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‘An epidemic of hate’: Biden administration officials meet with Jewish leaders to tackle rising antisemitism
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Top Biden administration officials launched a roundtable on antisemitism on Wednesday by describing a “rising tide of antisemitism” and likening the atmosphere in the United States to that of Europe, where Jewish worship is held under lock and key.
“Right now, there is an epidemic of hate facing our country,” said Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish second gentleman, who convened and chaired the 90-minute session.
Jewish officials represented at the meeting were impressed by how comprehensive the meeting was, saying it went beyond the white supremacist threat that the Biden administration has focused on in the past to other sources, among them attackers who target the visibly Orthodox and Jewish students on campuses.
The meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, comes on the heels of weeks of antisemitic invective spewed by rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, and the dinner attended last month by West, Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and former President Donald Trump at Trump’s Florida residence. The discussion also follows alarming spikes in antisemitic invective on Twitter and other platforms.
“In my experience, there’s nothing more vicious than what we’re seeing today,” said Susan Rice, President Joe Biden’s top domestic policy adviser, who described growing up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
Ten years ago, Rice said, when she was defending Israel against its many enemies as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she did not imagine a threat to Jews domestically. Now she says she hears antisemitic expressions coming from elected officials, public figures and entertainers, calling it an “incredible rising tide.”
Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department envoy to monitor antisemitism, said she no longer has the luxury of her predecessors, who traveled abroad to assess antisemitism in foreign countries. Now, she said, she had to treat the problem as a domestic and a foreign one.
“I can’t go to these countries and say ‘You have a problem,’” she said. “Now I have to say ‘We have a serious problem.’”
After multiple attacks on synagogues stateside in recent years, she said, Jewish places of worship were becoming more visibly fortified than they were for years when security, if it existed, was unobtrusive and synagogues were welcoming.
“For decades, when we traveled in Europe, we used to identify synagogues by gendarmes,” she said. “Now we see police cars, now we lock the doors in the United States.”
The Kanye West episodes evidently helped spur the convening of the meeting. George Selim, the Anti-Defamation League senior vice president who was present, said the meeting came together within a week, unlike similar events which can take months to organize.
“The urgency was clear, the meeting needed to be convened, it needed to be in person,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview.
Representatives of the dozen or so groups that attended were impressed by the level of attention: in addition to Emhoff, Rice and Lipstadt, there were officials from the National Security Council, the Officer of Public Engagement, and the Office of Faith-based Partnerships.
The representatives were impressed by how personal Emhoff, who is married to Vice President Kamala Harris, made the battle. He described how moved he has been by American Jews who are proud of him — the first Jewish spouse of a president or vice president. “I’m in pain right now, our community is in pain,” he said.
Emhoff’s unabashed identification with the Jewish community helped elevate the issue of combating antisemitism, said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad).
“He and I might see Jewish ritual and practice a little differently. But one thing Jewish people will remember forever in our history is that when the time came for him to make his decision, he decided to identify unequivocally as a Jew,” Shemtov said.
Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, the group that underwrote successful lawsuits against the neo-Nazis who organized the deadly 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, said the officials closely listened to every presentation. (The media was present for opening remarks by government officials, and was ushered out so the representatives of Jewish groups could speak freely.)
“We were watching them take copious notes, they were genuinely listening,” she told JTA.
The range of invitees and the topics addressed also extended beyond the threat posed to Jews from the extreme right, an area that has until now been the Biden administration’s focus, through a summit on extremism in September and a speech Biden gave in Philadelphia last summer.
Speakers addressed antisemitic attacks on the visibly Orthodox which, particularly in the New York area, are most often not carried out by white supremacists. And there were officials from at least three groups that represent the visibly Orthodox: The Orthodox Union, which is Modern Orthodox, along with Agudath Israel of America and American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), which are haredi Orthodox.
Speakers also were sensitive to the plight of Jewish students on college campuses, who often face hostility from peers whose sharp criticism of Israel can sometimes manifest as antisemitism.
“On college campuses, the supposed bastions of liberal ideas and ideals, many students believe it better to camouflage their Jewish identity,” Lipstadt said. One of the speakers was Julia Jassey, a senior at the University of Chicago who is the CEO of Jewish on Campus, a student group that tracks antisemitism on campuses.
