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American rabbis, wrestling with Israel’s behavior, weigh different approaches from the pulpit
(JTA) — Rabbi Sharon Brous began a sermon at her Los Angeles synagogue last month with a content warning. “I have to say some things today that I know will upset some of you,” she began.
That same morning, across the country in New York City, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl was confessing something to her congregants, too: The sermon they were about to hear “kept me up at night.”
Both women — among the most prominent and influential Jewish clergy in the United States — went on to sharply criticize Israel’s new right-wing government, which includes far-right parties that aim to curb the rights of LGBTQ Israelis, Arabs and non-Orthodox Jews.
In taking aim at Israel’s government from the pulpit, the rabbis were veering close to what many in their field consider a third rail. “You have a wonderful community and you love them and they love you, until the moment you stand up and you give your Israel sermon,” Brous told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The phenomenon even has an informal name, she said: “Death by Israel sermon.”
Brous would know: A decade ago, she was the target of sharp criticism after she encouraged her congregants at IKAR, a nondenominational congregation, to pray for Palestinians as well as Jews during a period of conflict in Israel. The incident didn’t end her pulpit, but she has come to understand why many rabbis choose what she called “the path of silence” when it comes to Israel.
Now, she said, American Jews must depart from that path. “I want you to hear me,” she said in her sermon. “There is a revolution that is happening, and this moment demands an awakening on both sides of the sea, an honest reckoning.”
All over the country, non-Orthodox rabbis are making similar calculations in response to Israel’s new governing coalition, which has drawn widespread protests over its policy moves. (Orthodox communities, including their rabbis, tend to be more politically conservative and skew to the right of non-Orthodox communities on Israel issues.) Israel’s government is advancing an overhaul of the legal system that would sap the power of the Supreme Court, and is also contending with an escalating wave of violence.
Some rabbis feel more emboldened to speak aloud what they have long believed. Others are finding themselves reconsidering their own relationship to Israel — and bringing their congregants along on their journey. A few still feel that criticizing Israel from the pulpit is a misguided and even dangerous venture, one that could splinter American Jewish communities.
What cuts across the spectrum is a belief that Israel has been discussed too little from the synagogue pulpit. Brous said the tendency of liberal rabbis not to talk about Israel lest they anger their more conservative congregants has resulted in a painful reality: “American Jews have not developed the muscle that we now need to respond to this regime.”
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City launched a new program called Amplify Israel, which he hopes will encourage Reform movement leaders to embrace Zionism even as they navigate a “deeply problematic and even offensive” new Israeli government. (Shahar Azran/Stephen Wise Free Synagogue)
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, meanwhile, believes today’s rabbis must be vocal in fending off the influence of “competing values” about Zionism from “various organizations that are either cool on Israel or don’t like Israel or just downright anti-Zionist.”
Last year, angered by a letter signed by dozens of rabbinical students denouncing Israel’s actions during its 2021 conflict with Hamas in Gaza, Hirsch launched an initiative based at his New York City Reform synagogue to equip rabbis with tools to counter what he said was “the growing influence of an anti-Zionist element” in the next generation of Jewish clergy.
The initiative, Amplify Israel, is housed at his Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, and employs another rabbi, Tracy Kaplowitz, to work full-time to galvanize leaders from across the Reform movement to support Israel. Kaplowitz jokes that her new job won’t be complete “until every Reform Jew is a Zionist.”
Hirsch knows the new coalition is complicating his task. “The new government is going to make our promotion of Israel more difficult in the United States,” he said, noting that the government “has elements in it that are deeply problematic and even offensive to most American Jews.”
He and Kaplowitz contend that it is possible, in their view, for rabbis to criticize aspects of the Israeli government from the pulpit while still remaining broadly supportive of the Jewish state and encouraging their congregants to be the same. They also say the need to build Zionist sentiment within the American rabbinate transcends any particular moment, including this one.
“If we have to transform how we connect to Israel each time there’s an election, we’ll be driving ourselves a little bit batty,” Kaplowitz said.
Rabbi Tracy Kaplowitz is a full-time Israel Fellow at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City. She jokes that her job won’t be finished “until every Reform Jew is a Zionist.” (Ryen Greiss/Stephen Wise Free Synagogue)
Hirsch sits on the advisory board of another new pro-Israel initiative, the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition. Helmed by Stuart Weinblatt, senior rabbi at Conservative Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Maryland, the group is an interdenominational network of more than 200 rabbis who advocate to ”strengthen the ties between American Jewry and the State of Israel.”
