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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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Rabbi Moshe Hauer, OU leader admired across Jewish world, is dead at 60
American Jewry is reeling following the sudden death of Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the executive vice president of the Orthodox Union who was widely known and admired across denominations.
Hauer, the O.U.’s public face since 2020, died of a heart attack at his Baltimore home on Tuesday, the holiday of Shemini Atzeret. He was 60. His death was not announced until Wednesday night, the end of the Simchat Torah holiday.
“Rabbi Hauer was a true talmid chacham, a master teacher and communicator, the voice of Torah to the Orthodox community and the voice of Orthodoxy to the world,” the Orthodox Union said in a statement announcing his death. “He personified what it means to be a Torah Jew and took nothing more seriously than his role of sharing the joy of Jewish life with our community and beyond.”
A levaya, or funeral service, took place Thursday morning at Bnai Jacob Shaarei Zion Congregation, the Orthodox congregation Hauer led for 26 years before taking the O.U. position five years ago.
“You taught us with such clarity, you taught us with such force, with such conviction, you taught us who you want us to be,” said Rabbi Daniel Rose, Hauer’s successor at the synagogue, in a speech he said was short because Hauer’s body and family were due on a flight to Israel for his burial. Pausing to cry, he went on, “I can’t ask you anymore. I think you taught us well enough that we don’t need to ask you.”
Hauer was an exemplar of Modern Orthodoxy’s historical blend of religious and secular expertise. After being ordained at Ner Israel, an Orthodox yeshiva in Baltimore, he earned a master’s degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins University. He was the founding editor of Klal Perspectives, an online journal elevating Orthodox perspectives on contemporary issues.
In 2023, Hauer testified about antisemitism on American college campuses at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The hearing prompted investigations of several universities for allegedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment.
Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who in 2023 worked with the O.U. to pass a Senate resolution condemning Hamas and campus antisemitism, issued a statement saying he was “deeply grieved by the death of my friend.”
Hawley said: “His sudden death is a tremendous loss to America and to friends of Israel everywhere. Rabbi Moshe was a man of remarkable integrity and kindness, and also foresighted leadership. He was a true and dear friend to me.”
Hauer also sometimes was required to speak hard truths to his community. In 2020, he met with Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in forming the O.U.’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hauer then urged congregations to exceed the government’s reopening guidelines. In 2023, he denounced a rampage by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, saying, “We cannot understand or accept this.”
A wide array of Jewish voices mourned Hauer and expressed shock at his sudden death.
“We just spoke this past Friday and texted on Monday, when he was overflowing with joy at the miracle of the hostages’ freedom and the unmistakable hand of Hashem in it,” tweeted William Daroff, president of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “Rabbi Hauer was a trusted advisor, cherished colleague, and wise counselor to me, a bridge-builder whose faith, humility, and moral clarity inspired all who knew him. His loss leaves a deep void for all who loved and learned from him.”
Rabbi Shlomo Peles of the Jewish Relief Network Ukraine, a Chabad organization, praised Hauer’s willingness to work with his movement.
“Rabbi Hauer constantly mobilized on behalf of the Rebbe’s Shluchim [emissaries], and especially for those in Ukraine,” Peles said in a statement. “Rabbi Hauer acted with genuine care, a broad heart, and a shining countenance.”
“Klal Yisroel has lost a leader who was universally respected as a talmid chochom of stature, a man of integrity, humility, vision, wisdom and depth,” Agudath Israel, an advocacy group representing haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Jews, said in a statement. “Rabbi Hauer created Kiddush Hashem in all of his encounters with the outside world, and he leaves behind an impressive list of significant accomplishments. The loss to our community is incalculable.”
“The Jewish people has lost a sage,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, in a Facebook post that included a photograph of himself sitting with Hauer in the official residence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog during a communal mission in July.
Jacobs recalled that Herzog had noted with some surprise that the president of the Reform movement was sitting next to a leader of the Orthodox Union. “I told President Herzog that it was completely natural for me to sit next to my friend and cherished colleague,” he wrote. “Yes, we disagreed on so many issues but shared a profound respect and love for one another. …. Rabbi Hauer’s humble leadership helped point the way for a more respectful and mutually responsible future for the Jewish people grounded in Torah.”
