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US teen deported, Israeli rabbi wounded as tensions mount for Jewish activists in the West Bank
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Having spent the night in an immigrant detention center in Ramle, Israel, Leila Stillman-Utterback, still handcuffed, began to daven shacharit, the morning prayers, as dawn broke.
“I think the police officers were very confused, because that was not the image of an activist that they had,” said the 18-year-old Vermont native.
Now, after being deported and banned by Israel for 10 years, she is unsure when she will be able to confuse people in Israel again.
In two separate incidents this past week, the right-wing Israeli government’s conflict with the Jewish left, both at home and abroad, reached new heights as American and Israeli Jews attempted to accompany Palestinians during their olive harvest in the West Bank. Harvesters have faced repeated restrictions by the Israeli military and a string of threats and attacks by local Israeli settlers.
In the first incident, Stillman-Utterback and another Jewish American were accused of violating the terms of their tourist visas and entering a closed military zone. The two were detained, deported and banned for 10 years from Israel.
Days later, armed Israeli settlers confronted a delegation of Jewish American activists. An Israeli dressed in partial military fatigues shot a live bullet into the air and a drone struck and injured a rabbi on the scene. The incident was caught on camera.
“These two incidents, one after another, are just evidence both of the danger of what’s happening, and that the Israeli government has made a decision that, rather than address the horrific violence by settlers, they’re going to … penalize American Jews who are here because they care about this land and the people who live here,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the executive director of the progressive Jewish organization T’ruah, who was present at the second incident.
The clashes and deportations of American Jewish activists, most of whom with deep connections to their Jewish communities as well as Israel, left Jewish groups and those affected dismayed.
The rabbinical associations for the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued a joint statement saying they were “appalled by the attack on a group of rabbis, including members from all three of our organizations, by radical settlers” in the West Bank.
“We demand that the attackers be held accountable for their actions and that the Israeli government use its authority to end such provocations and attacks,” they said. An Israeli Reform rabbi and member of parliament, Gilad Kariv, plans to raise the issue in the Knesset.
This year has seen an uptick in Israeli and international activists providing a protective presence for Palestinians attempting to complete the all-important olive harvest, which is a cultural touchstone as well as an economic lifeline for rural Palestinians facing high unemployment.
Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 27, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented 126 olive harvest-related settler attacks against Palestinians resulting in casualties, property damage, or both, a record pace. In addition, Palestinian farmers have been consistently presented with closed military zone orders for up to 24 hours in the areas they wish to harvest.
In mid-October, Israel detained and deported 32 foreign activists who were accompanying Palestinian harvesters near Burin.
Stillman-Utterback joined 10 other Jews — seven Israelis, and three other foreigners — on Oct. 29 as part of a solidarity harvest in Burin organized by Rabbis for Human Rights.
When she graduated from high school this past spring, Stillman-Utterback knew she wanted to spend a gap year in Israel. Stillman-Utterback’s mother is a rabbi, and she worked as a Hebrew school teacher while spending her summers at Eden Village, a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York. She was also on the Jewish Youth Climate Movement’s executive board in high school, and she was named a Bronfman Fellow, a cohort of high-achieving Jewish teens, two years ago.
“My anchors in my life and a lot of my communities that are really important to me are all Jewish,” Stillman-Utterback told JTA.
Having gone on multiple summer trips to Israel over the years, Stillman-Utterback spent the 2022-2023 school year living in Jerusalem with her family. She attended many of the pro-democracy protests outside the Knesset that year, calling them “inspiring.”
“I learned about Israel through the perspective of Jewish values like tikkun olam and b’tselem elohim,” she explained, using Hebrew terms meaning social action and the concept that all humans are created in God’s image. “That every human being is made in the image of Hashem, and that is how I was learning about and looking at the conflict.”
Along with the other woman deported by Israel, Stillman-Utterback had come to Israel this fall as a part of the Achvat Amim program, which is connected to the socialist Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair. The five-month volunteer program in Jerusalem focuses on “self-determination of all people.”
