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Epstein and Iran are an antisemitism mega-crisis. Here’s what Jewish organizations should do about it.
So far, 2026 has been a banner year for antisemites.
All hateful ideologies have slivers of truth within them; that’s why they work, moving from partial truth to wild exaggeration to scapegoating all members of the group for the perceived sins of some of them. Which is why 2026 has been a bonanza.
First, the release of the Epstein Files revealed a massive network of rich, connected elites — disproportionately Jewish and connected to Israel — who, at the very least, socialized and worked with a convicted sex offender, and in some cases may even have participated in his crimes. .
Then, Israel’s prime minister lobbied a U.S. president in the Situation Room (completely unprecedented), persuading him to launch a rash, costly, bloody, and thus far unsuccessful war on Iran, in violation of everything “America First” was supposed to stand for.
Worse, for some on the internet, those two stories are connected. The conspiratorial compulsion to manufacture facts to fit the larger theory leads to a fictional storyline: Epstein was working for Israel, Epstein handed the Israelis kompromat, Israel is blackmailing Trump, Israeli interests are dictating American foreign policy, and only Iran and China are standing up to the ‘Epstein Government.’
To be clear, there is no evidence for this hyperbole and speculation, which moves beyond valid critique of Israel into antisemitic conspiracy-mongering. Donald Trump has been pushing for war on Iran for 40 years, he wanted to push the Epstein Files out of the news, Epstein was working for himself not the Mossad, and there are some geopolitical reasons why some people might’ve seen this war as a good idea. Nor do Benjamin Netanyahu’s lobbying or AIPAC’s influence in Congress, however nefarious one may believe their intentions to be, amount to a Zionist conspiracy. The tech industry, the Christian Right, the fossil fuel industry, Big Pharma, Wall Street and other groups exert equal degrees of influence, often for equally nefarious ends.
But there is at least some basis for these false claims, and online influencers are connecting the dots. And whatever I may write in this article, it will be read by around .001% of the people who’ve seen China’s “White Eagle” videos or Iran’s “Lego” videos, which have gone viral online and amassed tens of millions of views, not to mention interviews by Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson. Sometimes these commentaries cross into overt antisemitism, sometimes they ‘merely’ allege a sinister conspiracy of Zionists or Epstein Associates to control the United States. Sometimes they’re from the Right, sometimes from the Left, and sometimes they horseshoe together. But this combination of real-world events and motivated propaganda is now a five-alarm fire, Defcon-1 crisis.
This crisis demands a response. But so far at least, what we’ve heard from the Jewish Establishment has been… crickets.
Unbelievably, the ADL’s website is focused on its “Best Schools in Antisemitism Report Card,” as the organization still obsesses over campus activists and professors instead of addressing the explosion in antisemitism since the Epstein Files release and Iran war, largely from networks of right-wing antisemites in government and online.
And, to my knowledge, no major Jewish organization has put out a statement in response to the Epstein Files, and the avalanche of revelations they have contained about his social and business relationships with Jewish figures and organizations, particularly in the years after his 2008 conviction in Florida for procuring sexual massages from a teenager. Indeed, files released last January revealed that prosecutors had prepared a much more significant indictment against Epstein, charging him with abusing more than a dozen girls over a period of six years, but set it aside when Epstein pled to lesser state charges.
(The Wexner Foundation, whose patron Les Wexner was Epstein’s leading client for two decades and who one witness claimed was a participant in his sexual parties, wrote a letter to its alumni following Wexner’s evasive congressional testimony saying that, at present, “we are only listening. We will sit in a posture of taking in your feelings and feedback.”)
However much the people in Epstein’s orbit did or did not know, or did or did not do, they must be brought to account. Yet there has been no reckoning, no accountability, hardly any response at all from the Jewish mainstream.
This has been a profound moral failure. In the words of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who has spoken out forcefully on the issue, “That there has been overwhelming silence since the release of era-defining information on the theft and raping of children — including not only the nation’s most powerful leaders, but Jews who routinely gave prestigious talks in our community — is a moral desecration and abdication of duty. Our sacred obligations require us to show up unequivocally for those harmed — especially children! — and to condemn all sexual abuse and violence. I do not know why this might ever seem complicated.”
