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‘Fleishman is in Trouble’ hits FX Thursday. Just don’t call it a Jewish series, says its creator.
(JTA) — From Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s point of view, her best-selling 2019 novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble” wasn’t all that Jewish. She’s a little perplexed by the deluge of press junket questions about its Jewish essence.
“It’s funny: I don’t think of it as a Jewish book. I know people do,” she said.
Brodesser-Akner, a journalist famous for her sharp celebrity profiles, is now the showrunner of the book’s star-studded TV adaptation, an 8-episode FX series that debuts on Hulu on Thursday. In the story, Toby Fleishman (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is a 41-year-old Jewish hepatologist who has recently divorced Rachel (Claire Danes), his ambitious, icy, blonde theater agent wife. Early on in the story, Rachel disappears in the middle of the night, leaving Toby with their two children and a truckload of resentment. Toby, who had a nebbishy and romantically insecure youth before marrying Rachel, is now drowning in the sexual bounty of dating apps.
On Zoom, Brodesser-Akner was speaking a few days after the show’s blowout bash at Carnegie Hall and Tavern on the Green, an iconic Central Park restaurant. “I’ve never been to an event like that. It was 600 people,” she said. It sounded like a scene that could have been plucked right from “Fleishman,” which is set on the extremely wealthy Upper East Side, and in which the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood are at odds with the ambitions and personal longings of its middle-aged characters.
Brodesser-Akner, 47, who was both adrenalized and a little frazzled, had to balance the premiere with parenting duties — she’s a mother of two boys, ages 15 and 12. “I’m still picking sequins from my teeth.”
As a writer, Brodesser-Akner likes to play with the power of subjectivity, and she built “Fleishman” on it. Though the story begins as Toby’s, it eventually morphs into a “Rashomon”-esque take on the divorce and what really went wrong in the Fleishmans’ marriage. The story is narrated by Libby (Lizzy Caplan), Toby’s friend from their year abroad in Israel. A former men’s magazine writer, Libby is now a lost and frustrated stay-at-home mom in suburban New Jersey (and a stand-in for Brodesser-Akner). Adam Brody steals scenes as Seth, an immature finance bro and another year-in-Israel friend with whom Toby reconnects after the divorce. (His presence is a homecoming of sorts for those of us who spent our tween years watching him play a different Seth in “The O.C.”)
“I don’t think of it as a Jewish book,” says Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
Brodesser-Akner pieced together the story’s Jewish elements: a doctor named Fleishman, a bat mitzvah, Friday night dinners, a year abroad in Israel, a few jokes about Jews being bad at home repairs (which is the subject of a very funny scene in episode six between Toby and Seth). There are a few insidery details that she fails to mention, like a fake Jewish sleepaway camp called Camp Marah, which sounds like the real Camp Ramah but roughly translates to “Camp Bitter” in Hebrew. Does all this add up to a “Jewish” story?
“I read ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen, and it mentions Christmas I think 47 times. I read ‘Crossroads’ and it’s about the family of a youth minister. But neither of those is ever called a Christian book. This is called a Jewish book. I don’t object to it being called a Jewish book. But to me it’s mostly an American story. As a writer and as an observer of the culture, I think that calling this a Jewish book is proof of the answer to an old question: are Jews considered Americans? And the answer is no.” She threw in her characteristic meta analysis: “So now you have a very Jewish profile. How Jewish is that, Sarah?”
The self-aware comment is a good reminder that although her responses may be unguarded, she has not forgotten that she’s on the record. A name in New York media, Brodesser-Akner wrote for GQ and is now a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, having profiled Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke and Tom Hanks and written about the Joshua Cohen novel “The Netanyahus,” the television show “Thirtysomething” and much more. She inserts herself often into her writing, not to make it about herself, but to remind the reader that every profile is by nature filtered through the lens of the writer crafting it. Her writing is searing, self-deprecating — so raw it’s still bleeding and often quite funny.
“I wrote the book the way I would write a profile, just like I always do. But this man doesn’t exist,” she said.
RELATED: 5 Jewish places that inspired Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’
We had tried to meet in person near her home on the Upper West Side, but by the time she was available, I was in Tel Aviv, placing us along the Israel-New York axis on which “Fleishman” is set. When Toby suddenly calls Libby to tell her he’s getting divorced, he catapults her into memories of their early twenties in Jerusalem. Those thoughts make Libby miss the possibilities of her youth, the ones time has ruthlessly and inevitably extinguished. Eventually her longing for her past becomes so overwhelming that it threatens her marriage to her menschy and patient husband, played by Josh Radnor. (For more longing-for-younger-days while in Israel content, Brodesser-Akner wrote a Saveur essay about vegetable soup in Jerusalem — her Proustian madeleine. Interviewing Brodesser-Akner from my friend’s apartment in Tel Aviv, a city where I lived in my twenties, I found the theme of longing for the past hit almost too close to home.)
