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Unique Carnegie Hall concert to honor Japanese diplomat Sugihara, who saved 6,000 Jews
For most of his life, Chiune Sugihara received little recognition for the dramatic actions he undertook as Japanese vice-consul to Lithuania on the eve of World War II: the rescue of some 6,000 Jews from Poland and elsewhere from the Nazi death machine.
For decades, the Jewish world remained largely ignorant of his heroism. When, in 1985, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center located in Israel, honored the unassuming retired diplomat as a Righteous Among the Nations, Sugihara was too old and sick to travel to Jerusalem to accept the award. He died shortly after.
But his renown has grown in the years since his death, and now Sugihara is being celebrated in a new way with an extraordinary piece of music composed to commemorate his heroic actions.
On April 19 at Carnegie Hall, Japanese-American-Israeli cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper will perform this original piece of music — Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6, “Vessels of Light” — accompanied by the New York City Opera Orchestra conducted by Constantine Orbelian.
The gala concert, organized by Yad Vashem and the American Society for Yad Vashem, which commissioned the piece, will pay tribute to Sugihara’s legacy.
Along with the honorary Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, Sugihara issued life-saving visas to the Jews trying to escape Europe through a complex, illegal scheme involving fake transit visas via Japan to the Dutch-speaking Caribbean island of Curaçao.
Not a single Jew actually traveled to that faraway island off the coast of Venezuela, home to the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas. But the operation — carried out under the noses of Lithuania’s Nazi occupiers — enabled thousands of Jews to resettle in Shanghai, leading to eventual freedom.
“Being half-Japanese myself, I understand the culture, and I know as a Japanese person that opposing authority goes against every fiber of our being,” Cooper, the cellist, said this month in an interview near her home in Tel Aviv. Born in New York to a mother of Japanese descent, Cooper later converted to Judaism and moved to Israel. She and her husband, Leonard Rosen, are
raising their three children as Orthodox Jews.
“Everybody’s heard of Schindler, who had a factory. But Sugihara had nothing to gain from this. In fact, he had everything to lose,” said Cooper, a visiting professor of music at Tel Aviv University. “He didn’t want recognition and never spoke to anybody about it. He didn’t even know that he had saved anybody until the very end of his life.”
Cooper, who studied at Julliard and comes from a long line of musicians — her father is a pianist and her mother a violinist and former concertmaster of the American Symphony — has a special personal connection to the Sugihara story.
Her husband’s father, Irving Rosen, was one of the Jews whose lives was saved by Sugihara’s actions. Armed with papers enabling Rosen’s family to leave Lithuania and emigrate to Curaçao via Japan, the entire family traveled via the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vilnius to Moscow to Vladivostok, then by sea to Japan — and eventually Shanghai.
“I became obsessed with this story and wanted people to know about it, especially given everything that’s going on in the world with the rise of authoritarian governments, mass dislocations, refugees, wars, rising antisemitism and anti-Asian hate,” Cooper said. “I’m not a writer, a filmmaker or an actress. I’m a musician. People had asked me, ‘Why not put together a nice concert in tribute to Sugihara?’ But I wanted to write something that could last forever.”
Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem)
With the backing of Yad Vashem and the American Society for Yad Vashem, Cooper asked Auerbach to write the piece, a 40-minute composition for solo cello, choir and orchestra involving 130 performers, including Yiddish “whisperers,” allusions to Psalm 121 and an introductory piece by Japanese composer Karen Tanaka titled “Guardian Angel.”
At Carnegie Hall, Cooper, who plays on an Italian-made Guadagnini cello from 1743, will perform Auerbach’s moving, large-scale symphonic work as a soloist. She’ll also perform in Prague on March 27, Los Angeles on May 18, in California’s Napa Valley on July 18 and in Warsaw on October 8.
“Most people do not pay attention to history, because they’re so wedded to current events,” said the Carnegie Hall event’s co-chair, Peter Till, a board member of the American Society for Yad Vashem. “But this is even more relevant today because of the rise of extremist hate groups. They’ll forever deny that it exists, or ignore it, or say it couldn’t happen here, but hate continues
to repeat itself and people have to face up to it.”
The Sugihara story is especially compelling, Till said, because it’s the first event of its kind that links Holocaust survivors with Asia in general — and Japan in particular.
“This is as much about the music as it is an expression of humanity, of people from diverse cultural backgrounds coming together to save lives,” he said. “For Yad Vashem, this is a very important event because it shows the depth of understanding.”
Of the roughly 28,000 non-Jews who’ve been designated by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, only 40 were diplomats. Sugihara is the only Japanese citizen so honored.
