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Republican Jewish Coalition Announces ‘Praise Israel’ Challenge for Democratic National Convention Speakers
Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, holds a kippah in support of former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as he speaks on Day 2 of the Republican National Convention, at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US, July 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) has issued a challenge to speakers at the upcoming Democratic National Convention (DNC), calling on them to ask the crowd to cheer if they support Israel.
The RJC, a group which advocates for closer ties between the Republican Party and the Jewish community, announced the “Praise Israel” challenge on Monday, one week before the DNC is set to begin in Chicago.
“The RJC is officially challenging every speaker at the Democratic Convention in Chicago to ‘Praise Israel’: If you speak from the main stage and ask the crowd to cheer if they support Israel, the RJC will donate to plant 1,800 trees in Israel in your name, to showcase your standing with the Jewish state,” the group said in a press release.
RJC CEO Matt Brooks said in a statement that the challenge was inspired by his experience speaking at the Republican National Convention (RNC).
“Last month in Milwaukee, I spoke at the 2024 RNC Convention from the main stage at Fiserv Forum,” Brooks said. “I opened my remarks with a simple rallying call to everyone in the arena: ‘Let me hear you cheer if you support Israel!’ The crowd erupted in rapturous applause, demonstrating deep and widespread support for America’s best ally in the Middle East. I followed this by saying: ‘Now if you tried that at the Democrats’ convention, you’d be booed off the stage.’”
In its press release, the RJC noted that its vow to plant 1,800 trees was not arbitrary, noting that chai, the Hebrew word for “life,” is associated with the number 18.
“For those wondering ‘why 1,800?’ — it is 100 x 18, which stands for chai, ‘life’ in Hebrew,” the group stated.
The RJC statement came amid a strained relationship between the Democratic Party and the Jewish state that has deteriorated in the months following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Most Democrats initially expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas terrorists, but prominent figures in the party have, in recent months, adopted a more adversarial posture toward the Jewish state, often citing the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a key reason.
High-profile Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) have suggested that Israel has perpetrated a “genocide” against Palestinians in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where Israel has been waging a military campaign targeting terrorists since the Oct. 7 atrocities. Earlier this year, a group of dozens of Democratic lawmakers, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), sent a letter to US President Joe Biden, urging him to “reconsider” approving offensive arms shipments to Israel.
Meanwhile, Jews, a traditionally liberal voting bloc, have shown signs of shifting to the political right. Recent polls suggest that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump might see a historic surge in Jewish support in November, although it remains highly unlikely that he will win a majority of the Jewish vote.
Jewish voters prefer Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over Trump by a margin of 52.7 percent to 45.9 percent, according to a survey conducted by pollster Richard Baris. The poll indicated a softening of support for Democrats among Jewish voters, potentially stemming from dissatisfaction over the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
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US Sen. Chuck Schumer to Release New Book ‘Antisemitism in America’
US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) holds a press conference in the US Capitol in Washington, DC, April 23, 2024. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the federal government, announced on Wednesday that he will release a book on antisemitism.
Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, released a statement saying that Schumer’s book, titled “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” will be on shelves in February 2025.
The book will chronicle Schumer’s life in Brooklyn during the 1960s, his time at Harvard University, and his years in Congress. Schumer will also discuss the recent surge of antisemitic incidents across the US following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing Israel-Hamas war.
“At its core, my book is a warning,” Schumer said in a statement. “If America fails to understand the context and history of antisemitism, if America’s darker impulses ultimately overwhelm its better angels, an age-old truth will prove true once again: that antisemitism inevitably leads to violence against Jews and a rise in bigotry in our society at large.”
“Jewish Americans never thought it could happen here in America. Now, for the first time, they’re worried it could,” Schumer wrote.
