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Jewish comedian Modi Rosenfeld, a mainstay for Orthodox audiences, is gay. So what?
(JTA) — Mordechi Rosenfeld, the Jewish comedian, insists that the recent Variety article in which he reveals he is married to a man is not a “coming out” piece.
“This article is showing that I’m a veteran comedian and I’m married to a man,” said Rosenfeld, who is known to his friends and fans by the nickname Modi. “This is it. It doesn’t feel like a coming-out piece to me because I’ve been out.”
Anyone who has listened closely to Rosenfeld’s podcast in the last year would know that he and his husband have been married since 2020. The pair talk about living and traveling together, and in a recent episode revealed they would be vacationing on Fire Island, which has a famous gay scene, with prominent gay Jewish cookbook author Jake Cohen.
But the news could easily have come as more of a surprise for one swath of Rosenfeld’s core audience: Orthodox Jews from communities like the one where he grew up, where LGBTQ inclusion remains an unfamiliar and often frowned-upon frontier. Rosenfeld has delivered his signature blend of highly informed Jewish comedy, which often digs into the technical details of Jewish law, on kosher Passover cruises; at benefits for Orthodox organizations including yeshivas, Young Israel chapters and Hatzalah, the Orthodox ambulance service; and on the annual Chabad-Lubavitch movement telethon. But until recently, his routine has contained little whiff of his personal life — in fact, some of his jokes suggested to his fans that he had a wife named Stacy.
“Stacy” is in fact his manager and husband, Leo Veiga, a millennial raised Catholic in South Florida whom the 52-year-old Israel-born, Long Island-raised comedian met on the New York City subway in 2015. The split content has reflected Rosenfeld’s long-espoused belief that the only way comedy can work is to tailor the set to the crowd.
“Even though some religious organization has brought me in and people are coming to see me, I understand I’m under the umbrella of a certain demographic that I need to respect and know the audience,” Rosenfeld told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If you put me in front of an audience, I give them what they need. And they don’t need gay material — they need the material for this audience.”
“But when I’m on the road doing my material, I can do whatever I want,” he added. “They came to see me.”
The Variety article was born of Rosenfeld’s deepening belief that it’s possible to merge his Orthodox and gay identities more publicly — something that he has long done as a congregant and sometimes-cantor at the Modern Orthodox synagogue he attends in the East Village.
“The prayers are done in an Orthodox way. And somehow, gays have been attracted to come to this synagogue,” he said. “We have a whole group of gay people and we have a whole group of trans people welcome.”
“The rabbi’s thing is no one should ever feel bullied, no one should ever feel excluded,” Rosenfeld said. “Be you. Be a proud Jew and be you.”
Rosenfeld’s “not a coming out piece” is significant and part of a broader recent pattern, according to Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the founding director of Eshel, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews and their families.
“You used to leave. Coming out meant [you] had to go. Because you could either stay and be silent, or speak up and leave,” Greenberg said. “What has begun to change the story is people insisting on not choosing between their religious identities and their queer identities and insisting on staying in Orthodox communities.”
The Variety piece comes at a time of tension around LGBTQ inclusion in Modern Orthodoxy. Yeshiva University — where Rosenfeld studied at the Belz Cantorial School of Music — has made headlines for fighting for the right not to recognize an LGBTQ student club. This month, a synagogue affiliated with the Modern Orthodox flagship also made news for its treatment of a transgender congregant; Yeshiva’s top Jewish law authority said she could no longer pray there.
The episode ignited strong feelings for Rosenfeld.
“To torture someone like that, somebody who’s religious, who’s keeping the mitzvahs, who’s teaching, who’s doing that, and to open that up and to do what they did is so terrible,” Rosenfeld said. “It’s so, so terrible. That’s the only thing I can tell you.”
For Rosenfeld, there’s no tension between Jewish observance and being gay — although his articulation of why reveals an awareness of the pain that others might feel in trying.
