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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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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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