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- Never Again for All, or for No One: 2025 Sep 12

- A Map to a Place That No Longer Exists: 2025 Sep 5

- A Federal Security Grant Program Popular with Jewish Organizations May Now Require Beneficiaries to Cooperate with ICE: 2025 Aug 22

- Rhetoric Without Reckoning: 2025 Aug 22

- Remembering Awdah Hathaleen: 2025 Aug 21

- Mount Sinai Hospital Fired Social Worker Over “Gaza Must Live” Postcard: 2025 Aug 13

- The Betrayal of Light: 2025 Aug 12

- How the Department of Health and Human Services Took the Lead in Trump’s Campus Crackdown: 2025 Aug 7

- A Canadian Antisemitism Statistic Went Viral—But It Has No Source: 2025 Aug 6

- Anatomy of a Red Scare: 2025 Aug 1

- Egypt’s Hidden Refugee Crisis: 2025 Jul 29

- Siblings: 2025 Jul 25

- The Gazans Trapped in Sheba Hospital: 2025 Jul 23

- Ayman Odeh’s Failed Impeachment Is a “Win-Win” for the Right: 2025 Jul 22

- Lessons from La Guardia: 2025 Jul 18

- Two Empty Rooms: 2025 Jul 16

- Auditing the Hindu American Foundation’s Claims of “Hinduphobia”: 2025 Jul 8

- Inside the New Group Giving Antisemitism Trainings at Harvard: 2025 Jul 2

- Left Electoralism After Mamdani: A Roundtable: 2025 Jul 1

- A New Playbook for Democratic Critics of Israel: 2025 Jun 30

- Zionism: A People Reborn: 2025 Jun 27

- Egypt Cracks Down on the “Global March to Gaza”: 2025 Jun 23

OPINION | 12 SEP 2025, 2:36 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 12 SEP 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

Never Again for All, or for No One

A PR snafu at the LA Holocaust Museum reveals the impossibility of drawing boundaries around an anti-genocide rallying cry.

Sean Pergola

A “Never Again” sign at the MIT encampment in 2024

Vincent Ricci/SOPA Images/Sipa USA

On September 4th, the Holocaust Museum LA posted an Instagram graphic depicting interlocked arms of various skin tones, with one arm bearing a concentration camp tattoo. The text accompanying the picture read “‘Never Again’ Can’t Only Mean Never Again For Jews.” Other slides continued this universalist message: “Jews Must Not Let the Trauma of our Past Silence our Conscience. Standing with Humanity does Not Betray Our People. It Honors Them. To Be Jewish is to Remember And to Act.”

Anodyne as these sentences may sound, they were enough to set off a firestorm in the post’s comments section. Some praised the museum for what they believed was a statement against Israel’s violence in Gaza; others were outraged, calling the message “beyond disgraceful.” “Our ancestors are rolling in their graves,” one commenter wrote. On her popular @rootsmetals account, the pro-Israel influencer Debbie Lechtman called the sentiment an “All Lives Mattering of the phrase ‘never again.’” Right-wing advocacy group StopAntisemitism even tried to capitalize on the controversy, commenting, “Donors seeing this – please DM us. We’re happy to help redirect your giving our way, an organization that focuses solely on the Jewish people and fighting the bigotry we face.”

Two days later, the museum intervened, taking down the post and issuing an apology—this time with comments turned off. The graphic had been “part of a pre-planned social media campaign intended to promote inclusivity and community,” the new Instagram post stated, lamenting that it was “easily open to misinterpretation by some as a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East. That was not our intent.” In other words, the post was a call for inclusivity, but there was exactly one case, one group of people, it was not meant to include: the people of Gaza.

This fundamental irony reflects more than a PR stumble; it exposes a deeper crisis in liberal discourse. These days, most moral claims issued from a liberal institutional voice contain an extra clause, whether or not it is stated explicitly: “except for Gaza.” Indeed, Palestine has long been the exception to the rule of inclusivity in liberal society. Palestinians are continually denied their claim to the very rights hailed as “universal” for everyone else: the right of return, the right to self-determination, the right to food and medical care. Even advocacy for those rights is uniquely excluded from rights to free expression—including by those who are otherwise vocal about free speech—a phenomenon so routine that it has earned its own label: the “Palestine exception.” As its apology clarifies, the Holocaust Museum LA’s original post had tried to push this logic one step further, turning Palestine into an exception in speech itself, wherein “never again” means “never again for anyone,” but “anyone” really means “anyone but Palestinians.”

The problem the museum ran into, however, is that language resists being fixed within the bounds of chauvinism; even when born of exclusionary intent, words take on lives that exceed it. The history of the phrase “never again” itself attests to this fact. The slogan has circulated in multiple contexts, and may have its roots in Weimar-era anti-war and antifascist movements, but its most enduring lineage comes from Israeli poet Yizkah Lamden’s poem “Masada,” a 1920s Zionist work which celebrates the choice of the Sicarii Jews to commit mass suicide rather than be captured by the Roman army. This spirit of Jewish militarism later captivated right-wing ultra-nationalist Meir Kahane, who popularized the phrase in his 1971 manifesto and used it to justify acts of terrorism against Palestinians to fortify the Jewish ethnostate. The Jewish Defense League, a far-right terrorist group founded by Kahane, adopted “never again” as one of its mottos (the other being “every Jew a .22”).

It is Kahane, not any antifascist group, who is credited for introducing “never again” to the popular lexicon—upon Kahane’s death in 1990, then-president of the American Jewish Committee Sholom D. Comoy remarked that “despite our considerable differences, Meir Kahane must always be remembered for the slogan ‘Never Again,’ which for so many became the battle cry of post-Holocaust Jewry.” Yet his claim on the words has become tenuous in the years since its popularization: the phrase now commonly serves as a distinctly universalist call for justice. Benjamin Netanyahu himself evoked it in reference to the Rwandan genocide, Jewish immigrant rights group Never Again Action took it up as their namesake, and it was used as a general call for nonviolence by gun control advocates in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Kahane’s own words could not be confined to the boundaries he’d imagined; they were too pithy and broadly applicable to stay fastened solely to the prevention of another genocide of Jews. Like the museum’s statement, “never again” was “easily open to misinterpretation.”

This slippage in meaning isn’t a unique case of politics outgrowing a speaker’s intentions, but a reflection of the fundamental structure of language itself. As philosophers since Plato have noted, language does not and cannot stay confined to one object or situation; to speak of something is, to some extent, to speak of it in general. Even a sentence as simple as “the sky is blue” already depends on a broader concept—blueness—that goes beyond the sky itself. Understanding the sentence therefore entails recognizing the sky as part of a larger category, creating an inherent comparison between it and all other blue things. So too when we call something a genocide; the word itself would be meaningless if it did not categorize historical events within a general framework of atrocity. Philosopher Jacques Derrida called this essential feature of language “iterability”: for a word or phrase to be meaningful at all, it must be able to be grafted onto new contexts. As he writes in “Signature Event Context,” any piece of language “can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts.” This is how “never again” was able to travel from Kahane’s manifesto to an anti-Zionist rallying cry used by Jewish Voice for Peace. To understand a phrase is to be able to replicate and reinterpret it, so to understand the meaning of “never again” is to immediately call to mind other instances of genocidal violence—Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and, inevitably, Gaza.

As fewer and fewer Americans support Israel’s onslaught, and as more and more scholars and human rights groups deem Israel to be committing genocide, it becomes increasingly impossible to exclude Gaza from universalist moral claims—which is precisely why so many Instagram users, especially those most outraged by the post, unquestioningly assumed the museum’s vague statement to be about Gaza. This leaves only one option for institutions to quell iterability and prevent accusations of hypocrisy: silence. Instead of risking an unintended statement about Palestine, they may decide not to speak. In their retraction, the Holocaust Museum LA chose this silence. Rather than risk the application of “never again” to Gaza, they renounced their utterance of “never again.” Rather than exhorting Jews not to “let the trauma of our past silence our conscience,” they chose to fall silent themselves.

This is the endpoint of the insistence that Gaza can never be compared with the Holocaust. Because language allows comparison, we must be silent. And so the choice is stark: Either we speak of the Holocaust and our commitment to “never again,” opening ourselves to the unavoidable comparisons, or else we become unable to speak of the Holocaust except in tautologies. To honor “never again” requires risking universality; to deny that risk is, in the end, to forget.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

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Sean Pergola is the operations coordinator at Jewish Currents.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/never-again-for-all-or-for-no-one at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

MEMOIR | 5 SEP 2025, 1:48 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 10 SEP 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

A Map to a Place That No Longer Exists

In this city, there are thousands upon thousands of us, each carrying their own coordinates to somewhere that can no longer be found.

Abdullah Hany Daher

A child walks in front of a home destroyed by Israeli warplanes in the city of Khan Yunis, Gaza, June 16th, 2024.

Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa/Alamy Live News

In Gaza, the landscape changes faster than memory can keep up. Every neighborhood carries its own scars, some fresh, some already fading into dust. Places once familiar become unrecognizable overnight; streets you walked yesterday may not be there tomorrow. On this shifting ground, home is not just a structure. It is a fragile anchor to a previous version of life, one that can vanish without warning. Losing this place means losing the map inside you.

I remember the first time I saw our house after it was hit. It was May 2024. I stopped in the street, staring at the roof. A missile had torn through it, leaving a wound wide open to the sky. I stepped inside slowly. The door wouldn’t open all the way, the paint peeled off the walls in rough patches. The air was thick with dust and the smell of burnt concrete. I tried to see it as someone else’s home, but I couldn’t. This was ours, the place that had shaped me since childhood.

I cried—not in the quiet way I had learned during the war. My head tilted back, eyes locked on the hole above me, and I let it happen. I cried because the sky was now inside without permission. Because sunlight fell on broken tiles instead of on the living room floor. Because one strike could erase years of living.

In June 2025, I returned. This time there was no house. Not damaged, not wounded—gone. Scraped from the earth as if it had never stood there. I stood where the living room had been, staring at dirt and scattered stone. I thought my chest would collapse. It didn’t. In place of tears, a strange stillness. That’s when I learned what it means for grief to run dry, to be left with only emptiness. Losing a home in one sudden blow knocks you down. Watching it disappear piece by piece teaches you how to live in the ruins.

Before my house, it was my grandfather’s that was hit. It was January, cold and damp. His home had burned to the ground. No roof, no walls, just blackened remains. I had never seen him cry before. His shoulders shook, making him look smaller, as if the fire had shrunk him too. He stared at the ground where his kitchen used to be. I understood then that a house burns twice—once in the flames, and again in the eyes of the one who loved it.

In the months after my house vanished, I began noticing how the absence of buildings changes the way you move through the city. Streets lose their logic. You turn corners expecting a wall that is no longer there. You look for shade that once came from a row of homes now replaced by a flat expanse of rubble. Even sound changes—footsteps echo differently when there’s nothing for them to bounce off of. In time, you start to mistrust your own sense of direction, as if your internal map has been quietly rewritten without your consent.

Neighbors carry this disorientation, too. I have seen people stand frozen in the middle of what used to be a busy intersection, staring at nothing. Some point to the air as they speak, tracing outlines of vanished shops and doorways in the space above the dirt. Conversations about loss have grown shorter. At first, every destroyed home had a story, passed on in neighbors’ conversations and quick exchanges in the streets: the room where a wedding dress hung, the kitchen that smelled of coffee, the wall that wore the scribblings of a child. Where once people might tell you about a living room, a garden, now they just name a family and say, “They’re gone.” We talk about bombings like we talk about the weather: today here, yesterday there. The details are lost in the sheer volume of absence.