“Being gay, you can keep Shabbos, you can keep kosher, you can keep anything you want to do,” he said. “You can learn Talmud, you can learn Torah, the only thing you can’t do is kill yourself. You can’t commit suicide. That’s not even on the table as an option.”
When Rosenfeld shared the Variety article on his Instagram page, the vast majority of the nearly 800 comments left by fans and friends showed support for his public embrace of his gay identity.
“It’s amazing that you announce that you are gay,” one fan wrote. “You are an example to all the Jews struggling with their gayness. You are a role model to me. Cheers.”
“I think it’s great you can be out with so many of your orthodox fans,” wrote Peter Fox, a freelance writer and Jewish community advocate. “What a wonderful gift of visibility.”
But a few commenters said they would boycott his work in the future, some citing interpretations of Jewish law.
“I can’t believe you are gay,” wrote one person. “What a giant Hillul HaShem [desecration of the name of God]. I lost all respect for you. Unfollowing now. And good luck to you when it’s time to be judged by The Almighty.”
Rosenfeld doesn’t anticipate that the Variety article will lose him any gigs. If anything, he says, it might actually increase his audience. Since he has started adding gay material to his repertoire, his audiences have been increasingly LGBTQ, like at some of the “Holidazed” shows he performed in December at Sony Hall in New York.
Still, he noted, “onstage, I’m more Jewish than I am gay.”
Rosenfeld began to dabble in comedy while working on Wall Street early in his career, when his colleagues realized he was good at impressions. In the last several years, he has emerged as a leader in a wave of comedians focusing on their Jewish identities, even playing himself on an episode of HBO’s “Crashing.” Five years ago, New York City’s then-mayor, Bill de Blasio, declared June 26 as “Mordechi Modi Rosenfeld Day” in honor of his contributions to the artistic community, and last August, Rosenfeld co-hosted the first-ever Chosen Comedy Festival on Coney Island with his frequent comedy partner Elon Gold to a crowd of 4,000. The Jewish comedy show has since gone on to an audience in Miami and will head to Los Angeles in February.
Meanwhile, Rosenfeld has embarked on a steady stream of sold-out shows on multiple continents himself, while enjoying several viral moments. In one bit that was shared thousands of times last year, he pilloried the practice of taking people who have made antisemitic comments to Holocaust museums, joking, “It just gives them ideas.”
Since comedy clubs reopened after their pandemic closures, Rosenfeld has worked on new material at New York’s iconic Comedy Cellar, where patrons’ phones are kept in sealed envelopes and filming is prohibited. The absence of phones gives comedians the freedom to workshop new material — and a lot of that new material, for Rosenfeld, has been focused on living with a millennial husband.
Rosenfeld and Veiga’s story is a classic New York City meet-cute: The comedian was riding the 6 train when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Veiga, then an intern at CAA, the talent agency, introducing himself.
“And then we went on a date,” Rosenfeld told JTA. “I picked him up and I brought him to the Comedy Cellar, where I was performing. And he didn’t know that.”
After his 15-minute set, Rosenfeld returned to the comedians’ table, where he had nabbed Veiga a seat, to gauge his date’s reaction. “I said, ‘So I’m a comedian.’ And then we had dinner, we had two more dates, and then he moved in.”
In the eight years they have been together, Rosenfeld credits Veiga with facilitating the evolution of his career as both his husband and manager. During the COVID lockdown, as comedians everywhere found themselves unable to perform in their usual crowded clubs, Rosenfeld says he thought he was getting a break from work — but it was Veiga who suggested a pivot to video. That’s when Rosenfeld grew his online presence and developed his now-beloved characters, like the Israeli know-it-all “Nir, not far” (married to the fictitious, off-camera Stacy) and the Hasidic Yoely, who reviews quarantine-era TV shows and runs for president.
