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How a Kentucky lawmaker’s friendship with a Jewish woman helped inspire her viral speech decrying anti-trans legislation
(JTA) — Pamela Stevenson, a Democratic state representative in Kentucky, was chatting recently with her friend Zahava Kurland about one of Kurland’s duties at her Orthodox synagogue: preparing the dead for burial.
“She was trying to explain to me certain things that had to be done,” Stevenson, who is also a Black Baptist minister, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week. The seemingly esoteric topic was one of many the two women have discussed over more than a decade of weekly Friday-morning conversations — which cover anything from politics and friendship to faith and being one’s true self.
Stevenson said her conversations with Kurland have made her attuned to Jewish sensibilities. “She’s always listening for and giving me information” about Judaism and Jewish experiences, said Stevenson, who was first elected to the Kentucky legislature in 2020.
So Kurland was not surprised when, in a viral speech on Wednesday decrying her fellow lawmakers for signing off on a law that bans gender-affirming care for trans youth, Stevenson also centered antisemitism.
“First, you hated Black people,” Stevenson said, addressing the Republican lawmakers who voted for the legislation. “Then, you hated Jews. Now, you’re hating everybody. So the question is, when the only people left are you, will you hate yourself?”
Kurland said her friend is a listener and naturally empathetic, so she would be sensitive to how hatreds intersect.
“She’s truly well balanced,” said Kurland. “She truly cares about people.”
Stevenson says she looks forward to her Friday morning talks with Kurland. She said the conversations have helped give her a more expansive perspective on life, which drives her to fight bigotry.
“I really believe that I will never know as much as she knows,” Stevenson said. “But I can develop an appreciation for what it’s like and not use my view of the world as the only view of the world.”
What prompted Stevenson’s floor speech was the overwhelmingly Republican legislature’s override of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a law that bans a range of medical treatments and practices for trans youth. It outlaws doctors from providing gender-affirming treatment to youth; requires them to cease care if it has already begun; bans conversations in schools about gender identity or sexual orientation; bans school districts from allowing transgender students to use the bathroom aligned with their gender identity; and allows teachers to refuse to use a child’s preferred pronouns.
The bill was introduced weeks after state Sen. Karen Berg’s trans son, Henry Berg-Brousseau, died by suicide. Berg, who is Jewish, said that referring to the anti-trans bill as a parents’ rights bill is an “absolutely despicable affront to me personally,” according to The Washington Post. Stevenson, who has appeared alongside Berg at rallies, called her “phenomenal” and said, “This is infinitely more personal for her.”
Stevenson said that she mentioned anti-Jewish hatred in her speech because she believes hatreds are mutually reinforcing, and she connects the anti-trans sentiment she sees with rising racism and antisemitism.
“If you have a model where you have to hate somebody to win, then you always have to have somebody to hate,” she said. “People say it was out of nowhere, but it’s really out of somewhere. We’ve gone through the cycles of the Native Americans, the Black folks have been hated for a long time, the disabled. Everybody is always on the bottom of that model. And in just recent years, it was the Muslims, then it was the immigrants, and then it was back around the Blacks again. And so because of this overflow of hate, there’s been an uptick in antisemitic actions.”
Stevenson said her mission is to make people cognizant of the roots of hatred. “People want to say that all the attacks against the Jewish temples and the Jewish people in recent times came out of nowhere,” she said, referring to reports of a spike in antisemitic attacks. “No, it did not. We just have chosen not to pay attention to what’s been said.”
Kurland, who is a member of Congregation Beth Jacob in Atlanta, and Stevenson, a retired Air Force Colonel and an attorney who is running to be Kentucky’s attorney general, met in 2006 when Stevenson was serving in the Air Force and Kurland was working as an accountant in Atlanta. They attended a three-day course with Landmark, the personal development program that presses participants to face uncomfortable truths about themselves.
“When we were closer-in logistically she came over very often for Shabbos meals,” Kurland said. “I often invite people for Shabbos meals and the holidays and I love explaining, you know, how Judaism gave more to the world than anything, anybody, any person. Torah, Judaism has given the world its whole structure for society.”
The Air Force started moving Stevenson around. “That’s when we started talking on the phone all the time, because we couldn’t get together,” Kurland said.
