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Project Esther created a blueprint for Trump to fight antisemitism. The ‘Shofar Report’ is a liberal response.
Most American Jews have taken a dim view of the Trump administration’s approach to fighting antisemitism, saying his policies are disingenuous and prone to exacerbate the problem rather than solve it.
But beyond rejecting the crackdown on universities, liberal Jews have lacked a singular blueprint for fighting antisemitism akin to what the conservative Heritage Foundation offered the Trump administration with Project Esther.
The Nexus Project is hoping to change that with Tuesday’s release of the Shofar Report, a 63-page document that combines policy recommendations with essays arguing that leaders interested in countering antisemitism should focus on strengthening democratic institutions.
Its authors hope that it will fill a vacuum for both politicians and individual Jewish Americans.
“People are really hungry for solutions,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “They’re frustrated by the false choice of either protecting democracy or countering antisemitism.”
Spitalnick’s organization has been one of the leading voices alongside Nexus in arguing that the Trump administration’s moves to deport student protesters and cancel grants to universities accused of antisemitism are endangering Jews by weakening American democracy.
“We’re saying fighting the weaponization of antisemitism is a strategy for fighting antisemitism.”
Jonathan JacobyNational director of the Nexus Project
The Shofar Report builds on these arguments with a set of nine key recommendations focused on funding educational initiatives and civil rights protection while avoiding limits on free speech by directing enforcement at “clear discrimination and harassment.”
It calls for providing universities with more resources to combat harassment toward Jews, teaching more about the Holocaust and expanding investments in programs that help people leave extremist movements.
John Ruskay, the former director of UJA-Federation of New York, said that the Shofar Report comes at a time when Jewish leaders have poured resources into fighting antisemitism often without much basis in data or a cohesive strategy and that it could help “those who want to go beyond sloganizing.”
It also serves as counter-programming to Project Esther, released by the Heritage Foundation shortly before last year’s presidential election with advice for how a future Trump administration should fight antisemitism. The document described a “Hamas Support Network” (composed of progressive nonprofits and foundations) threatening Jews that could be dismantled by the federal government.
Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of Nexus, said that the Shofar Report’s narrative is that there is no tension between protecting civil liberties and countering antisemitism. “People think that we need to fight antisemitism and then, as a separate matter, you need to fight the weaponization of antisemitism,” he said. “And we’re saying fighting the weaponization of antisemitism is a strategy for fighting antisemitism.”
Nexus, which expanded from an academic task force focused on defining antisemitism into a full-fledged advocacy organization in 2024, quickly gained influence with the Biden administration and among Democrats in Congress who were looking for advice on how to respond to increasingly illiberal policy recommendations around antisemitism put forth by both Republicans and legacy Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, the New York Democrat, has become a champion of Nexus’s approach, which focuses as much on concern for freedom of expression as on raising the alarm about antisemitism itself. He praised Tuesday’s report in a statement, saying it “highlights some of the most timely and acute challenges facing the Jewish community and American democracy today.”
The second half of the report, which was edited by Forward opinion columnist Emily Tamkin, features longer essays by academics seeking to contextualize the contemporary conversation around antisemitism for Jewish clergy and lay leaders trying to guide their communities.
The Shofar Report’s reliance on so many authors can muddle its message around the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism — arguably the central question in today’s debates.
Rabbi Seth Limmer, for example, kicks off the policy briefs by focusing on the protests that followed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, and dwells on other quandaries coming from progressives, like the absence of Jewish studies experts at the University of Chicago’s Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity.
But a few pages later, David Myers, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers a forceful defense of higher education. He writes that the threat to Jews at universities comes from “new attempts to silence protesters in the name of protecting Jews.”
The varied perspectives add weight to what Jacoby said was an attempt to create a document that could transcend traditional partisan lines, and Limmer said his hope is that readers understand the need for a holistic approach to the problem: “It is definitely time for a new conversation around antisemitism that removes this fictitious partisan divide that pretends like only some people are responsible for the problem.”
While the report offers a detailed diagnosis of what it refers to as “authoritarian shortcuts” — in one section Judith Lichtman, a civil rights attorney, assails “attacks on nonprofits under the guise of fighting terrorism” — many of its recommendations lack specificity. Lichtman, for instance, called for Congress to “address white supremacy in law enforcement,” but does not detail how lawmakers should do so.
Project Esther’s public report also included somewhat vague advice to the executive branch, though these were partially fleshed out in private donor presentations created by the Heritage Foundation that detailed the mechanics of pressuring universities and civil society groups.
Other recommendations in the Shofar Report include expanding media literacy programs to help students recognize conspiracy theories, incorporating Jewish content into school curriculum and supporting partnerships between Jews and other minority groups. Some of its more concrete policy advice — like fully funding the Education Department’s civil rights office, which is less than half the size it was at the start of 2025 and being further reduced during the government shutdown — seem almost certain to be nonstarters so long as President Donald Trump is in office.
Jacoby acknowledged that the Shofar Report is being released at a time when Democrats, who are more likely to be receptive to its perspective, are out of power and focused on responding to actions from the White House rather than driving their own policy agenda.
“This is a plan for the present, not for the future,” Jacoby said. “We’ll work on that next.”
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251 hostages were taken to Gaza on Oct. 7. The bodies of these two remain there.
Hamas on Tuesday returned to Israel the body of Dror Or — a 48-year-old father from Kibbutz Be’eri who was abducted with his family on Oct. 7. The handover was mediated by the Red Cross and confirmed by Israeli forensic testing. Or’s wife was killed in the attack, and two of their children were later released during a previous ceasefire.
In exchange, Israel returned 15 Palestinian bodies, completing the latest exchange under the ceasefire as talks begin on advancing to the agreement’s second phase.
