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Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State
“Teddy Roosevelt’s great-great-great grandson is an anti-Israel protester at Princeton,” blared a New York Post headline on May 4, 2024.
The Post reported that Quentin Colon Roosevelt, an 18-year-old freshman, and descendant of the 25th President, is an anti-Israel activist at the Ivy League university. But far from being hip and new, Quentin’s brand of anti-Zionism is old hat — he is merely continuing a long family tradition of anti-Israel activism.
There is an abundance of literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s views on Jews and Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination. Both FDR and his wife Eleanor had made antisemitic remarks. In a private conversation in 1938, then-President Roosevelt suggested that by dominating the economy in Poland, Jews were themselves fueling antisemitism. And in a 1941 Cabinet meeting, FDR remarked that there were too many Jewish Federal employees in Oregon. In his final days, FDR promised Saudi leader Abdul Aziz Ibn al Saud that he would oppose the creation of Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.
FDR is the president who led the United States to victory against Adolf Hitler. He also employed Jews in high-ranking positions in his government. But he is also the president whose administration failed to save more Jews fleeing Nazism, and who refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz and other death camps where millions of Jews met a ghastly end. Accordingly, it makes sense that his beliefs regarding Jews have been the subject of books and belated study.
Less examined, however, is the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt clan, and their beliefs regarding Zionism. In part, this is easily explained by the unique place that FDR holds in American history. He is the only president to serve four terms, and presided over both the Great Depression, World War II, and arguably the beginning of the Cold War. His branch of the family, the Hyde Park Roosevelts, were Democrats and remained active in public life for decades after his 1945 death.
At first glance, the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were more of a turn of the 19th century affair. They were Republicans, and their scion was Teddy Roosevelt, a war hero turned governor of New York state who, thanks to an assassin’s bullet, found himself as the nation’s leader in 1901.
The famously ebullient Roosevelt helped redefine the country’s idea of a president, and served as an inspiration for his cousin Franklin. But Teddy largely presided over an era of peace and tranquility, not war and upheaval.
Teddy was a philosemite. He was the first occupant of the Oval Office to appoint a Jewish American to the Cabinet. He championed the rights of Jews, both at home and abroad, and was harshly critical of the numerous pogroms that unfolded in czarist Russia.
As Seth Rogovoy has noted, Roosevelt’s “special relationship with Jews was forged during his time serving as police commissioner in New York City, a post he assumed in 1904.” When an antisemitic German preacher named Hermann Ahlwardt gave speeches in the city, Roosevelt assigned a contingent of Jewish police officers to guard the man.
Roosevelt was also a Zionist. In 1918, shortly after the Balfour Declaration, he wrote: “It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist state around Jerusalem.” He told Lioubomir Michailovitch, the Serbian Minister to the United States, that “there can be no peace worth having … unless the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.” Six months later Roosevelt died in his sleep.
Not all his descendants would share his belief in Jewish self-determination, however.
Two of Teddy Roosevelt’s grandchildren, Kermit and Archie, served their country in the CIA during the early years of the Cold War. Both were keenly interested in Middle East affairs, and were fluent in Arabic. Both were well read and highly educated, authoring books and filing dispatches for newspapers like the Saturday Evening Post, among others.
They were also prominent anti-Zionists.
Kermit Roosevelt, known as “Kim,” played a key role in anti-Zionist efforts in the United States and abroad. He was not, by the standards of his time, an antisemite. But he was ardently opposed to the creation of Israel.
As Hugh Wilford observed in his 2013 book America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East: “the anti-Zionism of the overt Cold War foreign policy establishment is well known” but “less widely appreciated is the opposition to Jewish statehood of the individuals responsible for setting up the United States’ covert apparatus in the Middle East.”
This began with the OSS, the CIA’s precursor. And it included men like Stephen Penrose, a former American University of Beirut instructor, and Kim Roosevelt’s boss during his wartime service in the OSS.
“Documents among Penrose’s personal papers reveal him engaged in a variety of anti-Zionist activities at the same time that he was commencing his official duties with the OSS,” Wilford notes.
Like many of his fellow Arabists, Penrose was the son of American missionaries who, failing to convert the native population to Christianity, sought to foster Arab nationalism instead. Penrose described himself as a “chief cook” who was “brewing” opposition to Zionism. He became one of Kim Roosevelt’s mentors.
