Uncategorized
Before Oct. 7, a rabbi and imam at Syracuse were building bridges. After the attacks, more students joined them.
At Syracuse University, Adam Baltaxe held an unlikely role: the Muslim Student Association’s lone Jewish member.
Baltaxe, who graduated last spring, was a fixture at the Muslim group’s events — eating at potlucks, attending religious services, even giving a speech at the group’s Eid celebration — while also serving on Hillel’s executive board.
His interest in interfaith dialogue began while studying abroad in Chile, where conversations with his Palestinian host mother after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel left a lasting impression. Back at Syracuse, Baltaxe set out to recreate those exchanges.
“I started off just talking to individual Muslim or Palestinian students on campus, one-on-one. And there were a lot of times it would start pretty hostile,” he said. “And then, through conversations, actually a lot of those people ended up becoming my friends.”
Baltaxe was also a Jewish representative on Syracuse’s Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders; an interfaith librarian at Hendricks Chapel, where he assisted students in discovering books on various religions; and a founding member of the Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship, a group of 10 Jewish students and 10 Muslim students that met weekly starting in spring 2024.
In the two years since Oct. 7, headlines have cast colleges as battlegrounds: places where Zionists are excluded from parts of campus, pro-Palestinian encampments are broken up by police, and ideological “safe spaces” shield students from encountering anyone with whom they disagree. It would be easy to assume most students have grown jaded about communicating across divides.
Yet at Syracuse, students like Baltaxe are bucking that narrative, taking part in a campus culture that embraced interfaith dialogue before Oct. 7.
Baltaxe was “one of the bridges between the Muslim students and the Jewish students. It felt really nice to have his company,” said Mian Muhammad Abdul Hamid, who was a member of the Muslim Student Association and Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders before graduating last spring. “It just goes to show that we can model the world that we want to live in, rather than mirroring what’s going on with the rest of the world.”
That culture, some students say, began with faculty. Rabbi Ethan Bair, Syracuse Hillel’s former rabbi, and Imam Amir Durić, a Muslim chaplain now serving as assistant dean for religious and spiritual life, became fast friends when Bair arrived at Syracuse in 2022. That year, they organized joint events like an Iftar dinner at Hillel, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast for Muslims during the month of Ramadan. By the summer of 2023, the two envisioned hosting dialogue sessions between Muslim and Jewish students, and they received a grant from Interfaith America to make it happen.
But after the attacks of Oct. 7 and Israel’s ensuing military strikes on Gaza, Durić said he questioned whether it was the right time. During such a tense moment, he wondered who would participate, and could constructive dialogue even happen?
They decided to move forward, guided by their motto to “model rather than mirror” — a choice that proved to be the right one, Durić said.
“That friendship was the key,” Durić said of his relationship with Bair. “What helped, regardless of all the challenges, was us still being friends.”
“Imam Durić sent a strong signal, saying that, ‘Well, this is the most important time for dialogue,’” Bair said. “And of course, I agreed.”
The program began as a way to share culture and religion, not to debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Durić said. The students discussed their faith practices — from Shabbat to Muslim daily prayer — and bonded over the challenges of keeping kosher and halal. But as students got to know one another, conversations naturally shifted to politics.
One evening, after a dinner during which the group heard presentations from experts about antisemitism and Islamophobia, the students stayed behind for over an hour to talk about the conflict in Gaza, Durić said.
“We built this family of Jews and Muslims who could talk about anything. We disagreed a lot,” Baltaxe said. “But we all came together.”
‘A little more understanding’
Syracuse was not immune from the kinds of clashes causing turmoil at other universities. But when events threatened to deepen campus divides, connections between Muslim and Jewish students offered a path to navigate the tensions.
In October 2023, the University cited “safety concerns” in cancelling an event titled “Teach In: The Occupation of Palestine”; students held the gathering off-campus instead. The next month brought the first in a series of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, with a “Shut it Down for Palestine” rally held on Nov. 9.
That spring, pro-Palestinian protesters camped out on the quad for two weeks before voluntarily disbanding, while pro-Israel demonstrators rallied in response.
But while tensions flared, students in the fellowship quietly got to work. They helped serve as liaisons between encampment protesters and administration, contributing to a peaceful resolution, Baltaxe said.
