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Visiting Jerusalem, Ron DeSantis tries out his Jewish stump speech
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Ron DeSantis may not have declared that he’s running for president yet, but his incipient campaign was on full display Thursday at a conference in Jerusalem, where he ran down a laundry list of issues relevant to Israel and American Jews.
Most of the Florida governor’s remarks reflected what has become Republican orthodoxy in the post-Donald Trump era: He supports Israeli West Bank settlements as well as keeping Jerusalem under full Israeli control. He wants the United States to be more aggressive toward Iran’s nuclear program. He vehemently opposes the movement to boycott Israel.
And he declined to take a position on the Israeli government’s effort to sap the Israeli Supreme Court of much of its power — which President Joe Biden has repeatedly criticized as a danger to Israeli democracy.
“We must also, in America, respect Israel’s right to make its own decisions about its own governance,” he said. “You’re a smart country. You figure it out. It shouldn’t be for us to butt into these important issues.”.
He also pushed back at claims that his legislation has led to the banning of Holocaust books in his state, calling them “fake narratives” (though multiple Holocaust books have been banned). And, at a press conference, he signed a bill that aims to penalize antisemitic harassment. He also touted a new bill that gives vouchers worth thousands of dollars to parents who send their children to private schools.
“We’ve really seen a historic migration of American Jews and Israeli Americans moving to southern Florida,” he said. “It’s really, really boomed, and I think Florida’s policies have really reinforced that.”
DeSantis, who landed in Israel yesterday, was the keynote speaker at a conference on Thursday hosted by the Jerusalem Post at the Museum of Tolerance here. He received multiple standing ovations and cheers throughout the morning. At a press conference after his speech, some of his supporters sat among the journalists and clapped at his responses.
Israel is the latest on a four-stop international trip by DeSantis, who is expected to announce later this year that he will challenge former President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. On the trip, he is meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and other officials. His trip also includes stops in Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
“If there’s any announcements, those will come at the appropriate time,” he said in response to a question about his potential candidacy.
In his speech, DeSantis described his past support for Israel, advocating for the 2018 move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and, in 2019, holding a Florida cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. He also told the crowd that he baptized his children with water from the Sea of Galilee and said he put a note in the Western Wall asking God to protect Florida from hurricane season.
An affinity for the Bible also played a role in DeSantis’ position on the West Bank, which he called “disputed” rather than “occupied.” He referred to the territory by the term “Judea and Samaria,” which is the Israeli government’s standard term for the area and also emphasizes its place in the Bible. He spoke of visits to the northern West Bank settlement of Ariel, as well as to the City of David, a Jewish neighborhood and archaeological site in eastern Jerusalem.
“We visited the Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria,” he said during his speech regarding a previous trip. Later, at the press conference, he said, “Those are the most historic Jewish lands there are, going back thousands and thousands of years.”
He also came out staunchly in favor of continued Israeli control of eastern Jerusalem, claiming that it is the best way to ensure religious freedom in the city. Palestinians aspire for the city’s eastern area to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
“With Israeli sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem, people have the ability to practice their religion freely,” he said. “They have the ability to visit their sites freely. That would just actually not be true if that were in other hands.”
Although his Israel policies dovetail with those of Trump, and even though Trump’s Israel ambassador, David Friedman, was at the conference, DeSantis avoided saying the former president’s name in his speech, instead referring to “the previous administration.” He did say Trump’s name once during the press conference.
Following his speech, DeSantis announced partnerships with Israeli firms to develop tech products, and portrayed his state as an inviting home for Jews. He said the state had invested millions of dollars into synagogue security as well as Holocaust education. And he signed a bill that bans projecting threatening images on buildings without permission, as well as littering with the intent to intimidate.
Florida has seen an uptick recently in white supremacist activity. The Goyim Defense League, a far-right antisemitic group, relocated there last year. In October, several public spaces in Jacksonville displayed messages promoting the antisemitic ideas of rapper Kanye West. Neo-Nazis intimidated attendees at an Orlando-area Chabad center in February, and last week, police arrested a man for a March attack on a different Florida Chabad center.