Stevenson is “a committed listener, someone who’s going to hear you and call you out on your stuff,” Kurland said. “It’s not a friendship where you massage each other’s egos. It’s a friendship where you hold each other to account for who you say you are.”
They each speak with outrage at the lawmakers who, they feel, would breach the relationship between a parent and a child.
“As a mother, how dare you interfere with one of the most intimate relationships?” Stevenson said two weeks ago during debate on the bill, addressing Rep. Jennifer Decker, a Republican who was its lead sponsor. “We have no right to interfere in the parental rights.”
Kurland agrees. “These are all decisions to be made between a child and his parents or her parents and their doctor,” she said. “It has no place for the government to have anything to do with anything.”
And both Kurland and Stevenson say religion is a key part of their identities.
“Judaism is the center part of my life,” said Kurland. “It’s what I am, it’s who I am, it’s what I’m about. And as a Jew, you cannot sit by and let another one of God’s human beings [be excluded]. I mean, when we honor other people, we are doing God’s work. We are honoring God. When we cut people out, then we’re not “
Stevenson likewise calls herself “a woman of faith.”
“I believe what is required, in almost every faith that I know of, is to love one another and take care of the people around us,” she said.
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The post How a Kentucky lawmaker’s friendship with a Jewish woman helped inspire her viral speech decrying anti-trans legislation appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Australian Police Arrest Teens for Antisemitic Harassment of Jewish Schoolboys
Illustrative: Government workers cleaning antisemitic graffiti in Sydney, Australia in February 2025. Photo: AAPIMAGE via Reuters Connect
Australian police have arrested two teenagers suspected of chasing Jewish schoolboys in a stolen car while shouting Nazi slogans in Melbourne last week.
The suspects, one of whom already has a criminal history at age 16, were taking a joyride in the vehicle in the St. Kilda East section of the city when they spotted the Jewish boys walking home, according to Australian media. After initially passing by them, the driver reportedly executed a U-turn and gave chase, nearly striking one of the fleeing boys as he tried to escape what appeared to be an imminent threat to his life.
“Parents said the boys were badly shaken and reluctant to return to school, struggling to understand why they had been targeted,” the outlet J-Wire reported. “One father said the use of Nazi gestures was particularly distressing for families in a community where many are descendants of Holocaust survivors.”
Police confirmed on Friday night that they arrested the 16-year-old boy, who has been charged with aggravated burglary, theft of a motor vehicle, and numerous driving offences.
The announcement from law enforcement came after a 15-year-old was arrested for the incident and charged with theft of a motor vehicle.
The younger boy has been bailed ahead of his court appearance next month, Australian media reported. However, the 16-year-old has been remanded in custody and is set to appear in court on Tuesday.
Australian lawmakers have sought to confront antisemitism in recent weeks with new legislation, following a historic surge in antisemitic incidents across the country.
The wave of antisemitism culminated last month at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, where gunmen, allegedly inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group, opened fire on a Jewish gathering celebrating the start of Hanukkah, killing 15 people and wounding dozens of others.
On Tuesday, the Australian Federal Parliament passed the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate, and Extremism Act, increasing penalties imposed on hate crime perpetrators and creating new ones against “preachers and leaders” who promote hatred. Other provisions of the law, passed as separate acts, impose new gun restrictions and strengthen and aim to strengthen the immigrations system’s threat detection capabilities.
These measures passed as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese apologized for his government not doing enough to combat antisemitism.
A year before the incident, the Executive Council on Australian Jewry (EJAC) reported a 316 percent increase in antisemitic incidents between 2023 and 2024, a figure which included a surge in physical assaults and “graffiti calling to kill Jews as a direct imperative.”
“In the past such deal calls were in the form of the ‘Death to the Jews’ — expressing a sentiment rather than an act,” the group said in its 2025 report. “The same theme has also occurred in hate emails, phone calls, and other messages — calling for the mass death of Jews. The expression of such sentiments has become much more common, adding to the sense of social license for acts of severe physical violence against Australian Jews.”
In other incidents, someone graffitied the home of Lesli Berger, former president of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies; a Jewish man was assaulted by an anti-Israel mob because he took down an advertisement of a pro-Palestinian rally; and, 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.
Anti-Israel sentiment in Australia 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.”
