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She represents the ‘worst of the worst.’ Now Judy Clarke is leading the defense in Pittsburgh synagogue massacre trial.
PITTSBURGH (Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle via JTA) — When Judy Clarke delivered her opening statement to the jury that will determine the fate of the man charged with committing the massacre in the Tree of Life synagogue building, she did not deny that her client was responsible.
In fact, she sympathized with the victims and their families.
Clarke, 71, began her address by acknowledging the horror of Oct. 27, 2018, and its aftermath.
“The tragedy that brings us together today,” she said in a soft-spoken yet confident voice, is “almost incomprehensible. It’s inexcusable. … Eleven lives were taken, others shattered. The loss that occurred is immeasurable.”
She told the jury there was “no disagreement, no doubt” about the identity of the perpetrator. It was “the man seated at that table,” she said, indicating her client. “He shot every person he saw and, in the process, injured others in their sacred spaces.”
Clarke was appointed to Robert Bowers’ defense team in December 2018, after he requested the counsel of a federal public defender specializing in death penalty cases. He faces 63 criminal counts related to his attack on congregations Dor Hadash, New Light and Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha. Many of the charges carry the death penalty.
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As the trial proceeds, Clarke won’t try to convince the jury her client isn’t guilty. A “win” for her defense team will be for the defendant to avoid a death sentence and instead have him remain in prison for the rest of his life.
Clarke has vast experience defending those whom some call “the worst of the worst.” Her roster of past clients includes Susan Smith, who murdered her two young sons by drowning them in a lake in South Carolina; Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber; Buford Furrow, a white supremacist who opened fire in a Jewish community center outside of Los Angeles in 1999; Eric Rudolph, who planted a bomb in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Except for Tsarnaev — whose case is under appeal — Clarke succeeded in avoiding a death sentence for all her clients, either by negotiating a plea deal or by convincing the jury that mitigating factors, such as a mental illness, precluded imposition of the ultimate punishment.
Clarke’s team tried to negotiate a deal for a life sentence for Bowers in exchange for a guilty plea but was unsuccessful. Four and a half years after the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, the three-week jury selection process commenced on April 24 and testimony began on May 30.
“This is not a straightforward murder case,” Clarke told the jury in her opening statement. The federal charges — which include obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death — must be proved by showing the defendant had the requisite intent to commit those particular crimes, she said.
She acknowledged that her client’s actions on Oct. 27, 2018, were “reprehensible” and “misguided” and recounted his virulent social media postings and other rantings about Jews. But she also portrayed him as “quiet” and “socially awkward, a man with few friends.” He didn’t live on his own until he was 44, she said, and his family saw him as someone “more likely to commit suicide than kill others.”
It’s clear that Clarke is appalled by her client’s actions. It’s also clear that she is determined to see that his rights are protected and that the judge and the jury faithfully apply the rule of law.
“Judy is one of the best lawyers I’ve ever known,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angles and a former federal prosecutor. “She works insanely hard. She spends the time with the clients that she needs to. She doesn’t believe in the death penalty, and she’s devoted herself to representing people who are, you know — ‘the Voyage of the Damned’ is what she would say.”
Levenson, who has known Clarke for three decades, described her as “honest” and “very humble.”
“She doesn’t stand against the victims,” Levenson stressed. “I think she actually feels very much for the tragedy that occurred. But she has a job to do, which is to try to save her client’s life. And she does it with integrity.”
The two met during the Unabomber case, when Clarke was representing Kaczynski and Levenson was a legal commentator for CBS. Kaczynski at first resisted a plea deal sentencing him to life in prison because he did not want to admit to mental health issues.
Defense attorney Judy Clarke, at right, responds to questions at a press conference after the trial of Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski was delayed in Sacramento, California, Jan. 8, 1998.(Rich Pedroncelli/AFP via Getty Images)
“She had a very difficult client, one that I think a lot of people would just sort of throw up their hands and say, ‘What can I do?’” Levenson recalled. “And she was able to get him to agree to that plea, which probably saved his life.”
Ted Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski, praised Clarke for her ability to see humanity, even in those who have committed unspeakable atrocities.