Stillman-Utterback joined half a dozen harvests before the one that led to her deportation.
Before the latest and last action, the activists were stopped by Israeli soldiers at a “flying checkpoint” at the entrance of the village of Burin. An organizer was handed a closed military zone order, prohibiting the group from entering the area. According to one of the volunteers, they decided to take another route to join the harvest in an area that they believed was not included in the order.
Shortly after arriving at the new area, organizers learned that their bus drivers had been detained by the Israeli military, with their keys confiscated. Upon hearing this, they decided to bring the group to the soldiers, according to one volunteer present. The volunteer asked for anonymity because Israeli authorities later demanded the activists sign a statement promising not to speak publicly about the incident.
After the activists were held for 90 minutes by the soldiers, Israeli police arrived and announced they were detaining the entire bus because the participants were aware they had entered a closed military zone. The volunteers were escorted to the police station in the Israeli settlement of Ariel. Those with Israeli citizenship or with visas other than a student or tourist visa were released shortly thereafter.
According to Michal Pomerantz, the lawyer for the deported women, Stillman-Utterback and another Jewish-American woman on tourist visas were brought to an immigration tribunal in Ramle. With the proceedings carried out in Hebrew, they were unaware that it was a deportation proceeding and that the man they were speaking to was a judge, according to Pomerantz.
Israeli authorities say the participants ignored the initial warning and were aware they were in a closed military zone. One of the other detained participants said the group believed they had moved to an area that was not under the order.
“The policeman asked [Stillman-Utterback], ‘Why didn’t you get off the bus?’” recounted Pomerantz. “I mean, it was an 18-year-old in the middle of the West Bank. She had no idea where she was.”
The head of Hashomer Hatzair wrote a letter to Israeli authorities vouching for the two women while asserting they were engaged in a Zionist program oriented around “coexistence.” Pomerantz says this plea didn’t make a difference to immigration officials. Neither did telling Israeli officials that they were Jewish.
Faced with either appealing the decision and spending the weekend in an immigration prison or accepting a flight out of Israel, both women accepted the offer to be flown out, leaving the country on Friday.
“They basically are getting deported over being in a closed military zone for a couple of minutes,” said Becca Strober, the executive director of Achvat Amim.
The deportation of foreign Jews engaged in solidarity activism with Palestinians is a relatively new phenomenon. Strober recalled one such action she and others took in 2016 in which they deliberately entered a declared closed military zone. In that case, while six Israeli activists were detained, the American citizens were left alone.
The closest example to the case in Burin is that of Leo Franks, a British Jew who arrived in Israel last year on a tourist visa with plans to immigrate. After being detained for pro-Palestinian activism work in the West Bank, Franks had his immigration application denied and was ordered to leave the country within seven days.
“For a state that claims to be a Jewish state for all Jews,” said Strober, “if you just show up one day and stand in support of Palestinians by doing something as basic as picking olives together, actually, then your Jewishness is irrelevant.”
Jewish and other groups organizing solidarity harvests this year complain that while there were previously mechanisms for coordinating harvests with the military, this year they are largely unable to do so.
Organizers for Rabbis for Human Rights say they have been presented with closed military zone orders the majority of the time they arrive at Palestinians’ olive groves. Pomerantz and a team of lawyers have been involved in an ongoing case with the Israeli Supreme Court for the last three years, claiming that military zone closures are being misused by the army for political instead of security purposes.
“Our ability to be protected by the army has really broken down,” said one of the other Jewish volunteers who was detained in Burin. “And especially with this Netanyahu-led coalition, we’re treated as traitors. We’re treated as suspects, as anarchists, as people coming with some kind of foreign agenda.
“But we affirm that we’re doing this for the sake of Israeli society, as much as we’re doing it for the liberation of Palestinians.”
