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The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page
(JTA) — The last 20 years haven’t been kind to Jewish journalism, with local weeklies shrinking or folding and even big city papers suspending their print publications and going completely digital. Publishing online has allowed these papers to cut costs and given them the potential for a wide reach — albeit a potential undermined by an increasingly siloed and ideologically polarized market for news and ideas.
Yet still there are those who aren’t giving up on print — at least in small, carefully targeted batches. This spring has seen the launch of two Jewish journals — Masorti, a reboot of the former Conservative Judaism, and Fragments, a product of the left-leaning Jewish human rights group T’ruah. The two magazines join a small but scrappy fraternity of journals aiming to steer the Jewish conversation.
“We’re the people of the book. I think print is having a moment,” said Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson, who as director of Emor, T’ruah’s affiliated think tank, edits Fragments. “In the midst of all the [digital] bombardment people experience, there’s something very grounding about picking up a hard copy and being able to mark it up or carry it with you.”
Of course, Fragments and its more established cousins — from a legacy Modern Orthodox quarterly like Tradition to the interdisciplinary journal Modern Judaism — are all available online, and few print more than 1,000 copies at a time. The goal, the editors and publishers of some of the newer publications told me, is to establish a brand and repair what each one said was a broken communal discussion about Israel, domestic politics and religion.
“I hate what’s become of discourse in Jewish life, which largely goes on on Twitter and other places like that,” said Mark Charendoff. “I think Jews like longform discussions, and we’ve become very, very impatient. I wanted to carve out a space for that long type of writing and reading.”
Charendoff is president of the Maimonides Fund, which publishes Sapir, perhaps the best known of the newish journals. It has a high-profile editor — Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist on the New York Times opinion page — and a penchant for hot-button topics that rally conservatives and enrage liberals. Recent issues of the two-year-old journal have focused on “cancel culture” and a campus environment that most of its contributors consider hostile to conservatism and Jewish life.
“I think society and the Jewish community has become so polarized that people are afraid of articulating controversial views. We need to take a breath and say, ‘You’re not going to be harmed by reading something you disagree with,’” said Charendoff.
T’ruah believes there are plenty of controversial views being aired, but mostly on the right: It has explicitly positioned its new journal as a “necessary alternative to well-funded right-wing Jewish publications.” The news release announcing Fragments did not name those publications but presumably they include Sapir; Mosaic, supported by the right-leaning Tikvah Fund; and Tablet, which is published by Nextbook, Inc., whose president, Mem Bernstein, is on the board of Tikvah and is the widow of its founder. Tablet has published writers from across the political spectrum, but has drawn howls from the left for its frequent articles denouncing “wokeness” and cancel culture and a recent piece questioning the motives of donors who support gender-affirming care for trans people.
(Another journal, The Jewish Review of Books, was initially backed by Tikvah, but recently spun off under its own foundation.)
The premiere issue of Fragments includes essays on concepts of freedom by Laynie Soloman, a director at SVARA, an LGBTQ yeshiva based in Chicago, and Joelle Novey, the director of an interfaith environmental group in the Washington, D.C. area.
Nelson sees two audiences for Fragments: “It’s definitely speaking to the left and offering a deepening of language and of conversation around Jewish sources and Jewish ideas,” he said. “And it’s an effort to speak to the center, which often shares our values and can be spooked by the language they see coming from the right.”
Fittingly for a magazine published by a group formerly known as Rabbis for Human Rights, Fragments leans into Jewish text and religious perspectives. That sets it apart from Jewish Currents, a legacy journal of the Jewish left that, after a relaunch in 2018, now aims for an audience of young, left-wing, mostly secular Jews who, when not anti-Zionist, are deeply critical of Israel. Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, has said that the magazine has become “a reliable and essential space for challenging, rigorous, surprising work that has shifted the discourse even beyond the American Jewish left.”
The aspiration that the “discourse can be shifted” by gladiators writing for small magazines harkens back to the post-World War II period, a sort of golden age of Jewish thought journals. Jewish and Jewish-adjacent publications like the Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent provided a launching pad for an ideologically fluid cohort of “New York intellectuals” that over the years included Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Goodman, Midge Dector, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Alfred Kazin.
Partisan Review was among a spate of magazines that offered a platform for Jewish intellectuals in the years immediately after World War II. (Open Culture)
While writers like these tackled Jewish issues, or general issues through a Jewish lens, many of them influenced the wider national conversation. Angel has said she has drawn inspiration from Commentary: Founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine became hugely influential in promoting neoconservative ideas and thinkers in the 1980s and ’90s.
