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Fearless or foolish? Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s Jewish president, stands apart in opposing Trump’s campus policies
As he often does these days, Wesleyan University president Michael Roth recently delivered a lecture on another campus outlining all the reasons why academia should be more forcefully standing up to President Trump’s policies.
He peppered the lecture with Yiddish words. He laid thick on what he called his “Jewish accent.” A colleague came up to him afterwards.
“You’re doing Jew-speak,” they told him.
Roth laughed recalling his response: “No s–t, Sherlock. That’s part of what I’m doing.”
What he’s doing, Roth told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a recent interview, is constantly reminding his potential critics who he is. For one, he’s the only university president in the country who openly, repeatedly rejects Trump’s claims that the administration’s campus crackdowns — rescinding grants, limiting international student visas, dismantling “DEI” — are a means of fighting antisemitism after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
For another, when his own school dealt with pro-Palestinian encampments last year, he made no secret of handling the matter diplomatically instead of through discipline — an approach that landed other university presidents in hot water, but not him.
And above all that, he’s proudly Jewish.
“If you’re going to accuse Wesleyan’s administration of being antisemitic, start with me. But don’t call me on Saturday,” Roth quipped. “Because I’m going to be in Torah study.”
Roth isn’t quite sure how he, the leader of a small-town Connecticut liberal arts school with a mere 3,000 students, became so unusual among his profession by defending what he sees as the central principles of academic freedom.
“It’s a bit of a puzzle,” he told JTA. “I don’t think my view is very original. Any of the presidents I know at different schools probably have similar views.” His views also seem to align with most American Jews, at least according to polls, which show that nearly three-quarters of them also believe Trump is using antisemitism as an excuse to attack higher education.
In recent days, two other Jewish presidents, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University, have publicly rejected a Trump administration offer of “priority” funding that would have required them to bar some forms of speech, making them the only university leaders to do so. But Roth still stands out in the lengths he is going to rebuff Trump’s higher education policies — and to center his Jewish identity in doing so.
There he is, accepting a “courage award” from the literary free-speech group PEN America “for standing up to government assaults on higher education.” There he is, giving interviews in which he lambasts “prominent Jewish figures around the country who get comfortable with Trump, it seems to me, because they can say he’s fighting antisemitism: ‘He’s good for the Jews.’ It’s pathetic. It’s a travesty of Jewish values, in my view.”
There he is, signing an open letter declaring that antisemitism “is being used as a pretext to abrogate students’ rights to free speech, and to deport non-citizen students.” The leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group that has been suspended from multiple college campuses for disruptive protests, were on that letter. So was the leader of Wesleyan University.
And there he is, telling JTA that so-called institutional neutrality positions, adopted by a range of universities amid the Israel-Gaza war (and supported by the Jewish campus group Hillel International), are “bogus.”
Pro-Palestinian encampments at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, May 9, 2024. (Screenshot)
A representative for the American Association of University Professors, a faculty union that has dropped its former opposition to boycotting Israel, praised Roth’s presence on the national stage.
“Michael Roth is criticizing the misuse of Title VI to define anti-semitism as criticism of Israel and its weaponization in the campaign to attack higher education. There is nothing startling about that position,” Joan W. Scott, a Jewish researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study who sits on the union’s academic freedom committee, told JTA.
Scott added, “I’d say Roth’s reasons for his courageous stance have to do with his integrity and perhaps his knowledge of history. He doesn’t want to be among those who, like Heidegger, thought that appeasing the regime in power was a safe position to take.” (A spokesperson for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus free-speech advocacy group that supports institutional neutrality, declined to comment on Roth.)
Roth’s profile has caught the attention of some Jewish families, including that of Mason Weisz of White Plains, New York, who said Roth was one reason that his son is a first-year at Wesleyan now. Weisz recalled hearing an NPR interview with Roth in April, after admissions decisions were out but before seniors had to pick their schools, as particularly pivotal.
The interview “in which he argues that Trump’s use of antisemitism to justify his strong-arming of universities actually is bad for the Jews, encapsulates everything I appreciated about Roth.” Weisz told JTA. “Here is a university president who is willing to risk going on record against the administration, again and again, to fight for academic integrity. He has a nuanced view of world events, an appreciation for true debate, and a fearlessness that I hope are an inspiration for Wesleyan’s faculty and students.”