In a joint statement made by the IDF and Israeli police after the incident, authorities said they had conducted an operation in Burin together with the Population and Immigration Authority after discovering activities by Israeli and foreign activists in the area that were “endangering public security and causing friction on the ground.” Subsequently, they worked to “locate and stop foreign elements involved in incitement and provocations which create disturbances of the public order.”
The statement went on to say that the two women had violated the terms of their tourist visas. Though at first promising to do so, a spokesperson for the IDF did not comment further to JTA.
Rabbi Jacobs said she organized a trip to the West Bank this year in response to the changing conditions on the ground.
“Settler violence has just gone up extraordinarily in the last couple of years during the war,” Jacobs told JTA. “When we’ve been watching it from afar, as many of our Israeli and Palestinian colleagues have been affected by it, it seemed appropriate that even if we can’t as Americans be here every day, that we would at least find a time for a group of us to be here.”
Working with Rabbis for Human Rights on the ground, Jacobs and eight other rabbis — several of whom had already flown to Israel to attend the World Zionist Congress — first went out picking olives in the Palestinian village of Battir before staying overnight with Palestinian shepherds in the Jordan Valley. Such shepherds report an onslaught of physical attacks by Israeli settlers while being mostly prevented by settlers and soldiers from grazing their flocks in lands now often located in military firing zones or nearby Israeli settlements or outposts.
On Tuesday, the group then went to fields near Deir Istiya to pick olives with local Palestinians, joining other solidarity activists, a few of whom wore markers of Jewish observance such as tzitzit and kippot. The local Palestinians had been unable to reach their olive groves this year due to restrictions from Israeli soldiers and local settlers. The rabbis and Palestinians managed to pick the olives for a short time as a drone buzzed overhead. At times the drone came close to the harvesters.
At one point, the drone swooped down and struck Rabbi Dana Sharon from Rabbis for Human Rights, leaving a deep gash on her shoulder.
Soon after, two armed Israelis arrived, dressed in partial military fatigues and claiming to be a part of the security coordinator team of the nearby settlement of Revava. “The drone is a property of the [settlement security guards]!” shouted the men. Though the drone was returned, shouting ensued, with one of the harvesters shouting back. One of the men then shot a live round in the air before retreating.
Soon after, Israeli soldiers in uniform approached the group of olive harvesters, saying they were told by the two armed Israelis that the group of rabbis and olive harvesters had taken their drone and attacked them. These soldiers relented when shown videos by the harvesters suggesting otherwise.
The shock of the encounter was palpable among the group of visiting American rabbis, who hailed from a combination of Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative congregations. One stunned rabbi asked an Israeli working for Rabbis for Human Rights about the gunshot, “That was a blank, right?” It was not.
The men have not been identified but appear to reflect a blurring of the lines between settlers and soldiers in the West Bank.
In a statement to JTA, the IDF identified the men the group thought were armed settlers as soldiers.
“IDF soldiers operated a drone that hit harvesters,” the statement said. “The incident is under review.”
According to the IDF, the soldiers arrived “to collect the drone, during which they fired shots in the air.” The incident was “unusual” and ”included unprofessional behavior” by the soldiers, said the IDF, which said without offering specifics that “disciplinary action” would be taken.
According to Jacobs, different IDF soldiers in uniform were present from the beginning when the group began the harvest. By Jacobs’ account, these soldiers did nothing as the drone came closer and when the armed men confronted the group.
“I don’t think this [incident] is unusual, though,” she said. “Settlers in IDF uniforms harass Palestinians every day and sometimes wound and kill them. What was unusual was that this group included American and Israeli rabbis, which is likely the reason the IDF is responding at all [to requests for comment].”
Rabbi Sarah Reines, of Temple Emanu-El in New York, looks back on her three-day trip in the West Bank heartened by the Palestinian communities she visited and committed to continued solidarity.
Reines praised “these people’s resilience and their ability to discern the difference between Israelis who threaten them and cause them harm, those who are neutral, and those who are friends.”