The silence has also fanned the flames of antisemitism, especially because, as a Jewish Studies colleague put it to me, antisemitism thrives on the claim that you aren’t supposed to talk about when Jews in powerful positions act wrongly.
Now, if you’re of the opinion that antisemitism is a mysterious, baseless hatred that has always existed and always will exist, maybe you don’t think this news matters much. Today they hate us for Epstein and Iran, tomorrow will be something else.
But that view is dead wrong.
First, it flies in the face of the data that shows massive increases in antisemitism in the wake of Trump’s nationalism, and, later, the Gaza war. The hatred underlying antisemitism may be timeless, but it is fueled by the times. It is not a binary; it rises and falls and rises again.
Second, the Judeo-Pessimistic view ignores how antisemitism feeds off of conspiracy theories, political ideologies and resentment. The “Jews will not replace us” chant did not come from nowhere; it came from the nationalist right’s Great Replacement Theory. And the recent explosion in attacks on American Jews came as a response to the Gaza War; just as innocent German Americans and Japanese Americans were scapegoated during World War II, innocent Jewish Americans are scapegoated today.
Nothing Jewish leaders say or do will eradicate antisemitism. And preschoolers at a Michigan synagogue are not in any way responsible for the crimes of Epstein or the machinations of Netanyahu. Any time Jews are scapegoated and targeted for the perceived misdeeds of others, that is antisemitic, full stop. But, to paraphrase the Yom Kippur liturgy, we can mitigate the severity of the decree.
What might that look like? Let’s look at Epstein first, Iran second.
First, we need a real, public reckoning with the Epstein Files and the long relationships Epstein had with notable and/or rich American Jews (Wexner, Larry Summers, Howard Lutnick, Leon Black, Alan Dershowitz, Woody Allen, Ehud Barak, Robert Maxwell, Leon Botstein, and, most notably for antisemites, Lynn Forester and Ariane de Rothschild), and his support of Jewish and Jewish-adjacent institutions (including Ramaz, Hillel International, Harvard Hillel, YIVO, the Jewish National Fund, Mount Sinai Hospital, UJA-Federation of New York, Seeds of Peace, Touro College, Friends of the IDF, American Jewish Committee, and several Orthodox yeshivas).
This isn’t about outing or shaming; individuals or organizations who dealt with Epstein before 2008 can honestly claim they had no knowledge of his criminal behavior. Rather, it is about public, communal teshuvah, recognizing that our community institutions failed, our ethical values failed, and some of our wealthiest members failed as well. We did not protect the vulnerable (Exodus 22:21, Leviticus 19:16), judge rich and poor alike (Deuteronomy 1:17, Leviticus 19:15), or treat all people as made in the image of the Divine (Genesis 1:27).
These should not be mere performative statements. We should act, as a community, to repair what is broken – first and foremost by listening to Epstein’s victims, financially compensating them, and sharing their stories. There should be a community-wide campaign to fund organizations that combat sexual abuse and domestic violence, and help victims recover. (Examples include Za’akah, Shalom Bayit, as well as initiatives at Mount Sinai and many Jewish federations.) And our organizations should also use this moment to revisit their own politics on preventing misconduct and abuse. There should be strong words and even stronger actions.
Regarding the Iran War, the problem runs deeper.
A large majority of American Jews oppose the Iran War, just as they opposed Israel’s actions in Gaza. Yet individuals and organizations that publicly take such positions are marginalized in the Jewish community, and are often banned or shadow-banned from Jewish gatherings and religious institutions. (For example, 70% of American Jews oppose unconditional aid to Israel, but AIPAC targeted a pro-Israel congressional candidate for taking that view, leading to an anti-Israel opponent being swept into office.) We like to say that our community tolerates a wide range of views, but our institutional rhetoric of “standing with Israel” and a quick glance at the speaker list of any mainstream Jewish gathering makes it clear that some views are more favored than others.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu and Trump say, repeatedly, that anyone opposing the Israeli government’s policies (let alone the state itself) is a self-hating Jew, a traitor, or an antisemite. They are the antisemites’ best partners, insisting that there is no daylight between Israel’s actions and American Jews. That you’re either for us or against us.