Weinblatt hews to an early generation’s view of how rabbis should approach Israel from the pulpit. He told JTA that he believes his colleagues should always be supportive of Israel in public, even if they choose to pressure the Israeli government and advocate against certain policies in private — which, he says, is “the appropriate vehicle” for voicing concerns. “My position has always been that support for Israel should be unconditional,” he said.
“If we as rabbis are sharply critical of Israel, the result can often lead to a distancing from Israel, which ultimately may diminish the connection people feel to Judaism and the Jewish people,” he added. “People do not always distinguish and differentiate between opposition to a particular policy and broader criticisms of Israel which can do lasting damage.”
Asked whether the Israeli government could ever conceivably take a step that would necessitate a public response from American rabbis, Weinblatt ruminated for days. He ultimately told JTA that the current debate around proposed changes to the Law of Return, the Israeli policy that allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to claim citizenship, would be such an example, as that is a policy that would have a direct effect on Diaspora Jews.
Tightening who is eligible under the Law of Return is in fact a goal of some elements of Israel’s governing coalition, although the Diaspora minister assured an audience in the United States that, unlike with the proposed changes to the government’s judicial system — which have earned criticism across the political spectrum — there would be an effort to build consensus and no changes would happen overnight.
Still, the prospect of such a change so alarmed Rabbi Hillel Skolnick of Congregation Tifereth Israel in Columbus, Ohio, that he traveled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, Israel’s lawmaking body.
“The members of my congregation and my movement have a spiritual connection with Judaism and also a political connection because we live in a democracy, so they see a Jewish democracy as an ideal that they can look to as a light unto the nations,” he said, in a speech he delivered as a representative of the Conservative/Masorti movement.
“By even questioning the idea of the Law of Return,” he went on, Israel “takes away from both the Jewish connection and the democratic connection they have with this country.”
Skolnick suggested that he was unsure of how to speak to his congregation about the new government and its agenda. “My question to you is, what message can I go home with?” he asked.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, founder and chair of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition, shown with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Weinblatt believes American rabbis’ “support for Israel should be unconditional,” and that disagreements with its government should be hashed out in private. (Courtesy of Stuart Weinblatt)
This week, hundreds of American rabbis will be returning to their congregations with messages honed by a week in Israel. The Reform movement just concluded its biennial convention, which was held there for the first time since before the pandemic. Their visit coincided with major developments in the country’s twin crises: The Knesset advanced the judicial reform legislation, and three people were killed in a Palestinian shooting and subsequent settler riot in the West Bank.
In a sign of the balancing act that American rabbis are navigating, the Reform movement’s leader, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who has been among the earliest and most outspoken critics of the new Israeli government, will also be a featured speaker at Amplify Israel’s conference this May aiming to encourage Zionist sentiment among Reform Jews.
At the convention, the leader of the Central Conference of American Rabbis called for Reform clergy to move away from defining Israel in stark black-and-white terms — an apparent reference to Jews who speak of “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” forces.
“In order to connect better with those in our communities around Israel in a nuanced and meaningful way, we must be able to move beyond the pro/con dichotomy which only serves to divide us in ways that are a distraction to the actual issues at hand,” Rabbi Hara Person told the attendees. During the conference, the rabbis attended and voiced support for Israeli protests against their government.
“We are seeing a shift for the better, in my opinion, about how Jews are feeling comfortable critiquing Israel’s policies,” Rabbi Sarah Brammer-Shlay told JTA last fall, before the Israeli elections. Brammer-Shlay was a signer of the 2021 rabbinical students’ letter who graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and today is a rabbi and chaplain at Grinnell College.
That kind of shift has Weinblatt worried. “Sometimes, rabbis are actually out of sync and out of touch with their congregations, who do want to hear messages of support of Israel,” he said.
That may well be the case, particularly at synagogues with aging populations, but survey data suggests that American Jews are moving to the left on Israel at the same time that Israel itself has shifted to the right. The most recent Pew Research Center survey of American Jews, in 2021, found that most have a negative opinion of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; only one-third think Israel is making a sincere effort to achieve peace with Palestinians; and 10% support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel.
While rabbis typically consider what they think their congregants want to hear, they aren’t bound to say it. And some rabbis say this moment is a time to take a stand, even if there is blowback.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed, a Conservative congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, announced in December that his congregation would no longer recite the Prayer for the State of Israel, part of most congregations’ Shabbat morning liturgy since 1948. He said the extremism of Israel’s leadership meant the words no longer applied, and replaced the prayer with the more generally worded Prayer for Peace in Jerusalem.