Having connections on both sides, he said, made that work possible.
“The core of this is that people don’t have empathy because they don’t know people on the other side,” he said. “It’s much harder to empathize with people who you don’t know.”
Sadie Meyer, student president of Syracuse Hillel, also credited friendships as helping to ease conflict. As part of Hillel’s programming, she had organized a day of volunteer work with the Muslim Student Association in November 2023 and a Passover seder with the Student Assembly of Interfaith Leaders in spring 2024.
“I actually have really good friends who took part in a lot of different protests,” said Meyer, who did not participate in any. “But I respected their opinions. I heard a lot more — because they were my friends — about what they truly were trying to get out of it, and I had a lot of respect for what they did.”
Still, clashes escalated off campus when an individual unaffiliated with the University reportedly made a Nazi salute toward a group of Syracuse students and punched one. The student who was punched declined to press charges. The next day, Syracuse parent and public relations executive Ronn Torossian was arrested after confronting a pro-Palestinian protester and refusing to leave campus, according to University officials.
“There must be an emergency meeting to discuss the safety of Jews at Syracuse University,” Torossian wrote to the Daily Orange, saying it was “reprehensible” that protesters held signs with slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea.”
Most recently, two Syracuse University students were charged with hate crimes after authorities say one of them tossed a bag of pork into a Jewish fraternity house during this year’s Rosh Hashanah celebration.
“We are heartbroken and outraged by this hateful crime committed against our fraternity,” the fraternity posted to Instagram. “This was an attack on our home, our values, and our safety, as well as every Jewish student on campus.”
At times, Baltaxe also felt campus becoming hostile: He recalled being simultaneously called a “fake Jew” by pro-Israel students and a “violent Zionist” by pro-Palestinian students. Still, he said Syracuse stood out for the students who remained committed to reaching across divides.
“I think we were way ahead of the curve when it came to addressing this stuff,” he said. “Obviously, there’s always going to be individual incidents, but I never felt truly unsafe.”
Duncan Green, a Jewish junior and another member of the Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship, said interfaith engagement offered him a more nuanced lens through which to process the campus unrest.
On a campus with a large Jewish population — roughly 2,500 students, or 16 percent of the student body — and about 200 students who identify as Muslim, the fellowship helped him step outside his bubble, he said.
“We didn’t solve any geopolitical age-old problems,” Green said. “But I do think that we came away with a little more understanding.”
During one of their final meetings, Green noticed the fellowship was meeting while pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests played out just down the block.
“I thought it was sort of symbolic that while that was all going down, we were together just having a nice lunch,” he said. “We were paving the way for a different way of going about all this.”
Durić echoed that not all 22,000 students at Syracuse were ready for dialogue. But for those who were, the fellowship offered a model. “It did serve as an alternative,” he said. “An alternative to how we can approach things that are uncomfortable, where we may disagree.”
Beyond Syracuse
The Jewish-Muslim Dialogue Fellowship continued on campus for two semesters. Its third cohort, in spring 2025, expanded beyond Syracuse University, meeting at Interfaith Works of Central New York and including students from Hamilton College, Le Moyne College, and several Palestinian American young adults who were not enrolled in college.
A few months ago, Rabbi Bair — eager to dedicate more of his time to interfaith work — left Syracuse to help develop a “bridge building” curriculum for Hillel International, which he said has already been used on several dozen college campuses. His departure means the dialogue fellowship won’t continue at Syracuse this semester.
Even so, Durić, who was promoted to assistant dean, said he expects the new imam and new rabbi to continue fostering connections between Jewish and Muslim students. This fall, they kicked off the semester with a program called “Salaam Shalom,” exploring Arabic and Hebrew words that share similar roots.
Bair also sees the fellowship as an example to be replicated. His long-term vision is an off-campus residential house shared by Muslim and Jewish students — modeled after Moishe House — where student leaders commit to hosting interfaith programming in exchange for subsidized rent.
“Jewish-Muslim bridge dialogue was not the norm in the wake of October 7 on campus,” he said. “My prayer is that this kind of work will continue more and more on college campuses — so that what we did is not an outlier, but is maybe the beginning of a culture shift.”
