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Jerusalem Post conference is latest Israeli event in New York to be disrupted by protests

(JTA) — Leading up to its New York City conference, the Jerusalem Post tried to avoid the anti-government protests that had bedeviled other recent gatherings where Israeli government officials had spoken.

And until 3 p.m., it appeared the Israeli newspaper’s efforts had succeeded.

Protest organizers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the conference had canceled 20 to 30 tickets that protesters had bought. A demonstration outside the conference, which took place in Manhattan on Monday, had dissipated by mid-morning.

At one point, four security guards on the sidewalk manhandled a protester who tried and failed to enter the atrium. But inside, for most of the day, all passed quietly. Israeli right-wing government ministers who had been heckled at other events appeared onstage without interruption. The biggest distraction in the room was a constant hum of chatter among the attendees.

But in the mid-afternoon, as Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat took the stage to discuss government action to encourage entrepreneurship, the familiar Hebrew chants of “Shame! Shame!” echoed in the room, disrupting his remarks, and a group of protesters were escorted out.

Israeli Immigration and Absorption Minister Ofir Sofer (left) and Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli (center) appear onstage at the Jerusalem Post Conference in New York City on June 5, 2023. (Marc Israel Sellem)

“What violence, what did we do?” said Shany Granot-Lubaton, a local protest organizer who was barred from entering. “Barkat can’t take it that we’re heckling him? We can heckle him. Keep talking, we’re all adults. We’re allowed to express our opinion.”

The ejection was a kind of coda to a week in which protesters in New York and elsewhere, many of them Israeli expatriates like Granot-Lubaton, have tried to meet and disrupt Israeli cabinet ministers wherever they were — at meetings with Jewish organizations, speaking in synagogues, at a parade on Sunday or walking on the public sidewalks. Videos of the disruptions circulated online. The ministers who were the targets of the protests decried being hounded, and the demonstrators said they were exercising their right to free speech.

In one instance in Los Angeles, in the face of the protesters, an Israeli cabinet member canceled a speech. On Friday night, a leading architect of the Israeli government’s effort to weaken the judiciary grabbed a protester’s megaphone in New York City and rushed away before handing it back.

On Sunday, Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of Diaspora affairs, was photographed making what looked like an obscene gesture while grinning at protesters at the Celebrate Israel Parade. He and a spokesperson insisted that he was telling the protesters to smile, but that only one finger was raised toward his mouth because he was clutching an Israeli flag with the others.

.@AmichaiChikli to the pro-democracy protesters across the barriers pic.twitter.com/g69jsXOf58

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) June 4, 2023

Speaking onstage on Monday, Chikli seemed to allude to the incident. “Amazing experience, good music, good vibes, and we made sure everyone smiled,” Chikli said about the parade.

The conference organized by the Jerusalem Post was intended to provide a substantive forum to discuss contemporary Israel as a complement to the celebratory parade. The Jerusalem Post, which is a syndication client of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s wire service, did not respond to requests for comment about its handling of protesters.

Throughout the conference, the government’s judicial overhaul — which, if passed in its current form, would sap the Israeli Supreme Court of much of its power — was referenced throughout the conference but did not dominate the agenda. Speakers included Chikli, Barkat and a few other Israeli cabinet ministers; New York City Mayor Eric Adams; two senators: James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, and Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat; officials from the Biden administration; and an assortment of other public figures in Israeli politics, business and the nonprofit sector.

“Israel is an independent country, they make their own decisions,” Cardin, who recently announced his impending retirement, said in an interview on the conference sidelines. “There are policies that the current government are espousing that I think are wrong, and I’ll express myself, but it doesn’t at all affect my deep support for the special ties between our two countries and the continued U.S. support for Israel.”

But while the gathering didn’t center on the strife currently tearing apart Israeli society, speakers throughout the day stressed the need for pan-Israeli solidarity, at times coupled with criticism of the government. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister who served a prison sentence for corruption, gave a fiery interview in which he said, to cheers, “If we do not understand that these ministers do not speak for the people of Israel and for the Jewish people, we will pay dearly.”