“She has a really good heart, a really good intention,” David Kaczynski said. “I think she really cares about her clients. I think she has a kind of unconditional commitment to their humanity. And, of course, that meant a lot to me, because as much as I deplore what my brother did in harming people, I love him. He’s my brother.”
“So it’s a very fine line to walk, representing the client who has clearly got some serious personal problem,” he continued. “Ted was quite a loner. He was very shy. He had a very difficult time connecting with anybody. And in this very difficult situation, Judy was able to be there for him, and I think that was really meaningful for Ted, that he had some support, some human connection at this time of crisis in his life.”
David Kaczynski has followed Clarke’s career and continues to be impressed with her “professionalism and sense of humility.”
“I think the legal profession is trained to be strictly analytical and adversarial,” he said. “And she somehow works within this environment in a way that preserves her humanity as she’s trying to make people aware of the humanity of someone whose very right to exist is in question.”
Some question whether a person who has committed a heinous crime deserves a zealous defense. Levenson insists they do.
Our judicial system is “best served” when capital defendants are provided with a high-caliber defense, Levenson said, because “it’s in these situations where people are so emotionally invested that we can get it wrong.”
In addition to being a former prosecutor, Levenson created the Loyola Project for the Innocent, which works to get those who are serving sentences for crimes they did not commit out of prison.
Defense attorney Judy Clarke, seen here in Pittsburgh in 2023, is representing the man accused of murdering 11 Jews during Shabbat services in Pittsburgh in 2018. (Screenshot from KDKA report)
“I’ve seen firsthand that there are far too many lawyers who just immediately assume that their client’s not only guilty but should get the most severe punishment — that there’s nothing to be said on their client’s behalf,” Levenson said. “And you and I both know there’s a lot more to any given case, and that even people who do terrible crimes have other aspects of their lives that the justice system should consider.”
“In our system, we are supposed to consider each case, each individual, the facts, and not only determine whether someone’s guilty but what should happen to them,” she continued. “And that works well. When you have a lawyer who’s just going through the motions — and the one thing you can say about Judy is she doesn’t just go through the motions — I think the public can have more confidence in the verdict. As long as that lawyer is acting honestly and with integrity, it’s so much better to have that zealous advocate.”
The massacre at the Tree of Life building “was just a terrible, terrible, terrible tragedy,” said Levenson, who is Jewish. Clarke “will do her best to keep the case in perspective. In other words, focus not on big messages, but on this individual and any mitigating factors for this individual.”
Jon B. Gould, dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California-Irvine, has researched attorneys who specialize in death penalty cases. In 2019, along with Maya Pagni Barak, he published “Capital Defense: Inside the Lives of America’s Death Penalty Lawyers,” a book based on extensive interviews, providing insight into the reasons someone would willingly represent a person who has committed an egregious crime.
“They are an unusual kind of lawyer,” Gould said. “They’re actually an unusual kind of person because for many of these cases, they are representing what is sometimes said to be ‘the worst of the worst.’”
There are a variety of motivating factors for capital defense work, Gould said. Some of these lawyers are strongly opposed to state-sanctioned killing. For others, he said, “it is the excitement of the most complicated kind of law.”
Other death penalty specialists take the cases for “professional prestige,” and some do it for the money because capital defense lawyers get paid more than regular defense lawyers, Gould said. Some take the cases for religious reasons.
“Now, that’s all in the larger context of none of these lawyers looks at the facts of the case and thinks it’s anything other than a horrific tragedy,” Gould stressed. “I also found that for many of them, they are entirely sympathetic to the family members of the victims. They don’t look at these cases and think, no big deal. They look at these cases and think that’s something horrible that happened to the victim’s family, but they also look at the defendant and think, as one of them said to me, ‘No one gets to this place of being the defendant without having something horrible having happened to them earlier in life.’”
Death penalty cases are “really, really, really hard on defense lawyers,” Gould added. “It’s really distressing work. The evidence that they have to pore through is horrific. Many of them have PTSD.”
While many people “look at defense lawyers and think there must be something wrong with them,” Gould said it’s essential to remember “that they are fulfilling a very important function in the criminal justice system that none of us would ever want to have to do.”
