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Biden plan to combat antisemitism demands reforms across the executive branch and beyond
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden unveiled a multifaceted and broad strategy to combat antisemitism in the United States that reaches from basketball courts to farming communities, from college campuses to police departments.
“We must say clearly and forcefully that antisemitism and all forms of hate and violence have no place in America,” Biden said in a prerecorded video. “Silence is complicity.”
The 60-page document and its list of more than 100 recommendations stretches across the government, requiring reforms in virtually every sector of the executive branch within a year. It was formulated after consultations with over a thousand experts, and covers a range of tactics, from increased security funding to a range of educational efforts.
The plan has been in the works since December, and the White House has consulted with large Jewish organizations throughout the process. The finished document embraces proposals that large Jewish organizations have long advocated, as well as initiatives that pleasantly surprised Jewish organizational leaders, most of whom praised it upon its release.
Among the proposals that Jewish leaders have called for were recommendations to streamline reporting of hate crimes across local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, which will enable the government to accurately assess the breadth of hate crimes. The proposal also recommends that Congress double the funds available to nonprofits for security measures, from $180 million to $360 million.
One proposal that, if enacted, could be particularly far-reaching — and controversial — is a call for Congress to pass “fundamental reforms” to a provision that shields social media platforms from liability for the content users post on their sites. The plan says social media companies should have a “zero tolerance policy for hate speech on their platforms.”
In addition, the plan calls for action in partnership with a range of government agencies and private entities. It says the government will work with professional sports leagues to educate fans about antisemitism and hold athletes accountable for it, following instances of antisemitic speech by figures such as NBA star Kyrie Irving or NFL player DeSean Jackson.
The government will also partner with rural museums and libraries to educate their visitors about Jewish heritage and antisemitism. And the plan includes actions to be taken by a number of cabinet departments, from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the USDA.
“It’s really producing a whole-of-government approach that stretches from what you might consider the obvious things like more [security] grants and more resources for the Justice Department and the FBI,” said Nathan Diament, the Washington director of the Orthodox Union. “But it stretches all the way across things that the Department of Labor and the Small Business Administration can do with regard to educating about antisemitism, that the National Endowment of the Humanities and the President’s Council on Sports and Fitness can do with regard to the institutions that they deal with.”
An array of Jewish organizations from the left to the center-right echoed those sentiments in welcoming the plan with enthusiasm, marking a change from recent weeks in which they had been split over how the plan should define antisemitism. Still, a handful of right-wing groups blasted the strategy, saying that its chosen definition of antisemitism diluted the term.
Despite the relatively united front, there are elements of the strategy that may stoke broader controversy: Among a broad array of partner groups named in the plan is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose harsh criticism of Israel has led to relations with centrist Jewish organizations that are fraught at best. The call to place limits on social media platforms may also upset free speech advocates.
Biden recalled, as he often does, that he decided to run for president after President Donald Trump equivocated while condemning the neo-Nazis who organized a deadly march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“Repeated episodes of hate — including numerous attacks on Jewish Americans — have since followed Charlottesville, shaking our moral conscience as Americans and challenging the values for which we stand as a Nation,” Biden wrote in an introduction to the report.
The administration launched the initiative last December, after years during which Jewish groups and the FBI reported sharp spikes in antisemitic incidents. The strategy was originally planned for release at its Jewish American Heritage Month celebration last week, but was delayed, in part because of last minute internal squabbling over whether it would accept a definition of antisemitism that some on the left said chilled free speech on Israel. Some right-wing groups were deeply critical of the new strategy for not accepting that definition to the exclusion of others.
Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad) praised the breadth of the plan, and said the delay seemed to produce results.
“The White House has taken this very seriously. The phrase that something is still being worked on can often be a euphemism for a lack of concern,” he said. “In this case, it seems to have resulted in an even more comprehensive and hopefully more effective result.”
