Uncategorized
Gunman Dead After Car Ramming Attack at Michigan Synagogue
FBI members work on the site after the Michigan State Police reported an active shooting incident at the Temple Israel Synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, US, March 12, 2026. Photo: Rebecca Cook via Reuters Connect
Security guards assigned to protect Temple Israel, a synagogue in Oakland County, Michigan, killed a gunman who crashed his truck into the front entrance of the Jewish facility on Thursday before opening fire, according to local and federal law enforcement officials.
The prompt response to the threat spared the lives of staff and children enrolled in a day school on the campus, making the shooter’s killing the only fatality to result from the incident.
“Lockdown is still in place, but the active shooter has been taken down,” the synagogue told congregants via text message in the early afternoon. “Lockdown will be in place until they know that the shooter was working alone. All kids and all staff accounted for and fine. Truck rammed into front door and opened fire.”
The synagogue — located in West Bloomfield Township, a suburb of Detroit — later issued a statement noting “everyone is safe” after what it described as a “terrorist gunman” attacked the building.
“Temple Israel was the victim of a terrorist gunman who was confronted and neutralized by our security personnel who are truly heroes,” the synagogue wrote, praising staff and security for protecting the 140 kids at its early childhood center.
“Our teachers followed their training and kept the children safe and calm.”
Eight first responders were injured and being treated at the hospital, according to Henry Ford Health.
“The emergency medicine teams at Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital and Henry Ford Providence Novi Hospital are currently caring for eight first responders following this afternoon’s incident at Temple Israel,” the hospital said in a statement.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said earlier that a security guard was struck by the suspect’s truck and injured.
West Bloomfield Police Chief Dale Young told reporters that the suspect “breached the building” and “drove in through doors with a vehicle,” adding that surveillance showed the vehicle “traveling with purpose down the hall.”
Officials said that security personnel “engaged the suspect with gunfire.” The assailant, reportedly armed with a rifle, exchanged shots with security before being killed. According to reports, the suspect’s body was badly burned, as the vehicle caught fire after crashing into Temple Israel.
The vehicle used in the attack is registered to a naturalized US citizen from Lebanon who lives in Dearborn, Fox News reported citing three law enforcement sources. The Algemeiner could not immediately verify that information. Investigators are reportedly working to determine if the name tied to the vehicle registration matches the suspect who died at the scene.
“Michigan’s Jewish community should be able to live and practice their faith in peace,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said in a statement responding to the attack. “Antisemitism and violence have no place in Michigan.”
US President Donald Trump addressed the incident during remarks at a White House Women’s History Month event.
“Before we begin, I want to send our love to the Michigan Jewish community and all of the people in Detroit, Detroit area, following the attack on the Jewish synagogue early today,” Trump said, noting he had been “fully briefed” on the situation.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Trump added. “But it goes on. We’re going to get right down to the bottom of it.”
The incident came amid a welter of antisemitic hate crimes across the US and broader Western world since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Last May, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead in Washington, DC while leaving an event for young Jewish professionals.
Days later, an assailant threw Molotov cocktails at a group of Jewish activists advocating for the Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza at the time, killing one person and injuring 13.
In January, a young man suspected of setting the Beth Israel Congregationin Jackson, Mississippi on fire told investigators he targeted the synagogue over its “Jewish ties.”
Another arsonist struck the San Francisco Hillel building in December.
Last month, two men trespassed the grounds of the Olami Dallas Center in Texas and demanded entry to the home of its rabbi by claiming to be window cleaners. According to StandWithUs, a Jewish advocacy group, the perpetrators rang the doorbell of Rabbi Yaakov Rubin, who refused to let them, in response to which one of the men spat on the property as the other said “Free Palestine.” StandWithUs added that they also said “fake Jews” during their attempt to gain access to the building.
“The pattern is now apparent,” Sabrina Soffer, research fellow for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told The Algemeiner on Thursday. “We have allowed radical anti-civilizational ideologies and entities to infiltrate our society, and we are paying the price. What started with ‘globalize the intifada’ and ‘free, free Palestine’ and Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy mongering against Chabad led inexorably to anti-Jewish violence. We have to fight against these pernicious ideas in K-12 classrooms, on the campus, and anywhere else they appear.”
Antisemitism in the US has surged to break “all previous annual records,” according to a series of recent reports issued by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has said the numbers are the highest recorded since it began keeping data on antisemitic incidents in 1979.
The FBI has disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups have noted that this rise in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
The wave of hatred has changed how American Jews perceive their status in America.
According to the results of a survey commissioned by ADL and the Jewish Federations of North America, a majority of American Jews now consider antisemitism to be a normal and endemic aspect of life in the US.
A striking 57 percent reported believing “that antisemitism is now a normal Jewish experience,” the organizations disclosed, while 55 percent said they have personally witnessed or been subjected to antisemitic hatred, including physical assaults, threats, and harassment, in the past year.
The survey results revealed other disturbing trends: Jewish victims are internalizing their experiences, as 74 percent did not report what happened to them to “any institution or organization”; Jewish youth are bearing the brunt of antisemitism, having faced communications which aim to exclude Jews or delegitimize their concerns about rising hate; roughly a third of survey respondents show symptoms of anxiety; and the cultural climate has fostered a sense in the Jewish community that the non-Jewish community would not act as a moral guardrail against violence and threats.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
The post Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
The post Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’ appeared first on The Forward.