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The End Jew Hatred Movement is spreading across the country — and sparking controversy
(New York Jewish Week) — Last month, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Jewish Democrat, proclaimed April 29 “End Jew Hatred Day,” citing “an urgent need to act against antisemitism in Colorado and across the country.”
Similar proclamations came from New York Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican, and dozens of other elected officials nationwide.
But in the New York City Council, an identical effort proved controversial. While the overwhelmingly Democratic council approved April 29 as End Jew Hatred Day annually, six council members either abstained from or voted against what organizers had intended to be an unanimous decision.
The initiative behind the proclamations, called the End Jew Hatred Movement, is a relatively new presence based in New York City that is increasingly making its voice known nationally — through rallies, petitions, a relentless press campaign and now in the halls of government. One measure that demonstrates the initiative’s growth is the number of April 29 proclamations. Last year, there were a handful. This year, according to End Jew Hatred, there were 30.
The movement also provided the spark for the unexpected opposition in the New York City Council. Lawmakers who did not support the proclamation said they demurred because the End Jew Hatred Movement, while run by people who say they “set aside politics and ideology,” has been associated with right-wing Jewish activists.
End Jew Hatred doesn’t publicize much about its structure or funding. It is not a registered nonprofit organization, and would not tell the New York Jewish Week its annual budget or how it receives donations.
Its backers call it an unapologetic voice that’s fighting a growing problem, antisemitism, while its critics say it is an attempt to inject hawkish rhetoric into a national effort to combat anti-Jewish persecution. Amid that debate, the movement’s growth, and its successful spearheading of resolutions nationwide, show how an initiative founded by conservative activists has wielded influence in the conversation about antisemitism, even in liberal political spaces.
Here’s what we know about End Jew Hatred, how it’s establishing itself in New York City and beyond, and why its activities are drawing backlash.
A movement founded in the politics of 2020
Founded in New York City near the beginning of the pandemic, End Jew Hatred first drew local attention in October 2020, when it organized a rally in front of the New York Public Library protesting the way its activists said New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo were unfairly targeting Orthodox New Yorkers with public health restrictions.
Haredi New Yorkers and their backers railed against the city’s regulations that year, and claimed that policies limiting group prayer and other religious ceremonies were selectively enforced against their communities.
“Never in my life did I think I would see this type of blatant Jew-hatred from our public officials,” Brooke Goldstein, who founded End Jew Hatred, said at the rally, which drew dozens of protesters. “Singling out New York Jews for blame in the coronavirus spread is unconscionable and discriminatory.”
But while the movement’s first significant action concerned the pandemic, a spokesman for End Jew Hatred said it was inspired by another seismic event that took place in 2020: the racial justice protests and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“How can we replicate this for the Jewish people?” said Gerard Filitti, senior counsel for the organization Goldstein directs, the Lawfare Project, describing End Jew Hatred’s genesis. “We saw antisemitism shoot up during the pandemic. So it was kind of the right time to launch this idea.”
Since then, in addition to spearheading the proclamations, the initiative has continued holding rallies, protesting the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which aids Palestinian refugees, for “promoting Jew hatred”; speaking out against antisemitism in Berlin, Toronto and other cities around the globe; and, earlier this year, opposing a reported plea bargain for the men who assaulted Joseph Borgen while he was en route to a pro-Israel rally in May 2021. It was also a signatory on a letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg protesting the plea deal, and members of the movement showed up to the alleged attackers’ court hearing.
Nearly three years after its launch, the movement remains opaque about its structure, declining to share any financial information or elaborate on its relationship to the Lawfare Project, which bills itself as an “international pro-Israel litigation fund.” In a brief statement to the New York Jewish Week, a spokesperson for End Jew Hatred said the organization accepts donations from local community members and support from like-minded nonprofit groups, though he declined to detail how those donations were processed.
“Our network of activists spans the globe, from New York City to Los Angeles, from Toronto to Berlin,” he said. “Also, the movement is supported by people from all walks of life who donate both their time and money to make the movement a success. Activists are encouraged to fundraise within their community, and some actions have been supported by organizations that have taken part in them.”
Roots in pro-Israel and right-wing activism
The Lawfare Project, Goldstein’s group, has represented Jewish students who settled a discrimination lawsuit with San Francisco State University, and the following year, represented an Israeli organization that settled a suit with the National Lawyers’ Guild, after the guild declined to place the group’s ad in its annual dinner journal.