In a January 1948 Middle East Journal article entitled, “Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics,” Kim called the 1947 UN vote in favor of a Jewish state an “instructive and disturbing story.”
Roosevelt believed that the US media was unduly supportive of the creation of Israel, and claimed that almost all Americans “with diplomatic, educational, missionary, or business experience in the Middle East” opposed Zionism.
Kim’s pamphlet was reprinted by the Institute for Arab American Affairs, a New York-based group whose board he sat on. He also began working with the Arab League’s Washington, D.C., office and “turned elsewhere for allies in the anti-Zionist struggle, starting with the Protestant missionaries, educators, and aid workers.”
This nascent group soon received financial support from the American oil industry, which maintained close links to Kim’s OSS/CIA colleague, William Eddy.
As Wilford noted, the Arabian consortium ARAMCO “launched a public relations campaign intended to bring American opinion around to the Arab point of view.”
In addition to missionaries and big oil, Kim gained another important ally in the form of Elmer Berger, a rabbi from Flint, Michigan. Berger served as executive director of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist group that, among other things, opposed the creation of a Jewish army during World War II at the height of the Holocaust. Berger and Roosevelt became drinking buddies and close collaborators on their joint effort against the Jewish State.
Kim eventually became “organizing secretary” for a group called The Committee for Justice and Peace. The committee’s original chair, Virginia Gildersleeve, was both a longtime friend of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay and the dean of New York City’s Barnard College, which today is part of Columbia.
Gildersleeve was “also a high-profile anti-Zionist” who “became involved with the Arab cause through her association with the Arabist philanthropist Charles Crane and the historian of Arab nationalism George Antonius.”
Crane, a wealthy and notorious antisemite, had lobbied against the creation of a Jewish state since the beginning of the 20th century, even advising then-President Woodrow Wilson against supporting the Balfour Declaration.
By 1950, the Committee had managed to recruit famed journalist Dorothy Thompson to their cause. Thompson was reportedly the basis for actress Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1942 movie Woman of the Year. A convert to anti-Zionism, Thompson’s extensive network of reporters and celebrities proved crucial to Kim and Berger’s efforts to rally opposition to the Jewish State. In a 1951 letter to Barnard College’s Gildersleeve, Thompson wrote: “I am seriously concerned about the position of the Jews in the United States.” People, she claimed, “are beginning to ask themselves the question: who is really running America?”
Another ally emerged that year: the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA began funding the Committee, as well as its successor, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Beginning in June 1950, Kim’s correspondence with Berger began making veiled references to the ACJ head taking on “official work” in Washington. This, Wilford believes, is a reference to working with the CIA. Indeed, the well-connected Kim and Archie Roosevelt had known top CIA officials like Allan Dulles since childhood.
With support from figures like Eddy, AFME also began encouraging Muslim-Christian alliances — ostensibly to counter Soviet influence, but also to attack the Jewish state. This led to some awkward alliances, including with Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism and an infamous Nazi collaborator.
Husseini had ordered the murders of rival Palestinians, incited violence against Jews since the 1920s, and had led forces, equipped with Nazi-supplied arms, to destroy Israel at its rebirth in 1948. Now, along with the Secretary General of the Arab League, and Saudi King Ibn Saud, he was meeting with Eddy to discuss a “moral alliance” between Christians and Muslims to defeat communism. Kim himself knew Husseini, having interviewed him for the Saturday Evening Post after World War II.
AFME lobbied for the appointment of anti-Zionist diplomats and in favor of Eisenhower administration efforts to withhold aid from Israel. And both Berger and Thompson pushed for favorable coverage of the new Egyptian dictator, Gamal Nassar, who would wage war on the Jewish state for nearly two decades. Initially, they were successful, with TIME magazine writing that Nasser had the “lithe grace of a big, handsome, all-American quarterback.” Of course, there was nothing “all-American” about Nasser, who would become a Soviet stooge.
AFME officials like Garland Evans Hopkins would draw rebukes after claiming that Jews were bringing violence against themselves — a staple of antisemitism. Hopkins claimed that Zionists “could produce a wave of antisemitism in this country” if they continued acting against “America’s best interests in the Middle East.”
AFME itself would eventually lose influence, particularly after its boosting of figures like Nasser was revealed as foolhardy. Berger would go on to advise Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) in his efforts to get pro-Israel Americans to register as foreign agents.