Roth also earns good marks from some Jewish students on campus.
“He does care about Jewish students. He’s someone who does take their concerns seriously. And compared to other university presidents, he’s been better,” said Blake Fox, a Jewish senior at Wesleyan who identifies as pro-Israel and serves on the campus Chabad board. “He wants to be the ‘cool’ president.”
Fox says he had a good experience as a Jew at Wesleyan, in part because the encampments there never felt threatening (he noted the protest movement was much smaller at Wesleyan than it was at other schools). That was due, at least in part, to Roth’s efforts to peacefully negotiate an end to the encampments.
Yet, Fox said, the president — whom he’s met several times — was also deeply concerned for the well-being of Jewish students. In meetings with Fox and other Jews on campus, Roth vowed to take action if any protesters ever threatened a Jewish student by name.
He also appreciated Roth standing up to Trump, particularly on issues of campus speech. “I’m pro-Israel, but I also support the First Amendment,” Fox said. “Even if there are individuals whose speech is bad, targeting them for deportation is a dangerous precedent, I think.”
The campus of Wesleyan University, July 24, 2013.(Joe Mabel via Creative Commons)
Though a historically Methodist school, Wesleyan today has no religious affiliation and enrolls around 600 Jewish students — nearly 20% of the student body. There’s no Hillel, but the school’s Jewish community includes a full-time rabbi, student leadership, dedicated Jewish residential housing, and a unique, modern sukkah that has won architecture awards. The Wesleyan Jewish Community rabbi declined to comment for this story.
There’s also a Chabad outpost, which opened in 2011. Its director, Rabbi Levi Schectman, told JTA he was “grateful for the open door to the President’s office and for the strides that have been made so far,” adding, “There is still more work to be done so that all students feel heard and safe.”
Schectman also said the Wesleyan Jewish community he interacts with is “living and thriving”: A recent “Mega Shabbat” gathering drew what he said was a center record attendance of 175 students.
And then, of course, there’s Roth, the school’s first Jewish president, who has held the post since 2007. A free-speech scholar, he’s published books about the campus environment, including one called “Safe Enough Spaces.” He grew up in a Reform household on Long Island and has written essays on Jewish identity, but considered himself “only modestly observant” until his father died 25 years ago. After that point, he said, he “began saying Kaddish and subsequently attending Torah study.”
Nowadays Roth makes a point of involving himself in Jewish campus life — all forms of it. He spent Rosh Hashanah with the affiliated Jewish community, and, last year, caught a Shabbat service held at the pro-Palestinian student encampments.
The latter group wasn’t too thrilled to see him there, he recalled; they’d been targeting him by name, often in insulting language. But he wanted to learn more about the Jews who were participating in the protests right outside his office. When one of them, an Israeli, personally apologized to Roth for the aggressive behavior of other encampment participants, he invited the student to his office and they had a long chat. “There were so many interesting conversations,” he said.
Michael Schill, President of Northwestern University, testifies at a hearing called “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos” before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Capitol Hill on May 23, 2024 in Washington, DC. University leaders are being asked to testify by House Republicans about how colleges have responded to pro-Palestinian protests and allegations of antisemitism on their campuses. (Michael A. McCoy/Getty Images)
Of course, many Jews in academia know that merely being Jewish cannot protect oneself from charges of enabling antisemitism. It didn’t save Northwestern University president Michael Schill, who — like Roth — is a free-speech scholar who tried to deal with his school’s encampments through negotiation instead of by force.
In so doing, Schill was hauled before Congress and lost the confidence of many of his Jewish faculty, staff and alums. The heads of the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America, both Northwestern alums, publicly aligned against him. Last month, Schill announced he was stepping down.
Roth doesn’t know Schill personally, but said he thought it was “just terrible” he had resigned. “I found it very sad that the board didn’t come to his defense in a way that allowed him to continue,” Roth said.
He acknowledges he’s in a better position to speak out than the heads of other universities, where hospitals and major research centers are more reliant on federal funding, and where instances of antisemitism had been more prevalent pre-Trump.