Sometimes at night I try to picture our house in all its specificity: the way afternoon light spilled through the window, the cool hallway in summer. But the picture blurs, and panic sets in. What if I forget? What if the place that no longer exists vanishes inside me too? I’ve learned that memory, like a building, can erode without care. It starts with small things—forgetting the exact sound of the front door closing, the smell of rain on the balcony—and ends with a kind of internal demolition, the slow collapse of memory, the sense that pieces of yourself are being erased.

Here, houses are more than walls and roofs. They hold footsteps, smells, echoes of conversations. They keep the map of your life. When too many are gone, the city itself begins to forget. Streets lose their shapes, people lose their usual routes and routines, the landmarks that once oriented them—the corner shop, the mosque, the old tree at the end of the street. The mind’s map slowly disappears. And when a city forgets, the people lose more than shelter—they lose themselves, the proof of their existence and belonging.

I still pass by the ground where our house once stood. Sometimes I stop, sometimes I continue on. When I do stop, I don’t cry anymore. I remember the roof with the hole, the day the sky first came in uninvited, and how that hurt more than when everything was finally gone. Back then, there was still something to lose. Now, there is only the place that no longer exists. I do not hold that place alone. In this city, there are thousands upon thousands of us, each carrying their own coordinates to somewhere that can no longer be found.

Abdullah Hany Daher is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. He documents the human stories of war, aiming to preserve voices that the rubble cannot silence.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/a-map-to-a-place-that-no-longer-exists at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

REPORT | 22 AUG 2025, 8:55 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 10 SEP 2025, 12:09 PM UTC

A Federal Security Grant Program Popular with Jewish Organizations May Now Require Beneficiaries to Cooperate with ICE

Dozens of Jewish organizations signed a letter denouncing requirements that Nonprofit Security grantees work with immigration authorities and refrain from boycotting Israel.

Emily Wilder

A New York City Church displays a sign welcoming immigrants and refugees.

Richard Levine / Alamy Photo

Synagogues, churches, mosques, schools, and other nonprofits that receive money from a popular Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants program for increased security may now be required to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, as well as prohibited from engaging in “discriminatory” boycotts and programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), according to stipulations for grantees published by DHS in April. The Trump administration’s new conditions for the Nonprofit Security Grants Program (NSGP)—which is set to disperse $274.5 million in 2025 to institutions facing security threats to pay for enhancements such as cameras, fences, bulletproof glass, trainings, and guards—could create a bind for many liberal Jewish organizations around the country, which have historically benefited from the lion’s share of the program’s funding, but which also oppose the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offensive and anti-DEI crusade. Already, in response to these new conditions, more than 50 clergy and dozens of progressive Jewish groups, alongside a handful of synagogues and other faith groups, are now pledging not to seek the security grants until the requirements are repealed, according to an open letter published August 22nd. However, few of the major Jewish organizations that have lobbied for increased congressional funding to the NSGP pool have spoken publicly on the changing guidelines.

The new DHS requirements that grantees must follow or risk the termination of their award apparently apply to programs across DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) programs, including the NSGP as well as state funds for disaster relief. After the guidelines were initially published, the terms conditioning grants on barring DEI “ideology” and on grantees’ “coordination and cooperation” with immigration officials—including providing access to individuals sought by ICE and refraining from “harboring, concealing, or shielding” undocumented immigrants—were legally challenged by attorney generals of 20 states in an ongoing federal suit. (The administration reportedly walked back on plans to tie FEMA relief to collaboration with immigration enforcement in a June court filing in the case.) The restriction on grantees engaging in “discriminatory prohibited boycott,” which DHS defined as cutting or limiting business ties “specifically with Israeli companies,” received particular pushback, including from prominent right-wing supporters of the administration. While concerns this anti-boycott clause might preclude the handful of municipalities that have voted to cut ties with Israel from receiving disaster relief were sidestepped when DHS quietly edited out the reference to Israel in a new document uploaded in early August, the vague language prohibiting “discriminatory” boycott has remained. Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, which has tracked legislation targeting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, argued that DHS is “just playing with language on the margins,” and while it “can’t attack [BDS] frontally, the intent is the same.”

The impacts of these DHS requirements on the NSGP received little attention until the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the country’s largest Muslim civil rights group, alerted religious institutions and other nonprofits earlier this month. In an August 7th statement, the group called DHS’s updated terms “dangerous and unconstitutional” and warned that imposing them on NSGP grantees would represent “an unprecedented threat to religious freedom, free speech, and the moral independence of civil society groups and houses of worship.” CAIR’s government affairs director Robert McCaw told Jewish Currents that unusual, “really sloppy” mid-grant-cycle revisions to the grant guidelines have made it difficult to clarify the consequences for NSGP beneficiaries. Multiple conflicting versions of FEMA’s notice for the NSGP application period have been live online—an earlier document posted to FEMA’s website granted specific exceptions to the immigration conditions for grantees, as did another version posted on the government’s main grants platform, grants.gov. But the August 13th grant announcement, once again on FEMA’s website, said the conditions in fact “may be material to the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to make this grant award.” (DHS did not reply to requests for clarification on which document applies.) McCaw said that if the new federal expectations do apply, they would “essentially deputize any house of worship into Trump’s ICE programs if they receive funds through the DHS.” Because the terms specify that any action impeding DHS immigration enforcement is a violation, institutions would be barred from notifying their community when they are made aware of ICE agents in the area. Acceptance of the conditions, McCaw said, could serve to “scare congregants away from houses of worship who are fearful because of their immigration status.” The unclear prohibition on boycott could likewise “chill the free speech and political participation of communities organizing around human rights issues.”

Though McCaw said the exact consequences of the unprecedented rules remain opaque—“What would DHS do? Pull out fencing and remove security cameras because a Muslim community dared to boycott Israel’s human rights violations?”—he speculated that organizations that do not comply with DHS’s rules may be denied funding, not receive distributions for which they were approved, or have their grants “clawed back.” In fact, this week conservative outlets reported that the federal government terminated $8 million in grants, including some via the NSGP, to Muslim organizations after the far-right think tank Middle East Forum alleged links to “terror.” (DHS has not yet publicly confirmed the reports.) In light of its concerns, CAIR advised in its statement that “nonprofits and houses of worship should refrain from applying for these grants until DHS restores prior terms that do not contain these coercive requirements.”

Friday’s letter, which cited CAIR’s objections, was organized by the Community Safety Campaign, a group that advocates for Jewish communities to find alternatives to policing and cooperation with national security programs. The institutional signatories included mostly progressive advocacy groups such as Bend the Arc alongside a handful of synagogues—including Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and unaffiliated congregations—as well as Muslim and Christian organizations. Some, the letter said, had been NSGP recipients in the past but now “are unified in refusing to capitulate to conditions that would require us to sacrifice the safety and dignity of our community members, neighbors, and partners in order to receive funding.” The letter called for the grant program to be moved out of DHS and housed elsewhere in the government.

While the NSGP enjoys wide bipartisan support from lawmakers looking to demonstrate their commitment to protecting houses of worship and particularly to fighting antisemitism—Congress has over time increased the program’s budget from $25 million at its launch in 2005 to nearly $275 million at present—it has occasionally also attracted controversy. A 2011 Forward investigation into the NSGP found that Jewish communities had been able to leverage political power to mold the program and enjoy the majority of its distributions, leading even major Jewish institutions like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), now a staunch supporter of the NSGP, to raise concerns about the separation of church and state. In 2021, when FEMA encouraged grant recipients to share “information and intelligence” with local and federal law enforcement, CAIR briefly recommended Muslim organizations hold off from applying to the program out of concern this could facilitate increased government surveillance on Muslims, as Jewish Currents reported at the time. (Ultimately, in response to CAIR’s pressure, the Biden administration clarified that program funding would not require intelligence sharing with law enforcement.) Last January, another letter by the Community Safety Campaign called on elected officials to reject proposed additional allocations to the program because of its location in DHS, claiming “it provides an insidious cover for the systemic violence caused by the Department of Homeland Security as well as other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, at the US-Mexico border, in neighborhoods and our houses of worship.”

In the past, the NSGP has “been seen as kind of a benign program” that most people outside of institutions’ administrative staff don’t even know about, said Nadav David, an organizer with the Community Safety Campaign. But the new DHS guidelines have politicized the program to require endorsement of Trump administration priorities, “several of which many liberal and center-left communities are opposed to,” he said. There are a number of Jewish institutions and leaders around the country who have historically sought NSGP grant funding but have also denounced ICE raids or adopted anti-racism programming. And the new requirements are attracting protest from voices who have not necessarily endorsed the Community Safety Campaign’s broader condemnation of the NSGP or the group’s commitment to defending pro-Palestine advocacy. Among the individual clergy who signed the letter supporting abstention from the program was Suzanne Singer, former rabbi of Temple Beth El, a Reform synagogue in Riverside, California, that received a $200,000 NSGP grant through the state, used for building fences and installing CCTV cameras, before her retirement in 2023. After seeing neo-Nazis demonstrate in front of Beth El in 2009, she regards government security aid as a useful protection against violence, she told Jewish Currents. But now, she signed (representing herself and not her former institution), because she believes “a place of worship should be a safe place, not a place where people are worried they’ll be picked up and sent to some horrible detention center or to South Sudan. I don’t see why the security of synagogues should be tied to our willingness to let that happen.”

In response to a Jewish Currents inquiry about criticisms of the new federal conditions, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin defended the guidelines in an email, writing that “the NSGP is being used as it was always intended—to protect nonprofits from acts of terror or extremism. These grants are allocated according to clear and existing guidelines. Complying with the laws set out by the Constitution and Congress is actually not an infringement on the First Amendment.” She also reiterated the department’s previous statement, after its removal of the language specific to boycotting Israel, asserting that no grant postings expressly include any requirement tied to Israel and that “FEMA grants remain governed by existing law and policy and not political litmus tests.” However, “DHS will enforce all anti-discrimination laws and policies, including as it relates to the BDS movement, which is expressly grounded in antisemitism. Those who engage in racial discrimination should not receive a single dollar of federal funding.” According to McCaw, it’s clear that the anti-boycott clause, despite the mixed messaging, “has the same impact and effect: participating in a boycott of Israel based on its human rights violations will absolutely, according to DHS, disqualify you from receiving federal funds.” (DHS did not respond to request for clarification on whether support for BDS would be grounds for termination of NSGP funding.) As a result, this stipulation is another way for the administration to enforce its intent to “punish anyone who has the decency to speak out against the genocide in Palestine,” according to Fatema Ahmad, executive director of Muslim Justice League, which has organized against counterterrorism programs that disproportionately impact Muslim communities.

Several of the national Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL), that have long led lobbying to grow the NSGP have supported the administration’s moves to amp up the repression of pro-Palestine advocacy and have remained silent on Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. One leading advocate for expanding the NSGP is the Secure Community Network (SCN), which provides security support for Jewish institutions in partnership with law enforcement, and whose CEO, Michael Masters, called for the deportation of noncitizens he claimed “materially support” terrorism—including participants in student protests—an accusation pro-Israel organizations have frequently leveled at campus pro-Palestine groups. In an August 11th webinar in partnership with the JFNA about applying for the NSGP, Masters characterized the program as crucial to respond to “an alarming rise in threats, vandalism, harassment, and violence” against Jews since October 7th, 2023, which he traced to “designated foreign terrorist organizations and of course the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies; as an example of such threats, he mentioned “the trauma of a young student who is confronted by masked pro-terror organization agitators barring their entry from a classroom.” During the webinar, JFNA senior manager Rachel Dembo told those asking in the chat about the new immigration and DEI conditions that, in a recent meeting with DHS officials, “they had again reassured us that they are here to support the faith-based community in upholding and promoting their religious freedom.” No other mention was made of the controversial terms. The SCN, JFNA, and Dembo did not respond to requests for comment about their positions on the DHS requirements by press time, though JFNA told the Connecticut Mirror that it would continue to “strongly encourage” nonprofits to apply for funding and that the organization was “working closely with DHS” to support applicants. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an NSGP proponent and frequent Trump critic, and the ADL also did not respond to requests for comment.

