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This Jewish farmer is harvesting corn — and planting a synagogue — in the Illinois prairie
STERLING, ILLINOIS — Nik Jakobs crouched down and scooped a handful of dirt. A third-generation cattle farmer and grandson of Holocaust survivors, he rubbed the soil between his fingers, testing its weight the way his father and grandfather once did.
But this time, he wasn’t thinking about crops. He was thinking about a synagogue.
Jakobs, 40, plans to build one right here: a 3,000-square-foot sanctuary and museum near land his family has worked for decades. It will house an ark, a bimah, a Torah, and twelve stained glass windows — all rescued by Nik from a shuttered Pennsylvania synagogue, fragments of light and lineage hauled halfway across the country.
The heirlooms sit in storage for now — not as relics, but as seeds waiting to be planted. Come spring, the Jakobs family plans to break ground.
Across the American heartland, sanctuaries that once anchored small-town Jewish life are closing faster than they can be saved. Some have become yoga studios or condos or Airbnbs; others have simply fallen silent. But in Sterling, Illinois, a family of farmers is trying something radical in its simplicity: to plant one again.
For Nik, that act is as familiar as it is audacious. The question isn’t just whether these sacred objects will find a home, but whether a tradition built on movement and memory can keep reinventing itself. Even among family and friends, there are doubts — about the cost, the scale, the odds of filling pews again. But Nik shrugs them off the way he does bad weather: “You plant anyway.”
It’s a lesson passed down from his grandfather, who started the farm after the war and taught his children that survival was only the first step. You work the soil, you care for it, you hand it off. That’s how things last — not through miracles, but through maintenance.
In the meantime, this fall, as crops ripened and combines roared to life, the family pitched a tent for Rosh Hashanah services. Nearly 50 people came to pray. An offering not of corn or soy, but of continuity, sown for the generations that might come after.
In Sterling, the Jakobses braid family, farm, and faith together.
Of corn and continuity
Jakobs Bros. Farms began with a refugee and a field.
After surviving the Holocaust, Norbert Jakobs arrived in Illinois in 1949, bought some land, and began again: raising cattle, planting corn and soybeans, and teaching his sons that survival was a kind of gratitude. Over the decades, the family grew the operation, a testament to their roots in this soil.
Dave Jakobs — Norbert’s son, Nik’s father, and the keeper of those fields — sat high in the cab of his combine, slicing through a sea of corn his father originally planted. He wore a cap adorned with the farm’s logo and a blue short-sleeve shirt that matched the afternoon sky. Outside, the air shimmered with dust; inside, the cab vibrated with the engine’s low thunder.
“I pitch, he catches,” Dave said, nodding to the tractor hauling a grain cart beside us. “Teamwork. That’s how the harvest gets done.”
For two hours, as he cut through the fields, Dave’s AirPods stayed in and his mounted iPhone on the dash blinked while he fielded calls from family and farmhands. Markets, moisture, machinery. The unseen math of keeping a farm alive. But before long, the talk turned to the synagogue.
“You don’t build the baseball diamond for them to come,” he said. “You build it because you love baseball.”
The line sounded like something out of Field of Dreams, and in a way, the Jakobs’ vision isn’t so different: faith built in the middle of a cornfield, for whoever still believes enough to show up.
He knows Sterling may never attract new Jewish families. The Jakobs family isn’t naïve about that. But the project was never only for them. The building will include a museum to tell the story of Jewish life in the region — and of families like theirs who rebuilt after the Holocaust. It’s a place for their children, yes, but also for their neighbors: a living record of what endurance looks like in the Midwest.
“Being a farmer, we’re at the mercy of God,” Dave said. “You take care of the land, and it takes care of you.”
If the harvest of corn measured what they could reap, this other harvest — the synagogue they were planting now — would measure what they could hand down.
A feast and a future
Back at the house, the roar of the combine gave way to a gentler rhythm — knives scraping, oven doors clicking, the percussive sounds of another kind of harvest.
