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Brooklyn gyms have an answer to antisemitism: teaching Jews to fight back
(New York Jewish Week) — Emanuel Landsman, a Lubavitch father of five who lives in Crown Heights, found the recent rise in antisemitic attacks to be very concerning. But instead of being afraid, he decided to learn how to fight.
Over the past three years, Landsman has become proficient in the Israeli martial art known as Krav Maga (literally, “close combat”). “I’m a visibly Jewish man,” Landsman told the New York Jewish Week. “I came to train because of all the antisemitic attacks and what was going on around us. I would get hollered at by cars driving by. My kid came home and said others were walking down the street and yelling at him.”
Recently, high-intensity self-defense classes have been popping up in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, specifically in response to street attacks on Orthodox residents. Last week, an analysis of NYPD data by the Times of Israel showed that antisemitic incidents in New York City have doubled over the past two years.
Landsman learned to fight with a training program called Legion, which has previously held Krav Maga classes in Manhattan and Connecticut. Next month, Legion is making its first post-pandemic expansion to Brooklyn; weekly classes will take place at the Beth-El Jewish Center, a synagogue in Flatbush.
“It’s not a requirement to join our class, but the majority of our members are Jewish,” Legion’s president and former Israeli Defense Forces soldier Corey Feldman told the New York Jewish Week. “Our logo is a Jewish star. It’s pretty obvious who we are and what we stand for.”
Jews are attacked because we’re seen as vulnerable targets. Join Legion Self Defense & send a message to criminals: “you can no longer attack me & expect me not to defend myself.” I had the opportunity to participate in the program for 2.5 years, & acquired life changing skills. pic.twitter.com/bOnAbnwbPF
— Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (@InnaVernikov) January 8, 2023
Feldman added that he is seeing more of a demand for these classes, which include separate classes for men and women, and a mixed class as well. “We already have 40 people in New York City, with many more that wanted to join, but we didn’t have room to accommodate.” Feldman said, adding that as antisemitic attacks on Jews increase, people are “aware of the need for this.”
“We believe that the best way to confront that is deterrence,” Feldman said. “We want to make sure you’re going to think twice before you start pushing that guy on the subway who is wearing a kippah.”
In Legion classes, members work up a sweat through a mix of high-intensity workouts that include punching, kicking, grappling and other forms of martial arts.
The new Legion classes in Brooklyn will be held in City Council member Inna Vernikov’s district, which encompasses parts of Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay and Midwood. She told the New York Jewish Week that she’s “very involved” with Legion; she has taken Legion classes herself and said she is working to provide discretionary funding from her district office this year, although she declined to discuss specifics.
“It’s extremely important that every single Jew, especially visibly Orthodox Jews, do this,” Vernikov said. “I’ve seen small, petite women train and gain life-changing skills. You develop an attitude and a confidence that if you walk down the street and use the skills properly, the attacker will avoid you.”
Another Krav Maga program serving Brooklyn Jews is Guardian Self Defense, which was started by Joe Richards, a Jew from Long Island. In 2019, he rented out a room in a Crown Heights yeshiva to teach members of the local community how to fight.
“Across the hall they were having a bar mitzvah,” Richards told the New York Jewish Week. “And then there was us training. We ran these 45 guys hard and pushed them.”
Since then, Richards said he now teaches hundreds of Jewish students through his program. In Crown Heights, he runs three weekly classes for the Lubavitch community in space rented at the local outpost of the gym chain Crunch. GSD also has other locations in Manhattan, Long Island and Florida.
Richards said he started his Brooklyn classes after seeing videos of attacks on people wearing the distinct dress of Orthodox Jews. “Let me bring the training to the area where this is happening,” Richards said. “There were no freaking gyms there. I went into the community and recruited them [students]. And now the people [students] are doing all the recruiting because it’s so popular.”
Members of Shomrim, a neighborhood watch organization in the Orthodox community, are using Krav Maga training to learn how to defend themselves in the field.
Crown Heights Shomrim member Ben Cousin, who trains regularly with GSD, told the New York Jewish Week that “ordinary people” are now learning how to fight in his community through these programs. “They have been victims of antisemitic attacks,” Cousin said. “Some of them have seen it, they feel it, but they are joining because they feel they have to stand up for themselves.”