Rabbi Moshe Hauer, left, meets with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at Herzog’s official residence in Jerusalem, Jan. 22, 2025. (Orthodox Union)
When he was tapped as its new executive vice president in 2020, succeeding Allen Fagin, Hauer pledged to address the rising costs of the Orthodox lifestyle — the O.U. supports federal “school choice” policies in order to offset the high costs of day school tuition — and expressed his commitment to Modern Orthodoxy, which in contrast to haredi Judaism seeks to balance a strict adherence to Jewish law, or halacha, with a deeper engagement with modernity.
“Our community expresses this commitment by engaging with the world around us, as well as with all members of Klal Yisrael and by addressing every modern issue and contemporary challenge from within the value system of Torah,” he told the New York Jewish Week at the time. “We undertake all of these responsibilities while also completely dedicating ourselves to a growing engagement in Torah study, prayer and halachic observance.”
To that point, he added, the O.U. “is completely committed to maximizing — within the framework of halacha — the engagement of Jewish women in every aspect of Jewish life. This is an organizational and communal priority.”
Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday night that she had been so shocked to hear of her friend’s death that she texted him hoping that it was not true. She said she had just spoken to him last week, in the latest installment of an ongoing conversation that transcended their differences.
“Our very different realities came up over and over again. I loved learning how he lived his life, and he seemed to love learning how I lived mine. Difference, but mutual respect, was at the core of our deep friendship,” Katz wrote.
In the Jewish Week interview, Hauer pledged to improve “relationships beyond the confines of our community.”
That was also the message of one of his last public statements, shared on Oct. 3. In it he described the upcoming Sukkot holiday as an opportunity for connection among Jews from “ideologically diverse places.”
“Even those who usually live separately must seize opportunities for contact and connection,” he said.
Hauer’s survivors include his mother, Miriam Hauer; his wife, Mindi Hauer; their sons Yissachar, Yehuda Leib and Shalom; daughters Devorah Walfish, Batsheva Neuberger, Chana Schneiweiss and Rachel Hauer, and their spouses and numerous grandchildren.
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A glimpse of the Jewish left in 1920s Palestine
Boom and Chains
by Hanan Ayalti, translated by Adi Mahalel
Wayne State University Press, 312 pages, $34.99
Boom and Chains, by the Yiddish writer Hanan Ayalti, is a sweeping, morally urgent novel of Mandate-era Palestine that marries socialist ambition, Zionist dreams and the lived terrain of Arab dispossession.
First serialized in Warsaw in 1940 and now translated into English by Adi Mahalel, the book reads less like a period curiosity than a dispatch from the very core of 20th-century Jewish history. Its cadences are elegiac and insurgent at once, never letting the reader forget that every utopian project is built on contested soil.
This edition includes a prologue — reprinted at the back as an appendix — that looks back at kibbutz life in Poland and traces how Ayalti’s characters first took shape ideologically. The prologue is not essential to the plot, but it frames the psychic foundation of utopian commitment: how a generation could inherit the dream of community, sacrifice and labor long before setting foot in Palestine. The translator’s glossary and notes guide readers through dense terms of socialist-Zionist vocabulary, from halutzim, which means pioneers, to the nuanced phrase, “building through work.”
The main narrative unfolds in three parts: “Kibbutz,” “Land and Work” and “God and Money.” These sections map not only the external struggles of settlement but also the inner fractures of its pioneers. When Zalmen, the central figure, lands in Jaffa, the novel enacts collision immediately — Arab boatmen unloading cargo, British officials announcing strikes, Jewish pioneers hammering tents into soggy terrain.
Every logistical failure becomes a metaphor: each collapsing tent points to the wider chasm between idealism and ground. The storm sequence in the early kibbutz chapters — especially “Lying in the Mud and Barking at the Moon,” where the settlement nearly washes away — dramatizes that elemental struggle. You feel the land itself resisting its would-be redeemers.
By the time the narrative moves into Part II, the Arab perspective emerges not as backdrop, but as voice. Mustafa, once a peripheral figure, becomes a frustrated agitator whose sermons — half economic, half prophetic — speak of debt, dignity and land. His words register with painful clarity, even if the pioneers cannot or will not hear them.
The 1929 riots arrive with terrible inevitability. In one of the most wrenching scenes, Moshe Milner, a Jewish pioneer from Poland, is beaten for trying to raise funds for both Jewish and Arab victims. Solidarity itself is punished. In moments like this, Ayalti insists that the reader confront the impossibility of innocence.
Part III takes the novel toward collapse. Ideological certainties falter, comrades turn on one another, and even the land that promised redemption becomes charged with betrayal.