This year, the group is providing legal aid to a Las Vegas-area Jewish teen who had a swastika drawn onto his back. And it sued the mayor of Barcelona over her decision to sever ties with Tel Aviv.
Goldstein also has a history of right-wing activism and controversial statements. She has made appearances on conservative news networks such as Fox News, One America News and Newsmax. She once said that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian person,” and on Election Day in 2016, tweeted, “Can I run the anti-anti-islamophobia department in the Trump administration?”
Goldstein has said she sees Ronald Lauder — the philanthropist, World Jewish Congress president and conservative donor — as an ally. In a virtual conversation between the two hosted by Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Synagogue last year, Goldstein thanked Lauder for his “support and his friendship,” and Lauder called Goldstein “so smart and wonderful.” Lauder was also involved with the movement’s effort to establish End Jew Hatred Day in New York City last year.
Ronald S Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) recorded before a bilateral a conversation with Chancellor Scholz. (Michael Kappeler/Getty Images)
End Jew Hatred has also worked with Dov Hikind, a former Brooklyn Democratic state assemblyman who now runs a group called Americans Against Antisemitism. Hikind’s group has partnered with End Jew Hatred, and he has appeared at its events. Hikind told the New York Jewish Week that his group and End Jew Hatred are “involved in terms of pushing the same agenda.”
Hikind has stirred controversy as well: In 2013, he wore blackface as part of a Purim costume, and in 2005, sponsored a bill that would have allowed police to profile Middle Eastern men on the subway. He was a follower of the late right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Controversy or consensus?
Even as its right-wing connections have sparked suspicion from progressive activists, End Jew Hatred has garnered support from establishment Jewish groups. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations promoted End Jew Hatred Day on Twitter last week, posting a graphic with the logo of the movement. And the city’s Jewish Community Relations Council also backed the City Council resolution.
“All people, regardless of party affiliation, have a role to play in combating antisemitism and other forms of hatred, and we should not lose sight of that,” a JCRC spokesperson told the New York Jewish Week. “From our perspective, every day should be End Jew Hatred Day.”
Lauder has also advocated the use of the term “Jew hatred” in place of antisemitism in a video published by the World Jewish Congress that has been viewed more than 480,000 times.
“No one is embarrassed anymore when they’re called an antisemite,” he said. “Antisemitism must be called what it really is: Jew hatred.”
That view is not universally shared among antisemitism watchdogs. Holly Huffnagle, the American Jewish Committee’s U.S. director for combating antisemitism, said that the term “Jew hatred” is “jarring” and “makes people stop and think.” But she said the term does not capture the way antisemitism is often expressed via coded conspiratorial language.
“[People] might not know what [the term] antisemitism is, but Jew hatred they know,” she said. “In that sense it can be used to get attention, to help people call it out.”
“On the other hand, the antisemitism we see today, in its primary form, which is conspiratorial, is not captured by the term ‘Jew hatred,’” she added. “I hear from a variety of people that they don’t hate Jews, they’re against Jew hatred, they’re not antisemitic, but they believe that Jews have too much power [or] they control the media.”
And End Jew Hatred’s right-wing ties have also made some progressive activists in its home base of New York City wary of its motives. The lead sponsor of the City Council’s End Jew Hatred Day resolution was Queens Republican Inna Vernikov, a former aide to Hikind who has previously spotlighted antisemitism allegations at the City University of New York.
Her resolution, which passed overwhelmingly, garnered a mix of 14 co-sponsors, including some prominent Jewish Democrats and all six of the council’s Republicans — two of whom have links, respectively, to white supremacists and a person arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Council Member Inna Vernikov introduced a resolution to create an annual “End Jew Hatred” day in the New York City Council on April 27, 2023. (New York City Council Flickr)
Those right-wing connections were part of what led six progressive council members to either abstain from or vote against the resolution. One of the council members who voted no, Brooklyn’s Shahana Hanif, told the New York Jewish Week that she has participated in multiple actions against antisemitism but opposed the resolution because she didn’t want to endorse End Jew Hatred as a movement.
“Antisemitism is real,” Hanif said. “I understand the urgency. I understand the opportunity when there is a resolution or any kind of symbolic gesture that comes along, that every legislator wants to be united in supporting our Jewish colleagues. But in the same breath, it is our responsibility to know who is leading on these efforts.”
City Comptroller Brad Lander, a prominent Jewish progressive politician, vouched for Hanif’s record of standing up to antisemitism and echoed her concerns. He told the New York Jewish Week that End Jew Hatred’s activists are “right-wingers who have a track record of working very closely with people who foment hatred.”
