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A manufactured ‘mainstream’ wants the White House to define antisemitism on its own flawed terms
(JTA) — As the Biden administration nears the long-awaited announcement of its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, tensions have emerged over what definition of antisemitism the White House will use. According to Jewish Insider, “major mainstream Jewish groups” are battling against the “left” to define antisemitism, suggesting that the groups’ preferred definition, that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, is the mainstream one.
The framing determines a winner before the contest even begins — this is the power play of the term “mainstream.”
Here’s how it works: A purportedly neutral source — Jewish Insider, say, or the Associated Press — names a set of players as the “mainstream.” Without any discussion of method or sources, the characterization produces reality. The self-fulfilling designation allows a select group of organizations to command the center. These groups and their spokespeople then use their “mainstream” power to naturalize and normalize their own agenda, like defining the IHRA definition as the “gold standard” despite concerns that it chills legitimate criticism of Israel, or condemning “progressive” voices for their refusal to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, or chastising Rep. Rashida Tlaib for commemorating the Nakba, the “catastrophe” that befell her people with the creation of Israel.
Game on.
The strategy of claiming the center to control it is nothing new. In the annals of American Jewish institutional formation, it’s happened again and again. Just witness the names of organizations: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the American Jewish Committee, the Zionist Organization of America, and the list could go on and on. One after the other, these groups have claimed to be the center, the “mainstream.”
RELATED: The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and why people are fighting over it, explained (2021)
As a historian who has written about many of these groups, I can tell you that every claim to be the united front, the central address, the singular American Jewish organization has rested on the surety that most American Jews believed no such thing. Indeed, words that posture such a “mainstream” are best read as indicators of dissent, debate and fracture.
When it comes to confronting antisemitism, some of today’s Jewish leaders might imagine that American Jews can achieve unity that has long eluded them or Jewish institutional life. They might be so certain of this vision as to pretend that it is true, with fundraising and media blitzes that appear to speak on behalf of all Jews. Slick advertising campaigns, whether on television and social media or highway billboards, and a hotly contested and poorly constructed yet exclusive definition of antisemitism may make it seem that the Jewish “mainstream” speaks as one, loudly for all Jews and all people who care about fighting antisemitism.
But don’t let the powerplay bulldoze you. Those television and social media blitzes? They are the product of one megadonor’s imagination and thick wallet. The pink highway signs that deliver glib “lessons” against antisemitism in the form of snark? They are brought to you by the same high-net-worth family that advertised its storage company with similarly cheeky taglines. And even the creation of and campaigns to endorse the IHRA definition have specific histories and funding sources.
None of this is to say that those efforts should be dismissed because they have histories and are tied to narrow but deep pockets of wealth. The problem comes when those histories and sources of power go unacknowledged and instead parade themselves as the “mainstream,” the authentic truth of what all Jews must believe.
RELATED: The White House intends to fight antisemitism. That starts with a sensible definition. (Opinion)
In the power plays to claim the Jewish “mainstream,” institutions and their leaders are trying to silence those who disagree with their policies and politics. The term “mainstream” acts as a cudgel against efforts to build solidarity between Palestinians and Israelis who oppose the actions of the Israeli government. Its purveyors vocally and consistently defend harsh anti-boycott laws, on the books in several American states, that penalize institutions or individuals for engaging in or promoting boycotts against Israel. Or they helicopter onto American college campuses to pressure university administrators to subscribe to the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Instead of arriving at the field ready to play an honest game, “mainstream” Jewish institutions and their leaders want to be the only players. To argue that we must all agree on one definition in order to talk about antisemitism is like clearing the field before the game even begins.
Because this is more than a game — because hatred and bigotry fuel violent crimes at an alarming rate in the United States — Jewish and non-Jewish people who have a stake in the conversation about antisemitism should refuse to play. Publications that insist on anointing a “mainstream” ought to be called out. And the press, instead, should investigate the role that some of its agents play in advancing the power play of the “mainstream” — including, for example, Jewish Insider, which is less than transparent about its own history and sources of funding.
As a participant in one of the “listening sessions” convened by the White House in February of this year, I can report that the scholars who joined me around the table (OK, Zoom screen) had a wide range of perspectives. When asked to share our views on antisemitism, none of us got to call ourselves the “mainstream” expert on the questions. Instead, we identified the methods, sources and theories that authorized our understandings of the roots and manifestations of antisemitism.
