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Nuance is crucial in fighting hate. That’s why I helped write an alternative definition of antisemitism.
(JTA) — My 95-year-old mother knows a thing or two about trauma. Not only because she is a survivor of Auschwitz but also because she is a psychologist.
“What worries me,” my mother says, “is that we Jews will succumb to our past trauma rather than rise above it.”
I share my mother’s concern.
Jewish Americans face the threats of escalating antisemitism and growing white nationalism at the same time that the Israeli government’s anti-democratic policies are eliciting increasingly harsh condemnation worldwide.
There is no inherent relationship between antisemitism and the outcry over Israeli policies. But when they occur together, they can trigger traumatic memories and confuse our thinking. This confusion can lead to a dangerous conflation of issues at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism.
Prime Minister Netanyahu exploits this confusion to deflect condemnation of his policies. He constructs a misleading equation, portraying severe criticism of Israel as not only a threat to the Jewish state but also to the Jewish people.
To demonize his political opponents, Netanyahu invokes the ultimate act of antisemitism, the Holocaust. He did so when he blasted those negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran and when he reprimanded The New York Times over its criticism of the agreements he reached with far-right political parties. His strategy is to downplay antisemitism on the right and emphatically equate left-wing with right-wing antisemitism to obscure their distinctions.
Some Jewish organizations, perceiving strong criticism of Israel as threatening Jewish unity and the Jewish state, reflexively reinforce that equation. A case in point is Anti-Defamation League chief Jonathan Greenblatt’s approach to anti-Zionism.
Greenblatt used his keynote address at ADL’s annual leadership summit in May to hammer home his assertion that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Full stop.” Over the past two weeks, he has played a leading role in the campaign to endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance non legally binding working definition of antisemitism (IHRA) as the sole such definition in the Biden administration’s U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. In a tweet urging its adoption, Greenblatt proclaimed: “Anything else permits antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism.”
Greenblatt was worried about reports that the White House would include other definitions in the strategy, such as the Nexus Document, which addresses “the complexities at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism.” Greenblatt has repeatedly denigrated Nexus by calling it a “pasted-up process organized by activists” and circulating inaccuracies like: “The Nexus definition assumes that unless there is outright violence involved, anti-Zionism is generally not antisemitism.”
In fact, the Nexus Document includes seven examples of anti-Zionist or anti-Israel behavior that should be considered antisemitic and four that might not be. As Dov Waxman, a member of the Nexus Task Force and chair of Israel Studies at UCLA, tweeted: “Nexus clearly identifies when criticism of Israel or opposition to it crosses the line into antisemitism. But because it is clearer than IHRA in this respect, it is less susceptible to being misused and weaponized against Palestinians and their supporters.”
It’s not that Greenblatt doesn’t understand the complexity of these issues. He has taken nuanced and moderate positions on anti-Zionism in the past. But complex formulas impede the use of simplistic equations. If Greenblatt wants to show that anti-Zionism is always an existential threat to both the Jewish state and the Jewish people, he can leave no room for nuance.
Ultimately, the White House acknowledged the significance of utilizing a varied set of resources to combat antisemitism, stating, “There are several definitions of antisemitism, which serve as valuable tools to raise awareness and increase understanding of antisemitism.” The strategy acknowledged that the United States had already “embraced” the IHRA version, describing it as the “most prominent,” and went on to say that it “welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document” and other efforts.
That formula has angered some supporters of the IHRA definition, including World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder, who said: “The inclusion of a secondary definition in addition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism is an unnecessary distraction from the real work that needs to be done.”
Like Greenblatt, Lauder wants to build a consensus around a simple explanation for a complex situation. But their approach actually diminishes our ability to carry out “the real work that needs to be done” because it weakens our ability to confront the dominant force fueling increased antisemitism in America: white supremacy
According to the ADL, white supremacy is the greatest danger facing Jewish Americans. As President Biden said in his opening remarks when the National Strategy was unveiled: “Our intelligence agencies have determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy — including antisemitism — is the greatest terrorist threat to our Homeland today.”
