditched Tehran’s 2015 nuclear pact with six powers and reimposed sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy. Iran responded by escalating enrichment far beyond the pact’s limits.
Iran’s clerical establishment is grappling with multiple crises — energy and water shortages, a plunging currency, losses among regional militia proxies in conflicts with Israel, and rising fears of an Israeli strike on its nuclear sites — all intensified by Trump’s hardline stance.
Iran’s arch-foe Israel, which sees Tehran’s nuclear program as an existential threat, has repeatedly threatened to bomb the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Tehran has vowed a harsh response.
The post Iran’s Khamenei Dismisses US Nuclear Proposal, Vows to Keep Enriching Uranium first appeared on Algemeiner.com.