Margo Jakobs, Nik’s mom, called out from the kitchen, her voice rising above the clatter of pots and the hum of an old house. She stood barefoot on the wood floor, auburn hair brushing her shoulders, a heather-gray T-shirt with “Peaches” across the front. On the counter sat a sous-vide cooler holding the evening’s main course: prime rib for Rosh Hashanah.
She moved with the calm and choreography of someone who had done this many times before, stirring and chopping, calling out to her husband and sisters-in-law as they passed through. Every motion felt purposeful, like another line in a prayer.
Her grandfather was taken to Dachau on Kristallnacht, lined up before a Nazi guard who pointed a gun and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. He was able to escape with a few other men, thanks to a commandant he served under in World War I. The family fled on one of the last ships from Rotterdam. “The ship before theirs was bombed,” Margo said.
They rebuilt their lives in Wisconsin: her grandparents in a paper factory and department store; her parents later opening a bakery. Now, in rural Illinois, Margo keeps those stories alive — kneading resilience into every meal she prepares.
By the time she married Dave Jakobs in 1983 and moved to Sterling, two hours west of Chicago, the town’s Jewish community was already shrinking. Temple Sholom had once thrived, its sanctuary filled by families drawn to the promise of a postwar Midwest. But when the Northwestern Steel and Wire plant closed, so did the shops and synagogue it sustained.
“It made Sterling so vibrant in the 1940s and ’50s,” Margo said. “But as the mill closed, people moved away. It’s just sad.”
When she joined the congregation, she and Dave were among the few young Jewish couples left. “We had picnics and potlucks,” she said, smiling.
Earlier this year, Temple Sholom sold its building to a church. Members packed away the Torahs and yahrzeit plaques and began meeting in a tent on the Jakobs’ farm. When word spread that they planned to build again, on a two-and-a-half-acre cornfield in the middle of town, something unexpected happened: other synagogues that were closing began sending their remnants. Prayer books and pews, windows and wine goblets, all to be replanted here.
“We’re humbled,” Margo said. “People are entrusting us with what’s precious, with their stories.”
She wanted to be clear, though, that the project isn’t just about her family. It’s about Temple Sholom and all the congregants who have kept it going. “It takes a village,” she said, wiping her hands on a towel.
In that village is Scott Selmon, the congregation’s treasurer, who has quietly kept Temple Sholom alive for decades — paying the bills, leading services when no rabbi could make it, and making sure the lights stayed on long enough for the Jakobs’ dream to take hold.
He doesn’t see it as their project alone. “It’s all of ours,” he told me. “We just happen to have good people willing to lead the way.”
Selmon spoke of Nik’s grandfather, who became a pillar of the Jewish community in Sterling. “Norbert taught us what it meant to belong somewhere,” Scott said. “To show up for each other, to make this town home.”
People carried in casseroles for Rosh Hashanah and a neighbor dropped off a basket of apples from her orchard. Selmon watched quietly. “That’s what this is,” he said. “Community. You tend it, you keep it alive.”
Standing next to Selmon was Bill Sotelo, 79, who spent three decades as a machinist at the mill. He grew up in Mexico, was raised Roman Catholic, but had always felt a pull toward Judaism. In the 1980s, he started attending Temple Sholom and volunteered whenever something needed fixing. “I helped run the water line to the bathrooms and the kitchen,” he recalled.
Sotelo and his wife, Teresa, eventually converted. Bill celebrated his bar mitzvah at the shul when he was 68. “I did a DNA test recently,” he told me with a grin, “and it turns out I’m 8% East European Jew.”
Once, this village had been vast. Downtown Sterling bustled — clothing shops, newsstands, scrap yards, law offices — many owned by Jewish families who helped build the town’s economy. The steel mill by the river powered the synagogues and storefronts across the Sauk Valley — in Sterling, Rock Falls, Dixon, Morrison, even tiny Mount Carroll and Milledgeville.