Benny Gantz, the centrist former defense minister and opposition politician, said that when it comes to Israel countering a military threat from Iran, “Should a time come when action is needed, this government will receive full support from the opposition in any determined, appropriate, and responsible action.”

But he added, regarding Israel’s domestic politics, “We need to shift power from the extremes to the center, and treat minorities decently.”

Israeli government officials focused their remarks on other topics. Chikli both praised and criticized the Biden administration’s recent plan to combat antisemitism, expressing gratitude that it referred to a definition of antisemitism whose provisions mostly focus on Israel, but lamenting that it referred to another definition as well.

“I think it is positive that there is a plan to combat antisemitism,” he said. “It is important that they say the most important and central definition. But it is bad that they opened the door for irrelevant definitions.”

And Chikli and Ofir Sofer, the minister of immigration and absorption, both suggested that the government should discuss amending the Law of Return, which affords automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew or descendant of at least one Jewish grandparent.

“I don’t think it’s going to change in the near future,” Sofer said, adding that he would set up a committee to discuss the issue. “But I am going to deal with this issue. I will lead the dialogue between the Jewish community and the Israeli government and Israeli society.”

But standing outside after they were kicked out, the handful of protesters who were in the conference said their goal was to prevent the government officials from conducting business as usual.

The goal, said Matti Shalev, a protester, is “to make Nir Barkat aware that anywhere in the world he is going, we’re going to remind him that this will not come to pass.”


The post Jerusalem Post conference is latest Israeli event in New York to be disrupted by protests appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020

Muslims grew fastest; Christians lagged behind global population increase
• Christians are the world’s largest religious group, at 28.8% of the global population. They are a majority everywhere except the Asia-Pacific and Middle East-North Africa regions. Sub-Saharan Africa has surpassed Europe in having the largest number of Christians. But Christians are shrinking as a share of the global population, as millions of Christians “switch” out of religion to become religiously unaffiliated. 



• Muslims are the world’s second-largest religious group (25.6% of the world’s population) and the fastest-growing major religion, largely due to Muslims’ relatively young age structure and high fertility rate. They make up the vast majority of the population in the Middle East-North Africa region. In all other regions, Muslims are a religious minority, including in the Asia-Pacific region (which is home to the greatest number of Muslims).



• The religiously unaffiliated population is the world’s third-largest religious category (24.2% of the global population), after Christians and Muslims. Between 2010 and 2020, religiously unaffiliated people grew more than any group except Muslims, despite their demographic disadvantages of an older age structure and relatively low fertility. The unaffiliated made up a majority of the population in 10 countries and territories in 2020, up from seven a decade earlier. 

• Hindus are the fourth-largest religious category (14.9% of the world’s population), after Christians, Muslims and religiously unaffiliated people. Most (99%) live in the Asia-Pacific region; 95% of all Hindus live in India alone. Between 2010 and 2020, Hindus remained a stable share of the world’s population because their fertility resembles the global average, and surveys indicate that switching out of or into Hinduism is rare.   

• Buddhists (4.1% of the world’s population) are the only group in this report whose number declined worldwide between 2010 and 2020. This was due both to religious disaffiliation among Buddhists in East Asia and to a relatively low birth rate among Buddhists, who tend to live in countries with older populations. Most of the world’s Buddhists (98%) reside in the Asia-Pacific region, the birthplace of Buddhism.  

• Jews, the smallest religious group analyzed separately in this report (0.2% of the world’s population), lagged behind global population growth between 2010 and 2020 – despite having fertility rates on par with the global average – due to their older age structure. Most Jews live either in North America (primarily in the United States) or in the Middle East-North Africa region (almost exclusively in Israel).  

These are among the key findings of a Pew Research Center analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys, including census data releases that were delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. This report is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes global religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Funding for the Global Religious Futures project comes from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation. 

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Antisemitism in some unlikely places in America

By HENRY SREBRNIK Antisemitism flourishes in a place where few might expect to confront it – medical schools and among doctors. It affects Jews, I think, more emotionally than Judeophobia in other fields. 