Schools like Columbia have made significant concessions to Trump, including on antisemitism issues, in exchange for having their funding restored. Harvard, after initially putting up resistance to Trump’s demands, has now reportedly entered a negotiation phase; the University of California system has also been targeted for a $1 billion payout to the government. Last week, the Trump administration unveiled what it said was a new “compact” that schools would be required to sign to secure their federal funding; the demands include one to protect conservative viewpoints on campus.
Is Roth worried that Trump could turn on Wesleyan next?
“Didn’t I say I was Jewish?” he responded, laughing. “Am I worried? Of course I’m worried. I’m a worrier… I would hate to put Wesleyan at risk.” But, he said, that wouldn’t stop him. “I have three grandchildren. I want them to grow up in a country where they don’t have to be brave to speak up.”
Now, as the two-year anniversary of Oct. 7 nears, Roth’s name is also on some things other Jewish leaders wouldn’t touch.
He spoke to JTA while on the road to a literary festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, co-sponsored by the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents, which has emerged as one of the loudest voices in Judaism to oppose both Israel and communal American Jewish support for it. He would be appearing onstage with the journalist M. Gessen, who has compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to Nazi Germany.
Roth told JTA he hadn’t known that Jewish Currents was a co-sponsor when he agreed to take part in the festival. But, he added, it wouldn’t have changed anything about his appearance. He’ll talk to anybody Jewish. He’s appeared on their editor Peter Beinart’s podcast, and a while back he submitted a piece to the magazine that was rejected (“I guess it was insufficiently anti-Israel,” he mused) and wound up running in the Forward instead.
He sees his own views on Israel as moderate. While he called for a ceasefire in March 2024, far earlier than many others in the Jewish world, he still refuses to call the Gaza war a genocide and remains adamant he supports “Israel’s right to exist.” He only blames Israel for what he said were the security failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack, which he had condemned immediately as “sickening.”
He takes Israel’s wartime behavior to task for “paving a path for egregious war crimes and a level of brutality and inhumanity that I never would have associated with the country.” Yet he remains “stunned,” even today, by what he called “the lack of basic sympathy, empathy, for the victims of those horrific murders” of Oct. 7.
“I pride myself on being realistic about the persistence of antisemitism,” he said. “Still, the callousness with which some people greeted those horrors was very disturbing.”
Yet when the encampments came for Wesleyan last spring, and some of their participants accused him directly of being complicit in genocide, Roth — unlike nearly every other university president — opted to negotiate with them. He wrote a piece in the New Republic declaring that he would not call the police, even though he knew the protesters to be in violation of some campus policies.
Even in that piece, he offered an ominous prediction: “My fear is that such protests (especially when they turn violent) in the end will help the reactionary forces of populist authoritarianism.”
Roth didn’t like many of the phrases his own campus protesters used, including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Yet he forcefully defended their right to say it, angering some Jews on campus as a result.
“I try to have it both ways,” he said — weighing his principled views on both Israel and protest. This can sometimes lead to very intricate needle-threading. He recalled how, when an address he gave to prospective students was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters unfolding a banner, he let them continue and even acknowledged the banner before pressing ahead.
Fox does take issue with some of Roth’s stances, including his opposition to institutional neutrality.
“I think he fundamentally misunderstands what institutional neutrality is,” Fox said. “We don’t need to hear your views on Ukraine. We don’t need to hear your views on Israel.” Having the school president call for a ceasefire, he thought, is “alienating both sides of campus.”
More significantly for his job, Roth has long opposed the movement to boycott and divest from Israel. This has angered activists at Wesleyan, who, like those at other schools, have made divestment a central demand.
Last spring, in order to peacefully break up his school’s encampment movement, Roth had promised protest leaders they could make a case to the board for divestment that fall. When the board opted not to divest, a small number of protesters became angry and attempted to take over a university building.
“They were not very civil to my staff members,” Roth recalled, describing the protesters as basically daring him to take action.
That time, he did call the cops.
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The post Fearless or foolish? Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s Jewish president, stands apart in opposing Trump’s campus policies appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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University of Sydney Fires Staff Member Over Antisemitic Abuse of Students
Illustrative: An anti-Israel protest at the University of Sydney in Australia, April 26, 2024. Photo: Dean Lewins via Reuters Connect
The University of Sydney in Australia has dismissed an employee who was filmed shrieking at Jewish students over their support for Israel, a tirade in which she described them as “depraved” and inhuman.