“We are now at a stage where anti-Jewish racism has left the fringes of society, where it is normalized and allowed to fester and spread, gaining ground at universities, in arts and culture spaces, in the health sector, in the workplace and elsewhere,” EJAC president Daniel Aghion said in a statement on the day the group released its 2025 report. “In such an environment, Jews have legitimate concerns for their physical safety and social well-being in Australia. Together, we must do all we can to combat this scourge.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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What an antisemitic conspiracy theory and the Alex Pretti killing have in common
The night after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as federal officials continued to spread lies about what happened, a friend asked me for advice on another disturbing instance of misinformation. What she should say, she asked, to a colleague who is posting antisemitic conspiracy theories about last month’s wildfires in Argentina.
That conundrum was related to the horror of our government trying to blame an innocent man for his own murder, I told her. And democracy, our very society, depends on figuring what to do about both.
In both cases, there’s a stubborn refusal to admit reality. Blinded by hate, suspicion or party loyalty, and locked in hermetically sealed media silos, people blame phantoms — in the case of Argentina — or the actual victims — as in Minneapolis — for the ills of our world.
And with each rejection, each accusation, society bends a bit more toward breaking.
In Argentina, after fires ravaged some 3,000 acres earlier this month, retired military general César Milani and others blamed the blazes on Israel.
My friend’s colleague was one of the many thousands of social media posters who spread those accusations, convinced that Israelis in Patagonia deliberately started the fires in order to clear the way for Zionist settlement.
Nothing my friend could say — that authorities had not determined the cause, that the Argentine government itself said the “Zionist fire” accusations were baseless — could convince her colleague otherwise.
“She would just tell me, ‘That’s what they want you to believe,’” my friend said. “What could I say to that?”
I wish I knew. Because all weekend I despaired seeing the same dynamic at work in the United States, in even more tragic circumstances.
Video footage, eyewitnesses and expert analysis show that Border Police shot Pretti multiple times, after they threw him to the ground and removed a holstered firearm he was legally carrying. Videos show that Pretti, who had been using his iPhone to film Border Police and ICE agents, had run to help a woman whom the federal agents had shoved down.
Anyone who takes the time to look and listen to the evidence can agree on what happened. Or so you would think.
Yet many federal officials, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, suggested that the real victims were the agents who killed Pretti.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior aide, called Pretti “a domestic terrorist.” Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Border Patrol operations, said Pretti sought to “massacre law enforcement.” (Federal officials used very similar language to describe Renée Good, an unarmed mother whom ICE agents shot and killed earlier this month, after her death.)
Pretti “allegedly tried to pull out a firearm,” reported the resolutely pro-Trump OneAmerica News — ignoring the fact, clear in videos of the incident, that it was agents who removed his firearm from his holster, and agents who shot him after.
As with the Argentine fires, these were the accusations that ricocheted across social media, where posters accused Pretti — with zero evidence — of being an agitator paid for by Jewish Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros.
“Pretti was unalived” — online slang for “killed” — “by federal law enforcement officers who were defending themselves from being murdered by a deranged, Soros-paid terrorist,” was one of the typical, depressing posts to pop up in my feed this weekend.
At least in Argentina the government issued a statement debunking the Zionist arson claim, after an investigation found it was baseless.
In the U.S., a full, fair inquiry into Pretti’s death may shed more light on why the killing occurred. But despite some Republican lawmaker’s calls for a joint federal and state investigation, the federal government is so far doing what it did after the Good’s killing: shutting state authorities out and focusing on the actions of the victims, not the shooter. Three days ago an FBI agent assigned to investigate Good’s death resigned after the Department of Justice pressured her to drop her investigation into the agent behind the shooting.
And so a senseless death that could provide a moment of national reckoning, even reconciliation, will be mourned by many Americans in justifiable outrage. But for others, nothing will penetrate their conviction that Alex Pretti was guilty of provoking his own murder.
The historical record provides little hope that people so locked into a point of view shaped by misinformation can ever change their minds.
I always assumed that the public understanding of the Kent State University shootings, on May 4, 1970, was a matter of settled history: Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on peaceful protesting college students, killing four, and we all knew it was an unjustifiable massacre.
But revisiting that history in the wake of Pretti’s death, I discovered that was far from the truth.