“We can’t take on white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ hate, or any form of hate without taking on the antisemitism that helps animate it,” says Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and former head of Integrity First for America, which successfully sued the neo-Nazis who organized the deadly 2017 Charlottesville march. “And likewise, we can’t take on antisemitism without taking on white supremacy or these other forms of hate … All our fates are intertwined.”
But Israel’s policies create a dilemma. When many of our potential allies see Israel, they see a country that calls itself a democracy but enacts laws enshrining Jewish dominance over Palestinian citizens of Israel. And they see a country that has denied fundamental human rights to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for 56 years. So, not surprisingly, they are moved to speak out about these realities.
Criticism of Israel will inevitably heighten in response to the policies and actions of this Israeli government. Some of Israel’s critics may indeed cross a line by using antisemitic tropes or stereotypes or denying Jews the same rights afforded to others, including Palestinians. When they do, they should not get a free pass. Full stop.
But we must resist the temptation to reflexively respond with accusations of Jew-hatred, even when the criticism of Israel is off-base or unjustified. We cannot afford to oversimplify complex issues by conflating political disagreements about Israel with antisemitism. If we do, we risk distracting from addressing the most dangerous instances of antisemitism and bigotry.
Times like these call on us to shed the weight of our past and approach these issues with clear minds and thoughtful consideration. “Sometimes we split the world into good and bad to guard ourselves against difficult realities,” my mother said. “If we can rid ourselves of the bad and make it so the other side is always guilty, then we feel safe. But by doing so, we lose the ability to find a solution.”
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Behind Ronnie Eldridge’s sweet, motherly face, one of the toughest political minds in NYC
When news arrived that Ronnie Eldridge had passed away at the age of 95, I thought back to the mid-1980’s when I made a number of visits to the apartment on Central Park West that she shared with the legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin and their blended family of six kids. At the time I was doing stories for NPR about Breslin and his passionated denunciation of municipal authorities for their neglect of city’s homeless. Sometimes I’d record Breslin at home.
I couldn’t help noticing that almost every time I was in that apartment, Eldridge was on the phone with an autistic Jewish man named Ralph. I tend to notice things like that because my brother Michael, olav ha sholom, was autistic.
According to Daniel Eldridge, the eldest of the three Eldridge “kids,” his mother met Ralph at a Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign event in 1968. Apparently, a campaign volunteer who was manning the door was giving Ralph a hard time.
Ronnie Eldridge intervened and declared that Ralph, who she had never met before, was her friend and he was to be allowed in. Daniel Eldridge told me his mother spoke with Ralph nearly every day after that.
Because my conversation with Daniel Eldridge was conducted on speakerphone, Eldridge’s granddaughter, Sophie Silberman, piped up.
“She looked after everybody with kindness and devotion,” Silberman said. “She knew that she was significant to Ralph and it didn’t take much to keep that part of his life alive and it meant the world to Ralph.”
Big shoes to fill
That kindness and devotion echoed in several recollections of Eldridge’s public life today.
Ruth Messinger, a former city council member who went on to lead the American Jewish World Service, told me that Eldridge “was very savvy.”
“She was a no-nonsense person,” Messinger said. “If there was an issue, if there was a problem, she would take it on. She was a seriously progressive presence for many, many years. She pursued the issues and stood up for justice.”
“She was just an institution all by herself,” said her successor in the New York City Council, Gale Brewer.
Eldridge represented an Upper West Side district in the Council for 12 years before being term-limited out of office. “Her shoes were very big shoes to fill,” Brewer said.
Eldridge was one of the sponsors of a 1992 law that required cameras be placed in facilities that house automated teller machines. She was motivated to win passage, having been held up using an ATM in her neighborhood.
Brewer is one of many public officials and activists who are remembering Eldridge’s advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable members of society, including the LGBTQ community and women who have been abused by their spouses or boyfriends. She remembers Eldridge visiting incarcerated women who were doing time for crimes linked to their experience as battered women.
“She put that issue on the map,” Brewer told me.