We need the opposite of such false binaries and false equations. We need space for legitimate criticism, precisely so that illegitimate antisemitism can be recognized and called out. It’s not always easy to do so: The Nexus Project, which works to disentangle antisemitism and valid critique of Israel, has produced a helpful three-page guide to doing so in the context of the Iran War, in which the difference is often one of degree, rather than kind.
For example, it is indeed outrageous that Netanyahu pitched this war in the way he did to our increasingly demented-seeming president. One doesn’t need to resort to conspiracy-mongering to note that. Was this war ever in the American national interest? Did anyone really think the Iranian people would rise up against their government after America blew their cities to smithereens? All these are valid questions. Yet often they are posed in terms of antisemitic imagery depicting Jews, or Israel, as a giant puppetmaster or octopus manipulating world affairs. By validating legitimate criticisms, we can better call out illegitimate ones.
Honestly, I’ve long ago given up on most large Jewish organizations making space for diversity of opinion, because their donors tilt to the right, a structural reality I wrote about in this publication 10 years ago.
So my call, instead, is to Jewish centrists, moderates and progressives. If you want a Jewish community that reflects your Jewish values, you need to pay for one: You need to donate at the same levels as right-wing donors do. You need to take back the mainstream Jewish community by spending money and dictating your priorities.
To repeat, these efforts won’t end the scourge of antisemitism; there is no use arguing with bigots. But the bigots are not our audience — rather, the point is to combat the narratives that are persuading more and more people to join their ranks. By standing up for our values, we can put some space between Jeffrey Epstein (and his accomplices) and the Jewish community as a whole. And we can differentiate between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitic conspiracy theories based on them. We can stand up to the lies about Jews that are spreading like wildfire right now — by proudly and forcefully telling the truth.
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Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to build a case to strip Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her citizenship and eventually deport her.
It is my hope that American Jews — even those who do not like Omar and can recite every questionable comment she has made over the past 15 years to illustrate why — will understand this as offensive and outrageous not only because they are Americans, but because they are Jews.
The Trump administration may claim that it is building a case against Omar due to paperwork (reports suggest that they are interested in whether her father listed her age as 17 on her citizenship application when she was really 18). It is similarly filing dozens of lawsuits attempting to denaturalize citizens by trying to prove they lied in the process of gaining citizenship. However, that this is happening now, ahead of the midterm elections against a sitting member of Congress, a high-profile progressive whom the president has said should “go back” to her country of origin, suggests that it is, to put it mildly, politically motivated.
Evidently, the Trump administration sees citizenship not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward, one that can be taken away if that is seen as useful to the president and his adherents. That use could be silencing political opposition or something as simple (and callous) as an opportunity to brag about the sheer number of attempted denaturalizations.
Jews, too, have found themselves on the wrong end of political denaturalization. I do not mean to compare the Trump administration to the Nazis, but the stubborn fact is that Jews were indeed stripped of their citizenship as part of a political project in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And in the early 20th century in the United States, it was Jews who politicians claimed were incapable of assimilating, of ever really being a part of the United States. These arguments culminated in legislation that kept out Jews who could have found refuge here. The threat of denaturalization and the experience of perpetual otherness is a grievous part of modern Jewish history; we should be offended by its presence in our political present.
Jewish tradition as well as history encourages us to stand up to authority when that authority is wrong. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman; Nathan yells at King David for sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband killed; Moses famously urges Pharoah to change his oppressive ways. Even God is on the receiving end of pushback when Abraham pleads and negotiates to spare Sodom.
I do not think one needs to be Jewish to be outraged by the attempt to denaturalize Ilhan Omar. I think it is also bone-chilling as an American who believes we, including our elected officials, have the right to openly oppose our president, and I am worried as a person who thinks it would be good to continue to live in a democratic republic. And I am sure that there are Jews who will say that Omar deserves to lose her citizenship because she has said things about Israel they do not like.
But the Jewish lens through which I see this is that it is right to challenge power when it is abused, and it is wrong for the powerful to make a show of trying to cast their opponents out of the country.
