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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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In 92NY talk, Bret Stephens urges ‘dismantling’ ADL and investing more in Jewish identity
(JTA) — In a speech that described antisemites as an “axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incurably stupid,” Bret Stephens asserted that supporters of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish defense groups should largely abandon their current strategy for combating antisemitism and instead redirect their resources toward strengthening Jewish life itself.
Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist and founder of the Jewish thought journal Sapir, said antisemitism is largely impervious to appeals to tolerance, reminders of Jewish and Israeli accomplishments, or mandatory Holocaust education.
Instead, he called for large-scale investment in Jewish day schools, cultural institutions, philanthropy, media, publishing and religious leadership, arguing that the infrastructure already exists but lacks sufficient scale and coordination.
“What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort,” Stephens said, delivering the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Sunday. “We should spend the money and focus our energy elsewhere.”
In an on-stage conversation after the talk, Stephens told Rabbi David Ingber, the Y’s senior director for Jewish life, that if it were up to him, he would “dismantle” the ADL, the leading Jewish group fighting antisemitism.
“That’s not how Jewish money should be spent,” Stephens told Ingber, acknowledging that the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, was in the audience. “That’s not helping raise a generation of young Jews who are conscious of their Jewishness as something other than the fact that they saw ‘Schindler’s List’ and they visited the Holocaust Museum. That cannot be the locus of Jewish identity. If we’re going to survive, victimization cannot be at the heart of our identity.”
Reached the next day, Greenblatt said he considered Stephens a friend and described his thoughts on Jewish identity as “powerful and provocative,” but found Stephens’ critique of efforts to combat antisemitism “misguided.”
Greenblatt said the ADL’s functions include collecting data on hate crimes, training synagogues and other Jewish institutions in security and a Center on Extremism that gathers intelligence that has been used to “intercept and prevent plots from unfolding that literally could take the lives of people in our community.”
Greenblatt said he agreed on the value of investing in Jewish education and centering identity. “I profoundly agree that the best defense against antisemitism is a good offense, and yet you cannot deny the necessity of defense, that you will not have a strong Jewish community if you don’t have a safe Jewish community,” he told JTA. “You cannot have what Bret called a thriving Jewish people if they’re constantly under threat. So I just don’t agree that it’s a binary choice.”
Stephens’ remarks about the ADL come at a time when the organization has been under fire from the left and right. While many on the left object to its Israel advocacy and accuse it of cozying up to the Trump administration, right-wing critiques have included accusations that it has supported “woke” policies and that its advocacy has been ineffective in countering antisemitism on the far left and far right.
Asked about these critiques, Greenblatt said that the ADL, as one of the oldest anti-hate organizations in the country, has become a convenient target for partisans, inside and outside the Jewish community, who are frustrated by the persistence of bigotry and eager to discredit their ideological opposites. “I think this blame game is bad for America, and I think it’s lethal for our Jewish community,” he said.
The State of World Jewry speech has been a tradition at the influential New York cultural center since 1980, and has been given by, among others, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.
For the third year in a row it has been delivered by a prominent center-right pundit. Like Stephens, author and podcaster Dan Senor (2025) and journalist Bari Weiss (2024) suggested that the strongest response to a community reeling from antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks is for Jews to turn inward and invest in their own institutions rather than seeking inclusion or protection within broader coalitions.
Elsewhere, writers on the Jewish left, including Eric Alterman in the Forward and The New Republic and Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, have focused on what they see as a gap between a conservative Jewish establishment and a liberal Jewish majority troubled by the extent of the war in Gaza. While condemning the Hamas attacks and antisemitism on the left and right, they argue that anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism, and Jewish groups should prioritize liberal, democratic values over unconditional defense of Israel.
“I don’t think that we made an ideological choice,” Ingber told JTA, when asked about the recent lineup of speakers. “It’s where the center of gravity is at this moment. Voices like [Stephens’ and] Bari’s and Dan’s are seriously engaging with the complexity of this situation, and in some ways mirror a little bit of what’s happening more broadly in Israel” and beyond.