Some of the initiatives in the plan focus less on directly confronting antisemitism and more on promoting tolerance of and education about Jews.The Biden Administration will seek to ensure accommodations for Jewish religious observance, the accompanying fact sheet said, and “the Department of Agriculture will work to ensure equal access to all USDA feeding programs for USDA customers with religious dietary needs, including kosher and halal dietary needs.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League CEO who was closely consulted on the strategy, said promoting inclusion was as critical as fighting antisemitism. “Is FEMA giving kosher provisions after disasters going to solve antisemitism?” he said in an interview. “No, but… it’s an acknowledgement of the plurality of communities and the need to treat Jewish people like you would any other minority community, and I think I’m very pleased to see that.”
In the months since Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, convened a roundtable to launch the initiative, the Biden administration has pivoted from focusing on the threat of antisemitism from the far-right to also highlighting its manifestation in other spheres — including amid anti-Israel activism on campuses and the targeting of visibly religious Jews in the northeast. Those factors were evident in the strategy.
“Some traditionally observant Jews, especially traditional Orthodox Jews, are victimized while walking down the street,” the strategy said in its introduction. “Jewish students and educators are targeted for derision and exclusion on college campuses, often because of their real or perceived views about the State of Israel.”
The proposal that may provoke controversy beyond American Jewry is the Biden Administration’s calls to reform the tech sector, which echo bipartisan recommendations to change Section 230, a provision of U.S. law that grants platforms immunity from being liable for the content users post. Free speech advocates and the companies themselves say that if the government were to police online speech, it would veer into censorship.
“Tech companies have a critical role to play and for that reason the strategy contains 10 separate calls to tech companies to establish a zero tolerance policy for hate speech on their platforms, to ensure that their algorithms do not pass along hate speech and extreme content to users and to listen more closely to Jewish groups to better understand how antisemitism manifests itself on their platforms,” Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Biden’s top Homeland Security adviser, said during a 30-minute briefing on the strategy on Thursday. “The president has also called on Congress to remove the special immunity for online platforms and to impose stronger transparency requirements in order to ensure that tech companies are removing content that violates their terms of service.”
Neo-Nazis and white supremacists encircle counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 11, 2017. (Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In the weeks before the rollout, a debate raged online and behind the scenes amid Jewish organizations and activists about how the plan would define antisemitism. Centrist and right-wing groups pushed for the plan to embrace the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition. Among its examples of anti-Jewish bigotry are those focusing on when Israel criticism is antisemitic, including when “double standards” applied to Israel are antisemitic.
Advocates on the left say those clauses turn legitimate criticism of Israel into hate speech; instead, they pushed to include references to the Nexus Document, a definition authored by academics that recognizes IHRA but seeks to complement it by further elucidating how anti-Israel expression may be antisemitic in some instances, and not in others. Others sought to include the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which rejects IHRA’s Israel-related examples.
In the end, the strategy said the U.S. government recognizes the IHRA definition as the “most prominent” and “appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”
A number of the centrist groups pressed for exclusive reference to IHRA, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Those groups praised the strategy and focused only on its embrace of IHRA. So did the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Herzog.
“I would like to congratulate the Biden administration for publishing the first ever national strategy to combat antisemitism,” Herzog wrote on Twitter. “Thank you, @POTUS, for prioritizing the need to confront antisemitism in all its forms. We welcome the re-embracing of @TheIHRA definition which is the gold standard definition of antisemitism.”
Some center-right groups like B’nai Brith International, StandWithUs and the World Jewish Congress, praised the strategy while expressing regret at the inclusion of Nexus. Right-wing groups, such as the Republican Jewish Coalition and Christians United for Israel condemned the rollout.
RJC said Biden “blew it” by not exclusively using the IHRA definition. The Brandeis Center, which defends pro-Israel groups and students on campus, said the “substance doesn’t measure up.”
Groups on the left, however, broadly praised the strategy. “We call on our Jewish communities to seize this historic moment and build on this new strategy to ensure that the fight for Jewish safety is a fight for a better and safer America for all,” said a statement from six left-leaning groups spearheaded by Jews For Racial & Economic Justice.
Greenblatt said it was predictable that groups on the left would take the win and that groups on the right would grumble — but that it was also beside the point. IHRA, he said, was now U.S. policy.
“This document elevates and advances IHRA as the way that U.S. policy will be formulated going forward and across all of the agencies,” Greenblatt said. “That is a win.”
