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Three-time war veteran and longtime JTA correspondent Tom Tugend dies at 97
(JTA) — It was the kind of story that Tom Tugend loved to tell, except he lived it.
He left Berlin, aged 13, on Adolf Hitler’s birthday, in 1939, driven out by the ideology reflected in the swastikas on the banners fluttering in the streets. Six years later, he was back in Germany as an American soldier interrogating the Nazis who had driven his family out.
“I had been a refugee a few years before,” Tugend told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2021. “They kicked me out, they were the masters. And suddenly they couldn’t be nice enough, and couldn’t do enough for us. And of course, each one, some of his best friends were Jews.”
Tom Tugend, who fought in three wars — two for the United States and one for Israel — spent decades as Jewish media’s gentleman correspondent, covering, among other beats, Hollywood.
He died at his home in Sherman Oaks, California, on Wednesday at 97, his daughter Alina said.
“His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” Alina Tugend told JTA Thursday. “He was a hero to many people.”
Tugend was unfailingly kind and soft-spoken, including in an interview last year with the JTA, in which he shared story after story, from firing swastika-emblazoned anti-tank guns in Egypt to his experience facing antisemitism as a young German immigrant in the United States.
Born in 1925, Tugend was raised in a well-to-do German Jewish family. His father, Gustav Tugendreich, a respected pediatrician, understood the danger of Hitler’s rise and left for the United States in the mid-1930s after securing a lectureship at Bryn Mawr College.
When he was able to bring them over, he urged his family to follow him, but life remained good enough in Germany that they resisted until it was almost too late — they left four months before World War II started.
It was Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, and the city’s trees and poles were draped with massive swastika banners. “Gee, I mean, they may not like the Jews, but it’s very nice of them to give us such a nice sendoff,” Tugend recalled last year with a laugh.
The transition to life in the United States was not easy. The family encountered antisemitism in their new home.
In eighth grade, for example, Tugend’s class read Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” which famously includes Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, as a main character. One of Tugend’s classmates, whom he had considered a friend, raised his hand and asked the teacher, “Wouldn’t you rather buy from an American than a Jew?”
“I don’t generally talk about it because it goes so counter, it sounds almost disloyal that you say I had a more difficult time initially in the United States than I had in Germany,” Tugend recalled.
He was restless, and joined the army when he was 18 — where he found more antisemitism. He was deployed in March 1944 and spent time in Marseille helping the French army fight SS units. When his commanders learned he spoke fluent German, they sent him to that country to interview Nazis.
He returned to the United States in March 1946 but remained unsettled. Two years later he saw an opportunity.
“Since a Jewish state is established only every 2,000 years, I was afraid I might not be around the next time,” he said, so he enlisted in the nascent and notoriously strapped Israeli army, which got its material where it could.
Tugend served as a squad leader in an English-speaking anti-tank unit, where he wound up using German guns that featured large swastikas on the barrel.
When that war ended, Tugend returned to California to complete his journalism degree. That stay was short-lived, too — he was drafted again in 1950 but was spared combat. Instead, he went to San Francisco to edit an Army newspaper.
After Korea, Tugend said, he ran out of wars. He shifted his focus to writing. He spent 30 years working at the University of California, Los Angeles and also had a parallel career in Jewish journalism, starting in 1964. He would go on to write for the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, and he spent decades as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s West Coast correspondent.
Lisa Hostein, the longtime former JTA editor-in-chief and current executive editor of Hadassah Magazine, remembered meeting Tugend on a Jewish press trip to Argentina in 1986. She told JTA last year that Tugend was “always the consummate professional and gentleman.”
Over the years, Tugend was honored by the Greater Los Angeles Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. He also received a lifetime achievement award from the American Jewish Press Association.
His last published article was last month in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles; it was an obituary for Edward Robin, a Los Angeles philanthropist and businessman, who was 80, 17 years Tugend’s junior.
Weeks before his own death, Tugend infused the article with his gentle and generous warmth. “A mere listing of his leadership roles in Jewish organizations worldwide would call for a book-length article,” Tugend wrote about Robin.
Honored at last month’s Jewish Journal gala, which he attended, Tugend never lost his love of writing. “You still get a certain kick in seeing your byline,” he told JTA last year.