Now the mill sits quiet, but Sterling is trying to grow again: a redevelopment project, a new hotel, a sports park, green trails along the river. “Sterling’s been reinventing itself ever since the mill closed,” former Mayor Skip Lee told me. “What the Jakobs are doing — taking something old and giving it new life — fits right into that story.”
The Jews scattered across the Sauk Valley are rooting for Sterling — for this family, this field, this synagogue — to succeed.
Margo opened the oven to check dessert: a peach crisp warming beside an apple-bourbon cake. The smell of cinnamon and butter filled the kitchen, a small sweetness before the holiday began.
A tent that became a temple
The September light was fading, the fields turning the color of old straw. Out on the lawn beside the house, Nik and his brothers, Alex and Ricky, worked in rhythm, raising a canvas tent where the Rosh Hashanah service would be held. Metal poles lay scattered in the grass like the ribs of something waiting to take shape.
“It’d be easier if we had a temple,” someone joked.
In the distance, a combine droned through the corn, a harvest of another kind unfolding just beyond the prayer site. Nik carried folding chairs from the basement. Alex unspooled an extension cord from the garage to power the lamps and string lights. When they tamped the final stakes into the soil, the tent stood ready — not planted, exactly, but rooted for a day.
By morning, the field had turned into a sanctuary. Nearly 50 people gathered beneath the sloped roof, the air still and expectant after weeks without rain. Some women wore sundresses and cowboy boots; others went barefoot, their toes brushing the grass. They faced east, toward Jerusalem, toward renewal.
At the front, three Torahs rested on a table covered with a white cloth embroidered decades ago by Nik’s grandmother, Edith, while she hid from the Nazis — her childhood handiwork carried through war, exile, and soil.
Cantor Lori Schwaber, who has helped lead High Holiday services in Sterling for three decades, stood beside Hannah, Nik’s cousin, her prayer shawl pale pink in the morning sun. Their melodies carried across the field.
When it came time for the haftarah, Hannah chanted from the Book of Samuel, the story of another Hannah who prayed for a child and was answered with life. The promise echoed here: Even in barren soil, something new can take root. This was a harvest whose yield measured not in bushels, but in belonging.
Then Taylor, Nik’s eldest, stepped forward to read the same passage in English. It was a rehearsal for the bat mitzvah her family plans to hold in the new synagogue. The rabbi from Pennsylvania, whose congregation donated its stained glass and ark, has already promised to officiate a service that weekend.
As the service ended, Nik’s four daughters called out the shofar blasts: Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah. Tekiah Gedolah. Each shout met by their father’s ram’s horn, its note low and unbroken, bending through the air until it joined the wind.
The synagogue and the soil
In a storage area tucked away on the farm sit the rescued pieces from Temple B’nai Israel — the century-old synagogue in White Oak, Pennsylvania, whose sacred objects Nik salvaged.
The space was quiet, almost reverent — a warehouse of waiting. Along one wall, stained-glass windows lay boxed and labeled, their blues and ambers dulled by dust, their light waiting to be released. A pair of rabbi’s chairs stood sentinel beside the bimah, their arms worn smooth by generations. At the far end, Nik lifted a heavy blanket to reveal the ark — twin lions perched on top, their wooden paws folded in patience.
“This is what we’re saving,” Nik said softly. For a man who measures life in acres and seasons, this was another kind of harvest.
Around the objects sat more fragments of American Jewry: twelve stone tablets engraved with the tribes of Israel, salvaged from another synagogue — Beth Israel in Washington, Pennsylvania — beside the yahrzeit plaques from Sterling’s own Temple Sholom. Legacy upon legacy, boxed but not buried. A reliquary of Jewish endurance.
He was done storing the past like seed. It was time to see what would grow.
In the center of town, there’s the cornfield where the new synagogue will rise, beside New Life Lutheran Church. A farmer from the congregation had sold them the land: steeple on one side, shul on the other. The name felt like a promise.
On the hood of his truck, Nik spread the blueprints, the paper snapping in the wind. A sanctuary lined with stained glass from White Oak. Beside it, a museum to tell the story of Jewish life in small-town America — and the people who refused to let that story end.