Comrade Gamzu, part zealot and part tragic figure, embodies this unraveling. At one point, he sits in his office writing an article for the Hebrew socialist newspaper — a small moment that crystallizes the novel’s insight: Labor is fought not only in fields and factories, but in words. The stormy conclusion leaves characters battered and arrested, and gives readers the sense that history itself has not yet chosen its verdict.
Ayalti’s place in Yiddish literature is unusual. While contemporaries often looked back at the shtetl or outward to immigrant life, he brought Yiddish to the frontier of Palestine. The result is a language of tension, where sacred vocabulary intermingles with slogans of socialist struggle.
It’s a reminder that Yiddish was not only a vehicle for memory but also for imagining futures — even ones later suppressed. (After moving to the United States, Ayalti set the novel aside for years, only completing Boom and Chains after returning to Israel.) In its ambition, Boom and Chains recalls the scope of the Soviet-Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson and the ideological searching of I. L. Peretz, but it’s more direct, more politically uncompromising.
The translation is mostly smooth, though a few idioms fall flatter than the Yiddish likely sounded. For instance, a phrase like “to break one’s back for the land” feels more awkward in English than the fierce irony it probably carried in the original. Still, the glossary is a gift: Terms like Shomrim (guards, or members of the Labor Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair) and shekhine — the Yiddish form of Shekhinah, the Divine Presence) — are defined in ways that illuminate not just vocabulary, but the ideals behind it. You can feel, even without direct citation, how carefully Mahalel has rebuilt the novel’s world for English readers.
One recurring weakness is that some characters lapse into long ideological speeches. Ayalti, at times, can’t resist the pamphleteer’s impulse. Yet even these stretches reveal the emotional urgency of an age when politics was lived from the trenches when the modern State of Israel was still years from being founded. The heaviness that results is, paradoxically, part of the book’s honesty.
What makes Boom and Chains remarkable is how current it still feels. The struggle over land and labor, the ethical crisis of building renewal at another’s expense, the oscillation between hope and despair — all of it reads less like distant history than like a mirror. The book refuses the easy consolation that redemption can be clean. Instead it presses its readers: No soil is free of debt, no vision immune to fracture.
For Jewish readers today, this translation is a gift. It restores a lost voice of Yiddish modernism and places before us a stark question: Can a dream of justice survive when its ground is contested from the start? Boom and Chains doesn’t settle the question, but it forces us to live with it. And perhaps that is the deepest service a novel can offer.
The post A glimpse of the Jewish left in 1920s Palestine appeared first on The Forward.
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2 more deceased hostages, including only woman, returned to Israel as Hamas says it has freed all it can
(JTA) — Hamas returned the bodies of two more hostages late Wednesday and said it had released all of the remains it is able to access, leaving 19 people unaccounted for.
The two hostages returned Wednesday, DNA analysis showed, were Muhammad Al-Atarash and Inbar Hayman.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum announced in December 2023 that Hayman, 27, had been killed in Gaza after being abducted from the Nova festival. And the Israeli army announced in July 2024 that Al-Atarash, 39, a Bedouin father of 13, had been killed in combat while responding to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Their return leaves 19 hostages unaccounted for and deepening tensions over their return. The ceasefire deal struck last week required Hamas to release all hostages, living and dead, within 72 hours. It met the deadline for the 20 living hostages, who were freed on Monday, but has not for the deceased ones.
Israel reportedly believes that Hamas knows where additional hostages’ remains are located, following reports from freed hostages that they were sometimes held alongside bodies. President Donald Trump, who brokered the deal between Israel and Hamas, said on Wednesday that he believed further efforts were being made to locate the hostages, who were killed on and after Oct. 7.
“It’s a gruesome process,” he said. “But they’re digging. They’re actually digging. There are areas where they’re digging, and they’re finding a lot of bodies. Then they have to separate the bodies. You wouldn’t believe this. And some of those bodies have been in there a long time, and some of them are under rubble. They have to remove rubble.”
Turkey has reportedly offered to send teams of searchers who have expertise developed through responding to earthquakes in their country. The country’s relations with Israel deteriorated sharply during the Gaza war as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly supported Hamas.
The status of the remaining hostages has left Jews around the world torn over how deeply to celebrate the living hostages’ release and the end of fighting. Some say it is inappropriate to celebrate when there are still 19 people abducted from Israel who have not been returned for a proper burial.
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