Tugend is survived by his wife of 66 years, Rachel, and their daughters Alina Tugend, Orlee Raymond and Ronit Austgen.
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IDF Reports Steep Drop in Palestinian Terrorism but Threat of West Bank Violence Remains High
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
Terror attacks in the West Bank — and the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists — fell sharply in 2025 compared with the previous two years, according to a new Israel Defense Forces (IDF) report, even as security officials warn the threat remains volatile.
The IDF’s Central Command on Monday released an annual security assessment showing Palestinian-perpetrated terrorist activity in the West Bank fell significantly in 2025, with overall incidents — including stone-throwing and firebomb attacks — down 78 percent from the previous year.
According to the data, Palestinian terrorist activity spiked in 2023 with 847 attacks that killed 41 Israelis, declined in 2024 to 258 incidents with a death toll of 35, and then fell sharply in 2025 to just 57 attacks resulting in 20 Israeli fatalities.
These latest figures mark the lowest level of West Bank Palestinian terrorist attacks and fatalities since the war with Hamas began, even though violence remains far higher than in 2021, when just three Israelis were killed.
As Israeli intelligence and security forces intensified operations across the West Bank, the military said the drop in attacks followed the launch of Operation Iron Wall — a large-scale January 2025 campaign aimed at dismantling terrorist infrastructure — along with continuous operations throughout the year, including a sustained IDF presence in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps.
According to the newly released report, Israeli forces confiscated over 17 million shekels intended for terrorist activity, seized more than eight tons of dual-use materials, shut down 17 weapons-manufacturing sites, and confiscated 1,370 weapons components.
During a major operation last year, the IDF dismantled a Hamas network in Hebron that was preparing attacks across the West Bank and Israel, with members trained in weapons use, improvised explosive device fabrication, and intelligence gathering on potential Israeli targets.
Even while noting positive trends, however, the military cautioned that it remains on high alert under a “war tomorrow” scenario, warning that terrorist groups could attempt to trigger a wider uprising in the West Bank.
Last month, the IDF raised alarm bells over a growing terrorist threat in the West Bank, warning that Iranian-supplied weapons in the hands of Palestinian militants could enable an Oct. 7-style attack and prompting Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
The latest IDF report also highlights a surge in attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in 2025, recording around 870 incidents — a roughly 27 percent increase from the previous year, with a notable rise in serious cases.
In the wake of this surge in violence, the Israeli government has formed a joint task force — comprising the IDF, police, Border Police, and Shin Bet intelligence agency — to prevent and investigate attacks against Palestinians and the wider Muslim community.
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Qatari Money Corrupting Georgetown University, New Report Says
Students, faculty, and others at Georgetown University on March 23, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Georgetown University’s suspect relationship with the country of Qatar is the subject of another report which raises concerns about what the Hamas-friendly monarchy is getting in exchange for the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends on the institution for ostensibly philanthropic reasons.
Titled, “Qatar’s Multidimensional Takeover of Georgetown University,” the new report, by the Middle East Forum, describes how Qatar has allegedly exploited and manipulated Georgetown since 2005 by hooking the school on money that buys influence, promotes Islamism, and degrades the curricula of one of the most recognized names in American higher education.
“The unchecked funds provided by Qatar demonstrate how foreign countries can shape scholarship, faculty recruitment, and teaching in our universities to reflect their preferences,” the report says. “At Georgetown, courses and research show growing ideological drift toward post-colonial scholarship, anti-Western critiques, and anti-Israel advocacy, with some faculty engaged in political activism related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anti-Western interventionism.”
Georgetown is hardly the only school to receive Qatari money. Indeed, Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding to American colleges and universities, according to a newly launched public database from the US Department of Education that reveals the scope of overseas influence in US higher education.
The federal dashboard shows Qatar has provided $6.6 billion in gifts and contracts to US universities, more than any other foreign government or entity. Of the schools that received Qatari money, Cornell University topped the list with $2.3 billion, followed by Carnegie Mellon University ($1 billion), Texas A&M University ($992.8 million), and Georgetown ($971.1 million).