Mainstream Jewish organizations have recently confronted the administration over delays in administering the NSGP. In July, 11 organizations, including the ADL, American Jewish Committee, and the JCPA, joined other faith groups in sending a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem pressing DHS to post the 2025 application for NSGP, which at that point was two months delayed. More recently, on August 7th, over 70 congresspeople urged Noem to release information about NSGP funds awarded from last year that were supposed to be dispersed in June, attributing delays to a decision by the administration “to pause the drawdown of funding in order to conduct an additional review of all grant allocations.” (DHS finally announced the June awardees on August 21st.) In response to an August 19th Jewish Currents inquiry, Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer, an organizer of the bipartisan letter, did not address specific questions about ICE collaboration or DEI programming but said “the Trump Administration should not be adding more red tape that will only delay critical dollars, especially when Jewish communities face such urgent security needs.”

Organizers of Friday’s letter, by contrast, argued that the DHS requirements for cooperation with ICE and restrictions on DEI and boycott lay bare the dangers of materially linking communities’ security to federal law enforcement. The NSGP since its inception has been “one of the ways in which Jewish communities are brought into complicity with” counterterrorism and policing programs that disproportionately target Muslim communities, Community Safety Campaign’s David said. Muslim Justice League director Ahmad was glad to see CAIR advise other organizations against applying, hoping the move “encourages more institutions to question why we were ever working with these agencies.”

Update, 9/8/2025: Shortly after this article was published, on August 26th, the JCPA said it had sent a letter to DHS requesting it remove from the NSGP application “vague and concerning language” about these conditions that could discourage groups from seeking funding. Meanwhile, JFNA, SCN, the ADL, and others urged Jewish groups to apply for this “critical resource” in a statement published September 2nd.

This article has also been updated to clarify that DHS has released multiple contradictory versions of the guidelines for the NSGP and to note that the Trump administration walked back its intention to tie state disaster relief to immigration enforcement in a court filing.

Footnotes

Emily Wilder is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/a-federal-security-grant-program-popular-with-jewish-organizations-may-now-require-beneficiaries-to-cooperate-with-ice at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

ESSAY | 22 AUG 2025, 4:44 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 10 SEP 2025, 12:10 PM UTC

Rhetoric Without Reckoning

A new wave of liberal Zionist criticism of the Israeli government rings hollow without accountability for the genocide.

Simone Zimmerman

The March for Israel in Washington, DC, November 14th, 2023.

Robyn Stevens Brody/Sipa USA

In late July, hundreds of rabbis signed a letter stating that even as they “unequivocally support” Israel’s battle against Hamas and Hezbollah, they “cannot condone the mass killings of civilians, including a great many women, children and elderly, or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.” The letter denounced Israel’s “severe limitation” on humanitarian relief in Gaza, and its “policy of withholding of food, water, and medical supplies from a needy civilian population,” saying it “contradict[s] essential values of Judaism as we understand it.” The letter currently has signatories from major denominations in the US, Israel, and around the world. This week 80 Modern Orthodox rabbis joined the chorus, signing a letter lamenting the Israeli government’s starvation campaign and intensifying settler violence in the West Bank. “Orthodox Jewry, as some of Israel’s most devoted supporters, bears a unique moral responsibility,” the letter says. “We must affirm that Judaism’s vision of justice and compassion extends to all human beings.”

Since Benjamin Netanyahu blatantly violated the ceasefire at the end of March—making clear he was abandoning the remaining Israeli hostages in favor of the territorial expansionist aims of his far-right coalition—a growing number of voices from within the heart of American Zionist Jewish life have publicly broken against Israeli government actions in Gaza. In the last several weeks in particular, as news of famine-related deaths has prompted international outcry and experts warn that we have passed the “tipping point” for mass starvation deaths, this wave of dissent has reached a fever pitch. On July 27th, the leadership of the Reform movement urged the Israeli government not to “sacrifice its own moral standing” by starving Palestinians and condemned calls from Israeli government ministers to decimate Gaza—the same type of incitement the movement had insisted in January 2024 “[did] not reflect the basis of Israel’s strategy in its war against Hamas.” On the July 30th episode of the popular podcast For Heaven’s Sake—a show affiliated with the Shalom Hartman Institute, an influential think tank for North American rabbis and institutional leadership—host Donniel Hartman made a stunning admission in a discussion attempting to face Israel’s policy of famine in Gaza: “It’s very convenient for us to say we didn’t know . . . We chose to hide what we know . . . What do you think we are doing when you create a siege?” he said.

While most of those speaking up for humanitarian aid within the mainstream have refrained from connecting their critique of Israel’s starvation tactics to a wholesale condemnation of its military campaign, and continue to blame Hamas for the large part of Gaza’s suffering, there are a number of other prominent Zionist figures who have recently reconsidered their resistance to the term “genocide.” Writing in the Forward in May, rabbi and scholar Jay Michaelson—who in late October 2023 adamantly denied that Israel intended to target Palestinian civilians and accused Israel’s critics of inciting violence against Jews—conceded that it is, in fact, Israel’s intention “to starve the population, to reoccupy much of the Gaza strip and level much of the rest of it, to force a million innocent human beings to leave or die.” He wrote that “the Netanyahu regime has made me, and liberal Zionists like me, look like the worst thing any Israeli can call another: a freier. A sucker. A fool.” Following a shifting liberal zeitgeist around the use of “genocide”—legitimized by historian Omer Bartov in the New York Times and Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem—Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street said he has “been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.”

In reading these unprecedented Jewish condemnations of Israeli actions, one gets the impression that something in Israel’s approach on the ground has changed dramatically in the past few months, not just in degree, but in kind. It has not. Experts were already ranking Israel’s military campaign among “the most destructive in history” in December 2023. By then, the damage to buildings in Gaza was already so extensive that the enclave was a different color from space. By early 2024, Gaza was reported to have the largest child amputee population in the world. Around the same time, humanitarian groups and other experts were already sounding the alarm that the blockade was creating a humanitarian crisis and that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant partially due to their perpetration of the crime of starvation—a circumstance foreseen by Gallant’s infamous promise on October 9th, 2023, that Israel would allow no food or water to enter Gaza.

In reading these unprecedented Jewish condemnations of Israeli actions, one gets the impression that something in Israel’s approach on the ground has changed dramatically in the past few months. It has not.

In light of this, why is it only now that the silence in the American Jewish community over Gaza has at last broken? And what should those of us who were against the war on October 8th expect from those who have taken almost two years—in which we have seen entire families disappeared under the rubble, entire cities reduced to ghost towns, and now an entire civilian population wasting to the bone—to voice their concern?

The most generous explanation for what has taken these Jewish leaders so long is that many American Jews were shocked and horrified by the violence of the October 7th attacks, and subsequently felt it was their duty to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israeli society—95% of which supported the Israeli government’s war, declared in the name of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. But Israelis’ understandable grief was immediately sharpened into a monstrous call for revenge, which emanated directly from the Knesset. Mainstream American Jewry rushed to offer their unconditional solidarity and to take on the trauma of the October 7th attacks as their own, bolstered by a media echo chamber rife with misinformation, atrocity propaganda, and fearmongering. In the coming months, as the Israeli military flattened Gaza, American Jews remained stuck in the story of October 7th. They learned the names of every Israeli hostage, but nothing of Khalil Abu Yahia, Hind Rajab, Hossam Shabat, or Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan. Synagogues hosted speakers representing the 115 Israelis who lost both parents on October 7th, and sent solidarity delegations to the kibbutzim, while remaining willfully ignorant of the fact that doctors in Gaza had coined the term WCNSF, for “wounded child no surviving family,” due to the thousands of children they treated whose entire families had been killed. When information about the genocide did break through, it was brushed aside as blood libel and slander, the result of a scourge of rising antisemitism, on campuses and in the streets.

In part, mainstream American Jewish leaders have justified their refusal to face the facts of Gaza’s mass graves, barely functioning hospitals, and flattened universities via a dangerous, self-soothing Jewish exceptionalism—the belief that Jews are guided by a superior ethical code and that Israel as a Jewish state is, too. Speaking on For Heaven’s Sake in December 2023, Hartman declared, “I don’t believe . . . and nobody in Israel believes, that Israel’s targeting civilians. It’s not in our ethos. We know our army. We know our soldiers. That’s not what we do.” At that point, South Africa had detailed ample evidence to the contrary in their application to the International Court of Justice alleging genocide, including reports of summary executions of multiple members of a single family, the murders of unarmed civilians fleeing on designated “safe routes,” and the dropping of 2,000 pound “dumb” bombs which killed indiscriminately within a 1,000-foot radius. Hartman and his co-host Yossi Klein Halevi, both American émigrés to Israel, brushed off the indictment as antisemitism. Others acknowledged the damage but insisted it was a necessary cost of the war. Hartman and Klein Halevi’s colleague across the ocean, Hartman Institute President Yehuda Kurtzer, has made the case repeatedly since October 2023 that “Israel is fighting a just war based on a just cause.” In January 2024 he responded to American Jews growing uneasy with the carnage in Gaza by saying that he still believed there was no “moral imperative” to oppose the war and that he could not identify a clear “limit to the blood sacrifice we must demand or endure” in pursuing ends he believed in.

Watching the persistence of such arguments well into 2025, it’s hard not to conclude that the simplest reason why most American Jewish leaders didn’t speak out sooner is because they weren’t actually opposed to what was happening for most of the last 22 months. For Israel’s liberal defenders, the country’s show of dominance against Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran was necessary to restore Israeli deterrence against future attacks, even if it may have gone a bit too far. In May of this year, on his own Hartman podcast Identity/Crisis, Kurtzer discussed the destroyed buildings, the massacred families, and the campaign of starvation and concluded that he had not changed his opinion that Israel’s fight was just. And yet, where “I was willing to endure the costs to my enemies, to civilians, and even to my own moral fiber in that process,” he said, “I just am not willing to endure it anymore.” In other words, he is satisfied with the damage. Now that it’s done, it’s safe to be uncomfortable with it. In July, Rabbi Doug Kahn, executive director emerita of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, took a moment to praise Israel’s “brilliant strategic operation against Hezbollah and against Iran” as he implored the country to use its supposed military ingenuity to “find a way to end the humanitarian nightmare that exists in Gaza.”

All of this rhetoric betrays the clear hierarchy of the value of human life endemic to Zionism. Only the logic that Jewish death is unacceptable and Palestinian death is a tragic necessity can explain the way these leaders remained ensconced in a story about Jewish victimhood as Gaza burned. In fact, even within that very first week after October 7th, there was no way to tell a story exclusively about Jewish victimhood unless you simply did not value Palestinian lives. For one thing, over 200 Palestinians had already been killed in the West Bank in 2023, before the Hamas incursion took place. But for another, Israel’s retaliatory bombing began almost immediately, raining death on the neighborhoods of Gaza, while settler violence spread like wildfire across the West Bank. The Palestinian death toll far surpassed that of October 7th within a single week, hitting 2,300 people by October 15th. Early warnings from Palestinian analysts, journalists, and doctors, as well as genocide scholars, human rights organizations, and international bodies about where Israel’s campaign was headed were all ignored. Even now, as some admit aloud to the horrors they’ve long suppressed, most American Zionists frame the end to the war primarily in terms of the benefit to Israel. In articles and statements from conservative columnist Bret Stephens to the Reform movement, Israel’s self-interest and public image remain front and center, and harm to Palestinians remains a footnote.

