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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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Antisemitic AI Videos Target Children With Disney-Pixar Style to Push Holocaust Denial, Report Shows
AI-generated videos found on TikTok, Meta, YouTube, and X imitated popular animation styles from Disney-Pixar movies to present Holocaust denial and antisemitic tropes to children. The image of a child second from the left is from a trailer depicting Jewish children in a concentration camp during World War II. Photos: Screenshot collage from CyberWell report.
A pathbreaking report released this week reveals that online users have started exploiting AI video generators to weaponize the nostalgia of Disney-Pixar styles, wrapping venomous hate in a candy-coated shell to reach youth.
On Sunday, CyberWell, a Tel Aviv-based nonprofit focused on monitoring antisemitism on social media, published research tracking 307 identified pieces of AI-generated content targeting Jews on social media between January 2025 and February 2026. The group found that the images and videos received 30 million views and more than 2.8 million user interactions such as likes or reshares. They observed animations created with OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo, X’s Grok, and Suno.
While TikTok accounted for the biggest chunk of the content at almost 36 percent, the popular video-sharing service also came through with the highest level of enforcement at more than 88 percent. Instagram drove the top rates of engagement, accounting for almost 65 percent while its total antisemitic posts reached nearly 25 percent.
The Meta platform saw a removal rate of 67 percent, notably higher than Alphabet’s YouTube (28 percent) and billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform (20 percent). Musk recently incorporated X, xAI, and its Grok chatbot into his rocket company SpaceX before an anticipated IPO in June.
CyberWell found three primary narratives across the videos: 33.2 percent portrayed Jews as greedy or money-obsessed, 21.5 percent involved the Holocaust, and 21.2 percent presented violent rhetoric against Jews inspired by a specific event, in this case the June 2025 Israel-Iran conflict and the viral video “Boom, Boom, Tel Aviv.” The video features such lyrics as “Boom, boom, Tel Aviv. This is what you get for all your evil deeds […] You brought this upon yourself, it’s your time to bleed […] Humanity never expected good behavior from you Jews.”
The researchers called mid-2025 a turning point in the rise of AI-driven antisemitic videos, with 98.4 percent of identified content originating from that point forward.
The report describes “a recurring pattern in which users package AI-generated antisemitic content in formats designed to appeal to younger audiences. The most common examples include fabricated Disney-Pixar-style movie trailers and gaming-related audio clips that promote Holocaust-related mockery, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and hate speech targeting Jews.”
One of the techniques users attempt to evade moderation is to label such videos with tags claiming “satire” and “dark humor.” Others will use the term “Caust” instead of “Holocaust.”
One example presented features a fabricated trailer for a “Caust” movie created with Sora in the Pixar style. Researchers described how “set in a concentration camp, the trailer portrays Adolf Hitler in a lighthearted manner while following a group of Jewish child prisoners attempting a dramatic escape. By presenting the Holocaust in a playful, animated format, the video turns atrocity into entertainment and diminishes the gravity of Jewish suffering.”
The AI videos also exploit kids’ love for video games.
One TikTok video created with Sora and titled “CAUST COMMANDER” received 66,500 views, 4,623 likes, and 3,619 reposts. According to the report, “the post portrays Adolf Hitler in a playful, stylized manner while depicting him killing those around him. The video makes light of the Holocaust and the mechanisms used to exterminate Jews by presenting them in a gamified, commercialized format, including the promotion of fake merchandise such as Zyklon B gas, themed outfits, and ‘back bling.’”
On March 24, OpenAI announced the decision to shut down Sora following months of reporting on antisemitic content proliferating across the platform. Analysts judged that the decision was reportedly motivated by a need to free up computational power for the training of new models so OpenAI could remain competitive as Anthropic’s Claude surges in popularity among coders and Alphabet’s Gemini draws away users.
The report emphasizes the deep extent to which antisemitism has penetrated AI systems.
“Many of the websites used in AI training datasets function as active hubs for antisemitic discourse, raising concerns about their inclusion in model development,” the report says. “For example, Reddit ranks among the most cited domains across major AI systems, while analyses of ChatGPT outputs indicate that Wikipedia alone contributes to roughly half of generated responses. The reliance of AI companies on these websites underscores the risk that antisemitic narratives circulating online may become embedded in model inputs and later disseminated at scale.”
CyberWell CEO and founder Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor warned that AI had turbo-charged both the speed and intensity of online antisemitism.
“Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the scale and speed at which antisemitism can be produced and distributed online,” Cohen Montemayor said. “Generative AI now allows bad actors to industrialize hate, producing high-impact content that can reach millions, with enforcement often coming only after it has already been widely amplified.”
Cohen Montemayor added that CyberWell’s latest report “examining the circulation of antisemitic AI-generated content on major platforms provides critical insights for how social media platforms can take on the abuse of generative AI tools to spread antisemitism in the digital universe.”
CyberWell found that while the Pixar-fied, disarming aesthetics targeted children, it was the videos openly glorifying violence that provoked the highest level of shares reaching 33 percent of content but 41 percent of engagement.