“I don’t think it means that we endorse their worldview, but it means that the Jewish community is benefitting from their platform,” he continued.
Stephens, who told Ingber that he was a “gadfly” on the typically liberal opinion pages of the New York Times, laid out four arguments in his talk: that the fight against antisemitism is largely ineffective; that antisemitism functions as a perverse compliment rooted in resentment; that Jews should stop trying to disprove hatred through achievement or moral suasion; and that Jewish survival depends on building independent institutions rather than seeking acceptance from broader society.
Stephens questioned whether decades of investment in education, advocacy and monitoring — the core strategies of organizations such as the ADL and campus advocacy groups — have produced measurable results, even as antisemitic beliefs and incidents have increased.
“Does anyone think the fight against antisemitism is working?” he asked.
As evidence, Stephens pointed to polling data showing that “one in five millennials and Gen Zs believe the Jews caused the Holocaust,” as well as the persistence of antisemitic rhetoric in media, politics and academia during a period when Jewish institutions are, he said, more engaged and better funded than ever.
In this, Stephens joined a number of observers who have been questioning the cost and effectiveness of efforts to combat antisemitism, which have surged in recent years.
“The mistake we make is this: We think that antisemitism stems fundamentally from missing or inaccurate information. We think that if people only had greater knowledge of the history of Jewish persecution, a fuller grasp of the facts of the Israeli-Arab conflict, a finer understanding of all the ways antisemitism manifests itself, a deeper appreciation of the Jewish contribution to America’s success and to human flourishing worldwide, that the hatred of us might dissipate or never start in the first place,” he said. “That thesis is wrong.”
Stephens framed antisemitism as a response to Jewish distinctiveness, which acts as a counterculture in authoritarian or conformist societies, and resentment, especially when Jewish communities flourish.
“They do not hate us because of our faults and failures,” Stephens said. “They hate us because of our virtues and successes.”
Stephens criticized what he described as a persistent Jewish impulse to seek validation through their contributions to the wider society — citing Jewish participation in progressive movements and Israeli peace initiatives as examples that failed to reduce hostility.
“Constantly seeking to prove ourselves worthy in order to win the world’s love is a fool’s errand,” he said.
That argument led to Stephens’ fourth and final point: that Jews should invest in building and expanding their own institutions rather than seeking inclusion or protection within broader coalitions.
Quoting composer Philip Glass, Stephens said, “If there’s no room at the table, build your own table.”
“We have superb Jewish day schools, but we need many more of them,” he said. “We have astounding and vibrant cultural institutions… We have extraordinary Jewish philanthropies, but they need to become a primary locus of Jewish giving.”
Just as Senor did in his 2025 talk at the Y, Stephens framed the current moment — marked by rising antisemitism and social alienation — as an opportunity for Jewish renewal and not merely a period of crisis. Referring to “Oct. 8 Jews,” a term he popularized after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Stephens said he had come to rethink his own definition of traumatized Jews in more positive terms.
“What I should have said was that the ‘Oct. 8 Jew’ was the one who woke up trying to remember who he or she truly is,” he said.
Stephens’ conversation with Ingber was twice interrupted by hecklers, who were promptly escorted out by security. Before the talk, a group of demonstrators outside the venue waved Palestinian flags and chanted, “Free, free Palestine.” Ingber said demonstrators taunted him and others who attended the talk as they exited the building.
The post In 92NY talk, Bret Stephens urges ‘dismantling’ ADL and investing more in Jewish identity appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Primary School in Paris Vandalized Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks
Nearly 200,000 people took to the streets of Paris to protest rising antisemitism. Photo: Reuters/Claire Serie
A Jewish primary school in eastern Paris was vandalized over the weekend, with windows smashed and security equipment damaged, prompting a criminal investigation and renewed outrage among local Jewish leaders as targeted antisemitic attacks continue to escalate.
