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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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When Assassination Attempts Stop Shocking Us
US President Donald Trump takes questions from media at a press briefing at the White House, following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The villagers of Chelm once faced a serious problem.
A wooden bridge at the edge of town had a loose plank in the middle. People kept stepping on it, falling through, and breaking their legs. The town elders gathered for an emergency meeting. Some said, “We should put up warning signs!” Others said, “We should add lights along the bridge!”
Then one leader stood up and said, “I have the answer! Let’s build a hospital at the bottom of the bridge!”
This, I fear, is where America stands today.
Just a few days ago, during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., a gunman rushed past a security checkpoint and opened fire. The President, the First Lady, and members of the Cabinet were evacuated. The suspect, a 31-year-old teacher with an engineering degree, had written a manifesto targeting administration officials, and investigators later found anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric on his social media accounts.
Regardless of where one stands politically, this news should shake our very core. A civilized society cannot become comfortable with such evil acts of violence. And yet, by morning, the conversation had already shifted: More security. Stricter gun laws. Better screening.
All of it sounded like building another hospital at the bottom of the bridge — because while some of these ideas are worthy and necessary, they do not answer the deeper question that should be at the forefront of our minds: How did we arrive at a moment when evil has become so banal that it no longer shocks us?
Many blame all sorts of reasons — from political extremism to mental illness, from social media to economic anxiety — and while each of these may contain parts of the truth, none addresses the root of the problem. Because the broken plank is not only political. It is a crisis of the nation’s soul.
Shortly after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 at the same Washington Hilton in Washington D.C., the Lubavitcher Rebbe addressed the nation with remarkable clarity. The Rebbe rejected the explanation that crime grows from deprivation and poverty, as some suggested. The Rebbe noted that Reagan’s attacker lacked nothing materially. The real issue, the Rebbe said, was that he lacked education. Not education of the mind alone, but education of the conscience.
A child must grow up knowing that there is “an Eye that sees and an Ear that hears,” that human life is sacred, that actions matter even when no one is watching, and that freedom is not permission to do whatever one wishes, but responsibility to do what is right.
Without that foundation, a society may produce people of dazzling intellectual brilliance, but with almost no goodness to guide it.
Alas, history has already shown us where that road leads. The Nazi era proved that reason alone can rationalize anything, even evil. Germany of the 20th century produced philosophers, scientists, poets, and composers. And yet, it also produced Auschwitz.
In Schindler’s List, there is a haunting scene during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto in which a little girl, hiding near a piano, is shot by an SS guard. As her tiny body lies in blood, another guard sits down and begins to play the piano. One guard asks the other, “Is that Bach?” His friend replies, “No. Mozart.” And they continue to discuss the music as if nothing had happened. That was Nazi Germany: murder alongside Mozart.
Elie Wiesel once asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe how he could still believe in God after Auschwitz. The Rebbe responded with a question of his own: “In whom do you expect me to believe after Auschwitz? In man?”
Because without God and the absolute truth of His Bible, morality becomes negotiable. Without grounding ourselves in Divine commandments such as “Do not murder,” even cultured and educated people can descend into evil.
We must act responsibly in the face of real threats, increase security, and pass legislation where needed. But if we truly want to prevent the next attack, we must repair the bridge itself. And that repair begins with teaching our children not only how to think, but how to live. Not only how to succeed, but how to serve. Not only how to respect life, but how to recognize “the Lord your God” Who gives us life and Who commands us to protect it in ourselves and in others.
A few years ago, here in Arizona, I had the privilege of working with Governor Doug Ducey and others to help bring a statewide Moment of Silence to the beginning of the school day. Just one quiet minute in which students can pause and remember that life has purpose, that actions have meaning, and that there is something greater than themselves.
This responsibility belongs to all of us. Adults and children alike must know that kindness is not optional, that words matter, and that every human being — even those who are different from us — is created in the image of God. And the simple moral truths that built our civilization must once again guide the way we live: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “Love your fellow as yourself.” “Do not stand idly by while your fellow’s blood is being shed.”
Let us repair the bridge. Let us return to God and His guidance, and strengthen the soul of our country. For when a nation strengthens its soul, it not only survives. It rises.
Rabbi Pinchas Allouche is the founding Rabbi of Congregation Beth Tefillah and the founding dean and spiritual leader of the Nishmat Adin High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he resides with his wife, Esther, and 10 children.