One area will honor the Jewish merchants and families who once filled the Sauk Valley towns. Another will recreate the room where a Christian family hid Nik’s grandmother and her relatives during the Holocaust — her childhood spent in whispers, her prayers muffled beneath a pillow.
He paused, tracing calloused fingers along the edge of the paper. “It won’t be dark,” he said. “People will walk through and understand what it means to come out of hiding.”
Since the Forward first published Nik’s story about the synagogue in a cornfield, envelopes have arrived at the farm, postmarked from towns Nik had never heard of — some with checks for $18, others with offers of sacred objects from shuttered shuls across the country. One rabbi wrote to donate his congregation’s bimah chairs; Nik plans to use them as seating in the museum, each marked with a small plaque naming where it came from.
Margo told me she still dreams of Torah crowns, the silver rimonim that once shimmered atop scrolls in sanctuaries now gone. Each new package feels like a quiet affirmation, a widening circle of faith.
The Jakobs family and the small but mighty Sterling Jewish community are not trying to save Judaism. They’re proving it can still take root here, in open country.
Hope, here, isn’t an idea. It’s a practice, the daily work of planting what you may never see bloom.
Stretching before us, the field was bare, the soil raked smooth and waiting. Nik stood in silence, listening for the faintest stir of something beginning, the sound of a harvest yet to come.
The post This Jewish farmer is harvesting corn — and planting a synagogue — in the Illinois prairie appeared first on The Forward.
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He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’?
Heading into his audition for Marty Supreme, Isaac Simon was nervous. But not for the reasons you’d expect.
“I was taking a long lunch break from the museum,” he said, “and at the time I was three or four months into my job.”
Appearing in a Josh Safdie movie was something Simon, who runs internship programs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, had genuinely never dreamed of. He wasn’t an actor, or an aspiring one. He’d never taken an acting class or been in front of a camera.
But two years after he was scouted at a baseball card convention, Simon was invited to try out for the role of Roger, a cocksure amateur who gets hustled on the ping-pong table by Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser. Standing 6-foot-9 with ice-blue eyes, low eyebrows and flowing brown hair, Simon had the look, the paddle skills and, clearly, the temperament to land a pivotal part in an Oscar-bound — and richly Jewish — cinematic hit.
“I don’t get starstruck,” Simon, 31, said. “I get excited.”
The slew of non-actors who feature in Marty Supreme alongside A-listers like Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tyler, The Creator has already become part of the film’s lore. Safdie and veteran casting director Jennifer Venditti have a penchant for casting street regulars; among the first-timers in the movie are basketball legend George Gervin, viral TikTok and YouTube personas and the guy from Shark Tank.
But perhaps none had as personal a connection to the film’s story of post-war Jewish striving as Simon, a native New Yorker whose graduate study at Queens College focused on the development of Holocaust studies in the U.S. In Marty Supreme, which is loosely based on the story of real-life midcentury table tennis star Marty Reisman, one of the protagonist’s best friends is a Holocaust survivor; one of the film’s most arresting scenes is an Auschwitz flashback.
Simon’s day job is, of course, at the largest Holocaust museum in New York. The fateful coincidence of his casting, Simon said, was “like a bizarre lottery ticket I was able to cash in.”
A fateful encounter
The story of Simon’s star turn begins in the summer of 2022, when Venditti spotted him at a baseball card show in Long Island. Venditti was there with Safdie; Simon — then still in grad school — was there with his dad.
Venditti said they was there to cast extras and non-actors for a baseball-related movie, and asked if she could take a two-minute video of him talking about himself. He obliged, and in the recording told her where he was from (New York City) and what he was doing at the show (chasing the famously rare T206 tobacco card series).
“I thought to myself, ‘Wow, could I really have been at the right place and the right time for something I wasn’t even expecting?’” Simon recalled. Then two years passed, and the run-in faded from memory.