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Netanyahu joins Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ despite misgivings about Qatari, Turkish participation
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has joined U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” less than a day after telling Israel’s parliament about his “argument” over the board’s membership.
Trump invited roughly 60 countries to join the board, a global body that is expected to oversee the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Among those that received invitations are Qatar and Turkey, which have supported Hamas.
“We have a certain argument with our friends in the United States over the composition of the advisory council that will accompany the processes in Gaza,” Netanyahu said on Monday.
Netanyahu’s comments came after Trump touted the board on social media, in the latest bid to move the three-month-old ceasefire into a new phase. The invitations went out soon after Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff announced that the ceasefire deal had entered its second phase, ushering in the formation of a Palestinian committee to oversee Gaza’s governance.
“It is my Great Honor to announce that THE BOARD OF PEACE has been formed,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social last week. “The Members of the Board will be announced shortly, but I can say with certainty that it is the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.”
Some European countries have indicated that they are interested in joining the board, while others have rejected the invitations. Pakistan and Russia are considering joining, while Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally, Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko, warmly accepted the invitation in a statement Monday.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Argentinian President Javier Milei, United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and Paraguayan President Santiago Peña were among the first to announce their acceptance of the invitations on social media. Egypt accepted its invitation on Wednesday.
Countries that sign onto the board will be installed for three-year terms with the option of paying $1 billion to fund its activities and gain permanent membership.
The board’s creation comes as Trump is openly dismissive of U.S. participation in other international bodies. The invitations said the Board of Peace would “embark on a bold new approach to resolving global conflict,” a description that critics said could set up the body to rival the United Nations in global governance. While the United Nations authorized the board to oversee the management of Gaza for two years, the board’s charter does not specifically mention Gaza.
French President Emmanuel Macron rejected Trump’s offer in a statement Monday, writing that the board’s charter “goes beyond the framework of Gaza and raises serious questions, in particular with respect to the principles and structure of the United Nations, which cannot be called into question.” (Trump later threatened to impose tariffs on French wines and champagne over the refusal.)
Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee warned in a statement Sunday that the board “would have a mandate wider than the implementation of the Gaza Peace Plan,” adding that “while it may be imperfect, the UN and the primacy of international law is more important now than ever.”
Sweden and Norway turned down their invitations on Wednesday.
Still, other world leaders have expressed their interest in joining the board, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who said her country was “ready to do our part” and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who said they had agreed in principle, but that “unimpeded aid flows” to Gaza was a precondition for joining. Meloni is right-wing and Carney is liberal, indicating that the board is
A spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that he was reviewing the invitation and was “hoping to get more details from the US side.”
Trump is expected to hold a formal signing ceremony for the board as early as Thursday while he attends the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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How a Persian Jewish immigrant became the rodeo king of California
David Halimi grew up Jewish in Tehran, watching Bonanza. He now produces rodeos in Northern California and owns a bar modeled on Cheers.
At 73, Halimi is known around Chico as the man behind a Western wear store stocked with thousands of cowboy boots, a rodeo circuit that draws bull riders from across the region, and a U-shaped bar where locals joke about who might be the town’s version of Norm. Less obvious — but no less central — is that he is also a longtime synagogue president, a Hillel board leader, and a professor who teaches business analytics at the local university.
Asked how an Iranian Jew learned the rhythms of the American West, Halimi doesn’t mystify it. “I’m a quick learner,” he said.
Halimi still follows events in Iran closely. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “It’s my heritage.” He has no illusions about the imbalance of power. “People protesting with their bare hands are no match to machine guns and professional assassins.” Still, he allows himself hope. “I wish and I pray that the people will prevail.”
For Halimi, the distance between Iran and Chico is not just geographic. It is the distance between a life shaped by instability — he grew up in Iran in the aftermath of a coup — and one he has spent decades deliberately building.
On a recent afternoon inside the 6,000-square-foot Diamond W Western Wear, Halimi wore what he sells — black alligator boots, jeans, a button-down, blazer and a hat — and moved easily past towers of boots, glass cases of belt buckles, pausing as an employee steamed a cowboy hat back into shape. His wife, Fran, emerged from the back. Customers drifted in.