The “golden age” was an explosion of Jewish creativity, and political influence, that would be difficult to replicate today. Benjamin Balint, a former editor at Commentary and author of a history of the magazine, says the flowering of Jewish journals in the mid-20th century was the result of “terrific pent-up pressure among the children of immigrants who were pushed down for so long and were able to explode into the mainstream.” Small magazines “provided that release — pushing critics and writers into the larger culture,” said Balint, who previously edited Sources, the journal of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
A long piece in Tablet recently argued that such Jewish influence is in steep decline “anywhere where American Jews once made their mark,” from academia to Hollywood to government. Author Jacob Savage doesn’t blame the loss of the immigrant work ethic, however, but rather “American liberalism” for marginalizing Jews.
Whatever the cause, few of the newer journals aspire to that kind of influence on the larger culture, and acknowledge that they are trying to shape the conversation within the Jewish community.
“We believe that Jewish leaders need great ideas to do their work well,” said Rabbi Justus Baird, senior vice president for national programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and publisher of its journal Sources, launched in 2021. “The way we invest in ideas is by cultivating a large group of Jewish thinkers and scholars who are doing not just the scholarship for its own sake, but really trying to work collaboratively on how Jewish thought can apply to the challenges facing the Jewish people.”
The Hartman Institute (which also counts the Maimonides Fund among its long list of major donors) is a religiously pluralistic, liberal Zionist think tank with outposts in New York and Jerusalem. Recent essays in Sources include lengthy essays by Yale religious studies professor Christine Hayes on the ethics of shaming and Hartman scholar Mijal Bitton on how relationships can heal the breach between the Diaspora and Israel.
Part of Hartman’s goal in publishing the journal is to provide a space for such long-form articles, filling what Baird calls “a gap between the quick, super-responsive, news-oriented Jewish publication landscape, the hot takes about what is going on, and the academic Jewish work.”
“It’s a space where ideas can really percolate,” said Claire Sufrin, who now edits Sources. “The written word, the printed word is there and can be shared in that way and people can engage with it over and over again.”
Masorti, the relaunched journal of Conservative Judaism, is also trying to bridge a gap, in this case between Jewish scholarship and the synagogue.
“Rabbis have responsibilities to serve as congregational leaders, and also the obligation to engage in Jewish learning and scholarship,” said Rabbi Joseph Prouser, the editor of Masorti.
The original Conservative Judaism was published from 1945 through 2014. The reboot is sponsored by the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and its five seminaries, including the Jewish Theological Seminary, the New York flagship. Its readership base is rabbis and cantors affiliated with the movement.
Masorti arrives at a critical time for the Conservative movement: In an essay in the first issue, its associate editor, Rabbi Jonathan Rosenbaum, says what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination is at a “precipice.”
“At its summit, the plurality of [North American] Jews identified with the Conservative movement, something like 40%,” Rosenbaum said in an interview. “There was something like 1.6 million Jews who were thought to be part of the Conservative movement up to maybe the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Today, there are about 500,000.
“Part of the goal of the journal,” he said, is to “look at the problems and the means of solving them.”
In the past the Conservative Judaism journal had been a forum for debate within the movement. It published dueling papers, for example, on the decision to ordain women and what is and isn’t permissible on Shabbat. Prouser says he’ll uphold that tradition of dissent: The current issue features an essay by Michal Raucher, a Jewish studies professor at Rutgers University, who criticizes the movement’s establishment for embracing a justification for abortion that doesn’t go far enough in recognizing the bodily autonomy of women (an argument she also advanced in a JTA oped).
And Prouser does hope these arguments are heard beyond the movement, positioned between traditionalist Orthodoxy and liberal Reform. “One of the beauties of the Conservative movement is that we can talk to people to our right to our left right, we can talk to the entire spectrum of the Jewish community,” he said.
The editors of the new journals agree that there are fewer and fewer spaces for civil conversation among Jews, blaming the filter bubble of the internet and the take-no-prisoners style of current political debate. And each said they would like to be part of the solution.
Sufrin, the editor of Hartman’s journal, calls it a “bridge, because people can talk about it together, they can engage with the ideas together, and it’s in that conversation that they can develop a relationship and ultimately, talk together more productively.”
The question is whether it is too late: At a time when algorithms reward readers with the kind of material they are likely to agree with, will even an elite reach across ideological divides and listen to what the other side is saying? When institutions — from government to religion — regard compromise as surrender, who dares to concede that your ideological opponent might have a point?
“Difference and disagreement are productive when we engage with the best versions of those with whom we disagree,” Hayes writes in Sources. That sounds like a call to action. Or is it an epitaph?
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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.