She added, “The rising danger only increases my resolve to represent the highest Jewish values of respect, lovingkindness, peace and preservation of life in the land Jews call home.”
In the case of Stillman-Utterback, her deportation and banning left her with “a sense of betrayal,” one that she is now processing from back in the United States.
“It sent me the message that, despite being Jewish in a state that was created for Jews, I’m not the right kind of Jew, or maybe not even Jewish at all, in the eyes of the state and the army and the police,” said Stillman-Utterback.
The post US teen deported, Israeli rabbi wounded as tensions mount for Jewish activists in the West Bank appeared first on The Forward.
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Antisemitism is exploding on the right but the Jewish establishment is focused on the left
America’s antisemitism watchdogs are committing institutional malpractice.
While antisemitism explodes on the right, including throughout the Trump administration and popular right-wing online spaces, anti-antisemitism organizations are disproportionally focusing on left-wing anti-Zionists and Muslim politicians, minimizing if not ignoring white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, and Christian nationalists — many of whom are active in Republican political circles.
And now, with the release of the latest batch of Epstein files and the start of the Iran War, what was already an epidemic has become a plague. As the Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld has discussed at length, the incoherent rationales for the war have led many to the conclusion (mostly incorrect, in my view, though not without some basis) that America has been pushed into fighting Israel’s war — a view that slides quickly into antisemitic conspiracy theories on both the right and the left, as well as antisemitic ”revenge” attacks by Islamists, Muslims, or other Arabs, like the attempted murders at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, last week.
Our communal institutions are failing us. Antisemitism can be found all across the political spectrum, yet as the ADL convenes its annual “Never is Now” conference today, its agenda is and newsfeed are disproportionately focused on the left. Our community needs to engage in some serious soul-searching. And change course.
Almost two-thirds of young conservatives hold antisemitic views
It is shocking to learn how pervasive antisemitic views are among young conservatives, including many working for the government.
A November 2025 study by the conservative Manhattan Institute (not some left-wing org) found that “nearly four in ten in the current GOP (2024 Trump voters plus registered Republicans) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Younger men are especially likely to hold this view (54% of men under 50 vs. 39% of women under 50).” (Interestingly, 77% of Hispanic GOP voters held this view, compared with 30% of white GOP voters.)
In another poll, 64% of young conservatives aged 18-34 agreed with at least one antisemitic statement in a survey. That is absolutely astonishing.
Here’s an even more chilling story. Also last November, Rod Dreher, the post-liberal, far-right conservative thinker, reported on a trip to Washington, D.C. (meeting with Viktor Orban and JD Vance, discussing “the survival of Christianity in Europe”) in his Substack newsletter. After meeting with a number of conservatives in the Trump administration, Dreher wrote:
The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world…. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in antisemitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.
Dreher speculated that a number of factors caused this phenomenon, including the losses of economic opportunity, trust in institutions and “common culture.” He continued:
[T]he issue of antisemitism on the young right is much deeper than I had guessed… [A] lot of this is reaction to how Jewish organizations like the ADL have policed speech critical of Israel, and of anything to do with Jews, so heavily over the decades that they have caused intense resentment among the Gentile Zoomercons. One man told me that for as long as he has been in politics, any criticism of Israel got you tagged as an antisemite, and that was a potential career-killer. So his generation has come to hate that, and to cease caring about the opinions of Jews.
Again, Dreher is not hostile to the right; he is part of it. But what he sees within his own movement shocks him. And this was before the Iran War. Dreher concludes:
The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree…. Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil.
I encourage you to read the whole post. I disagree with almost all of Dreher’s ideological positions, but his serious confrontation with this crisis is a model of honest reflection. I would also recommend reading the work of journalist John Ganz, who has written powerfully of the nihilistic, antisemitic Groyper phenomenon and its significance within the GOP.
To be sure, there is antisemitism on the left as well. But there is absolutely no analogue to the scope of right-wing antisemitism and its proximity to power. Here are a few specific examples.