Part of the reason Brodesser-Akner doesn’t think the “Fleishman” story is all that Jewish is that she doesn’t feel all that Jewish — at least not relative to her mother and sisters, who are aligned with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement and live within a few blocks of each other in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
“I don’t think any writer has ever gotten it right,” she says of her Jewish background. “They say I was raised Orthodox. It’s interesting because it always makes me look like the black sheep in my family, when really they are. I’m exactly how I was raised to be until I was 12.”
After her mother, a secular Israeli, and her father, a Conservative Long Islander, divorced, her mother put Brodesser-Akner and her sisters in Jewish school. Some Jewish observance trickled back to her mother, who ended up going the Chabad route.
“My mom had never been inside a synagogue until the day she married my father. Now that is what we call ironic,” Brodesser-Akner said.
Brodesser-Akner’s two sisters followed, and her mother eventually remarried and had another child, the only sibling born into a religious household.
“The thing that made me a journalist was being raised in a home where, at age 12, I was relegated to observer. I had to learn how to understand other people’s points of view. And now that’s what I do,” she said.
Despite their religious differences — Brodesser-Akner attends an Orthodox synagogue but sends her children to an unaffiliated Jewish school and says she wakes up “every morning with new ideas” — the author is very close with her family, and her sisters were at the “Fleishman” premiere.
“They were at the premiere of my perverted sex show,” she joked with a laugh referring to the Hulu series, which features some sexual content as Toby explores the post-divorce New York dating scene. “They show up for me and I show up for them. I have my challenges with it, but I think their challenges must be greater. They never say this to me, but they must think that my life is comparatively…” She looked away thoughtfully, trying to find the right words. “They must think my lifestyle is comparatively less worthwhile. But we really love each other.”
To Brodesser-Akner, the most Jewish show on television is “The Patient,” which she calls “the best show I have seen in 100 years.” And that’s not because it (like “Fleishman”) is on FX. “I’m not that kind of interview!” she said.
Lizzy Caplan plays Toby’s friend Libby. (FX Networks)
“It’s the most Jewish show in all of the Jewish ways. It grapples with a Jewish prisoner; with the difference between a Conservative Jewish female cantor whose son becomes ultra-Orthodox — I’d never seen that on screen. It was kind of the only relatable Jewish matter I’ve ever seen. People ask me if I’ve watched ‘Shtisel.’ And I always say, I’m in the 47th season of an ultra-Orthodox family drama myself and not really interested!” She laughed. “But also I think of the other Jewish matters on television, which are adapted memoirs of people who were ultra-Orthodox and now aren’t. It’s like no one can imagine religious people being happy in their lives. And that’s really shocking to me. My family is very happy.”
Brodesser-Akner wound up with her dream cast: she had a list of five actors — Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, Josh Radnor and Adam Brody — and no backup plan. She noted the fact that viewers have seen them grow up on screen as one reason they were right for the roles. For many, watching Caplan, Eisenberg and Brody sit across from each other in a diner will feel like a camp reunion, the fulfillment of a Jewish television fantasy they never knew they had.
“One thing that we were trying to get across is ‘how could it be that I am this old when I was once this young?’ And the fact that you have a memory of Claire from ‘My So-Called Life,’ or Jesse from ‘The Squid and the Whale’ — that does so much of the work of the show without writing a word,” Brodesser-Akner said.
Besides Danes (who plays the only main character with a non-Jewish parent, whom the book makes clear she resembles) the lead actors are all Jewish — a notable fact in a time when Jewish representation on screen, and who should be allowed to play Jewish characters, is the subject of continued debate.
Last month, New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who is Jewish, tweeted, “There is a simple solution to the question of whether various non-Jewish actors are allowed to play Jews & that is to ask me.” Brodesser-Akner responded to the tweet, writing “[Non-Jew] Oscar Isaac in Scenes from a Marriage is the best ex-ortho I ever saw on screen!”
About casting Jewish actors, Brodesser-Akner noted a legal issue rarely mentioned in the representation debate: one can cast based on looks, but it’s illegal in the United States to cast based on religion. She took this very seriously.