In 1967, as Arab forces gathered to annihilate Israel, Berger blamed the Jewish State, accusing it of “aggression” and its supporters of “hysteria.” Top ACJ officials resigned in protest. That same year, Ramparts magazine exposed CIA support, financial and otherwise, of AFME.
Kim and Archie Roosevelt, however, would continue their careers as high-ranking CIA officers before eventually starting a consulting business and making use of their extensive Middle East contacts.
For some college protesters, attacking Israel — and American support for Israel — might seem new and trendy. Yet, both the CIA and big oil were precisely doing that, decades ago, forming alliances with anti-American dictators, antisemitic war criminals, the press, Protestant groups, academics, university administrators, and fringe Jewish groups claiming to represent “what’s best” for American Jewry.
As William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
The post Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State first appeared on Algemeiner.comhttps://www.algemeiner.com/.
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Synagogue in Rome Vandalized, Memorial Plaque Defaced Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks Across Italy
Antisemitic slogans deface the walls of the Beth Michael synagogue in Monteverde, Rome, marking the latest attack on the city’s Jewish community. Photo: Screenshot
A synagogue in Rome was defaced on Sunday night when unknown individuals vandalized the building and a memorial plaque honoring a Jewish child killed in a terrorist attack — the latest incident targeting the city’s Jewish community amid a relentless climate of hostility.
On Monday morning, the Beth Michael synagogue in Monteverde, a neighborhood in southwest Rome, was found defaced with antisemitic graffiti reading “Monteverde anti-Zionist and anti-fascist” and “Free Palestine.”
The synagogue’s memorial plaque honoring Stefano Gaj Taché — a two-year-old Jewish child murdered in the 1982 Palestinian terrorist attack on the Great Synagogue of Rome — was also vandalized.
Local police have launched an investigation into the latest incident, pursuing leads on two masked individuals captured on surveillance cameras near the synagogue.
Victor Fadlun, president of the Jewish Community of Rome, condemned the attack, denouncing it as part of a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents targeting Italy’s Jewish community.
“This was all part of a climate of intimidation … Antisemitism in general has become a tool for political protest,” Fadlun said in a statement. “We have faith in the police and call for strong government intervention to stop this spiral of hatred.”
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani expressed solidarity with the local Jewish community, calling for swift action to hold the perpetrators accountable and reaffirming the country’s commitment to fighting this growing hatred.
“Antisemitism is an evil germ that must be eradicated from Europe and Italy. Antisemitism cannot be confused with criticisms that can be leveled at the Israeli government,” the top Italian diplomat said in a statement.
“We must guarantee the safety of all Jewish citizens, who must not be subjected to threats and violence,” Tajani continued.
The European Jewish Congress also condemned the incident, urging authorities to investigate “this hate crime and ensure that such acts are treated with the seriousness they deserve.”
“Defacing a memorial honoring a murdered child is an act of profound disrespect and a painful reminder of how antisemitism continues to poison our societies,” EJC wrote in a post on X.
“This is not ‘anti-Zionism.’ It is antisemitism: the targeting of Jewish memory, Jewish mourning, and Jewish history,” the statement read. “Stefano’s name is a symbol of one of Italy’s darkest terror attacks. His memory should be protected, not desecrated.”
We condemn the vandalism of the memorial plaque for Stefano Gaj Taché, the two-year-old Jewish child murdered in the 1982 Palestinian terrorist attack on the Great Synagogue of Rome.
Defacing a memorial honouring a murdered child is an act of profound disrespect and a painful… pic.twitter.com/wcG144OWL6
— European Jewish Congress (@eurojewcong) December 1, 2025
This latest incident comes amid a surge in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment across Europe and around the world since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In Italy, Jewish individuals have been facing a surge in hostility and targeted attacks, including vandalism of murals and businesses, as well as physical assaults. Community leaders have warned that such incidents are becoming more frequent amid continued tensions related to the war in Gaza.
Last month, a group of Orthodox Jewish American tourists was brutally attacked at Milan’s Central Station by a pro-Palestinian individual.
The victim, who was with a group of 10 Orthodox Jewish tourists visiting Italy, was checking the departure board when an unknown individual began harassing him.
The attacker then allegedly chased the victim while punching and kicking him and striking him in the head with a blunt metal ring.
During the attack, the assailant reportedly shouted antisemitic insults and threats, including “dirty Jews” and “you kill children in Palestine, and I’ll kill you.”