- Kingsley Wilson has served as the Department of Defense press secretary since May 2025. Less than a year prior, she replied to an ADL post commemorating the lynching of Leo Frank that “Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl,” a noxious lie that circulates in the antisemitic underbelly of the internet — strong evidence that she spends a lot of time in such spaces. Last March, Rep. Ritchie Torres wrote to Hegseth demanding Wilson’s firing, describing her social media posts as a “minefield of antisemitic rhetoric, white nationalist conspiracies, and pro-Kremlin propaganda.” Instead, Hegseth promoted her.
- Paul Ingrassia, currently acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, had been tapped to lead the Office of General Counsel until Politico exposed comments he made in a group chat including “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” On X (the post has since been deleted), Ingrassia called Fuentes “a real dissident of authoritarianism.”
- Other examples are the often nameless staffers running the social media accounts of the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other departments. As has now been well documented, these accounts routinely post images and slogans taken from Neo-Nazi and white supremacist communities like “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” posted by the Department of Justice, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” posted by DHS, variations of “Which Way Western Man?” (a 1978 book claiming a conspiracy by “World Jewry” against the “Western Man”) and many posts (too many to be coincidence) exactly 14 words long, a probable reference to David Lane’s white supremacist “Fourteen Words” slogan. (The ADL has a database of such references online.) These are both dogwhistles to the extreme right and evidence that these staffers are swimming in the ultra-nationalist swamp.
- And then there are the Young Republican group chats, which somehow keep turning up across the country filled with abject racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism. For example, a pile of Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont (once again obtained by Politico) included, among hundreds of lines of abject racism, posts like “I was about to say you’re giving national [leaders] to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest” and various jokes about gas chambers.
And that’s not even including Elon Musk, whatever his statements or hand gestures may mean.
To be clear, there are many Jewish voices on the right who have spoken out, including Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro. So has Trump, who after all has many Jews in his family (even as he often traffics in antisemitic stereotypes about money). But they haven’t made the problem go away, and it’s not at all clear that they even represent the Republican majority anymore. What happens after Trump leaves the political stage?
Meanwhile, other Republican leaders have explicitly rejected calls to isolate or condemn the antisemites. Shapiro, for example, has called out Megyn Kelly for refusing to condemn Fuentes and Owens. And when conservative pundit Scott Jennings asked Vice President Vance, “Does the conservative movement need to warehouse anybody out there espousing antisemitism in any way?” he replied, “No it doesn’t, Scott.” While Vance did also say “I think we need to reject all forms of ethnic hatred, whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, anti-white hatred,” that is a toothless statement if he refuses to take any action against those who express it.
So, they remain in office. Carlson, meanwhile, remains welcome at leading conservative institutions like Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation, despite a long torrent of antisemitic rhetoric, most recently blaming Chabad Lubavitch for the Iran war, which would be merely ludicrous were it not also exceedingly dangerous. (For good measure, Carlson has recently platformed not only Holocaust deniers but 9/11 “Truthers” who say that Israel was behind the terrorist attacks.)
Antisemitism is intrinsic to right-wing nationalism
This isn’t just a matter of a few bad apples. This is a massive, systemic trend. It is part of the rise of ethno-nationalism, Christian Nationalism, National Conservatism and the triumph of Pat-Buchanan-style America First politics. Despite the efforts of people like Loomer and Shapiro, and prominent Jewish NatCons like Yoram Hazony, it is impossible to somehow surgically remove antisemitism from that politics while leaving the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, and racist strands in place — as Hazony appears to have recently found out. (“I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online the last year and a half,” he said at this year’s NatCon conference. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken.”)
Antisemitism is not incidental to the nationalistic worldview that is ascendent in the Republican Party; it is essential to it. As Ilya Somin recently wrote in the Unpopulist newsletter:
Nationalism doesn’t just historically correlate with bigotry — it consistently drives antisemitism and other racial and ethnic prejudices. Indeed, nationalism intensifies preexisting antisemitic impulses. To the degree that today’s conservatives decide to embrace — or even just make peace with — nationalism and dispense with the universalist liberal principles of the American Founding, they will find it difficult to impossible to stem the spread of antisemitism in their midst.