Cohen Montemayor called for the platforms to “move beyond disclosure and invest in systems that identify harmful narratives at scale, including those embedded in audio, visuals and coded formats that evade traditional detection.”
Warning that AI was “being weaponized at scale,” Cohen Montemayor explained that “by strengthening automated detection, investing in competent and transparent human moderation, auditing training data and partnering with specialized external stakeholders, platforms and AI developers can address the complex and fast-evolving forms of online hate through sustained collaboration between technology companies, policymakers and expert partners.”
In one of the most closely watched legal battles in artificial intelligence, a jury on Monday ruled against Musk in a lawsuit the billionaire filed to force OpenAI to revert fully to its original nonprofit mission. Jurors decided that Musk had filed his suit too late.
The world’s wealthiest man faces potentially more severe legal challenges in response to his AI business in France, where prosecutors said they intended to pursue criminal charges due to the Grok chatbot’s promotion of Holocaust denial and generation of child sexual abuse images.
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Yeshiva University Holds Conference Calling for ‘Social Science’ Study of Rising Antisemitism
A graduate wears a Star of David on her graduation mortarboard during the commencement ceremony for Yeshiva University in New York City, US, May 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
Vital new data, scholarship, and moral encouragement were exchanged during a national conference Yeshiva University held earlier this month to promote the study of antisemitism as a “social science problem,” several academics who attended the event told The Algemeiner in exclusive interviews.
The “Antisemitism Conference” brought some 200 academics to the institution’s campus in Manhattan, New York amid a moment many Jewish community advocates have described as a “crisis” of antisemitism. Across the US, Jews have faced discrimination, battery, and even death over their Jewish identity and for being Zionists. Having seen the situation plunge to unprecedented lows, Yeshiva University called on scholars from a range of fields to use their expertise to explore and report on the matter.
Following the conference, Raeefa Shams of the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) told The Algemeiner that the academic community was responsive and arrived at the event with a harvest of findings and insight.
“They presented research they are in the process of conducting or in the process of publishing,” Shams said. “For example, we had one faculty member who presented on the correlation between anti-Israel attitudes and conspiratorial, antisemitic thinking. There was another scholar who presented on the experience of Jewish students with antisemitism post-Oct. 7. We had somebody else present about antisemitism within the American Psychological Association. We had a clinical psychologist talk about antisemitism and traumatic invalidation.”
The Algemeiner has covered a wide range of antisemitic incidents which transpired on the streets and campuses of the US since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel unleashed a spike in global antisemitism. These included, among many other examples, a public-school principal inveighing against “Jew money,” an attempted arson at the Hillel International chapter in San Francisco, California, and the movement of some conservative students into the far-right ecosystem of antisemitism. In New York City, home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel, Jews have been targeted in the majority of all hate crimes this year despite comprising a small fraction of the total population.
The wave of hatred has changed how American Jews perceive their status in the US. According to the results of a previous survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Jewish Federations of North America, a striking 57 percent of American Jews believe “that antisemitism is now a normal Jewish experience.”
Higher education can lead the way in reversing this trend if it promotes the adoption of “trauma informed” policies, clinical psychologist Dr. Mari Bal-Halpern, told The Algemeiner.
“There needs to be a safe environment. That does not mean that we’re silencing voices, but it needs to be safe for everybody,” Bal-Halpern said, “We know how to do that; there are guidelines for how. Most universities say they are, but are they really following those guidelines? I doubt it.”
Antisemitic incidents in the US decreased overall in 2025, but violent attacks targeting American Jews remained at alarmingly high levels, according to the ADL’s latest Annual audit report. While antisemitic assaults increased by just 4 percent, from 196 in 2024 to 203 in 2025, perpetrators increased their use of “deadly” weapons by nearly 40 percent, the ADL said. Incidents of assault involving a deadly weapon increased to 32 in 2025 from 23 in 2024.
The advocacy group noted that the upward shift was reflected in the shocking murders of Jews in antisemitic attacks in the US for the first time since 2019. Two Israeli embassy staffers — a young couple set be engaged — were shot dead in Washington, DC last May, and weeks later a firebombing in Colorado claimed the life of an octogenarian. In both crimes, the alleged killers cited anti-Zionism as their motivating ideology.
Yeshiva University’s “Antisemitism Conference” was the first step toward amassing even more empirical data on this subject, another conference participant said.
“For all of us who are embarking on this area of research and investigation, we’re all dealing with this very large, amorphous, difficult to fully understand but very disturbing phenomena of rising antisemitism or rising anti-Israelism to the extent that there is a connection between them,” said Rutgers University psychology professor Dr. Kent Harber. “We’re trying to get some sense of the dimension and facets of it for our individual work.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Thomas Massie, Leading Anti-Israel Republican, Faces Trump-Backed Challenger on Primary Day in Kentucky
US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the US Capitol on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The heated Republican primary battle in Kentucky between incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie and Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein is set to come to a close on Tuesday in what has become one of the most closely watched congressional fights in the US, one which could have seismic ramifications for the future of the Republican Party’s relationship with Israel.