Only the logic that Jewish death is unacceptable and Palestinian death is a tragic necessity can explain the way these leaders remained ensconced in a story about Jewish victimhood as Gaza burned.

Some progressive Zionist groups have been willing to go beyond open letters and podcast chatter. On July 28th, eight rabbis wearing tallitot and carrying sacks of flour were arrested for blocking the street outside of the Israeli consulate in New York. They held signs calling for food to be let into Gaza, and chanted, “Let Gaza Live.” T’ruah, the group that organized the protests, has been in support of a ceasefire since the end of 2023, but this was notably their first act of civil disobedience since October 7th. They have since helped organize similar actions in Chicago and San Francisco. A few days later, on August 4th, T’ruah and other liberal Zionist organizations joined a New York protest organized by the more left-wing group IfNotNow (INN), forming a previously unlikely coalition under the banner “Jews say no more to ethnic cleansing and starvation.”

This is a welcome step. Standing at the action that day, I was heartened to witness the growing ranks of Jews standing against the horrors in Gaza. But the presence of these progressive Zionist groups also provided a painful reminder of their long absence. After October 7th—while INN, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and the newly formed Rabbis for Ceasefire joined Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) as part of a broad multifaith, multiracial anti-war movement—T’ruah, J Street, New Jewish Narrative (formerly Americans for Peace Now), and other progressive Zionist organizations that work together as the Progressive Israel Network (PIN) emphasized Israel’s right to defend itself and backed away from the “ceasefire” call. While these groups had critiques of mainstream Jewish organizations who wholeheartedly endorsed Israel’s onslaught, ultimately they chose to stand with them over the pro-ceasefire left, even joining a war rally in November 2023, when over 5,000 Palestinian children had already been killed. Most of these groups took months to push for meaningful material costs on Israel, like limiting weapons sales, and in the meantime, many of them made the work of those who did advocate for such measures more difficult. J Street threatened to withdraw their endorsement of lawmakers who dissented against the Gaza war, and their dithering on adopting the word “ceasefire” signaled to lawmakers that they should do the same. “We’ve spent 15 years building this political power to rival AIPAC,” a J Street staffer who quit in protest told Jewish Currents in March 2024. “And now, all of a sudden, when that power could be wielded during a literal genocide, it’s like, ‘Oh, we actually can’t do any of the things we’ve been saying all these years that we can.’”

I couldn’t help but feel a version of this frustration thinking about the impact these newly emboldened rabbis and organization heads could have made a year and a half ago. Through their network of staff, boards, donors, members, and congregants, these leaders have access and power. They doubtless faced enormous pressure from many of those corners to hold a pro-Israel line after October 7th, but few seemed to believe there was anything they could do besides flow with the communal current of panic and revenge. They might have taken the opportunity to lead rather than follow, to train their constituents’ grief and anger on stopping a military escalation that would evidently only lead to more death and suffering, and away from the disregard of Palestinian humanity. As Democratic opinion shifted dramatically against Israel, these individuals and groups could have used their access to make waves. Rabbi Rachel Timoner counts staunchly pro-Israel Senator Chuck Schumer among the congregants of her Brooklyn congregation; Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR in Los Angeles gave the benediction at the Democratic National Convention, where the Uncommitted Movement was shamefully barred from speaking. They might have stepped out and pushed Democratic leadership. It would have mattered. Instead, they lagged behind them, reserving their most forceful public words for campus activists or Zohran Mamdani.

Crucially, the statements of newfound moral urgency from both groups of latecomers—the progressive ilk and the Zionist mainstream—so rarely acknowledge or reflect on their catastrophic delay in taking a stand. This trend has been evident for over a year: When PIN groups collectively began endorsing the call for a ceasefire in March 2024, when the death toll in Gaza passed 30,000, they took great pains to distinguish their calls from those of groups farther to their left, making it clear that they continued to stand with Israel. In her remarks at the recent IfNotNow action, Jacobs cited T’ruah’s October 12th, 2023, statement, which called for humanitarian relief in Gaza. “I wish we had been wrong,” Jacobs said. What she omitted is that her organization’s original call for humanitarianism was made within an explicit endorsement of the Israeli government’s military operation in Gaza—signed by the entire Progressive Israel Network. Similarly, as Michaelson embraced the “genocide” designation this spring, he defended his previous positions, and castigated those who leveled the charge of genocide before he did. “Looking back, I still believe I was correct then—and am still struck by how quickly some of Israel’s critics leapt to the most incendiary and extreme characterization of its military operations,” he wrote. Kurtzer, too, has appeared unwilling to examine any of his priors. In a piece earlier this month, he continued to defend the “just war” framing while conceding that “we may have passed the threshold” of its relevance. Still, he aimed his concern chiefly at Holocaust historian Raz Segal’s essay in this publication, arguing that “It was incoherent to make the claim of genocide in Gaza back in October of 2023 . . . It is a textbook example of what we call confirmation bias . . . one of the worst transgressions a scholar can commit.” He asked his readers instead to “to confront [the] horror and to feel it deeply . . . but to stop short of giving it a name.”

To harp on accountability is not about settling accounts, or discouraging anyone from joining an urgent fight. It is to insist that only an honest reckoning with what has gone wrong these last two years can ensure that the same harm is not repeated.

Altogether, the result is that nearly two years into a genocide, leaders of a community that has actively offered political, financial, and narrative support to the perpetrators are acting as if their sudden disavowal is enough to erase their complicity. To harp on this is not about settling accounts, or discouraging anyone from joining a desperately urgent fight. It is to insist that only an honest reckoning with what has gone wrong these last two years can ensure that the same harm is not repeated. Jewish leaders’ insistence on clinging to their priors and shunning those who predicted many of the horrors they now decry speaks to their refusal to engage in the uncomfortable work of transformation—of changing the structure that enabled the genocide in the first place, and does so still. In a telling example, a rabbi who spoke at the July 27th T’ruah rally published an op-ed a few days later explaining the significance of his protest coinciding with the day his son was joining the Israeli military as a lone soldier: “My stake in the future of Israel as a democratic state with a moral army is greater than ever,” he explained—as if the mass starvation of Gaza he protested is somehow separable from the impunity of the occupying army bolstered by foreign Jewish recruits like his son.

The Rambam teaches that there are multiple steps to teshuva (repentance for harm). The wrongdoer must recognize and regret the behavior; cease the wrongdoing; confess the wrongdoing; then reflect on the impact and ask for forgiveness. Finally, teshuva requires a commitment not to repeat the action when confronted with a similar situation in the future. In her book On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg writes that a “victim centered approach” to repair values the needs of the victims above the stability of the “institutional ecosystem” that allowed the harm. She recognizes that addressing the harm will necessarily challenge those in power, and that “this may be exactly why those who are culpable wish to avoid the conversation altogether.” But she insists that this is an inevitable part of the process. “How can we change if we don’t know who we are? If we can’t face what we have done?”

It may feel premature to speak of teshuva as the slaughter in Gaza continues, but the framework can offer us tools to shift course towards more effective action. As we enter the reflective month of Elul, we must ask, what would real teshuva look like in practice within the Jewish world? The first step must be an honest intracommunal reckoning. This may start behind closed doors, as Jewish people who supported the war process the harm they’ve done with their families, friends, and broader communities. These conversations should account not just for the unbearable starvation today, but for Israel’s decades-long process of dispossession and dehumanization of Palestinians, which led Israel to perpetrate a genocide in the name of the Jewish people. Those in need of inspiration in facing complicity head-on, without making excuses, might look to Lihi Ben Shitrit, an Israeli political scientist at NYU, who reflected recently in the Forward on the intellectual and emotional blocks she experienced to recognizing and naming the genocide in Gaza. Once “taken aback by [Raz] Segal’s certitude,” she now concedes that, “when it comes to the threat of genocide, [Segal’s] being alarmist is precisely what is needed.” She continued, “Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza . . . Writing this article is my first step in this direction.”

Like Shitrit’s did, this private reckoning should quickly graduate into the public sphere. Rabbis and institutional leaders who regret past statements should walk them back in front of their congregations and in the media, explaining clearly what made them change their minds. They can model vulnerability and courage in speaking to why they dismissed the expressed genocidal intent of Israeli leaders as rageful bluster, while ignoring the clear warnings of Palestinians who live the devastating impact of Zionism every day. They can acknowledge the ways that “Jewish unity” was marshaled at the expense of Palestinian lives, and its catastrophic failure to succeed even on its own terms—to guarantee any of us safety, least of all the Israeli hostages. Rabbis who have catered to the most belligerent right-wing voices in their communities should trust that they have a quieter constituency desperate for moral leadership and ready to be brave, and an opportunity to help those who are scared or stuck to change their minds. “The larger the scale of harm—and the greater the number of people obligated to address and repair that harm—the more critical the first step of repentance is,” Ruttenberg writes. “The work of confession forces the penitent . . . to resist the temptation to minimize, to gloss over, to skip a reckoning with what actually happened, how it happened, by whom, and why.”

In addition to making efforts to educate themselves, communities should invite Palestinian speakers whose voices have been kept out of frame for too long. This will require apologizing for smearing many of them as antisemites, paving the way for the firing and harassment of Palestinians and their allies, and the detention of student protesters. Not everyone will accept these invitations, but some will, especially if they see Jewish groups newly activated in defending those under attack by the administration and civil institutions. Liberal Zionists may find they need the help of anti-Zionist Jewish organizations they previously shunned, like JVP, to share their experience with direct accountability and partnership with Palestinians.

Jewish communities should ask themselves “What would you have done to stop the annihilation of the Jews of Europe?” and should do just that for Palestinians now. You are either for genocide or against it.

The goal of these listening and learning programs must be material commitments to mobilize the power of Jewish institutions to end the unfolding Israeli attempt to complete the Nakba and empty the land of Palestinians. Leaders must take action. They must focus their considerable political energy on stopping the flow of weapons from the American government to Israel, putting pressure on electeds and participating in civil disobedience. They can also start addressing the complicity of our communal institutions: cutting ties with Jewish organizations that still fully support Israel’s genocide, including AIPAC, the American Jewish Comittee, and the Anti-Defamation League; canceling their mission trips to Israel; and reorienting their relationships with Israeli partners toward supporting disruptive civil disobedience and scaling up protective presence in the West Bank. Institutions of all stripes should commit portions of their annual budget to reparations for Palestinians living in Palestine, and to groups supporting the displaced and injured in diaspora. Congregations should demonstrate the understanding that there are more important things than “unity” by bringing delegations to the UN and the Hague to support the prosecution of Israeli officials at the forefront of dismantling the tenets of international law. Reconsidering the communal taboo on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—a commonsense, nonviolent program that Palestinians have long advocated for—would be a bridge to allyship not only with Palestinians but with international partners, reconnecting Jewish communities to the rest of the world. Jewish communities should ask themselves “What would you have done to stop the annihilation of the Jews of Europe?” and should do just that for Palestinians now. You are either for genocide or against it.

The temptation to avoid this reckoning and stay in safer territory will be strong. But the stakes are too high and too many lives have already been lost. Business as usual must be disrupted for the genocide to end. If leadership resists this process, it will be the responsibility of the rank-and-file—the membership, the congregation, the employees—to insist on it. Those in stubborn institutions should leave, or band with others to start new spaces where they themselves can lead. Liberal Jews willing to engage in public reckoning may find that many of us on the Jewish left will be softened by it. After all, most of us—myself included—had our own painful confrontation with Zionism. We recall both the isolation of being cast out of the mainstream Jewish community and the sweetness of building new relationships of solidarity. I’m only here today because many people offered me an off-ramp. That’s why many in my position feel that it is our responsibility to engage—to exercise humility and grace as we sit with other Jews in their fear and shame, and invite them to take action with us.