I can only hope that the other listening sessions and the White House process has proceeded accordingly, with little reverence for the self-appointed Jewish “mainstream.” A resolve to understand the diversity of views and what led people or groups to them will upset any single view — or definition. A successful strategy will not be cowed by the “mainstream” but instead will highlight the varieties of truly and authentically held ideas that together can animate efforts to stem the tide of antisemitism and bigotry.
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What a West Bank visit taught me about the past and present tragedies of Tisha B’Av
As we chant Lamentations on the floor, in the dark, on Wednesday night for Tisha B’Av, we will open with the word “eikha” — “how.”
That same word became the refrain of a recent eight day visit I made to Israel and the West Bank.
I traveled to Jerusalem for a week of immersive learning with 150 rabbis and cantors at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s annual Rabbinic Torah Seminar. But my learning wasn’t restricted to the beit midrash. I spent time with cousins finishing combat service; friends working late into the night in the Knesset before its dissolution; people working to build shared society in Haifa; and families grieving the loss of loved ones. And at every turn, I found myself asking “eikha.”
“Eikha” is more than a question. It is the sound made when the distance between what should be and what is becomes almost impossible to bear. Naming that distance is at the heart of Tisha B’Av — and, for me, at the heart of thinking honestly about Israel today. How will Israel move from this moment of profound moral and political fracture toward the future our prophets imagined?
On a visit to the West Bank with Rabbis for Human Rights, I connected with Israelis from across the country who had come to be a protective presence for Palestinians in Jenata, near the settler outpost of Havat Eitam. The Palestinians there face violence and intimidation in an area formally under Palestinian civil authority. We heard from a man whose brother had recently been killed by settlers, and we learned that their imam was jailed just that morning to prevent Friday prayers from moving forward as planned.
Then we were told to leave. The corner of the village we were visiting was declared a 24-hour closed military zone.
Next we traveled to Umm al-Khair, a Palestinian herding community where the Hathaleen family buried their son Awdah almost a year ago, after he was shot and killed by an Israeli settler who still walks free. Since his death, settlers have built caravans encroaching into the village, with some only a few meters from homes. This encroachment has triggered the declaration of another “closed military zone,” cutting the family off from their own bathroom and animals. They must use a neighbor’s bathroom and can only feed their animals when a soldier comes to allow it.
I asked a soldier standing guard that day whether any of it troubled him.
“Doesn’t Oct. 7 trouble you?” he replied.
I don’t know what that soldier has seen, or what he has lost. But I know his response took two griefs and set them against each other, as though one atrocity could justify another. “Eikha”: How do we nurse our deepest wounds without allowing them to justify our wounding others? How do we stay safe and moral?
This past Shabbat was Shabbat Hazon — the “Sabbath of Vision” — so named for the opening word of the Haftara, which describes Isaiah’s vision of a devastated but ultimately redeemed Jerusalem. That reading, in our current context, must push us — and, God willing, Israel’s next political leaders — to articulate compelling responses to the questions bearing down on Israeli society and on Judaism itself. To ask how we came to a point of such dire trouble, and realize a vision for redemption from it.
I keep thinking about the way slain hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin would remind his fellow captives, citing Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s words, that if they could hold onto a “why,” they could endure any “how.”
Israel and the Jewish people have profound whys. We are meant to be, in the words of “Hatikvah,” “a free people in our own land.” And to be, in the words of the Torah, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
This Tisha B’Av, as we mourn the destruction that shattered Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel 2,000 years ago, we must also reckon honestly with the forms of inhumanity that threaten its moral future and physical safety today.
We must understand that our freedom, our holiness and our humanity are bound up in that of the Hathaleen family, and the besieged villagers of Jenata. During my visit, an Israeli cousin of mine acknowledged that everything I had seen in the West Bank was real and terrible — and that he didn’t want Palestinians living so close to Israel, out of fear of an Oct. 7 attack from the West Bank. What I wish all of us could better understand: If Jewish freedom depends upon denying Palestinian freedom, then it is neither the freedom of “Hatikvah” nor the holiness the Torah demands. I also don’t think it will make us safe.
