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Dump Trump? No sign of dissatisfaction at ZOA gala as ex-president is honored for Israel efforts

(JTA) — In his first public appearance after midterm elections in which his Republican Party failed to take control of the U.S. Senate, former president Donald Trump headed to a friendly audience.

The Zionist Organization of America was awarding Trump a rare honor, the Theodor Herzl Medal, for his contributions on behalf of Israel.

When the organization announced the award a month ago, it seemed that ZOA’s gala would be timed perfectly to kick off Trump’s 2024 reelection bid. Trump plans to make an announcement on Tuesday, and many expect him to launch a campaign then.

Instead, the gala landed at a precarious moment for the former president, as allies throughout the Republican Party have signaled or even said forthrightly in the last several days that they believe he should not run.

But if there is trouble in Trumpland, it wasn’t on display Sunday night at Chelsea Piers in New York City, where the ZOA crowd gave Trump a warm reception and offered no indication of any debate about which Republican candidate would be best for Israel in 2024.

Trump received standing ovations just about every time his name was mentioned, as multiple presenters recited the litany of achievements that they said had made him the best U.S. president ever for Israel. They include moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, brokering the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab countries, pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal and more.

In his speech, Trump traversed familiar territory, arguing that his 2020 loss reflected “something screwy with our elections” and criticizing American Jews who don’t support Israel, about whose existence he has repeatedly expressed surprise.

“You do have people in this country that happen to be Jewish that are not doing the right thing for Israel,” said Trump, who traveled to New York for the gala from his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, where his daughter Tiffany celebrated her wedding Saturday night.

Donald Trump speaking at the ZOA Gala in NYC:

‘You do have people in this country that happen to be Jewish that are not doing the right thing for Israel.’ pic.twitter.com/MP47CzHnJv

— Jacob Henry (@jhenrynews) November 14, 2022

Other people on the program were not present. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader of the U.S. House who could become majority leader in January, did not attend.

And not everyone who spoke was there in person. Miriam Adelson, the previous winner of ZOA’s honor named after the founder of modern Zionism who, with her late husband Sheldon, has been a major funder of Republican Jewish causes, introduced Trump via Zoom.

“Who knows what added miracles you have up your sleeve?” Adelson said during her speech, addressing Trump. “What we do know is that like Herzl, your name adorns Zionist history — a history still being written and in which you will no doubt continue to play an epic role.”

Adelson did not mention that she has pledged to stay neutral in the 2024 presidential primary.

The ZOA gala in some ways represented the kickoff of that primary season for Republican Jews, one that appears likely to center on the question of whether to back Trump should he run again, or whether to throw support behind someone without his considerable baggage.

Later this week, the Republican Jewish Coalition will gather in Las Vegas for its annual convention. Trump won’t be speaking there, but several other likely contenders for the Republican nomination will be, including Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence; Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who got a warm reception at a different gathering of Jewish conservatives in New York earlier this year. The event will be the first post-midterms convening of the potential candidates.

The Republican Jewish Coalition, which endorses and supports Republican politicians, has at times been circumspect about Trump’s influence on the Republican Party. In 2016, the group was virtually silent on Trump until he won the general election, and this year, it has not backed all of the far-right candidates whom Trump endorsed, even openly criticizing one of them, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania’s governor’s race, for his association with antisemites. (Mastriano conceded to Democrat Josh Shapiro during the ZOA gala.)

ZOA, meanwhile, says its only concern is a candidate’s support for Israel. The group’s president, Mort Klein — in a fiery speech that mocked progressive Democrats, Arabs and the idea of a Palestinian state — made clear that his confidence in Trump was unwavering.

“The Torah promises that Israel is the Jewish homeland, and will always be the Jewish homeland,” Klein said. “Unlike politicians, except President Trump, God keeps his promises.”

Attendees were enthusiastic about Trump’s presence. Some crowded toward the former president as a clutch of Secret Service officers held them back as Trump made his way to his seat.

Steve Merczynski, a Brooklyn resident who was wearing a hand-knit “MAGA” scarf made by a company he operates, pulled what he called a “Trump dollar” from his wallet. The fake bill showed Trump shaking DeSantis’ hand, with the caption “Make America Florida” — the implication being that a ticket shared by the two men would be Merczynski’s ideal in 2024.

