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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.
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Cameron Kasky, Jewish Parkland shooting survivor, is running for Congress on platform to ‘stop funding genocide’
(JTA) — Cameron Kasky, the 25-year-old Jewish activist and school shooting survivor, has entered the race to represent one of the United States’ most Jewish congressional districts — on a platform that includes stopping Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.
“We need leaders who aren’t going to coddle their billionaire donors, who won’t support a genocide and who aren’t going to settle for flaccid incrementalism,” Kasky said in the launch video posted on Tuesday for his campaign to represent New York City’s 12th Congressional District.
The video’s caption includes the three main points of his campaign: “Medicare for all. Stop funding genocide. Abolish ICE.”
While Kasky’s anti-Trump positions are likely to go over well with the district’s largely liberal populace, his stance that Israel is committing a genocide — and the apparent centrality of that stance to his campaign — could be an issue for constituents. The district includes the Upper West and East Sides of Manhattan, where many voters sided with the pro-Israel Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in the city’s recent mayoral election, as well as Midtown Manhattan.
Kasky’s messaging may, however, speak more to young voters in the district. A New York Times/Siena poll from September found that 66% of New York City voters ages 18 to 29 found that Mamdani, an anti-Zionist, “best addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” among the mayoral candidates.
A democratic socialist, Kasky was a vocal supporter of Mamdani throughout the mayoral election — and an aggressive critic of fellow Democrats who objected to the mayoral candidate’s anti-Israel stances.
“‘Vote blue no matter who unless it’s a Muslim who criticizes Israel’s extremist far right nationalist government’ is not ‘vote blue no matter who,’” he wrote in one tweet.
In another, he wrote that Democrats who refused to endorse him after the primary should “go get a consulting gig and stop disrespecting your own voter base.”
Kasky had teased entering the crowded race for months, ever since Rep. Jerry Nadler, Congress’ most senior Jewish member, announced he would not be running for reelection.
In that time, Kasky has also weighed in on the viability of Micah Lasher, the Jewish state Assembly member and former Nadler aide who launched his own campaign for the seat earlier in the fall.
Lasher is unable to “fight fascism” because of his “genocide denial and free speech attacks on students,” Kasky wrote, with a screenshot of a Lasher tweet from Oct. 28, 2023, that criticized what Lasher called the “awful use of the word ‘genocide’ by some westerners to describe Israel’s actions.” (As the war in Gaza neared its two-year mark this summer, a poll found that half of Americans believed Israel had committed genocide, a claim that Israel and the United States both reject.)
Kasky also reposted a poll according to which Brad Lander, Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish ally, would beat the moderate congressman Dan Goldman, who is Jewish and withheld an endorsement due to “some of the rhetoric coming from Mamdani.”
“Needless to say, I am looking forward to working with Brad Lander,” Kasky wrote.
Kasky is the co-host of the “For You Podcast” with Tim Miller, which attempts to “break down the politics of the TikTok generation,” for The Bulwark, a center-right, anti-Trump media company.
One of Kasky’s podcast guests over the summer is now his opponent: Jack Schlossberg.
Schlossberg, who is the grandson of President John F. Kennedy and has said he is “at least 100% half Jewish,” announced his own candidacy for the 12th Congressional District last week.
Kasky remarked on their podcast that many women in his life have crushes on Schlossberg — and Schlossberg replied that the two men have a similar appeal.
“I always say, when you go unhinged politics Jew, it’s hard to go back,” Kasky said.
Kasky was thrust into the national spotlight as a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Together with other survivors, he led a march in Washington and spurred a national movement that is seen as crucial to the 2022 passage of the most significant federal gun control legislation in decades.
Kasky, a junior at the time of the shooting, is credited with having selecting the name and hashtag #NeverAgain — which has long been linked to Holocaust commemoration — for the student-led gun control campaign. (Another co-founder of Never Again MSD is David Hogg, who recently stepped down as the youngest-ever vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.)
Before the shooting, Kasky said he played Motel in a school production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” The quality of his performance was proof, he joked, that he was not a paid actor in the protests, as some conspiracy theorists accused.
Kasky attended Hebrew school growing up, which he referenced when speaking on MSNBC about the “No Kings” protests against Trump.