”I couldn’t just say, ‘God, please guide our leaders well,’” Kalmanofsky said, pointing specifically to the fact that extremist politicians Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich were now government ministers who would be the beneficiaries of such prayer. “The things that they’re saying cannot possibly represent the Israel that I want to support.”
Kalmanofsky had not previously been outspoken as a critic of Israeli policy. He said he has faced some tough feedback from some in his community, including from those who believe this is a moment that demands more, not less, prayer for Israel — “not an unreasonable response,” he said. But a month into the liturgy change, he said he is confident he has made the right decision.
“Something really meaningful had changed in the public life of the state of Israel,” he said. “That deserved real recognition, and a real response.”
Continuing to focus on preserving a Jewish connection with Israel without “dealing like grown-ups” with its “very serious problems” would render the rabbinical voice irrelevant, Kalmanofsky said. “At best, we’re kind of like, ‘blind love, blind loyalty.’ And at worst, we’re totally obtuse, and have nothing meaningful to say about the real world.”
“If you’re going to have a pulpit,” Kalmanofsky added, “you’re going to have to use it once in a while.”
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West Bloomfield Iraqi Christians rushed to aid Temple Israel on a terrifying day. An open invitation for Shabbat followed.
Last week’s attempted attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, prompted the Shenandoah Country Club across the street — which serves the town’s Iraqi Christian Chaldean community — to provide a refuge across cultural lines.
Staff turned a ballroom usually reserved for weddings into a reunification area. By the afternoon, 140 children from the Temple Israel day care center, who had no idea they were escaping a terror attack, were safe inside.
The next night, the same room filled again with refugees from Temple Israel. This time, the event space hosted 1,000 congregants gathered for Shabbat.
Shenandoah Country Club President Patrick Kattoo said when a staff member told him about a possible shooting across the street, “I instructed him to direct all those people into our building, into our ballroom, and immediately give them what they need.”
Kattoo proceeded to allow law enforcement to set up command centers at Shenandoah, as children and teachers sheltered in the ballroom for hours. Around 5 p.m., relieved families were reunited at the country club.
In true Iraqi fashion, Kattoo said the children were kept well fed. “It was Thursday, so our chef was here. We just brought them out chicken tenders and fries, M&Ms, waters, and drinks. There were infants here that were in diapers, and fortunately, we have diapers that we keep on hand.”
Once he arrived, Kattoo said Temple Israel community members were in “panic mode.” “There were just a lot of frightened children. And I’ll tell you one thing: Shenandoah will not stand to see frightened children.”
Around 40 more children and their teachers did not make it to the country club, and instead found safety in the home of a Chaldean neighbor.
Township Supervisor Jonathan Warshay recounted that Rabbi Paul Yedwab wondered, “you know, would he be holding funerals for these children? And then they learned where they were.”
Jewish community members expressed their deep gratitude for the Chaldean community.
Temple Israel rabbi Jason Bennett told the Forward, “They immediately sprang into action, everything from just giving us their space to baking cookies for the kids and creating an atmosphere where, at least for the children, it was safe and secure, and families could come and reconnect with their kids. It was a beautiful part of this tragic day to see children just shielded from everything.”
Some Temple Israel adults said that because of the bucolic environment at the country club, many of the children thought they had gone on a field trip.
Rabbi Bennett recounted hearing about one child recapping the day at bathtime: “The child said, ‘Well, I was so excited. I got to read a story, and then I did some art, and then I got to meet a police officer.’ That was her recounting, which is remarkable.”
‘It was really natural’
Chaldeans are Iraqi Christians who traditionally speak Aramaic, and Michigan has the largest population of Chaldeans outside of the Middle East.
The Chaldean community makes up 24% of West Bloomfield’s 65,000-person population. The Jewish and Chaldean communities have long shared a special relationship there, with joint youth programs, shared meals between community leaders, and parking lots often shared between Temple Israel and Shenandoah Country Club during large community events.
“Throughout my career, these last 32 years, they have been inextricably linked to the Jewish community,” said Bennett. He noted that in other difficult moments, the two communities have supported one another.
“We were together after 911 and supported each other. When Oct. 7 came, they came into our sanctuary, and their entire board was with us for our vigil service,” he recounted. “They brought a significant donation at that time to the Jewish community to help our emergency campaign for Israel. And so it was really natural when something like this happens, for them to be our partners.”