It was not until the summer of 2024 that he received an email from Venditti: “Isaac Simon audition opportunity – scouted at card show.” No script was provided and nothing about the project was disclosed — just a date and a location.
On his elevator up to the audition, he heard the hollow bouncing of a ping-pong ball. Having seen a headline about Chalamet being attached to a Reisman biopic a few days earlier, he realized what the next few minutes might entail.
“The first audition was a total blur,” Simon recalled. “I remember playing ping pong with the assistant casting director and he was like, ‘Oh you’re good!’” At a subsequent callback, he played out a few improv scenarios — some light trash talking, or being cheated in a game. A few weeks later, he got called in for costume fittings.
He hadn’t solicited any acting tips, or studied film prior to his audition. But his work at the museum, where he trains educators on how to teach the Holocaust in 90 minutes, had prepared him.
“Because teaching is a performance, there is sort of an inherent performative quality to the work I do,” Simon said. “And so I think that that lent itself well — or at the very least, it didn’t hurt — to the work I was being asked to do for Josh.”
‘Cast for a reason’
Having run through his lines with his dad and his girlfriend, Simon headed upstate that fall to play Roger — and play opposite Chalamet. (This time, he took two days off of work.)
Roger, the reigning hotshot at a humdrum bowling alley, features in two scenes. In the first, he’s goaded into wagering $40 against Marty, who’s feigning amateurism, and loses. He reappears a few minutes as Marty fills up at a nearby gas station, realizing he was hustled by the reigning American champion; he and his pals want their money back.
Walking into the converted Bowlero where they shot the first scene, Simon was floored by the set. “Each individual looked like they were from the 1950s, and yet their outfit was distinctly their own,” he recalled. Miyako Bellizzi, the costume designer, had fitted him in a striped button-up and faded blue work pants; Simon’s hair was slicked back and to the side.
He hadn’t met Safdie before he got to set, and his cues from the Uncut Gems co-director were limited.
Over the course of his scenes, there were times when he wasn’t sure he was doing what Safdie wanted. Here, it was his inexperience that Simon drew on. “I kept reminding myself that I was cast for a reason, and I was cast as a non-actor for a reason,” he said, “and what I’m bringing to this experience is inherently different than what a trained actor would be. Therefore, if I were a trained actor, I would not be what Josh was looking for in the scenario.”
He didn’t have too much time to banter with the film’s stars during the shoot; most of his time on set was spent with other bit-players. But when the camera was shooting other actors, Safdie wanted to keep the sound of live table tennis in the background, so he had Chalamet and Simon play each other off-camera.
As to who had the upper hand? “We’re probably about even,” Simon said.
Jewish mythmaking
Even after the shoot, Simon couldn’t quite believe it was real. He told almost no one outside his family, superstitious that the scene would get cut. But then the premiere arrived. “It was surreal,” he said.
He’s now seen the film nine times — yes, all the way through — indulging friends who want to see it with him. And his acting has won some praise, with one X post calling it an “incredible underrated performance” liked more than 2,000 times.
Simon likes the movie, if you couldn’t tell, echoing its director and star in calling it a love letter to New York. The film, Simon said, touches on Jewish identity in a way that reminds him of his own family and their experience in this country.
“The way in which it captured intergenerational relationships in Jewish homes in post-war America, in New York specifically, felt very autobiographical for the way that my relatives talked amongst each other,” he said. “There’s a love there that transcends.”
As a Holocaust educator, Simon felt the movie handled that theme appropriately. He found the honey scene — an Auschwitz flashback too intense to explain here — moving, and the Holocaust humor tactfully dispatched. He loved the yiddish.
Yet Simon still couldn’t wrap his head around his own involvement in such a fitting project. His work passing on the history and memory of the Holocaust to future generations was already meaningful before he got an IMDB page.
“So to be cast in a film and have a speaking line,” he said, “and it just so happens that that film is also this incredibly Jewish film — which has direct references in the scene at Auschwitz — is equally bizarre, but also really beautiful, and oddly perfect.”