The conscience of the Lindsay administration
Eldridge was one of the anti-war activists in the 1960’s who made mountains move on the national level. During the war in Vietnam she helped found the “Dump Johnson” movement, which in turn sparked President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to forego re-election in 1968. That prompted Robert F. Kennedy to enter the race. Eldridge was keen on RFK. She was a young mother in 1964 when she volunteered his campaign for the U.S. Senate.
During the ’68 presidential campaign, RFK said of Eldridge, “Behind that sweet, motherly face, Ronnie Eldridge has one of the toughest political minds in the city, if not the country.” She used the quote on a campaign poster for her unsuccessful bid to become Manhattan Borough President in 1977.
Eldridge’s activism also paid dividends on the local level. She served as the coordinator of Democrats for Lindsay and helped the Republican mayor win re-election in 1969 on the Liberal Party line. She was a political strategist for Lindsay and was known as the conscience of the Lindsay administration.
Around that time, she was part of a group that included the singer Harry Belafonte challenging the license of television station WPIX. The challenge dragged on for nine years but in 1978 an out of court settlement put about $10 million into the entity that challenged the license. I learned about all this when I asked Eldridge how she came to possess that very valuable Central Park West apartment.
A tabloid life
A number of Eldridge’s close friends have remarked that being married to Jimmy Breslin may’ve come with some perks, it must’ve been a challenge as well. For those of us who read Breslin religiously in the New York Daily News and New York Newsday, some of the gruff newspaper columnist’s more entertaining columns chronicled the foibles of the interfaith family’s Upper West Side life together.
This shtick inspired a pilot for a 1989 CBS sitcom about a NYC newspaper columnist and a mayoral aide. American Nuclear was co-written by Breslin but the network ultimately decided not to pick up the series.
In a 2004 for a radio documentary interview about her husband, I asked Ronnie Eldridge about having her domestic life portrayed in a tabloid
“The first time it happened everybody was hysterical,” she said. “I had a daughter in Paris. She called from Paris and was in tears. A daughter at college, she was also in tears. And my son in California said, ‘What’s going on?’ And then Jimmy’s family said, ‘Oh, just don’t pay any attention to it.’”
“When I was in the city council, I would just pretend that I didn’t read the paper. He would write articles. condemning and attacking colleagues of mine. I’d have to go into the city council and, see somebody that he’d just called unmentionable names. So, I just learned to leave it alone.”
A memorial service will be held for Ronnie Eldridge on Wednesday, March 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street in Manhattan.
The post Behind Ronnie Eldridge’s sweet, motherly face, one of the toughest political minds in NYC appeared first on The Forward.
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New Analysis Questions Legality of Campus BDS Efforts Against Israel
Cornell’s divestment protests continued during the university’s commencement ceremony, May 25, 2024, during which students interrupted a speech by President Martha Pollack with chanting and canvas signs. Photo: Reuters Connect
A newly released research paper is raising fresh legal questions about the wave of campus and institutional campaigns calling for divestment from Israel, arguing that such efforts may violate anti-discrimination laws in the United States.
The report, published by Northwestern Law School professor Max M. Schanzenbach and Harvard Law School professor Robert H. Sitkoff, examines the growing push by activists affiliated with the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), which urges governments, universities, and companies to cut economic ties with Israel in the first step to the Jewish state’s eradication.
According to the paper, divestment campaigns that single out Israeli institutions or businesses could potentially run afoul of state and federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on national origin.
BDS advocates argue that their campaign is a form of political protest designed to pressure Israel to change its policies. The movement, formally launched by anti-Israel activists in the mid-2000s, has called for boycotts of Israeli goods, divestment from companies linked to Israel, and government sanctions.
But the new analysis contends that when governments or public institutions adopt such policies, the underlying legality could be questionable. The authors argue that targeting Israel specifically for economic exclusion could conflict with existing anti-discrimination statutes or state laws aimed at preventing boycotts of Israel.
More than half of US states have enacted legislation limiting participation in BDS-related boycotts or requiring government contractors to certify that they are not boycotting Israel. In some states, including California, laws restrict the awarding of public contracts or funding to organizations that participate in boycotts targeting the country.