“That doesn’t mean that any of us is unsympathetic to the victims,” he emphasized. “No one deserves what’s happened in any of these cases. But if we do believe in the rule of law, then there needs to be capital defense lawyers. And we need to respect the work they’re doing because that’s what it means to live in a system of rule of law and not simply a system where we simply execute people in the town square without the opportunity to have a defense.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by funding from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. It is reprinted with permission.
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Anti-Zionist ‘Catholics for Catholics’ Group to Honor Carrie Prejean Boller at Event Featuring Candace Owens
Carrie Prejean Boller, who was ousted from the White House Religious Liberty Commission in February 2026 following outrage over her repeated downplaying of antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot
Right-wing, anti-Zionist activist Carrie Prejean Boller, who was recently removed from the White House Religious Liberty Commission over her conduct and repeated downplaying of antisemitism, will receive a “Catholic Champion” award next month at a gala organized by Catholics for Catholics, a group which urges Catholics to reject Zionism and promote American nationalism.
Prejean Boller’s behavior at a Feb. 9 commission hearing intended to address rising antisemitism in the United States included an impassioned defense of antisemitic personalities Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, as well as her peddling of unsubstantiated claims that Israel has intentionally starved and murdered Palestinian civilians.
“I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling Candace Owens an antisemite,” Prejean Boller said to Seth Dillon, CEO of the political satire site Babylon Bee, during the hearing. “She’s not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism, and that really has to stop. I don’t know why you keep bringing her up, and Tucker.”
In January, Owens blamed Zionists for directing US President Donald Trump’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and chose to repost rapper Ye (former Kanye West)’s “Death Con 3 on Jewish People” tweet from 2022, praising the sentiment as a “whole vibe.” She has labeled Jews as “pedophilic,” accused them of murdering Christians, and blamed them for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in addition to making comments casting doubt on the Holocaust. In November, Owens admitted she had grown obsessed with the Jewish people.
During the hearing earlier this month, Prejean Boller, a former Miss California, also pressed witnesses, including Jewish religious leaders, on Israel and Zionism, questioning whether opposition to the Jewish state should be considered antisemitic, and castigated Israeli military action in Gaza. She donned a Palestinian flag pin on the lapel of her suit. Prejean Boller’s conduct drew audible boos from the audience and confusion from her colleagues, as well as widespread backlash online.
The next day, Prejean Boller posted on X defending herself, writing, “I will continue to stand against Zionist supremacy in America. I’m a proud Catholic. I, in no way will be forced to embrace Zionism as a fulfillment of biblical prophesy [sic]. I am a free American. Not a slave to a foreign nation.”
The commission was established by US President Donald Trump to examine religious freedom issues and was intended to focus on concrete challenges facing Jewish communities, including bias and harassment. It is supposed to produce a report for Trump on religious liberty later this year.
Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas and chair of the commission, announced Prejean Boller’s expulsion from the panel on Feb. 11, saying she “hijacked” the hearing for her “own personal and political agenda.”
Then John Yep, president of Catholics for Catholics, announced on Feb. 12 that Prejean Boller would receive his group’s “Catholic Champion” award at its upcoming March 19 Catholic Prayer for America Gala in Washington, DC. Speakers announced for the event include Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Owens, her former Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh, Father Chris Alar, Sister Dede Byrne, and Yep himself.
“Politics is always downstream from religion. While Catholics acknowledge that the modern 1948-State of Israel has a NATURAL right to exist, pushing a false ‘Biblical Mandate’ to support its domination of the entire Holy Land is neither Catholic, nor in America’s interests,” Yep stated. “Tragically, this theological error has often been used to justify both, horrific crimes against our Christian Palestinian brethren, and catastrophic foreign policy decisions by American leaders.”
Yep insists that his group only opposes Zionism and does not promote antisemitism.
“Of course as Catholics, antisemitism — hatred of Jews — is wrong,” Yep wrote. “But so is equivocating resisting ‘Zionism’ with hatred of Jews. This is what my fellow Catholic Carrie Prejean so boldly stood for on the panel for Religious Liberty.”
Yep frames his group’s purpose as defending Catholics for expressing their faith publicly. “When one of our own is out there bravely trying to stand up for what is right and is getting attacked, rest assured we won’t sit back,” he said. “We are a movement of faithful patriots that back frontline warriors like Carrie, who love God and the USA with the power of our Catholic faith.”