Mercyzynski carried what he called a Trump dollar, which showed former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis embracing each other on the front of American currency. (Jacob Henry)

“I resent how they’re scapegoating him,” Steven Merczynski said about Republicans who are blaming Trump for the party’s poor showing last week. “As Jews we should know about scapegoating. To me Trump is the biggest scapegoat.”

Cindy Grosz, who hosts a conservative talk show called the Jewess Patriot from her home on Long Island, said she sees Donald Trump as “a friend or a husband.”

“Like a matchmaker looking to make a shidduch, you take the good with the bad,” she said. “If you weigh his policies versus the discussion, his policies made America great. And now we have to make America great again.”

Grosz, who ran unsuccessfully to become a Republican congressional candidate in 2020, said she wouldn’t count Trump out based on this week’s election results.

“They have called for his demise how many times and he has survived it,” she said. “I don’t think that whatever happened this week is his end either. And I look forward to hearing what he has to say Tuesday night.”


The post Dump Trump? No sign of dissatisfaction at ZOA gala as ex-president is honored for Israel efforts appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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US Lawmaker Introduces Bill to Deport Immigrants With Extremist Ideologies

US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) leaves the House Republican Conference caucus meeting in the US Capitol on April 15, 2026. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) has introduced sweeping legislation aimed at expanding the federal government’s authority to deport, denaturalize, deny US citizenship, and refuse entry to immigrants tied to extremist ideologies, including socialism, communism, and Islamic fundamentalism.

The legislation, titled the MAMDANI Act, short for Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists, is a direct political reference to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and what conservatives describe as a growing alliance between far-left anti-Israel activism and Islamist extremism.

Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and avowed anti-Zionist, has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career and been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric.

In a statement, Roy argued that the legislation would increase the government’s capability to filter out potential immigrants with anti-American, anti-Western ideologies.

“Not just for the last six years, but for the last 60 years, our immigration system has been cynically used to disadvantage American workers’ competitiveness in favor of mass-importing the third world,” Roy added. “This has not just led to higher crime and lower wages, but also the promulgation of hostile ideologies fundamentally opposed to American values.”

Roy said the bill is intended to confront what he called a “Red-Green Alliance” between far-left and Islamist extremists that has fueled antisemitism, anti-American radicalism, and support for terrorist organizations under the guise of progressive politics.

“By targeting the Red-Green Alliance, this legislation deploys new tools to fight back against the Marxist and Islamist advance that has devastated Europe and has now arrived on our doorstep, especially in my home state of Texas,” Roy continued. 

Under the proposal, non-citizens affiliated with socialist parties, communist parties, the Chinese Communist Party, or organizations deemed to promote Islamic fundamentalism could be denied entry or deported. The bill would also expand grounds for denying naturalization and, in some cases, allow denaturalization for individuals found to have concealed ideological affiliations or to be actively advocating for violent anti-democratic movements.

Supporters of the bill argue that the measure is necessary amid rising antisemitic incidents across the United States following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. They point to pro-Hamas rhetoric on some college campuses and among far-left activist circles as evidence that immigration enforcement should include stronger scrutiny of extremist ideological affiliations.

In recent years, conservatives have drawn attention to the massive surge in antisemitic protests on American soil, pointing to an increase of foreign migration as the culprit. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 slaughters in Israel, protests erupted on US campuses and streets. Many of these demonstrations, many of which devolved into riots, were spearheaded by either foreign nationals or recent migrants from the Middle East or southeast Asia.

US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned in 2024 that “actors tied to Iran’s government” have encouraged and provided financial support to many of these protests.

Critics, however, say Roy’s legislation raises serious constitutional concerns, particularly around First Amendment protections, religious liberty, and due process rights. Civil liberties advocates have warned that broad ideological tests for citizenship or deportation could be vulnerable to court challenges and used too broadly against political dissent.

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Orthodox Jews Harassed in Brooklyn as Antisemitic Hate Crimes Surge in New York City Under Mamdani

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech during his inauguration ceremony in New York City, US, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

Multiple videos which emerged this week captured in vivid detail the surge of antisemitic hate crimes that have proliferated under New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s leadership.

On Monday, Williamsburg News shared a 36-second video depicting two young males riding bicycles on Williamsburg Street & Lee Avenue in Brooklyn. The first swerves his bike in front of an elderly Jewish man, leading the victim to turn and address his assailant. Then the second perpetrator comes from behind on his bike and knocks off the Jewish man’s black hat.

