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LGBTQ Israelis fear setbacks as homophobic parties win a place in Netanyahu’s coalition
TEL AVIV and JERUSALEM (JTA) — It was the day before Israel’s Nov. 1 election. In a classroom in downtown Jerusalem, Avi Rose was teaching about Jewish identity through art to a group of Jewish students from abroad spending a gap year in Israel. Suddenly, movement outside caught his eye.
Rose stopped his lecture and approached the second-story window. He was unprepared for what he saw. Dozens of religious Jewish youth from the homophobic Noam party were marching down Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street, chanting and carrying large anti-LGBTQ signs.
The sight was distressing for Rose, a gay Israeli artist who emigrated from Canada 20 years ago. In 2007, he and his husband, Ben, became the first Israeli citizens to have their same-sex marriage certificate from abroad recognized in Israel.
“I’m teaching this wonderful group of young people that have come from all over the world to have their moment in Israel, to finally be free in their Jewish homeland, to be in this democratic Jewish safe space. And they have to see their own teacher going, ‘Oh my God. There are these people out there who their sole purpose is to hate me.’ And it was a dissonance,” recalled Rose, who lives in Jerusalem with his husband and their 10-year-old twins.
“I mean, what the hell am I doing here if that’s the way we are as a Jewish people?” he continued. “And I was scared. I won’t lie to you. I was scared…. I had flashbacks about what my grandparents went through in Europe. And I had to remind myself we aren’t quite there yet. I’m not at the point [where I am going to] pack my bags and protect my children and get out of here.”
By the end of the next day, 14 members of the union of three far-right parties — Noam, Otzma Yehudit (or Jewish Power) and National Union — became the third-largest slate in the Knesset and the second largest in the governing coalition that Benjamin Netanyahu is now assembling. Netanyahu’s other coalition partners are two haredi Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. It will be the most right-wing conservative, religious government in Israel’s history, and its leaders are already vowing to roll back rights that LGBTQ Israelis have only recently won.
Israel does not permit same-sex marriage. But its Supreme Court has strengthened protections for Israelis who enter same-sex marriages abroad, requiring that the marriages be recognized by the state and ensuring that same-sex couples be permitted to adopt children and pursue surrogacy. Now, a Shas lawmaker could be appointed to head the ministry in charge of granting marriage licenses, and a self-proclaimed “proud homophobe” is poised for a leadership position as well.
“I don’t think they’ll criminalize my marriage or take my children away,” said Rose. “But there is a general sense of fear seizing the LGBTQ community.”
Noam, the smallest of three factions making up the joint Religious Zionism list, has focused on advancing policies that prevent the creation of non-traditional families, such as same-gender parents or children created through surrogacy, which it calls “the destruction of the family.” The party’s election slogan was a call to make Israel “a normal” nation.
A man sits outside Shpagat, a gay bar in Tel Aviv, in November 2022. (Orly Halpern)
In a 2019 tweet, the party outlined its vision for what “normal” means. “A father and a father is not normal,” the list began. It ended by alluding to the party’s opposition to Pride flags: “Asking to remove a flag that represents all this madness — that’s actually quite normal.”
One afternoon last week, two male cooks wearing tight black T-shirts exposing prodigious biceps were preparing for opening hour at Shpagat, Tel Aviv’s first gay bar. “Ohad,” who asked not to use his real name out of fear of being harmed, told JTA that there was great concern among his peers about how the new government would shift budgets, change laws and policies and deny LGBTQ Israelis their rights.
“I’m concerned that we will lose all the rights we gained with the recent government and over the last few years,” said Ohad. The outgoing government, a centrist interlude after more than a decade of right-wing leadership, was the most progressive in Israel’s history in terms of the gay community. “We’re talking about the most basic things, like being allowed to donate blood, being allowed to parent children through surrogacy, cancelling the prohibition of LGBTQ+ ‘conversion therapy.’ It’s both to cancel things and to go backwards.”
Yair Lapid speaks at the Tel Aviv Pride Parade on June 10, 2022, weeks before becoming Israeli prime minister. His government was Israel’s most progressive on LGBTQ issues.(Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Indeed, one of the memes that worried Israelis have shared widely since election results came out reads, “Don’t forget that tonight, we are moving the clock back 2,000 years.”