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a progressive group, also opposed the resolution. Rafael Shimunov, a member of the group, said the resolution was “clearly associated with the right,” and noted that at a hearing ahead of the vote, an activist decried bail reform, something right-wing advocates have pushed for years to repeal.
Shimunov also took issue with remarks Vernikov has made about George Soros, the billionaire Jewish liberal megadonor who has become an avatar of right-wing antisemitism, and whom Vernikov called ”an evil man, who happens to be Jewish.” JFREJ activists also noted that also noted that some Republican cosponsors of the bill, such as Vernikov, Vickie Paladino and Joann Ariola, have called for transgender women to be barred from women’s sports at schools and universities. In addition, Paladino has a history of anti-LGBTQ comments. The activists say these views undercut the council members’ calls to oppose hatred directed at Jews.
End Jew Hatred’s supporters dismissed accusations that their cause is right-wing. In a text message, Vernikov told the New York Jewish Week that “this resolution has nothing to do with politics or right-wing extremists.” Hikind also echoed that message.
“Everyone in the Jewish community supported this idea,” Hikind said. “To say it’s just right-wing organizations is dishonest and hypocritical.”
Filliti, the Lawfare counsel, said the aim of the resolution — and End Jew Hatred as a whole — was to send “a unifying message.”
“We’re not looking to make this political,” he said. “We have had so much success with this and we are so happy to see this going forward.”
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The post The End Jew Hatred Movement is spreading across the country — and sparking controversy appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook.
I have seen NAZA and I am shook. Not simply because of what the film reveals about how Israel is waging the war in Gaza, but because of what it reveals about how a society becomes capable of doing this at all. And as I’ve watched the reaction in Israel since the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, I’ve come to see that the reaction itself reflects the very systems the film exposes.
There are two systems at the center of NAZA, which opens Sept. 30 in New York City. The first is the technical one: the surveillance, targeting, artificial intelligence and military technologies that allow the Israeli army to identify and kill people at enormous scale. The second is the psychic and narrative system that makes the first one possible. It allows people inside the military to participate in this machinery, and journalists, filmmakers, politicians and ordinary people outside it to absorb what is happening, rationalize it, defend it or simply carry on.
The reaction to the film has become part of the evidence. That is what has shaken me.
The film, by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, takes us inside the systems of surveillance, targeting and killing used by the Israeli military in Gaza. But it is also an investigation into the people inside those systems and the stories they tell themselves about what they are doing.
Some of the officers interviewed are members of Israel’s elite military and intelligence units. They speak about their work with an almost surreal normalcy. One talks about coming home after his work and continuing to work on his Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Another talks about going to Poland on a Holocaust trip in high school, being taught that the Nazis were pure evil, and now understanding them.
Abraham asks those they interview whether anyone questions what they are doing. No one.
This blindness doesn’t stop with the military.
It lives in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we are defending, whose lives we are responsible for, and whose suffering can be pushed outside the frame. It lives in the deep Israeli and Jewish memory of vulnerability and annihilation, in the knowledge that Jewish safety is not an abstraction. It lives, too, in what happens when that memory becomes so consuming that another people’s suffering becomes something we can only see through our own fear.
I have watched that dynamic reveal itself over and over since Venice.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked the film and announced plans to pursue legislation that could strip citizenship from Israelis who “defame” Israeli soldiers abroad, explicitly citing NAZA and its filmmakers. Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called Abraham and Szor traitors and sought to have their citizenship revoked.
Protesters have gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home for multiple nights, chanting “death sentence for traitors.” Demonstrators have sought out the offices of Local Call, where Abraham works, and activists have threatened to track down the filmmakers and their families. Graffiti depicting the filmmakers as traitors has appeared on the streets.
And all of this is happening before almost anyone in Israel has even seen the film. The film has not even been released in Israel — but the fury has not waited for a screening.
I cannot get past that.
The reaction is not some separate story happening around NAZA. It is part of what NAZA is showing us.
Attack the person asking the question. Question their loyalty. Invoke existential danger. Change the subject. Make the person holding the mirror into the threat.
This is where Oct. 7 enters the story.
Of course Oct. 7 happened. Israelis were murdered and kidnapped. The trauma is real. The responsibility of journalists to verify serious allegations is real.
But there is a difference between acknowledging Oct. 7 and requiring every critique of Israel’s military actions to pass through it before it can be heard.