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Trump’s new Gaza plan marks a radical break from Israeli policy — can it succeed?
The United States has in effect broken with Israeli policy, cleverly engineering the Palestinian Authority’s return to Gaza.
President Donald Trump’s plan for the second stage of the Gaza ceasefire, the launch of which was announced Wednesday, involves the creation of a transitional Palestinian technocratic authority with strong ties to the PA. This collapses fictions Israel has sustained for years: that Gaza can be stabilized without the PA, which was ousted from the territory by Hamas in 2007; that the PA is no better than Hamas; and even that Palestinian governance itself is illegitimate, a belief held by the most extreme Israeli nationalists.
Reality has finally prevailed, and that reality is that the PA, flawed though it is, remains the only Palestinian political body capable of replacing Hamas in Gaza.
The logic expressed by those, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who aim to keep the PA out of Gaza, has brought Israel to the brink. Splitting Palestinian governance between Hamas and the PA, long Netanyahu’s strategy, led to unmitigated disaster, and public anger is at a boil.
Which means that the PA must return to Gaza not only for the sake of Palestinians, but also for Israelis. The Zionist project must be steered away from permanent war, international isolation and internal decay. That means finding a way to work toward a sustainable future with the Palestinians — which almost certainly means, in turn, accepting the PA as their legitimate government.
Decades of misleading rhetoric
Since the establishment of a ceasefire, brokered by Trump’s administration, in September, Hamas has reasserted control over large parts of Gaza. Militarily weakened, it survived politically — because Israel still refused to empower any viable Palestinian alternative.
That return to the status quo in many ways serves Netanyahu’s agenda. Keeping Hamas in power allows for a state of permanent emergency and despair about the chances for peace — the very forces that Netanyahu has, for decades, successfully turned into political capital. “There is no difference between the PA and Hamas” became a mantra — as if a political bureaucracy and a theocratic militia that massacres civilians and rejects coexistence on principle could be legitimately compared.
Now, as long as Hamas rules Gaza, its very presence constitutes an emergency narrative that Netanyahu can use to delay the accountability over his responsibility for Oct. 7: Wartime is no time for politics.
The Palestinian Authority, by contrast, has been treated as dangerous because it represents a measure of pragmatism.
The PA, ineffective as it has been, could be the basis of a functional political framework that would force Israel to confront the need for separation from the Palestinians, real borders, and eventual Palestinian statehood. That’s especially true because there’s the potential for actual peace with a Palestine run by the PA, which already coordinates with Israel at enormous political cost in the West Bank, where its security forces arrest militants and dismantle extremist cells.
New governance for Gaza
The technocratic committee put forward to govern Gaza under Trump’s second phase plan is formally nonpartisan, but its personnel and legitimacy are largely drawn from the ranks of the PA, with Ali Shaath, a former PA deputy minister, set to lead the effort. Others come from the same institutional ecosystem, because there is simply no other reservoir of Palestinian administrative experience. The PA has publicly endorsed the framework. Israel must now also meet its own obligations under the Trump plan — no matter how distasteful its leaders might find the plan’s endorsement of the PA to be.
That means, chiefly, that Israel must declare clearly that once Gaza is stabilized by the technocratic committee, it is prepared to enter negotiations toward a Palestinian state, with final borders to be determined later. Israel can openly state its intention to retain major settlement blocs in the West Bank and seek long-term security arrangements in the Jordan Valley. But it should also affirm in principle its readiness to recognize a Palestinian state and guarantee access arrangements in Jerusalem.
These statements would not resolve the conflict, by any means. But they would go some way toward restoring credibility.
To get there, Hamas must surrender its weapons in Gaza, with an international stabilization force present to keep the peace. The best chance for disarmament is if the weapons are handed to Palestinians. By default, the PA security forces will be the best candidates for the job, as the new technocratic government lacks a security arm. Hamas’s senior leadership should probably be allowed to exit into exile.
