(JTA) — The Trump administration official behind a controversial antisemitism probe at the University of Pennsylvania told an audience of Jewish leaders that her office’s demand for a list of Jews from the university was necessary for her to identify “potential victims.”

“There is no other way to protect victims of harassment or discrimination unless you collect information about them,” Andrea Lucas, chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said at a conference on antisemitism and the law held at Harvard University.

As part of its investigation into antisemitism at Penn, the EEOC has demanded the Ivy League university produce a list of Jewish faculty, staff and students, along with personal identifying information. The school opposed the subpoena, saying the demand “raises serious privacy and First Amendment concerns,” but an Obama-appointed judge recently ruled that the Trump administration was within their rights to ask for such a list.

Penn has appealed the case and this week asked for a stay on the court order, which would otherwise require them to produce the list by May 1.

The case has drawn fierce opposition from Penn’s Jewish community, including its Hillel chapter, and beyond. Free-speech groups have also spoken out against the demand, though some Jewish groups have argued it is reasonable.

Lucas, who is not Jewish, said she couldn’t comment specifically on the Penn case due to ongoing litigation. Her representative did not respond to requests for an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency following her talk.

But in broad terms she defended her office’s approach to antisemitism cases, claiming that for class-action employment harassment cases, any eventual payout would be dependent on having specific names of victims.

“At some point, either the government will know information about individuals related to their religion or we will not be able to enforce the laws on their behalf. I understand the sensitivities around this issue,” she told the crowd. “But fundamentally the Jewish community does have to decide: Do you want to have civil rights enforcement in this space?”

The conference was put on by the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal group that frequently defends Jewish and pro-Israel college students. It was held at Harvard as part of the terms of a different antisemitism settlement between Harvard and the Brandeis Center, related to the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian activism after Oct. 7.

Attendees were a mix of representatives from umbrella Jewish groups, including Hillel International’s lead counsel; sympathetic Jewish university faculty; and strongly pro-Israel advocacy groups including the Lawfare Project and American Friends of Likud. William Daroff, the head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, also spoke on a panel.

Lucas said she had to obtain information about “somebody’s affiliation with a religious organization” in order to determine potential payouts from any religious discrimination settlement her office might negotiate. She also claimed the list would give her a fuller picture of the victims.

“I have reason to believe there are victims there, but I may not know all of them. So there’s going to be information gathering,” she said, adding that the EEOC would do the same for Black complainants alleging discrimination.

The Brandeis Center’s founder Kenneth Marcus, himself a former Trump official, interviewed the chair onstage and praised her leadership of the office.

“I think that she has been a transformative chair of the EEOC, one of the most consequential civil rights enforcement officials that we have,” Marcus said of Lucas, who was nominated to the commission by Trump in 2020 and appointed as chair in 2025. The EEOC’s Penn case dates back to 2023, prior to Trump’s second term in office.

Not everybody in the audience agreed with Lucas’s arguments. Mark Rotenberg, general counsel of Hillel International, told JTA that Hillel echoed its Penn chapter’s concerns about the list.

“The government has many ways in which to ascertain the scope of the problem of antisemitism in higher education without forcing the universities themselves to create and disclose lists of Jews,” Rotenberg said shortly before appearing on another panel at the conference.

He added, “The idea that this topic, compiling lists of Jews, is just like compiling lists of women or something like that misses the important historical context in which Jews experience horrifying examples of being singled out by the government. And the Jewish experience with that is something that we believe the enforcement officials need to take into account when they choose the tools they use to deal with the terrible problem of campus antisemitism.”

Rotenberg said he wasn’t the only one in the room who differed with the EEOC chair on the issue. “I think people in the room were trying to be courteous to her and didn’t want to engage in an open debate with her on the merits of that,” he said.

Lucas did not directly address broader concerns from Jewish groups that “collection of Jews’ private information carries echoes of the very patterns that made Jewish communities vulnerable for centuries,” as Penn Hillel said earlier this year. Instead, she addressed perceived privacy issues.

“I can assure you, though, that we understand the concerns and we take our confidentiality duties very, very seriously,” she said.

The EEOC is also pursuing an antisemitism probe against the University of California. The agency’s work is separate from other federal campus antisemitism probes at the Department of Education and other agencies.

Under Lucas, the EEOC has been more aggressive in pursuing antisemitic workplace discrimination cases — a cause the chair said she felt compelled to because of her interest in religious liberty.

“For me, religious liberty is a core thing the EEOC needs to be focusing on,” she said. “And combatting antisemitism is, of course, an integral part of defending religious liberty.”

The post At Harvard antisemitism conference, Trump official defends ‘list of Jews’ legal strategy in Penn case appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a 10-day ceasefire, amid separate U.S. efforts to sustain the fragile ceasefire with Iran.

“I just had excellent conversations with the Highly Respected President Joseph Aoun, of Lebanon, and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, of Israel,” Trump wrote in a Thursday post on Truth Social. “These two Leaders have agreed that in order to achieve PEACE between their Countries, they will formally begin a 10 Day CEASEFIRE at 5 P.M. EST.”