Another issue is the distribution of government funding. Israel’s Ministry for Social Equality, for example, allocated 90 million shekels ($26.7 million) this year to benefit the LGBTQ community, which included funding for LGBTQ centers in some 70 cities. The education ministry and local municipalities also provide budgets to the Israel Gay Youth organization, and for teaching in schools about LGBTQ inclusion. Avi Maoz, the head of the Noam party, said he wants to cancel “progressive study programs” about gender.
A spokesperson for the Noam party was unable to make Maoz available and declined to otherwise offer comment.
Transgender Israelis could face the most stark changes. About 40% of transgender people have attempted suicide at least once in their life, according to the health ministry, and more than half avoid receiving medical care. Last year, the outgoing government’s health minister, Nitzan Horowitz, who is gay, set new policies to make healthcare more accessible to the transgender community.
Now the fear is that these policies will be canceled, as will be subsidies for sex reassignment surgeries and drugs. “For all the boys and girls who are in the process of defining their gender identity physically and emotionally, it will make their treatments very expensive or unaffordable,” said Ohad. “That can jeopardize their lives.”
It’s clear that the right-wing party leaders are not sympathetic to the plight of LGBTQ Israelis. Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionist party, identifies himself as a “proud homophobe.” In August, his party protested the enrollment of a third-grader at a religious boys’ school who had transitioned from his gender assigned at birth.
“There is no place in the national religious school system for such confusion of opinions and views that seriously harm the values, natural health and identity of its students,” Smotrich wrote to the education ministry.
The right-wing parties have trained their sights on Israel’s Supreme Court, which has delivered crucial victories to LGBTQ advocates and other minorities. The parties say the court is out of step with Israeli values.
One of the first legislative measures the next government intends to pass is the High Court Bypass Law, which would allow a simple majority of the Knesset’s 120 lawmakers to override Supreme Court rulings on laws that the court struck down, thereby undermining the court’s ability to protect human and civil rights.
“It will leave us as a defenseless minority,” said Liad Ortar, the head of an environmental, social and corporate governance firm, who spoke to JTA from the Climate Change Conference in Egypt. Ortar and his husband have 8-year-old twins through a surrogate from Thailand.
Liad Ortar, right, is concerned that Israel’s incoming government could enact policies that hurt families like his where both parents are of the same sex. (Courtesy Ortar)
Many LGBTQ Israelis fear that lack of tolerance from government ministers could translate into incitement, harassment and physical attacks in the public sphere, and that the religious right-wing extremists who have directed violence towards Palestinians will now target them as well.
“In recent months there has been a very extreme escalation in what’s happening with the settlers and their violence, including the army, that doesn’t really provide protection,” said Ohad. “Not long ago there was an attack on a left-wing woman activist.… Those people are now going to become the ministers of education and culture. So aside from the Arabs and what the settlers do to them there, the next easy target is the gay community.”
In 2015, a religious Jewish man stabbed and killed Shira Banki, a 16-year-old girl marching with her family in Jerusalem’s gay pride parade — weeks after he completed a 10-year sentence for a similar attack in 2005. Now, members of the Religious Zionism slate have called to abolish gay pride parades.
“It’s not only that we are really afraid and worried about our own future. But it’s also our kids’ future. How will it look? And not just the kids of a gay couple, but gay children,” Ortar said. “We’re going to go back to the time where homosexuality can’t be shown publicly, whether at school or in the public sphere. Where they might beat the hell out of a gay couple because they walked hand in hand. Or cursing children in schools because their parents are gay.”
Not all LGBTQ Israelis are alarmed by the incoming government. Gilad Halahmi, a gay man who lives in Tel Aviv, has been active in promoting the Otzma Yehudit and has developed a personal rapport with its leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir. “The fact that he and Smotrich have an anti-LGBTQ agenda doesn’t mean they hate [us],” he said.
Halahmi said he believes his involvement has mitigated Religious Zionist stances on LGBTQ issues, and he also said Amir Ohana, a Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud party who is gay, had helped shift right-wing politicians’ views on those issues. But even without that, he said, the tradeoff to get the policies he wants on other issues is worth it.