Officers from the New York City Police Department (NYPD)’s 90th precinct responded to the assault and opened a hate crime investigation.

Also on Monday, the Boro Park Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and also serves as a neighborhood watch group, released a 37-second clip of young males driving a white SUV into a crosswalk before stopping to address a Jewish man with payot wearing traditional Hasidic attire. He begins to walk away, provoking a teenager in the back seat to leap out, chase after him, and yell, “Come here! Come here!”

An individual sitting in the front seat’s passenger side applauds the act of intimidation before the young man rushes back into the SUV which speeds away, tires squealing.

While evidence of these antisemitic incidents emerged from security footage, the perpetrators of a separate incident from last week chose to film their harassment targeting a Jewish pizzeria proprietor themselves.

Operatives of the so-called Palestine News Network (PNN) conducted one of their pseudo-interviews of Isaac Garson, owner of Slices Pizza in Hastings-on-Hudson, a community roughly 20 miles north of New York City.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes the group’s modus operandi of choreographed hostility, explaining that members “have a history of entering neighborhoods with significant Jewish populations, or approaching those attending Jewish or Israel-related events, where they shoot videos that walk the line between ‘interview’ and provocation.”

The 47-second video appears in a vertical format, indicating filming on a phone. In the lower right corner, the video bears a red and white PNN logo intended as a parody of the traditional CNN logo. Garson emerges from the restaurant, gestures his hands, and says, “I’m going to be calm. I want peace around the world.”

The man filming the encounter then goads, “What about Palestine? Can you say Palestine, specifically?”

The video cuts to footage of a man outside the restaurant who appears to be affiliated with PNN and carries a fractured placard that says, “End US AID to Israel.” However, the word “Israel” was originally at the bottom of the sign but snapped off, requiring the activist to carry along the broken piece to complete his political proclamation.

The next 20 seconds of the video focus on the men harassing a woman wearing a black baseball cap and black sunglasses walking by on the sidewalk. They demand to know “what’s your opinion?” The video cuts off her answer and jumps to them insulting her as “a textbook case of white mediocrity. Mediocre aesthetics, no stances, this is what we call ‘white mediocrity.’ You’re a shining example of mediocrity.”

The woman, taken aback by being insulted by eccentric activists carrying a dilapidated sign on the street, says, “Oh. Well, that’s also your opinion.”

The conclusion of the video returns to Garson, who asks the men: “What happened to Israel in 1948?”

The cameraman then yells, “Oh, it came out! It came out!”

Garson asks, “What happened?”

The cameraman then chants proudly, “The Nakba! The Nakba!”

The Arabic term “Nakba” translates as “catastrophe,” and anti-Zionists regularly deploy it to signify the founding of the modern State of Israel. In 2023, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree defining the “Nakba” as “the crime against humanity committed against the Palestinian people in 1948.”

Garson then asks in the video: “How many people were killed on Oct. 7?” referring to the Palestinian terrorist group’s 2023 invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.

The cameraman shoots back, “We support Oct. 7!”

Beginning to walk back into his restaurant, Garson says, “OK, great, you support a murder.”

Hastings-on-Hudson Mayor Tom Drake released a statement on Wednesday condemning PNN’s harassment.

“I am sorry that this type of conduct has reached our amazing and tolerant village,” Drake said. “Today, the strength exhibited by our friend and business owner, who I have been in communication with, makes me proud to be your mayor and do everything to support our businesses and residents, even when faced with such a gross display of hate.”

Drake added, “As a community, we cannot let stickers placed on signs or other forms of hate become normal. While they may seem small in some cases, they are intended to cause fear and intimidation. These actions have targeted a specific population of our village, and I urge all Hastings residents to join me in condemning such actions of hate and come together and support one another.”

The ADL names the leaders of PNN as Ramsey Aburdene and David Wolf, explaining they chose to found the group following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in southern Israel. Aburdene says that he has urged people for years to “stop condemning Hamas.”

Wolf is Jewish and described by the ADL as “an extreme anti-Zionist” who “had his Star of David tattooed over with a Palestinian flag.”

PNN has amassed more than 100,000 followers on the X social media platform and has seen its videos shared by prominent anti-Zionist influencers such as British rapper Lowkey and “anti-imperialist journalist” Benjamin Rubenstein.

The incidents come amid continued criticism and scrutiny over the Mamdani administration’s approach to countering antisemitism.