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The Conspiracy Architecture Doesn’t Need Jews: It Just Prefers Them
A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Within hours of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD), a comment on The Young Turks’ social media pages offered one theory of the case.
The shooting, the commenter explained, was the work of “the family that owns and brags it founded that country and stole our fed and our way of tying our currency to its value in gold.”
Another, on the same channel, called it “another convincing Mossad-CIA joint charade.”
A sitting president had nearly been shot at a press dinner in Washington. The shooter, a 31-year-old California tutor named Cole Tomas Allen, was already in custody. None of this had any plausible connection to Israel, Jews, or the Federal Reserve. The audience supplied that connection anyway.
At NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, my colleagues and I collected and annotated 2,000 YouTube comments from 10 major US news outlets in the first 24 hours after the attack — left, center, and right — and compared them to our earlier work on the Charlie Kirk killing in September 2025 and on the saturation of antisemitic conspiracy during last summer’s US-Israeli campaign against Iran.
What we found is a structural shift in how online publics process political violence in real time. It is not, on its surface, what a Jewish reader might expect. It is more troubling than that.
At first glance, what I am about to describe might look like a decline in antisemitism. It is not.
In the Kirk corpus, roughly three in 10 comments performed conventional blame attribution: it was the Left’s fault, the Right’s fault, the media’s fault, Kirk’s own rhetoric. At the WHCD, that figure collapses to one in 20. Conspiracy theories — false flag claims, staged-event narratives, claims that Trump himself or the security state orchestrated the shooting — jump from a marginal six percent to roughly one in four. Within a single news cycle, the question being answered shifted from *who is responsible?* to *did this even happen?*
And it shifted across the entire spectrum.
At CBS, the most-engaged comment in the entire corpus — 1,887 likes — read: “That’s a helluva way to get out of the dinner berating.” The second most-engaged, 1,875 likes: “And the band played on.” A Titanic metaphor, Trump as the doomed captain.
One-word assertions reached the engagement-leading tier without any humor cover at all: “STAGED” at CBS, 659 likes. “Faker than 3 dollar bill BS” at CNN, 1,233 likes.
The same logic ran in the opposite direction at Fox News, where the staging frame was inverted into “MAGA-HOAX” — left-leaning commenters arriving on the Fox thread accused MAGA itself of having staged the attack. Different villain, identical architecture: a manufactured event, a hidden orchestrator, a perpetrator framed as a patsy, security-camera footage read as evidence of staging.
The motives stacked on top of one another — mutually exclusive, but co-existing without friction. Trump staged it to escape being roasted at the dinner. Trump staged it to manufacture sympathy for his $400 million ballroom expansion. Trump staged it to distract from issues like the Iran war, or from his collapsing poll numbers.
This is what a comment section now looks like in the hours after a political-violence event in the United States. Not partisan blame. Not grief. Not even shock. Instead, we see conspiracy as the default register of interpretation, stable across editorial positions.
What does this have to do with Jews?
Six weeks ago, during the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, the same architecture was running through the same comment sections — and the orchestrator slot was filled by Israel, by Mossad, by AIPAC, by “the family that founded that country,” by Trump-as-Israeli-asset. The mechanics were identical. What rotated was the villain.
This is what Jewish readers need to see clearly. The conspiratorial machinery that saturates American comment sections after political violence is not ideologically fixed. It is a template. It takes whatever villain the moment makes available — Israel during Iran coverage, Trump and the CIA at the WHCD, regardless of context, because that audience already carries the frame.
Antisemitism, in other words, has become structurally optional but instantly available. The infrastructure no longer needs a Jewish orchestrator to function. It still has a slot ready for one.
That is why a comparatively low antisemitism rates at most outlets this week is not a reprieve. It is a measurement of which villain the architecture happened to reach for. The infrastructure built up during the Iran coverage has not gone away. It has gone latent. The next event that supplies a Jewish or Israeli connection will reactivate it instantly, because the architecture itself was never dismantled.
One qualifier. Our corpus closed on April 26, before reports surfaced of writings recovered from Allen’s hotel room. What those documents revealed about his motive, they cannot affect the finding here. We are not diagnosing the shooter. We are diagnosing the commentariat.
Two things follow.
For those tracking online antisemitism: monitoring systems calibrated only to antisemitic markers will systematically miss what is actually happening. The threat to Jews is not located only in explicitly antisemitic comments. It is located in the universalization of the conspiratorial template that produces them whenever the conditions are right.