“I give up LGBTQ rights, but I get something that is much more important to me in return, which is the economic issue, the security issue, the migration issue, governance,” Halahmi said. “It’s things that are 10 times more important to me than public transportation on Shabbat or whether I’ll get married in Israel or abroad.”
But for those who value religious pluralism and LGBTQ rights — and polls have shown that a majority of Israelis do — the current moment is alarming. On Sunday, Ben-Gvir vowed to revoke government recognition of non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism, in the latest sign that a far-right coalition would seek to create practical changes quickly.
For Rabbi Mikie Goldstein, the new government’s threatened assault on pluralism and LGBTQ rights offers a one-two punch that has him questioning whether he should continue living in Israel. Goldstein, an immigrant from England, was the first out gay pulpit rabbi in Israel when he took the reins of a congregation in Rehovot in 2014. Now, he leads the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly in Israel, working to support rabbis and their congregations who belong to the movement, known as Masorti in Israel.
“If I can’t do my work properly, if I’m not accepted — how much can you take?” Goldstein said. “I’m not prepared to give up yet [on Israel] but it’s certainly crossed my mind.”
LGBTQ activists say they won’t give up rights without a fight — and that they are prepared to mount one.
“We are very much united,” said Ortar. “We have a very strong civil infrastructure. The LGBTQ community is very well established in social and demographic groups. A lot of us are in the media, industry, high tech. After the statement about abolishing the parade, you could hear the drums beating. There will be demonstrations if that happens.”
In 2018, some 100,000 people demonstrated — outraged after then-prime minister Netanyahu voted against a bill to allow gay couples to use surrogacy.
Members of the LGBTQ community and supporters participate in a demonstration against a Knesset bill amendment denying surrogacy for same-sex couples, in Tel Aviv, July 22, 2018. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)
Last week, Netanyahu tried to assuage fears and ordered officials in his close circle to tell the press that his government would not allow any change to the status quo regarding LGBT rights. But he did not come out saying it himself.
“This is the time to be angry, not scared,” said Rose. “We can’t be complacent anymore. The privilege of complacency has come to an end. That has to be the message of this election. You have to fight for what you want.”
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He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’?
Heading into his audition for Marty Supreme, Isaac Simon was nervous. But not for the reasons you’d expect.
“I was taking a long lunch break from the museum,” he said, “and at the time I was three or four months into my job.”
Appearing in a Josh Safdie movie was something Simon, who runs internship programs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, had genuinely never dreamed of. He wasn’t an actor, or an aspiring one. He’d never taken an acting class or been in front of a camera.
But two years after he was scouted at a baseball card convention, Simon was invited to try out for the role of Roger, a cocksure amateur who gets hustled on the ping-pong table by Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser. Standing 6-foot-9 with ice-blue eyes, low eyebrows and flowing brown hair, Simon had the look, the paddle skills and, clearly, the temperament to land a pivotal part in an Oscar-bound — and richly Jewish — cinematic hit.
“I don’t get starstruck,” Simon, 31, said. “I get excited.”
The slew of non-actors who feature in Marty Supreme alongside A-listers like Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tyler, The Creator has already become part of the film’s lore. Safdie and veteran casting director Jennifer Venditti have a penchant for casting street regulars; among the first-timers in the movie are basketball legend George Gervin, viral TikTok and YouTube personas and the guy from Shark Tank.
But perhaps none had as personal a connection to the film’s story of post-war Jewish striving as Simon, a native New Yorker whose graduate study at Queens College focused on the development of Holocaust studies in the U.S. In Marty Supreme, which is loosely based on the story of real-life midcentury table tennis star Marty Reisman, one of the protagonist’s best friends is a Holocaust survivor; one of the film’s most arresting scenes is an Auschwitz flashback.
Simon’s day job is, of course, at the largest Holocaust museum in New York. The fateful coincidence of his casting, Simon said, was “like a bizarre lottery ticket I was able to cash in.”
A fateful encounter
The story of Simon’s star turn begins in the summer of 2022, when Venditti spotted him at a baseball card show in Long Island. Venditti was there with Safdie; Simon — then still in grad school — was there with his dad.