The post Before Oct. 7, a rabbi and imam at Syracuse were building bridges. After the attacks, more students joined them. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist Attacks Israel During Democratic Primary Campaign for Governor
Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist speaks at a “Hands Off” protest at the Michigan Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on April 5, 2025. Photo: Andrew Roth/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist has sparked backlash among the state’s Jewish community in recent weeks over his fierce condemnations of Israel while running in the Democratic primary to be Michigan’s next governor.
Gilchrist has sharpened his rhetoric against Israel, falsely accusing the Jewish state of both committing a “genocide” against the Palestinian people and purposefully inflicting famine across Gaza.
Since entering the race, Gilchrist has embarked on a full-court press to galvanize Michigan’s Arab community behind his campaign. Gilchrist recently spoke at events held by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and ArabCon, in which he condemned Israel for supposedly committing a “genocide” in Gaza. He has also vowed not to accept money from organizations that support Israel’s war against Hamas, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a lobbying group that seeks to foster bipartisan support for the US-Israel alliance.
“This is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of fact,” Gilchrist said to a cheering audience at ArabCon last month. “This has been established by the global leaders who study genocide. This is not something we should support. American taxpayer dollars should not fund offensive weapons of war while children are starving, while medical resources are being blocked to civilians, and while lineages of families are being erased.”
ArabCon, an annual convention held in Dearborn, Michigan to address issues affecting the Arab American community, featured several speakers connected to terrorist organizations. Some featured speakers referred to Zionists as “vile” and dismissed the Jewish people’s connection to Israel.
At last year’s event, Mohammed Maraqa, data strategist for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said that “the Jewish community is led by their business people, by their moneyed interests.”
Gilchrist further condemned Israel in fundraising emails, claiming that the Jewish state has oppressed Palestinians and accusing AIPAC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US, of collaborating with “billionaire allies” to silence him.
“What’s happening in Gaza is a genocide. Families are starving. Children are being bombed. And our federal government is writing the checks that fund it,” Gilchrist’s campaign wrote in a fundraising email. “I stand for human rights, dignity, and safety. That is why I am standing with the Palestinian people and their family, friends, and allies in Michigan – even knowing that AIPAC and its billionaire allies will flood Michigan with attack ads to try to shut me up.”
The Jewish Federation of Detroit issued a statement accusing Gilchrist of peddling “antisemitic” tropes and mischaracterizing Israel’s military campaign against the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza.
“Gilchrist promotes an inaccurate and offensive narrative that also omits the horrific attacks of October 7th and ignores those that remain hostage in Gaza,” the Jewish Federation of Detroit said in a statement, referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
“This inflammatory language is an attempt to foster divisiveness as a campaign tool. We expect our elected representatives to reject political rhetoric that plays into antisemitic tropes and instead promote peace and understanding among all Michiganders,” the group continued.
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress, endorsed Gilchrist on Tuesday.
“I trust Garlin [and his] lived experience, not only as a father, but as someone who understands what it means when we don’t have people in office defending us and fighting on our behalf,” Tlaib said.
Skeptics have suggested that Gilchrist’s repudiation of Israel is an effort to inject life into his fledgling gubernatorial campaign. Despite serving as the running mate of sitting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Gilchrist has failed to secure her endorsement. Earlier this year, Whitmer refused to throw her weight behind Gilchrist, breaking a longstanding tradition of Michigan governors endorsing their second in command.
According to polls, Gilchrist faces a steep uphill climb to win Michigan’s Democratic nomination for governor. A recent poll conducted by Impact research showed Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson leading Gilchrist by a whopping 39 points. Unlike Gilchrist, Benson has refused to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.”
Uncategorized
US-Backed Efforts Bring Longtime Foes Israel and Syria Closer to Security Pact
Members of Israeli security forces stand at the ceasefire line between the Golan Heights and Syria, July 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Israel and Syria are reportedly in the final stages of months-long negotiations over a security agreement that could establish a joint Israeli, Syrian, and US presence at key strategic locations.
Jerusalem and Damascus have agreed to form a joint Israeli-Syrian–American security committee to oversee developments along their shared border and uphold the terms of a proposed deal, Israeli officials told Saudi media outlets Al-Arabiya and Al-Hadath.