For those thinking about platform governance: we already know how to see this in close to real time. The bottleneck is not technical. It is institutional. Moving from documentation to early warning and intervention is a political choice, not a research problem.
The empty chair after the evacuation was Trump’s. The chair where antisemitism used to sit in this kind of discourse is, at most outlets this week, also empty. Neither absence is permanent.
Dr. Matthias J. Becker is AddressHate Research Scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the founder and lead of Decoding Antisemitism, the largest study of online antisemitism conducted in Europe, and now directs its successor project, Decoding Hate, at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism.
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‘Aliyah Buddies’: How Moving to Israel Helped Me Find My People, My Community, and My New Life
Illustrative: New olim disembark at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the first charter aliyah flight after he Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, arriving to begin new lives in Israel. Photo: The Algemeiner
When I made Aliyah to Israel last September, I knew another war with Iran was possible. So, on February 28th, when we all woke up to sirens, I wasn’t shocked. But I was surprised at how quickly ballistic missile attacks became almost a normal, routine part of reality.
Even so, as attacks continued with multiple impacts near where I live in Tel Aviv, I was still so glad that I had moved to Israel. Despite everything going on, I still wish I had done it 10 years ago. Now that I am here, I can’t even remember the fears that held me back for so long.
Part of the reason I feel this way comes from the support and community I have built here in Tel Aviv, largely with olim, and specifically those who were on my Aliyah flight.
Nearly seven months later, a group of us from the flight, organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, in partnership with the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, and Jewish National Fund-USA, are in touch almost daily in an online chat group.
The group was born out of what I call “the Israel effect,” the phenomenon of people gravitating toward each other, looking for ways to help or get to know new people.
This happens in bomb shelters, at the grocery store, in the street — and it happened on our flight. Pretty immediately, I started talking to another olah who was sitting next to me on the plane. When we landed, we ended up in the airport waiting to complete the process of immigration with several other olim our age. We discussed everything from where we were from to where we were going to live and work, to our reasons for moving across the world and our army processes. Because we were starting a similar chapter of life, the connection was natural.
Eleven of us opened a group chat that day called “Aliyah Buddies.” At first, our questions revolved around finding ulpans and learning how to settle bureaucratic matters like converting our drivers licenses. Even though I had plenty of Israeli relatives on my father’s side of the family who were excited to accompany me to the Interior Ministry or the bank, this group was still a lifeline.
It was a place for us to put all of our worries, our doubts, and our struggles, and to be supported by the other people in the group who were experiencing the same problems. We moved from practical matters to inviting people out to events, planning reunions, asking for help choosing LinkedIn pictures, and giving general life updates. No matter what time of day or what the topic was, there was always somebody willing to help, encourage, or commiserate.
“I love this chat,” one member wrote in the Fall after a fellow group member posted photos of a single friend looking for a relationship. Just recently, a friend in the group chat got engaged and invited us all to her engagement party.
Under missile fire, this feeling is amplified. Shortly after the war’s first sirens, someone posted “Everyone good?” with a heart emoji. That led to everyone checking in from places across the country, then discussing the Home Front Command’s system of early warnings, alerts, and all-clears. In the weeks since, there have been constant check-ins along with photos from shelters, sharing fears and stress as well as more humorous stories about missile alerts interrupting showers.
In a post October 7th world, these connections are more meaningful to me, especially after I, like so many others, went through several friendship losses in the wake of the attacks. Friends who I had known for years unfollowed me or blocked me without so much as a single word. It doesn’t compare to what the State or people of Israel went through, but I definitely lost my spark for months, and felt guilty that I was living a safe, comfortable life in the Diaspora while so many were fighting and losing their lives here in Israel. Now, being here and building new communities like we’ve done in our group chat means everything to me.
Aliyah has shown me, more than anything, how deeply we as Jewish people care for one another — even if we don’t fully know them yet. What I didn’t fully understand before I moved to Israel was the strength of the community here. The sense of camaraderie among immigrants, the way people show up for each other — it makes the challenges of building a life here seem doable.
Anyone considering aliyah should understand that coming to Israel doesn’t solve all of your problems. But I’m finally in the right place, the place that feeds my soul, and where everything comes together. It is exhausting, frustrating and has challenged me in countless ways, but it is more amazing and fulfilling than I could have hoped — and at the end of the day, that’s what counts.
Arielle Gur made Aliyah to Tel Aviv in September 2025 out of love for her family, the country, and the people of Israel.