I watched veteran journalist Raviv Drucker’s interview with Abraham and found myself increasingly disturbed by the frame. The questions repeatedly returned to whether the film was sufficiently balanced, whether Abraham had sufficiently accounted for Oct. 7, whether his sources could be trusted.
These are not illegitimate questions. But when they become the ritual through which every serious critique of Israel’s military actions must pass, something else is happening. The burden keeps shifting onto the person asking the question: Prove that you understand us. Prove that you see our pain. Prove that you are not erasing us. Prove that you are still one of us.
Only then can we begin to talk about what Israel is doing.
And then there was something that happened to me personally. The head of one Israeli film forum told me it would be better not to defend Abraham and Szor publicly because it could cost “us” the elections.
I understood exactly what she meant. And that is what frightened me. Don’t make things harder. Don’t give ammunition to the other side. Don’t jeopardize the political outcome. Don’t defend these two young filmmakers too loudly. The instinct is the same: don’t disrupt the story that allows us to keep going.
The kind of collective psychosis allows my people, including my people in Tel Aviv, to go about their lives as if things are normal while Gaza is being destroyed is not separate from what NAZA describes. It is part of it.
I am my grandfathers’ granddaughter. One was killed in 1948 fighting for the creation of Israel. The other survived the Holocaust and became a human rights activist. I have spent my life carrying these two parts of Jewish history inside me: the absolute necessity of Jewish safety and the absolute necessity of human rights. I don’t experience those things as contradictions.
What NAZA has forced me to confront is what happens when one of those truths becomes a shield against the other.
That is what shook me about NAZA. Not only what it shows us about Gaza. Not only what it shows us about the technology that makes killing possible, or the people who learn to participate in it. But what it shows us about the stories we need to tell ourselves in order not to see what is happening in front of us.
And what happens when someone holds up a mirror and refuses to let us look away.
The post I’m an Israeli who watched ‘Naza.’ And I am shook. appeared first on The Forward.
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In a legal settlement, UC Berkeley offers a dance scholar a position it denied her because she’s Israeli.
(JTA) — (J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — For more than nine months, UC Berkeley has failed to honor a legal settlement with an Israeli dance scholar who was denied a teaching position due to her nationality.
In response to a J. inquiry, a university spokesperson said the delay was caused by “internal miscommunication.” The university now promises that the scholar, Yael Nativ, will receive the job offer she was guaranteed in the December 2025 settlement “no later than the week of Sept. 28.”
“We deeply regret this unfortunate delay and look forward to welcoming Dr. Nativ back to our campus,” UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said in a statement.
Nativ said she received an apology for the delay and the promise of an imminent job offer in a Sept. 21 email from a university administrator.
“It’s always a surprise when I get emails from them because the correspondence was so little to none,” Nativ said. “I’m so tired of this case.”
Nativ, a sociologist specializing in Israeli dance, taught in UC Berkeley’s dance department during spring 2022 as a visiting professor through the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. Her course focused on contemporary dance in Israel through social, political and cultural perspectives.
The institute invited Nativ to reapply for another year of teaching. But after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, SanSan Kwan, chair of the dance department, informed Nativ that she would not be rehired. In November 2023, Kwan told Nativ in a WhatsApp message: “My dept cannot host you for a class next fall. Things are very hot right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
The university’s civil rights office investigated the matter and concluded that Nativ was discriminated against based on her Israeli identity.
Nativ sued the university, with representation from the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, in August 2025. When the two sides settled the lawsuit in December 2025, the university acknowledged its wrongdoing and committed to apologizing to Nativ and inviting her back to campus.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons apologized to Nativ over Zoom on Feb. 3, but no job offer arrived.
The lapse was publicized by Malcolm Feeley, a retired UC Berkeley Law professor, who wrote about Nativ’s case in a Sept. 16 article in the Jewish Review of Books.
“Justice delayed is justice denied. This is justice delayed in the extreme,” Feeley said in an interview. “It takes a concerted effort of badgering to get [the university] to move an inch.”
In a statement to J. following the publication of Feeley’s article, Mogulof said the university hadn’t sent Nativ a job offer due to a misunderstanding among administrators about who was responsible for doing so.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermalin will personally ensure the offer will come within the next two weeks, according to Mogulof.
Nativ went on to work as a research fellow at Ben-Gurion University in Israel after she left Berkeley. She said her main goal since the lawsuit has been to hold UC Berkeley accountable, not to land a job.
“It wasn’t urgent for me to go [back to campus]. It’s more about making a point, getting my justice,” she said. “But if they invite, I will consider.”