Over the years, his footprint downtown has expanded to include two restaurants and a soon-to-open coffee shop, all within walking distance of his store.
Halimi didn’t arrive in America looking for a job. He arrived looking for an opportunity. When he moved to the United States at 16, in 1969, he worked full time while going to school, bussing tables at a restaurant and saving aggressively. By 18, he had pooled his earnings with his older brother to make his first real estate investment. “I was never looking for a job,” he said. “I always wanted to do my own thing.”
That instinct carried him through college, where he studied mathematics and economics, and later into commodities trading — “the stock market on steroids,” as he put it — before settling in Chico in 1979. It had the virtues he was looking for: a small-town feel, a university’s energy, and room to build.
Mending fences, building community
For all the boots, buckles and bull riders, Halimi’s most consequential work happens closer to home. He has served on the board of Congregation Beth Israel of Chico for decades, including numerous stints as president, and has been a steady presence through the cycles that define small Jewish communities.
Rabbi Lisa Rappaport, who leads the congregation, said that constancy matters. In a community with limited resources, leadership often means stepping in wherever the need arises.
That was especially true after the synagogue was targeted with antisemitic graffiti in late 2022. What followed, Rappaport recalled, was an outpouring of support. Donations funded a new security system. A local metalworker volunteered to create a new sign. Another family, moved by the response, offered to pay for a fence.
Halimi volunteered to design and help build it. Vertical bars, he insisted, would make the synagogue feel like a jail. Instead, he created diagonal metal panels inspired by math’s golden ratio, incorporating stainless-steel symbols of the Twelve Tribes — a boundary meant to protect without closing the place off.
Rappaport credits both Halimi and his wife, a former religious school director and longtime sisterhood leader, with helping sustain the shul. “They’re in it till the end,” she said. In a small community, she added, that kind of commitment is existential. “If you have a couple of people who have that frame of mind,” she said, “it keeps the community alive. It’s people like that that keep it pulsing.”
Halimi, now a grandfather, carries that same lesson into his classroom at Chico State, where he has been teaching since 2009. Each semester he leads two courses: business analytics and the evolution of management theory. He doesn’t think of it as a job so much as a responsibility. “I like seeing the light bulb go on,” he said. Former students, now entrepreneurs themselves, sometimes track him down to say thank you. The payoff, he said, is “psychic income.”
Halimi teaches what he learned: “Even when the odds are against you,” he said, “you can still succeed.”
His rodeo business began, improbably enough, as a marketing complaint. Halimi had been sponsoring country concerts and rodeos to promote the store, but he was unimpressed with the results. Other sponsors, he noticed, felt the same way. So he launched his own production company. First, they hosted country music concerts. Soon, they built a rodeo: the National Bullriding Championship Tour, which just marked its 30th year.
He had expected resistance from the industry. Instead, he found acceptance, and eventually respect. “It’s very unusual,” he acknowledged, “for an Iranian Jew to be a successful rodeo producer.”
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Argentina’s chief Sephardic rabbi reaffirms century-old ban on local conversions, sparking backlash
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s Sephardic chief rabbi reaffirmed a 100-year-old ruling that conversion may not be performed in Argentina and is considered valid only if carried out in Israel.
Representatives of non-Orthodox movements reacted angrily, asking why the ruling was issued now and saying it would essentially subject Argentinian converts to the tight hold that Israel’s Orthodox rabbis have on conversion.“Orthodoxy is attempting to present itself as the sole legitimate source of Judaism and halachic [Jewish legal] authority,” Rabbi Ariel Stofenmacher, the rector of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano, the Masorti/Conservative movement’s seminary in Buenos Aires, told JTA. “We are concerned that members of the Jewish community in Latin America, where about 80 percent or more are not Orthodox, may read that statement by an important rabbi and feel confused.”