Antisemitism is also an integral part of the right-wing internet. The most popular podcaster of all, Joe Rogan, recently hosted conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, a vicious antisemite who, according to reporting in this publication, “wrote last year that the U.S. was ‘controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of ‘antisemitism’ and claimed Jews control the media; and said that Israel had manipulated the Holocaust for its own gain.” (He also platformed Jake Shields, an MMA fighter-turned-far-right commentator who had said the previous month when he was on the show that Jews control America.)
And Rogan is just the tip of the spear. Andrew Tate routinely spouts antisemitic rhetoric with no corollary anywhere on the left. Influencer Nick Shirley just posted supportively of an antisemitic video by fellow influencer Tyler Oliveira. Right-wing conspiratorial antisemitism is taken for granted in the looksmaxxing and incel worlds. The Great Replacement theory (“Jews will not replace us!”) is routinely embraced on right-wing news media channels. Unambiguous, full-throated right-wing antisemitism is just part of the vibe.
But the ADL has been too busy worrying about Zohran Mamdani’s wife’s political views.
How is this happening?
Why, with an entire Jewish communal infrastructure dedicated to fighting antisemitism, are we failing to focus on the most troubling manifestations of the crisis? Why are our legacy organizations getting it so wrong?
There are several answers to those questions.
The first is obvious: hardline pro-Israel donors have distorted organizational priorities, directing resources and attention to what offends them personally, rather than what poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety. Their motivations may be sincere; clearly many organizational leaders are sincerely dismayed by anti-Zionism, and due to their own emotional connections to Israel and Zionism, they may sincerely experience it as antisemitism. But now, much of the Jewish establishment has concluded that harsh criticisms of Israel, and certainly anti-Zionist ones, are not wrongheaded political views but expressions of antisemitic bigotry. And that has warped organizational priorities and resource allocation decisions.
Again, it’s not that antisemitism does not exist on the anti-Zionist left: It does. And, of course, there is antisemitic violence perpetrated by anti-Zionists motivated by animus toward the State of Israel; we have seen that this week. But the overwhelming majority of that violence is committed by Islamists and terrorists, not campus protesters or obnoxious writers, artists and publishers. Yet the Jewish Establishment continues to paint with a broad brush, lumping together activists with principled objections to Zionism (as they understand or misunderstand it) with murderers and bigots targeting Jews with violence. There is no left-wing equivalent of the world Dreher describes, or the candidacy of James Fishback in Florida, or the popularity of Joe Rogan. And, love him or hate him, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeatedly, vociferously condemns antisemitism even as he holds views on Israel that are well to the left of many American Jews.
Second, obviously, many of the leading donors to Jewish establishment organizations are either Republicans themselves, or so strongly supportive of the Netanyahu government that they would prefer to trade the American Jewish birthright for the porridge of Greater Israel. Yes, they might concede, right-wing antisemitism is a problem, but plenty of Republicans are against it and the benefits of aligning with the Trump regime – for Israel, for their conservative moral values, or for their own pocketbooks — outweigh the costs.
Whether that is correct or not is impossible to say. But I would suggest, broadly speaking, that ethno-nationalism rarely turns out well for the Jews. The neocons and fiscal conservatives are not in charge anymore, and the MAGA movement’s nationalist-antisemitic monster cannot be contained once it is unleashed. As I fear that today’s coddlers of the party’s antisemitic wing will, one day, look as misguided as those who minimized the threat of nationalists in the past.
It’s also clear that some of our leaders (mostly Boomers or Gen-Xers) are often simply clueless about online culture. They seem not to even know the language. They may now know what a groyper is. But how about goyslop? Agartha? “Noticing”? 14:88? Have these donors ever been on Discord? Scrolled through TikTok? Watched Joe Rogan? Seen what happens to your YouTube feed when you watch a single video featuring conspiratorial content or a manosphere influencer?
