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Rabbi David Wolpe, stepping down from a top pulpit, wants you to stop arguing and start listening

(JTA) — David Wolpe has been called one of the most quoted rabbis in the United States, and not always to his advantage. As senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, one of the largest and most visible Conservative pulpits in the country, the decisions he makes and things he says are often treated as bellwethers of centrist American Jewry. When he questioned the historicity of the Exodus story or began performing same-sex marriages, for example, he made front-page news.
Wolpe has also led an unusually diverse synagogue, with pews filled both by largely liberal Jews of Ashkenazi descent and Persian Jews with roots in Iran who tend to be more politically conservative. Bridging these divides has been a signature of his rabbinate, and in recent years he has been writing and tweeting about civil discourse in increasingly polarized times.
On Friday, Wolpe, 63, became emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple, where he had been the senior rabbi since 1997. As he prepared to step aside – he’ll spend the next year as a fellow at Harvard Divinity School — he joined me in a public Zoom conversation Tuesday to talk about what he learned as a rabbi, the changes he has seen in American Judaism, and his hopes and fears for the future. But I especially wanted to talk about the polarized political climate and his views on moral and political discourse (with which I have occasionally disagreed). We also talked about rabbis who speak about politics from the pulpit, a topic which led to a fascinating back-and- forth among Wolpe and his colleagues in the pages of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.
“We’re much more polarized than we were in 1997,” Wolpe, the author of eight books and a long-running column in the New York Jewish Week, told me. “Everybody knows that. And you can get into much more trouble by expressing an opinion on one or the other side of a controversial issue than you could back then.”
Our conversation was wide-ranging, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing here. Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity, focusing on our discussion of civil discourse.
You have a famously diverse synagogue. What were some of the cultural and political divides that you had to bridge and how have they changed?
There were political divides, first of all. I have right and left. I have some very ardent supporters of Trump and very ardent detractors. And there was a cultural divide because the patterns of language and so on of the Persian community and the Ashkenazi community were different. I wrote about this in a forthcoming New York Times editorial, about the two best ways to bridge [these divides]. I’ll take a step back to explain it more fully than I did there. We don’t have a common culture. Nobody reads the same books. Nobody watches the same movies. Nobody watches the same television shows. I mean, the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode [of “Dallas,” in 1980] drew tens of millions of views, but the finale of something like “Succession” draws a couple million. The one thing everyone has in common is politics. So when people talk, when they meet each other, they start with politics, which is guaranteed to cause division.
Sinai Temple, where David Wolpe was senior rabbi starting in 1997, is known for the political and ethnic diversity of its large congregation. (Courtesy Sinai Temple)
One of the things I tried to encourage in the synagogue was to get people to know each other in different ways than opening the conversation about politics. Talk about your kids. Talk about school. Talk about what you’d like to do on vacation, talk about food. Talk about life so that you know the person as a person before they express their opinion so at the outset of the conversation you wouldn’t totally dismiss them. And the other thing I encourage, which is difficult, is just listening. Understand that growing up in Tehran gives you a different view of the world than growing up in Philadelphia. And I have to respect the fact that it’s a very different orientation. And in order to understand it, I can’t tell someone else what to think. I have to listen to what they think and ask questions about it. Which is not easy. Here’s a little Hebrew lesson: The word “savlanut,” which means patience in Hebrew, comes from the word “seivel,” which means to suffer. Because patience is suffering sometimes, but you have to go through it to understand others.
I want to talk a little bit more about how you bridge those gaps. But I want to go back to a famous moment in your rabbinate. This is in 2001, when in a series of sermons you cited archaeologists who said that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all. The L.A. Times picks up the story. And you were accused by some as being the rabbi who chose science and history over faith and Judaism. I want to ask not just about that, but also what you think a rabbi would have to say today to spark a similar furor.
I’m going to start with the first part. My whole point in the sermon was that it didn’t matter — that actual faith transcends the facts of the case. And that I celebrate Passover the same way despite the fact that archaeologists rebut the historical record, and also that you can’t make historical claims and then tell archaeologists “what you say doesn’t matter.” But that is a separate controversy for another time.