This is, I think, the particular question facing rabbis and Jewish communal leaders like me right now: how do we hold onto our right — our obligation — to name Israel’s failures honestly, as people bound to this place and this story, without having our words weaponized to delegitimize and demonize the entire project? My criticism of what I saw in Jenata and Umm al-Khair comes from love — the same love that makes looking away impossible. Learning how to hold both at once, unflinching criticism and unwavering commitment, may be the most urgent “eikha” of this particular moment.
After Tisha B’Av comes the Shivah d’Nehemta — the Seven Weeks of Consolation that carry us into Rosh Hashanah.
In those weeks, the questions of “eikha” don’t disappear. They deepen. These weeks lead us into Elul, a time of intense heshbon hanefesh — accounting of the soul. The pairing of consolation with accounting suggests that renewal comes not through answering our questions, but through finding the courage to keep asking them.
How do we protect ourselves without surrendering our humanity? How do we acknowledge our own suffering without turning it into permission to inflict suffering on others?
Those are Israel’s questions as they move toward their October elections. They are ours as well, as we navigate being Jews in this moment.
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To protest immigration policy, they’re saying kaddish — then marching to Comic-Con
Progressive Jewish groups across the country this week are using the fast day of Tisha B’av to protest national immigration policies, gathering outside ICE facilities, immigration courts,city halls and in San Diego’s case, culminating at a convention center. Tisha B’av protests are also planned in Los Angeles, Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
Tisha B’av commemorates several Jewish national tragedies, including the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago. Protest organizers connect the torment tied to the destruction and ensuing exile, recounted in the book of Lamentations, to the pain experienced by immigrant families today.
“We had our sacred spaces taken away from us and we became wanderers,” Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, leader of San Diego synagogue Dor Hadash and one of the protest organizers, said in an interview. “And what is happening to the people who are in our streets? They’ve already been made wanderers once — having to escape torture, persecution, degradation — and now we’re doing it to them again.”
The protesters in San Diego — representing Jewish groups, labor unions, left-wing political organizations and social justice nonprofits — will begin by reading from Lamentations outside the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Courthouse, where immigrants are often detained following their hearings. They then will march to the San Diego Convention Center. They also plan to recite kaddish for people who have died in ICE custody or at ICE protests.
The immigration protests are part of a long history of Jewish groups using Tisha B’av as an opportunity to reflect on social ills. And while they will occur across the country, the protests are not nationally organized, according to their organizers. Instead, each one has a particular local resonance.
“San Diego is a border city,” Rothbaum said, “and the fact that we have a government that says the people born on this side of the border are more important, more precious, more sacred than people born on the other side of that border is blasphemy.”
Rothbaum’s involvement in Tisha B’av immigration actions dates back to the first Trump administration, when he was working in Massachusetts. A similar rally will unfold there this week outside New England’s ICE headquarters.
That event will include an Erev Tisha B’av program led by the state’s Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action.
Cindy Rowe, the alliance’s president and CEO, will also speak about Tisha B’av at a rally at Boston City Hall to protect the temporary protected status of Haitian immigrants, which expires Thursday. Massachusetts is home to roughly 45,000 Haitian immigrants whose legal status could be in jeopardy after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that President Trump has broad authority to deport them.
The expiration of Haitians’ temporary protected status on Tisha B’av was “a cruel twist of fate,” Rowe said.
Tisha B’av represents “a day of mourning for the destruction of communities, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now in our modern day,” Rowe said. “The destruction of our own community right in front of our eyes.”
More than a dozen Jewish groups — including several synagogues, a JCC and various social justice groups — are partnering with multifaith organizations and labor unions on a Thursday afternoon event in Los Angeles, which will include testimony from clergy who have witnessed the conditions of detention in ICE facilities.
These groups held a similar event last year, when the spectacle of immigration enforcement raids was winning daily headlines. The media focus has since dwindled, but ICE detentions continue apace, according to Brooke Wirtschafter, executive director of Jewish Partnership for Los Angeles, a progressive group that focuses on local issues like housing and immigration.
“It is very much alive and real in Los Angeles in 2026,” Wirtschafter said. “If it is less dramatic than it was in 2025, it’s still very active, and so it’s important to us to continue to raise the issue.”
Likewise, a Jewish-themed immigration protest outside Comic-Con might feel dissonant to the traveling fans encountering it. Rothbaum wants it to turn heads.