To build a Palestinian consensus in this direction, regional powers — Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey — must make reconstruction conditional on disarmament. The choice must be unmistakable: real recovery without any trace of a Hamas militia – or years in tent cities.
If all this is achieved, the real work begins. Areas under the new authority must visibly improve. Adequate housing, electricity, water, education, employment, and free movement must return in ways Palestinians can measure. The comparison with Hamas rule must be obvious.
Reformations in the PA — and Israel
Such a process with the PA should also be made conditional.
As existing U.S. proposals suggest, the PA must be required to undertake concrete reforms, including by overhauling educational materials that appear to condone violence against Israelis and ending payments to the families of imprisoned militants.
Senior PA officials have already signaled willingness to move on both fronts. These are achievable changes,
The payoff would be immense, potentially including normalization with Saudi Arabia, broader reconciliation of Israel the Arab and Muslim worlds, the gradual erosion of the global delegitimization campaign against Israel, and renewed international cooperation — especially in confronting Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and regional militias. In time, Zionism would once again be seen as a serious national project capable of difficult, mature decisions.
The catch: Little of this is likely to happen under the current Israeli government.
That is the central truth of 2026, an election year: a change of leadership in Israel is not optional for anyone who wants a better future. The disaster of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack was the culmination of years of strategic failure, ideological paralysis, and the reckless empowerment of Hamas. This is what happens when complacent societies repeatedly elevate unfit leadership in the face of existential danger.
So Israelis must decide: will they support a government that thrives on permanent conflict, or endorse the possibility of peace?
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California’s Gavin Newsom Proposes Budget Increase for State Universities Amid Federal Funding Threats
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, California, US, on Aug. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a rumored potential candidate for US president in 2028, has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds for state universities amid the Trump administration’s policy of canceling federal grants and contracts held by institutions which it accuses of failing to combat campus antisemitism.
Newsom previously sought to cut funding to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) by 8 percent during the 2025-2025 fiscal year (FY), before dropping that figure to 3 percent. Then on Friday, the governor proposed a new budget which would increase next year’s appropriation by $350.6 million for UC and $365.7 million for CSU, raising the state’s general fund for the schools to $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively.
“The budget introduced today by Gov. Newsom continues to provide critical support for the university and our students,” UC president James B. Milliken said in a statement responding to the news. “State support is more important than ever, as we face tremendous financial pressures stemming from rising costs and unprecedented federal actions. UC campuses rely on funding stability to serve students and maintain the academic and research excellence that has made UC the world’s greatest research university.”
He added, “An investment in UC is an investment in California’s future. I look forward to our ongoing partnership with Gov. Newsom and the legislature to ensure that our students have what they need to succeed at UC and beyond.”
The move, even as it defers $129.7 million for UC and $143.8 million for CSU to a later date, gives the schools breathing room as they fear the Trump’s administration’s confiscation of funds. Last year, for example, the administration impounded $250 million from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
US President Donald Trump ordered the money canceled in August after determining that the school exposed Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact. He ordered the move even after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.
UCLA was sued and excoriated by the public over its handling of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that an anti-Zionist student group established on campus in the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester. Witnesses said that it was a source of antisemitism from the moment it became active, and according to the lawsuits, students there chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it.
Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
On the same day that UCLA settled the suit, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement at the time. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Newsom has positioned himself as an ally of higher education throughout its clash with Trump. In August, he demanded that Harvard University president Alan Garber resign rather than reach a deal with the Trump administration that would restore federal funding to Harvard in exchange for the school’s agreeing to conservative demands for addressing campus antisemitism and shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“You don’t work with Donald Trump — only FOR Donald Trump,” Newsom protested, writing on the X social media platform. “Looks like Harvard has chosen to surrender. Alan Garber must resign. An absolute failure of leadership that will have demonstrable impacts to higher education across our country. He should be ashamed.”
He added, “California will never bend the knee.”
Newsom had days earlier criticized Trump’s effort to combat antisemitism and reform higher education, denouncing it as “disgusting political extortion.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.