I think today it’s very audience-dependent. If you got up in a Reform congregation and said that, you wouldn’t cause a ruckus, but if you got up in an Orthodox congregation and said that — most, but not all — you would cause a furor. When I came out for same-sex marriage, it was on the front page of The New York Times and the L.A. Times because it caused such a furor in the congregation. When that happened, I said to my daughter, “I want you to know when you go to school tomorrow, people are going to be saying bad things about your father,” and she said to me, “Why?” And I said because I’m sending a letter that I’m going to be doing same-sex marriages. I remember her looking at me and saying, “What took you so long?” Because for her it was like I was saying, “I’m gonna marry brown-haired people to blonde-haired people.” She didn’t understand why that was an issue. The nature of controversies change a lot, but there will always be controversies.
So how did you weather it? What helps you keep congregants on board – or not, and decide it’s okay to let some congregants slip away?
If you believe what you’re saying matters and is true, it helps a lot. I also told my daughter what Churchill said, I think after the Boer War, which is “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” In other words, the people who didn’t like me before didn’t like me after, and the people who loved me before loved me after. You realize that there is an immediate cost to being true to yourself, but there’s a long-range, huge benefit and that it’s worth it. So I was very fortunate. I didn’t lose my job. I didn’t lose my friends. You know, there are people who take stands and they lose much more than I did. And obviously, you know, if you’re in a different kind of country, you lose even more than that. So, I think if you’re given a pulpit, then to the extent that you believe something, it’s really important to enunciate from the pulpit, and that you can [create] change by doing it. You have a responsibility.
Still, there’s a big debate over whether rabbis should be talking politics from the pulpit. Where do you stand on that? What do you think are the limits of literally the bully pulpit?
I’m very, very opposed, actually, to rabbis talking politics from the pulpit, and I’ll tell you why I say that. First of all, it’s not like I know more about politics than my congregants. So if I talked about gun control, for example, about which I have strong feelings, I’m talking to people who know as much or more about it than I do, who see it differently. And it seems to me it is an illegitimate arrogation of my role as a rabbi to say that “because I see it this way, this is Judaism’s position,” which is generally how it’s framed. I actually gave a class years ago where I took a whole bunch of issues — immigration, abortion, women’s rights — and I gave all the Jewish sources on both sides, just so people should realize that Judaism speaks to both sides of these issues.
I always ask rabbis who speak politically from the pulpit, “If you were not a rabbi, if you were not even Jewish, would your political position be different?” In other words, is your political position mandated by what you understand the Torah to be even though it’s not your personal position? Or is it just your personal position filtered through the Torah? And almost inevitably, it’s the personal position, filtered through the Torah. That to me is just basically preaching politics with a little Judaic twist. And I don’t think that’s what a rabbi should be doing. If there is one place that can be a refuge in a country that is saturated with politics all the time, so that you can actually elevate your soul and hear things about your life and about Jewish history and aspiration, it seems to me it would be the synagogue. I should say as a caveat, I exempt Israel from that: Being pro-Israel seems to me a fundamental Jewish tenet and not a political one.
But I want to push back a little bit. Historically, we look back with such pride on rabbis like Abraham Joshua Heschel or Joachim Prinz in Newark, who in a very polarized time in this country took a strong stand and threw their Jewishness, threw their pulpits, they threw their whole selves into the civil rights movement.
That is the example that people always point to: Heschel. And I say that’s exactly right, because it’s the exception, it’s not the rule. If there is a radical injustice being perpetrated — and I felt, for example, [the denial of] gay marriage was a radical injustice — then you speak up. But everything becomes a question of radical injustice now, everything, every political issue. Civil rights was a uniquely morally urgent issue, about which I really believe it was right to speak up, but those are few and far between. And instead what happens is everything gets thrown into the same pot. Minimum wage becomes just as urgent and people will invoke civil rights to argue one way or another on minimum wage and every other issue in the world, and whether you should be a Republican or a Democrat. And the way that they speak about the other part of the country, it’s like, “they’re obviously radically immoral and terrible.” And I don’t think the rabbi should contribute to that discourse, except in the most extreme circumstances, which obviously civil rights was.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (far right) marches with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery on March 21, 1965. (Getty)
You’ve been writing frequently in the journal Sapir about the ethics of dialogue. And in one essay you ask, “How should we respond when someone promulgates a view with which we disagree, or one that we find offensive, repugnant, even dangerous?” So I’ll throw that question back to you. How do we respond?
The first way you respond is you ask the person, “Why do you believe that?” Because you’ll learn much more and you might discover interesting facts both about the person and about the belief that you didn’t know at first. I’ve had this discussion many, many times with people who have political beliefs that differ from my own and once you actually interrogate the belief, then you can respond to it. But we’ve become a culture in which the way you respond is by attacking the person. I also want to say that, in my experience, most of the political diatribes that we hear change nobody’s mind. Instead, they make your team feel good. And the other team doesn’t even listen to you.