Schumer has traditionally been a strong supporter of the Jewish state. Speaking at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference in 2019, Schumer said, “You can be, all at once, completely Jewish, completely pro-Israel, and completely American.” Schumer also opposed the controversial 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, a policy championed by former President Barack Obama, and joined a 2017 resolution objecting to condemnations of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In recent months, however, as the Democratic base has soured on Israel, Schumer has adopted a more adversarial posture toward the Jewish state. In March, while on the Senate floor, he called for new elections in Israel, stating that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “lost his way,” a nearly unprecedented statement by such a high ranking US official calling on the people of a close democratic ally to replace its leadership.
Schumer also hesitated to join Republican House leader Mike Johnson (LA) in extending an invitation to Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress. Although Schumer eventually joined the invitation and attended Netanyahu’s speech last month, he refused to shake the Israeli prime minister’s hand.
The announcement of Schumer’s book was met with significant skepticism among observers on both sides of the political aisle.
“Chuck Schumer saw Jewish students being blocked from attending college campuses, issued Jewish only wristbands and being intimidated with physical violence and thought how can he make some more money off of it,” Stephen Miller, contributing editor of The Spectator, said on X/Twitter.
“I gotta be honest, every form of prejudice is declining in 21st century America. None are rising, including antisemitism. By admitting this, we will be a better country where people can feel more optimistic and at ease,” wrote progressive reporter Zaid Jilani.
“What a complete f—king clown,” wrote Daily Wire host and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
The post US Sen. Chuck Schumer to Release New Book ‘Antisemitism in America’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘We Support Israel’ Sign at Maryland Synagogue Vandalized Amid Wave of Antisemitic Incidents Across State
Illustrative: Anti-Israel demonstration at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, April 30, 2024. Photo: Robyn Stevens Brody/SIPA USA via Reuters Connect
A sign reading “We Support Israel” outside a synagogue in Bethesda, Maryland was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti this week, according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.
“The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington is deeply disturbed by the discovery yesterday of antisemitic graffiti on a ‘We Support Israel’ sign outside Congregation Beth El of Montgomery County,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday.
The Jewish Federation noted that the incident came just two days after similar antisemitic graffiti was found near Bethesda Elementary School in Maryland this past weekend. “Israel rapes men, women, and children” was spray-painted on a school sign, and “Free Gaza” was reportedly painted onto a nearby crosswalk and sidewalk.
“We call on our community and allies to continue making it clear that antisemitism and hate speech have no place in Greater Washington,” the Jewish Federation said in its statement. “We are in close contact with local law enforcement, and we appreciate their swift responses to these incidents to ensure our community’s safety.”
The Bethesda area has a large Jewish population — about 45 percent of Maryland’s Jewish community lives in Montgomery County.
The latest incidents of vandalism came amid a troubling wave of antisemitic incidents in Maryland.
Baltimore police announced on Saturday that they arrested a man who is suspected of a hate crime for setting a fire outside the Jewish Museum of Maryland earlier this month. The museum is located between two historic synagogues on Baltimore’s Lloyd Street: the Lloyd Street Synagogue and the B’nai Israel Congregation. The fire on Aug. 4 was set outside the museum but also right next to B’nai Israel, which reportedly shares a security gate with it.
Weeks earlier, Baltimore’s mayor and police chief denounced a slew of antisemitic incidents in which the homes of Jewish families in the Glen section of the city were graffitied with swastikas. As many as 10 homes were targeted in the spree of hate, according to a local NBC affiliate, shocking locals who were dismayed that the incidents occurred in their neighborhood.
Such outrages aren’t new. In December, for example, vandals twice slashed a pro-Israel sign displayed on the lawn of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation in Pikesville, local media reported. In a later incident in March, a gang of teenagers mugged and assaulted two Jewish men who were walking into their synagogue. The youths reportedly chased one of the men and stole a “large amount of cash” from the other. More recently, an Israeli flag was ripped and stolen from the porch of a doctor’s office earlier this summer.
Across the state of Maryland, which had the seventh most antisemitic incidents in the US in 2023, outrages targeting the Jewish community increased 211 percent compared to the prior year, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s latest data.