Trump added in a separate post that he was inviting both Aoun and Netanyahu to the White House for “the first meaningful talks between Israel and Lebanon since 1983, a very long time ago.”

He wrote: “Both sides want to see PEACE, and I believe that will happen, quickly!”

The announcement comes over a week into a separate ceasefire between the United States and Iran, which Israel joined but said would not apply to its fighting in Lebanon, where Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy, is based.

The announcement reportedly came as a surprise to even some of Netanyahu’s closest deputies, arriving a day after he told the country that he had instructed the army to deepen its fighting against Hezbollah. He told members of his cabinet on Thursday that Trump had requested the pause, according to Israeli media.

“We have an opportunity to reach a historic peace agreement with Lebanon,” Netanyahu told Israelis in a video statement announcing the truce.

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam welcomed the ceasefire in a post on X, writing, “As I congratulate all Lebanese on this achievement, I pray for the martyrs who fell, and affirm my solidarity with their families, with the wounded, and with the citizens who were forced to flee their cities and villages.”

Negotiating with Lebanon is complicated because it does not control Hezbollah, which began firing on Israel two days after Israel and the United States launched a war on Iran in February. Since then, Hezbollah has launched hundreds of rockets into Israel, causing widespread damage and prompting Israeli strikes across Lebanon as well as a ground operation in the country’s south.

A burst of rocket fire by Hezbollah shortly before the ceasefire’s scheduled start left at least one man in Israel seriously wounded.

A senior Hezbollah official told Reuters that Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon had informed the group about a ceasefire. He said Hezbollah would commit only if Israel halted all forms of hostilities.

Iranian negotiators have insisted that the fighting in Lebanon must be included in any longer-term agreement with the United States and Israel, but Israeli officials have maintained that its forces will remain in Lebanon during the ceasefire.

Netanyahu convened a meeting with the country’s security cabinet on Thursday after news of the ceasefire broke, telling ministers that he had accepted the deal at the request of Trump.

“When Israel’s greatest friend, President Trump, is acting alongside us in close coordination, Israel cooperates with him,” Netanyahu said, according to Ynet.

The post Israel agrees to 10-day halt in fighting in Lebanon, after Trump announces ceasefire appeared first on The Forward.

Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon have a message that can sound utterly preposterous as violence hardens as the main mode of communication between Israelis and Palestinians: The Future Is Peace, the title of their new book.

They are dead serious — and bring their own grief and healing to the cause.

On October 7, 2023, Inon’s parents, Bilha and Yakovi, were killed by Hamas terrorists in their home in Netiv Haasara near the border with Gaza. Decades earlier, Abu Sarah’s brother, Tayseer, was killed by Israeli forces following a year-long detention for alleged stone throwing.

You might recognize Abu Sarah and Inon from the winter Olympics, where the world watched as they carried the torch together—the first Israeli and Palestinian duo to ever do so — or from photos of them embracing the Pope, a picture of brotherhood.

Their book takes readers on an eight-day journey through the region, from the streets of East Jerusalem, where Abu Sarah grew up, to the farmland in the kibbutz that Inon’s father tilled. Along the way, they meet other bereaved families and friends who have been touched by the conflict. They found that the resistance to engaging with the other side’s narrative came from a fear of erasing one’s own.

Agreement, they concurred during an interview in Manhattan, is not a prerequisite. “I think what we bring in the future is peace is that we show first you don’t have to agree on everything. It doesn’t matter if you are pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, there will be things you will disagree with, there will be language you will not be happy with, there will be things that you think we got wrong,” said Abu Sarah.

For them, non-consensus is the beauty of the book — and their relationship with one another. “Relationships which have no disagreement, by the way, are boring,” he added. “We often quote Pope Francis, who said, ‘The only place that has no disagreement is a cemetery.”

Inon suggests the skeptical reaction to peacemaking is a coping mechanism. “You’re protecting yourself from wanting to believe. You think no one knows how to take you there.” He added, “We talk along the journey about the importance of dreaming. What we realized is that when you don’t dream, the others, the extremists, are dreaming for us, and then their dream is our nightmare.”

Parallel paths to peace 

Abu Sarah’s experience living under the occupation and growing up in the West Bank led him to pursue anti-Israel activism.

At age 10, he watched his “protector,” the sibling he shared a bed with each night, succumb to his wounds from injuries sustained during his time in an Israeli prison. “All I knew was that someone had killed my brother, and I wanted to hit back,” he says in the book.

Following his death, and during the years spent living under occupation, Abu Sarah sought revenge. Eventually, when he realized it would be difficult to get a job without speaking Hebrew, he enrolled in a Hebrew language class — the first time he had ever met an Israeli who was not a soldier at a checkpoint.

As he began connecting with his teacher and classmates, he slowly let down his guard. Getting to know Israelis beyond the context of occupation gave him a new perspective and sparked his interest in peacebuilding. Eventually, he founded Mejdi Tours, leading dual-narrative trips across Israel with a Jewish counterpart, explaining landmarks through the lens of their respective communities.