“This is going to be able to provide more tools to be able to combat antisemitic activity,” DeSantis said. ״If you have a synagogue and someone shines a swastika-like image on that, they have a right to do the image for themselves, but putting it on someone else’s property, they’re defining that in this bill as a trespass.”
The signing of that bill, and DeSantis’ contention that he supports Holocaust education, comes as legislation he signed has enabled parents in the state to pursue bans of Holocaust literature. A South Florida school district library removed a Holocaust-themed novel by Jodi Picoult in March, and this month, a high school in the state removed a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary from its shelves.
Despite those instances and other bans parents are seeking, DeSantis claimed that there was no significant campaign to ban Holocaust books. He called that allegation the “book ban hoax.”
“Those are all fake narratives,” he said. “We’ve provided curriculum transparency for parents, to make sure that the curriculum used in school is transparent and to make sure everything is age appropriate and is not conflicting with Florida standards. And so, what parents have identified unfortunately are pornographic images in books.”
The legislation, which has targeted books about sexuality and gender, is at the center of DeSantis’ campaign to limit or ban discussion of those topics in schools. The law, called the “Parental Rights in Education” bill and dubbed by critics as the “Don’t say gay” bill, also bans discussion of LGBTQ topics between kindergarten and third grade, among other measures. It is one of a series of recent state laws limiting transgender rights.
That law is also at the center of DeSantis’ feud with Disney, the state’s largest employer, which just sued the governor for allegedly punishing the company for its criticism of the law. At the press conference, DeSantis said the suit is about Disney wanting “to be able to control things without proper oversight.”
DeSantis did not refer specifically to the Anne Frank graphic novel in his remarks, and said Florida had “beefed up” Holocaust education in the state. But a Jewish ally of his who accompanied him on the trip, Republican state Rep. Randy Fine, defended banning the book, which he called the “Anne Frank pornography book.”
“I read the diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid and I don’t remember any of that stuff that they put in that graphic novel,” Fine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And frankly that graphic novel is antisemitic. To sexualize the diary of Anne Frank in that sort of inappropriate way, it is antisemitic.”
When told that the passages, which are authentic and relate to Frank’s attraction to another girl as well as a description of her own genitalia, have been included in the diary for decades, Fine said that the graphic novel was inappropriate regardless because it depicted the passages in an image.
“It wasn’t just that the passages were in the book,” he said. “It was how they were visualized.”
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The post Visiting Jerusalem, Ron DeSantis tries out his Jewish stump speech appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Four Plead Guilty in 2024 Assault of Pro-Israel Attendees at North Carolina Library Event
West Asheville Library in North Carolina. Screenshot: buncombecounty.org.
In 2024, two Jewish residents and an 80-year-old senior citizen were beaten and dragged out of a public event in North Carolina which celebrated Hamas and was organized by an anarchist bookfair. Now, almost two years later, four people have pleaded guilty in relation to those attacks at the West Asheville Library.
On Tuesday, three individuals entered a guilty plea for simple assault in Buncombe Superior Court, while a fourth pleaded guilty to resisting a public officer.
According to a local news report, “All four persons were placed on supervised probation for one year. As conditions of their probation, each must complete 30 hours of community service, have no contact with the victims, and refrain from posting about the event on social media.”
One of the Jewish victims, David Moritz, was in the courtroom during the proceedings and told me, “I am happy we got some measure of justice.”
Another person beaten that day in 2024 was Bob Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran with cancer and a stent in his heart. Campbell was stomped, assaulted, and pushed to the ground, a footprint clearly visible on his shorts. Local police encouraged Campbell to see a doctor.
Now, two shocking security camera videos have been shared which capture some of the violent assaults against the three pro-Israel attendees. Moritz told me it was this video evidence which led to the guilty pleas.
In one video, Campbell is seen on his knees with masked radicals all around him, while Moritz is being attacked.
In another video, Moritz — the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors — is seen being violently pushed out of the public library while he tries to defend himself and return to help his friends being assaulted in the building.