The Jewish participants said they benefited from hearing how others experienced antisemitism. Abba Cohen, Aguda’s Washington director, said he found receptive listeners when he described an increased effort by local councils to limit the building of Orthodox communities. He and Nathan Diament, the Washington director of the Orthodox Union, also described the threat to the visibly Orthodox.
Their accounts moved others present who do not live the Orthodox lifestyle. “We all have different experiences with antisemitism and clearly for someone who’s Orthodox, it might feel different than for someone who’s not,” said Sheila Katz, the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women.
Katz said the meeting was a relief because she often has difficulty explaining to her progressive allies why antisemitism persists as a threat.
“I feel like in the last, you know, year, I’ve been saying over and over again, this is getting worse. This is getting amplified, people are emboldened,” she said. “And there are a lot, particularly in the progressive community that would say, ‘No, no, that’s not what’s happening.’”
Some practical proposals were discussed, including a letter this week from a bipartisan slate of lawmakers advocating for a cross-agency “whole of government” task force to combat antisemitism, and an expansion of federal funding that currently underwrites security upgrades for Jewish institutions to include paying for extra police patrols.
The meeting did not result in concrete decisions, but participants said they left with the impression that the federal government was ready to dive deep into finding practicable solutions.
“For me, this is not the end. This is just the beginning of this conversation,” Emhoff said.
Other groups represented included the American Jewish Committee, Hillel International, the Jewish Federations of North America, the Reform and Conservative movements, and Secure Community Network, the security consultancy for the Jewish community.
“It sends a very important message that the sort of rampant antisemitism we’re seeing is unacceptable and that the highest office in the country is doing something about it,” Spitalnick said.
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The post ‘An epidemic of hate’: Biden administration officials meet with Jewish leaders to tackle rising antisemitism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran ‘Has No Choice’ but to Move Capital as Water Crisis Deepens, Says President
People shop water storage tanks following a drought crisis in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 10, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian affirmed on Thursday that the country “has no choice” but to relocate its capital, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain — even as the regime spends billions of dollars rebuilding its military and nuclear infrastructure and backing its terrorist proxies.
In a televised national address, the Iranian leader renewed his call to relocate the capital, asserting that the deepening crisis has “rendered the city uninhabitable.”
Pezeshkian said Iran’s water, land, and infrastructure systems are under such extreme pressure that relocating the capital is now unavoidable, adding that when the move was first proposed, the government lacked even a minimal budget to pursue it.
“The truth is, we have no choice left — relocating the capital is now a necessity,” he said during his speech.
With parts of the city sinking up to 30 centimeters a year and water supplies dwindling, Pezeshkian described Tehran’s current situation as a “catastrophe.”
He urged government ministries and public officials to coordinate their efforts to avert a grim future for the country.
“Protecting the environment is not a game,” the Iranian leader said.
“Ignoring it is signing our own destruction,” he continued, explaining that Tehran can no longer cope with population growth or the city’s expanding construction.
Among the solutions considered to tackle the crisis, one has been importing water from the Gulf of Oman. However, Pezeshkian noted that such an approach is extremely costly, with each cubic meter costing millions to deliver to Tehran.
Earlier this year, the Iranian regime announced it was considering relocating the capital to the Makran coast in the country’s south, a remote region overlooking the Gulf of Oman, in a bid to ease Tehran’s congestion and alleviate its water and energy shortages.
Advocates of this initiative emphasize its strategic benefits, including direct access to the Indian Ocean and significant economic potential through maritime trade, centered on the port of Chabahar, Iran’s crucial gateway to Central Asia.
However, critics argue that the region is still underdeveloped, fraught with security risks, and unprepared to function as a capital, warning that the move could cost tens of billions of dollars — an amount the country cannot bear amid economic turmoil, soaring inflation, and renewed United Nations sanctions.
Notably, the Iranian regime has focused its resources on bolstering its military and nuclear programs rather than addressing the country’s water crisis, a choice that has left citizens’ needs unmet while advancing its agenda against Israel.
The regime has also spent billions of dollars supporting its terrorist proxies across the region and operations abroad, with the Quds Force, Iran’s elite paramilitary unit, funneling funds to the Lebanese group Hezbollah, in defiance of international sanctions.
According to the US Treasury Department, Iran has provided more than $100 million per month to Hezbollah so far this year alone, with $1 billion representing only a portion of Tehran’s overall support for the terrorist group, using a “shadow financial system” to transfer funds to Lebanon.