Hamas took more than 250 people hostage on the day of the attack. With only two captives now believed to remain in Gaza, the transfer marks a grim but significant step in resolving one of the central flashpoints of the current truce negotiations.
The bodies of one Israeli and one Thai national are still in Gaza.
- Ran Gvili, 24, was a member of a police counter-terror unit who was on medical leave with a broken shoulder when he heard about the attack. He rushed south and helped evacuate fleeing concertgoers at the Nova music festival. It was later determined that Gvili was shot and killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, his body dragged into Gaza.
- Sudthisak Rinthalak, a 43-year-old agricultural worker from northeastern Thailand, was killed in Kibbutz Be’eri during the attack, and his body was taken into Gaza. He had been working in Israeli agriculture since 2017, and was regularly sending money back home to support his parents.
Hamas said Wednesday it remained committed to the deal and intends to return both bodies.
Related: Jews around the world pinned yellow ribbons to their clothes and wore dog tag necklaces. How will they continue to mark Oct. 7 once all the hostages have been returned?
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Boston’s unfinished Holocaust museum hoists boxcar into exhibit space overlooking Boston Common
(JTA) — Traffic on Tremont Street in downtown Boston came to a standstill Tuesday morning as a crane lifted a historic 12-ton railcar onto the fourth floor of the city’s upcoming Holocaust museum.
The museum, the first of its kind in New England, was launched by the The Holocaust Legacy Foundation in 2022, which was founded by couple Jody Kipnis and Todd Ruderman following a 2018 March of the Living trip to Auschwitz.
While construction on the site, which rests on the city’s Freedom Trail near the Boston Common, remains ongoing, the installation of the 20th-century railcar, believed to be the same type used by the Nazis to transport Jews to extermination camps, marked a major milestone for the museum’s creation.
The railcar, which measures 30 feet long, 12 feet high, and nearly 9 feet wide, was lifted into the new museum structure by a 173-foot tower crane before construction continues around it.
A group of supporters, Massachusetts officials, civic leaders, Jewish community representatives and Boston-area partners looked on as the railcar was installed, according to the museum.
“The hardest truth this railcar forces us to confront is this: the Holocaust was not carried out by the Nazis alone. It was carried out by people, ordinary people, who kept the trains running, who stamped the papers, who followed schedules, who chose silence over courage,” said Kipnis, the co-founder and CEO of Holocaust Museum Boston, in a statement. “This railcar will stand at the heart of the Holocaust Museum Boston to confront that truth.”
After the museum opens in late 2026, the railcar will rest in a protruding bay window on the museum’s fourth floor so that pedestrians will be able to see visitors enter the railcar but not exit, a choice the museum said it intended to symbolize “the millions who never returned and the freedoms that were stripped away.”
The railcar was donated to the museum by Sonia Breslow, a Phoenix resident whose father was deported to the Treblinka concentration camp on a railcar of the same kind. Breslow’s father, who later moved to Massachusetts, was among fewer than 100 survivors of Treblinka, where 900,000 Jews were murdered.
The railcar was first discovered in a Macedonian junkyard in 2012, according to the museum, and later transported to Massachusetts, where conservator Josh Craine of Daedalus Art Conservation spent the past six months restoring it for exhibition.
“Seeing this railcar lifted into its new home took my breath away,” said Breslow. “My father survived a transport to Treblinka in a car just like this. Most who were taken there did not survive. For this railcar to be in Massachusetts, a place where he rebuilt his life, is deeply personal. It ensures that his story, and the stories of millions, will never be forgotten.”
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Peter Beinart is speaking in Israel. Cue the criticism from both the left and the right.
(JTA) — Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart drew a volley of criticism on Tuesday from the boycott Israel movement as well as a right-wing Israeli group over an appearance at Tel Aviv University.
Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, spoke Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv with Yoav Fromer, a senior faculty member at TAU’s English department, in an event titled “Trump, Israel and the Future of American Democracy.”
A founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, publicly called on Beinart to cancel his visit after saying it had privately urged him to do so. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is the BDS movement’s cultural arm and a leading advocate for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions.
“Palestinians condemn Peter Beinart’s event at complicit Tel Aviv University in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” PACBI said in a post on X. “Whitewashing genocide can never be reconciled with any claim to humanism or moral consistency.”
In a press release, PACBI accused the university of being “deeply complicit in enabling and trying to whitewash Israel’s US-armed and funded genocide as well as its decades old regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation and apartheid.”
Beinart declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But he responded to the criticism on social media, where said he supports a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as well as a right of return for Palestinians and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — all principles of the BDS movement to which he has long subscribed.
At the same time, he said, while he supports “many forms of boycott, divestment and sanction against Israel and Israeli institutions,” he believes there is “value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes” by speaking at universities.
“I do so because I want to reach Jews who disagree with me—because I believe that by trying to convince Jews to rethink their support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, I can contribute, in some very small way, to the struggle for freedom and justice,” Beinart wrote.
The author of several books including “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” published earlier this year, Beinart is also scheduled to speak at Hebrew University later this week, according to Haaretz.
Beinart also wrote that “right-wing Israeli organizations have pressured Tel Aviv University to cancel my talk,” adding that he felt he should “take advantage of this opportunity to say in Israel what I’ve been saying elsewhere for the last two years.”
Matan Jerafi, the CEO of the right-wing Israeli activist group Im Tirtzu, sent a letter to Tel Aviv University’s president, Ariel Porat, on Tuesday urging him to cancel the event, according to Israel National News.
“Why is he hosting someone on his campus who does not recognize the State of Israel and calls for sanctions against Israel?” wrote Jerafi. “We call on Mr. Porat to cancel this absurd event. Stop tarnishing the reputation of Israeli academia. This is not Columbia University.”
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