According to Chaldean community member Jibran Jim Manna, who was born in Baghdad, the love the Chaldean community has for Jews goes all the way back to Iraq. “Prior to us immigrating to the U.S., our neighbors were Jewish, and we loved them; they were good to us.”
He said the shared experience of being minorities forced to flee Iraq has shaped that bond. “They all had to get out of Iraq,” he said, “and we had to leave there too.” He added, “Some of us, like myself, think of ourselves as one of the lost tribes of Israel, because we are so close in culture.”
A Chaldean’s first Shabbat service
The day after the attempted attack, roughly 1,000 members of the Temple Israel community gathered in the Shenandoah Country Club ballroom for Shabbat services.
Kattoo said Temple Israel rabbis had told him on Thursday in the attack’s immediate aftermath that they had nowhere to hold services. The sanctuary had been badly damaged in the attack, in which the assailant’s vehicle had caught fire. “I said, ‘Well, our doors are open, you could do it here tomorrow,’” Kattoo recalled.
Bennett said that while Temple Israel had received multiple offers to host services, holding them at Shenandoah “felt like the natural fit, given the long-standing partnership and the role that they had played in that day.”
He added: “They set up for us, they welcomed people in, they partnered with police and law enforcement agencies, and we just had this magnificent gathering of 1,000 people to celebrate what had gone right.”
The rabbis were able to bring the “miraculously” recovered Torahs to the country club. But the temple’s prayer books had been destroyed, so the service was held without them.
The theme of the evening was honoring acts of heroism. According to Warshay, congregants “gave a standing ovation to the leaders of Shenandoah and to the security personnel.”
For Warshay, a highlight was seeing families together in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. “There were many families at the service, a lot of young children. We sort of heard them talking and playing around,” he said, adding, “It was quite emotional.”
Kattoo said as congregants entered the ballroom for services, he “greeted every single one of them,” then stayed as the community joined in prayer.
“I don’t speak Hebrew,” he said, laughing. “But you know, I thought it was a beautiful service. I learned something. It’s beautiful to see that they have their community gather every single week on a Friday. To me, it’s unbelievable. It’s my first Shabbat service I’ve ever seen in my life.” He added, “I kind of wish we did that once a week.”
According to Kattoo, the outpouring of thanks from the Jewish community has been overwhelming. “Their gratitude was beyond what I could expect.”
While Temple Israel is in the process of moving services to the Berman Theater at the local JCC, Kattoo said his offer to host Shabbat services still stands: “If the banquet hall is available, I’ve told them it’s more than theirs.”
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Jan. 6 protester Jake Lang renounced his Judaism to court the far right. It isn’t working.
(JTA) — Jake Lang has burned a copy of the Talmud, performed a Nazi salute outside AIPAC’s headquarters and repeatedly declared that “Christ is King.”
But those antisemitic displays have not earned him an in with his fellow far-right personalities. Instead, after Lang’s anti-Muslim rally in New York City earlier this month was derailed by bomb-throwing counterprotesters, they ramped up a campaign against him.
“This f—cking r—tard larping as a white Christian is jewish,” wrote social media personality Dan Bilzerian, who has increasingly embraced antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories, in a post on X to his 2 million followers. “This is what jews do, they pretend to be white to spread white, black and Muslim hate only to later separate themselves later by saying oh but I’m not white I’m jewish.”
Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic livestreamer at the center of a growing divide at the Republican party, quickly piled on.
“This guy is a Jewish operative and his entire campaign is a psyop to instigate conflict between Whites and Muslims to gin up support for escalation against Iran,” Fuentes tweeted. “Couldn’t be more transparent yet all of you people are falling for it.”
In far-right corners where antisemitism is a currency, it was an explosive allegation. But it was also rooted in truth about Lang’s Jewish heritage.
In November, after Lang staged another anti-Muslim protest in Dearborn, Michigan, photos circulated online of him holding a bar mitzvah certificate with his name on it at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He quickly denounced Judaism but soon disclosed to Nick Shirley, the far-right YouTuber, that his mother is “Russian Jewish.”
The disclosure gained new attention within the far-right ecosystem after Lang’s demonstration outside Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. And Lang, a pardoned Jan. 6 protester who is currently vying for a Senate seat in Florida, offered more details about his background.
During an appearance on a podcast hosted by right-wing Jewish activist Laura Loomer, he again said his mother is Jewish. But he was baptized as a child, he said, while contending that his mother isn’t among the kind of Jews whom far-right antisemites, including himself, view as pernicious.
“We have these false Jews that Jesus warned us about, that are in control of the banking in different places, but they’re not the average Jew,” Lang said. “We have amazing, patriotic, white Jews, which my mother is one of them, who exemplify everything it needs to be an American.”