“Qatar has proved highly adept at compromising individuals and institutions with cold hard cash,” MEF Campus Watch director Winfield Myers said in a statement. “But with Georgetown, it found a recipient already eager to do Doha’s bidding to advance Islamist goals at home and abroad. It was a natural fit.”
MEF executive director Gregg Roman added, “Georgetown is Ground Zero for foreign influence peddling in American higher education. It has not only abandoned its mission to educate future generations of diplomat and scholars to represent US interests at home and abroad, but is working actively to undermine the foundations of American government and policy. No doubt they’re eager to get the money, but at base this evinces an ideological hostility to Western civilization.”
Georgetown’s ties to Qatar’s have aroused suspicion before.
In June, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) released a report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” a 132-page document which revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, the GU-Q located in the country’s Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report explained, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Another recent Middle East Forum (MEF) report raised concerns about Northwestern University’s Qatar campus (NU-Q), accusing it of having undermined the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by functioning as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
The report also said that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continued. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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France’s National Assembly Advances Bill to Combat Modern-Day Antisemitism
Procession arrives at Place des Terreaux with a banner reading, “Against Antisemitism, for the Republic,” during the march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
France’s lower house of parliament has advanced legislation targeting what it describes as “renewed forms of antisemitism,” including anti-Zionism and Holocaust minimization, drawing applause from Jewish leaders and sharp criticism from opponents who claim it could undermine free expression.
On Tuesday, the National Assembly’s Law Committee narrowly approved, by an 18-16 vote, a bill — introduced by Jewish MP Caroline Yadan — aimed at combating modern-day antisemitism and Israel-hatred amid growing hostility toward Jews and Israelis across France.
“Strong and decisive measures to send a clear message to our fellow citizens: France unconditionally protects everyone on its soil, guided by the force of the law, steadfast principles, and loyalty to its history,” Yadan wrote in a post on X.
Fière et émue de l’ADOPTION
, aujourd’hui en Commission des lois, de ma proposition de loi visant à lutter contre les formes renouvelées de l’antisémitisme.
Renforcement du délit d’apologie du terrorisme ;
— Caroline Yadan (@CarolineYADAN) January 20, 2026
With support coming largely from the governing majority and the far right and opposition from the left, the bill is now set to advance to the full assembly for further debate.
The new legislation seeks to strengthen existing law by punishing both explicit and implicit praise of antisemitism, equating praise of perpetrators with praise of antisemitic acts, and treating the downplaying or trivializing of terrorism as a form of support.
It would also reinforce laws against glorifying terrorism, establish a new offense for inciting the destruction of a state, and crack down on the trivialization and denial of the Holocaust.
“Today, anti-Jewish hatred in our country is fueled by an obsessive hatred of Israel, which is regularly delegitimized in its existence and criminalized,” Yadan said. This hatred, she continued, is “disguised under the mask of progressivism and human rights.”
“Antisemitism is never an isolated phenomenon,” the French lawmaker said. “It is always a warning. It is the first symptom of a violence that, sooner or later, spreads, expands, and strikes more broadly.”
“When it flourishes, it is our collective responsibility that falters. That is why we must act,” she added.
Debate over the bill comes as France continues to experience a historic surge in antisemitic incidents across the country following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews — welcomed the legislation, highlighting the importance of safeguarding freedom of expression while ensuring that hate speech threatening public safety is properly regulated.
“CRIF welcomes this initial adoption and underscores the importance of fighting hatred and discrimination within the Republic, whether antisemitic, racist, or in any other form,” the statement read
On the other hand, opponents of the bill warn that it could threaten free speech by blurring the distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, potentially criminalizing ambiguous statements, irony, slogans, or political commentary.
“Turning public speech on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a penalized arena risks deepening divisions rather than easing them,” Socialist MP Marietta Karamanli said during the parliamentary debate.
La France Insoumise MP Gabrielle Cathala, representing the far-left political party, also opposed the legislation, arguing that it does little to effectively combat antisemitism.
“It does not protect Jews. It protects a policy – that of the State of Israel and its criminal leaders – a policy of apartheid, a colonial enterprise, and genocide of the Palestinian people,” she said.
According to experts and civil rights groups, anti-Israel animus has motivated an increasingly significant percentage of antisemitic incidents, especially following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which resulted in the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.