Moritz informed me that there were further violent aspects of the assault, which involved victims being struck multiple times, taking place in areas of the library that were not under video surveillance.
He conveyed that there were numerous additional individuals who assaulted them at the library who remain unidentified. He expressed gratitude for the diligent efforts of the local police and district attorney’s office and hopes that law enforcement will continue to pursue further suspects.
Moritz is extremely appreciative of the assistance that he and the two other victims received from StandWithUs, a prominent organization that fights antisemitism and educates about Israel. StandWithUs provided the three victims with pro bono legal support throughout the entire process and helped in identifying a suspect.
Yael Lerman, director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, told me that her organization is “tremendously proud of the victims for working tirelessly to help identify their attackers, despite the fact that many of the attackers wore masks to conceal their identities.” Lerman said she is “thrilled” they worked together to help identify the attackers so they could “bring them to justice.”
“We need to give a lot of credit to the police department and the prosecutor. They really came through,” she added.
“The victims were fearless and persistent,” Lerman continued. “One of them was in his 80s and it did not stop him from fighting back. In this day and age, a lot of people — including Jews — feel fearful. The victims in this case are wonderful role models.”
Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.
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How Moses Created an Enduring Model of Great Leadership
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Socrates is supposed to have said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” And he didn’t just toss out this aphorism to sound clever — he literally lived it.
One day, in ancient Athens, a group of young aristocrats gathered around Socrates, who cut a strange figure standing barefoot in the bustling marketplace. Merchants were shouting prices, craftsmen were hammering bronze, and locals bustled from stall to stall in search of what they needed to buy. And in the middle of all this noise stood Socrates, asking questions.
One confident young man, eager to show off his intellect, stepped forward to challenge him. Socrates asked him a simple question: “Tell me, what is courage?” The young man gave a polished answer — something about bravery in battle.
Socrates nodded thoughtfully. Then he asked another question. “But what about the courage of someone who endures hardship? Is that courage, too?”
The young man paused for a moment, then adjusted his answer. Socrates asked another question. And then another. Each time the young man tried to refine what he had already said.
Within a few minutes, the initially confident student who started out with such bravado suddenly realized something uncomfortable: The more he tried to define courage, the less certain he became that he understood it at all.
Socrates smiled. He had not humiliated the young man. Nor had he delivered a lecture explaining the answer. Instead, he had done something far more powerful: He had made the student think. For Socrates, teaching was never about pouring knowledge into passive listeners. It was about awakening curiosity, provoking reflection, and guiding his students to discover the truth for themselves.
Incredibly, Socrates left behind no books at all. His ideas survive entirely through the students he inspired — most famously, Plato, whose own student, Aristotle, would go on to tutor Alexander the Great.
This concept was not unique to Socrates; a similar pattern appears in the history of medicine. Hippocrates is remembered as the father of medical practice; his name is associated with the Hippocratic Oath, the ethical pledge physicians have taken for centuries.
But Hippocrates’ greatest achievement was not a single medical breakthrough, but the creation of a teaching tradition. His true legacy was a lineage of physicians who refined and expanded his ideas.
Hippocrates understood that medical advances would not come from one brilliant doctor, but from generations of practitioners who shared their knowledge with those who followed.
Centuries after Hippocrates, the same philosophy reappeared in the career of one of the founders of modern medical education, the great Canadian physician William Osler. In the 19th century, much medical training still took place in lecture halls, where students memorized facts from textbooks.
Osler believed that this approach fundamentally misunderstood how doctors are made. “Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom,” he insisted. At Johns Hopkins he transformed medical education by bringing students directly into hospitals to observe patients, diagnose illnesses, and learn from real cases. His influence spread through the countless physicians he trained, many of whom went on to become leaders in medicine themselves.
This tradition of multiplying knowledge, rather than hoarding it, also lies quietly at the heart of Parshat Vayakhel. After the trauma of the Golden Calf, the Jewish people are given the opportunity to rebuild their spiritual life through the construction of the Mishkan. It is an enormous national project — architecturally complex, artistically demanding, and seemingly beyond the scope of a recently liberated nation of former slaves.