Earlier this month, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch revealed that “confirmed hate crimes increased nearly 12 percent this quarter citywide. We continue to see that the vast majority of our hate crimes are antisemitic in nature.”

Tisch added that “in fact, in the first quarter of 2026, more than half of all confirmed hate crimes, or 55 percent, were antisemitic, despite Jews only making up approximately 10 percent of the population of New York City.”

Mamdani assumed office on Jan. 1.

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‘Another Holocaust’: Netanyahu Tells Bereaved Families on Memorial Day of Iran Plot to Destroy Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the opening event for the Memorial Day at the Yad LaBanim House in Jerusalem, April 20, 2026. Photo: Marc Israel Sellem/Pool via REUTERS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Holocaust during a Memorial Day ceremony in Jerusalem on Tuesday, saying joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran had prevented the regime from carrying out its genocidal vision. 

“The Ayatollah regime in Iran planned another Holocaust. It plotted to destroy us with nuclear bombs and thousands of ballistic missiles,” he said at the state ceremony for fallen soldiers at Mount Herzl military cemetery. “Had we not acted against the existential threat, had we not acted with determination and daring, the names of the death sites Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan might have joined the names of the death camps of the Holocaust: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka.”

“But that did not happen because together with our great friend, the United States, we crushed the Iranian regime’s machinery of destruction in time,” he said. “We removed an immediate existential threat.”

Netanyahu ended by saluting wounded soldiers and bereaved families. “May the memory of the fallen of Israel’s wars be blessed and kept in our hearts forever,” he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing the Tefillin of IDF Golani Brigade Fighter First Sgt. Sean Carmeli, who fell in the 2014 war with Gaza. Photo: Ma’ayan Toaf (GPO)

The national Memorial Day, known as Yom Hazikaron, came as Iran poured cold water on the notion of extending the ceasefire, saying it would not send officials to Islamabad to continue negotiations with the US.  

Meanwhile, a second ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump with Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah was also poised to be tested, as rocket sirens sounded toward evening in northern Israeli communities near the border with Lebanon.

At a separate Memorial Day ceremony for fallen Mossad personnel, intelligence agency chief David Barnea disclosed that one of the service’s operatives was killed during the war with Iran.

The officer, whose identity remains under gag order, had served in the agency for more than three decades, Barnea said, adding that he was “filled with pride” by his actions.

“There is no other day during the year that is as difficult for us, for me, as Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen,” Barnea said, tracing a line from the defenders of the pre-state Jewish community to the soldiers fighting since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. He said the obligation to defend the country had passed from generation to generation, with each cohort choosing to shoulder it anew.

Other commemorations took place outside the state ceremonies. On Memorial Day eve, OneFamily, a nonprofit that supports victims of terrorism and bereaved families, held a gathering centered on personal testimony.

The evening was led by two bereaved mothers, Liat Smadja and Laly Derai, whose sons were killed in the same explosion in Gaza in June 2024.

Smadja, who serves in the reserves as a casualty notifier, described the cruel inversion of learning that the task she performs for other families had come to her own door.

“I have the job of knocking on doors and delivering the worst possible news, one that changes a family’s life forever,” she said. “And then the message came for me as well.”

In Israel, “the knock on the door” has become a traumatic shorthand for one of the most feared moments in public life, the arrival of military representatives to tell a family that a loved one has been killed.

Derai said the families had forged a bond that cut across their different backgrounds.

“We come from different worlds and different backgrounds. Since [their death], we are one family, connected by something deep and unbreakable.”

Two days earlier, Derai had attended a weekend for bereaved families organized by OneFamily, spending the run-up to Memorial Day among others carrying the same loss.

Yigal Tamam, whose son Adir and daughter-in-law Shiraz were murdered on their way to the Nova music festival during the Oct. 7 attack, was also there.

As rocket fire erupted early in the morning that day, the couple pulled over and ran into a roadside bomb shelter, where they were killed by Hamas terrorists who threw grenades inside. The two were survived by their young daughters. 

“I’m breathing but I’m not alive,” Tamam said over the weekend.

He said he breaks down when he thinks about his grandchildren, Goshen, 10, and Gili, 8, growing up without their parents.

OneFamily founder Chantal Belzberg is set to receive the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement, a rare national award granted by the state for outstanding contributions to Israeli society, presented on Independence Day, which follows Memorial Day.

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