“They’re shredding children!” staff member Rose Nakad screamed at the students in October, repeating pro-Hamas propaganda Hamas falsely accusing Israel of targeting Palestinian children in Gaza. “You are a f—king filthy Zionist. Nothing to do with being a Jew, you disgusting, depraved person.”
On Monday — just one day removed from the Bondi Beach massacre in which gunmen opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah in Sydney, hospitalizing dozens of people in addition to the 15 individuals who were murdered — the university denounced Nakad’s conduct as “distressing and utterly unacceptable.” It had previously suspended Nakad, signaling its appreciation of the gravity of her misconduct amid a global surge in antisemitism.
“The behavior that took place on our campus in October this year was deeply distressing and utterly unacceptable. We immediately suspended the staff member pending a formal process and have now terminated their employment on the grounds of serious misconduct,” the university said in a statement.
“This decision followed careful consideration in line with our clear expectations of behavior and our obligation to make sure our campuses are safe and welcoming for all,” the university continued. “Hate speech, antisemitism, and harassment have no place at our university and when our codes of conduct are breached, we do not hesitate to take disciplinary action.”
It added, “We continue to work on making our campus safe for all and if our codes are breached, we do not hesitate to take disciplinary action.”
In footage obtained by Sky News, Nakad approached several students celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. She asked if they were “Zionists” and continued to harass them as they asked her to leave.
“A Zionist is the lowest form of rubbish,” Nakad said to the students, according to the video. “Zionists are the most disgusting thing that has ever walked this earth.” The staff member described herself as an “indigenous Palestinian,”
Australia had seen its share of antisemitic outrages before the Bondi Beach shooting, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
In December 2024, for example, the home of Lesli Berger, former president of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, was vandalized, having been graffitied with a swastika. Next to the infamous Nazi symbol the vandal spray-painted the words “Jordan Gayter,” believed to be a misspelling of the German phrase for “Juden Gatter,” or “Jewish Gate.”
In November 2023, mere weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, a Jewish man was assaulted by an anti-Israel mob because he took down an advertisement of a pro-Palestinian rally. Someone then thumped him on the back of his head, knocking him to the ground. Then three men joined in and proceeded to punch and kick him while calling him a “pro-Jew dog” among other names.
The onslaught concussed the man and, causing other injuries, fractured his spine. He reportedly spent four days in the hospital and later told a local media outlet that he is “very lucky” to be alive.
In one notorious episode in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, hundreds of pro-Hamas protesters gathered outside the Sydney Opera House chanting “gas the Jews,” “f—k the Jews,” and other epithets.
The explosion of post-Oct. 7 hate also included vandalism and threats of gun violence. For example, a male assailant repeatedly punched a Jewish man while screaming “dirty rotten Jew c—t”; a group of young men jumped a Jewish boy, whom they called a “dirty Jew”; and pro-Hamas protesters “spat on, threatened, and kicked” an elderly Jewish woman during a demonstration held to raise awareness of antisemitism.
Anti-Israel sentiment has also led to vandalism. In June 2024, the US consulate in Sydney was vandalized and defaced by a man carrying a sledgehammer who smashed the windows and graffitied inverted red triangles on the building. The inverted red triangle has become a common symbol at pro-Hamas rallies. The Palestinian terrorist group, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, has used inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “the red triangle is now used to represent Hamas itself and glorify its use of violence.”
Now, in the closing weeks of 2025, antisemitism in Australia has led to the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history.
Australian officials said they identified the mass shooters at Bondi Beach as Sajid Akram, 50, who was killed at the scene, and his son Naveed Akram, 24, who was in critical condition in a hospital. The younger suspect reportedly came to the attention of Australia’s domestic intelligence agency in 2019 for his ties to a Sydney-based cell of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Tributes Pour in for Jewish Director Rob Reiner, Wife After Couple Found Dead, Son Arrested on Murder Charges
(From left) Rob Reiner, Michele Singer, Romy Reiner, Nick Reiner, Maria Gilfillan and Jake Reiner attend the Los Angeles Premiere of ”Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” at The Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, California, US, Sept. 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Aude Guerrucci
Dozens of people in Hollywood have expressed profound sadness following the news that visionary Jewish filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their Los Angeles home on Sunday night and that their middle son is being charged with murder.