Simone Rizkallah, the director of the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism, pushed back against Yep’s plans in a statement to the Christian Post calling Prejean Boller’s actions “inappropriate behavior that warranted her removal, as Lt. Gov. Patrick rightly determined.”
Rizkallah said that Prejean Boller “should not be rewarded for such conduct, nor should it be held up as a model of Catholic witness.”
“The violence against our Jewish friends that American Catholics have witnessed on American soil in the last few years should be enough to disturb us,” she added. “At the very least, it should alert us to the tone-deafness — if not outright malice — of Miss Prejean’s behavior and the scandal of celebrating it.”
After acknowledging that the Catholic Church disagreed theologically with Christian Zionists who come from an Evangelical tradition which regards the state of Israel through the lens of fulfilling Biblical prophecy, Rizkallah said that “while the Catholic Church does not embrace prophetic or eschatological forms of Christian Zionism, Catholic theology does leave room for distinctly Catholic theological reflection that affirms the enduring covenantal significance of the Jewish people and the moral legitimacy of Jewish self-determination in their historic homeland.”
Last month, Pope Leo XIV marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a statement reaffirming the Catholic Church’s “unwavering” opposition to antisemitism. He also concluded with a link to Nostra Aetate, a declaration from the Second Vatican Council and promulgated on Oct. 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI, that called for dialogue and respect between Christianity and other religions. The theological reform called for a position of Christian-Jewish brotherhood, advocating “the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham’s stock.”
Leo has made speaking out against rising antisemitism a topic of regular concern since his papacy began last year.
Catholics for Catholics, founded in 2022, describes itself as “a militant organization dedicated to the evangelization of this great country through public prayer, powerful media, and strategic political action. We’re warriors who love Christ, our Lady, and the USA.”
The group’s logo is a shield with the Virgin Mary in the foreground and a 1776 American flag in the background. It has received an endorsement from Trump who said “your love of God and Country is evident in everything you do. We admire your dedication to preserving America’s founding principles through your faith.”
In a statement, Catholics for Catholics claimed that Zionism “has too often warped the minds of Christians about their own faith, and deadened their hearts to the plight of their brethren in the Middle East.” The group said that Catholics were being intimidated to “speak about the 1948 State of Israel in a way they speak about no other nation. And if we don’t comply with their demands, they’ll slander us as ‘Antisemites.’”
On Feb. 10, Yep wrote on X that “if an American thinks it’s bad to have blind support for the Country of the VATICAN …for example send billions of tax pay dollars to them..or other things…We Catholics dont consider you ‘anti-catholic.’ We humbly ask you in return not to use your religion to make us blindly support a foreign nation and call us ‘anti semitic” if we dont. Thank you [sic]!”
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Israel’s Bobsled Team Clarifies It Withdrew From Last Day of Winter Olympics After Wanting Lineup Switch
Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics – Bobsleigh – 4-man Heat 1 – Cortina Sliding Centre, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy – Feb. 21, 2026. Adam Edelman of Israel, Menachem Chen of Israel, Uri Zisman of Israel, Omer Katz of Israel in action during Heat 1. Photo: REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha
Israel’s four-man bobsled team withdrew from the last day of the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics on Sunday after there were issues with how the team wanted to change its lineup mid-competition and allow its alternate to participate.
The team’s captain and pilot AJ Edelman explained in a series of posts on X that since the team knew it had no chance of winning in the third heat on Sunday, it wanted to give their alternative, 25-year-old Druze athlete Ward Fawarseh, an opportunity to compete in the Olympics for the first time ever before the Winter Games concluded. Farwarseh is the first Druze to make it to the Olympics, and this year marks the first time ever that Israel is competing in bobsledding in the Games.
However, changing push athletes midway through a competition is only permitted under special circumstances, including an illness or injury. As a result, the Israeli team – consisting of AJ Edelman, Menachem Chen, Uri Zisman, and Omer Katz – decided together to withdraw from the third heat on Sunday.
“We offered to withdraw before any action was taken,” Edelman told The Algemeiner on Monday, clarifying that his team was not disqualified from the competition, despite reports suggesting the contrary.