This week, Israel announced that it was calling up 60,000 reservists in preparation to reoccupy and ethnically cleanse Gaza City, and also presented plans for a major settlement project in the E1 corridor in the West Bank, with the stated goal of preventing a Palestinian state. We very well may hear the anguished complaints from liberal Zionists who believe that Israel has once again gone too far. At this point, there can be no mistake that this is not an aberration, but the state’s intended course—a course it maintains because it can. There is no more time for handwringing; there is work to be done. Showing up today means committing to the long haul of protecting Palestinians living between the river and the sea and enabling them to rebuild and return home. The road to freedom and justice is long and we need as many people actively on it as possible. But there is no justice without teshuva, without accountability. It is painful work, to be sure, but it is the only hope toward bringing a better world for all of us, including all who call the land home, on the other side.

Read 2 letters to the editor about “Rhetoric Without Reckoning”

Simone Zimmerman is an organizer and strategist based in Brooklyn. She is a co-founder of the anti-apartheid group IfNotNow.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/rhetoric-without-reckoning at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

OBITUARY | 21 AUG 2025, 5:17 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 10 SEP 2025, 12:11 PM UTC

Remembering Awdah Hathaleen

The Palestinian activist turned hospitality into a tool of sabotage against the ongoing Nakba.

Maya Rosen and Erez Bleicher

Awdah Hathaleen in Umm al-Khair.

Emily Glick

On the night before he was killed, Palestinian schoolteacher, activist, and father of three Awdah Hathaleen addressed solidarity activists from around the world in a webinar that we hosted to strengthen support for the Palestinian struggle in the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank. Awdah was from the Palestinian Bedouin hamlet of Umm al-Khair, where he had been born in 1994, just under 50 years after his family was expelled from the Naqab desert during the Nakba, and a decade after the encroaching Israeli settlement of Carmel was established as part of a strategic corridor of illegal developments designed to systematically expel Masafer Yatta’s rural communities. Awdah played a central role in efforts to counter settler attacks, land expropriation, and state violence throughout the region, all of which have intensified over the last years, especially since October 7th. “Here in Umm al-Khair, every day, something is going to happen. We don’t know when, we don’t know why, we don’t know what. But something will happen,” Awdah shared on the last night of his life. “I want to be safe. I want to tell my family: ‘Nothing is going to happen tomorrow.’”

We first met Awdah ten years ago, when our international community of Jewish co-resistance activists began to support Palestinian direct action and popular struggle in Masafer Yatta. The two of us and Awdah were in our early twenties then, part of a cohort that all came of age and into our activism together. Awdah, who soon became one of our dearest friends, brought a particular warmth and grace to the world of dissident politics. Over the years that followed, he emerged as an essential coordinate in a constellation of direct action networks opposing the forced displacement of Palestinians. He drew us into the daily life of his community: Soon we were helping them to replant olive trees destroyed by settlers; rebuilding homes after demolitions by the army; organizing civil disobedience actions in defense of water rights and global solidarity campaigns against forced transfer; joining for weddings, funerals, and birthdays; and spending more winter nights by the fire and languid summer days playing with the children than we could ever count. Whenever we were in Umm al-Khair, Awdah would host us, insisting we stay for tea. When the tea was finished, he would insist on dinner. If we agreed to that, he would insist we spend the night or risk offending his hospitality. And in the morning, he would insist that the only logical thing would be to stay another night. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into a decade of being with Awdah in Umm al-Khair, and bringing others there as well.

For Awdah, the Bedouin tradition of hospitality was a primary strategy and cherished value in the work of countering the ongoing Nakba, and he had the remarkable ability to befriend every guest who ever passed through Umm al-Khair. As our lives became more and more imbricated with the life of Umm al-Khair—hosting delegations, actions, gatherings, or work days together nearly every week—we watched Awdah develop his graciousness and charm into a principle technology in the practice and process of liberation and in defense of his community. In his hands, hospitality became a tool of exquisite sabotage against an ever more refined system of partition—an offensive mechanism deployed like a carefully placed wrench in the gears of the bulldozers and a crowbar prying apart the stone wall of the state’s supremacist logics.

When we saw the message that Awdah had been shot, we both immediately thought of his constant exhortations to be present for one another, especially in the most difficult moments. Just the night before on the webinar, he had shared: “Sometimes you’re in a position where you feel alone, and it’s really the hardest feeling ever . . . It’s important to have people, to have friends everywhere who share your stories, who stand and shout for you.” We looked at each other, threw a few essentials into our backpacks, and headed to the car. On a stretch of highway about half an hour from Umm al-Khair, we got a call from friends who had rushed to the Be’er Sheva hospital where Awdah had been transported. He hadn’t survived. A single bullet, shot by the settler Yinon Levi, had pierced Awdah’s heart as he stood on the community’s basketball court, filming the destruction of the village’s olive trees by a settler’s excavator, which had also hit his cousin Ahmed, knocking him unconscious. Awdah, always fully committed to documentation, to telling the world of the injustice he saw, ended up filming his own murder, the footage cutting off after he falls to the ground, his two-year-old son shouting “Ya Rab, ya Rab!” (“Oh God, oh God!”) over and over.

When we arrived at the village that night, people were huddled together, dazed. Mourning tents had been hastily erected, and the sound of wails echoed in the nighttime air. Awdah’s blood was still wet on the basketball court at the center of the village. We stood looking in disbelief, recalling the iftar meals we had shared on this court, the liberation seder Awdah had insisted we host here, all the meetings where we had gathered here to plan actions. A phrase from the Book of Psalms, repeated in elegies for Tisha B’Av and penitential prayers for the High Holidays, describes the blood of the righteous, of martyrs, as having been “poured out like water.” Over the days that followed, we spoke to each other of the cruel irony of that image; here in Umm al-Khair, water was not casually poured out but carefully protected. Awdah had, in fact, been killed during a settler attack targeting the village’s main water pipe. A week later, the settlers would succeed in cutting that pipe. In an interview conducted last year for a report in these pages, Awdah had spoken of a similar attempt by the settlers: “People can live without homes. People can live with arrests, raids. But it is impossible to live without water,” he said. He conceded that if the settlers succeeded in cutting the pipes, it would be hard to continue living in Umm al-Khair, but, he said, “No one will leave this place. The people will leave only in one way—if they get killed here.”

That first night after Awdah was murdered, no one slept. At around 3 am, we watched as the police entered the village and the murderer himself stepped out of the police car. We watched as Levi pointed to the place where the incident had unfolded, animatedly telling the officers his account of the story. No one came to ask any of the Palestinian witnesses for testimony.

The very next morning, the excavator returned, accompanied by the military. The rhythmic clanging of the hulking machine hollowing out the land that Awdah fought for was the constant sonic background to our collective grief. During military raids in the nights that followed, 20 men from the village—Awdah’s brothers and cousins—were arrested for “interrogation,” most of them held for many days. Levi was released to house arrest a few days after the shooting, a condition that was lifted a few days after that. By Monday, a week after he killed Awdah, Levi was back in the village, gun in hand, directing his construction crew in the continuation of the broader project to expand the adjacent settlement. Many of Awdah’s relatives remained in jail, where they later reported being tortured: severely beaten; blindfolded and handcuffed; taunted and threatened; denied access to food, water, and bathrooms.

It was hard to be in Umm al-Khair in the days, then weeks, after Awdah’s murder. The army would enter and declare a closed military zone and drive us out with stun grenades; settlers would walk through the village in blatant provocation and on Fridays gather for Shabbat services at the new settlement construction site adjacent to where Awdah had been killed. The women of the village went on hunger strike to protest the Israeli authorities’ refusal to release Awdah’s body for burial—a common practice Israel employs after Palestinians have been murdered, exerting control even in death. Multiple women fainted over the course of these days and had to be taken to the hospital. At night, sleeping in Awdah’s family’s home at the request of his widow Hanady, Maya and other women activists would hear the toddler who had witnessed his father’s murder screaming “Abooey, Abooey!” (“Daddy! Daddy!”).

But however hard it was to be there, it was even harder to be at home. At least in Umm al-Khair, it was possible to be busy. Every day, there were new tasks. We spent one afternoon on our hands and knees, looking for the bullet that had exited Awdah’s back, in the hope that it might help in the legal proceedings. We had to coordinate signing for the release of Awdah’s relatives and picking them up from detention. There were journalists who wanted to come, and who needed introductions, quotes, and translation. There were kids to cook for, protests to plan, an international media and advocacy campaign to help coordinate.

Most of all, being in Umm al-Khair felt like being closer to Awdah, every nook and cranny of the village associated with him in some way, imprinted with some memory. At least in Umm al-Khair, Awdah’s voice was everywhere—in a certain sense literally, as everyone sat and watched videos of him throughout the day: interviews, virtual tours, old audio notes and silly videos from WhatsApp, and then the news reports about his death. His voice rang out across the village, ricocheting off the tin walls of the homes, the plastic slides and swings of the playground. We all spoke of him in a mix of Arabic, English, and Hebrew, and the lack of fluency meant the verb tenses were never quite right; this was the only place where Awdah was not condemned to the past tense.

The fervor of our struggle to get Awdah’s body back made it easy to forget that we actually weren’t fighting to get Awdah himself back. On the tenth day after his murder, at 6 am, we were notified that his body would be released. Despite the police’s promise that they would not interfere with the funeral, the military set up checkpoints to prevent entrance, turning away car after car. Thousands should have been there, and would have been, were it not for military restrictions. The funeral was small and quiet. Some of his relatives were still in prison, many others held back by military checkpoints. Teenage boys shoveled dirt and moved rocks for his grave, poured water on the gravesite so the fine desert sand wouldn’t fly away. On so many work days, this is exactly what we had done—shoveled dirt, moved rocks, for some new agricultural or building project. The dirt piled up. A military drone buzzed overhead.

In 2018, Awdah spearheaded the building of a honeybee farm in Umm al-Khair, and it became a tradition for us to organize solidarity activists to visit it ahead of Rosh Hashanah as a way to help usher in a “sweet new year” of partnership and shared action. A few years later, settlers from Carmel complained to the army that the bees were flying over the fence into the settlement, and the military forced Umm al-Khair residents to relocate the farm to a site outside the village. Several of the boxes housing the beehives were damaged in the process, so this past April, we worked with Awdah and other activists to rehabilitate the honeybee farm. Just a few weeks ago, he called us full of excitement to let us know that the first batch of honey from the farm we rebuilt together had been harvested.

It is painful to imagine continuing to do this work without Awdah. How will we plan campaigns, start projects, and dream beyond what we thought possible? “Woe to the one who did not learn” from him, the Talmud teaches about the righteous. Woe to those in the future, who will not know Awdah; his sons, who will not remember him beyond the haziest of images; the community and activists who will not have him to rely on. And yet, on the day the mourning period ended, Awdah’s brother spoke to us about continuing the honey harvest. That same day, we talked to his cousin about planning a day to plant olive trees where the bulldozer had attempted to raze them. There are so many projects we worked on with Awdah, which he has left us and the community to continue—work days to harvest za’atar, cucumbers, and sage; initiatives to bring new activists to sleep in the village’s guesthouse; ways to coordinate overnight shifts for protective presence ahead of expected demolitions; and fundraising efforts for people in the village who need medical treatment. “What allows us not to stay stuck in the fear, stuck in the pain, is the relationships between us,” Awdah once wrote, in words that now propel us forward, teaching us how to mourn and honor him. “We find that this pain . . . heal[s] over time through the relationships we hold, through each act of resistance.”

