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As Fall Semester Ends, the March of Antisemitism Continues on Campus
A Palestinian flag flies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Photo: Students for Justice in Palestine/Instagram
Heading into the new year, the campus situation continues to be a complex one for Jewish students and faculty. Most universities continue to reject the compacts offered by the Trump administration, which would restore Federal funding in exchange for changes in DEI and other policies. But other institutions have reached settlements with the government, notably Cornell University, which will pay $30 million and invest an additional $30 million for agricultural research. The university will also provide the government with data regarding admissions, conduct campus surveys, and comply with Federal law. The settlement was strongly opposed by Cornell faculty.
Elsewhere, Columbia University’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing rejected a series of Israel divestment proposals. The committee determined that the proposals did not meet the standard of broad consensus within the university community.
Despite the Gaza ceasefire, Israeli academics report intensifying boycotts particularly among European faculty and institutions. At least 1,000 incidents have been recorded with approximately 25% occurring since the summer of 2025. Spain has halted academic collaborations almost completely, with Belgium and the Netherlands following behind. Israelis also report a quiet boycott by American colleagues. Warnings regarding the erosion of Israel’s economic and strategic positions as a result of academic boycotts continue to be sounded.
Student associations and governments continue to be the focal point of anti-Israel and antisemitism on campuses.
In a reflection of elite British student politics, after a debate, the Oxford Union overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution that Israel was a “greater threat to regional stability” than Iran. Pro-Hamas students attending the debate displayed red hands, a reference to the lynching and mutilation of Israeli soldiers.
Despite the continuing failure of student divestment measures to prompt university action, Harvard’s undergraduate assembly voted on a poll regarding divestment. Reporting was especially convoluted, but the poll apparently showed that 63% of respondents (1,055 of over 7,000) want Harvard to divest from Israel; the precise results were kept secret.
The student government at the University of Maryland unanimously voted to bar Israeli soldiers from speaking on campus. The vote came after an event sponsored by Students Supporting Israel (SSI) was protested by pro-Hamas students. The student government also voted to demand an apology from the university after two student protestors were detained. An event sponsored by SSI at Tulane University was forced off campus by threats of violence, while another at Louisiana State University was met with a violent protest.
Another BDS resolution was narrowly approved by the University of Michigan student assembly, which was then vetoed by the assembly president. The resolution calls on the university to investigate and divest from its financial ties to the Israeli government. The authors of the resolution later accused opponents of doxxing them.
CAIR has been central to both continuing campus pro-Hamas unrest and resulting lawfare. New reports have shown that CAIR provided financial support to pro-Hamas students who had been suspended by their universities for violence and harassment during protests.
In an example of the extremism that characterizes unionized students and potentially the next generation of faculty, the Cornell graduate student union approved a BDS resolution, which included support for terrorism. The resolution stated, “Standing with the strength of Palestinians resisting a genocide, and their unequivocal human right to resist oppression by any means necessary, workers around the world are building power through the belief that we free Palestine, and Palestine frees us.”
The resolution went on to claim that 680,000 Gazans had been killed, ten times the number that Hamas claims, and stated that, “The perpetuation of racist and anti-Muslim rhetoric is part of a broader doctrine of state-sponsored white supremacy that justifies Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians.”
Finally, at Catholic University, the student government debated, “A Resolution to Advocate For A Ban on Clubs in Support of a Nation(s) Commissioning a Genocide.” The resolution targeted the school’s SSI chapter, charging it was supporting “a Nation or organization that is actively pursuing inexcusable evil, such as genocide or terrorism, acts in a way that is contrary to the faith of the Catholic Church.”
In the K-12 sphere, the direct fealty of teachers unions to pro-Hamas causes continues to cause concern. In one case, the Chicago Teachers Union hosted the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression annual conference and featured speakers who praised Hamas and “armed resistance,” and called for the downfall of the US. A representative of the union also spoke at the American Muslims for Palestine conference.
Examples continue to multiply regarding individual teachers who promote anti-Israel narratives in classrooms, for example in an Oakland, CA, high school where Palestinian flags were displayed along side posters which decried “genocide” and which praised Cuba.
The pervasiveness of anti-Israel and antisemitic bias in public schools was also documented by a report from the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism.Hearings and investigations noted that bias was systemic through all of K-12 education including educational materials, teachers, and classroom behavior. Jewish students, teachers, and staff also reported growing harassment and ostracization, with many opting to hide their identity.
Examples of direct harassment and abuse of Jewish students continue to accumulate. In one recent case from Seattle, a Jewish family has sued the public school system alleging that their daughter was exposed to antisemitic abuse from fellow students to the point of being locked in a classroom by a teacher, in order to shelter her from an angry mob.
Arab and Muslim groups have reacted strongly to efforts that combat antisemitism and anti-Israel bias in public schools. In one case, CAIR and other groups blocked the appearance of Luai Ahmed, a gay, pro-Israel influencer, at Bay Area high schools, which accused him of “pinkwashing.”
Responses to antisemitic bias also came under fire in California, where the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has sued over a new law establishing an Office of Civil Rights and an antisemitism monitor. The group claimed that combating antisemitism undermined the First Amendment rights of children and “hands classrooms to a foreign agenda.” The claim is yet another that essentially declares that antisemitism is protected speech. Members of the California Faculty Association, including ethnic studies faculty who develop anti-Israel and anti-Western curriculum, have also called the bill “racist.”
In response to growing reports on the antisemitism crisis in K-12 education, the House Education and Workforce Committee has launched an investigation of the Berkeley Unified School District in California, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, and the School District of Philadelphia. In each case, there are numerous documented incidents of harassment and intimidation led by staff, teachers, and students, as well as the use of biased educational materials. These include student walkouts, staff endorsements of violence, partnerships with CAIR, a reenactment of October 7, and harassment of Jewish students.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a completely different version of this article appeared.
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”