What also tends to happen is that if you reach out your own team gets upset, because you’re just supposed to be supporting them and you’re not supposed to be listening to the other side. But the Talmud is filled with argument and debate. And the reason you listen to the house of Hillel and not the house of Shammai [two famous antagonists in the Talmud] is because of the way they conducted themselves during the debate. They let Shammai express their opinion first. They listened. They were kind. They were understanding. So this is a multifaceted question. It’s not just a question of abstract opinion. It’s also a question of the way you bear yourself in the public square.
But I wonder if something’s changed. I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but in terms of public debate I think there’s a different dialogue when one side is trying to muster facts and good-faith arguments, and the other side responds with straw man arguments and conspiracy theories. I’m wondering when trying to seek an argument for the sake of Heaven falls down because one side isn’t really willing to play by the rules.
First of all, I’ve seen both sides indulge in conspiracy theories and false facts. And while one side may be more egregiously guilty of this than the other, I’m always suspicious of someone who thinks their own side doesn’t do this. So if you’re willing to fess up and say “we do this” and then you turn to the other person and say “I see your side doing this,” that’s the beginning of a dialogue. Instead, what I hear is, “My side does facts. Your side does conspiracy.” That’s not going to start a dialogue. So if you’re willing to look at your own shortcomings, then you have the possibility of actually starting a dialogue. But that isn’t what I see. And I don’t want to make this all about the worst actors on [either] side. Because there’s a range and I see that in the people that I talk to.
You also recently tweeted, along the same lines, “Being right is increasingly favored over searching for truth. A healthy society like a thoughtful individual values discovery over justification.” That sounds like a summary of what you’ve been saying.
I had this proposal that I don’t know will ever be realized. I wanted everybody to have a politics dinner. And the idea was, you had to take the other person’s position. You could not express the opinion you believed in. You just had to take the other person’s position and see how well you could articulate what you think the other believes. Because when you start to do that, you start to realize that the other side actually has things that are worth hearing, and truth never resides entirely on one side of the argument. I want to be clear: That does not mean that I don’t favor certain sides over other sides and there aren’t people in the public sphere that I am not fans of, to say the least. But that alone doesn’t help advance the dialogue. To say that doesn’t move things forward. And I’m really interested in trying to move things forward.
What does “moving things forward” mean in this regard?
Genuine discussions with people who you really disagree with — that’s what I think of as moving things forward. Not ruling them out of court because they support this candidate or that candidate. This is not too crazy. You and I grew up in an America where people actually did this. Let me give you a statistic that I find really striking. When I was young, if you asked the average American, “How do you feel about your child marrying someone of another race?” The percentage was very small of Americans who felt good about that. If you said, “How do you feel about your child marrying someone of another political party?” Overwhelmingly, people were in favor of that. Now the numbers have exactly flipped. Now, that shows you that we can change for good and we can change for ill but the only way to change for good is by actually really engaging with the other. Otherwise, we’re going to dig deeper and deeper bunkers. And that can’t be good for America or for the world.
What are the limits of engagement? I’m thinking of when organizations are pressured to cancel a speaker because one side claims the other poses a threat or is somehow beyond the pale. Are there red lines that Jewish organizations shouldn’t be expected to cross?
I would not invite a Holocaust denier to speak to a Jewish organization.
An anti-Zionist?
I wouldn’t invite an anti-Zionist, but if a Jewish organization did, I would not say that they should never have done that. But I would say that they have an obligation to have somebody speak to the other side of that question. Because anti-Zionism to me often shades into antisemitism — they’re not exactly identical, but they’re closer than second cousins.
My general predisposition is that the way you combat bad ideas is with good ideas, not by saying those bad ideas can’t be heard, because we know this strategy doesn’t work. All it does is give fuel to the people who have bad ideas [to say] “Oh, you see, you don’t even want to engage with me. That’s because my idea is so dangerous that you can’t stand to hear it.”
I can give you other examples. I wouldn’t invite a Jew for Jesus to speak at a Jewish institution either. I have specific reasons. But it’s tricky, and there is no perfect distinction that you can make. I think we should try to err on the side of being a listener, as opposed to a censor.
Israelis and American Jews protest outside a Teaneck, New Jersey synagogue where Israeli politician Simcha Rothman, a leading figure in his government’s push to overhaul the judicial system, was giving a speech, June 1, 2023. (JTA)
I’ll throw out one more example and this is purely hypothetical: perhaps inviting an Israeli cabinet member who represents anti-democratic tendencies in the Jewish state.