Reiner, 78, was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1947. In the 1970s he co-starred in the sitcom “All in the Family” before becoming the famous director behind movies such as “This Is Spinal Tap,” “Stand by Me,” “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally…” and “A Few Good Men.” Earlier this year, Reiner released the sequel, “Spinal Tap: The End Continues.” He also directed the 2015 film called “Being Charlie,” inspired by his son Nick’s longtime battle with heroin addiction and the impact that his substance abuse had on the family.
On Sunday, Reiner and his wife, 68, were found dead by what police described as an apparent homicide at their home in Brentwood, California. Their middle son, Nick, is being held at Los Angeles’ Twin Towers Jail, having been arrested on murder charges in connection with their deaths. The 32-year-old reportedly has his bail set at $4 million. “As a result of the initial investigation, it was determined that the Reiners were the victims of homicide. The investigation further revealed that Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of Robert and Michele Reiner, was responsible for their deaths,” the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said in a statement on Monday.
“I saw them night before last looking healthy and happy,” Jane Fonda wrote in an Instagram post. “I am reeling with grief. Stunned.” She shared a photo of the late couple on Instagram and wrote that they were “wonderful, caring, smart, funny, generous people, always coming up with ideas for how to make the world better, kinder.”
Fonda also said the couple had recently been helping her to relaunch the Committee for the First Amendment, a group that champions freedom of expression from government censorship.
“My heart is broken,” Zooey Deschanel said in a tribute to Reiner, who played her father on the show “New Girl.” She called Reiner “the absolute warmest, funniest, most generous of spirits. A truly good human being. An incredible artist and such a playful and fun collaborator.”
“I cherish the time we spent working together and the many films he made that have shaped who I am,” she added. “Rob and his lovely wife Michele were always so kind and it brought me so much joy any time I was lucky enough to see them. I’m absolutely devastated. Sending so much love to their family and friends.”
The estate of Norman Lear, the legendary producer who created “All in the Family,” released a statement remembering the close relationship between the two men. “Norman often referred to Rob as a son,” the statement said. “The world is unmistakably darker tonight.”
Jerry Seinfeld said Reiner had one of the biggest influences on his career aside from Larry David, who co-created “Seinfeld,” and the late George Shapiro, who was Seinfeld’s manager and a producer on the renowned sitcom. Reiner also helped save “Seinfeld” from almost being canceled, Seinfeld said. He shared a photo of himself alongside Reiner and his father, the late actor Carl Reiner.
“Our show would have never happened without him. He saw something no one else could,” Seinfeld explained in an Instagram post. “When nobody at the network liked the early episodes, he saved us from cancellation. That I was working with Carl Reiner’s son, who happened to be one of the kindest people in show business, seemed unreal.”
“I was naive at the time to how much his passion for us meant,” Seinfeld added. “Rob and Michele married right as our show was starting and they became an imprint for me of how it’s supposed to work, each one broadening the other. Their death, together, is impossibly sad.”
Kathy Bates, who won an Oscar for her leading role in Reiner’s 1990 horror “Misery,” said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly that Reiner was a “brilliant and kind, a man who made films of every genre to challenge himself as an artist.”
“I’m horrified hearing this terrible news. Absolutely devastated. I loved Rob,” she added. “He changed the course of my life … My heart breaks for them both. My thoughts are with their family.” She also said the late director was someone who “fought courageously for his political beliefs” and praised his wife as a “gifted photographer.”
Novelist Stephen King, who wrote the books that inspired Reiner’s films “Stand by Me” and “Misery,” praised the late director in a post on X as a “wonderful friend, political ally, and brilliant filmmaker.”
“You always stood by me,” King added.
Paul Feig, the director of “Bridesmaids,” posted a photo of himself and Reiner at Comic-Con and wrote that the latter “was my true hero.”
“One never knows if it’s proper to post during something as tragic as this,” Feig said. “But I just want the world to know what so many of us know in the industry. Robert was the best.”
Reiner and his wife are survived by two sons Jake and Nick, and their youngest daughter Romy, who reportedly called 911 on Sunday after discovering the bodies of her parents.
Rob and Nick allegedly got into a “very loud argument” on Saturday night while attending a Christmas party hosted by former talk show host Conan O’Brien, People magazine reported, citing multiple sources. Rob and his wife were found dead at their home the next day.