Following the fall of longtime Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December, Israel deployed troops into a buffer zone along the Syrian border to establish a military position aimed at preventing terrorists from launching attacks against the Jewish state.
The previously demilitarized zone in the Golan Heights was established under the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement between Damascus and Jerusalem that ended the Yom Kippur War. However, Israel considered the agreement void after the collapse of Assad’s regime.
After months of negotiations and rising tensions, both countries appear close to finalizing an agreement based on the 1974 framework, with minor adjustments to reflect current realities — one of the most promising efforts yet to reach a lasting security arrangement.
For its part, Israel assured US and Syrian officials that it will not support any destabilizing forces within Syrian territory, according to reports.
Meanwhile, the Syrian government pledged to protect the Druze population while providing Sweida, a Druze region in the country’s south, with the support and resources needed to maintain stability.
Under a US-backed proposal, a humanitarian corridor from Israel to Sweida has reportedly been ruled out, with any aid route instead planned to run from Damascus to ensure all movement passes through officially sanctioned channels.
Earlier this year, tensions escalated after heavy fighting broke out in Sweida between local Druze fighters and regime forces amid reports of atrocities against civilians.
At the time, Israel launched an airstrike campaign to protect the Druze, which officials described as a warning to the country’s new leadership over threats to the group — an Arab minority with communities in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel whose religion is derived from Islam.
Jerusalem has pledged to defend the Druze community in Syria with military force if they come under threat — motivated in part by appeals from Israel’s own Druze minority.
But the Syrian government has accused Israel of fueling instability and interfering in its internal affairs, while the new leadership insists it is focused on unifying the country after 14 years of conflict.
Describing Syria’s new rulers as barely disguised jihadists, Israel has consistently vowed to prevent them from deploying forces in the country’s southern region, which borders northeastern Israel.
Despite lingering reservations about the newly established Syrian regime, Israeli officials have signaled interest in pursuing formal diplomatic relations if specific conditions are met.
Under the Trump administration, Washington has lifted sanctions on the Syrian government to support the country’s reconstruction efforts and pushed for Damascus to normalize relations with Israel.
Uncategorized
Civil Rights Leader Alyza Lewin Joins Combat Antisemitism Movement
Alyza Lewin (center), constitutional lawyer and former president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. She was recently announced as Combat Antisemitism Movement’s (CAM) new President of US Affairs. Photo: Israel on Campus Coalition.
Civil rights leader and constitutional lawyer Alyza Lewin will draw on her family legacy of Jewish resilience and advocacy in her new role as president of US Affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), one of the world’s leading nonprofits raising awareness about the global surge in anti-Jewish hatred, she told The Algemeiner in an interview this week.
CAM — whose recent work includes a new report showing a surge of antisemitic incidents on college campuses just over a month into the new academic year — announced Lewin’s joining the organization on Monday, calling her addition a move that “will elevate CAM to an even higher level.”
“I am incredibly proud that Alyza Lewin — among the foremost authorities on antisemitism in the US, with decades of unmatched experience safeguarding Jewish civil rights — will now, as CAM’s President of US Affairs, employ her personal expertise and vision in engaging American decision-makers so that they can better implement effective solutions to address the challenges facing American Jewry,” CAM chief executive officer Sacha Roytman said in a statement.
Lewin’s family history is rich with Jewish traditions of resistance to fascism and religious persecution, replete with stories of dead of night escapes from hostile countries, a grandfather who was murdered for publicly opposing Hitler during World War II, a grandmother born in Jerusalem during the Ottoman occupation, and victories in landmark legal cases, including Zivotofsky v. Clinton, which established the legal right of people born in Jerusalem to designate Israel as their place of birth on government documents.
“My father, Nathan Lewin, only knew one of his four grandparents because three of them perished in the Holocaust,” Lewin said, recounting her family history. “So, I grew up feeling as though the significant events in modern Jewish history were not just the history of the Jewish people, they were my personal history, my personal family history — you know, the Holocaust, the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. And I went through a phase as a child in which I read every young adult historical fiction book about the Holocaust. It was as if I felt this need to really understand what that was and what that was about.”
Nathan Lewin’s influence on his daughter was formative, serving as a paragon of Jewish excellence in education and the professions. After college, she enrolled in law and later joined forces with him to fight, pro bono, a succession of cases brought by Jewish people whose rights had been violated or denied.
