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Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
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Gunfight Outside Israeli Consulate in Istanbul Leaves One Attacker Dead
A drone view shows police officers and medics standing at the scene, after a gunfire was heard near the building housing the Israeli consulate, according to a witness, in Istanbul, Turkey, April 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mehmet Emin Caliskan
One attacker was killed and two others were wounded in an extended gun battle with police outside the tower building housing the Israeli consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday.
Footage showed the backpack-wearing attackers firing with automatic rifles and handguns, and police officers returning fire and seeking cover, as they maneuvered among parked white police buses near a checkpoint. One body lay on the street.
Shots rang out for at least 10 minutes among the glass towers in Turkey’s main financial district, Reuters witnesses said. One person was seen covered in blood.
No Israeli staff were at the consulate, which occupies a floor in one of the towers, at the time of the attack, Turkish and Israeli authorities said.
Israeli diplomats had left Turkey shortly after the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza began in late 2023, a conflict that prompted large pro-Palestinian protests outside the consulate and across the country, and a deep chill in Turkish-Israeli diplomatic ties.
US ENVOY SAYS CONSULATE WAS TARGET
The three attackers had links to an organization that “exploits religion,” Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci said, without giving any name. Two of them were brothers, and they had traveled in a rented car from the city of Izmit, he added.
While Turkish authorities did not say what motivated the attackers, Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey, said on X that it was an attack on the Israeli consulate and he condemned it.
President Tayyip Erdogan said the “heinous terrorist attack” would not dent Turkey’s trust and security. Israel’s foreign ministry said it appreciated Turkish security forces’ “swift action in thwarting this attack.”
Two police officers were also lightly wounded, Istanbul Governor Davut Gul told reporters at the scene of the midday incident, which occurred next to a major motorway as thousands of nearby workers were breaking for lunch.
DIPLOMATIC CHILL AMID GAZA WAR
Turkey, a fierce critic of Israel’s military operations in Gaza as well as in Lebanon and Iran, had recalled its ambassador from Israel in November 2023, and diplomatic relations have been effectively frozen since then.
At the same time that year, Israeli diplomats left Turkey due to security concerns, including the protests. Since then, heavily armed police and armored vehicles have been stationed in a broad area surrounding the consulate.
Militant violence has mostly subsided in Turkey in recent years after a violent spate from 2015 to 2016 when Islamic, Kurdish, and leftist militants carried out attacks amid the spillover from the Syrian civil war.
The latest incident was late last year when three Turkish police officers and six Islamic State terrorists were killed in a gunfight in the town of Yalova in northwest Turkey, amid raids on militant cells believed to be planning Christmas and New Year attacks.
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Ivy League Schools Are Cutting Jewish Admissions, While Faculty Attack Israel and Jews
Graduating students rise in support of 13 students not able to graduate because of their participation in anti-Israel protests during the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
In an escalation of its fight with Harvard, the Trump administration announced a lawsuit accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students, and threatening to cut off Federal grant money. The lawsuit alleges the university was deliberately indifferent to campus antisemitism, failed to discipline “campus agitators,” refused to enforce its own rules regarding demonstrations, and says the institution was in violation of Title VI.
The US Department of Education also announced two new investigations into Harvard focusing on racial discrimination and antisemitism. The lawsuit came as many universities have quietly adopted a strategy of waiting out the Trump administration.
The other notable development in March regarding campus antisemitism was the release of the report by the House Education and Workforce Committee. Among the more shocking revelations detail how Qatar Foundation officials dictated terms to Northwestern University regarding the institution’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
Particularly disturbing details described Qatari efforts to prevent the university from censuring faculty member Khaled Al-Hroub, who had denied that Hamas members had committed rape. The report also emphasizes that faculty affiliated with Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine “played a significant role in legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism on college campuses.
Elsewhere, legal systems continue to protect pro-Hamas protestors who vandalize university property. In one recent example, a New York State judge ruled that Columbia University cannot discipline students who occupied and vandalized buildings in May 2024 on the grounds that there was no evidence the students “acted to endanger Hamilton Hall or University property within Hamilton.” The judge, an adjunct Columbia Law School faculty member, deemed expulsions and other sanctions “arbitrary and capricious.”
In another case, pro-Hamas protestors who occupied and vandalized a building at the University of Washington in 2024 were charged with misdemeanor trespassing by county prosecutors, who claimed there was insufficient evidence for felony charges. These protestors caused more than $1 million damage to the building. Most have returned to campus.
In Michigan, a Federal court ruled that a lawsuit by Palestinian students who accused the University of Michigan of targeting their “activism” could advance. The suit alleges that disciplinary procedures and its suspension of the leading pro-Hamas student group constituted viewpoint discrimination.