This story was first reported by J. The Jewish News of Northern California and is reprinted with permission.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In a legal settlement, UC Berkeley offers a dance scholar a position it denied her because she’s Israeli. appeared first on The Forward.
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The choice in Michigan between El-Sayed and Rogers is one all American Jews have to make
Sometimes the most important part of making a decision is articulating what the decision actually is. What are the choices?
So it is in Michigan, where Jewish Democrats are asked to choose between Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat who is against providing military aid to Israel and who campaigned with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, and Mike Rogers, a Republican and an election denier who would help keep the Senate in the hands of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and who is presenting himself as the choice for Jews offended by El-Sayed. Either Rogers wins; El-Sayed wins without Jewish support; or El-Sayed wins with Jewish support. Those are the only possible outcomes.
Two groups have shown two different ways of dealing with this choice. The first, “Nonnegotiable Michigan,” a group of Jewish Michiganders including rabbis and cantors, has listed five “baseline needs,” or “nonnegotiables,” for their support, which include “Jewish sovereignty in Israel” along with full and safe participation in American life for all Jews including Zionists and a vision for a better Middle East.
The second, Michigan Jews for Democracy, has pledged its support for El-Sayed while noting some reservations and concerns. As one signatory, David Jaffe, put it in a statement released along with Michigan Jews for Democracy’s declaratory letter, “I am a proud Jew. I’m voting for El Sayed despite our disagreements, to support domestic policies that reflect Jewish values. I’m voting against grave threats to the safety of Jews and to American democracy. Rogers unquestioningly supports an authoritarian administration, its arbitrary arrests, its white Christian nationalism, and myriad terrible policies that have never in history been ‘good for the Jews.’”
In other words, one group has said the Democratic candidate cannot count on their support because of their disagreements with him, while the other has said that he has their support despite them. One is trying to get a candidate to say what they want to hear before the election; the other, that they will support him in the election and hope to be a “voice at the table” after.
Jewish groups are, of course, not the only ones who have grappled with such questions (“Nonnegotiable” calls to mind the “Uncommitted” movement to press for a ceasefire in Gaza and to end military aid to Israel from the 2024 presidential election). But to consider these two specific groups together is to consider a choice that an increasing number of Jewish Democrats — which is to say, the vast majority of American Jews — all over the country can expect to be making soon if they haven’t already had to.
Democrats (and younger Republicans) are less supportive of Israel and of US support for it. Candidates will need to speak to their voters and make campaign promises that are aligned with what those voters want to hear. And Jewish Democrats will have to be honest with themselves about the limited options before them and decide for themselves whether they want these candidates to win with or without them.
Per an AP-NORC poll from this summer, about 58% of Democrats think the United States is too supportive of Israel, while roughly half think Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. Not every candidate who makes it out of a primary and into a general election will say the same, but many will, both because of their own conviction and because they want to win Democratic votes.
For some Jewish Democrats, this presents no tension or contradiction; the same poll said that roughly three in 10 Jewish adults agree that Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza. There are American Jews for whom El-Sayed’s vision for the Middle East is not threatening but comforting and correct. But about half of American Jews rejected the idea that Israel carried out a genocide. And, as JFNA found, the vast majority of American Jews want Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state (though just 37% now identify as Zionist). Many may feel a tug of war between their support for or attachment to Israel and their liberalism.
There will be some who say that American Jews should reject the idea that this is a choice, that there is no contradiction between being a liberal Democrat and supporting Israel. That is all well and good in theory, but, come election day, voters in Michigan will make a choice between these two men. There is El-Sayed, who does not want to send military aid to Israel and who said “hurt people hurt people” after Temple Israel was attacked, referring to the fact that the perpetrator’s family was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Lebanon (El-Sayed has since apologized). And there is Rogers, who says he loves Israel and also denies the results of the 2020 presidential election (and pushed to ban abortion and opposed marriage equality, to take two examples from his record).
While Jewish Democrats can, of course, try to influence where Democratic candidates and voters are on Israel, they do not get to dictate it. They do not, in the Michigan general election, get to choose a candidate who supports democracy and also talks about how much they love and want to support Israel. They get to choose whether they want El-Sayed to win and Mike Rogers to lose and, if so, whether they want to be a part of making it happen regardless of El-Sayed’s views on Israel. Every Jewish Democrat, like every other voter, will have to make that choice, and can withhold their vote for whatever reason. But they should be clear about the reality of what they are choosing between.
There are only so many choices in Michigan. And outside of Michigan, too.
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