“Given that our placement going into the final run was all but predetermined, it was more important to us that our alternate could have the opportunity to compete in the Olympics. The team moved to make the replacement,” Edelman further explained in a post on X. “But the circumstances under which we made the substitution did not meet the bar that allows a team to make a lineup change, and we withdrew from our final run.”
“I will always remain proud that the team looked at their Druze brother, who had earned his place on the team, and unanimously said ‘we want this for you.’ I signed off on it and I take responsibility,” the American-Israeli athlete wrote in a subsequent post. He added that he apologizes “profusely” if fans were disappointed, but in a since-deleted post on X, he added that he does not apologize “at all” for the decision.
“The switch is not only common in our sport, we did it believing it was good for the country and to honor our teammate,” he said. “We thought we were putting country first.”
Team Israel finished the first two runs of the four-man bobsled competition with a combined time of 1:51.16, which placed them in 24th place out of 27 leading into the third heat on Sunday. Edelman and his teammate Menachem Chen also competed in the two-man bobsled race during the Winter Olympics.
In a statement given to The Times of Israel, the Olympic Committee of Israel claimed it did not allow the bobsled team to compete in the third heat on Sunday because they lied about a team member being sick in order to switch push athletes between the first two heats on Saturday and the third heat on Sunday.
“The bobsleigh team asked to include Ward, the substitute, in the competition. According to the rules, this is only permitted if one of the athletes is injured or ill,” the OCI said. “In order to make this possible, one of the team members — encouraged by his teammates — declared that he was unwell. He even went for a medical examination and signed an affidavit so that the Olympic Committee could request approval for a substitution.”
The OCI said that afterward, Zisman “admitted to the head of the delegation that he had acted improperly. This forced the Olympic Committee of Israel to withdraw the request and disqualify the move.” The OCI said that the team’s behavior was “improper” and “goes against fair and sportsmanlike conduct.”
In response to the OCI’s comments, Edelman told The Algemeiner that his team withdrew from the competition before the OCI took any action against them. “The process to change Ward to a primary accreditation is within the OCI control. The team’s withdrawal was within our own,” he said. “The team received a DNS, a ‘did not start,’ not a DSQ [disqualified].”
Bobsled was Israel’s only team sport at the Milan Cortina Winter Games. Edelman is Israel’s first multi-sport Olympian, after competing previously in skeleton, and he is also the first Jewish bobsled pilot to compete in the Olympic Games. He is additionally the most decorated observant Jewish Olympian and is believed to be the first Orthodox Jew to ever compete in the Winter Games.
Over the weekend, Italy’s state broadcaster RAI apologized after viewers heard on air someone tell others to “avoid” filming the Israeli bobsled team before it broadcast coverage of the four-man bobsled race at the Olympics on Saturday. Viewers heard, “Let’s avoid crew number 21, which is the Israeli one.”
RAI condemned the remark as “unacceptable” and RAI CEO Giampaolo Rossi said the incident represented a “serious” breach of the network’s “principles of impartiality, respect, and inclusion.” He added that RAI had opened an internal investigation to determine responsibility for the remarks and disciplinary proceedings.
Before the start of the 2026 Winter Games, an apartment in the Czech Republic where the Israeli bobsled team was staying during their final training was robbed, and passports and personal belongings were stolen. Then, during the team’s two-man bobsled race on Feb. 16, a commentator on the Swiss network RTS claimed on-air that Edelman “supports the genocide in Gaza” and should have been banned from the Olympics. The commentator also described the athlete as a “self-defined ‘Zionist to the core.’”
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Jewish Community Advocates Urge US Civil Rights Commission to Take Campus Antisemitism Seriously
A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a bullhorn during a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 11, 2025. Photo: Daniel Cole via Reuters Connect.
Jewish community advocates and civil rights lawyers discussed the campus antisemitism crisis in American higher education during two days of briefings and public comment held by the US Commission on Civil Rights last week, urging the agency to fight anti-Jewish hatred as aggressively as with other forms of discrimination.
Titled “Antisemitism on America’s College and University Campuses: Current Conditions and the Federal Response,” the forum served as one component of the commission’s bipartisan investigation of campus antisemitism, an inquiry led by Peter Kirsanow, a Republican, and Mondaire Jones, a Democrat. Drawing from advocates as well as critics of the Jewish community’s response to campus antisemitism, it highlighted work that remains undone while exposing some differences in opinion on Zionism, free expression on campus, and interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal funding.