“On the whole, the eligibility process for diplomats is slightly different than for ordinary rescuers, because they had immunity,” said Joel Zisenwein, director of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations Department. “In most cases, they were not at physical risk. But many of them had defied the guidelines and official policies of their foreign offices. Sugihara is even more interesting because he represented an ally of Nazi Germany.”
Zisenwein said Sugihara provided between 2,100 and 3,500 transit visas, though the exact number is not known.
“Literally, all rescuers from the Holocaust era have passed away, so people accepting the award are generally descendants or even grandchildren of the recipients,” Zisenwein said. “It’s interesting that Sugihara received his award for actions prior to the German invasion of Lithuania. Most of the Jews he rescued were Polish refugees who had fled there in 1939. Many countries claim to have their own ‘Schindlers.’ But here indeed was an individual who saved thousands of Jewish lives.”
Japanese-American-Israeli cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper has a special personal connection to the Sugihara story. (Vardi Kahana)
The evening’s master of ceremonies will be Zalman Mlotek, who is also artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. Tickets and sponsorships are still available for the event.
“It’s not just the people Sugihara saved. It’s the worlds of those thousands of people,” said Mlotek, whose father, Joseph Mlotek, was a 21-year-old Yiddish poet working at a newspaper in Warsaw when World War II broke out. After fleeing to Lithuania, the family heard about Sugihara and was able to obtain transit visas to Shanghai, where the elder Mlotek and his brother Abram spent the war years.
“My father became a Yiddish activist here in New York and set up a network of 200 Yiddish schools all over the country. He published books with my mother and did concert tours for Yiddish musicians,” said Mlotek, 71. “I look at myself today, as artistic director of the Yiddish theater for 20 years, carrying on this same legacy that would have been decimated had it not been for the heroism of Sugihara.”
Auerbach’s composition had its world premiere last November in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas (known in Yiddish as Kovno), where Sugihara’s story took place. Additional performances are scheduled for cities around the world through 2024.
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Instagram Pushes Antisemitic Videos to Hundreds of Millions of Users, Report Finds
Silhouettes of mobile users are seen next to a screen projection of the Instagram logo in this picture illustration taken March 28, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Instagram actively recommends bigoted content to its users, according to newly published research from a leading antisemitism watchdog group.
The revelation followed two high-profile losses this week in lawsuits that charged billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns Instagram, with failing to protect children on its social media platforms.
On Wednesday, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) published new findings from its Antisemitism Research Center (ARC). The report, “Engineered Exposure: How Antisemitic Content Is Pushed and Amplified to Millions Across Instagram,” focused on tracking 100 antisemitic posts during a 96-hour period which Instagram directly pushed into users’ accounts through its own recommendation system.
CAM’s researchers found that these posts provoked 5.3 million likes and 3.8 million shares, which analysts estimate reached as many as 280 million users.
“Among the most disturbing findings is that the ARC researchers identified AI-generated ‘rabbi’ personas that were fabricated to push antisemitic tropes while projecting false religious authority,” CAM said in a statement announcing the report.
One bogus rabbi account CAM uncovered had collected more than 1.4 million followers. The report described how an account called Rabbi Goldman “pushes antisemitic conspiracy theories, including allegations of Jewish control of the global financial system, to a large audience, with some videos getting more than five million views.”
ARC identified 11 other fake rabbis, bringing the total followers for such accounts up to 2.1 million. According to the researchers, “each presents a distinct persona and voice, yet all promote narratives portraying Jews as obsessed with money, playing to classical antisemitic stereotypes.”
The report also documented substantial linking of Jews with occult themes including references to demons, Satan, 666, Moloch, freemasonry, the Illuminati, and especially the ancient Canaanite storm god Baal. The slander against Jews as secretly worshipping a deity who demanded child sacrifice and rivaled the God of Israel in the Bible has manifested elsewhere on social media. Far-right podcaster Candace Owens has claimed that the Star of David has “ALWAYS [sic] been associated with Canaanite cults and Baal worship.”
An important component of this new research is that rather than investigators searching for hateful content, they relied solely on “the standard use of Instagram over four days, via content actively suggested by the platform’s recommendation systems.”
“This distinction demonstrates that exposure to these narratives does not require users to seek out extremist material,” the researchers explained. “Instead, the platform itself can act as a vector, introducing and amplifying such content through its own distribution mechanisms.”
Through providing examples of the content analyzed, the researchers showed how conspiracy theories transition into calls for violence. One video discussed in the report blamed “the Rothschilds” and central banks as guilty of causing all global crises including wars, diseases, and 9/11. The video then “escalates into explicit eliminationist rhetoric, calling for their eradication as a solution. It uses the Rothschild family as a proxy for Jews and frames them as a singular, malevolent force controlling world events.”
CAM CEO Sacha Roytman said the report provided evidence “of a broad systemic failure on the part of Instagram and Meta.”