Medicine has long been a Jewish profession with a history going back centuries. We all know the jokes about “my son – now also my daughter – the doctor.”  Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath to heal the sick, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. When we are ill doctors often become the people who save us from debilitating illness and even death. So this is all the more shocking.

Yes, in earlier periods there were medical schools with quotas and hospitals who refused or limited the number of Jews they allowed to be affiliated with them. It’s why we built Jewish hospitals and practices. And of course, we all shudder at the history of Nazi doctors and euthanasia in Germany and in the concentration camps of Europe. But all this – so we thought – was a thing of a dark past. Yet now it has made a comeback, along with many other horrors we assume might never reappear.

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, there has been a resurgence of antisemitism, also noticeable in the world of healthcare. This is not just a Canadian issue. Two articles on the Jewish website Tablet, published Nov. 21, 2023, and May 18, 2025, spoke to this problem in American medicine as well, referencing a study by Ian Kingsbury and Jay P. Greene of Do No Harma health care advocacy group, based on data amassed by the organization Stop Antisemitism. They identified a wave of open Jew-hatred by medical professionals, medical schools, and professional associations, often driven by foreign-trained doctors importing the Jew-hatred of their native countries, suggesting “that a field entrusted with healing is becoming a licensed purveyor of hatred.”

Activists from Doctors Against Genocide, American Palestinian Women’s Association, and CODEPINK held a demonstration calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., Nov. 16, 2023, almost as soon as the war began. A doctor in Tampa took to social media to post a Palestinian flag with the caption “about time!!!” The medical director of a cancer centre in Dearborn, Michigan, posted on social media: “What a beautiful morning. What a beautiful day.” Even in New York, a physician commented on Instagram that “Zionist settlers” got “a taste of their own medicine.” A Boston-based dentist was filmed ripping down posters of Israeli victims and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine did the same. Almost three-quarters of American medical associations felt the need to speak out on the war in Ukraine but almost three-quarters had nothing to say about the war in Israel. 

Antisemitism in academic medical centres is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish healthcare professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, according to a study by the Data & Analytics Department of StandWithUs, an international, non-partisan education organization that supports Israel and fights antisemitism. 

“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics, and study co-author, Alexandra Fishman, said on May 5 in a press release. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”

The study, “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” included survey data showing that 62.8 per cent of Jewish healthcare professionals employed by campus-based medical centres reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.

“When administrators and colleagues understand what antisemitism looks like, it clearly correlates with less antisemitism in the workplace,” co-author and Yeshiva University professor Dr. Charles Auerbach reported. “Recognition is a powerful tool — institutions that foster awareness create safer, more inclusive environments for everyone.”

Last December, the Data & Analytics Department also published a study which found that nearly 40 per cent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. The study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left more than one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 per cent, “feeling unsafe or threatened.”

The official journal of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine concurs. According to “The Moral Imperative of Countering Antisemitism in US Medicine – A Way Forward,” by Hedy S. Wald and Steven Roth, published in the October 2024 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, increased antisemitism in the United States has created a hostile learning and practice environment in medical settings. This includes instances of antisemitic behaviour and the use of antisemitic symbols at medical school commencements. 

Examples of its impact upon medicine include medical students’ social media postings claiming that Jews wield disproportionate power, antisemitic slogans at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, antisemitic graffiti at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Cancer Centre, Jewish medical students’ exposure to demonization of Israel diatribes and rationalizing terrorism; and faculty, including a professor of medicine at UCSF, posting antisemitic tropes and derogatory comments about Jewish health care professionals. Jewish medical students’ fears of retribution, should they speak out, have been reported. “Our recent unpublished survey of Jewish physicians and trainees demonstrated a twofold increase from 40% to 88% for those who experienced antisemitism prior to vs after October 7,” they stated.

In some schools, Jewish faculty are speaking out. In February, the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group at UCLA accused the institution in an open letter of “ignoring” antisemitism at the School of Medicine, charging that its indifference to the matter “continues to encourage more antisemitism.” It added that discrimination at the medical school has caused demonstrable harm to Jewish students and faculty. Student clubs, it said, are denied recognition for arbitrary reasons; Jewish faculty whose ethnic backgrounds were previously unknown are purged from the payrolls upon being identified as Jews; and anyone who refuses to participate in anti-Zionist events is “intimidated” and pressured.