More positively, the University of California Regents voted to settle a suit which alleges the institution failed to respond to antisemitic harassment and discrimination. The suit focused on pro-Hamas protests in 2024 where Jewish students were assaulted and harassed. The agreement stipulates antisemitism training for staff, faculty and students, an annual survey of Jewish life on campus, and the creation of a Title VI office.
Pro-Palestinian students complained the settlement is “a tool to silence the lived experiences of Palestinians and to criminalize student organizing against the ongoing dispossession and oppression of Palestinians in their homeland.” Immediately after and in contravention of the settlement, law school dean Edwin Chemerinsky announced to students that there would be no changes to the speakers policy.
The demographic composition of universities has been recognized as one of the bases for intensified hostility towards Jews and Israelis. The international component of student bodies, reaching in excess of 50% at some institutions, has imported students relentlessly hostile towards Israel and Jews. Complementing this, however, have been efforts to deliberately reduce Jewish populations.
New research has now shown how Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Columbia have systematically reduced the percentages of Jewish students in the past decades. Harvard reduced its Jewish population from approximately 25% in 2004 to the current low of 7%. Analysis of Columbia suggests the number was reduced from approximately 19% in 2004 to 9% today. Dramatic reductions in the number of white students admitted are also apparent.
Most Ivy League and elite institutions showed similar drops, with Cornell holding steady and Brown increasing the number of Jewish students. Muslim enrollment particularly at Columbia increased in the same period from approximately 4% to 7%. In response, Harvard denied reports that it had increased recruitment at Jewish day schools.
The rapid replacement of Jewish and white students at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia appears part of deliberate efforts to expand institutional “diversity,” globalize the student body and thus the subsequent donor base, and to “deAmericanize” the faculty and curriculum.
The replacement correlates with a massive upswing in anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic activity at these institutions. Downstream effects on American and global society may also be inferred as institutional cachets bolstered hateful stances from graduates.
Faculty Lead the Antisemitism Effort on Campus
Faculty continue to stand at the vanguard of anti-Israel and antisemitism on campus, a reality highlighted by details in the House Education and Workforce Committee report. In the wake of the Iran conflict Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups have also become outspoken in support of the Iranian regime and have decried the US.
The University of California Ethnic Studies Council and Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism stated, “We reject imperialist and fear mongering narratives that position Iran as the intruder in the region, rather than US military bases and US interventionism.”
Union Theological Seminary announced the creation of a “Religion and Public Life” program led by two former Harvard Theological Seminary faculty who had left that institution after the program had been scrutinized for its goal to “dezionize Jewish consciousness.” The appointment of Harvard faculty member Rosie Bsheer as Columbia’s “Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature” also installs a reliably anti-Israel if mediocre figure in a high profile position. Reports regarding Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies also depict a Jewish founded academic unit that has been thoroughly colonized by “anti-Zionist” faculty.
Elsewhere the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health also held another “human rights” event in which participants accused Israel of “genocide.” The head of that center, Kari Nadeau, has now been named dean of public health at UCLA.
In an unusual case that suggests the methods used by Qatar supporters to police academia, Kings College London academic Andreas Krieg was forced to apologize and compensate two individuals in separate defamation cases. Krieg had falsely alleged one of the academics was a UAE agent operating in Sweden which generated official investigations. Krieg was formerly a contractor for the Qatari Ministry of Defense and has a long history of promoting explicitly Qatari viewpoints.
Students Embrace Iran
The most notable development in the student sphere in March were expressions of support for the Islamic Republic of Iran in response to the American-Israel campaign. This included mourning Ayatollah Khamenei by the Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society at Kings College London, which called his death “an unimaginable loss.”
At the University of Washington, a pro-Hamas student group endorsed a message from the PFLP affiliated Tariq el-Tahrir Youth and Student Network praising “the raining of blessed missiles over US military bases” and calls for “DEATH TO AMERICA, DEATH TO ISRAEL, GLORY TO THE MARTYRS, LONG LIVE THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN, LONG LIVE THE AXIS OF RESISTANCE!”
The infamous pro-Hamas umbrella group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) also posted the message “Marg bar Amrika” or “death to America.” This forced the university to state the group was not “affiliated in any way with the University,” and that, “There is no evidence that anyone currently in control of their account is a current Columbia student, staff, or faculty member. They are illegally using the Columbia name.” Columbia was also forced to suspend the Young Democratic Socialists of America group for its continuing affiliation with CUAD.