Iran also provides weapons, training, logistical support, and political backing to the group along with other proxies, including Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, various militias in Iraq and Syria, and other Islamist entities.
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A shocking true story of Mexico’s Jewish community comes to Netflix
Growing up in Paris, an Italian castle, South Africa at the dawn of its civil rights movement and a kibbutz in the then-new state of Israel sounds like it would be enriching, the project of idealistic parents who wanted their children to see the world and witness history. But that wasn’t exactly how it unfolded for Tamara Trottner, née Salzberg, and her brother Isaac.
Instead, they lived in these locations for three years because they were on the run with their father Leo (Emiliano Zurita), who was being hunted by Interpol for kidnapping his own children. He had taken them to retaliate against his wife, Valeria (Tessa Ia), after she had an affair with his brother-in-law.
Trottner wrote a memoir about the experience and it has been adapted into a gripping and sumptuously-filmed Spanish-language miniseries, No One Saw Us Leave, which recently arrived on Netflix.
In the opening episode, we see a stylish wedding between a young Valeria and Leo, both children of leaders of Mexico City’s small Ashkenazi Jewish community. As she prepares to walk down the aisle, Valeria’s mother tells her she is destined to have “a sheyne lebn” — a beautiful life, in Yiddish — and the crowd dances to “Hava Negila.”
But even at their wedding, there’s little warmth between the two; their marriage is closer to a merger between their two families, and while they don’t hate each other, there’s little mutual understanding — Leo believes Valeria should be the woman of the house, but she is tapped into the burgeoning feminism of the 1960s and wants to get a Master’s degree.
We switch between flashbacks of the pair’s marriage — we see the beginnings of Valeria’s affair, as she dances with her brother-in-law Carlos — and Leo’s international run with his children, Tamara and Leo. Though the children, who begin the voyage aged 5 and 7, constantly ask about their mother, he alternates between telling them that she is coming to join them soon and that she did “something bad” and doesn’t want to see them anymore. In fact, Valeria is searching desperately, and has hired an ex-Mossad agent (Ari Brickman) to aid her in the international hunt.
It’s an emotional and suspenseful story as Leo routinely manages to evade the international police. But the subtle story driving all of the drama is that of the tight-knit Jewish community in Mexico City — even today, only 3% of Mexican Jews marry outside the community — and the interplay of respectability and influence within it.
As part of his retribution against Valeria — and to protect his own reputation as he flees Mexico — Leo spreads a story that his wife was unstable and an unfit mother, even alleging that she had been committed to a psychiatric facility. For at least the first episode of the show, the audience, too, is unsure why Leo has really taken the children, and the story about Valeria seems plausible; we’re not sure who to stand with.
The rest of the Jewish community, too, is unsure; at first, people ice out Valeria and her family as they try to gain information about the children’s whereabouts. The push and pull between two powerful families leaves the community confused and caught in the middle. And after Valeria launches a publicity campaign to clear her name and solicit clues, many of the other leaders worry about the damage to the community’s public image in Mexico, alluding to the European antisemitism they fled from. Leo’s father, meanwhile, is a domineering figure who asserts that his daughter-in-law’s affair is just as bad a blow to the community’s reputation as the kidnapping.
The confusion is helped by the fact that Leo is not presented as a villain; he’s a well-developed character, with his own issues with his marriage and with his overbearing father. An ardent socialist, we see him join an activist group against apartheid while hiding in South Africa, and later, when he flees to Israel, he joins the kibbutz he’d dreamed of, and is embraced for his politics and architectural talents.
(Leo’s time in Israel also gives the audience a window into the kibbutzim of the 1960s, which were still practicing an almost militant form of socialism they have since left behind — children were raised communally and told to call their parents by their first names.)
Eventually, Valeria finds her husband and the children, after checking nearly every kibbutz in the country — we see Kfar Aza, one of the towns destroyed on Oct. 7, get crossed off a list — and Israeli courts order Leo and the children back to Mexico. An end note summarizes the rest of the history: Valeria and Carlos, her affair partner, won and raised the children together, who didn’t see Leo again for 20 years.
Of course, much of the show’s drama is in the obvious: Leo’s flight, the children’s growing realization that their father has been lying to them, Valeria’s desperation. But the quiet conflict between families, the power of reputation — both within the small Jewish community and between that community’s relationship and the broader world — undergird every moment of the story. The power of Jewish community is, ultimately, inescapable.