If I were in that [institution] I would ask them to have somebody cross-examine this person, as opposed to just have them speak, because I think those views are too important to pretend they don’t exist, but they’re also too toxic to not be challenged.
At the risk of making you repeat yourself, I want to refer to the chat that is accompanying this Zoom. I don’t know if you have been following it but what I’m seeing is people saying that there are political questions that are moral questions, and if we overdo the idea of trying to learn from the other side, we are conceding a moral, just stance.
I hear this all the time. But what you don’t understand is that you hear it from both sides.
But that doesn’t mean both sides are right.
My brother who’s an ethicist [Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University] says ethical dilemmas are almost always a choice between two rights, not between a right and a wrong. And in every political question there are usually buried in it two things that are principles that everybody agrees with but just that we favor one principle over another. So for example, with immigration, the humane treatment of human beings, the right of a country to define its own borders and to decide who it is and who it isn’t. And we see this in multiple ways. And it’s not so easy to say this is clearly right and this is clearly wrong. And understand I’m not asking you to not take a stand. If someone wants to ask me my private opinion, I’m always happy to give it. I pull no punches when they ask me what I think of this person or that person in private. That’s not the question. The question is how do we conduct public dialogue so it’s not just two people shouting at each other? And believe me, as soon as you say to the other side, “I’m just right and moral and you’re just wrong” you have just closed down the possibility that you can talk. And if you want to do that, you can, but realize that that will just mean that everybody in your camp will agree with you, and everybody in our camp won’t listen to you, and nothing will get done.
People always hear listening as giving up on your own moral position. But it’s not. It’s listening. It’s being able to hear that someone else also has a moral position, even if you disagree with it. And if you really understand, if you can express the other person’s opinion really well — if you can do that well, then I think you’re ready to say, “and this is why I disagree with it.” But if you’re going to caricature it as just, well, “you’re an immoral jerk,” then honestly, you don’t understand what you’re arguing against.
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New Research Links South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel to Growing Ties With Iran

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Chatsworth, South Africa, May 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rogan Ward
Newly released research links South Africa’s expanding ties with Iran to its contentious genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), raising questions about the motives behind Pretoria’s legal battle.
Last month, the Middle East Africa Research Institute (MEARI) unveiled a report exploring the South African government’s relationship with Iran and the ways in which this partnership has shaped the country’s foreign policy.
The report — “Ties to Tehran: South Africa’s Democracy and Its Relationship With Iran: — argues that deepening ties with Tehran has led South Africa to compromise its democratic foundations and constitutional principles, aligning itself with a regime internationally condemned for terrorism, repression, and human rights abuses.
While Iran maintains support for South Africa’s coalition government in part due to a shared revolutionary, liberation ideology, Pretoria has frequently defended Tehran at the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by voting against sanctions or choosing to abstain, the report says.
In doing so, the study claims that the South African government has both undermined its democratic values and bolstered Iran’s regional ambitions by defending its nuclear program and downplaying its human rights abuses.
Adam Charnas, an analyst at the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), condemned the government’s long-standing ties with Iran and other regimes with questionable human rights records, calling them deeply troubling.
“This relationship was notably underscored when, shortly after Oct. 7, then-Minister of International Relations, Naledi Pandor, visited Iran for a two-week period to meet with [then-Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi],” Charnas told The Algemeiner.
“South Africa’s foreign policy appears to be more concerned with enhancing relations with rogue states,” he continued. “This narrow and party-led strategy jeopardizes its relationship with key trading partners rather than with addressing domestic challenges or advancing the welfare of its citizens.”
MEARI’s report also questions whether South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, the UN’s top court, was genuinely rooted in constitutional principles — or driven by outside political pressure.
According to the study, South Africa’s open hostility toward Israel and its biased approach in filing the case — failing to acknowledge Hamas’s role in launching the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel — undermines the government’s credibility.
At the time of the ICJ filing, senior South African officials were holding high-level meetings in Tehran.
The study explains that shortly afterward, the ruling African National Congress (ANC), struggling with financial difficulties, unexpectedly paid off a multi-million-rand debt, fueling speculation about possible covert support from Iran.
“The evidence for such a claim is entirely circumstantial, but bears relating. In early December 2023, the ANC, South Africa’s ruling party, faced imminent liquidation. It allegedly owed R102 million to a service provider, which it could not pay,” the report says.