Awdah lived out this message by elevating hospitality as a political medium, a crucial practice for building relationships of solidarity within collective struggle. These bonds of trust helped us escalate our action together, allowing us to take greater risks even under increasing repression. He liked to remind us of the Bedouin coffee tradition: The first cup is known as “al-haif,” the cup of the guest, a polite sign of hospitality. The second cup is “al-dhaif,” the cup of enjoyment, of congenial camaraderie. The third is “al-kaif,” the cup of “taste,” for enjoyment of the flavor itself. And the fourth is “al-saif,” the cup of the sword. If you stay for the fourth cup of coffee, you are obligated to join your hosts in battle against any forces that seek to do them harm—the act of hospitality alchemizing the categories of “guest” and “host,” subtly subverting them through the creation of a unit of defense and solidarity. Over the last decade, we have stayed well beyond the fourth cup of coffee and we will remain with our hosts for the struggle ahead, ready to join with the people of Masafer Yatta against the attacks that are sure to come, in a world that will be forever diminished by Awdah’s absence but guided always by his vision.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.

Erez Bleicher is a solidarity activist and writer living in Jerusalem. He is a member of All That’s Left and the Green Olive Collective.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/remembering-awdah-hathaleen at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

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Mount Sinai Hospital Fired Social Worker Over “Gaza Must Live” Postcard

Hospital employees say the termination is an example of the anti-Palestinian climate at the institution.

Alex Kane

Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

Francis Joseph Dean/IMAGO

Last year, Claire Raizen, a social worker at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital who worked with bone marrow transplant patients, put up a small postcard at her desk bearing the words “Gaza Must Live.” Raizen said this affirmation of her values in her workplace was an attempt to manage the disconnect that arose from “knowing atrocities are happening” in Gaza while she went about her daily life. The postcard was in a space where only co-workers came and went, she said, and was out of view of patients.

At first, other employees at the top-ranked hospital who saw the postcard reacted positively, Raizen said. “I had co-workers that would come into my office and say, ‘it’s so amazing to know that this is a safe place to talk about Palestine.’” But in early July, someone lodged an anonymous complaint that the postcard made them uncomfortable, a fact Raizen’s supervisor raised with her at a regularly scheduled check-in. Over the ensuing three weeks, she had a series of meetings with superiors who repeatedly pressed her to take down the postcard. In a July 10th phone call that Raizen recorded and shared with Jewish Currents, Alison Snow, the director of oncology social work at Mount Sinai, told Raizen that “somebody has been [made] uncomfortable by” the postcard, that it needed to come down, and that if she did not obey, she would face disciplinary action due to her “willful insubordination and refusing the directive.” Snow also said there is a workplace policy against having anything “political in nature” in the workplace. In a similar phone call the following day, Sal LaVecchia, the vice president for human resources at Mount Sinai, told her “these signs or messages in the workplace” are “distracting from our mission,” and added: “It’s a very controversial topic, as you as you know, and some people are uncomfortable and are offended.” (Raizen asked LaVecchia for a copy of the policy she was supposedly violating, which she said she never received.) In an interview with Jewish Currents, Raizen said she refused to take the postcard down because “complying with this order felt like it was going to compromise my most core ethical values”—principles that Raizen said were formed in part by growing up in a family with ancestors killed in the Holocaust. On July 31st, she was fired from her job. Mount Sinai did not respond to requests for comment.

Raizen’s colleagues were angered and shocked over the firing. “My jaw hit the floor when I found out that she was being fired over this,” said one Mount Sinai employee, who requested anonymity to protect themselves from retaliation. “It’s stunning that they fired Claire, an exquisite social worker beloved by her team, over something so inconsequential to how she does her job.” Raizen and her colleagues say that her firing disrupted care for Raizen’s patients. “The active patient issues that I was addressing have all just been dropped with no opportunity to pass those off to a colleague,” said Raizen. She said that former patients have missed appointments because they couldn’t access her for transportation assistance, and that others experienced delays in the completion of paperwork for disability benefits or medical leave. “There is a clinical termination process that social workers are trained to do when relationships between patients and clients end,” Raizen said. “Disappearing from my patients without being able to do that makes me concerned about causing emotional distress to critically-ill patients who already have significant levels of depression and anxiety. I am very concerned about the impact on patients’ emotional well-being.”

Currently, a circulating petition protesting Raizen’s firing has been signed by over 350 colleagues, patients, and other health care workers. It states that the termination is an instance of “selective application of censorship for a nonviolent statement about a traumatic and ongoing event.” Mount Sinai employees say that other hospital workers routinely wear symbols or post signs that advance political positions, such as the transgender pride flag or yellow ribbons showing support for Israeli hostages in Gaza. “There’s never any repercussions for that,” said a second Mount Sinai employee. “We could have brought [complaints about those expressions] but we didn’t want to stoop that low, because everybody has a right to their opinion.”

Mount Sinai employees say that Raizen’s firing is a particularly brazen example of the anti-Palestinian climate at the hospital. A day after the October 7th attacks—and amid Israel’s immediate bombardment of Gaza, which killed scores of Palestinians—Mount Sinai leadership sent a message to its employees declaring that they “stand with Israel.” While they acknowledged that civilians on “both sides” had died, they nonetheless affirmed that they “support Israel’s right to fight in its self-defense.” The only other message on Israel and Gaza sent to employees was sent on October 12th, 2023. Titled “Events in Israel and Gaza,” the email laments the “images of human suffering and loss of life emerging from the Middle East in the wake of the terror attack by Hamas against Israel.” Last October, medical students invited Dr. Mark Perlmutter—a doctor who had volunteered in Gaza—to give a talk at Mount Sinai entitled “Healthcare in War Zones: What a Doctor Witnessed in Gaza,” but according to the second Mount Sinai employee, the talk was canceled at the behest of the medical school dean, Dennis Charney. (The talk was ultimately held off-campus.)

Raizen’s firing is one of the latest examples of how workplaces around the country have repressed activism and speech in solidarity with Gaza, even as experts and human rights organizations have increasingly warned that Israel is perpetuating a genocide. That Mount Sinai is “now firing someone for saying Gaza should be able to live is stunning, especially at a moment when respected health organizations are decrying Israel’s starvation of Gaza and genocide,” said the first Mount Sinai employee. Nurses, museum workers, tech employees, and professors, among others, have been fired for opposing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza at their jobs. Since 2023, the civil and constitutional rights group Palestine Legal received 286 reports of workers being fired in retaliation for pro-Palestine advocacy. Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, said Raizen’s firing could chill the speech of others in her former workplace and beyond. “People who hear this story might start to wonder whether their employer thinks the same thing about the phrase ‘Gaza must live,’’” said Ahamed. “It prevents people from wanting to speak out.” Indeed, Raizen’s colleagues told Jewish Currents that they worried they could be next if they advocate for Palestinian human rights. “If they did that to her,” said the second Mount Sinai employee, “nobody is safe to speak up in this environment.”

Firings like Raizen’s also reflect a harsh reality for those who speak out for Palestinian rights inside their workplaces: Most workers can be fired for political speech—especially if you are not in a union. Under New York law, workers cannot be punished for political activity done outside of work hours, but the definition of such activity is limited to running for office or campaigning or fundraising for a political candidate. In any case, Raizen’s postcard was put up inside the workplace. “Such a posting is not protected under state law,” said Lee Adler, a labor lawyer and professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Indeed, Raizen said she spoke with a labor lawyer, who told her that “it is not a wrongful termination.” Raizen added: “The reality of being in a non-unionized position in a private workplace is your rights are extremely limited.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

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Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/mount-sinai-hospital-fired-social-worker-over-gaza-must-live-postcard at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

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UPDATED 17 AUG 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

The Betrayal of Light

At the precipice of each instant, two voices speak to me. One says, “You survived.” The other, “It will begin again.”

Abdullah Hany Daher

Gaza City, June 2025

Majdi Fathi/AP Photo

I used to wake up to sunlight shining through the window. Now a missile striking two blocks away wakes me. There is no morning anymore—no work, no school, no mealtime. There is only the next instant, and the fear we won’t survive it.

Even the sky in Gaza has changed. The sun rises, but brings no warmth. The night arrives, but offers no rest.

What we call sleep is no longer sleep. It is fatigue with one eye open. We pack our bags. We keep our children fully dressed. Every hum overhead stops our breath. When quiet persists for more than ten minutes, we relax a bit.

On the fourth night of October 2023, the sky lit up. A belt of fire lashed our street. I was lying on the floor beside my brother. We heard screeching. Then nothing. Then dust, and screaming. I saw my cousin’s chest open. His body falling to the ground made a sound unlike any other. My brother and I crawled out from under shards of glass. Half of the building across the street had vanished. We had no time to bury my cousin properly. No cloth. No light. For the first time, I questioned the fairness of surviving. Something froze inside me, then shattered. I didn’t cry. I stayed broken. After all, the war didn’t stop. Rebuilding would only mean readying myself to shatter again.

In a shelter, a child cried for his father who had died the previous morning. His mother, silent and unblinking, held him with arms of stone. “Mama, why aren’t you crying?” the child asked. The mother broke. I wish I hadn’t seen it, her face collapsing like that.

I once studied under a lamp. I read books. I dreamed of life. Now, the glow of my phone makes me flinch. A candle is a target. A match, a betrayal. The drones look for illumination. I remember the night a neighbor’s flashlight cost him his home. The plane circled. Then came the light. Then the ending.

We cover our windows. We speak in whispers. I learn the corners of our destroyed flat by heart. The number of steps between the hallway and the sink. The pattern of cracks on the floor. The smell of burning in the distance.

Children play games of silence. I grab my mother’s hand to make sure she exists. We don’t ask questions anymore. The answers are relentless: Nowhere is safe, no one is whole.

In December 2023, we were sheltering in an industrial area. Tanks circled. No exit. No future. My father said, “Now, run.” I saw the dust under the tanks’ tracks. I smelled their steel. I don’t know how we made it—but that’s all I was left with: the simple fact that we lived, and the feeling of guilt that others didn’t.

I am afraid of light. I am afraid of darkness. I am afraid of stillness. I fear noise. When the blasts stop, I grow more afraid. The silence is only a prelude. Every second feels like waiting. What are we waiting for? We do not know.

At the precipice of each instant, two voices speak to me. One says, “You survived.” The other, “It will begin again.”

A part of me wants to believe in morning. A part of me prepares for another night.

I used to know time as a schedule, a plan, a goal. Now, time is only something to endure.

Sometimes I close my eyes and picture a sunrise that implies coffee rather than fear. I dream of mindlessly opening a window to feel the breeze, of reading a book without the sound of drones overhead. I dream of nights in Gaza as they once were: lovers walking along moonlit streets, children playing. But I do not believe these dreams.

I wonder who I’ll be if this ends. If I will ever again sit near a lamp without flinching. If my children’s children will ever trust the light. There are no metaphors in Gaza. There is only what is gone and what remains—this life between shadows, and the memory of another light.

Abdullah Hany Daher is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza. He documents the human stories of war, aiming to preserve voices that the rubble cannot silence.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-betrayal-of-light at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

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How the Department of Health and Human Services Took the Lead in Trump’s Campus Crackdown

The agency has threatened crucial medical research funding to extract concessions from universities on student protests and DEI.

Alex Kane

President Trump with HHS officials and medical workers as he signs executive orders on lowering drug prices in July 2020.

Shealah Craighead

On April 1st, Katrina Armstrong, the former Columbia University president, sat down in a Washington, DC, office building for a deposition. Her interview was part of a federal investigation into months of campus protests opposing Israel’s perpetration of what experts call a genocide in Gaza. The Trump administration had opened the case in February under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars schools that receive federal funding from permitting a “hostile environment” for students on the basis of race, national origin, or other protected identity classes. By March, the administration had already cut $400 million in federal grants to Columbia due to the school’s alleged violations of Title VI; the threat of further cuts to Columbia’s federal funding now hung over Armstong’s deposition.