“I spoke to [‘The Plot Against America’ director] David Simon about it and he said, ‘They’re actors. You let them act.’ And I agree with that. The question that I asked myself was who was perfect for it?” she said.
Even if Brodesser-Akner rejects the claim that “Fleishman” is a definitively Jewish story, wasn’t she consciously playing with some Philip Roth-inspired Jewish archetypes? Toby the nice Jewish doctor, the devoted, idealistic dad who’s also self-righteous, horny and insecure.
No, she insists she wasn’t. But also Philip Roth is so ingrained in her that who’s to say? And isn’t the question flawed in the first place?
“All I can say is that I am made out of Philip Roth. I’m so formed by his books. I actually would say that you have a bias in the asking of your question, in that you’re Jewish too. And you also are made out of Philip Roth books since you’re a writer. Again, that goes back to the same question as ‘are we American?’ To me, Toby is not ‘a Jewish guy.’ He’s just a guy! He’s the kind of guy I know! I was just trying to be myself.”
“Fleishman is in Trouble” premieres its first two episodes on Hulu on Nov. 17. It will release each of its six remaining episodes weekly on Thursdays.
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Trump Proclaims Isolationist Critics ‘Are Not MAGA’ While Defending Mark Levin From Vulgar Insult
US President Donald Trump speaks during a visit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, US, Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
An uncouth online argument between two of the most prominent American conservative commentators inspired an intervention on Sunday night from US President Donald Trump, who backed radio host Mark Levin during a heated exchange with podcaster Megyn Kelly.
Trump also defended his policy toward Iran in his Truth Social post, lambasting isolationist critics of his foreign policy as not being part of his so-called “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” movement.
“Mark Levin, a truly Great American Patriot, is somewhat under siege by other people with far less Intellect, Capability, and Love for our Country. Mark is Tough, Strong, and Brilliant, hence the nickname, ‘THE GREAT ONE,’ conceived by our MAGA friend, the wonderful Sean Hannity,” Trump wrote before effusively praising Levin as “a true Conservative, and Intellect” who was “far smarter than those who criticize him but, above all, he is a man of Great Wisdom.”
Trump warned that “those that speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside, as do the people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound.” He went on to proclaim, “THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon.”
Repeating his pledge to obliterate the Islamic regime in Iran, Trump vowed that “MAGA is about stopping them cold, and that is exactly what we are doing. GOD BLESS OUR GREAT MILITARY, WHICH I HAVE REBUILT SINCE THE BEGINNING OF MY FIRST TERM, TO ACHIEVE EVERLASTING PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
While not naming the specific individuals who had attacked Levin, online observers recognized the commander-in-chief had written in response to a provocative exchange between “the Great One” and Kelly which had devolved into grade-school-level taunting.
In recent months, Kelly has earned the ire of pro-Israel advocates due to her decision to align herself with the antisemitic positions and conspiracy theories promoted by fellow podcasters Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes. During a discussion with Carlson in January, Kelly praised Fuentes — a man who has celebrated Adolf Hitler, promoted Joseph Stalin, supported Hamas, and urged his “Groyper” followers to rape women — as “very interesting and he’s very smart.” She said, “There is value to be derived from that guy’s messaging.”
Kelly, Owens, Carlson, and Fuentes have also been adamantly opposed to the US military campaign against Iran, claiming without evidence that Israel dragged Trump into the conflict.
On Sunday, Levin wrote on X: “Poor Megyn Kelly. An emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck. She’s completely revealed and destroyed herself. She’s everything people say she is, but much worse. Never an intelligent, thoughtful, or substantive comment. Utterly toxic.”
Kelly reposted Levin’s remarks before she struck below the belt. In a post that has since received 6.3 million views, Kelly wrote, “Micropenis Mark @marklevinshow thinks he has the monopoly on lewd. He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible. Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis.”
Levin then reshared Kelly’s jab at his manhood and responded with a Freudian implication, writing, “Busy Sunday morning for Megyn Kelly. She wakes up and has ‘micrope*is’ on her mind. Suffice to say, if it talks like a harlot, and posts like a harlot, it’s … well, you know the rest. Shalom!”
Early Monday morning, Kelly doubled down on her vulgarity and responded to Trump’s Truth Social post, suggesting that Levin had requested support.
“Micro penis @marklevinshow is such a SMALL MAN he had to go beg the president for a pat on the head (in the middle of a war!) to make himself feel better about … well, you know,” Kelly wrote. “This, after one mean tweet about him – following his 111 (!) nasty, non-stop, personal, misogynistic attacks on me. (Fox has an OBSESSED HARASSER on its hands.)”