“This kind of reminded me of my education growing up — when you go to Hebrew school, you learn about fascism a little bit younger than the other kids,” he said. “And you find yourself asking, in the face of authoritarianism, in the face of seeing a genocide happen before the entire world, what would I do? How would I react?”
He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, where he later dropped out, and lives in the 12th Congressional District that’s been described as a “crown jewel” of New York politics.
Now, Kasky is running on a progressive agenda that emphasizes fighting Trump and stopping U.S. military aid for Israel, referring to the country’s actions in Gaza in no uncertain terms as a “genocide” — a response which he says has been informed in part by his Jewish identity.
“I am always surprised when people ask me why I focus so much on Palestine,” he wrote. “Beyond my Jewish identity making me strongly opposed to genocide, I’m a school shooting survivor-turned-activist. I started my adult life demanding an end to American-made weapons slaughtering children.”
The post Cameron Kasky, Jewish Parkland shooting survivor, is running for Congress on platform to ‘stop funding genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Democrats urge Senate to oppose Trump’s pick for antisemitism envoy ahead of confirmation hearing
(JTA) — On the eve of a long-delayed Senate confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump’s pick for antisemitism envoy, a group of House Democrats is urging senators to reject the nomination of Yehuda Kaploun, arguing that he lacks the judgment and moral authority the post requires.
In a letter obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and sent Tuesday to Sen. Jim Risch, the Idaho Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, its top Democrat, the lawmakers call Kaploun’s nomination “partisan and controversial” and say his “comments and actions demonstrate a clear unfitness for this post.”
A total of 18 House Democrats signed the letter, including several Jewish lawmakers such as Jerrold Nadler, Jamie Raskin, Jan Schakowsky, Becca Balint and Steve Cohen.
The intervention is atypical: House members almost never publicly oppose sub-cabinet nominees, a category generally considered routine Senate business.
The committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on Kaploun’s nomination on Wednesday morning.
Trump tapped Kaploun in April to serve as the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, an ambassador-level role focused on antisemitism abroad. The Senate did not move for months to schedule a hearing, leaving the position vacant even as administration officials warned about a spike in antisemitism.
Kaploun, a Hasidic rabbi, Miami-based businessman and longtime political operative close to Trump, would be the first Hasidic Jew to serve in the role if confirmed. In a May profile, JTA detailed how he rose from a Brooklyn yeshiva student and community activist affiliated with the Chabad movement to a prominent figure in Republican politics and a visible surrogate in Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The Democratic letter focuses first on Kaploun’s rhetoric about Trump’s political opponents. It cites a comment in which Kaploun said that after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, “Democrats refuse to even recognize the butchers of women and kidnappers of children as terrorists,” calling the statement “absurd, insulting, and malicious.” The lawmakers argue that the remark maligns Democratic members of the Foreign Relations Committee who condemned the attacks and raises questions about his ability to work across party lines.
In addition, the Democrats point to an event Kaploun organized during the 2024 campaign at which Trump said that if he were to lose the election, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” and spoke of a “Democrat curse” on Jews who vote for the party. The letter describes those remarks as antisemitic scapegoating and says Kaploun’s failure to publicly condemn them — or what the letter calls the administration’s hiring of “antisemites and Christian Nationalists” — should be a central topic of Wednesday’s hearing.
The lawmakers also cite JTA’s earlier reporting on dueling lawsuits in Miami-Dade County involving Kaploun and another member of his synagogue, which alleged threats and an extramarital affair. Court records show that judges issued restraining orders on both sides and that the case was settled in April, days before Trump announced the nomination. Kaploun has denied having an affair and has said, through an attorney, that he was drawn into a marital dispute that has now been resolved.
The letter closes by turning Kaploun’s own past standard for nominees back on him, quoting a 1993 submission he made to the Senate, in which he argued that nominees must be judged on “honor,” “fidelity to principle” and respect for civil rights. “By his own standards, Mr. Kaploun fails,” the lawmakers write, urging senators to vote no.
Their intervention comes as a broad coalition of Jewish organizations has pressed the Senate to move quickly to confirm an antisemitism envoy and a parallel ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. In an August letter led by the Jewish Federations of North America, groups from across the Jewish communal spectrum urged Senate leaders to “swiftly” fill both roles, warning that “we dare not delay in filling these critical positions.”