“There was still that sentiment out there that they should have shot more students,” Dean Kahler, a former Kent State protester permanently paralyzed after a National Guardsman’s bullet severed his lower spine, told NPR in 2020, “that they should’ve killed more people.”
And long before Kent State, there was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer accused of treason in 1894 and later fully exonerated, in a case that divided France to the brink of civil war.
Ever since, a succession of right-wing elements in France have stuck to their belief in Dreyfus’ guilt. In 2021, the French lawyer Germain Latour said French antisemites suffered from an “epidemic of mental cholera” that prevented them from accepting the truth.
I wish I hadn’t had to tell my friend that it’s hard, if not impossible, to crack open every closed mind. But I did. My friend’s colleague will likely never stop believing Israel burned Argentina. Pretti’s killers will continue to have millions of defenders who will never see what to most of us is obvious.
Both stories follow the same script: reality conflicts with ideology, so reality gets discarded.
What matters more is that the people who care about finding and defending the facts push their institutions — courts, media, academia, clergy — to do the same. It is, to borrow a recent movie title, one battle after another. But for Alex Pretti’s sake, we cannot quit.
The post What an antisemitic conspiracy theory and the Alex Pretti killing have in common appeared first on The Forward.
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Guinness World Records Starts Accepting Israeli Submissions Again Following Legal Pressure
People stand next to flags on the day the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, are handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Guinness World Records (GWR) is once again accepting submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories, following pressure from an association of British lawyers that claimed the policy was discriminatory and threatened the validity of Guiness’s registered trademarks.
GWR confirmed to UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) via email that it ended its temporary pause on submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories that was implemented in November 2023, shortly after the start of the war in the Gaza Strip following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terrorist attack across southern Israel.
The exclusionary policy drew widespread condemnation in early December after Guinness World Records refused to accept a submission from the Israeli NGO Matnat Chaim, which was hoping to set a world record with an event in Jerusalem where 2,000 Israeli kidney donors will gather in one place.
GWR told Matnat Chaim at the time it was “not generally processing” record applications from Israel or the Palestinian territories “with the exception of those done in cooperation with a UN humanitarian aid relief agency.” Guinness denied claims that its policy against submissions from Israel or the Palestinian territories unlawfully excluded and discriminated against Israelis and Palestinians because the policy was based on location, not nationality or ethnicity.
In late December, UKLFI wrote to Guinness and warned that the company could face legal risks because of the policy and that it amounted to indirect discrimination. UKLFI noted that marketing publications under the title “Guinness World Records” while excluding records from in Israel or the Palestinian territories could be considered unfair commercial practice under consumer protection law. The policy could also risk the validity of Guinness’s registered trademarks, according to UKLFI.
Starting Jan. 15, GWR resumed its “routine acceptance” of applications, it told UKLFI in an email shared with The Algemeiner.
“We have continued to monitor the situation in the region carefully, reviewing the policy monthly,” GWR wrote. “The recent ceasefire and the return to a more stable environment have been key factors in these reviews. With these factors in mind … we recommenced our routine acceptance of applications for world records from Israel and the Palestinian Territories, including the application made by the Matnam Chaim charity.”
The company added that the decision to resume processing applications from the region was not an admission that its temporary pause had been unlawful or that its trademarks had been used improperly. Guinness also shared that several records set in Israel had in fact been recognized during the temporary pause. They included records for the fastest robot to solve a rotating puzzle clock, most backward somersault burpees in 30 seconds done by a male, oldest female person to perform a headstand, most sequences completed in a game of “Simon,” and tallest drag performer.
“Guinness World Records’ decision to resume accepting submissions from Israel and the Palestinian territories is welcome,” said UKLFI chief executive Jonathan Turner. “Excluding particular countries carries serious legal and commercial risks. Global organizations cannot present themselves as neutral and inclusive while applying exceptional policies to certain countries, particularly where this misleads consumers and disadvantages entire populations.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar also commented on GWR’s change in policy, celebrating that the massive gathering of kidney donors in Jerusalem will be recognized.
“Two thousand Israeli kidney donors are making the largest donation ever, in a selfless act of solidarity and humanity,” Sa’ar posted on the social media platform X on Monday. “Good to see it finally receive the celebration it deserves by the Guinness World Records, which revoked their original distorted decision to deny Israeli kidney donors their rightful recognition.”