One might therefore assume that Moses, the towering leader who brought them out of Egypt and delivered the Torah at Sinai, would oversee every detail of the project. But that is not what happens. Instead, Moses steps back and appoints a master craftsman, Betzalel, to lead the work.
Alongside him is Oholiav, and together they assemble a team of skilled artisans described by the Torah as people whose hearts were filled with wisdom and whose spirits were inspired to contribute. Curiously, Moses does not micromanage the process. Instead, he empowers others to build.
It is a remarkable moment. The leader of the Jewish people — the man through whom God speaks — understands that the Mishkan will never become a national spiritual center if it is simply the project of one man. It must become the creation of an entire people.
And so, Moses does something that many leaders struggle to do: He lets others lead. Because the ultimate leaders understand that their true legacy is not what they build with their own hands, but what they inspire others to build with theirs.
Moses’ greatest achievement here may not have been the Mishkan itself, but rather the establishment of a model of leadership that nurtures a new generation of leaders and builders. This same model would guide Jewish history at one of its most fragile moments.
When the Romans stood on the brink of destroying Jerusalem and the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, it seemed as if the spiritual center of Jewish life might disappear forever. The Temple had stood at the heart of Jewish religious life for centuries. Without it, the future looked bleak.
At that moment of crisis, the leader of Jerusalem’s beleaguered community, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, understood something essential. The survival of Judaism would not depend on rebuilding stones and walls once they were gone. It would depend on building the next generation of Jewish leaders.
With this in mind, he had himself smuggled out of the besieged city and asked the Roman general Vespasian to allow him to establish a new center of learning in Yavneh. Vespasian agreed, and after the destruction, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai began teaching a remarkable group of students.
The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot records their names and their individual strengths with unusual care: Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah, Rabbi Yose HaKohen, Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel, and Rabbi Elazar ben Arach. Each possessed a different temperament and intellectual strength, and each would go on to shape the next generation of Jewish scholarship.
Like Moses, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had his eye on the future. He set about creating the scholars who would carry Judaism forward after the Temple was gone — and after he himself was gone. From Socrates in Athens, to Hippocrates in the early days of medicine, to William Osler in the hospitals of modern universities, the pattern repeats itself across history: The greatest mentors do not simply teach. They create teachers.
And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of Moses’ leadership in Parshat Vayakhel. His example — like that of Socrates, Hippocrates, and Osler — shows that the measure of great leaders is not in what they build alone, but how they empower and inspire future generations to build and lead.
Moshe did not merely build a sanctuary in the wilderness. He created a model of leadership that empowered others to build alongside him. Which is why, for posterity, he is not known as King Moses or Priest Moses — but Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher.
Because the greatest leaders do not leave behind monuments. They leave behind people who know how to build them.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Apartheid Week Exposed: Combating a Vicious Anti-Israel Lie on Campus
An “Apartheid Wall” erected by Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Photo: X/Twitter
On a sundrenched corner of coastline, a light breeze dances across the blue waves. But what seems pleasant at the surface, ideal even, is hardly the full story. To the side, a metal sign reads: “Under Section 37 of the Durban Beach by-laws, this bathing area is reserved for the sole use of members of the white race group.” The city is Durban, the third-most populous city in South Africa, and this scene was commonplace under its erstwhile apartheid regime. “Apartheid,” Afrikaans for “separateness,” was a brutal system of legally enforced racial segregation that dominated Africa’s southernmost nation until being finally abolished in 1994.
But what does this faraway land have in common with Israel? According to the anti-Zionist movement, a heck of a lot. To compare this former regime to the anti-Zionists’ warped version of the Jewish State, they even hold an annual ritual of “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW) in protest of the latter’s continued existence. This canard is being legitimized at the very top, with California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom recently going so far as to assert that many observers are “appropriately” describing Israel as an “apartheid state.” What was once a fringe preserve of college radicals is now being increasingly indulged by the mainstream.