The point is not whether Trump can make good on the threat to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her, but that it is obscene to use denaturalization as punishment for being a high-profile political opponent in the first place. If he is trying to make it more dangerous to speak out while being from the “wrong” country, then the rest of us need to say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an American citizen.
We should do this because we are Americans and we should do this because we are Jews. We should do this because of the ways in which our American and Jewish identities bleed into one another. And, we should do this because we may not know exactly whether it is as Americans or as Jews that we know we have to protect the right to speak truth to power, but we know we need to do it all the same.
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Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s?
Herding political opponents into prisons and concentration camps, suspending civil liberties, and sending SA thugs to destroy newsrooms and beat up journalists were among the means used by Adolf Hitler to game Germany’s parliamentary election of March 5, 1933, won by the Nazis.
As much as Donald Trump might fantasize about deploying such brutal tactics to subvert our midterm elections, he hasn’t done so — yet. But his objective is the same: Detonate constitutional barriers standing in the way of his lust for power. “Cheat like hell,” Trump told the GOP’s midterm convention last month.
Historian Timothy Ryback has just published a book about the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, titled 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled A Democracy. The 53 days begin when Hitler becomes chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, and end with the Reichstag’s March 23 passage of the Enabling Act, which gave him absolute power.
For our own perilous time, there is another number to take note of: 652 — the number of days between Trump’s second inauguration and our Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Hitler’s long march to despotic power occurred over 3,422 days — from his failed Beer Hall Putsch on Nov. 8-9, 1923, up until passage of the Enabling Act.
After spending less than a year of a five-year sentence for the failed 1923 coup, Hitler returned to a Nazi party that was in utter disarray. But the Great Depression turned the Nazis’ fortunes around, as jobless and disaffected Germans flocked to Hitler with his promises to make Germany great again. In parliamentary elections in 1930, the number of Reichstag seats held by the Nazis rose dramatically from 12 to 107, and more than doubled that in elections in 1932, making them the largest party. After some backroom political wheeling and dealing, President Paul von Hindenburg offered the chancellorship to Hitler, which he accepted on Jan. 30, 1933.
Even though Hitler was chancellor, his coalition wasn’t dominated by Nazis. When the Reichstag went up in flames on Feb. 27, 1933, der Führer had the pretext he needed to begin dismantling the last remnants of democracy. The Nazis’ first targets were Communists. More than 4,000 were arrested in the initial hours after the fire. It didn’t take long for Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jews to also face raids, arrests, beatings and terror, as Hindenburg — at Hitler’s urging — issued a decree that suspended Germans’ civil liberties.
There was still a barrier standing in Hitler’s way: the Reichstag. But Hitler had a scheme for getting rid of it: calling for a new election and ultimately engineering a vote by the Reichstag to abolish itself.
In the days and nights before the national election, set for March 5, Nazis carried out a campaign of repression and menace across the country. Brandishing firearms, storm troopers ruled the streets. Homes of Hitler critics were raided. His campaign speeches were blasted from loudspeakers. Voters were offered rides to the polls in transports organized by the Nazis, an unsubtle hint at which party they should vote for.
In the election, the Nazis and their Nationalist allies won a majority of seats in the Reichstag but fell short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution. But Hitler had a workaround: Convene the Reichstag to vote on a measure that would allow him to declare laws without the approval of the federal legislative body. With Communist delegates of the Reichstag either in hiding or in custody, Hitler already had a structural advantage; they wouldn’t be there to vote. With the Reichstag building destroyed, the delegates convened on March 23 inside the Kroll Opera House, which swarmed with armed storm troopers and members of the SS who harassed and threatened delegates who were either on the fence about giving Hitler absolute power or were known to oppose it.
In the end, weeks and months of trying to tilt elections through terror and intimidation gave Hitler his ultimate prize: of 538 delegates in the Kroll Opera House, only 94 — all Social Democrats — voted against the Enabling Act. In effect, German democracy was steered by Hitler into committing suicide.
In an essay for Literary Hub, Timothy Ryback noted parallels between Hitler’s election victory on March 5, 1933 and our midterm elections and cataloged them.
They include Trump’s “brazen attempt to quash negative press coverage” and Hitler’s and Trump’s virtually identical pre-election low approval ratings. Both the Nazi leader and the American president had gone to court to try to have earlier election results overturned, and the German election, like our fast-approaching midterms, was seen as a referendum on the nation’s leader.