On Sunday night, a group of unknown individuals attacked the Beth Loubavitch–Beth Hannah primary school in Paris’s 20th arrondissement (district/borough), located on Passage des Saint-Simoniens, French media reported.
According to local authorities, the perpetrators did not enter the school building, but they did manage to smash windows, damage security equipment, and deface the school’s plaque and Jewish symbols.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office has now opened an investigation into the outrage, treating it as “aggravated damage” committed by a group with religious motives.
Éric Pliez, mayor of Paris’s 20th arrondissement, strongly condemned this latest antisemitic attack, promising swift action to ensure the safety of the local Jewish community.
“These acts are unacceptable and run counter to our values,” Pliez said in a statement. “The safety of our students is our highest priority. Alongside the municipal team, I reaffirm my unwavering opposition to all forms of antisemitism.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo also denounced the incident, reaffirming her full solidarity with the local Jewish community.
“I reiterate that these acts of antisemitic hatred, which I condemn with the utmost firmness, have no place in our city or in our Republic,” Hidalgo said in a statement.
Meanwhile, southeast of Paris, French authorities in Lyon are preparing for the trial of a 55-year-old man accused of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022, with the court set to determine whether antisemitism was a motivating factor.
Starting Monday, defendant Rachid Kheniche is facing trial after being charged with aggravated murder on religious grounds, even as he denies an antisemitic motive.
In May 2022, Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.
According to the police investigation, Kheniche and his neighbor were having a discussion when the conflict escalated.
At the time, he told investigators that he had tried to strangle Hadjadj but did not realize what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.
However, after two psychiatric evaluations, Kheniche was deemed criminally responsible.
Ten days after the murder, the Lyon prosecutor’s office launched a broader investigation to determine whether the act had an antisemitic motive.
With this new trial, only the alleged antisemitic motive is being contested, while the murder itself has already been established.
The National Bureau of Vigilance against Antisemitism and the Jewish Observatory of France have filed a civil suit, with the International League Against Racism and the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France also participating in the case.
“The anti-Jewish nature of the act is fully established, both materially and morally,” Franck Serfati, legal counsel for the groups involved in the suit, said in a statement.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, France has seen a 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 the French Interior Ministry, the first six months of 2025 saw more than 640 antisemitic incidents, a 27.5 percent decline from the same period in 2024, but a 112.5 percent increase compared to the first half of 2023, before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
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Top US Lawmaker Accuses Illinois Mayor of Not Protecting Jewish Students at Northwestern From Pro-Hamas Encampment
US Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol, Washington, DC, Nov. 4, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
The chairman of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce is demanding answers from the mayor of Evanston, Illinois, accusing him of failing to protect Jewish students during a pro-Hamas, anti-Israel encampment at Northwestern University that, lawmakers say. devolved into widespread antisemitic harassment and violence.
In a sharply worded letter dated Jan. 28, US Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said Daniel Biss, a Democrat, refused to authorize Evanston police to assist when Northwestern requested help clearing the encampment in April 2024, despite reports of assaults, intimidation, and explicitly antisemitic incidents. Walberg wrote that the decision left the university unable to enforce the law safely, citing committee documents indicating Northwestern lacked sufficient police resources to carry out arrests without city support.
According to the letter, Jewish students reported being spat on, verbally harassed, and told to “go back to Germany” and “get gassed,” while others said they were called “dirty Jew” and “Zionist pig” as they attempted to move across campus. One student wearing a kippah reported being targeted, while another described being assaulted as an encampment member recorded the incident.
Walberg described the environment as a “hotbed of antisemitic harassment and hostility,” rejecting public characterizations of the encampment as peaceful.
Northwestern’s campus, located in Evanston, became a hub of anti-Israel activism following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. The school was ravaged by a series of antisemitic incidents tied to campus protests. Most notably, pro-Hamas activists illegally occupied the Deering Meadow section of campus in May 2024, demanding the university boycott all Israeli entities.
