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We spoke to the Jews advising Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis

WASHINGTON (JTA) — In the middle of his victory speech on the night of the Iowa Caucuses, Donald Trump said he would end the Israel-Hamas war. 

At a recent debate, Nikki Haley avowed that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. 

At another debate, Ron DeSantis gave a shout-out to the director of the Republican Jewish coalition.

Jewish voters have historically voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from focusing on American Jewry and Israel — both because the Jewish vote in swing states can help determine the election, and because of Israel’s importance to evangelical Christian voters. 

This year, all three remaining Republican candidates take the Jewish community seriously enough that they have their own advisers on Jewish issues — trusted team members who possess deep knowledge both of the candidate and of the Jewish community. These Jewish whisperers fulfill a dual role, both steering the candidate on issues of Jewish concern and acting as a liaison to Jewish voters.

Ahead of next week’s New Hampshire primary, we spoke with top Jewish advisers to each of the campaigns. Each, predictably, said their candidate didn’t really need their advice — but each also plays a key role in their respective races for the White House.

David Friedman, lawyer-turned-ambassador for Donald Trump

David Friedman was Trump’s trusted bankruptcy lawyer until a snowbound day in February, 2005, when he said he realized he also was the real estate magnate’s close friend. He recalled that Trump traveled more than three hours through inclement weather to sit shiva with Friedman, who was mourning his father Morris, a prominent New York area rabbi.

In 2016, Friedman was one of a trio of close Jewish advisers to Trump, joining Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and another lawyer, Jason Greenblatt.

Trump named each of the three to roles in his administration, appointing Friedman as ambassador to Israel. Friedman’s past hardball rhetoric about the liberal Israel lobby J Street — he called them “worse than kapos” — almost sank his confirmation, but he was approved for the job on party lines.  

On his watch, Trump enacted a series of policies celebrated by the Israeli government and its supporters. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized an Israeli right to settle in the West Bank, recognized Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights, withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and brokered the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab states.  Trump has said Friedman played leading roles in moving the embassy and recognizing the Golan.

As ambassador, Friedman also pivoted from a Trumpian attack dog mode to a more avuncular persona, posting self-deprecating videos about coping with the frantic pace of getting ready for the Jewish holidays in Israel.

Three years after Trump left office amid a firestorm of controversy, Kushner and Greenblatt are no longer advising him. But Friedman endorsed his ex-boss last year. In an interview he said the endorsement — and his current advisory role on the 2024 campaign — were easy calls.

“The most powerful argument, obviously, is his record, and it’s a record not just with regard to Israel but with regard to fighting antisemitism domestically as well,” he said, referring to Trump’s 2019 executive order on federal investigations of universities for antisemitic discrimination.

What about Trump’s reputation for encouraging — or at least not condemning — far-right extremists? Friedman notably called out Trump in 2022 when the former president met with Kanye West, the rapper who made a stream of antisemitic comments, and Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier.

That was an outlier, said Freidman. Friedman spoke with Trump after he made his unhappiness known, but would not describe the phone call. “All I can tell you is that, to state the obvious, that hasn’t happened again,” he said.

How close are they? Trump has confessed to being unnerved when Friedman calls him “Mr. President,” wishing he would go back to Donald.

Fred Zeidman, fundraiser for Nikki Haley

Fred Zeidman has known Nikki Haley since 2010, when he was invited to support her first run for South Carolina governor that year.

“I absolutely just thought the world of her,” he said of Haley, then a state representative in her late 30s. “And so I sort of stayed close. She just seemed like she had it.”

Getting Zeidman on board was a catch for Haley, who was trailing better known South Carolinians at the time. Zeidman is a Texas businessman who was among the first to see presidential material in George W. Bush, and who organized, when Bush was governor, a life-changing tour of Israel for the future president.

Bush had named Zeidman to chair the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, a thankless non-paying job that requires a dedication to the issue — coupled with fundraising chops. Zeidman, who says his mission is “the safety and security of the Jewish people and the state of Israel,” had plenty of both: He has become a sought-after fundraiser for Republican candidates over several election cycles.