Kelly added, “Just like all feckless, weakling bullies Micro can dish it out but he can’t take it. After just one post putting the so-called ‘great one’ in his place, he ran crying to Daddy.”
Rejecting the charge that he had solicited support in their flame war from the president, Levin wrote on X that “no, I did not speak to the president about releasing any statement. These reprobates have nothing but lies and conspiracies and hate. And the more they talk and post, the more people have had enough of them. They will eventually dry up and blow away, like those who’ve come before them.”
On Sunday night, Levin thanked Trump for his praise, writing, “I am beyond humbled by your words and graciousness in writing such a beautiful note and sharing it on Truth Social. I am honored that you took the time to write it. Your courage, strength, and moral clarity are truly unparalleled. And your leadership has made our country and the world much safer.”
Six hours after Kelly’s initial insult against Levin, her ally Owens took her own shot, writing in a long note on X that “no matter how many articles Bari Weiss publishes or how many monologues Mark Levin stammers through, the overwhelming majority of people in the world sense that Charlie Kirk was murdered for opposing this war and that Israel’s hands are not clean in the story.”
Owens further aligned herself with Carlson and Kelly, stating, “People like myself and like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly (however ignorant we may or may not have been in our earlier assessments) once genuinely supported Israel and thought Zionism was a moral position.”
Continuing to advance her conspiracy theory of Israeli involvement in the murder of her friend Kirk, Owens wrote, “In their sheer arrogance, rather than meaningfully working to restore relationships, zionists continue to use tactics of slander, deception, law-fare and yes, murder to force their perspectives. They no longer seem capable of making a distinction between illusion and reality. They wrongly assumed that with enough money, they could purchase truth.”
On Monday, former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene backed Kelly in the feud, writing, “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis. It’s the most deserved insult and I don’t care if it’s vulgar. And Trump’s gigantic defense of Levin only enraged the base more. People are DONE. MAGA destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin.”
Greene had written her comment in response to Kelly defending her rhetoric to far-right influencer Mike Cernovich, who criticized the intra-right battle as a “total distraction to spend hours a week reacting to each other. It’s slave behavior.”
Kelly responded to Cernovich by justifying herself, writing, “Disagree. You can take the high road and ignore for a while but eventually after hundreds of tweets/attacks you punch the bully in the rhetorical face. And then he goes running to daddy about his Micropenis.”
While debates about Israel and the Iran war may engage online pugilists with audiences to entertain, polling shows that the vast majority of Republicans (85 percent) and self-identified “MAGA” supporters (91 percent) back Trump’s decision to bomb the Islamic regime in Iran.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Leaves the Left Party Over Anti-Israel Stance, Lack of Support Amid Death Threats
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s antisemitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has resigned from the Left Party, citing a rise in antisemitism within the ranks, relentless personal attacks, and a party climate that has become intolerable.
“I struggled with this decision for a long time, as I have felt a deep connection to the party over many years,” Büttner wrote in a letter to the party leadership, as reported by German media.
“But I have reached a point where I must acknowledge that I can no longer remain a member of this party without betraying my own convictions,” he continued.
According to several German media reports, the commissioner, who had been a member of the Left Party since 2015, said he was resigning over the party’s handling of antisemitism, internal expulsion proceedings aimed at removing him, and relentless personal attacks.
“The fight against antisemitism is a task that transcends party lines,” Büttner wrote in his letter. “All the more shocking for me is what I have had to witness within my own party for years.”
He criticized the Left Party’s rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, noting that the party falsely regards it as a tool to repress protest while continuing to relativize antisemitic rhetoric.
IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US and Israel — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016.
Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations.
In his letter, Büttner also condemned the Left Party in Lower Saxony, a federal state in northwestern Germany, for its position on Zionism, insisting that challenging Israel’s right to exist is unacceptable — especially after the state convention passed resolutions branding Israel a “genocidal state” and an “apartheid state.”
“These resolutions are no longer acceptable to me,” he said.
In recent years, Büttner has faced not only external threats but also a sustained campaign of insults and defamation from members within his own party.
“The way my own party has handled attacks against me is particularly troubling,” Büttner wrote in his letter. “Instead of clear solidarity, I have too often experienced silence.”
Federal party leader Jan van Aken expressed regret over Büttner’s resignation but rejected any accusations of antisemitism within the Left Party, reiterating that the party “stands unequivocally against antisemitism.”
Earlier this year, Büttner endured two personal attacks within a single week, the second escalating into a death threat.