Given these findings, many American physicians are worried not only as Jewish doctors and professionals, but for Jewish patients who are more than ever concerned with whom they’re meeting. Can we really conceive of a future where you’re not sure if “the doctor will hate you now?”

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

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The 2025 Toronto Walk (and talk ) for Israel

By GERRY POSNER There are walks and then there are walks. The Toronto UJA Walk for Israel on May 25, 2025 was one of a kind, at least as far as Canada and Jews are concerned. The number of people present was estimated to be 56,000 people or 112,000 total shoes. (How they get to that number is bewildering to me, since there is no one counting). This was 6,000 more than last year. Whether it is true or not, take it from me, it was packed. The synagogues in Canada should be so fortunate to get those numbers in total on High Holidays. The picture here gives you a sense of the size of the crowd.

Gerry with granddaughter Samantha Pyzer

This was my first walk in Toronto for Israel and I was with my granddaughter, Samantha Pyzer (not to forget her two friends whom she managed to meet at the site, no small feat, even with iPhones as aids). The official proceedings began at 9:00 a.m. and the walk at 10:00 a.m. There was entertainment to begin with, also along the way, and at the finish as well. The finish line this year was the Prosserman Centre or the JCC as it often called. The walk itself was perhaps 4 kilometres – not very long, but the walking was slow, especially at the beginning. There were lots of strollers, even baby carriages, though I did not see any wheelchairs. All ages participated on this walk. I figured, based on what I could see on the faces of people all around me that, although I was not the oldest one on the walk, I bet I made the top 100 – more likely the top 20.

What was a highlight for me was the number of Winnipeggers I met, both past and present. Connecting with them seemed to be much like a fluke. No doubt, I missed la lot of them, but I saw, in no particular order (I could not recall the order if my life depended on it): Alta Sigesmund, (who was, a long time ago, my daughter Amira’s teacher), Marni Samphir, Karla Berbrayer and her husband Dr. Allan Kraut and family. Then, when Samantha and I made it to the end and sat down to eat, I struck up a conversation with a woman unknown to me and as we chatted, she confirmed her former Winnipeg status as a sister-in- law to David Devere, as in Betty Shwemer, the sister of Cecile Devere. I also chanced upon Terri Cherniack, only because I paused for a moment and she spotted me. As we closed in near the finish, I met ( hey were on their way back), Earl and Suzanne Golden and son Matthew, as well as Daniel Glazerman. That stop caused me to lose my granddaughter and her pals. Try finding them amid the noise and size of the crowd – but I pulled it off.

Gerry with Chabadnik putting on tefillin

As I was in line to get food, I started chatting with a guy in the vicinity of my age. I dropped the Winnipeg link and the floodgates opened with “ Did I know Jack and Joanie Rusen?” So that was an interesting few minutes. And I was not too terribly surprised to come across some of my Pickleball family. All of these meetings, along with spotting some of my sister’s family and other cousins, were carried on with the sound of the shofar as we moved along the way. In short, this was a happening. Merchants selling a variety of products, many of them Israeli based, were in evidence and, of course, the day could not have ended without the laying of tefillin, aided by Chabad, who have perfected the procedure to take less than a minute. See the photo. Chabad had a willing audience.

Aside from the joy of sharing this experience with my granddaughter, the very presence of all these Jews gathered together for a common reason made this day very special to me. However, there was a downside to the day. The downside was that, as we began to walk back to our car there was no other way I could figure out how to return when the rains came and came. While we walked faster, we were impeded by pouring rain and puddles. But Samantha wanted to persevere, as did I. We made it, but were drenched. My runners are still drying out as I write this two days later.

What with being surrounded by 56,000 people, the noise, the slow walking, and the rain, I can still say the day was a real highlight for me – one of the better moments since our arrival in Toronto in 2012. As well as the photos we took along the way, I have the reminder of the day, courtesy of the UJA, as evidenced from the photo. It was not just the walk, but the talk that accompanied the walk that made it so worthwhile for me. I would do it again, minus the rain.

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