Venditti said they was there to cast extras and non-actors for a baseball-related movie, and asked if she could take a two-minute video of him talking about himself. He obliged, and in the recording told her where he was from (New York City) and what he was doing at the show (chasing the famously rare T206 tobacco card series).
“I thought to myself, ‘Wow, could I really have been at the right place and the right time for something I wasn’t even expecting?’” Simon recalled. Then two years passed, and the run-in faded from memory.
It was not until the summer of 2024 that he received an email from Venditti: “Isaac Simon audition opportunity – scouted at card show.” No script was provided and nothing about the project was disclosed — just a date and a location.
On his elevator up to the audition, he heard the hollow bouncing of a ping-pong ball. Having seen a headline about Chalamet being attached to a Reisman biopic a few days earlier, he realized what the next few minutes might entail.
“The first audition was a total blur,” Simon recalled. “I remember playing ping pong with the assistant casting director and he was like, ‘Oh you’re good!’” At a subsequent callback, he played out a few improv scenarios — some light trash talking, or being cheated in a game. A few weeks later, he got called in for costume fittings.
He hadn’t solicited any acting tips, or studied film prior to his audition. But his work at the museum, where he trains educators on how to teach the Holocaust in 90 minutes, had prepared him.
“Because teaching is a performance, there is sort of an inherent performative quality to the work I do,” Simon said. “And so I think that that lent itself well — or at the very least, it didn’t hurt — to the work I was being asked to do for Josh.”
‘Cast for a reason’
Having run through his lines with his dad and his girlfriend, Simon headed upstate that fall to play Roger — and play opposite Chalamet. (This time, he took two days off of work.)
Roger, the reigning hotshot at a humdrum bowling alley, features in two scenes. In the first, he’s goaded into wagering $40 against Marty, who’s feigning amateurism, and loses. He reappears a few minutes as Marty fills up at a nearby gas station, realizing he was hustled by the reigning American champion; he and his pals want their money back.
Walking into the converted Bowlero where they shot the first scene, Simon was floored by the set. “Each individual looked like they were from the 1950s, and yet their outfit was distinctly their own,” he recalled. Miyako Bellizzi, the costume designer, had fitted him in a striped button-up and faded blue work pants; Simon’s hair was slicked back and to the side.
He hadn’t met Safdie before he got to set, and his cues from the Uncut Gems co-director were limited.
Over the course of his scenes, there were times when he wasn’t sure he was doing what Safdie wanted. Here, it was his inexperience that Simon drew on. “I kept reminding myself that I was cast for a reason, and I was cast as a non-actor for a reason,” he said, “and what I’m bringing to this experience is inherently different than what a trained actor would be. Therefore, if I were a trained actor, I would not be what Josh was looking for in the scenario.”
He didn’t have too much time to banter with the film’s stars during the shoot; most of his time on set was spent with other bit-players. But when the camera was shooting other actors, Safdie wanted to keep the sound of live table tennis in the background, so he had Chalamet and Simon play each other off-camera.
As to who had the upper hand? “We’re probably about even,” Simon said.
Jewish mythmaking
Even after the shoot, Simon couldn’t quite believe it was real. He told almost no one outside his family, superstitious that the scene would get cut. But then the premiere arrived. “It was surreal,” he said.
He’s now seen the film nine times — yes, all the way through — indulging friends who want to see it with him. And his acting has won some praise, with one X post calling it an “incredible underrated performance” liked more than 2,000 times.
Simon likes the movie, if you couldn’t tell, echoing its director and star in calling it a love letter to New York. The film, Simon said, touches on Jewish identity in a way that reminds him of his own family and their experience in this country.
“The way in which it captured intergenerational relationships in Jewish homes in post-war America, in New York specifically, felt very autobiographical for the way that my relatives talked amongst each other,” he said. “There’s a love there that transcends.”
As a Holocaust educator, Simon felt the movie handled that theme appropriately. He found the honey scene — an Auschwitz flashback too intense to explain here — moving, and the Holocaust humor tactfully dispatched. He loved the yiddish.