The paper also challenges the argument frequently made by BDS supporters that such boycotts are protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. While individuals may advocate for boycotts as political speech, the authors argue that institutional policies, particularly those adopted by government bodies or public universities, could still violate anti-discrimination or procurement laws depending on how they are implemented.
The paper raises potential anti-discrimination concerns surrounding divestment campaigns that target Israeli companies. The authors argue that some boycott or divestment proposals could expose universities or public institutions to legal vulnerability if investment decisions are based primarily on a company’s Israeli national origin rather than specific conduct. Under certain US civil rights laws and state policies governing public institutions, actions that single out individuals or entities because of national origin may trigger discrimination claims. The paper suggests that if divestment policies are framed broadly against Israeli businesses as a category, rather than tied to particular corporate activities, institutions implementing them could face legal challenges alleging unequal treatment.
The analysis argues that modern divestment campaigns targeting Israel differ significantly from the anti-apartheid divestment movement against South Africa. The paper contends that while many universities in the 1980s adopted selective restrictions on companies directly tied to South Africa’s apartheid system, often aligned with international sanctions and corporate conduct codes, the current iteration of the BDS campaign against Israel frequently calls for broader exclusions based on a company’s ties to Israel itself, potentially creating legal risks such as national-origin discrimination issues.
Divestment campaigns have become especially prominent in recent years on US college campuses, where student groups have pushed universities to withdraw endowment investments from companies tied to Israel or its military. Critics, however, argue the campaigns unfairly single out the world’s only Jewish state and risk creating discriminatory policies against Israeli businesses or academics.
In the two years following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, campus activists have intensified efforts to implement divestment policies on university campuses. While universities have mostly resisted these efforts, federal lawmakers have advanced legislation to truncate divestment initiatives before they gain traction. For instance, in 2024, Congress introduced “The Protect Economic Freedom Act,” which would render universities that participate in the BDS movement against Israel ineligible for federal funding under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, prohibiting them from receiving federal student aid. The bill would also mandate that colleges and universities submit evidence that they are not participating in commercial boycotts against the Jewish state.
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UK Holds Four Men on Suspicion of Iranian Spying on Jewish Sites
Director General of MI5 Ken McCallum delivers the annual Director General’s Speech at Thames House, the headquarters of the UK’s Security Service, in London, Britain, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Brady/Pool via REUTERS
British police arrested four men on Friday on suspicion of helping Iran’s intelligence services carry out surveillance of people and locations linked to the Jewish community in London.
Detectives said one of the men was Iranian, while three had dual British-Iranian nationality. The arrests were part of a “long-running investigation,” police added, indicating the men‘s alleged activities pre-dated the US and Israeli bombardment of Iran, which started last Saturday.
British lawmakers and the domestic spy agency MI5 have long warned of threats posed to Britain by Iran. Three Iranians were charged with offenses under Britain’s National Security Act relating to assisting a foreign intelligence service last May.
In a separate investigation last year, police arrested five men, four of them Iranian, over a suspected plot to target specific premises, which British media said was the Israeli embassy. They were later released without charge.
“The Jewish community and the wider public will understandably be concerned by today’s arrests. We continue to monitor the situation closely,” interior minister Shabana Mahmood said on X.
Police said the four detained men were aged between 22 and 55. Six others were also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender, and police said searches were ongoing.
Speaking about the current Iranian conflict on Thursday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that people would use it to divide the country.
“The government is reaching out to communities across the United Kingdom – Jewish and Muslim alike – making sure communities and places of worship have appropriate, protective security in place,” he told a press conference.
Illustrating the threat from Iran, Britain’s MI5 spy boss said that over two years from 2022-2024, his service and British police had responded to 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals based in Britain who were regarded by Tehran as a threat.
Britain also recorded a 4% rise in antisemitic incidents in 2025, making it the second-worst year on record, a charity said. Two men were killed last October during an attack on a synagogue in the northern English city of Manchester.