“When a platform actively recommends content that dehumanizes Jews to mass audiences, we are no longer talking about a simple oversight or a mistake in the algorithmic design. We are talking about infrastructure that normalizes hatred at scale that must be addressed immediately,” he added.
Regarding potential motivations for what might have inspired Zuckerberg to allow for such a proliferation of hate, the report noted in its introduction that Meta had been “generating substantial advertising revenue from engagement with the content in question.”
In 2025, Meta’s revenue reached $200.966 billion, an increase of 22.17 percent from 2024, when revenue hit $164.501 billion, a 21.94 percent increase from 2023’s $134.9 billion, which in turn had grown 15.69 percent from 2022.
Bloomberg currently ranks Zuckerberg as the fifth wealthiest person on the planet, with an estimated net worth of $211 billion. Earlier this month, he purchased a $170 million mansion in South Florida’s Indian Creek, noted as the most expensive sale in Miami-Dade County and listed as “the largest residence ever created on Miami’s most exclusive island.”
On Wednesday, Meta laid off 700 employees, largely those affiliated with the failed Reality Labs division, which burned through $80 billion in pursuit of creating the virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds. The platform will shut down on June 15.
Roytman said that Meta “must take a hard look at how its algorithms are promoting antisemitic content and put real, transparent safeguards in place to stop it.”
Meta may have additional motivation now to level up the safety protocols on its platforms following back-to-back decisions in a pair of lawsuits this week which, legal analysts suspect, may have now opened the floodgates for thousands of similar cases around the country.
On Tuesday in Santa Fe, jurors found Meta liable and imposed a $375 million fine for failing to prevent minors’ exposure to harmful sexual content including online solicitations, human trafficking, and explicit imagery.
“Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement following the verdict. “Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
Torrez vowed to go after Meta for more money and force changes to the platforms.
“New Mexico is proud to be the first state to hold Meta accountable in court for misleading parents, enabling child exploitation, and harming kids,” Torrez said. “In the next phase of this legal proceeding, we will seek additional financial penalties and court-mandated changes to Meta’s platforms that offer stronger protections for children.”
On Wednesday in Los Angeles, jurors found Meta and Alphabet (parent company of YouTube) liable for the addictive qualities of their platforms exacerbating the mental health problems of a young woman and awarded her $3 million in damages with $3 million more in punitive damages.
Omri Ben-Shahar, a law professor at the University of Chicago, told the Wall Street Journal that “what is new is the addiction element.” He warned “that could create a very broad liability. The notion of addiction, there is something very abstract about it.”
Meta and Alphabet both plan to appeal the ruling. Alphabet spokesman José Castañeda sought to distance the company from Meta (which jurors found more heavily liable at a 70-30 penalty ratio), saying “this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”
Previous legal challenges to social media and online video companies for failing to prevent exposure to harmful content have usually failed due to longstanding legal interpretations of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
This statute has prevented plaintiffs from suing a website’s host the way they would an individual committing slander or a publisher engaged in libel. The legal innovation which allowed for success in these cases was lawyers’ decision to focus not on the content itself but on the design of the products which intended to hold users captivated, glued to their phones for hours.
“They knew,” said Mark Lanier, the lawyer for the 20-year-old plaintiff in the addiction case. “They targeted the children.”
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University of Wisconsin–Madison Denounces BDS Resolution Passed by Student Government
University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on May 1, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
The University of Wisconsin–Madison’s student government on Wednesday passed a resolution which endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and demanded the institution divest from companies involved financially with Israel, drawing a stern rebuke from the school’s administration.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the resolution accuses the Jewish state of “apartheid, genocide, and militarized violence … at the intersections of race, gender, religion, disability, and socioeconomic status.” It also compares Israel’s conduct in its defensive war against the terrorist group Hamas to the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan (RSF), a notorious paramilitary group responsible for a slew of war crimes and premeditated mass casualties of civilians.
After failing to reach the floor for a vote when the Associated Students of Madison (ASM) first considered it last week, it was approved during an evening session on Wednesday. The body has not yet released the final tallies of the vote, but the UW Madison administration confirmed that it passed in a statement which condemned the outcome.
The university also said it was “reviewing reports alleging that an online chat, including possibly some ASM representatives, used an antisemitic term in reference to limiting potential speakers at the March 18 ASM meeting” where the resolution was considered.
According to The Daily Cardinal, a campus newspaper, an SJP member told their contact in ASM via text message to slash the time allotted for public comment because the “proportion of Zios [sic] rises as the speaker list goes on.”
“Zio” is an antisemitic slur brought into prominence by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. While the term, derived from “Zionist,” has generally been deployed by white supremacists and other far-right extremists, it has more recently been used as well by anti-Israel activists on the progressive far left to refer to Jews in a derogatory manner.
