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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
—
The post Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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To Fight Antisemitism, Rebuild the Core Curriculum
Illustrative photo of a university classroom. Photo: Public domain.
Walk into almost any college classroom today and try a simple exercise: ask students to explain when, why, and by whom the modern state of Israel was founded.
I tried this recently with a group that was clearly comfortable using the term “settler colonialism” to describe the country. The room went quiet. One student mentioned World War II. Another suggested the British. A third admitted she wasn’t sure but felt strongly about it.
These were intelligent, motivated students. They were not refusing to engage. They were engaging earnestly with a vocabulary they had inherited but never been asked to examine. The problem was not their conviction. It was the absence of anything beneath it.
My anecdote is not the only evidence. The 2025 FIRE College Free Speech Rankings, drawing on more than 58,000 student responses across 250 institutions, found that 55 percent of students said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was difficult to discuss on their campus – the highest figure ever recorded on any issue in six years of the survey. The students chanting most loudly are not the students reporting that difficulty. The students reporting that difficulty are the recruitable middle: the ones who sense they are missing something but do not know where to begin. The data tells us they are out there in large numbers. The anecdote tells us what they are missing. They are the students a real curriculum could reach.
This is the campus crisis in miniature. The encampments, the shouted-down speakers, the slogans about rivers and seas whose geography their chanters cannot place: these are not the words and work of deeply read ideologues. They are the work of students absorbing claims from professors, administrators, fellow students, activist organizations, and social media without any baseline against which to test them. The committed ideologues – inside the institution and outside it – are not going away easily or quickly. The question is whether the students they are recruiting encounter, somewhere in their four years, the foundation that lets them notice when something is off.
Right now, they rarely do. American higher education has spent four decades dismantling the shared intellectual foundation that once made such noticing possible – the true core curriculum that ensures every student encounters the basic texts, histories, and ideas needed to make sense of the world they are trying to debate.
Our Jewish tradition has always understood that productive disagreement requires a shared foundation. Pirkei Avot distinguishes between machloket l’shem shamayim – argument for the sake of Heaven – and the rebellion of Korach. The disputes of Hillel and Shammai endure because both sides argued from a shared foundation of text and truth. Korach’s challenge is remembered not as productive disagreement but as faction. The difference is not intensity. It is the foundation beneath it. Korach’s mode works on people without grounding; Hillel and Shammai’s is unintelligible without it.
This is what we are watching on campus. The slogans are loud, but they are not arguments in the sense our tradition recognizes. They are assertions made in the absence of foundation – faction, not machloket. And the students absorbing them are not refusing the conditions of real disagreement; they have never been taught that those conditions exist. Without shared knowledge, there is no common language. Without a common language, there is no argument, only assertion. The encampments and the chants are what assertion looks like at scale.
The objection comes immediately: Columbia still has a core. Lit Hum requires Genesis and the Gospels. Contemporary Civilization assigns the Bible alongside Plato, Augustine, Ibn Khaldun, Locke, and Arendt. The texts are there. Students are required to read them. And Columbia was nonetheless an epicenter of the post–October 7 campus collapse.
The lesson is not that core curricula fail. It is that content alone is insufficient. A core taught ironically – treated with contempt or as a relic to be subverted rather than a tradition to wrestle with -will not produce the formation it once did. A required text taught grudgingly by faculty who view it as an artifact of oppression does not do the work the syllabus promises. Rebuilding the core means rebuilding the faculty culture that delivers it. Content is necessary; institutional seriousness is what makes it sufficient. The new programs at Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona State understood this. They built dedicated hiring lines in dedicated units, recruiting faculty whose intellectual commitments matched the project rather than reassigning faculty whose training pointed elsewhere. A real core requires the same.
The case for a core curriculum is more modest than the one usually made. It will not convert the committed activist or persuade the tenured ideologue. It will not stop outside organizations from producing falsified history about Israel, Zionism, or Jewish life. What it does is raise the cost of that propaganda by producing students who know enough to notice when something is wrong. A student who has read the Hebrew Bible, studied the history of the Middle East, and encountered Jewish thought as a living tradition rather than a footnote is not immune to bad arguments, but she is far better equipped to test them.
This is also why the post–October 7 wave of mandatory antisemitism trainings, IHRA workshops, and one-off DEI modules will not solve the problem. Inserting a two-hour training into an unformed mind does not produce the noticing capacity. It produces students who can recite definitions during the workshop and forget them by Friday, because the definitions are not anchored in anything. The same logic applies to the broader menu universities and donors are funding right now – and this is the harder truth for our community to hear: expanded Jewish studies offerings reach the already-interested, and several flagship programs have themselves been absorbed into the framework the core would interrupt. Targeted interventions assume a foundation that no longer exists. Build the foundation, and targeted interventions become unnecessary; skip the foundation, and they become theater.