While Yoely is a character, Rosenfeld, too, is religiously observant. He wraps tefillin in the morning, even while touring, and he and Veiga keep a kosher home. Though Veiga is not Jewish — the couple had a civil wedding — he attends synagogue with Rosenfeld, his Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation is excellent, and he is extremely well-versed in Jewish ideas and lingo. That has occasionally enabled him to stand up for their relationship when encountering people who believe it is forbidden: In one anecdote on the podcast, Rosenfeld shared that at a Shabbat retreat at a yacht club in notoriously conservative Orange County, California, a man at the couple’s table told them that the Bible says two men should not live together. Veiga retorted that the Bible says people should not mix wool and linen — implying that not all strictures are always followed, and leaving the man dumbfounded, according to Rosenfeld’s account.
Veiga has been part of Rosenfeld’s podcast behind the scenes since it began in August 2021, and began appearing on-screen in the taped recordings in December of that year. (In a sign of how deeply Jewish content is woven into his own life, he once wore a kitschy shirt referring to “muktzeh,” the prohibition of touching or moving certain objects on Shabbat.) Rosenfeld co-hosts the podcast with Jewish comedian Periel Aschenbrand, where guests include a mix of mostly comedians with the occasional rabbi (one time, Alan Dershowitz made an appearance).
Leo Veiga, left, wears a t-shirt bearing the Hebrew word “muktzeh,” which refers to a prohibition of touching certain objects on Shabbat. (Screenshot via YouTube)
In the December episode with Jake Cohen, Rosenfeld and Veiga recounted their experience at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Las Vegas. The couple, who admitted to following RuPaul’s Drag Race more closely than American politics, learned what causes Republican Jews were almost universally excited by (Israel and antisemitism on college campuses) and what causes they were lukewarm on (abortion) solely based on the volume of applause in the room. They also said they were surprised by how welcomed they felt as a gay couple at a Republican event, and remarked on how many of the political figures and donors they met were excited to show them pictures of all the other gay couples they knew.
Veiga said in the episode that he didn’t learn until after they agreed to the gig that the conference lineup included Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Rosenfeld said he found “a little creepy.” Both men have advanced policies and ideas that are anti-LGBTQ.
Rosenfeld said he had no principled objection to performing for Republicans, or anyone else.
“If the Democrats want to invite me, I will go there,” Rosenfeld said. “If Al-Qaeda wants to invite me, we’re there. A check and a microphone, and I’m there. It’s simple.”
The aside came as Rosenfeld, Veiga and Cohen discussed one of Rosenfeld’s favorite ideas — what he calls “moshiach energy.”
“Moshiach energy,” as Rosenfeld puts it, is akin to the Jewish principle of loving your neighbor as yourself and then putting that energy into the universe in order to bring about the coming of the Messiah. The idea is inspired by the last leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — a major source of inspiration for Rosenfeld, who studied at a Lubavitch yeshiva.
Comedian Modi Rosenfeld Rosenfeld speaks with Rabbi Manis Friedman, right, and comedian Periel Aschendbrand on his podcast in November 2021. A portrait of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last rebbe of the Chabad Orthodox movement, is behind Rosenfeld. (Screenshot via YouTube)
It’s an attitude that he says is embodied by his synagogue, which he has attended since it opened in the 1990s.
“I am so fortunate to belong to a synagogue, Sixth Street Community Synagogue, where when you put moshiach energy out, it comes right back at you,” he said.
Schneerson considered homosexuality a sin and advocated for Jews to choose not to yield to homosexual urges. Last year, on his podcast, Rosenfeld hosted a Chabad rabbi, Manis Friedman, the former translator for the Rebbe, who espouses the same view; he said he finds Friedman inspiring even though he may not agree with all of Friedman’s views. It’s one of many instances where Rosenfeld has been able to square his identities in ways that have proved challenging for others.
Greenberg, the executive director of Eshel, agreed with Rosenfeld’s hypothesis that the Variety article would have little effect on the comedian’s ability to book gigs — and he said Rosenfeld’s commitment to Orthodox ideas and practices could work in his favor.
“Maybe some of those organizations that have hired him before will actually think this is an even more important reason to have him,” Greenberg postulated. “Some people will see this as a kind of affirmative step that you don’t have to abandon your religious identity because you’re gay.”