Yet Simon still couldn’t wrap his head around his own involvement in such a fitting project. His work passing on the history and memory of the Holocaust to future generations was already meaningful before he got an IMDB page.
“So to be cast in a film and have a speaking line,” he said, “and it just so happens that that film is also this incredibly Jewish film — which has direct references in the scene at Auschwitz — is equally bizarre, but also really beautiful, and oddly perfect.”
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Trump’s new Gaza plan marks a radical break from Israeli policy — can it succeed?
The United States has in effect broken with Israeli policy, cleverly engineering the Palestinian Authority’s return to Gaza.
President Donald Trump’s plan for the second stage of the Gaza ceasefire, the launch of which was announced Wednesday, involves the creation of a transitional Palestinian technocratic authority with strong ties to the PA. This collapses fictions Israel has sustained for years: that Gaza can be stabilized without the PA, which was ousted from the territory by Hamas in 2007; that the PA is no better than Hamas; and even that Palestinian governance itself is illegitimate, a belief held by the most extreme Israeli nationalists.
Reality has finally prevailed, and that reality is that the PA, flawed though it is, remains the only Palestinian political body capable of replacing Hamas in Gaza.
The logic expressed by those, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who aim to keep the PA out of Gaza, has brought Israel to the brink. Splitting Palestinian governance between Hamas and the PA, long Netanyahu’s strategy, led to unmitigated disaster, and public anger is at a boil.
Which means that the PA must return to Gaza not only for the sake of Palestinians, but also for Israelis. The Zionist project must be steered away from permanent war, international isolation and internal decay. That means finding a way to work toward a sustainable future with the Palestinians — which almost certainly means, in turn, accepting the PA as their legitimate government.
Decades of misleading rhetoric
Since the establishment of a ceasefire, brokered by Trump’s administration, in September, Hamas has reasserted control over large parts of Gaza. Militarily weakened, it survived politically — because Israel still refused to empower any viable Palestinian alternative.
That return to the status quo in many ways serves Netanyahu’s agenda. Keeping Hamas in power allows for a state of permanent emergency and despair about the chances for peace — the very forces that Netanyahu has, for decades, successfully turned into political capital. “There is no difference between the PA and Hamas” became a mantra — as if a political bureaucracy and a theocratic militia that massacres civilians and rejects coexistence on principle could be legitimately compared.
Now, as long as Hamas rules Gaza, its very presence constitutes an emergency narrative that Netanyahu can use to delay the accountability over his responsibility for Oct. 7: Wartime is no time for politics.
The Palestinian Authority, by contrast, has been treated as dangerous because it represents a measure of pragmatism.
The PA, ineffective as it has been, could be the basis of a functional political framework that would force Israel to confront the need for separation from the Palestinians, real borders, and eventual Palestinian statehood. That’s especially true because there’s the potential for actual peace with a Palestine run by the PA, which already coordinates with Israel at enormous political cost in the West Bank, where its security forces arrest militants and dismantle extremist cells.
New governance for Gaza
The technocratic committee put forward to govern Gaza under Trump’s second phase plan is formally nonpartisan, but its personnel and legitimacy are largely drawn from the ranks of the PA, with Ali Shaath, a former PA deputy minister, set to lead the effort. Others come from the same institutional ecosystem, because there is simply no other reservoir of Palestinian administrative experience. The PA has publicly endorsed the framework. Israel must now also meet its own obligations under the Trump plan — no matter how distasteful its leaders might find the plan’s endorsement of the PA to be.
That means, chiefly, that Israel must declare clearly that once Gaza is stabilized by the technocratic committee, it is prepared to enter negotiations toward a Palestinian state, with final borders to be determined later. Israel can openly state its intention to retain major settlement blocs in the West Bank and seek long-term security arrangements in the Jordan Valley. But it should also affirm in principle its readiness to recognize a Palestinian state and guarantee access arrangements in Jerusalem.
These statements would not resolve the conflict, by any means. But they would go some way toward restoring credibility.
To get there, Hamas must surrender its weapons in Gaza, with an international stabilization force present to keep the peace. The best chance for disarmament is if the weapons are handed to Palestinians. By default, the PA security forces will be the best candidates for the job, as the new technocratic government lacks a security arm. Hamas’s senior leadership should probably be allowed to exit into exile.