“We started working together on religious liberty cases when I came to his firm,” she explained. “For example, we brought the Boim v. Holy Land Foundation case, the first case brought under the US Anti-Terrorism Act on behalf of victims of terror. We sued groups providing material support for it, opening a legal avenue for victims to collect damages from those in the US who facilitate it.”
It was during this partnership with Nathan Lewin that Alyza worked on Zivotofsky v. Clinton, which, as she recalled, was a vanguard of recognizing Israeli rights in Jerusalem.
“Prior to President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Jerusalem, the city was treated as a city with no country from the time Israel was established. Even the part of Jerusalem that was under Israeli control was still not recognized as being in Israel for the purposes of US passports and other policies. Zivotofsky v. Clinton changed that finally, but official for the passports it changed in 2020. So, it took us 20 years, pro bono, to effect that change,” she said.
She continued, “We had cases that involved the right to put up a mezuzah in your housing complex; cases that involved the right to grow a beard while employed in the police force. These were cases that really spoke to me.”
In 2017, Lewin joined the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, taking over as president of the organization while its founder, civil rights champion Kenneth Marcus, served in government as assistant secretary for civil rights in the US Department of Education. She went on to serve in the role for nearly eight years, fighting civil rights cases involving campus antisemitism.
“We express our gratitude to Alyza for her dedication passion, and tireless efforts during her time at the Brandeis Center. CAM has made great progress in the fight against antisemitism and have served as such valuable partners to the Brandeis Center,” Marcus said on Monday.
The Algemeiner covered Lewin’s litigation efforts regularly, as they took on the forces of rising antisemitism long before the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, when most Americans had not yet registered the issue as a problem that needed to be addressed.
In February 2022, Lewin represented Cassandra Blotner, a Jewish student at State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz who was expelled from a sexual assault awareness group for expressing support for Israel. In August of that year, she precipitated a civil rights investigation of antisemitism at University of Vermont and later challenged its president, Suresh Garimella, when he minimized Jewish students’ accounts of bigotry and discrimination.
“He essentially chosen to blame the victims,” Lewin, backed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other groups she mobilized for a concerted response, said in a statement. “Instead of summoning the courage that other university leaders across the country have shown in acknowledging the problem or offering support for Jewish students who are fearful about identifying publicly as Jewish, the UVM president’s statement doubles down and refuses to take responsibility.”
In 2024, the Brandeis Center won rulings, rendered by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which verified claims of discrimination brought by Jewish students enrolled in the City University of New York (CUNY) colleges. One of the cases sought justice for Brooklyn College Mental Health Counseling (MCH) program students, who were repeatedly pressured into saying that Jews are white people who should be excluded from discussions about social justice.
“I witnessed a Jewish student get told by the professor in front of our whole class to get her whiteness in check,” a Jewish student and witness to the events described in the complaint told The Algemeiner at the time, speaking anonymously due to fears of retaliation. “The professor basically said, ‘You can’t be a part of this kind of conversation because you’re white and you don’t understand oppression.’”
The badgering of Jewish students, the students said at the time, became so severe that one student said in a WhatsApp group chat that she wanted to “strangle” a Jewish classmate.
Those cases and more created legal precedent and school of thought for recognizing antisemitism as a civil rights issue falling under the jurisdiction of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which aimed to abolish discrimination based on heritable traits such as race, religion, sex, and ethnicity. Lewin hopes to expand the “ecosystem,” holding all institutions, from large corporations to private schools, accountable for allowing hostile antisemitic environments to degrade to the point of causing irreparable harm.
“What I hope to do now at CAM is to expand the ecosystem of individuals and institutions that understand, utilize, and apply this same framing,” Lewin explained. “There are so many additional communities and constituencies in society that would benefit from being able to understand and recognize how contemporary antisemitism manifest.”
She added, “I’d like to be able to help ensure the safety, security, continuity, and flourishing of the Jewish people. And to the extent that I can do that by using the legal education I was provided, by using the Jewish education that I was provided, and by celebrating my own families, and, as an extension, my people’s history that I am so proud of. If I can combine all of that in a way that really helps the Jewish people, I couldn’t ask for anything more. I’m grateful to be in this position every day and to call it work.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.