Kaploun has previously said he is refraining from interviews until after his confirmation process, but he has publicly argued for the importance of rising above partisanship. In a May op-ed published by JTA and co-authored with the previous two antisemitism envoys, Elan Carr and Deborah Lipstadt, Kaploun wrote that “the fight against this terrible scourge… must be bipartisan and non-political.”
The post Democrats urge Senate to oppose Trump’s pick for antisemitism envoy ahead of confirmation hearing appeared first on The Forward.
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Maduro Accuses Zionists of Trying to Deliver Venezuela to ‘Devils’ as US Threatens Terror Designation
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a march amid the disputed presidential election, in Caracas, Venezuela, Aug. 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Maxwell Briceno
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro accused Zionists of trying to hand his country over to “devils,” as the United States ramped up military pressure and opposition leaders continued to voice support for action against his regime.
“There are those who want to hand this country over to the devils – you know who, right? The far-right Zionists want to hand this country over to the devils,” Maduro said on Saturday during a speech to local pro-government grassroots organizations.
“Who will prevail? The people of [King] David, the people of God, the people of [Simón] Bolívar, or the imperialist demons?” he continued. “We are the people of David against the Goliaths that we have already defeated in history. If God wills it, we will face them.”
| Nicolás Maduro: “Algunos quieren entregar este país a los demonios; ya saben quiénes son: la facción sionista de ultraderecha”.
pic.twitter.com/i7IJ5W0kOs— Alerta News 24 (@AlertaNews24) November 16, 2025
The Venezuelan leader has a long history of blaming the Jewish state and Jewish communities for the country’s problems, even as opposition leaders continue to publicly voice support for Israel and denounce his regime.
Last year, Maduro blamed “international Zionism” for the large-scale anti-government protests that erupted across the country following the presidential elections, in which he claimed victory amid widespread claims of fraud.
He also called the Argentinian government “Nazi and Zionist” earlier this year, amid an ongoing dispute over the arrest of an Argentine military officer in Venezuela.
Maduro broke diplomatic relations with Argentina after President Javier Milei refused to recognize his reelection in July.
During his Saturday speech, the Venezuelan leader insisted that the country is a Christian nation and questioned why Americans would want to kill Christians, as he urged Washington to refrain from military escalation amid a US buildup in the Caribbean and strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels.
“I place at the forefront of this battle our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom our homeland has been entrusted, the only king between heaven and Earth, Jesus of Nazareth, the young child and Palestinian martyr, Jesus of Nazareth,” Maduro said.
“I place Jesus of Nazareth as commander-in-chief of the battle for peace and the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people,” he continued.
He also tried to appeal to the American people, urging them to say “no” to war and “yes” to peace.
Maduro’s latest remarks came just before the Trump administration on Sunday announced the decision to designate the Cartel de los Soles, which the Trump administration has accused Maduro of leading, as a foreign terrorist organization. The designation could open the door to strikes on Maduro’s assets and infrastructure inside Venezuela.
“Based in Venezuela, the Cartel de los Soles is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary,” the US State Department said in a statement, noting the designation will take effect next week, on Nov. 24.
“Neither Maduro nor his cronies represent Venezuela’s legitimate government. Cartel de los Soles by and with other designated [foreign terrorist organizations] including Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel are responsible for terrorist violence throughout our hemisphere as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe,” the statement continued. “The United States will continue using all available tools to protect our national security interests and deny funding and resources to narco-terrorists.”
Congress has seven days to review the decision after being notified, and “in the absence of congressional action to block the designation,” it will take effect, according to the State Department.
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that, while he doesn’t believe the administration needs congressional authorization for potential military strikes inside Venezuela, he would like to keep lawmakers informed.
“We like to keep Congress involved. I mean, we’re stopping drug dealers and drugs from coming into our country,” he said. “We don’t have to get their approval. But I think letting them know is good.”
In recent weeks, Trump has ordered at least 21 strikes on boats believed to be carrying narcotics and has built up thousands of troops in the region.
Last month, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the creation of a new counter-narcotics Joint Task Force, saying it was established “to crush the cartels, stop the poison, and keep America safe.”