There was much about the administration’s use of Title VI that was unusual, including the fact that they had cut funds to the university before the conclusion of their investigation and that they had publicized provocative accusations in similar civil rights investigations in ways that experts said hinted at a predetermined outcome. But another particularly notable shift concerned the agency that was spearheading these efforts: the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). For most of its history, HHS’s core aim has been promoting public health by, for example, eliminating smallpox, providing vaccines for children, and researching new viruses. (Some of this work is now imperiled under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) The National Institute of Health—a subagency of HHS—has likewise focused mainly on disbursing billions of dollars in federal funds to thousands of medical institutions, including universities, for medical research. Typically, the enforcement of Title VI in educational environments has been the purview of the Department of Education’s (DOE) Office of Civil Rights (OCR), Katy Joseph, a former chief of staff in the Biden administration DOE OCR, told Jewish Currents. But it was HHS that cut $250 million in grants to Columbia in March, and it was Sean Keveney, the acting general counsel for the agency under Donald Trump, who questioned Armstrong during her deposition in April.

Keveney said he was brought in to depose Armstrong because of his past experience as a Department of Justice attorney. “I have a lot of experience investigating and trying civil rights cases,” he said in an interview with Jewish Currents. “I’ve taken hundreds of civil rights depositions.” But, according to Joseph, an HHS attorney taking the lead in such proceedings represents a significant shift. “I can’t think of a precedent for HHS taking point in investigating universities,” Joseph said. “It’s concerning because it looks like new political leadership coming in and injecting partisan aims into the enforcement of civil rights law.” Keveney said that in the past HHS had indeed “not been as aggressive” as the DOE in investigating Title VI in educational institutions. That has definitively changed in the second Trump term, with the agency playing a major role in investigating universities over pro-Palestine activism.

HHS assumed its leading role in the Trump crackdown on universities in February, when the agency became a member of the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which combines officials from HHS, the DOE, the General Services Administration, and the Department of Justice (DOJ). “Antisemitism—like racism—is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” Kennedy, Jr. said in March, when the Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism first threatened Columbia with a cut-off in grants. “The censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.” The task force has drawn criticism for its politicization of antisemitism claims to serve the Trump agenda. “The Task Force has spearheaded the government’s weaponization of spurious antisemitism charges against higher education,” the Middle East Studies Association board said in March; Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Council said the task force’s “true aim is to coerce universities to suppress public protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, penalize dissent against Israel and Zionism, and violate scholarly autonomy.”

Through the task force, HHS began opening investigations into universities that had prominent pro-Palestinian protests, publishing findings that cast the protests as antisemitic, and cutting funding to universities. At Columbia, for instance, a month after the Armstrong deposition, the task force published their conclusion that Columbia violated Title VI, by allowing pro-Palestinian protests and chants such as “‘Globalize the Intifada’ and ‘Death to the Zionist State,’” among other incidents. HHS has also found Harvard in violation of civil rights law on similar grounds; on July 30th, the department referred the investigation to the DOJ “to initiate appropriate proceedings to address Harvard’s antisemitic discrimination.” (HHS’s civil rights investigations into Northwestern and Johns Hopkins are still ongoing.) Separately, the agency froze billions of dollars in grant money to at least six universities that had student protests, including UCLA, Brown, and Harvard, and in April it announced that it would cut funding to any future grant recipients from the National Institute of Health who participated in boycotts of Israel.

Critics say that HHS has become the leader of a broader campaign to crack down on criticism of Israel, not only at universities, but also within the medical field—a campaign that has been buoyed by the efforts of Israel advocacy groups, Zionist medical school faculty, and university administrators. In the process, HHS—which has the biggest budget of any federal agency and the largest grant-making program—has used its funding of university medical research as a key source of leverage. In 2023, the agency gave universities over $33 billion in research and development funding, which amounts to just over half of all federal expenditures for research at universities. “The White House is using HHS as a weapon to advance a political agenda,” said Laura Durso, who served as a chief of staff in HHS’s OCR during the Biden administration. “This is part of a larger strategy to undermine civil society, and in doing so HHS is veering from its historical position as a protector of civil rights.” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia, put it more bluntly: “This is part of the Trump administration’s gangsterism. They’ve got their soldiers in all parts of the federal government, and they activate the one that gives them the most leverage over whoever they want to shake down,” Howley said. “In this case, that’s HHS.”

In the process, critics say that HHS is undermining its own mandate to promote public health, by disrupting research into everything from how to detect breast cancer earlier to the connections between diabetes and dementia to the development of drugs to treat chemotherapy exposure. The HHS funding cuts helped put Columbia at a “tipping point,” with scientists facing “the decimation of decades of research,” according to a June statement by the school’s president. “They are ultimately throwing away research that they had asked for—that HHS had decided was helpful,” said Adam Sychla, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School whose NIH-funded grant to research medicines for diverse maladies that might produce fewer side effects was canceled in April by the Trump administration. Keveney defended HHS’s actions. “The attempt to turn this back on NIH or HHS to portray the agency as anti-science is a smoke screen to hide the fact that these universities have to comply with their responsibilities when they accept those funds,” he said. But Durso disagreed. “Defunding billions of dollars of federally-funded research endangers public health and will hamper scientific advancement for generations,” she said. “The agency cannot be taken seriously if it is trying to reverse-engineer a justification for those cuts by rushing to find universities in violation of federal law.”

The federal government has long used its public health agency to advance civil rights within the health care field, even under Republican administrations. For instance, both Ronald Reagan’s and George H. W. Bush’s HHS secretaries sought to address racial disparities in healthcare, and George W. Bush’s HHS secretary implemented policies that allowed more disabled people to receive health services in their own homes, rather than in institutions. At the same time, HHS policies have reflected the political priorities of the presidents who staff them: Reagan’s HHS implemented a rule barring federally-funded family planning clinics from providing advice or assistance to help women obtain abortions—a policy that Democratic presidents have reversed, only for it to be re-implemented in similar form by Republican presidents, including Trump.

The restriction on abortion information was only one of a slew of conservative policies implemented by Trump’s HHS. In his first term, Trump appointed Roger Severino, a Catholic conservative with anti-trans and anti-abortion views, to head HHS OCR. During his tenure, Severino’s office threatened to withhold federal funds from California because the state required that private insurers cover abortion care. They also published a rule allowing employers to opt out of covering birth control as part of employee health insurance plans, and amended regulations to exclude transgender patients from prohibitions on health care providers discriminating on the basis of sex. Severino notably created a new division in the HHS civil rights office called the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division whose mandate was to ensure that health care providers could not be forced into providing abortion or assisted suicide if they have a religious objection to such practices—a move that Durso called “the clearest evidence at the time of how the agency was going to prioritize its work.”

While the Biden administration reversed many of Severino’s policies, many federal employees that Severino hired remained behind. “A lot of the leadership that was put in place in the first administration was preserved,” said Severino. As a result, when Trump returned to office earlier this year with the priority of repressing pro-Palestine speech on campuses, HHS was ready—staffed with what a former HHS attorney, who requested anonymity for fear of professional consequences, called “loyal foot soldiers” for Trump’s agenda. Severino—who said he was part of the team that worked on Trump’s first-term executive order on combatting antisemitism—said he was “very proud” that the employees he hired have become central players in the current campaign. “HHS was first out of the gate to enforce the civil rights of Jewish Americans because we created such a well-running machine under the first Trump administration,” he said. “The infrastructure was ready to go.” HHS also received help from outside the agency: In the spring, eight civil rights attorneys from the Department of Justice were sent to HHS’s OCR to work on antisemitism investigations, according to the former federal attorney. The result of this influx of capacity, according to Durso, is that university investigations, alongside efforts to “threaten schools and dismantle public education” are proceeding at an astounding “speed and scale.

The Trump HHS was looking to target medical schools that had seen activism for Palestine in the past year. There was no shortage of possible targets. Like their peers in liberal arts schools, medical school students around the country have joined rallies, organized teach-ins, and participated in student encampments to protest Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Many medical students have focused on Israel’s mass destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure and its arrests and killing of doctors, with students at a range of medical schools organizing panels on public health in Gaza. As early as November 2023, medical students at Virginia Commonwealth University began holding weekly vigils for medical workers killed in Gaza. In March 2024, after the Israeli military invaded the grounds of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, Harvard public health students participated in a vigil for those killed during the raid, where they decried the deaths of healthcare workers, patients, and displaced families sheltering on hospital grounds. Harvard medical students and faculty have also protested the American Medical Association’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

From the start, this activism alarmed pro-Israel medical school faculty, who quickly began to cast the dissent as antisemitic, with some advocating for administrators to clamp down on the protests. Last May, dozens of Harvard Medical School faculty and alumni signed a letter to Harvard’s president calling for “significant consequences” for leaders of the pro-Palestinian encampment at the school. In February, medical faculty at Columbia joined colleagues from the business and engineering schools for a meeting with the university president, at which they called on Columbia to get ahead of federal government action by restricting protests.

Administrators at medical schools have responded to claims of antisemitism by embarking on a campaign of censorship targeting Palestine activism. In April 2024, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) removed a talk from their website about trauma-informed care by Leigh Kimberg, a professor in their medical school, which discussed Israel’s bombing of hospitals, killing of healthcare workers and children, and the training of US police officers in Israel. When Kimberg objected to the removal of her talk, the UCSF administration informed Kimberg she was permanently banned from speaking in the continuing medical education program at UCSF, where the talk took place. (Months later, after Kimberg got a free speech lawyer involved, UCSF lifted the ban, but the school continues to refuse to return her talk to the website.) That same month, Umayma Mohammed, an Emory University medical student, appeared on Democracy Now!, where she said that an Emory professor of medicine who had recently volunteered with the Israeli army was “aiding and abetting a genocide.” Emory suspended Mohammed for a year for violating codes of “professional conduct”; Mohammed later revealed that during her disciplinary hearing, three Emory medical school faculty testified in favor of her being expelled.

Pro-Israel advocacy in the medical field has not remained limited to case-by-case pressure campaigns. Instead, criticism of Israel from within medical institutions has also sparked the creation of new advocacy organizations such as the nonprofit American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA). Michelle Stravitz, AJMA’s CEO, said in an interview that the group started as an ad-hoc convening of medical professionals helping to coordinate sending medical volunteers to Israel after the October 7th attacks, and who were also taken aback at what they saw as “antisemitism in the health care space.” They formally founded the group in December 2023. Stravitz said that, as the conflict in Gaza continued, members of her group observed Jewish medical school students dealing with “hateful comments” that made then “feel uncomfortable.” She said Jewish students were being told they “support genocide,” an example that Stravitz said was “targeting Jews because of either the state of Israel, their connection to it, or a perceived connection to it.” Since its founding, AJMA has focused on helping organize rallies, lobby medical schools about the need to combat antisemitism, and develop antisemitism trainings for medical care centers. The organization has also lobbied members of Congress to its cause. Last December, AJMA co-sponsored a Capitol Hill hearing on alleged antisemitism in the medical field, which featured testimonies from medical professionals and Israel advocates about the creation of a “blacklist” of Zionist therapists and medical providers wearing Palestinian political paraphernalia, among other incidents.

Such advocacy by medical school faculty bolstered the brewing HHS crackdown. “When medical schools make students out to be the bad guys and crack down on their own students, that lays the groundwork for Trump to pursue his own anti-Palestinian agenda,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal. “Trump can point to universities’ own criticisms and say, ‘you said yourself that there is an antisemitism problem, therefore the government is justified in pursuing harsh consequences.’” For example, HHS has extensively cited reports produced by campus antisemitism task forces, like those at Harvard and Columbia, as evidence that the universities permitted a “hostile environment” for Jews on campus. Medical professors have joined such task forces at multiple schools, including Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Washington.