It’s an idea that is central to one of Rosenfeld’s signature jokes. For him, being Jewish means praying with tefillin every day, eating kosher food and observing Shabbat — while also being married to his husband.
“I always say: the Jewish people — we’re not the chosen people, we’re the choosing people,” Rosenfeld said. “Being Jewish is a lifestyle — like Equinox.”
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The post Jewish comedian Modi Rosenfeld, a mainstay for Orthodox audiences, is gay. So what? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How a young woman smuggled weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto
This is a revised version of the original article in Yiddish which you can read here.
On Both Sides of the Wall
Vladka Meed and Steven D. Meed
Citadel Press, 448 pages, $29.00.
“But surely by this morning we will learn something.” It was a sentiment that was going around the Warsaw Ghetto, overheard among the groups of Jews huddled on street corners. On occasion someone would muster up some hopeful words: “Jews, have no fear! You will all see. With God’s help, once more we shall survive the evil decree!” It was July 22, 1942: the first day of the Great Deportation. Any optimism was unfounded: On that day, the Germans led roughly 250,000 Jews to the death camps.
Thus begins the opening scene of On Both Sides of the Wall, Vladka Meed’s memoir of her life in Warsaw during World War II. Her story originally appeared in installments in the Forward shortly after her arrival in America, in 1946, under her real name, Feygele Peytel Miedzyrecki. A book-length edition was published by the educational committee of the Workers Circle in 1948.
In 1977, an English translation came out, with an introduction by Elie Wiesel. Now Meed’s memoir is available in an expanded edition, complete with an introduction from the historian Samuel Kassow and a foreword by the translator, Steven (Shloyme) Meed, Vladka’s son.
Vladka Meed takes the reader into the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto, with its charged atmosphere of hope, terror and despair. She summons the cacophony of those last ten, tragic months of the Ghetto; we hear the voices of Jews, Germans and their Ukrainian accomplices.
Fortunately, Vladka managed to avoid the daily aktsyes (deportation campaigns) when the mundir forces (“Jewish police,” in the ghetto vernacular) would capture Jews for deportation. Vladka soon found herself alone: “My mother, brother, and sister have all been taken from me to some unimaginable fate,” she writes. Vladka was lucky to find a job in one of the workshops that served the Germans.
Following the second selektsye (separation of fit and unfit Jewish laborers) in September 1942, the Jews that remained in the ghetto began preparing for an uprising. Vladka remembers their calls: “If we are to die, anyway, let us die with dignity!” “The enemy must pay a heavy price for our lives!”
As a young girl, Vladka was active in the Jewish Labor Bund, an affiliation that helped keep her alive during the Holocaust. She spoke Polish well without a trace of a Yiddish accent, and had “good Aryan looks.” The leadership of the ghetto’s Bundist underground suggested that she become a courier between the ghetto and the Aryan side. That’s how the young Jewish girl, Feygele Peltel, was transformed into a Polish woman by the name of Wladislawa Kowalska, or simply — Vladka.
Step by step, she integrated into “normal life” among Christian Poles. At first she had high hopes. “I had expected to encounter a strong interest among our Polish neighbors about life within the ghetto,” she writes. But she soon realized that her neighbors preferred very much not to know what was happening on the other side of the ghetto wall.
Vladka and her comrades on the Aryan side were charged with obtaining weapons for the ghetto. But their relations with members of the Polish underground army were poor, and little came of their interactions: “As we travel about the city, trying and failing to get arms…we beg them: ‘Help us to obtain weapons. We are willing to pay well for them!’”
Most of their requests fell on deaf ears. Often they’d hand over payment and receive nothing in return — or worse, their Polish contacts would betray them to the Germans. Even when the Jewish ghetto fighters managed to get their hands on a revolver, another challenge remained: smuggling it into the ghetto.
The book is a gripping read. Vladka Meed is a skillful narrator, and she gives a detailed accounting of her dangerous missions. Any day could have been her last: she never knew if she’d live to see the evening. Vladka had many more failures than successes, and in many cases she was saved by a fateful coincidence.