To build a Palestinian consensus in this direction, regional powers — Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey — must make reconstruction conditional on disarmament. The choice must be unmistakable: real recovery without any trace of a Hamas militia – or years in tent cities.
If all this is achieved, the real work begins. Areas under the new authority must visibly improve. Adequate housing, electricity, water, education, employment, and free movement must return in ways Palestinians can measure. The comparison with Hamas rule must be obvious.
Reformations in the PA — and Israel
Such a process with the PA should also be made conditional.
As existing U.S. proposals suggest, the PA must be required to undertake concrete reforms, including by overhauling educational materials that appear to condone violence against Israelis and ending payments to the families of imprisoned militants.
Senior PA officials have already signaled willingness to move on both fronts. These are achievable changes,
The payoff would be immense, potentially including normalization with Saudi Arabia, broader reconciliation of Israel the Arab and Muslim worlds, the gradual erosion of the global delegitimization campaign against Israel, and renewed international cooperation — especially in confronting Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and regional militias. In time, Zionism would once again be seen as a serious national project capable of difficult, mature decisions.
The catch: Little of this is likely to happen under the current Israeli government.
That is the central truth of 2026, an election year: a change of leadership in Israel is not optional for anyone who wants a better future. The disaster of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack was the culmination of years of strategic failure, ideological paralysis, and the reckless empowerment of Hamas. This is what happens when complacent societies repeatedly elevate unfit leadership in the face of existential danger.
So Israelis must decide: will they support a government that thrives on permanent conflict, or endorse the possibility of peace?
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California’s Gavin Newsom Proposes Budget Increase for State Universities Amid Federal Funding Threats
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, California, US, on Aug. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a rumored potential candidate for US president in 2028, has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds for state universities amid the Trump administration’s policy of canceling federal grants and contracts held by institutions which it accuses of failing to combat campus antisemitism.
Newsom previously sought to cut funding to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) by 8 percent during the 2025-2025 fiscal year (FY), before dropping that figure to 3 percent. Then on Friday, the governor proposed a new budget which would increase next year’s appropriation by $350.6 million for UC and $365.7 million for CSU, raising the state’s general fund for the schools to $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively.
“The budget introduced today by Gov. Newsom continues to provide critical support for the university and our students,” UC president James B. Milliken said in a statement responding to the news. “State support is more important than ever, as we face tremendous financial pressures stemming from rising costs and unprecedented federal actions. UC campuses rely on funding stability to serve students and maintain the academic and research excellence that has made UC the world’s greatest research university.”
He added, “An investment in UC is an investment in California’s future. I look forward to our ongoing partnership with Gov. Newsom and the legislature to ensure that our students have what they need to succeed at UC and beyond.”
The move, even as it defers $129.7 million for UC and $143.8 million for CSU to a later date, gives the schools breathing room as they fear the Trump’s administration’s confiscation of funds. Last year, for example, the administration impounded $250 million from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
US President Donald Trump ordered the money canceled in August after determining that the school exposed Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact. He ordered the move even after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.
UCLA was sued and excoriated by the public over its handling of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that an anti-Zionist student group established on campus in the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester. Witnesses said that it was a source of antisemitism from the moment it became active, and according to the lawsuits, students there chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it.
Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
On the same day that UCLA settled the suit, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement at the time. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Newsom has positioned himself as an ally of higher education throughout its clash with Trump. In August, he demanded that Harvard University president Alan Garber resign rather than reach a deal with the Trump administration that would restore federal funding to Harvard in exchange for the school’s agreeing to conservative demands for addressing campus antisemitism and shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“You don’t work with Donald Trump — only FOR Donald Trump,” Newsom protested, writing on the X social media platform. “Looks like Harvard has chosen to surrender. Alan Garber must resign. An absolute failure of leadership that will have demonstrable impacts to higher education across our country. He should be ashamed.”
He added, “California will never bend the knee.”
Newsom had days earlier criticized Trump’s effort to combat antisemitism and reform higher education, denouncing it as “disgusting political extortion.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.