“I hope when they come out and they see this group — and then they see Jews are part of this group — that they’ll think for a second before they go to the next thing, ‘Hey, what is my ethical obligation?’” Rothbaum said. “What are Americans’ ethical obligations to the people who come here, either escaping torment or looking for a better life?”
The post To protest immigration policy, they’re saying kaddish — then marching to Comic-Con appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel alarmed by reports of a possible US-Saudi nuclear deal
(JTA) — A potential U.S. civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which The New York Times has reported could be announced by the Trump administration as early as Wednesday, is alarming some Israelis and Americans.
Critics are concerned that the deal, through which U.S. companies would help Saudi Arabia build civilian nuclear energy plants, could allow Saudi Arabia to eventually develop nuclear weapons. The proposed plants would have the capacity to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel without pervasive oversight.
The arrangement would also remove one of the key incentives to encourage Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. The Biden administration had been in the process of exchanging such nuclear access for Saudi acceptance of open ties with the Jewish state when the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, upended the efforts.
Now, a number of media outlets, including the Times and The Wall Street Journal, are reporting that President Donald Trump plans to move ahead with the civilian nuclear program without such strings attached, though a deal has not yet been publicly announced by the Trump administration or formally acknowledged by the Israeli government.
According to Reuters, the nuclear deal would be given to Congress for review but could only be blocked by a two-thirds majority.
When quizzed by Army Radio on the deal, Likud Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar said Israel has been clear with the United States about its red lines but would not say if such a deal crossed that line.
These are conversations that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is having with security experts, he said.
Israeli opposition politicians were blunter about the potential danger. Former Israeli Defense Ministers Avigdor Liberman and Benny Gantz both warned a U.S.Saudi nuclear deal could spark a regional arms race.
That could happen because a nuclear Saudi Arabia, which is Sunni, could spur its Shi’a rival, Iran, to take even more aggressive steps toward building a nuclear bomb. Iran already possesses enrichment capabilities, and the point of the current war launched by the United States and Israel is to keep it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Liberman, who heads Yisrael Beytenu, wrote on X that “a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia will end with nuclear weapons [production] and lead to a mad arms race across the entire Middle East.”
Yair Golan, a former IDF major general who was a deputy chief of staff and now heads the opposition Democrat Party, said that the long desired Israeli-Saudi deal would have created important diplomatic ties and anchor a regional strategic alliance against Iran.
To give Saudi Arabia nuclear capabilities “without stringent monitoring requirements and without a framework of relations with Israel as a condition creates a dangerous reality for the State of Israel,” Golan wrote on X.
At the White House on Tuesday, Trump spoke broadly about other countries joining the Abraham Accords, the regional normalization agreements he brokered at the end of his first term in 2020, but did not mention Saudi Arabia.
The accords created a regional rubric under which Israel normalized ties with some Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. Both Trump and former President Joe Biden had sought to bring Saudi Arabia into the pact.
Tensions throughout the region following the Oct. 7 attack and the Gaza war, however, pushed Saudi-Israel normalization further out of reach. The Saudi demands for normalization sharpened in the subsequent years and include Palestinian statehood or, at the very least, progress toward that goal. The Netanyahu government has adamantly rejected such a condition in the wake of the attack and the Israeli public has increasingly opposed the concept as well.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died last week, was an ardent advocate for an Israeli-Saudi deal. He had pushed Trump not to make concessions to Saudi Arabia without the kingdom moving closer to Israel.
Graham had continued to work on normalization in the months leading up to his death. He told CBS News in June, “We’re going to try to get Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords to end the Arab-Israeli conflict in 2026.”
Dan Shapiro, who worked during the Biden administration as a senior adviser on Middle East regional integration for the State Department, said Wednesday that a U.S.Saudi nuclear deal would make such normalization more difficult.
The plan originally was for a civil nuclear energy agreement with sufficient safeguards against proliferation to be part of a package that would include normalization with Israel, he said.
“It appears that the Trump administration has given it away without normalization,” Shapiro told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Trump’s deal “seems to have abandoned a very important point of leverage to advance another important regional goal of the United States,” he said.
“This was supposed to be a major carrot for Saudi Arabia if they were to normalize with Israel, and now that carrot has been provided without it.”As a result, he said, “the whole incentive structure would have to be redone.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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