A real core curriculum is about exposure: to foundational texts, enduring debates, and the accumulated knowledge of civilization. It means basic historical literacy – ancient civilizations, the rise of monotheism, the events shaping the modern world. It means treating Jewish history as world history – from biblical origins through diaspora, emancipation, the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel – as a continuous thread, not a parenthesis. The Hebrew Bible’s influence on the American Founding, Maimonides on Aquinas, Jewish thinkers in the development of modern human rights law: these are not parochial concerns but central threads of the civilization students think they already understand. And it also means religious diverse literacy – serious familiarity with the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Quran, and other major traditions, taught alongside Jewish thought rather than instead of it.
In practice, this is a two to six-course required sequence taken across the first two years; roughly fifteen percent of an undergraduate program. The sequence sits before the major and replaces a portion of current distribution requirements. It is not an addition to the curriculum but a reorganization of what students already take, with the elective buffet narrowed and the shared foundation restored.
None of this is radical. Until recently, it was the baseline of an educated person.
Some institutions still take this seriously. Chicago has run its Common Core since the 1930s. Ursinus requires every undergraduate to take its Common Intellectual Experience. Yale’s Directed Studies is being expanded to meet rising student demand. More telling is the rise of new programs built from scratch. The Hamilton School at the University of Florida now houses the Robert M. Beren Program on Jewish Classical Education, which makes Jewish classical texts and Hebraic ideas a core pillar rather than an elective sidecar. North Carolina has launched a School of Civic Life and Leadership; Arizona State has run its School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership for nearly a decade. These programs are imperfect, but they demonstrate that meaningful academic offerings can be built in eighteen months when an institution decides to act.
This is the question our community has to confront honestly. Jewish philanthropy has spent enormous sums in the past two years on antisemitism response: Hillel programming, Israel education, campus security, dedicated Jewish studies chairs, Title VI litigation, monitoring projects. Some of it has worked. Much of it has not. And the highest-leverage move available to Jewish philanthropy right now may not be the obvious Jewish-specific one. The Beren Program at Florida launched with $15 million in philanthropic support; it is now training students who arrive on campus knowing more about Jewish history than most of their professors do. The new schools at North Carolina and Arizona State were built with state appropriations and trustee will. None of these are Jewish-specific projects. All of them do Jewish-specific work because forming students capable of serious thought about anything also forms them capable of serious thought about us.
The reflex is to fund Jewish-specific responses to antisemitism. The harder argument is that the highest-leverage Jewish philanthropic move right now is funding the rebuilding of the general core curriculum at major universities. Chairs in foundational texts. Programs in classical education. Centers that anchor serious engagement with the Western and Jewish traditions together. Not because these projects are Jewish, but because they form the soil in which serious thought about Jewish history, Israel, and Zionism can take root and in which the lies our students are being fed become harder to plant. We have the resources. The question is whether we have the institutional patience.
In theory, this work should begin earlier. In practice, K–12 education is too politicized to sustain a shared curriculum. California’s ethnic studies experience is the cautionary tale: the initial mandate was widely condemned for antisemitic content, and even after revisions the so-called “Liberated Ethnic Studies” movement produced classroom materials that have generated lawsuits and settlements. New York has required Holocaust instruction since 1994, yet a 2022 law was needed simply to verify whether districts were complying. K–12 reform is necessary, but it will not be swift or clean. Higher education is different. Trustees, presidents, and faculty senates retain genuine curricular autonomy. The barrier is not law. It is institutional will; a hard problem, but a solvable one.
Defenders of the current system frame open-ended choice as empowering. In practice, an education composed entirely of choices is not an education at all. It is a collection of experiences. The core curriculum was never about limiting freedom. It was about ensuring that freedom rested on a foundation. And contrary to the assumption that students would resist a more demanding model, the evidence points the other way. Yale’s Directed Studies is oversubscribed. Hamilton at Florida drew hundreds of applicants for its inaugural class. The demand is there. What is missing is the institutional will to meet it.
Knowledge does not guarantee agreement. But it makes serious disagreement possible again—the difference, again, between Hillel and Korach. Trustees, presidents, and faculty can act now. Foundations, particularly within our community, can accelerate the work. The K–12 fight should continue, but no one should wait on it.
Rebuild the core, and you don’t just improve education. You make the lies harder to tell and harder to believe. You give the next generation of students the foundation our tradition has always known is the precondition for argument worth having. We have spent two years asking how to fight antisemitism on campus. The deepest answer is also the oldest: rebuild the conditions in which machloket l’shem shamayim is possible again, and the rest follows.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
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The new face of Holocaust denial is harder to spot — and more dangerous
(JTA) — When I learned that Holocaust deniers had infiltrated a New Hampshire legislative meeting and tried to insert their view into the state’s Holocaust education efforts, I was personally outraged.