The post A shocking true story of Mexico’s Jewish community comes to Netflix appeared first on The Forward.
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Columbia University Student Groups Promote Targeting of NYC Synagogue, Where Mob Chants Antisemitic Death Threats
Nov. 19, 2025, New York, New York, USA: Anti-Israel protesters rally outside of Park East Synagogue. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
At least two anti-Israel student groups at Columbia University promoted a riotous demonstration in which hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent New York City synagogue on Wednesday night and clamored for violence against Jews.
“We don’t want no Zionists here!” the group chanted in intervals while waving the Palestinian flag outside the Park East Synagogue in the Upper East Side section of the borough of Manhattan. “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out.”
HAPPENING NOW OUTSIDE PARK EAST SYNAGOGUE
Antisemites have showed up outside Park East synagogue and are chanting for intifada.
The Rabbi of the synagogue is a holocaust survivor who remembers vividly the horrors of Kristallnacht.
Now, he gets to see the same human… pic.twitter.com/fFDtt8nOhV
— Rabbi Poupko (@RabbiPoupko) November 20, 2025
One protester, addressing the crowd, reportedly proclaimed, “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events! We need to make them scared.”
The demonstrators were harassing those attending an event by Nefesh B’nefesh, a Zionist organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel.
Footage on social media also showed agitators chanting “death to the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces, as well as “globalize the intifada” and “intifada revolution.”
Since the incident, which has garnered viral attention on social media, The Algemeiner has learned that at least two campus groups, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and the school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, used social media to advertise the protest, which was organized by the anti-Zionist activist organization Pal-Awda.
Responding to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment, Columbia said that it does not recognize or meet with CUAD or any of its affiliated organizations.
“The group that refers to itself as CU Apartheid and Divest is not recognized by Columbia and does not receive any funding or support from the university,” a spokesperson for the school said. “Any organization that promotes violence or encourages disruption of our academic mission is not welcome on our campuses.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Columbia University once struggled to contain CUAD, which in late January committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, ADP reportedly distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students.
In July, Columbia University president Claire Shipman vowed never to “recognize or meet with” the self-titled group, but CUAD insists on touting its university affiliation.
Other campus groups from different schools also promoted Wednesday’s targeting of Parl East Synagogue, such as City University of New York 4 Palestine (CUNY4Palestine). The riotous protest was held nearly a week after a local imam and graduate student in the CUNY system, Abdullah Mady, disrupted an interfaith event with a prolonged rant in which he called for imposing sharia law on Americans, defended amputating the limbs of misdemeanor level criminals and the wealthy, and denigrated a Jewish co-panelist, Baruch College professor Ilya Bratman.
The Wednesday night demonstration drew reaction from top New York politicians.
“This is [Gov.] Kathy Hochul’s New York,” US Rep. Elise Stefanik, a leading Republican candidate running to unseat Hochul in next year’s gubernatorial election, said on the X social media platform. “When New Yorkers were looking for strong leadership from our governor, instead of standing against antisemitic hate, Hochul chose to endorse a raging antisemite for mayor of NYC putting Jewish families at risk.”
Hochul endorsed New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist who is allied with far-left anti-Zionist groups and has vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit the city. He has also supported boycotts targeting Israel and failed to denounce the slogan “globalize the intifada,” which has been widely interpreted as a call for terrorism against Jews and Israelis worldwife.
The Jewish community has expressed alarm about Mamdani’s rise, expressing fear that New York City, already experiencing a massive surge in antisemitic hate crimes, will become less safe with Mamdani in office.
Elizabeth Pipko, a Jewish civil rights activist and former spokesperson for both the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, lamented how Wednesday night’s demonstration was indicative of a city becoming increasingly hostile for Jews.
“This is my synagogue. My family has proudly belonged to Park East Synagogue since their arrival in America in the 1970s (ironically fleeing from antisemitism and scenes just like this),” Pipko wrote. “It’s also important to note that the entrance being protested in front of here is Park East Day School. Not only is Park East an amazing place where I spent most of my childhood, but it is where children as young as 2 and 3 years old are going to walk in tomorrow morning, to get a Jewish education. A place where they should be allowed to feel safe.”
She added, “My heart breaks for NYC and what it is becoming.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.