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After Bondi Attack, the West Must Face the Reality of ‘Migration Jihad’
A woman keeps a candle next to flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honor the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
“They don’t move from the Arab world to Europe. They move the Arab world to Europe.” So said Professor Mordechai Kedar when he spoke to me for an extended interview as part of my podcast series. That episode was published the very day the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, was attacked. The massacre only confirmed his words. Migration, as he described it, does not merely transfer people from one place to another. It carries cultures, ideologies, and systems of meaning with it, and those systems do not remain inert; they spread and even flourish.
Kedar’s claim is not about ethnicity or private belief. It describes the movement of social order, of moral assumptions, of ideas about authority and legitimacy. People do not arrive empty-handed. They bring with them ways of organizing life, ways of resolving conflict, ways of defining who belongs and who does not. When those systems collide with liberal societies uncertain of their own boundaries, pressure accumulates.
The Bondi shooting especially matters because it strips away the last remaining comfort. This was not Gaza, not the West Bank, not a contested border. It was a beach, during a religious festival, in a country geographically and politically distant from the Middle East. A symbol of Australia, freedom, liberty. The perpetrators identified by law enforcement, a Muslim father and son, who had taken part in “military-style training” in the Philippines in the month leading up to the attack, targeted Jews.
Kedar warned me how this form of conquest moves through ideology, through repetition, through intimidation, through the slow reshaping of public space by force and intimidation — a “migration jihad.” Islam is not a private creed, but an all-encompassing framework. As Kedar puts it, it is “not only religion … Islam is also politics, economy, and every aspect of public life.” When that framework relocates, it seeks expression. When it meets hesitation, it expands.
Europe has been living inside this dynamic for years. Jews are often the first target, but the pattern rarely ends with us. Concerts, campuses, cultural events, and public squares have become the battlefields of this unconventional war. Yet political leadership responds with ritual rather than authority: candle lighting, moments of silence, interfaith theater. Expressions of sorrow, memorial gestures, and carefully chosen metaphors replace enforcement and deterrence. In Britain, demonstrations containing explicit antisemitic incitement have been tolerated for months without clear red lines. Around the world, the language of concern circulates freely while responsibility for combating poisonous ideologies and organized dangerous networks is shirked.
Paris has just canceled its traditional open-air New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs-Élysées because authorities judged the security risks too high to safely host such a large crowd of around a million people. The event will be replaced by a pre-recorded broadcast and fireworks only. Christmas markets and other festive sites have also been flagged as high-risk targets and subject to fortified security.
So, it’s not just Jews who are under threat. In Australia the terrorists came for Hanukkah, but they’ve been targeting Christmas for years. In Berlin in December 2016, a Muslim attacker, Anis Amri, drove a lorry into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz, murdering 12 people and injuring dozens more in one of the deadliest jihadist attacks in Germany.
In Strasbourg in December 2018, a Muslim attacker inspired by ISIS opened fire near the city’s Christmas market, killing five people, in an assault explicitly framed by French authorities as Islamist terrorism.
And last week federal authorities in the US arrested several people in connection with a planned New Year’s Eve bombing plot in Southern California. The FBI and Department of Justice say the group responsible is “pro-Palestinian” in its outlook as well as anti-law-enforcement and anti-government. The individuals were allegedly preparing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to be used in coordinated bomb attacks across Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.
But the response is weak. These days, order is no longer asserted; risk is managed. Jewish institutions are advised to remain calm while accepting abnormal levels of private security as a permanent feature of everyday life. An arrangement that should register as failure is absorbed as routine. Trust erodes this way.
Bondi shows that Europe is no longer the outer boundary of this phenomenon. Australia is now inside it. America, too, is discovering the same pressures through campus unrest, ideological intimidation, and violence that increasingly treats Jewish life as a proxy target for the wider freedoms and values it represents. The geography changes. The structure holds.
What Professor Kedar described was not prediction but trajectory. When people do not simply arrive but bring whole systems with them, the question facing Western societies ceases to be one of tolerance alone. It becomes a question of whether they still possess the clarity and resolve to defend the civic order and freedoms they inherited.
Jonathan Sacerdoti, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to The Algemeiner.