My grandparents, my mother’s first husband and their 5-and-½-year-old son were murdered by Zyklon-B gas in a Birkenau gas chamber in August 1943 — dying cruelly in exactly the way that Germar Rudolf, who was invited by a state lawmaker to testify before a legislative committee, says no Jews were killed.
Rudolf is a prominent figure among Holocaust deniers. For more than 39 years, his “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust” has sought to delegitimize and undermine the historical record of the mass murder of 6 million European Jews during World War II by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and characterizing the Holocaust as a myth.
Historian Deborah Lipstadt describes Rudolf as “a hardcore denialist. He says no gas chambers, no plan to kill the Jews. It’s all a myth.” In the course of a 2007 trial in Germany, in which he was convicted of inciting racial hatred, he dismissed the Holocaust as “a gigantic fraud.”
Holocaust denial is not merely the manifestation of an insidious and dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theory. It constitutes a moral clear and present danger motivated by a perverse determination to radically downplay if not expunge altogether the annihilation of 6 million Jews during World War II from the historical narrative.
The alarming reality, however, is that because Holocaust denial is generally considered to be less harmful than other variants of antisemitism, it is far too often allowed to fester and foment under a spurious guise of freedom of speech.
By failing to prevent Rudolf from testifying and not striking his testimony from the official record when he questioned whether and how my grandparents and my brother were murdered, the chairperson of this New Hampshire state House committee lent credence to Rudolf’s nefarious agenda. Sadly, this is anything but an isolated incident.
Confronting and refuting Holocaust deniers has come to resemble the classic Whac-a-Mole arcade game except that unlike trying to hit inoffensive plastic facsimiles of burrowing mammals with a mallet, exposing, ostracizing and utterly discrediting Holocaust deniers is both urgent and deadly serious.
Professional charlatans such as Rudolf, David Irving, Frank Leuchter, and Ernst Zündel have made Holocaust denial a career and can be dismissed as such. But I am increasingly unnerved by mainstream or quasi-mainstream figures who spout or otherwise provide a veneer of credibility to Holocaust denial claptrap.
This isn’t new. Patrick Buchanan, the Nixon and Reagan White House official and reactionary populist candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, wrote in a March 1990 syndicated column that it would have been impossible for Jews to perish in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp. Until I outed him and it in a 2009 New York Daily News op-ed, his official website, Buchanan.org, featured a Holocaust denial forum that included such comments as “there simply were not gas chambers or mass crematoriums at any of the German internment camps” and “We have known for some time that the Auschwitz myth is of an exclusively Jewish origin.”
Also in 2009, Bishop Richard Williamson, the excommunicated member of an ultra-right-wing splinter group of the Roman Catholic Church whom Pope Benedict XVI briefly brought back into the fold, declared on Swedish television in 2009 that “I believe there were no gas chambers” and that no more than 200,000 or 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, “but none of them by gas chambers.”
And more recently, Tucker Carlson has given Holocaust deniers a platform on his shows. First, in 2024, it was the Nazi apologist Daryl Cooper who propounded the conspiracy theory that the Third Reich never intentionally annihilated 6 million Jews, insisting instead that as the German army swept through Eastern Europe, “they went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.” Then, this past October, Carlson’s guest was the white supremacist Nick Fuentes who had previously brayed that “I don’t believe there were gas chambers. I don’t believe it was 6 million. I also don’t believe that there was ever an order given out that said, OK, you know, we’re gonna kill ’em all.”
Others in the MAGA world peddle similar Holocaust-rooted conspiracy theories to millions on social media, which is what makes debunking them especially urgent in this time of surging antisemitism. Podcaster Candace Owens, for example, has dismissed the lethal medical experiments performed by the notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele at Auschwitz as “bizarre propaganda.”
New Hampshire Rep. Matt Sabourin dit Choinière, who invited Rudolf and his acolytes to the legislative meeting, fits right in with this unsavory lot. At first blush, he may appear to be just another far-right MAGA activist, indistinguishable from a slew of others like him around the country who were elected to public office in the 2024 electoral wave that returned Donald Trump to the White House.
We now know that not only is he a Holocaust denier but that he is also in bed with likeminded groups and individuals whose goal is to sleaze their lies and conspiracy theories into the political, educational and social mainstream. By exposing him to scrutiny and notoriety, NPR and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency have performed an important public service.
