(JTA) — A California man who pleaded guilty to the 2023 death of Jewish protester Paul Kessler was sentenced Tuesday to one year in county jail and two years of felony probation, the Ventura County District Attorney announced.

Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji, 54, of Moorpark, California, pleaded guilty in May to felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury for the death of Kessler, as part of a plea deal that was sharply criticized by local Jewish leaders.

Alnaji admitted to striking Kessler, a 69-year-old Jewish pro-Israel activist, in the head with a megaphone during dueling pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrations in a Los Angeles suburb in November 2023. Kessler later died of his injuries. His death became the first tied to U.S. demonstrations surrounding the war in Gaza.

“There are no words to describe the pain of losing a husband in such a sudden and violent way,” Kessler’s wife wrote in an impact statement prior to the sentencing. “The grief is relentless. The silence in our house, the absence of his voice, his companionship, his love and the future we had planned together are losses I carry with me every day.”

Ventura County Superior Court Judge Derek Malan said during the June 30 sentencing that he had received 132 emails from community members regarding the case, many of which advocated for a harsher sentence for Alnaji and called the case a murder or hate crime.

Malan said that while he understood that the Jewish community could see his sentence as a devaluing of human life, the case was not “a Jewish life versus a Muslim life,” according to the VC Star.

“When we try to equate a life with a number, we fail,” Malan said during the June 30 sentencing, according to the VC Star. “The rules do support a grant of probation in this case.”

The Anti-Defamation League of California decried the ruling in a post on Instagram, writing that it was “little more than a slap on the wrist and not in proportion with the enormity of this crime.”

“It’s especially concerning that the Court spent much of the sentencing hearing expressing dismay with the letters received from the Jewish community and asking the DA’s Office to correct the perceptions of those who expressed how this woefully inadequate sentence would impact the Jewish community,” the post continued.

Alnaji’s defense attorney, Ron Bamieh, told Malan that his client was a “good person,” and that the November 2023 incident was “isolated,” according to the VC Star. He also read aloud a letter Alnaji wrote to Malan.

“I never wanted to harm anyone,” Bamieh said, reading Alnaji’s letter. “The grief I carry from that day is something I will live with always.”

Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko objected to the sentencing of Alnaji in a statement Tuesday.

“Mr. Kessler lost his life in a violent attack that took him from his family and his wife of 43 years,” Nasarenko said. “Given the circumstances of this case and the death that resulted, we believe a state prison commitment was the appropriate and just sentence.”

Bamieh addressed the ruling in a post on Instagram Tuesday, writing that “Kessler’s death is a tragedy. Nothing about this case changes that, and Dr. Alnaji has never pretended otherwise.”

“The court was clear today: this was never a murder case —no intent to kill could be proven. It was never a hate crime — no evidence of hate,” Bamieh wrote. “It was a battery that led to an accidental, tragic death.”

Rabbi Noah Farkas, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, told JTA in a statement that the case was a “stark reminder that hateful rhetoric has tragic, real-world consequences.”

“While we had hoped for a sentence that more fully reflected the seriousness of the crime, we hope the outcome offers some comfort to Kessler’s family, friends, and the Jewish community,” Farkas said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post California man gets 1 year in jail time for 2023 death of pro-Israel protester appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — A New York woman was arrested and charged with attempting to provide financial support to “Palestine Islamic Jihad,” a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist group, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

Catherine Beth Washburn, 37, of Irondequoit, New York, allegedly sent more than $30,000 in cryptocurrency across 80 transactions to an individual who identified as a Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighter in Gaza and claimed to have engaged in attacks against Israel, according to the Justice Department.

She was charged with attempting to provide material support and resources, namely currency, to a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

“As alleged in the complaint, this defendant, fueled by her self-described hate of Israel and Jewish people, went to great lengths to attempt to provide financial support to terrorist organizations that use violence to further their agendas, including the Palestine Islamic Jihad,” Michael DiGiacomo, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York, said in a statement.

Despite Washburn’s alleged attempts to “support violent extremism,” he added, she was “stopped.”

In February and March 2026, the FBI obtained alleged communications between Washburn and the Islamic Jihad fighter in which she told him that she wished “every day were October 7th.”

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is an Iran-backed Palestinian terror group that attacked Israel alongside Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, during which its fighters abducted and killed Israeli citizens, including Dror Or, who was killed in Kibbutz Be’eri, and Oded Lifshitz, who was killed in captivity, and Gadi Mozes and Arbel Yehud, who were abducted by the group and released in January 2025.

“[I]f I lived in Gaza, I would fight alongside the resistance,” Washburn allegedly wrote, adding that she hated Jews “very much,” and that she wished Israel “would disappear.”

In one message, Washburn allegedly stated, “I feel excited every time I see news of the killing of an occupation soldier.”

Attempts to reach Washburn for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency were unsuccessful.