Kassow’s introduction describes the greater historical context of that period, while Steven Meed provides personal details about his mother’s life before the Holocaust, based on her interviews in the American press.
In his translation, Meed includes bracketed phrases that provide brief, helpful contextual notes. He has also chosen to preserve Yiddish words from the so-called “ghetto language”, like aktsye (action), mundirn (police forces), and blokade (blockade). The choice to keep such vocabulary gives the text an authentic feel, even as Meed’s strategy occasionally raises questions. Why, for example, did he ‘translate’ the word kristin (Christian woman) in the Yiddish as “shikse” (an often pejorative term for a gentile girl) in the English? In general, his translations in the book occasionally veer far from the original.
In the United States, Vladka Meed dedicated her life to Holocaust education. This newest edition of her book carries this mission forward, and constitutes a significant addition to the ever-growing library of documents and research on the Warsaw Ghetto.
Unfortunately, the history of Jewish resistance to German occupation still hasn’t been properly integrated into American Holocaust education, even in Jewish day schools. At the University of Michigan, when I discuss the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with students in my course on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe, I often get this response: “Why didn’t anyone tell us about this in our Holocaust education classes? It’s so important!”
To this day we often view the history of the Holocaust with a focus on mass murder. Vladka Meed’s book, writes Kassow, “demonstrates [that] this battle to stay alive, against all odds, refuted the oft-made claim that Jews went passively to their deaths.”
The post How a young woman smuggled weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto appeared first on The Forward.
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US Senate Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel Fails — but Raises Questions About Future Democratic Support
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A failed Senate vote to block US arms sales to Israel has further exposed a deepening divide within the Democratic Party, one increasingly defined by younger voters and liberals whose views on Israel are shifting rapidly.
The Senate on Wednesday rejected two resolutions led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have halted roughly $450 million in weapons transfers to Israel, including bombs and bulldozers. The measures failed, ensuring the sales will move forward. But the margin, and who supported the effort, marked a significant political inflection point.
Of the 47 Senate Democrats, 40 voted in favor of blocking sales of bulldozers and 36 voted in favor of blocking transfers of so-called “dumb” bombs. The failed vote represents the largest show of opposition to military aid for Israel within the party in recent memory. While previous efforts spearheaded by Sanders drew support from a smaller bloc, this vote saw roughly 80 percent of Senate Democrats vote against transferring aid to the Jewish state, signaling a seismic shift in the dynamic between the Democratic Party and Israel.
Further, many traditionally stalwart supporters of Israel, such as Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Cory Booker (NJ), voted in favor of Sanders’s resolution, signaling that anti-Israel sentiment has migrated from the far-left fringes of the party into the mainstream.
That change is closely tied to evolving public opinion, especially among younger Americans.
Recent polling, including newly released data from the Yale Youth Poll, shows that younger voters are far more critical of Israel than older generations. Large shares of voters under 30 now support restricting or even ending US military aid, a position that departs sharply from the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington. Polls show that a supermajority of Democrats believe that Israel has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza, an assertion which lacks little evidence and has been boosted by foreign entities tied to Iran.
Data also suggests that increased social media consumption aligns with more skeptical attitudes toward foreign policy regarding Israel. Those who receive their news from social media, especially youth-centric platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, are far more likely to exhibit anti-Israel animus than those who consume traditional broadcast news media.
The Senate vote reflects the increasing pressure of Democratic lawmakers to stake an aggressive stance against Israel. Several lawmakers who backed the resolutions argued that continued arms transfers should be reconsidered amid the expanding regional conflict involving Iran and mounting humanitarian concerns. They argued that the Trump White House has not sought out appropriate congressional approval for the ongoing war in Iran. Many also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, suggesting that he has escalated hostilities in the region rather than acted in self-defense from existential threats. These same voices expressed dismay at civilian casualties in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.