Lang’s mother, Sari, participated in a press conference in January 2025 calling on President Donald Trump to issue blanket pardons to Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protesters, including Lang. Lang spent four years in federal custody in Washington, D.C., after being charged for allegedly beating a police officer with a bat during the protest.
Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice who studies extremism, said the backlash against Lang reflects a form of racialized antisemitism found in Nazi ideology, in which Lang’s Jewish ancestry remains disqualifying despite his adoption of far-right causes, including antisemitism.
“Here you have this guy, Jake Lang, who seems like a real scumbag in and of himself, but is affirming Nazi ideas,” said Taylor. “But that his Jewishness is still a knock against him amongst these other white supremacists and Nazis, and even his espousal of Christian theology doesn’t cleanse him of that issue in their mind.”
On the Loomer podcast, Lang shared his views of Jewish identity and influence, attempting to draw a distinction between Jews he considered allies versus enemies while invoking antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“I have to give an unequivocal, real deal talk to the American people here, we have been psyop-ed into blaming everything on the Jews, that’s ridiculous,” said Lang. “But on that same hand, I will be the first one to call out this liberal, woke Jewish mafia that controls Hollywood and is brainwashing the white women to all fall in love with black men, and they’re poisoning and they’re not real Jews.”
The episode also ties into a widening rift on the far right, one that has sharpened in recent weeks over the war in Iran. While Fuentes has vehemently opposed the U.S. strikes in the country, Lang has praised the conflict as a “war with Islam” and a display of “Christian dominance in the Middle East.”
“Now the Zionists have started amplifying anti-immigration, anti-Muslim rhetoric to distract Right Wingers from the Iran War,” Fuentes wrote in a post on X earlier this month. “Probably the best way to prevent Muslim immigrants from coming here or attacking us is to stop killing them and destroying their countries for Israel.”
During the conversation with Loomer, she and Lang decried what they perceived as support for Muslims from far-right influencers like Fuentes.
“While patriotic Jews and Christians unite to save our country from the threat of Islam, compromised influencers are actively radicalizing vulnerable youth on behalf of their foreign handlers in Qatar, Russia and Iran,” Loomer wrote in a post on X alongside a clip of the interview.
In a post on X, Fuentes, once a staunch Trump supporter who urged his supporters to attend the Jan. 6 protests, accused Trump of sidelining anti-war voices and embracing pro-Israel allies, including Loomer.
“Trump turned against Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Greene for their opposition to the Iran War and Epstein Coverup,” wrote Fuentes. “Now, he surrounds himself exclusively with Israel First Zionists like Mark Levin, Laura Loomer, and Jared Kushner. We didn’t leave MAGA, MAGA left us.”
While Lang, who was identified as a “Christian Crusader” onscreen during the podcast, acknowledged his Jewish heritage during the conversation with Loomer, he has simultaneously worked to distance himself from it.
In response to Bilzerian’s post, Lang posted a photo of him as a baby during his Catholic baptism, writing “JESUS IS LORD & GOD.”
In November, after the Western Wall pictures first circulated, Lang wrote, “You’re a f—cking idiot I denounced all ties to Israel and Judaism days ago…Jesus is King,” alongside a video of him burning the Quran, the central religious text in Islam, the Talmud and a book on Christian Zionism titled “Standing With Israel” by David Brog.
“Jesus is King, no Talmud, no Quran, America’s a Christian country,” Lang says in the video. “Lord Jesus, we pray your spirit over America. We pray that you would bring back white Christian America. We are being replaced, there is a white replacement and genocide happening and it is because of these two books, the beliefs of these people.”
In a December interview with YouTuber Nick Shirley, whose video on alleged fraud by Somali-run day cares in Minneapolis preceded a federal immigration crackdown, Lang explained that his visit to the Western Wall had been on a family vacation.
“That was over 10 years ago. Nowadays, it’s seen as a symbol of fidelity towards Israel and towards, you know, this kind of shadow government that’s seemingly overseeing America,” said Lang. “So nowadays, if I were to go as a Christian influencer, right, as a conservative, I would never show that type of fidelity because the optics behind it have basically been completely perverted.”
Riffing on a phrase that has come to express disdain for politicians who take photographs at the Western Wall, Fuentes denounced Lang last week as having been “kissing the wall, making out with the wall, with the f—cking cube on his head and everything.”