Antisemitism is everywhere online, abetted by social media algorithms that are somehow immune to regulation. And if you don’t believe that matters, consider how Gamergate, Pepe the Frog, QAnon, and other online content moved into the mainstream and helped put Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Now imagine that happening with a figure who is closer to Fuentes or Fishback than Trump.
Of course, the ADL as an organization is aware of these phenomena; I’ve cited their own work several times in this article. But if you browse through the speakers at “Never is Now,” or peruse the ADL’s recent press releases, you will quickly see that the threat from the right is given far less prominence than the threat (real and perceived) from the left. The institutional knowledge is there, but the institutional priorities are disordered.
Worst of all, not only is the Antisemitism Industrial Complex failing to focus on the most dangerous forms of antisemitism, many of its efforts are making matters worse — including in the last few weeks.
First, by counting all anti-Zionist protests as antisemitic incidents, the ADL has destroyed its credibility as an objective monitor of antisemitism, making it much harder to track; we no longer have reliable data.
Second, by terrifying thousands, perhaps millions, of Jewish people — including many friends of mine — this emphasis on left-wing antisemitism obscures the more serious threats from white nationalists, Islamists, terrorists, and others who commit acts of violence.
And third, the Jewish establishment has imposed a hyper-woke regime of censorship in which statements in support of Palestine, or in opposition to Israel, or in opposition to Israel’s role in the Iran War, are deemed to be bigotry that merits permanent cancellation. (I have experienced this myself as well.) As Dreher noted, this only makes matters worse, as both conservatives and progressives can see that political speech is being censored by Jewish elites with significant political power — which is exactly what their antisemitic conspiracy theories tell them.
Obviously, it is not the case that if the Jewish community were to do or say a certain thing, antisemitism would disappear. Bigotry never disappears. But the question is not a binary one of existence or non-existence, but one of scope, size, and proximity to power. By way of analogy, racism will also probably never disappear, but when abject racism is espoused by government officials and leading cultural figures, that is measurably worse than when it is consigned to the margins. And that is precisely what has happened with antisemitism.
The anti-antisemitism world has become an echo chamber obsessed with left-wing anti-Zionism, while nationalist antisemitism is now widespread among young Republican activists and online influencers. I only hope our leaders change course before it is too late.
The post Antisemitism is exploding on the right but the Jewish establishment is focused on the left appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Marty Supreme’ and everything else Jewish at this year’s Academy Awards
At last year’s Academy Awards, Anora — a frenetic, somewhat ambiguously Jewish look at a Jewish enclave of New York, took home best picture, original screenplay, director and actress for its Jewish lead Mikey Madison. This year, we have a film that feels, in some ways, quite parallel, while cranking the Yiddishkeit to 11: Josh Safdie’s breathless picaresque Marty Supreme, set on the Lower East Side, is up for best picture and its star, Timothée Chalamet is a favorite for best actor.
There’s also Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s portrait of Jewish lyricist Lorenz Hart’s breakup with composer Richard Rodgers (Ethan Hawke is up for best actor). And One Battle After Another, a campy and absurdist satire about the infiltration of white supremacists in the U.S. government, is poised to have a massive night, with the blockbuster Sinners serving as its main competition.
That all goes to say that it’s another great year for Jewish stories at the Oscars, with some really compelling fodder for discussion about the place that Jews occupy today in arts and media. What stories are we telling and how are they received?
Here, as ever, the Forward culture team is here to break it all down for you, live as it unfolds. Of course, we cover Jewish movies all year. But at the Academy Awards, we get to see how the rest of the world feels about these movies. We will be updating this story with our thoughts throughout the ceremony.
Traditionally, as we begin these Oscars roundtables, we discuss what we’re all wearing and eating. What’ve we got?