The post ‘We Support Israel’ Sign at Maryland Synagogue Vandalized Amid Wave of Antisemitic Incidents Across State first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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UCLA Allowing Pro-Hamas Protesters to Exclude Jews from ‘Gaza Encampment’ Area ‘Abhorrent,’ Federal Judge Says
Law enforcement officers detain a demonstrator, as they clear out a pro-Hamas protest encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Los Angeles, California, US, May 2, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/David Swanson
A US federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) must stop allowing pro-Hamas demonstrators to secure an encampment from which Jewish students were barred entry, calling the situation permitted on campus “so unimaginable and so abhorrent.”
Last semester, pro-Hamas groups at UCLA waged for three weeks a campaign aimed at pressuring school officials into adopting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The action culminated in their erecting on the Royce Quad section of campus a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” and refusing to vacate the area until their demands were met.
Enabled by UCLA chancellor Gene D. Block, who had the encampment protected by physical barriers and campus police, the area became the site of violent clashes between pro-Hamas and pro-Israel protesters and a zone of nullification in which federal civil rights laws prohibiting the exclusion of individuals based on their racial or religious identity were, according to the judge, flagrantly flouted. Throughout the encampment’s existence, Jewish students were barred from walking near or through the area on their way to class unless they denounced the Zionist component of their Jewish identities, a policy which UCLA police upheld without compunction.
Granting a request for injunctive relief filed by Jewish students who sued the university, US Judge Mark Scarsi of the District Court for the Central District of California grated UCLA’s defense of its role in supporting the encampment — which argued, in his words, that it “has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters” — and described what took place there as “so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.”
He continued, “The injunction does not mandate any specific policies and procedures UCLA must put in place, nor does it dictate any specific acts UCLA must take in response to campus protests. Rather, the injunction requires only that, if any part of UCLA’s ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas become unavailable to certain Jewish students, UCLA must stop providing those ordinarily available programs, activities, and campus areas to any students.”
Scarsi, who formally assumed office in 2020 after being nominated in 2018 by former President Donald Trump, also affirmed the plaintiffs’ contention that Zionism is an integral part of their Jewish faith. The ruling is the first to address directly how university administrators handled pro-Hamas encampments on their campuses, which, across the country, descended into proclaiming support for terrorism, threatening a genocide of Jews, and unobstructed vandalizing of school property and assault.
“Shame on UCLA for letting antisemitic thugs terrorize Jews on campus,” Mark Rienzi — president of the public interest law firm Becket, which represented the plaintiffs — said on Tuesday, praising the decision’s defense of religious liberty. “Today’s ruling says that UCLA’s policy of helping antisemitic activists target Jews is not just morally wrong but a gross constitutional violation. UCLA should stop fighting the Constitution and start protecting Jews on campus.”
A slew of lawsuits filed by Jewish students and against their universities over their handling of antisemitism after Oct. 7, when Hamas invaded Israel and launched the ongoing war in Gaza, have been decided this summer or remain in the courts.
Earlier this month, a Massachusetts federal judge “in part” denied Harvard University a motion to dismiss a suit which accuses it of failing to respond to numerous antisemitic incidents during the 2023-2024 academic year, clearing the case to proceed to trial. Throughout the summer, Columbia University and New York University (NYU) settled two lawsuits, with NYU paying an undisclosed sum of money to avoid further discovery and litigation.
Most recently, North Carolina State University (NCSU) settled a civil rights complaint which accused school officials of declining to discipline anyone involved in a series of antisemitic incidents in which a Jewish student was allegedly bullied, doxxed, and threatened with physical violence.
As part of the settlement, an outcome achieved during an “early” mediation process arbitrated by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the university agreed to update its anti-discrimination policies to adhere to a 2019 Trump administration executive order which recognized anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, include antisemitism in its programming on racial and ethnic hatred, and hold regular meetings with Jewish organizations on campus. The university will also base its handling of future antisemitic incidents on North Carolina’s Shalom Act (House Bill 942), which explicitly refers to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post UCLA Allowing Pro-Hamas Protesters to Exclude Jews from ‘Gaza Encampment’ Area ‘Abhorrent,’ Federal Judge Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.