In September, a Jewish couple was walking through Venice in traditional Orthodox clothing when three assailants confronted them, shouted “Free Palestine,” and physically attacked them, slapping both.
This incident followed another attack on a Jewish couple in Venice the month before, when a man and his pregnant wife were harassed near the city center by three unknown individuals.
The attackers approached the couple, shouting antisemitic insults and calling the husband a “dirty Jew,” while physically assaulting them by throwing water and spitting on them.
One of the assailants later set his dog on the couple in an attempt to intimidate them before the group stole their phones.
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Harvard Files Another Motion to Dismiss Antisemitism Lawsuit, Student Hits Back
Students walk on campus at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Nov. 19, 2025. Photo: Reba Saldanha via Reuters Connect
Harvard University has asked a US federal court to respond to a second and final motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a former graduate student who says the administration unlawfully refused to discipline students and faculty who harassed him for being Jewish.
Harvard submitted its first motion in October, charging that the alleged victim, Yoav Segev, has not backed his claim with evidence and that his grievance derived not from any legally recognizable harm but a disagreement over policy. Segev fired back on Nov. 17, with his attorneys writing in response that Harvard’s litigation strategy is a “morally indefensible” attempt to disappear allegations which they say the school knows are true.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Segev was mobbed in October 2023 by a crush of pro-Hamas activists led by Ibrahim Bharmal and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, who stalked him across Harvard Yard before encircling him and screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as he struggled to break free from the mass of bodies which surrounded him. Video of the incident, widely viewed online at the time, showed the group shoving keffiyehs — traditional headdresses worn by men in the Middle East that in some circles have come to symbolize Palestinian nationalism — in his face.
“The harassment also came from Harvard faculty, who publicly blamed Mr. Segev because his presence, as a Jew, was somehow ‘frightening’ to other students,” Segev’s attorneys wrote in a memorandum to the court. “This pervasive harassment also includes Harvard mistreating and misleading Mr. Segev to deny him a fair process while protecting and rewarding his attackers. Harvard ignores these allegations.”
They added, “Moreover, while the complaint focuses on Mr. Segev’s assault, ensuring harassment, and Harvard’s unreasonable response, it details the many other ways Harvard neglected the entire Jewish community, of which Mr. Segev is a member.”
Harvard implored the court to respond to its filing, saying Segev “does not attempt to explain how the facts alleged about that single, short-lived event — shouting and some brief instances of non-injurious physical contact — could be vile enough to have a systemic effect on his education experience.”
It continued, “Mr. Segev attempts to sweep in a purported ‘overall environment’ of events that predate his time at Harvard or that he did not experience. To that end, Mr. Segev retreads a litany of allegations copied from other lawsuits arguing that reliance on these allegations is proper because he ‘is a member of Harvard’s Jewish community, and he suffered … just as much as other Jewish students.’”
In the two years since the October 2023 incident, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo not only avoided hate crime charges but even amassed new accolades and distinctions — according to multiple reports.
Bharmal went on to be conferred a law clerkship with the Public Defender for the District of Columbia, a government-funded agency which provides free legal counsel to “individuals … who are charged with committing serious criminal acts.” He also reaped a $65,000 fellowship from Harvard Law School to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamic group whose leaders have defended the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.
As for Tettey-Tamaklo, he walked away from Harvard Divinity School with honors, according to The Free Press, as the 2024 Class Committee for Harvard voted him class marshal, a role in which he led the graduation procession through Harvard Yard alongside the institution’s most accomplished scholars and faculty.
He is currently hired as a Harvard teaching fellow, according to a recent report by The Washington Free Beacon.
Harvard’s relationship with the Jewish community became a staple of American news coverage ever since some of its students cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, in which Palestinian terrorists indiscriminately murdered Israelis while sexually assaulting both women and men. Later, students stormed academic buildings chanting “globalize the intifada”; a faculty group posted an antisemitic cartoon on its social media page; and the Harvard Law School student government passed a resolution that falsely accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Since US President Donald Trump’s election in November 2024, Harvard has attempted to turn over a new leaf, settling lawsuits which stipulate its adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) widely used definition of antisemitism and even shuttering far-left initiatives which were adjacent to extreme anti-Zionist viewpoints.
In July, the university announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions, saying it will establish a new study abroad program, in partnership with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, for undergraduate students and a postdoctoral fellowship in which Harvard Medical School faculty will mentor and train newly credentialed Israeli scientists in biomedical research as preparation for the next stages of their careers.