Inon made his own journey to connecting across the divide, starting long before Oct. 7. As so many young Israelis do, he and his wife, Shlomit, had traveled the world after their army service. He realized that he had developed friendships with people in far-flung countries but hadn’t managed to make a single Palestinian friend back home.

Passionate about tourism as a means of connection, Inon decided to open a guesthouse in Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel. When he first came to Nazareth, many were skeptical of him. “There were many rumors that I was a Mossad agent, or Shin Bet, even worse,” said Inon. Over time, he began to build relationships and trust in the Palestinian community.

The murder of his parents could have been the end of his mission. Instead, Inon recommitted himself to it. Just days after Oct. 7, Inon and his siblings publicly stated that they did not seek revenge against the Palestinian people for the atrocities committed that day. He even hosted a memorial service in Nazareth so that his Palestinian friends living in the city could attend.

While they had lived somewhat parallel lives, with both men working in the travel industry as a means for peace, Inon and Abu Sarah met only once, several years before Oct.r 7.

After Abu Sarah learned of the death of Inon’s parents, he decided to reach out. Inon’s immediate empathy was striking to Abu Sarah, for whom forgiveness of the other side took years. A friendship and partnership began. “I lost my parents on Oct. 7, but I gained Aziz as a brother,” said Inon.

I asked them what moments of tension have been like in their relationship. Inon said the two have managed to find common ground over shared values. But for a long time, he struggled to get on board with the value of justice, which is a priority for Abu Sarah.

“I kept telling Aziz, I don’t know how to bring justice to Tayseer or my parents. I remember President Biden saying that when Israel assassinated Nasrallah, justice was being done. But with the same bomb, 300 civilians were killed. So will it now be legitimate for them to avenge the death of … their innocent loved ones?”

Eventually, after discussions with religious leaders, Inon came around to embracing the idea of justice. He discovered that of the 613 mitzvot in Judaism, the only two that are mandated are justice and peace. “After learning that, I said Aziz, from now on, I can have justice within the values that I believe.”

Another disagreement they’ve faced: Abu Sarah’s love for country music — Inon can’t stand it.

A different kind of solution

Inon and Abu Sarah can seem almost radical in their commitment to dialogue. To some, their approach may feel detached from reality. They know that most Israelis and Palestinians do not think the way they do. But to them, the belief that violence is inevitable is far more difficult to accept.

“Loss, instead of making us want to walk away, makes us more convinced that this is the only path, “ said Abu Sarah. “Really, if we give up, then what we should do is go get a gun and shoot at each other. Because what’s the alternative? You either believe we can solve this by sitting and working it out, or you believe we have to kill each other, and we refuse to believe that alternative.”

Notably, only one page of the book is devoted to discussing a solution to the conflict in the literal sense. “Here are shelves of practical solutions, chapter after chapter about borders, about water resources, about Jerusalem, about refugees, about security arrangements,” said Inon, laughing about the Israel-Palestine section that has become a fixture of many bookstores following the Gaza war. For them, the book is less about prescribing a specific political outcome and more about laying the emotional groundwork needed to get there.

Abu Sarah and Inon did not want to close themselves off by endorsing a single political solution. “We don’t want to be in a box,” Inon said, explaining that neither of them feels strongly tied to one specific outcome.

“Our values are human dignity, security and safety for everyone, recognition of everyone … People want to argue with us, two states, one state, three states, monarchy. That’s less the issue. If that agreement is based on those values,” said Abu Sarah.  “Then we’ll be fine, regardless of the political ‘blah, blah, blah,’ if it’s not, you can have the nicest drawn map, and it will fail.”

Mocking the peacemaker 

While both men had been engaged in peace work long before Oct. 7, that day and the war in Gaza that followed changed the landscape. Colleagues and friends told them they could no longer find it in themselves to care about the suffering of the other side.

“Palestinian friends would say … this happened because of what they’ve been doing to us … Then I would talk to Jewish friends who would tell me, ‘I used to sympathize with you Palestinians, but from now on, I just don’t care,’” Abu Sarah said. “The moment you do that, part of your humanity dies. I prefer to have the pain of feeling than to kill that part of me that maybe makes it easier.”

Abu Sarah said that when he tells people he is a peacemaker, they are incredulous. “They go, Oh, well, how is that going? Like in a mocking way.” He compared it to those working to find a cure for cancer. “If you’ve met a cancer researcher who’s trying to develop vaccines… you would respond to someone who is trying to make vaccines, saying, ‘God bless you.’”

“Peace has been done many times. A cancer vaccine has not,” he remarked, laughing.

Inon recalled a memory of his father shared during his parents’ shiva. Every night, his siblings sat around the table listening to him — the manager of the kibbutz’s farm — talk about his day.

“He would share the catastrophe in the fields,” Inon said. “The floods, the drought, the wildfire, the insects. Every day there was something new.”

But he always had faith in next year’s crop.

“He would say that next year, he will sow again. It doesn’t matter how devastating this season is,” he continued. “He will learn from his mistakes. He will consult with other farmers … and next season, he will sow again — not with prayers, not just believing, but knowing that next year will be better.”

The post A Palestinian and an Israeli bereaved in violence make the case for peace appeared first on The Forward.