A Guardian Self Defense fighting class in Crown Heights. (Courtesy)
Cousin spoke about how the GSD teaches “de-escalation” tactics, and is not just about fighting. He told a story about when he was on patrol with Shomrim and his team confronted a man after a robbery. “He pushed me,” Cousin said. “Instead of pushing him back, I said, ‘I don’t want to fight you.’ I calmed him down. I apologized. That comes from the training — I don’t want to fight, but I’m ready, just in case.”
“This is a last resort program,” he added. “If you put your hands on us, we will remind you that Jewish blood is not cheap.”
Like Legion’s Feldman, Richards is gearing up for a new group of GSD trainees this year who have heard about his Krav Maga program. Richards is the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors and compared the current rise in antisemitism to what his grandparents experienced.
“The Jews are being targeted everywhere — verbally, online, physically. From the right and left, we are now under siege,” Richards said. “If you’re visibly Jewish, you have a double target on your back. We don’t have the luxury of trying to plan what we should do. Everybody should be taking action.”
“There are plenty of people in this class who had never thrown a punch in their life,” Landsman said of his training with Legion. “I’m not asking you to join the UFC [the mixed martial arts league], but you need to be able to stand your ground and unfreeze yourself when somebody is threatening you with violence. You need to know when to run or when there is no retreat and you have to defend yourself.”
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The post Brooklyn gyms have an answer to antisemitism: teaching Jews to fight back appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America
On the National Mall Sunday, Christian worship music boomed from giant speakers as “Adonai” and other names of God flashed across jumbo screens behind a praise band. Pastors invoked America’s biblical destiny. Sadie Robertson, the Christian social media personality and granddaughter of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, preached from both the Old and New Testaments.
And then Rabbi Meir Soloveichik — the lone Jewish speaker at the planned nine-hour “Rededicate 250” rally called by President Donald Trump, billed as a national “jubilee of prayer, praise and thanksgiving” — stepped to the podium and began talking about Irving Berlin.
Soloveichik, 48, a scion of one of modern Orthodoxy’s most revered rabbinic families and a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, used his remarks to offer a Jewish case for American exceptionalism, a contrast to the explicitly Christian vision of the nation’s founding that defined the day.
Recalling how Berlin wrote “God Bless America” as fascism spread across Europe and antisemitism consumed the continent, Soloveichik described the song as both a patriotic anthem and a prayer of gratitude from a Jewish immigrant who found refuge in the United States. The hymn, he said, represented “a plaintive prayer to God that America continue to be blessed.”
The four-minute speech fit squarely within Soloveichik’s broader worldview. A senior scholar at the conservative Tikvah Fund and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, he has long argued that America’s civic ideals are aligned with traditional Judaism and biblical morality. His 2024 book, Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship, examines Jewish political leadership through the lens of faith and moral responsibility.
For Soloveichik, the connection between Judaism and American identity culminated in the Second World War. He noted that “God Bless America” was first broadcast publicly the day after Kristallnacht, when Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and synagogues across Germany. “At the very moment when darkness deepened,” Soloveichik said, “America raised its voice united in the song that Irving Berlin wrote.”
He added that “in the years that followed 1938, the prayer that is ‘God Bless America’ was carried by American soldiers who defeated evil, liberating Europe and the world.”
Then came the line that drew some of the loudest applause of his remarks: “It is a reminder, as hatred of Jews makes itself manifest again, that antisemitism is utterly un-American.”
Separation of church and state
The moment captured the complicated role Jews increasingly occupy within the Trump-era religious right: embraced as part of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, even as critics warn that the broader movement surrounding events like Rededicate 250 blurs the line between religious pluralism and Christian nationalism.
Rachel Laser, the Jewish CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, denounced the rally before the event. “If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish in our country,” she said in a statement. “Instead, they continue to threaten this foundational principle by advancing a Christian Nationalist crusade to impose one narrow version of Christianity on all Americans.”
Sunday’s event — part revival meeting, part patriotic pageant — was the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s religious programming tied to this year’s 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson were slated to appear alongside evangelical pastors, worship leaders and conservative Christian influencers. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance were scheduled to address the crowd by video, while Trump himself spent the weekend golfing after returning from an overseas trip to China.
“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” Johnson said Sunday on Fox News, dismissing criticism that the rally blurred the separation of church and state. Those objecting to the event, he added, “want to erase the history of America.”
No Muslim speakers appeared on the lineup. Organizers promoted Trump’s declaration of a national “Shabbat 250” observance the day prior as evidence of interfaith inclusion.