Speaking to The Harvard Crimson — which has endorsed boycotting Israel — Harvard vice provost for international affairs Mark Elliot trumpeted the announcement as a positive development and, notably, as a continuation, not a beginning, of Harvard’s “engagement with institutions of higher education across Israel.” Elliot added that Harvard is planning “increased academic collaboration across the region in the coming years.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Antisemitism in Healthcare Is a Public Health Crisis — and Must Be Treated as One
Illustrative: Medical staff work at the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) ward at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, in Jerusalem January 31, 2022. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While healthcare providers pledge to “do no harm,” that oath is being violated as antisemitism seeps into the very spaces meant to embody compassion and healing. This was the warning issued by Dr. Jacqueline Hart, who organized a medical conference on this issue, and emphasized that antisemitism in medicine endangers both patients and practitioners.
At the conference, titled “Addressing Antisemitism in Healthcare,” a Jewish medical student described classmates who erased her from social media groups when they learned she was Jewish, and chalked the names of Hamas “martyrs” (those who brutally murdered Jewish men, women, and children) outside the school on the anniversary of October 7.
Other Jewish medical students were labeled “colonizers,” “oppressors,” and “bloodthirsty Zionists” by their peers. A genetic counselor who petitioned to stop her professional association from platforming a speaker with a history of antisemitic rhetoric received death threats from colleagues, and had to walk into work with a police escort. One Jewish resident recalled a patient who sneered, “I don’t trust the Jew to treat me,” while the supervising physician said nothing.
Jewish patients within the mental health sphere are experiencing what’s known as traumatic invalidation — the denial or dismissal of one’s pain, experience, and humanity. Research shows that when people are silenced, minimized, or erased in this way, the psychological impact can be as damaging as other recognized traumas, leaving deep scars of mistrust, hypervigilance, and isolation.
And when bias permeates hospitals and clinics, everyone is at risk. Patients hesitate to disclose important personal information, practitioners experience significant harm, and the public’s faith in medicine erodes.
For these reasons, antisemitism in healthcare must be treated as a public-health crisis.
A National Call to Action
America’s great medical hubs — Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, Atlanta, and others — have long set the pace for clinical innovation and high-quality care. Now they must lead again. Public and private leaders within healthcare must mobilize around confronting antisemitism head-on.
For example, longitudinal studies should be funded and conducted on the impact of antisemitism on patient outcomes, workforce retention, and mental health, and to develop antisemitism-reduction interventions — just as we do for smoking cessation or infection control.
Policies and practices that illuminate and address the issue must be implemented, including adding antisemitism metrics to existing patient-safety and employee-climate surveys; requiring academic medical centers and health systems to track and publicly report antisemitic incidents; and posting a Patients’ Bill of Rights that explicitly guarantees a care environment free from discrimination.
Healthcare facilities should review their dress codes and revise policies to prohibit staff from wearing political attire that could intimidate patients or colleagues. This will help to ensure that treatment environments remain safe and welcoming for all.
Mandatory training and education are needed, including integrating antisemitism education into cultural-competence curricula for students, residents, and continuing medical education for practicing clinicians.
Facilities should create anonymous reporting hotlines — either individually or collectively — where patients and workers can report antisemitic or other bias-related incidents without fear of retaliation, and facilities should also ensure there are penalties for retaliation.
Mental health services must be available for patients and health care workers who experience discriminatory treatment. Further, regulations should be reviewed and revised to guarantee that clinical environments remain free from antisemitic bias and other forms of hate.
Finally, medical schools’ LCME accreditation and hospital Joint Commission status should be made dependent on having an antisemitism-prevention program or training requirement.
Medicine’s social contract is built on safety, dignity, and trust. When Jewish clinicians who report antisemitism are told to “keep politics out of the hospital,” or Jewish patients fear revealing their identity, that contract is broken. The cure is neither complicated nor optional: study the problem, implement interventions, train the workforce, and enforce standards — just as we have done with other threats to public health.
What’s at stake is not only the well-being of Jewish patients and professionals, but the integrity of our healthcare system itself.
Sara A. Colb is the Director of Advocacy for ADL’s National Affairs division. Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern is the Director of Trauma Training and Services at Parents for Peace and a Lecturer in Psychology at Harvard Medical School, where she supervises psychology interns and psychiatry residents.