Calling Lang a “big, disgusting, revolting Jewish douchebag,” Fuentes connected Lang to the allegations, amplified this week by the U.S. counterterrorism director in a resignation letter, that Jews had lured the United States into conflict.
“They tricked us into going and fighting their wars by convincing us that their enemies were our enemies too, and now we’re doing it all over again,” said Fuentes. “And then you’ve got Jake Lang in New York, inciting Muslims to attack him again … antagonizing them to achieve that desired result.”
The attacks on Lang from Fuentes and Bilzerian are revealing, according to Taylor, the extremism scholar.
“Here you have a guy who wants to be a card-carrying white supremacist, who wants to be a card-carrying Christian nationalist, and who wants to kind of prove his bona fides by hating on Muslims, and the white supremacists are rejecting him because he has an underlying Jewish ethnic identity,” he said. “There’s no other word for that than just racism, right? And antisemitism.”
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U of Florida College Republicans, caught making Nazi salutes, sue school for disbanding chapter
(JTA) — Another group for young Republicans is in hot water over revelations that its members have engaged in antisemitic activity.
The University of Florida disbanded its College Republicans chapter over the weekend following social media posts in which two members reportedly made Nazi salutes, among other actions. In response, the group sued the university, accusing administrators of violating its First Amendment rights.
“The University of Florida punitively deactivated and shut down the UFCR, in response to alleged viewpoints expressed by a member of UFCR, and in an effort to silence the club and chill its future speech,” the lawsuit reads.
The chapter is being supported in its efforts by a national umbrella College Republicans organization, whose president said he supported the students’ “right to free speech.”
UF has 6,500 Jewish undergraduates, the most of any university in the country, according to Hillel International. The revelations concerning its College Republicans group come weeks after a similar controversy involving Florida International University’s chapter, and followed leaked antisemitic group chats among leaders of several statewide Young Republicans chapters, including New York, last year.
In a statement explaining its move to disband the group, UF said members of the College Republicans “engaged in a pattern of conduct that violated its rules and values, including a recent antisemitic gesture.” Photos posted online by pro-Israel activists appeared to show members of the chapter flashing Nazi salutes, as well as posing with antisemitic influencers Nick Fuentes and Myron Gaines. Other reports of the leaked material describe group chats stating that Hitler “didn’t do enough.”
The UF statement continued, “The University of Florida has emphatically supported its Jewish community and remains committed to preventing and addressing antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and harassment that are threatening and disruptive to our students and to the teaching, research and expressive activities of the campus community.”
UF College Republicans had recently hosted James Fishback, a GOP gubernatorial candidate in the state who has embraced popular online antisemitic slang on the campaign trail. In its lawsuit and on X, the College Republicans group suggested the two events were linked.
“48 hours after we hosted James Fishback (@j_fishback) at the largest Candidate event at UF in nearly 10 years, @UF terminated our organization,” they wrote on X. The lawsuit claims, “UF likely further deactivated Plaintiff because UFCR hosted republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, a critic of Israel, at a March 11, 2026, event attended by 500 students.”
Fishback himself criticized the university for disbanding the group, likening it to the school’s decision to disband a pro-Palestinian group in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.
“It is disgraceful for Florida’s taxpayer-funded universities to punish student groups for their protected speech,” he wrote. “In 2023, it was Students for Justice in Palestine. Today, it’s College Republicans.”
Also supporting the chapter was College Republicans of America, an umbrella organization, although its website does not include UF as a listed chapter.
“We support our students’ right to free speech, even if their endorsements don’t match our own at the national level,” CRA’s president, William Branson Donahue, wrote on X. “I’m aware they’ve retained counsel and we will support them in reinstating the chapter.” The group’s recently appointed political director, Kai Schwemmer, is a streaming partner of Fuentes.
The university had claimed it was following the lead of a different College Republicans umbrella group in disbanding its chapter, the Florida Federation of College Republicans — a more moderate organization that condemned antisemitism after the FIU scandal. UF College Republicans says it has no relation to the Florida Federation of College Republicans.
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for further comment to College Republicans of America was not immediately returned. The student who joked about Hitler in the group chat told the New York Times he had not intended to be antisemitic and also claimed he was not affiliated with the UF College Republicans.
Anthony Sabatini, the attorney representing UF College Republicans, is also representing FIU students who were exposed in that school’s recent College Republicans antisemitic group chat controversy. On X, Sabatini shared a notice from FIU’s general counsel that one of the students, who had been placed under investigation by the university, had been “re-instated.” The president of that school’s Turning Point USA chapter recently stepped down over his involvement in the chats.
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