One of the Sunday event’s chief promoters, Trump spiritual adviser Pastor Paula White-Cain, had reassured supporters beforehand that the gathering would celebrate America’s Christian foundations without “praying to all these different Gods.”
Soloveichik did not address those tensions. Instead, he closed by returning to the image of America as a nation uniquely capable, in his telling, of transforming a Jewish refugee into the composer of one of the country’s most enduring patriotic hymns.
“To sing this song,” he said, “is to be reminded that America’s story is unique.”
“GOD BLESS AMERICA IS NOT JUST A SONG. IT’S A PRAYER.” 🇺🇸🙏
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik delivers a powerful reminder that America’s love of liberty has always been tied to faith — tracing its story and why anti-Semitism is fundamentally un-American. pic.twitter.com/aKMg42nS2I
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) May 17, 2026
The post At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel to Establish Defense Offices in Former UNRWA Compound
A man handles fallen cables at the Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as the headquarters is dismantled by Israeli forces, in East Jerusalem, January 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Israel’s cabinet on Sunday approved a plan to build a defense compound on the site of the recently demolished premises of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in East Jerusalem.
Israel in January demolished structures inside the UN Palestinian refugee agency’s East Jerusalem compound after seizing the site last year, in an act condemned by the agency as a violation of international law.
In a joint statement, the Defense Ministry and Jerusalem Municipality said the new compound would include the establishment of a military museum, a recruitment office and a defense minister’s office.
Defense Minister Israel Katz called the decision one of “sovereignty, Zionism, and security.”
UNRWA, which Israeli authorities accuse of bias, had not used the building since the start of last year after Israel ordered it to vacate all its premises and cease its operations.
A UNRWA spokesperson declined to comment on the Israeli plan.
The agency operates in East Jerusalem, which the U.N. and most countries consider territory occupied by Israel as it was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel considers all Jerusalem to be its indivisible capital.
UNRWA also operates in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East, providing schooling, healthcare, social services and shelter to millions of Palestinians.
“There is nothing more symbolic or justified than establishing the new IDF recruitment office and defense establishment institutions precisely on the ruins of the former UNRWA compound — an organization whose employees took part in the massacres, murders, and atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7,” Katz said.
Israel has alleged that some UNRWA staff were members of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and took part in the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 Israelis and led to Israel’s war against Hamas.
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Palestinian Leader’s Son Wins Role in Abbas’ Party, Official Says
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, accompanied by his son Yasser, leaves a hospital in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, May 28, 2018. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
The millionaire businessman son of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has won a steering role in his father’s political party Fatah, a party official said on Sunday, as a succession fight looms for control of the embattled Palestinian Authority (PA).
Yasser Abbas won a seat in elections for the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body, at its first general conference in almost a decade. Mahmoud Abbas, 90, will remain chairman, it decided.
The PA was set up as an interim administration under the 1990s Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella group still internationally recognized as the representative of the Palestinian people. The powerful Fatah party dominates both the PA and the PLO.
Abbas’ son’s foray into politics has fueled speculation that the president may be seeking to position Yasser, 64, to succeed him as head of Fatah.
That has drawn criticism from some Fatah officials, who say Yasser would be unable to unify Palestinians or help them chart a new political future after years without national elections or tangible steps toward statehood.
In the more than two decades since Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Fatah founder Yasser Arafat, Palestinians have come to view the PA as ineffective and corrupt, something denied by Abbas, who has ruled by decree since his mandate expired in 2009.
In 2007, Abbas’ Fatah forces in the Gaza Strip were overpowered by Hamas militants who seized control of the enclave, a year after Hamas swept the Palestinian parliamentary elections.
Peace talks with Israel meant to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem collapsed in 2014, with expanding Israeli settlements since carving up areas slated for Palestinian statehood. The PA is also grappling with a financial crisis.
Yasser Abbas, who has never held an official role within Fatah or the PA, runs tobacco and contracting firms in the parts of the West Bank where the PA exercises limited self rule. Critics have long alleged that he and his brother Tarek have used public funds to help their businesses, allegations both men reject.
Among others to have won seats on the Central Committee are Majed Faraj, head of the General Intelligence Agency, and former militant group leader Zakaria Zubeidi, released in a Hamas-Israel prisoner-hostage exchange as part of a 2025 Gaza ceasefire.