Antisemitism in British education continues to intensify. The depth of hostility towards Jews on British campuses is depicted in a new report from the Union of Jewish Students, which details among other things that 20% of students would be reluctant or unwilling to have a Jewish housemate. Some 47% of students indicated they had been exposed to slogans or protests celebrating the Hamas massacres of October 7. The massacres were widely hailed by pro-Hamas student groups who celebrated the killing of Israeli civilians and soldiers. Jewish students are also routinely subjected to harassment and even violence on and off campuses
K-12 Teachers Support Iran and Oppose Israel
Teachers unions remain the focal point for anti-Israel and anti-American activism (and in the case of Philadelphia for training “revolutionary abolitionists”). They have now also taken the lead as supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In response to the attack on Iran the Chicago Teachers Union co-sponsored a “hands off Iran and Lebanon” rally along with Palestinian, communist and other groups.
The union also adopted a resolution calling for a May Day civic action that would shut down schools. The protest calls for “No Work, No School, and No Shopping” to “defend our Democracy, demand ICE out of our cities, and tax the rich to support our schools and vital services.”
Anti-Israel activity by teachers unions and state officials in Canada continues to follow the path of Britain toward antisemitism and boycotts of Israel. In one development the British Columbia Teachers Federation passed a motion endorsing the BDS movement. In another, Montreal school officials announced they would be investigating reports of Israeli soldiers speaking in Jewish schools as violations of public funding laws.
In a third case a Holocaust survivor’s talk at a Canadian private school’s symposium was canceled. The school pointed to safety and the “current volatile geopolitical climate and … the high-profile nature of the dignitaries scheduled to attend,” and said it was “reviewing the format of its annual Holocaust commemoration ceremony.” The move came as “anti-Palestinian racism” continues to be elevated as the single most important and untouchable form of discrimination and pedagogical pivot in Canadian schools.
Dr. Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian specializing in the Middle East and contemporary international affairs. A completely different version of this article was originally published by SPME.
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Ambulances Burned in London: How Many More Warnings Do We Need?
Charred remains of ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish community organization, which were set on fire in an incident that the police say is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, in northwest London, Britain, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
The world woke up last week to the news of yet another antisemitic attack in the UK, this time in the form of an arson attack, where three masked individuals set alight four Hatzola ambulances outside a synagogue in Golders Green, London.
The police were surprisingly quick to label this as an antisemitic attack. Tweets started flooding in from political leaders such as the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, declaring “This is a deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack,” and “Antisemitism has no place in our society.”
We need to ask ourselves a simple question: Is condemnation really enough to stop this?
On September 27, 2025 — a late Saturday night — I sat down at a pub in Manchester. Not even 60 seconds passed before my kippah caught a middle-aged woman’s attention. She leaned right over me, demanding answers: “Do you believe in genocide?” “Do you believe in free Palestine?”
Trying to de-escalate and enjoy my pint in peace, I respond, “Let’s keep politics away from the pub.”
She repeated herself in a more aggressive tone, and then picked up my pint, threw it in my face, and ran out straight into a taxi.
With just 12 hours until my flight, the police agreed to meet me the next morning to take a statement. I gave them a very clear message: If you don’t deal with the minor antisemitic attacks, there will be something way bigger, and it will be too late.
Five days later, just 0.5 miles from that pub, the Yom Kippur attack occurred — when an Islamist terrorist committed a heinous act of violence, leaving two Jews murdered in cold blood.
Following the shocking terror attack, I hoped the police would finally enforce a zero-tolerance policy on minor antisemitic attacks, especially the antisemitic assault that happened to me at the pub five days prior, as they had promised during the interview.
I stayed hopeful for four months, until the case was closed with no action taken. What does that tell us?
The Jewish community in the UK has reached a stage where they often don’t bother calling the police after antisemitic assaults or attacks, because receiving a crime reference number and a “we won’t tolerate antisemitism in our society” condemnation isn’t enough.
When British political leaders and police turn a blind eye to hundreds of antisemitic assaults in the UK, while thousands march and scream “globalize the intifada,” and Israelis are banned from attending a soccer game on British soil, does that reduce antisemitism — or risk encouraging it?
If the UK is serious about making Jews feel safe, they must end these marches calling to “globalize the intifada,” and crack down on every single minor antisemitic attack.
What starts small doesn’t stay small.
A group calling themselves the “Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand” has claimed responsibility for the arson attack on the Hatzola ambulances, and several other arson attacks targeting synagogues in Europe over the past month. This terrorist organization has ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), yet the UK still fails to formally proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization. We must ask ourselves: What signal does that send to those willing to attack Jews?
The warning signs are there. They’ve been there.
At what point are they actually going to be taken seriously?
Chaim Frankenhuis is a UK-born commentator based in Israel, focusing on the rise of antisemitism, distorted media narratives, and developments surrounding Jewish heritage.