In reality, aside from those sunny beach fronts, Israel has precisely nothing in common with the racist regime that stained South African society for far too long. Under Israeli law, racial discrimination is illegal, and previous surveys suggest that 80 percent of Arab citizens prefer living there than anywhere else. Arab-focused political parties are elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and people of all backgrounds hold prominent roles across all sectors. Israeli Christians, the majority of whom are Arab, are an upwardly mobile minority over-represented across law and computer science subjects.
Such facts would not have been simply unlikely in apartheid South Africa, but completely out of the question. Non-white South Africans could not even legally sip coffee in the same cafe as their Caucasian compatriots, never mind hope to seek employment or excellence in the same fields or pursue friendship or relationships.
When confronted, Israel’s detractors dismiss these facts, which disprove their apartheid slur, as “strawman” arguments, and move to claim instead that military courts, checkpoints, building restrictions, administrative detention, or alleged “Jewish-only roads” are evidence of “apartheid.”
The allegations are false — Israelis of all religions share the same roads — or at best specious. Where residents under the Palestinian Authority are prevented from roads used by Israeli Jews and Arabs, it relates to jurisdiction and security responsibility, not race or religion. During the Second Intifada, roads were repeatedly used for ambushes, drive-by shootings, and roadside bomb attacks targeting Israeli civilians: Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Druze, or otherwise. Security restrictions were introduced to separate civilian traffic from known attack corridors, which significantly reduced the frequency of attacks. Checkpoints and military courts, too, arise from an unresolved territorial conflict and ongoing security concerns, not a policy of racialized segregation.
This organized intellectual assault on Israel’s existence is nothing new. “Apartheid Week” was launched in 2005 and has been an outlet for misinformation and lies ever since. While the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aids it brands itself as “grassroots,” it enjoys swathes of establishment backing. NGO Monitor has exposed how various governments, the European Union, and anti-Zionist groups like the New Israel Fund routinely help pay for and publicize groups responsible for such campaigns on campus and beyond. It is therefore up to the rest of us to put up a veritable opposition to their tempting babble.
Naturally, there will always be a core of hardline activists unwilling to interrogate their own prejudices, but plenty of ordinary students have simply never heard another side to the story. Many young people also feel intense social pressure to accept flawed anti-Zionist talking points. Giving such students the space to hear a new perspective can help them interrogate and form their views in a more constructive environment. This is what the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)’s sixth annual “Apartheid Week Exposed” campaign, and our work all year-round, seeks to encourage at this critical juncture.
This week, our campus program will partner with “Israel-is” to host a campus speaking and tabling tour across Florida and California. The program will feature two speakers with firsthand perspectives on the Middle East. In Florida we will host Neriya Kfir, an Israeli Oct. 7 survivor and former IDF soldier, and Padideh Daneshzad-Moghaddam, an Iranian speaker who grew up under the Islamic Republic and will share insights into her life in her home country and the aspirations many Iranians have for freedom. Then in the Golden State, Staff Sergeant Dean Cohen and Farriba, an activist born in Mashhad, northeast Iran, will take the reins.
We have already, and will continue, to hold similar educational events with students across the US and around the world. We are also providing students with helpful myth-busters on Israel and the Middle East, offering them the factual grounding to help them navigate what may feel like a lonely university experience.
We seek to elevate voices that you are not likely to hear on campus. IAW and its allies routinely celebrate the tyrannical theocrats responsible for massacring peaceful protestors, abusing women, and organizing terror around the world, atrocities they both bizarrely celebrate and continue to deny. IAW activists seemingly place little value on any human life deemed to get in the way of their anti-Israel aims. This year, and in previous ones, various campus groups are using IAW to rally for the release of Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prison. In 2004, he was convicted on five counts of murder for the deaths of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk.
Students in America and beyond — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or otherwise — deserve a better future. One in which constructive dialogue replaces name-calling and intimidation. Administrators, for their part, should also make clear that the university does not endorse the claims made during these partisan campaigns and should enforce standards of conduct when activism crosses into harassment or violence. It is certainly a big ask, but we can only hope for such a change if we help to build it.