During the tense standoff in the spring 2024, Jewish students reported being physically assaulted and harassed while attempting to navigate campus, including incidents in which students wearing visible Jewish symbols such as a kippah were targeted.
Amid the post-Oct. 7 campus protests, the Education and Workforce Committee has been investigating several schools for what lawmakers described as insufficient responses to a surge in antisemitism. Last week, Walberg released documents along with his letter showing what he described as Biss’s failure to protect Northwestern’s Jewish students during the encampment.
Biss called Walberg’s letter a “dishonest political attack” during a news conference at City Hall on Thursday morning.
“But we are here today because that attack is an effort to go at the right to peacefully protest. This is an effort to use the very real danger of antisemitism to advance a political agenda,” Biss said. “I will say that personally, as a Jewish person, as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, I find it deeply, deeply offensive.”
Biss also defended his decision not to intervene in the campus unrest.
“After meticulously assessing the situation through the lens of public safety and the right to peaceful protest, we came to that conclusion,” Biss said. “We believed at the time it was the right decision. I believe today it was the right decision.”
The mayor added that the police department warned at the time that sending city officers to the encampment “might further inflame the situation.”
In May 2024, university president Michael Schill testified in front of the US Congress amid mounting skepticism over efforts to clamp down on campus antisemitism. His administration ultimately ended the encampment by reaching what became known as the “Deering Meadow Agreement” with the pro-Hamas protesters. Terms of the deal included establishing a scholarship for Palestinian undergraduates, contacting potential employers of students who caused recent campus disruptions to insist on their being hired, creating a segregated dormitory hall to be occupied exclusively by students of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim descent, and forming a new advisory committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty may wield an outsized voice.
Biss touted the deal during his press conference last week, noting it ended the encampment peacefully.
However, the agreement was abolished in November 2025 as part of a deal that the university reached with the Trump administration, which months earlier in April had impounded at least $790 in frozen federal funds over accusations of antisemitism and other discriminatory behavior. Northwestern agrred to pay $75 million and implement measures to protect students from antisemitism in exchange for a resumption of federal funding.
However, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an organization that has been scrutinized by US authorities over Hamas — filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Northwestern Graduate Workers for Palestine (GW4P) group to cancel Northwestern’s new antisemitism prevention course, which was implemented as part of the deal. The lawsuit was dropped last month.
In last week’s letter, Walberg alleged that political considerations influenced Biss’s decision not to intervene with police force. Walberg cited testimony from a Northwestern trustee who claimed Biss publicly framed his refusal to provide police support as a way to bolster his progressive credentials, even as the university struggled to maintain order. Internal communications referenced in the letter suggest Northwestern officials feared the city’s position left Jewish students vulnerable during a period of escalating campus unrest nationwide.
Walberg also criticized Biss for recently condemning the federal government’s agreement with Northwestern to restore funding, calling the mayor’s opposition inconsistent with his stated concern about discrimination.
The committee is requesting a formal briefing from Biss on law enforcement coordination and antisemitism in Evanston-area campuses, signaling potential legislative action. Walberg emphasized that Congress has broad constitutional authority to oversee education-related civil rights enforcement, including Title VI protections against religious and ethnic discrimination.
Biss has sought to bolster his reputation with the left flank of the Democratic Party as he runs for Congress himself in Illinois’ 9th District. The mayor has vowed to no longer accept funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, and has adopted a platform critical of the Jewish state.
In a campaign news release on Thursday, Biss wrote that Walberg’s letter was a “baseless attack fueled by” AIPAC.
“It’s no coincidence that Rep. Walberg’s letter arrived just eight days before the beginning of early voting in the March primary election,” Biss wrote. “They’re playing cheap political games in service to AIPAC’s right-wing agenda. It is shameful.”
AIPAC’s mission is to foster bipartisan support in Congress for the US-Israel alliance.
Spectators suggest that Biss, who is facing a bruising primary battle with 26-year-old anti-Israel social media personality Kat Abughazaleh, has sought to curry favor with local progressive activists by pushing a harder line against the Jewish state.