The lawmakers largely framed their votes not as opposition to Israel’s existence, but as a challenge to current policies and the use of US-supplied weapons.
Opponents, including most Republicans, maintained that US military support remains essential to Israel’s security, particularly as tensions with Iran escalate. They warned that blocking arms sales could weaken a key ally in a volatile region.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization dedicated to increasing support for the GOP among Jews, framed the vote as reflective of a broader anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party.
“There is only ONE pro-Israel party, and it is the Republican Party,” RJC wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the group J Street, endorsed the vote as an “encouraging” sign of progress.
“It’s encouraging to see a growing number of senators recognize that unconditional US military support for Israel is no longer tenable in light of the Netanyahu government’s policies. The work now is to translate that shift into action: alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, stopping violence on the West Bank and pursuing paths to end the ongoing fighting across the region,” Ben-Ami wrote.
A self-proclaimed “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobbying organization, J Street has come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to combat antisemitism or anti-Israel narratives within liberal political circles.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), one of the most strident defenders of Israel in Congress, criticized his party’s turn against Israel, saying in a new CNN interview that they have “boxed themselves in” by supporting Sanders’s resolution. He dismissed the notion that Democrats would become more likely to support Israel with a change in Israeli leadership.
“When Netanyahu goes, and you’re now on record with this, you’re going to revert back and say that now that he’s gone, I can now start sending offensive weapons?” Moskowitz pondered.
Despite the failure of the resolutions, the size of the Democratic vote in favor underscores how quickly the political landscape is changing ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
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Duke University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Over Antisemitic Political Cartoon
Aerial view of Duke University on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Duke University has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and impounded its money for posting an antisemitic political cartoon on social media, The Duke Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
According to the student paper, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. The image was created in 1970 by political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
The Chronicle said the image elicited no fewer than 10 formal complaints from Jewish students for showing a blatant antisemitic trope. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further into history, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
In a statement to the Chronicle, SJP denied that it intended to endorse the cartoon’s antisemitic messaging, saying it “was never intended to be antisemitic” and that anti-Zionist activism is “not the same as targeting Jewish people.”
This was not the first time that the anti-Zionist group posted antisemitic imagery. In 2024, the Harvard chapter of its faculty spinoff, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP), posted a political cartoon of a Jew lynching an African American and an Arab. In the illustration, a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David and containing a dollar sign at its center dangles a Black man and an Arab man from a noose. In its posterior, an arm belonging to an unknown person of color wields a machete that says, “Liberation Movement.”
Such activity is an integral part of the playbook of anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging on social media, scholars have found.
From 2013 to 2024, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University studied over 76,000 posts created by Students for Justice in Palestine and its affiliates, finding that over half, 54.9 percent, included only a single, evocative image.
“In contrast, Reels (5.3%) and Videos (4.9%) are used far less frequently,” the institute said in a report based on its research. “Based on these descriptions, we see a strong preference among campus-based anti-Israel groups for static visual formats, suggesting that this type of bimodal content represents the highest form of shareability within activists networks.”
To boost their audience and reach, pro-Hamas groups also post together in what ISCA described as “co-authored posts,” of which there were over 20,000 between 2013 and 2024. Their content set off strong emotions in the individual users exposed to them, inciting incidents of antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and violence. Such outrages, it added, increased in proportion to the concentration of anti-Israel groups on a single campus, evidence of “particularly strong” correlation.
ISCAP’s conclusions can be found in the real world, as SJP and its network of student groups have helped fuel a historic wave of antisemitic incidents on college campuses over the past two and a half years — from spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew” to gang assaulting Jews at Columbia University’s Butler Library.
SJP has also expressed its hope of inciting insurrection in the US and amassing a jihadist army.
In 2024, the national SJP organization proclaimed on X that the anti-Zionist student movement is a weapon for destroying the US, saying that “divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal” but enacted with the later goal of initiating “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” On the same day the group issued the statement, Columbia University’s most strident SJP spinoff, created after SJP was suspended, was reported to have distributed literature which called for “popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to a previous event. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.