In prior years, the ANC has on several occasions been unable to pay staff salaries. But just days after the South African government filed its case against Israel at the ICJ, which MEARI drescribes as “an undertaking involving a phalanx of lawyers of international stature that could cost as much as R1.5 billion [about $84.35 million] in taxpayer money,” the ANC announced that it had reached an out-of-court settlement with its creditor to settle its debt and turned its finances around.
However, since the party’s finances were not available to the public, a fact-check by a leading South African newspaper could not find evidence to prove that the ANC had received funding from any particular source, Iran or otherwise.
Although the ANC claimed it complies with South African law requiring the of donor funding exceeding R100,000, the law is “weakly enforced,” MEARI notes.
“It could be pure coincidence that Hamas thanked South Africa for bringing a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ, and that this case aligns perfectly with the ‘mutual bilateral interests’ of South Africa and Iran,” the report says, with a not-so-subtle bit of sarcasm. “It could be pure coincidence that within days of taking this grave step, South Africa’s the ruling party, the ANC, managed to pull back from the brink of bankruptcy by settling a substantial debt out of court after having ignored multiple court orders and left staff unpaid.”
Since December 2023, South Africa has been pursuing its case accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
Both Iran and Hamas have publicly praised the South African government’s legal action.
For its part, Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Jewish community has lambasted the case as “grandstanding” rather than actual concern for those killed in the Middle Eastern conflict.
Last year, the ICJ ruled there was “plausibility” to South Africa’s claims that Palestinians had a right to be protected from genocide.
However, the top UN court did not make a determination on the merits of South Africa’s allegations, nor did it call for Israel to halt its military campaign. Instead, the ICJ issued a more general directive that Israel must make sure it prevents acts of genocide.
The ruling also called for the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 rampage.
“It could be that South Africa simply did not have the resources to respond in international courts to the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war crimes committed by the latter in the pursuit of that war of aggression,” the MEARI report says. “It could be that it didn’t feel there was sufficient historical solidarity to oblige it to speak out about genocides of Uyghurs in China, or Rohingya in Myanmar, but Israel just went a step too far.”
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the South African government has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel’s military campaign, which seeks to free the hostages kidnapped by the terrorists and dismantle Hamas’s military and administrative control in Gaza.
Beyond its open hostility toward Israel, South Africa has actively supported Iran’s terrorist proxy by hosting two Hamas officials at a state-backed conference expressing solidarity with the Palestinians in December 2023.
In one instance, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa led the crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
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German Media Investigation Reveals Gaza Photographer Staged Images of Despair, Prompting Agencies to Cut Ties

Palestinians carry aid supplies that entered Gaza through Israel, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, July 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Two leading German newspapers have released a joint investigation accusing Gaza-based photojournalists of staging images of hungry and despairing civilians, sparking fresh controversy over how the Israel-Hamas war is portrayed in international media coverage.
The report, published by BILD and Süddeutsche Zeitung, followed a recent controversy over a widely circulated image of a Gazan youth portrayed as starving — a photo later revealed to depict a boy with a genetic disorder, prompting outlets such as The New York Times to issue clarifications.
The German investigation focused on Palestinian photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, a freelancer for the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency, who allegedly staged images to dramatize civilian suffering and depict it as the result of Israeli actions.
Fteiha’s work has been published by major international outlets including CNN, Reuters, and the BBC, despite what the report described as openly biased photojournalism.
According to the German outlets, Fteiha has openly expressed anti-Israel views on social media, sharing inflammatory and antisemitic content.
The report further noted that, by working for a state-run Turkish news outlet whose government maintains longstanding ties to Hamas and a well-known hostile stance toward Israel, his work functions more as propaganda than as objective journalism.
On Tuesday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry praised the German investigation, saying it “reveals how Hamas uses ‘Pallywood,’ staged or selectively framed media, to manipulate global opinion.”
“With Hamas controlling nearly all media in Gaza, these photographers aren’t reporting, they’re producing propaganda,” the statement said.
“This investigation underscores how Pallywood has gone mainstream with staged images and ideological bias shaping international coverage, while the suffering of Israeli hostages and Hamas atrocities are pushed out of frame,” it continued.
Beware of fake news.