According to the criminal complaint, Washburn is a leader of the Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation, an extremist anti-Zionist group. The group, which operates in the United States and abroad, was launched last spring and engages in “direct action” to “protest, attack, destory [sic], sabotage and shut down Zionist and U.S infrastructures & business and all its affiliates,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.

In August 2025, an affiliate of the group, Jermaiah Yusuf Sawaqed, 25, of Everett, Massachusetts, was charged with vandalizing the Massachusetts State House with paint.

Washburn made an initial appearance Tuesday afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark W. Pedersen and was detained.

The post NY woman charged with attempting to send over $30,000 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad appeared first on The Forward.

New president Jennifer Mnookin took the helm of Columbia University July 1, vowing to chart a steady course following a tumultuous Gaza War protest movement and Trump administration threats to pull funding that led the Ivy to make a controversial pledge for reforms.

The government also threatened a takeover of the department called Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department (MESAAS), which has long been associated with the Palestinian cause and known as a hub for scholarship critical of Israel.

Columbia’s July 2025 agreement, issued in response to allegations that the protests amounted to discrimination against Jews on campus, pledged to “conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting with the Middle East” to ensure offerings are “comprehensive and balanced.”

Nearly a year later, the department has been left untouched, according to its chair, Gil Hochberg.

“No requests, suggestions, recommendations, changes were made or enforced by the university on MESAAS as a department. Our academic autonomy has been respectfully preserved,” she said in an interview with the Forward. “The department itself has not been directly or indirectly affected.”

Columbia has made other moves to offer more courses that cover Israel. But undergraduates who study the region say that fragmentation makes pursuing a major challenging.

Orpaz Zamir, a Middle East Studies major at Columbia who hopes to pursue a career in Mideast policy, said courses focused on the conflict are limited. “If you want to study about Israel and Palestine, there are only two classes you can take,” referring to a sociology course taught by Professor Yinon Cohen and the course taught by Massad. He took both.

Massad, the only professor currently teaching about the conflict in MESAAS, has been the department’s chief lightning rod. His article a day after the Oct. 7 attacks, describing the Israeli victims as “colonists” and videos of the attacks as “awesome,” sparked a petition with 70,000 signatures to remove him from Columbia. Massad, who is tenured, has been teaching the course Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies for years. Among his students was Darializa Avila Chevalier, a former Columbia Gaza encampment leader who last week defeated a longtime New York congressman on an anti-Israel platform and drew criticism for her refusal to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks. As an undergrad, she called Massad her favorite professor.

In Spring 2024, a visiting professor, Mohamad Abdou, was fired amid the Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism because of a social media post he made shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks that read: “I’m with the muqawamah [the resistance] be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.”

Activist faculty made headlines but also spoke to a broader reality, as identified by an internal Columbia University antisemitism task force that found in its December 2025 report that “Columbia lacks full-time tenure line faculty expertise in Middle East history, politics, political economy, and policy that is not explicitly anti-Zionist.”

The same report concluded: “Many Jewish and Israeli students reported that if they want to study the Middle East at Columbia, there currently are not enough options that don’t treat Zionism and Israel as fundamentally illegitimate.”

Exam questions

Students interviewed by the Forward describe experiences consistent with those findings. Zamir said he found Cohen’s course on Israel more balanced than Massad’s, though concluded the assigned readings disproportionately favored the Palestinian perspectives.

“To the Palestinian side, he would give entire chapters and long readings, and then for the pro-Israel side it would be mostly a few pages of an article,” said Zamir. “There’s one book that they did give to us that was a bit more pro-Israeli, but it was pro-Israeli in the bad sense, like it justified ethnic cleansing. It’s not the kind of thing that I would support.”

In Massad’s course, Zamir saw discussions of the conflict reflect a particular ideological viewpoint.

He recalled Massad questioning evidence of Hamas sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attacks and disputing claims that Hamas intentionally targets civilians. Zamir also found the questions on exams to be problematic. On one exam, Zamir said, two out of three questions had to do with how Zionism collaborated with the Nazis. On the final exam, one of three questions asked students whether Israel had the right to exist.

“Because he didn’t give any reason in class for why Israel should exist, it’s very hard to answer that question with anything other than ‘no,’” Zamir said. He said he drew on arguments he had learned outside the course to argue that Israel did have that right — and received full credit for the answer.

Zamir noted that despite their ideological differences, Massad made an effort to make him feel welcomed as the only Israeli in the class, even when fellow students didn’t.

Other students interested in the subject described similar difficulties finding courses they viewed as balanced.

“I was looking up every professor and looking pretty scrutinizingly through the description of every class,” said Zev Huneycutt, a rising senior majoring in Middle East studies, economics and political science.