In 2016, Zeidman could not stomach Trump’s approach and backed other candidates in the primary.  Like some former Trump skeptics, he became a fan when Trump proved his pro- Israel bona fides (in part via Haley, who served as Trump’s first United Nations ambassador). At one point, Zeidman even tore up a t-shirt saying George W. Bush was the greatest ever president for Israel.

But this year, following Trump’s false claims of winning the 2020 election, and the subsequent Jan. 6 riot, he has again chosen Haley. Zeidman is a dedicated Republican, but also longs for healing. He has been outspoken in praising President Joe Biden’s backing for Israel in its war with Hamas. 

He says he felt intense pride in being an early backer of Haley’s in 2015, after she brought about the removal of the Confederate flag outside the state capitol in the wake of the mass shooting at a Charleston Black church.

“When you look at the things that she did to demonstrate leadership to demonstrate moral clarity, when after the shooting —  You know, she’s got it,” he told JTA this week. “She’s showing what she needs to do. She didn’t capitulate. She stood up of all places in the world at ground zero of the Confederacy.”

Zeidman says that Haley has also shown leadership on how Republicans can handle abortion — sticking to their conservative principles while not demonizing abortion rights advocates.

“She is the first Republican to break ranks on women’s rights, which is a key, key, key, key issue and ought to be a defining issue,” he said.

Zeidman’s son, Jay, also worked for George W. Bush as a liaison to the Jewish community. But he’s departed from his father — and is a leading fundraiser for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. His father describes with pride how they banter about their respective candidates.

Gabe Groisman, Jewish surrogate for Ron DeSantis

Gabe Groisman met Ron DeSantis about a decade ago, when the then-Florida congressman was visiting Israel.

“I immediately understood that he was one of these elected officials who really, really understands the region,” Groisman,  a former mayor of Bal Harbour, told JTA. “It’s not just talking points.”

Groisman credits DeSantis’s time in the Navy, as an attorney at Guantanamo Bay and then on deployment to Iraq, for how he seems to get Israel. DeSantis’ faith, and his diplomas from Yale University and Harvard Law School, don’t hurt, Groisman added.

“It seems like it’s a mix between his military experience as a JAG officer in the Navy and his education and then also his religion — he definitely has a deep religious connection to the state of Israel,” he said. DeSantis has baptized his children with water from the Kinneret, or Sea of Galilee.

That made DeSantis the perfect candidate for Groisman, who feels a calling to persuade Florida’s Jews to vote Republican. Groisman, who accompanied DeSantis when the governor convened his first Cabinet meeting in Israel in 2019, is on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

DeSantis, among the first governors to legislate against dealings with businesses that boycott Israel, is well known for his pro-Israel positions. Groisman wants people to learn more about DeSantis’s domestic Jewish initiatives, including expanding school choice — a potential boon to Jewish day school families — and toughening laws targeting hate crimes against Jews. 

He says he’s frustrated by the press linking DeSantis with issues reviled by liberal Jews, including book bans and his targeting of the LGBTQ community.

“Despite lots of press to the contrary, the fact is, he’s with the Jewish community, time and time again,” Groisman said. “He’s helped pass legislation year in and year out to protect the Jewish community, expanding different laws to give police more power to protect the community.”

Groisman is the kind of Jewish leader Republicans hope will become more prominent: As Bal Harbour mayor from 2016-2022, he used his platform to speak out against Israel boycotts and has been an outspoken critic of campus antisemitism. A lawyer, a philanthropist and a consultant on government relations, he is active in the Israeli-American Council.

He gets an activist strain from his Israeli American mother, Judit, a longtime member of the Women’s International Zionist Organization. 

“Even though she’s getting older, she spends her life as a community organizer,” he said. “Her attitude is, ‘get things done.’


The post We spoke to the Jews advising Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote

Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.

The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.

Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.

Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”

“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”

Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.

UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.

Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.

Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.

“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.

“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”

On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”

The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.

“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.

Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.

Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.

“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.

The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.

“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.

“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”

During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”

At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”

“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.

The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’

Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.

As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.

Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.

For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance. 

On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.

One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”

The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.

These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference. 

Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.

This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students. 

Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.

As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.

These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.

McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction. 

This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.

We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”

Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.

The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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