During the proceedings, several students who witnessed the onslaught firsthand described how the administrative bureaucracy, a branch of higher education governance dominated by the American progressive movement, stonewalled discrimination complaints, ignored utterances of classic antisemitic tropes, and refused to acknowledge rising antisemitism on the political left while accusing Jewish community advocates of assaulting academic freedom.
“I raised concerns repeatedly with administrators — but was met with silence or deliberate indifference. My peers faced retaliation in classic DARVO tactic: deny, attack, and reverse victim-offender roles,” said Sabrina Soffer, research fellow for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and a George Washington University alumna who sued the institution over alleged antisemitic discrimination. “We must stop this pipeline of hate in its tracks. Administrators must be held accountable for failing to enforce academic integrity and upholding their duty of care. We must scrutinize foreign funding, syllabi review, and the composition of academic departments.”
For several years before and since Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Algemeiner has reported daily on campus antisemitism incidents which involved identity-based physical assaults, verbal abuse, and others acts of discrimination. These included anti-Zionists spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew”; gang assaults at Columbia University’s Butler Library; swastika graffiti; the desecration of Jewish religious symbols; and the expulsion of a sexual assault survivor from a victim support group over her support for Zionism.
Other incidents include, a faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic political cartoon which marked Jews and Israel as enemies of people of color; a Cornell University student threatening to murder Jewish men, whom he called pigs, and to rape Jewish women, and perpetrate a mass shooting at the campus’ kosher dining hall; and professors praising Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which included mass murder, sexual assault, and kidnapping as legitimate modes of “resistance.”
Many such incidents preceded the Oct. 7 massacre by several years and received little to no coverage in the mainstream press.
Lenny Gold, executive producer of the campus antisemitism awareness documentary “The Blind Spot,” said during the hearing that higher education has hidden from the problem in lieu of addressing it transparently and vigorously.
“Schools often invoke academic freedom to justify their indifference to antisemitism while failing to recognize freedom’s inseparable partner: responsibility,” Gold said. “Academic responsibility includes eliminating the blind spot towards Jews and our inextricable connection to our ancient homeland, and having zero tolerance for antisemitism in classrooms, on campus, and in curricula, academic departments, and administrative staffs.”
He continued, “Anti-discrimination programs and policies must treat Jews an antisemitism on an equal footing with other protected groups and forms of prejudice.’
Soffer and Gold’s point of view sustained a slew of opposition during last week’s gathering, with some critic isms being uttered by Jewish students from elite colleges who accused the media and pro-Israel Jewish community of exaggerating the antisemitism crisis in the name of profits, ideology, and bullying the Ivy League. They also accused US President Donald Trump — whose daughter is Jewish and whose administration has mounted a legal campaign against campus antisemitism and the ideological bias that fostered it — of exploiting antisemitism to promote a political agenda.
“Since the Gaza War, I’ve felt more hesitant to tell people I’m Jewish, not because I’m scared of being the victim of a hate crime, but because I’m scared people will assume I’m against Palestinian people and associate me with the Trump administration’s anti-Palestinian rhetoric,” American University student Ellie Sweet told the commission, insisting that what is being described as antisemitism is harmless, anti-Israel rhetoric.
Another student, Sarah Silverman of Harvard University, screamed her entire seven-minute statement, in which she at one point charged that “policy described as protecting Jewish students did not make me feel protected!” She added, “Instead, in a deeply troubling way, I felt blamed. I knew I had done nothing wrong, but when decisions are made in your name without ever speaking to you but are affecting your academic community in extremely negative ways, you begin to worry that others believed you asked for these actions.”
A highlight of the event was testimony delivered by Kenneth Marcus, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights during the first Trump administration and currently leads the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
“Antisemitism does have various disguises, and anti-Zionism in that sense brings forward to the present all of the same tropes, the same stereotypes, the same defamations that have historically befallen the Jewish people, viewing Israel as the collective Jew or Jew among nations” he told the commission. “That is the form of antisemitism that we see most commonly on colleges campuses and that we need to address.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.