The New Hampshire case required investigative reporting in part because Sabourin dit Choinière and Rudolf offered a twist on the old formula at the hearing by cloaking their denial in palatable language. They spoke about a quest for truth and, in the case of the lawmaker, averred that he believed that terrible atrocities had been visited upon Jews during the Holocaust, but that there were nevertheless mitigating facts that had to be told. That left one of his colleagues so confused, JTA has reported, that she seemed to indicate agreement with their testimony. In fact, she did not understand that what she was hearing constituted Holocaust denial.
The two questions we must ask ourselves are (a) how many others like Sabourin dit Choinière are there around the country, and (b) how do we unmask and defang them? The one thing we know for certain is that we cannot afford to ignore them in an illusory hope that they will somehow slither back into the ideological swamp from whence they came. To this extent, the New Hampshire House committee meeting fiasco may actually have been a much-needed wakeup call as well as a teachable moment.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
The post The new face of Holocaust denial is harder to spot — and more dangerous appeared first on The Forward.
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Why J Street’s New Policy Initiative Is Seriously Misguided
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, Oct. 1, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
We live in a time when synagogues and Jewish-sponsored events are under violent attack from London to Bondi Beach, to Temple Israel in Michigan.
At such a moment, efforts by J Street to see US military aid to Israel stopped are not just misguided; they are profoundly irresponsible.
On April 13, J Street posted a statement on its website titled, “Reassessing the US-Israel Security Relationship.”
J Street said, “The United States should phase out direct financial support for arms sales to Israel and treat Israel as it does other wealthy US allies.”
J Street did say (at the end of the statement) that, “The United States should continue to sell short-range air and ballistic missile defense (BMD) capabilities to Israel.”
But is that part just a way for them to play both sides if they need to? Otherwise, why make this charge (at the beginning of the statement): “Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits security assistance to any country whose government engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
Also alarming is how J Street deliberately misrepresents the positions of people who want to end direct military aid to Israel: “A responsible and relatively rapid phase-out of all financial assistance, including for ballistic missile defense, is now supported by figures from across the political spectrum, such as Prime Minister Netanyahu, Senator Lindsey Graham …”
However, neither Netanyahu or Graham have made statements that fit J Street’s flawed approach and dishonest narrative.
The truth is that when interviewed by The Economist, Netanyahu stated, “I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years.” How can J Street say that “the next 10 years” is the same as “relatively rapid”?
And on January 9 on X , Graham tweeted the following: “The aid we have provided to Israel has been a great investment keeping the IDF strong, sharing technology, and making their military more capable – to the benefit of the United States.” Graham went further saying, “we need not wait ten years,” but nowhere did Graham say he was for ending all military assistance while Israel is at war.
You’ll often hear from J Street, and other critics of Israel, that American aid is a “blank check.” It isn’t. US military assistance to Israel is governed by agreements and legal frameworks that require much of that funding to be spent on American-made defense systems.
In practice, that means a significant share of the aid flows back into the US economy — supporting domestic manufacturing, defense jobs, and technological development. You can debate the policy. But calling it a blank check is simply inaccurate — and yet the phrase persists because it fits a far too often preferred anti-Israel narrative. And it’s very hard to believe that J Street does not understand this reality, even as it advances that framing.
There is a huge difference in the strategic relationship that America has with Israel than any of its other allies. Israel offers America military support, intelligence, and operational experience that is unparalleled. Yet J Street’s advocacy to curtail or condition aid ignores the depth and mutual benefit of that partnership, reducing a complex alliance to a one-sided transaction.
The Iron Dome and David’s Sling — key components of Israel’s multi-layered missile defense system — are battle-proven in real-world conditions. The United States has directly benefited from Israeli innovation in missile defense, counterterrorism, and battlefield medicine. No US ally in any corner of the world has contributed to America’s defense in such an immediate and practical way. And that should mean we debate aid to Israel differently than aid to allies who don’t give us those tangible benefits.
Efforts by J Street to target funding for these systems are not abstract policy debates; they would weaken tools that save civilian lives and inform US defense capabilities.
President Truman recognized the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, just minutes after Israel declared independence. Of course, this had something to do with the Holocaust. What’s more, the very fact that Israel is encircled by Iranian terrorist proxies that seek to destroy it, that so many nations refuse to even recognize its right to exist, and that Iran is struggling to preserve its nuclear program are all reasons that dictate that there is something inherently different about its situation compared to its neighbors. And that should be taken into account when debating and deciding on US policy.
This is not about silencing debate. It is about grounding that debate in facts, history, and the real-world consequences of policy choices. At a time of rising threats, weakening a proven alliance and undermining defensive systems like Iron Dome does not advance peace or security — it puts both at risk.
Positions like these help explain J Street’s limited support within the American Jewish community — and why its views must be scrutinized and challenged.
Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, AFSI, (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.