The race, now considered the most expensive House primary in US history, has evolved far beyond a local Kentucky contest. Instead, it has become a national referendum on the direction of the Republican Party under US President Donald Trump, the limits of ideological dissent within the GOP, and the growing divide between traditional pro-Israel conservatives and a rising faction of right-wing isolationists skeptical of American support for the Jewish state, Washington’s closest ally in the Middle East.
Though Massie was expected to cruise to reelection in the ruby-red Kentucky district, his quest to secure his seat has been made far more daunting after Trump made defeating Massie a personal political mission. Trump, accusing Massie of siding with Democrats to block his agenda and demoralizing the Republican base, has endorsed Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL officer and spent months pummeling the incumbent with a barrage of public insults.
In a May 18 social media post, Trump lambasted Massie as “the worst congressman in the history of our country.”
“I’m in the Oval Office, and we’re in a fight with the worst congressman in the history of our country,” Trump said on Truth Social. “His name is Thomas Massie, he’s from Kentucky and I hope you’re going to put him out of business tomorrow, he is so bad.”
The Kentucky congressman, a libertarian-leaning conservative long known for opposing federal spending and challenging Republican leadership, broke sharply with Trump over several major issues in recent months, including Iran policy, foreign aid, and the administration’s posture toward Israel during escalating regional tensions in the Middle East.
Though Massie maintains an extensive history of voting down foreign aid to virtually every country, not just Israel, his sharp criticisms toward the Jewish state and its supporters have drawn the ire of many GOP voters. Massie has accused the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, of deploying “babysitters” to monitor and police the votes of lawmakers and prevent dissent around issues regarding Israel and the Middle East. He has also accused Israel of targeting civilian infrastructure in its military campaigns, omitting that terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah repurpose these locations to store munitions or launch missiles.
Recently, Massie drew backlash from Jewish groups after he posed for a photo with an individual wearing a shirt emblazoned with the phrase “American Reich,” a direct reference to the Nazi regime. Massie has not commented on the incident or distanced himself from the individual.
Massie has also come under fire over an advertisement released by a pro-Massie super PAC targeting billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, a prominent Jewish supporter of pro-Israel causes who has backed efforts to defeat the incumbent.
The ad characterizes Singer as a “pro-trans billionaire” and features a rainbow-colored Star of David behind his image while attacking Gallrein’s allies.
Massie’s criticism of US support for Israel and his resistance to interventionist foreign policy drew fierce backlash from pro-Israel organizations and Republican donors, many of whom quickly consolidated behind Gallrein, a relatively unknown Kentucky Republican who has embraced Trump’s America First movement while simultaneously affirming strong support for Israel and the US-Israel alliance. The attempt to unseat Massie has attracted roughly $19 million in outside spending, with pro-Israel advocacy groups, MAGA-aligned organizations, and conservative super PACs flooding Kentucky airwaves with ads portraying the Kentucky firebrand as increasingly out of step with Republican voters.
For many pro-Israel Republicans, the race represents an early test of whether the GOP will tolerate lawmakers who oppose robust American backing for Israel during a period of heightened regional instability. The race also comes at a time in which antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have become points of contention within the GOP. Though older Republican voters continue to support Israel in substantial numbers, a growing number of polls indicate that younger Republican voters are far more skeptical of the US-Israel alliance, with many wanting to end aid to Israel and cease foreign military campaigns.
Massie has argued that his foreign policy views reflect constitutional conservatism and opposition to “forever wars.” But critics inside the Republican Party say his approach increasingly mirrors the isolationist wing of the American right that seeks to reduce US commitments abroad, including support for Israel.
Gallrein, by contrast, has framed the election as a battle for peace through strength, aligning himself closely with Trump’s aggressive posture toward Iran and emphasizing unwavering support for Israel’s security.
The primary also carries broader implications for Trump’s continued dominance over the Republican Party. Unlike many previous Trump critics who came from the GOP’s moderate wing, Massie is a staunch conservative with strong grassroots credibility among libertarians and Tea Party voters.
Though the race is expected to be very close, Gallrein has amassed substantial momentum in the closing stretch of the competition. A recent poll showed Gallrein leading Massie 53 percent to 45 percent among likely GOP voters in the state’s 4th Congressional District.
A Massie defeat would likely send a powerful message to Republicans nationwide that opposition to Trump — particularly on foreign policy and Israel — carries enormous political risk, even for deeply conservative incumbents.
A victory for Massie, however, could embolden a small but growing bloc of right-wing lawmakers skeptical of foreign intervention and willing to publicly challenge both Trump and the GOP’s traditionally hawkish pro-Israel establishment.
With polling tightening in recent days and turnout expected to be high, political observers across Washington, Jerusalem, and conservative media circles are watching Kentucky closely.