The document, issued on Jan. 13 and signed by Chief Rabbi Yosef Chehebar, reaffirms a takanah, or rabbinical ban, first established in Argentina in 1927. The authors of that ban, Rabbi Shaul Sitehon Dabah of the Syrian-Aleppo tradition and the Ashkenazi Rabbi Aharon Goldman, emerged in response to a proliferation of lax or irregular conversions, particularly in rural areas among Jewish immigrants.
The statement signed by Cheheber describes the ban as “general and binding.” It emphasizes that the decree was enacted permanently, “with no temporal limitation or expiration whatsoever,” and frames it as a safeguard for “the purity of lineage and the sanctity of our families.”
In the years since the original ban, however, non-Orthodox rabbis say the conversion process has been standardized, and that the level of preparation in Argentina is considered very high. The Masorti seminary, which has conducted conversions since its founding in 1994, argues that the reasons for the restriction “are no longer applicable.”
Critics of Cheheber’s document say there have been no recent incidents or developments that would have prompted such a reminder.
“We reject recent statements that invoke a cherem from the 1920s to invalidate conversions carried out outside the State of Israel and by non-Orthodox rabbis, as well as the use of language that appeals to notions of ‘lineage,’ ‘purity’ or ‘contamination,” the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano and its affiliated Rabbinical Seminary said in a statement Jan. 15. “Such claims are halachically unsustainable and ethically unacceptable, particularly when they introduce categories alien to Judaism and morally offensive.”
Rabbi Isaac Sacca, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Buenos Aires, posted Chehebar’s ruling on social media and defended it in an interview with JTA.
“The regulation represents a self-imposed limitation by Argentina’s Orthodox rabbis on their own authority, undertaken in order to ensure security and peace of mind that a practice as delicate and sacred as conversion is carried out with due seriousness, and that neither the convert, nor families, nor the community are misled,” he said.
Conversion has been a flashpoint between the diaspora and Israel, where the Orthodox rabbinate for decades held a near monopoly on Jewish lifecycle events, including conversion. Non-Orthodox conversions were recognized in Israel under a landmark ruling handed down by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2021, but non-Orthodox groups continue to object to government regulations that complicate the recognition of these conversions.
Conversion has been particularly fraught in Latin America, including the controversies that led to the 1927 takanah and, more recently, the mass conversion in Brazil, Colombia and other countries of people who identify as Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forcibly converted during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
Within Orthodox circles in Argentina, preparatory stages for conversion may take place in the country, but the bet din, or rabbinical court, that validates them operates in Israel. According to sources who asked to remain anonymous, the target of the latest ruling was not the non-Orthodox movements but Orthodox rabbis who had been offering more flexible alternatives to prospective converts, such as completing an Orthodox conversion in neighboring Uruguay and then returning to Argentina to seek its recognition in Buenos Aires.
Chehebar’s recent statement specifies that the takanah “applies both to any person residing in Argentina, as well as to anyone coming from another country with the intention of establishing residence in national territory, even in cases in which the giyur [convert] has already been carried out in their country of origin or another country, outside of Eretz Israel.”
Asked whether any specific incident had triggered the statement, Sacca replied: “We are not aware of any particular event. It is simply a reminder that the Sephardic Chief Rabbinate of Syrian-Aleppo tradition has conveyed to our rabbinate for public dissemination.”
The ruling “does not constitute a rejection of the convert, nor does it devalue those who sincerely seek to join Judaism,” he added. “On the contrary, it functions as a halakhic safeguard designed to preserve a core commandment linked to Jewish identity, in a context marked by social pressures and institutional weaknesses. It also seeks to prevent hasty decisions that could affect the spiritual and personal lives of those seeking conversion, as well as those of their descendants.”
The Masorti movement insisted that its own rabbis conduct the conversion process in a manner that is “serious, demanding, and deeply Jewish,” based on rigorous study, commitment to Jewish life and responsible rabbinical guidance. “Those who join the Jewish people through this path,” the statement affirms, “are received as full Jews, with dignity and complete belonging, in accordance with rabbinic tradition.”
Said Stofenmacher: “We reaffirm that we conduct legitimate conversions in accordance with the halacha, as we have done for decades, with thousands of individuals who have joined the Jewish people in our region, and we will continue to do so in all the communities where our rabbis serve.”
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