“Amidst all the turmoil, everyone understood that the March 5 election was a make-or-break moment not only for the Hitler chancellorship but for democracy itself,” Ryback wrote.
With the midterms just around the corner, this can be said about America as well.
Since Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, he has thrown more effort into trying to rig the midterms for the Republicans than into virtually any other endeavor — other than perhaps misusing his powers to enrich himself and his family, and dreaming up monuments to himself.
Trump’s pardon of 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6 was an early signal that the defeated president had no intention of playing fair during the 2026 midterms. What followed was a barrage of assaults on the election system. Here’s just a partial list: lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data, the gutting of oversight bodies, intimidation of election officials and orders for key GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts — all designed to both undermine Americans’ trust in the election system and manufacture pretexts for contesting any midterm outcomes that displease him.
Amid these relentless attempts to subvert the midterms, the Democrats have had success at blocking some of Trump’s poisoned salvos, such as holding the line against the so-called SAVE America Act and fending off Trump’s attempts to seize voter information. But none of this deters Trump, who just comes back with more schemes. The latest revelations come from documents obtained by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization.
Those documents show that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding state election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of a sweeping federal effort to find alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms,” according to Democracy Docket, which reviewed the documents.
“This is an absolute smoking gun,” said Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.
Trump has openly suggested a federal takeover of election administration, and during the past several months it seems like he’s been laying the groundwork for that to happen if he doesn’t get the results he wants on Nov. 3. It’s all too easy to imagine horror scenarios: Trump claims massive voter fraud, his supporters storm county election offices in protest, the FBI seizes ballots and voting machines, unrest erupts across the country, Trump declares martial law.
If Trump’s schemes trigger the kind of disorder he appears to be preparing for, the question will be whether our courts, our press, our civil servants and our voters stand firm. Germany’s institutions bent until they broke. Ours have bent, but they have not yet snapped. What happens next will reveal whether they still possess the steel that Germany’s lacked.
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Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs
(JTA) — Sally Rooney’s publisher says it will stop supplying her books in the United Kingdom because current legislation prevents it from passing her earnings on to her.
The best-selling Irish writer, whose work includes the novel “Normal People,” which was adapted into a hit BBC drama, has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
Faber said it would no longer supply her books in the United Kingdom because of her backing for Palestine Action, a group that the British government last year proscribed as a terrorist organization, saying it had “orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions.”
“Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work,” the publisher said.
“To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” it said. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”
Faber had no further comment, the statement said.
Yvette Cooper, then the Home Secretary, banned Palestine Action last year following an attack by the group on the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton which caused millions of pounds of damage. It had previously targeted businesses and premises which it said were linked to Israeli defence companies.
Soon after the announcement, Rooney wrote an opinion piece in the Irish Times in which she doubled down on her support for Palestine Action, adding that she would give the proceeds of her books to back the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under British law, so be it,” she wrote.
In a statement following the action announced by Faber, Rooney cited her Irish Times opinion piece as she explained that the publication of her books “could now constitute a serious criminal offence.”
The ban of Palestine Action has proven to be highly contentious in Britain. Back in February, the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori challenged the move in the High Court, with Rooney providing a supportive witness statement. She said at the time that she was “almost certain” her work would be dropped in Britain if the ban persisted.
The court ruled in Ammori’s favor, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in June. The Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal next month.
Rooney said on Wednesday: “After a process of consultation and deliberation, and with my full agreement, my publisher Faber has therefore determined that it can no longer supply my work within the UK.
“I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences.”
Rooney’s support for the Palestinian cause predates the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. In 2021 she declined to sell Hebrew translation rights for her novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” to the Israeli publisher that had previously released her books in Hebrew.
At the time, she said she supported the BDS movement and would not work with an Israeli publisher unless it is willing to “publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
That move prompted backlash in Israel and beyond, including calls to boycott Rooney’s work. Israeli bookstore chains reportedly removed some of her books from shelves.
However, earlier this year she agreed to have her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” published by an Israeli publisher approved by boycott activists.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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