A joint investigation by @SZ and @BILD reveals how Hamas uses “Pallywood”, staged or selectively framed media, to manipulate global opinion.At the center is Anas Zayed Fteiha, a Palestinian photographer for Anadolu and an open Israel- and Jew-hater, whose… pic.twitter.com/MrBfvylwCi
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) August 5, 2025
“Pallywood” is a term used to describe the alleged practice by Palestinians of staging fake injuries, deaths, or scenes of devastation to elicit international sympathy and fuel hostility toward Israel.
According to the investigation, Fteiha selectively shares images that reinforce an anti-Israel narrative. For example, one of his widely circulated photos depicts desperate Gazan women and children holding pots and pans outside a food distribution site.
However, other photos taken at the same scene — showing mostly adult men calmly waiting in line and receiving aid — were not distributed by Fteiha and have gone largely unnoticed.
Gerhard Paul, emeritus professor of history and a leading expert on visual propaganda, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that these types of images serve a specific function by shaping narratives and influencing public opinion.
“They are intended to overwrite the brutal images of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Many people don’t even remember these pictures,” Paul said. “Hamas is a master at staging images.”
He also explained that journalists and photographers in Gaza face significant risks and, because of their close proximity to Hamas terrorists, are unable to operate independently.
According to the German newspapers, part of the problem is that Israel restricts access to the Gaza Strip for independent journalists, allowing Hamas-controlled propaganda to dominate the coverage.
Shortly after the investigation was published, the German Press Agency and Agence France-Presse announced they would no longer work with Fteiha and would apply more rigorous scrutiny to photos from other photographers.
For its part, Reuters said Fteiha’s photos “meet the standards of accuracy, independence, and impartiality.”
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Florida State University Grad Student Charged With Battery After Harassment of Jewish Peer Caught on Video

Female student at Florida State University, believed to be graduate student Eden Deckerhoff, who allegedly assaulted male Jewish classmate at gym on campus. Photo: Screenshot/StopAntisemitism
Local law enforcement officials have charged a Florida State University (FSU) graduate student who allegedly assaulted a Jewish classmate at the Leach Student Recreation Center last Thursday with misdemeanor battery, according to a report by The Tallahassee Democrat.
“F—k Israel, Free Palestine. Put it [the video] on Barstool FSU. I really don’t give a f—k,” Eden Deckerhoff said before shoving the Jewish man, according to video taken by the victim. “You’re an ignorant son of a b—h.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Deckerhoff, a student at the FSU College of Social Work, allegedly accosted the victim after noticing his wearing apparel issued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). FSU reportedly employs her mother, Rosalyn Deckerhoff, as a teaching professor in its College of Social Work.
After footage of the incident went viral on social media, the university promptly suspended Deckerhoff and issued a statement condemning antisemitism.
“While this process is underway, the student shown prominently in the video has been prohibited from returning to campus. Our commitment to swiftly and effectively responding to incidents of hate is unwavering. We appreciate the prompt report of this incident, which allowed us to address this instance of antisemitism without delay,” the university said.
It continued, “Florida State University strongly condemns antisemitism in all forms and follows Florida law, which protects Jewish students and employees from discrimination motivated by antisemitism, harassment, intimidation, and violence.”
According to the Democrat, Deckerhoff has denied assaulting the student, telling investigators, “No I did not show him at all; I never put my hands on him.” However, law enforcement described the incident in court documents as seen in the viral footage, acknowledging that Deckerhoff “appears to touch [the man’s] left shoulder.” Despite her denial, the Democrat added, she has offered to apologize.
The Jewish FSU student is not the first victim of violence or harassment motivated by anti-Zionism. In some cases, such incidents have been ftal.
In June, a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they exited an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supporting the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
Less than two weeks later, a man firebombed a crowd of people who were participating in a demonstration to raise awareness of the Israeli hostages who remain imprisoned by Hamas in Gaza. A victim of the attack, Karen Diamond, 82, later died, having sustained severe, fatal injuries.
Another antisemitic incident motivated by anti-Zionism occurred in San Francisco, where an assailant identified by law enforcement as Juan Diaz-Rivas and others allegedly beat up a Jewish victim in the middle of the night. Diaz-Rivas and his friends approached the victim while shouting “F—k the Jews, Free Palestine,” according to local prosecutors.
“[O]ne of them punched the victim, who fell to the ground, hit his head and lost consciousness,” the San Francisco district attorney’s office said in a statement. “Allegedly, Mr. Diaz-Rivas and others in the group continued to punch and kick the victim while he was down. A worker at a nearby business heard the altercation and antisemitic language and attempted to intervene. While trying to help the victim, he was kicked and punched.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.