“In the Middle East studies department, when I would look them up, and they’d have leveled this kind of crazy criticism of Israel, and it’s not stuff like, ‘I have some issues with current Israeli government policies,’ it’s stuff that goes a little farther than that. It’s delegitimizing, and I’m like, ‘Okay, well, I’m not taking that professor then.’”

In February, as part of the agreement with the federal government, Columbia published an internal review committee’s recommendations and commitments from several academic departments to enhance Middle East-focused offerings — almost all of which are set to occur outside the MESAAS department.

Indeed, the first recommendation from the review committee reads: “Expand coursework on the Middle East … by developing offerings that complement — and are clearly differentiated from — courses offered by MESAAS.”

Hochberg concludes that this is because MESAAS is already fulfilling its mandate. She noted that the department was “rigorously reviewed” both internally and externally in 2024 during the standard review process that takes place for every department at Columbia every eight years.

“It would be very strange to have another, and the university would never do that,” she said, adding that the review done in 2024 generated a file of 20 pages of recommendations detailing the strengths and weaknesses of the department. According to Hochberg, none of the recommendations made in internal and external reviews had to do with how Israel is taught at MESAAS.

Hochberg, who was born in Israel and identifies as an anti-Zionist, has previously taught courses on Israeli culture. Serving as chair of MESAAS for the past six years, she said, administrative responsibilities have required her to step back from teaching those courses, contributing to what she acknowledges as a gap in the department’s offerings on Israel.

She contends much of the criticism of an anti-Israel bias within MESAAS has been overblown. “It’s a very vigorous department,” she said. “The picture of it as being like a propaganda machine, it’s just not fair.”

Arab Studies search

Though Columbia has left MESAAS largely untouched, it has made additions to other departments and institutes, including bringing on a visiting professor in the economics department to teach about the Middle East, and arranging a visiting appointment in the History Department to teach the history of modern Israel. Its School of International and Public Affairs has appointed a visiting professor, jointly with Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, to teach on the Jewish world and Middle East policy with courses beginning this fall.

The university also plans to hire a new Edward Said Professor in Modern Arab Studies and Literature, a tenured position that was vacated last August by Rashid Khalidi, a leading scholar of Palestinian history. Khalidi cited the university’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism as part of its agreement with the federal government — which equates denying Jews their right to self-determination in Israel with antisemitism — as his reason for resigning.

One potential candidate, Max Weiss, was active in Princeton’s pro-Palestinian movement, serving as a spokesperson when faculty occupied Princeton’s Clio Hall in April 2024 and 13 people were arrested. Another, Rosie Bsheer, was removed from her leadership post at Harvard after she organized a panel that former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers described as “very likely” antisemitic under the IHRA definition.

The university also plans to launch a new undergraduate major in Global Affairs and Public Policy, which it says will expand Middle East course offerings. But the proposal has drawn criticism. In a June 15 statement, the Student Affairs Committee of the University Senate, a body that sets campus policy, questioned “the role of the Global Affairs and Public Policy major in regard to the federal resolution agreement’s commitment to offer politically prescribed curricula on the Middle East.”

To help expose students to a range of analyses of the Middle East, the internal review committee encouraged cross-listing among the Jewish studies institute, MESAAS and the proposed new program.

But this upcoming school year, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is offering several courses that pertain to the Middle East, including a course on the history of modern Israel and a course on Jews living in North Africa, that are not cross-listed with MESAAS. (The Institute’s director declined to speak with the Forward, saying that she does not discuss Columbia in the media.)

The only Israel-focused course that MESAAS will cross-list for the upcoming year is the sociology course taught by Cohen.

According to Hochberg, “There are absolutely no political barriers to including courses offered by Jewish and Israel studies in the department, and there never have been.”

She said, “I don’t think it’s a hostile relationship between MESAAS and IIJS. There’s just no substantial relationship. But we do cross-list some courses.”

For Zamir, Columbia’s new reforms are unlikely to address what he views as the underlying problem.

“Adding some classes in the Israel Institute won’t change things, because no one will take a class in the Israel Institute unless they are pro-Israeli to begin with,” he said. “If it’s in the Middle East department, it’s like ‘okay, well, it sounds neutral,’ even though it’s definitely not.”

Lishi Baker, who graduated this spring with a major in history and a specialization in the Middle East, said he largely built his Middle East studies education outside the MESAAS department. He sees the university’s efforts to expand Middle East offerings in other departments as a welcome development.

“A lot of people do what I did, which is study the Middle East through other departments,” Baker said.

He pieced together courses from the History Department, political science, policy school and Jewish studies, ultimately earning a minor in Jewish studies because many of the courses he took related to Israel did not count toward his major.

“I think now, the best place to study the Middle East at Columbia is everywhere but the Middle East Studies Department,” said Baker.

The post Columbia University pledged to revamp Mideast offerings. Students of the subject say fragmented courses fall short. appeared first on The Forward.