The Brandenburg state parliament received a letter threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
A former police officer, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
In the week prior to this latest attack, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red, inverted Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking what was at the time latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
In August 2024, swastikas and other antisemitic symbols and threats were also spray-painted on his personal car.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Germany has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to newly released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in the country reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials have noted that the real number of antisemitic crimes registered by police is likely much higher, as many do not get reported.
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Over 100 Groups Call on University of California to Address Campus Antisemitism
Illustrative: Students attend a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at University of California, Berkeley during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berkeley, US, April 23, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect
Over 100 Jewish advocacy groups have signed a petition imploring the University of California (UC) system to confront faculty antisemitism amid the fallout over a new AMCHA Initiative report which argued that professors accelerated the campus antisemitism crisis by promoting the use of their platforms to promote anti-Jewish tropes in the name of opposing Israel and Zionism.
“We urge the [UC Board of Regents] to act now: stop faculty and academic units from using UC authority, resources, classrooms, and UC-branded platforms to advance political advocacy as institutional practice by strictly enforcing UC’s existing rules, and strengthening them where needed,” said the petition, which has so far amassed 124 signatures from groups, as well as 4,000 individuals. “This is not about policing faculty speech. It is about enforcing the crucial boundary between private speech and institutional advocacy.”
It continued, “When that boundary disappears, academic norms break down and students face harassment, intimidation, and exclusion. We call on you to protect students, restore the university’s academic integrity, and rebuild public trust in the University of California.”
The petition’s signatories include Alums for Campus Fairness, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, The Lawfare Project, Zionist Organization of America, and Students Supporting Israel (SSI).
The AMCHA Initiative report, titled “When Faculty Take Sides: How Academic Infrastructure Drives Antisemitism at the University of California” examined the “antisemitism crisis” across UC campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. It included dozens of examples of faculty antisemitism, including their calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; founding pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters; and endorsing institutional adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
The University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, the AMCHA Initiative explained in the exhaustive 158-page report, which focused on the Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz campuses.
“The report documents how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization,” the report said, adding that the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) alone holds at least 115 faculty endorsers of the BDS movement, according to the report. Meanwhile, dozens of its academic departments issued statements of support of the pro-Hamas encampments which struck college campuses during the 2023-2024 academic school year and became the hubs of antisemitic assault and discrimination.
It also said that FJP chapters offered more than supportive words, “defending and helping orchestrate boycott-aligned activism (including encampment demands), seeking to deplatform Israeli speakers, and filing an amicus brief … that denied Zionism’s place within Jewish identity and defended exclusionary encampment conduct toward Zionist Jewish students, including expulsion from campus spaces.”
UC Office of the President spokesperson Rachel Zaentz reportedly said the UC system was taking AMCHA’s report “seriously” and reviewing it. However, UC spokesperson Dan Mogulof expressed concerns about the methodology used to compile the data.
“While we appreciate this organization’s dedication to confronting antisemitism, it is unfortunate that no apparent effort was made to seek information directly from the campus and/or confirm information, some of which appears to have been gathered from unreliable sources,” Mogulof told The Daily Californian.
The AMCHA report followed previous studies revealing the extent of faculty misconduct in higher education promoting anti-Israel animus and even outright antisemitism.
In February, The Algemeiner learned that, according to a lawsuit, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University assigned a Jewish student a project on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”
Similar incidents have come at a fast clip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre: a Cornell University professor praised the terrorist group’s atrocities, which included mass sexual assaults; a Columbia University professor exalted Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival to murder Israeli youth as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance”; and a Harvard University FJP chapter shared an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Zionists as murderers of Blacks and Arabs.
The AMCHA Initiative has explored faculty antisemitism before.
In September 2024, the organization published a groundbreaking study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
FJP, AMCHA’s researchers added, also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. They said that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty — who, they noted, spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools — were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students.
Additionally, FJP facilitated the proposing and adopting of student government resolutions demanding acceptance of the BDS movement — which aims to isolate Israel culturally, financially, and diplomatically as the first step toward its destruction. Wherever FJP was, the researchers said, BDS was “4.9 times likely to pass” and “nearly 11 times more likely to be included in student demands,” evincing, they continued, that FSJP plays an outsized role in radicalizing university students at the more than 100 schools — including Harvard University, Brown University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University — where it is active.
“One of the important functions of these groups is to give academic legitimacy to the notion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that’s a hugely important trope being trafficked on campuses right now,” AMCHA Initiative executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.