Olivia: brown sweater and jeans; no food but aggressively chewing mint gum. I will later be drinking some of the seltzer I got from Brooklyn’s Seltzer Fest today.
Mira: I did a bunch of cooking for the week so I have vegetarian avgolemono soup and Alison Roman’s fennel salad. (I’m obsessed with this salad.) I am proudly wearing hard pants.
PJ: I am reheating some chicken from last night. Wearing a blue sweater with a little toggle and jeans. How many of Stellan Skarsgård’s large adult sons are here? In other l’dor v’dor news, Bill Pullman just mentioned how they filmed the Spaceballs sequel with his son Lewis.
Talya: I believe I’m wearing the exact same sweater I donned for this event last year — where’s my award for consistency? And, as always, sweatpants; I cannot comprehend suffering through this event in jeans.
Discussion of Israeli-Palestinian protests on the red carpet
Mira: Love a toggle. Speaking of outfits, anyone have thoughts on Odessa A’zion’s spangled red carpet set? She is one of the only people who styles herself on the red carpet, which I do respect.
Olivia: A’Zion’s outfit kind of looks like she forgot to tie whatever was supposed to be holding it up. I don’t think it looks bad, just like it’s falling down.
PJ: It wouldn’t look out of place hanging from the window of a VW van with shag carpet and some Tibetan prayer flags.
Mira: Of note, the past several years have seen protesters approaching people on their way into the ceremony, and a lot of pins on the red carpet taking a stance on the Israel-Hamas war, largely pro-Palestinian ones. We’re seeing less of that this year — though not none. Javier Bardem posted a photo of him wearing a pin reading “no to the war” in Spanish, along with another pin featuring Handala, a cartoon boy considered a symbol of Palestinians. The team of The Voice of Hind Rajab, nominated for best foreign film, are also wearing red pins with a white dove.
PJ: Those have replaced the red hand ArtistsforCeasefire pins, which some said recalled the bloody palms of Palestinians who killed IDF soldiers in 2000.
Olivia: A reporter for ABC in a pre-recorded segment asked executive producers and showrunners for the ceremony Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan if anything would get bleeped, such as mentions of Trump, Israel and Palestine. Recently, the BBC removed director Akinola Davies Jr’s call for a “Free Palestine” from their BAFTA stream. Kapoor asserted that the night’s production team supports free speech, but we’ll see what transpires over the course of the night.
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US Sends Additional Arms to Israel to Sustain Iran Operations
The first of two Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors is launched during a successful intercept test. Photo: US Army.
i24 News – The United States has recently increased shipments of munitions to Israel to support ongoing Israeli air operations against Iran.
According to reports broadcast by the public radio network Kan Reshet Bet, several weapons deliveries have arrived in Israel in recent days as part of what officials describe as an ongoing airlift aimed at sustaining the pace of military strikes.
Since the start of the campaign, Israeli forces are believed to have dropped more than 11,000 bombs on targets across Iran.
The shipments come as reports emerge about a potential shortage of ballistic missile interceptors in Israel. US officials told the news outlet Semafor that Israel’s interceptor stockpiles have been heavily used during the conflict.
According to those sources, Washington had already been aware for months that supplies could become strained, though it remains unclear whether the United States would be willing to share its own interceptor reserves. Israeli officials have since rejected claims that such a shortage exists.
Unlike the Iron Dome, which is designed to intercept short-range rockets and projectiles, ballistic missile interceptors serve as Israel’s primary defense against long-range missile threats. Fighter jets can also be used to attempt interceptions, though this method is considered a supplementary measure to missile defense systems.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has taken additional budgetary steps to support the war effort. During an overnight vote between Saturday and Sunday, ministers approved a roughly 1 billion shekel reduction across various ministry budgets to help finance classified military purchases linked to Operation “Roar of the Lion.”
The government had already approved a 3 percent cut in ministry budgets, a move expected to increase the defense budget by approximately 30 billion shekels as the conflict continues.