Noting that the resolution “issued a number of flawed, unrelated and illegal demands,” the administration said in Wednesday’s response to the vote that “Wisconsin state law prohibits state and local government agencies from adopting their own rules or policies that would involve them in a boycott of Israel” and that “ASM leadership was counseled by university attorneys on the clear illegality of that specific part of the resolution” but “nonetheless voted to pass it.”
The administration did not condemn BDS as matter of principle, however, but said that UW-Madison “condemns antisemitism in all of its forms” in regard to the “Zio” text message.
Formally launched in 2005, the BDS movement opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.
Leaders of the BDS movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
The apparent antisemitic undertones of the ASM vote at the University of Wisconsin-Madison underscore the reality of campus antisemitism and the degree to which it has changed Jewish student life.
According to a recent survey commissioned by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Hillel International, a striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus, and of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. The survey also found that 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism.
Meanwhile, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
The survey, included in AJC’s new “The State of Antisemitism in America” report, added that 32 percent of Jewish students feel that campus groups promote antisemitism or a learning environment that is hostile to Jews, while 25 percent said that antisemitism was the basis of their being “excluded from a group or an event on campus.”
Jewish students endure these indignities while preserving their overwhelming support for Israel. Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed identified caring about Israel as a central component of Jewish identity and 76 percent agreed that calling for its destruction or describing it as an illegitimate state is antisemitic.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran Lowers Minimum Age for War Roles to 12, Sparking Outcry Over Child Soldier Use
Kids hold up an Iranian flag and chant slogans during a protest against the Israeli airstrikes on Iran, in Sana a, Yemen, June 20, 2025. Photo: IMAGO/Hamza Ali via Reuters Connect
The Iranian regime has lowered the minimum age for participation in war-related activities to just 12 years old, a move that will likely fuel the concerns of human rights groups, which have condemned Iran’s treatment of children.
In a televised interview with state media, Rahim Nadali, a cultural with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Tehran, announced that the new initiative “For Iran” is recruiting participants to assist with patrols, checkpoints, and logistics.
“Since children are increasingly volunteering to take part, we have lowered the minimum age to 12,” Nadali said, urging young children to join the war effort if they wish.
Rahim Nadali, Cultural Deputy of the IRGC’s Tehran branch (Mar 26, 2026):
“12 and 13-year-old children wanted to participate in Basij checkpoints across the cities. We have lowered the age limit to 12 and above.” pic.twitter.com/lLZy9pU5xm— حافظه تاریخی (@hafezeh_tarikhi) March 26, 2026
Iran International first reported Nadali’s statement, which has since circulated on social media.
As part of the regime’s state media coverage of the US-Israeli war against Iran, this latest announcement has ignited mounting backlash over the use of minors in security‑related roles — a practice that is not new in Iran.
“Recruiting children into military activity is a violation of international laws and the international community must not stay silent,” Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad posted on social media, along with video of Nadali’s comments. “This is the same regime that lectures the world about morality. But when it comes to survival? They’re willing to send children into danger.”
In the past, widely circulated social media images and videos have repeatedly shown children and teenagers in military-style uniforms cracking down on protests, including during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which erupted nationwide after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died in a Tehran police station following her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules.
Under international law, Iran’s move flagrantly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which explicitly prohibits the use of children in military activities, marking a dramatic breach of its global obligations.
Human rights groups have also repeatedly accused Iranian security forces of killing child protesters during past crackdowns.
According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, more than 200 children were killed during the nationwide anti‑government protests earlier this year, which security forces violently crushed, leaving thousands of demonstrators tortured or killed.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also documented cases of children being shot, detained, and abused during these latest demonstrations, noting that government forces have repeatedly targeted minors in ways that breach international law.
Iran has a long track record of widespread human rights abuses, including crackdowns on protesters, harassment of activists, threats to minorities, executions of children, violations of women’s rights, and dire prison conditions.
During the January uprising, at least 6,724 protesters, including 236 children, were killed, with another 11,744 cases still under verification, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). Multiple other reports have estimated that the overall death toll may exceed 30,000.
As in past years, executions remain one of the starkest manifestations of human rights abuses in Iran, with at least 2,488 people executed last year, including 63 women and two children, 13 of them carried out publicly.
Tehran’s latest controversial move comes as Iran has reportedly slammed a US proposal to end the war as “one‑sided and unfair,” a rebuff that has cast doubt on the prospects for a negotiated ceasefire.
US President Donald Trump has warned the Islamist regime it must reach a deal or face a continued onslaught.
“They now have the chance, that is Iran, to permanently abandon their nuclear ambitions and to join a new path forward,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
“We’ll see if they want to do it. If they don’t, we’re their worst nightmare. In the meantime, we’ll just keep blowing them away.”