In some cases, the link between members of groups like AJMA and repression from the Trump administration has been explicit. At Harvard, for instance, HHS’s investigation was prompted, at least in part, by a January 2025 article on alleged antisemitism in medical programs authored by two AJMA members: Steven Roth, an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and Hedy Wald, a clinical professor of family medicine at Brown. In the Israeli medical journal Rambam Maimonides, the authors reviewed medical school graduation commencement footage at the 25 highest-ranked medical schools in the US, and found that at 13 of them, students wore “symbols representing antisemitic themes”—pointing only to expressions of Palestinian identity like stoles featuring the Palestinian flag, a keffiyeh, and a map of historic Palestine, in addition to political speech like “stop bombing hospitals.” The study was picked up by the New York Post, which caught HHS’s attention, according to a letter from HHS obtained by the Harvard Crimson. The agency then announced civil rights investigations into the Harvard medical school, along with three others mentioned in the journal article. (Roth said he “didn’t expect” his journal article to play a role in sparking federal action, but that he’s “very pleased that it went that way.”)

Some medical school faculty at Columbia and Harvard have seen the Trump administration’s scrutiny of the school as an opportunity to push for internal changes aimed at tamping down criticism of Israel. “Most of us don’t think it’s right for the government to use federal funding as a cudgel to change the university,” said a professor at Columbia’s medical school who requested anonymity due to fears of further government retaliation. But the professor pointed to “a small number of faculty” who are comfortable with the Trump approach to dealing with what they perceive as Columbia’s “antisemitism problem.” A Harvard professor, who also spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves from professional retaliation, echoed the Columbia scholar. “Those who are part of this loud minority are finding that the Trump administration’s investigations are producing the right cultural environment for them to air their concerns,” they said. Now, these demands “are getting [more] air time from leadership, because everyone is afraid.”

The present alignment between Zionist medical faculty and the Trump administration is animated by a broader shared vision of what medical education should look like, one that goes beyond just criticism of Israel. “Most of us do not want to concentrate on issues of race and hatred and oppression and privilege,” said Roth, one of the authors of the Rambam Maimonides article that triggered an HHS investigation at Harvard. Roth lamented that since the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, “the pendulum swung too far” in the direction of “critical race theory” inside medical schools, which in turn has influenced how medical students see Israel/Palestine. “Many of the top schools now have what they call an anti-racist curriculum,” he said. “In some schools, they even have coursework on this idea of oppressed and oppressor and privilege,” which then leads to “the false narrative that Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinians are the oppressed.” The perceived link between diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and Palestine solidarity activism has also been picked up by Trump administration officials, who told The Washington Post this month that “antisemitism and DEI are inextricably linked.” In fact, the Trump administration’s Task Force on Antisemitism has often started out by targeting universities with widespread pro-Palestine protests, only to follow up with demands to root out DEI in universities.

Such attempts to leverage federal funding to silence both Palestine activism and anti-racist education at medical schools are paying off. At Columbia, the loss of HHS funding has helped the Trump administration secure a series of changes from the university, formalized in a July 23rd agreement. In it, the university agreed to pay a $200 million fine to the federal government to resolve the Title VI investigation into alleged antisemitism, to hire law enforcement with arrest powers, and to appoint a new provost to review Columbia’s Middle East studies programs. The week before the deal, the university agreed to adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism—a demand the Trump administration had made in March—and to partner with the increasingly right-wing Anti-Defamation League on antisemitism training. In addition, the university agreed to “not maintain programs” that promote “diversity” and to cease taking race or sex into account when making hiring decisions. In exchange, the federal government agreed to restore federal research funding from HHS and NIH, which one group, Grant Witness, estimated to total $1.2 billion—far more than the $400 million the administration cut off initially. “It is our hope that this is going to be a template for other universities around the country,” Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary, told a conservative TV outlet.

Indeed, the week after the Columbia deal, Brown struck its own accord with the administration to resolve civil rights inquiries—including the HHS Title VI investigation into alleged antisemitism—and to restore its federal research funding. To secure the deal, Brown agreed to renew partnerships with Israeli academics, hire an outside organization to conduct a survey on the campus climate for Jewish students, adopt the Trump administration’s anti-trans definition of “male” and “female,” and ensure that its programs do not promote “unlawful DEI goals.” The administration also continues to expand its targets: On August 1st, the federal government froze over $500 million in research funds to UCLA over allegations that it is promoting illegal affirmative action, failing to combat antisemitism, and discriminating against women for allowing transgender athletes to compete. “Via NIH grants, HHS has found an extremely powerful point of pressure for the administration to exert unprecedented control over universities,” said Emma Saltzberg, the US deputy director for Diaspora Alliance, a group that fights antisemitism and its weaponization. This allows them “to weaken the medical and scientific research apparatus, impose transphobic ideas about gender, and reduce racial diversity on campuses—all in the name of protecting Jewish students.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

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Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/how-the-department-of-health-and-human-services-took-the-lead-in-trumps-campus-crackdown at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

REPORT | 6 AUG 2025, 7:12 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 AUG 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

A Canadian Antisemitism Statistic Went Viral—But It Has No Source

The spread of a dubious antisemitism statistic reflects the anxieties of the Canadian Jewish establishment amid a changing political environment.

Blake Lambert

At the end of April, Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism unveiled a new report on global antisemitism in the previous year. Overall, it painted a dire picture of Jewish life since October 7th, 2023, finding that “antisemitism has become more threatening, dangerous and violent,” and that it is “undergoing a process of normalization, marked by increased social tolerance.” While the report surveyed regions across the world, from Latin America to western Europe to Australia, and contended that antisemitism was a rising concern in all of them, it presented particularly shocking numbers for Canada, which currently has the world’s fourth-largest Jewish community. According to the report, the number of antisemitic incidents had increased by 670% between October 2023 and October 2024 as compared to the same time frame in the previous year—the highest increase of any country surveyed. As examples of antisemitism in the country, the report cited both direct attacks on Jewish institutions, like a Molotov cocktail attack on a Montreal synagogue, and demonstrations of political support for Palestine, like the president of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union pledging to protect pro-Palestine protestors. In a press release accompanying the report, the Ministry declared that Canada had been found to be the world’s “champion of antisemitism,” as the Times of Israel reported, citing the 670% figure.

In addition to the The Times of Israel, Ynet, the English language website of Hebrew daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot, also reported Canada’s alarming rise in antisemitism but erroneously cited the figure at 970%. A few days later, Casey Babb, a fellow at the free market-oriented MacDonald-Laurier Institute and at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, wrote in Bari Weiss’s outlet The Free Press that a “pogrom” was “brewing in Canada,” calling Canada “one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world,” and citing the 670% figure as one piece of evidence.

This 670% figure first came into play with another Diaspora Affairs ministry report from October 2024, specifically focused on antisemitism in Canada, issued by its online division, Mashlat. At that time, too, the story of a post-October 7th surge in Canadian antisemitism traveled widely: Multiple media outlets in Canada, Israel, and even India covered the story. Soon after the report’s release, a Free Press story entitled “The Explosion of Jew-Hatred in Trudeau’s Canada” became a viral sensation, with the 670% figure prominently cited in its subhead. “Despair has become a feature of everyday life for Jews across Canada who are experiencing open hatred—and yet are living under a government that appears either blind to it, paralyzed by it, or indifferent to it,“ wrote the author, Terry Glavin. The article was widely shared by conservatives and pro-Israel advocates, from Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre—who used it as an excuse to denigrate the leadership of then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), Canada’s dominant pro-Israel group, which is also affiliated with Jewish federations across Canada.

Yet for all the consternation it caused this year and last, there’s one major problem with this 670% figure: it does not appear to have a source. As its citation for the figure, the Ministry’s 2025 report linked to the 2024 Mashlat report, which in turn cited an August 8th, 2024 story from i24NEWS, an Israeli media outlet, which claimed that a recent World Zionist Organization (WZO) report had found a “670% increase compared to 2023” in antisemitism in Canada. Yet—as the organization Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East first pointed out in a December 2024 rebuke to the viral Free Press article—it’s not even clear where in the WZO’s materials “670%” has appeared, or what report the article is referring to. The WZO’s 2023 report for Canada indicated a “200-800% increase in antisemitic levels” in the final months of 2023 “compared to the same period the previous year”—which it attributed to police hate crime reports and additional “data from the WZO’s department for Combating Antisemitism.” The 2024 report, which was not even released when the statistic was first cited by i24NEWS, found a “562% increase in antisemitic incidents [in Canada] in 2024 compared to 2022” based on reports collected by the WZO and incidents recorded in the media. Neither number corresponds to the one used by i24NEWS in its original report, and neither uses the period of October 7th, 2023–October 7th, 2024 delineated by Mashlat.

Even allies to the Israeli ministry and WZO could not say where the number came from. “Quite frankly, I don’t know where the World Zionist Organization gets its numbers from. We have reached out to them, I haven’t heard back,” said Richard Robertson, the research and advocacy director for B’nai Brith Canada, which releases an annual antisemitism audit. While both B’nai Brith and CIJA have frequently raised the alarm about what B’nai Brith described as “perilous, record-setting heights” of antisemitism in Canada—often citing pro-Palestine advocacy as examples of antisemitism—neither B’nai Brith nor the CIJA used the 670% increase in their reports. Mashlat, i24NEWS, and WZO did not respond to requests for comment on the origin of the number.

This statistic has provided ammunition for a mainstream Canadian Jewish community increasingly at odds with their fellow Canadians over Israel/Palestine. A June 2025 poll from the market research firm Leger showed that roughly half of Canadians agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—a conclusion now common to most major human rights organizations. In line with these trends, the Canadian government’s tone towards Israel has sharpened since December 2023, with the Liberals supporting United Nations ceasefire resolutions and limiting weapons sales to Israel. Meanwhile, staunch pro-Israel politics remain dominant among Canadian Jews, even more so than for their American counterparts. According to Mira Sucharov, a professor of political science at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Canadian Jews are more likely than American Jews to have visited Israel, have knowledge of Hebrew, and send their kids to Jewish day school. While there are various Jewish groups with differing opinions, she said, few have thus far been able to mount successful opposition to the conservative Zionist consensus.

In this environment, the definition of antisemitism has become contested terrain. While Canada has seen increased attacks on synagogues and Jewish day schools in the past 20 months (resulting in property damage but no casualties), Jewish groups have also leveled accusations of antisemitism at critics of Israel’s war on Gaza. For example, when Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned Israel for allowing widespread starvation in Gaza, B’nai Brith Canada tweeted that the politician was “fuelling a narrative that emboldens hate and antisemitism.” In this environment, both the growing incidence of Palestine solidarity protests since October 7th and the increasing frequency of incidents targeting Jewish people and spaces are viewed as a singular phenomenon of out-of-control antisemitism. For many Israel advocates, it appears, a statistic claiming a “670% increase in antisemitism” seems credible because it confirms their fears about the future of pro-Israel politics in Canada.

Accurate data about antisemitism in Canada can be difficult to find. In a February 2024 survey of Jewish attitudes about Canada and Israel published last spring in Canadian Jewish Studies, University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym concluded that, for a variety of reasons—including changes in the scope of data collected over time—“figures testifying to a steadily rising level of anti-Jewish behaviour over decades are likely inflated.” Still, many sources agree that there has been a rise in prominent antisemitic incidents in Canada since October 7th, 2023. These include, for example, three shootings at the building of a Jewish girls’ elementary school in Toronto in the middle of the night; an arson attack at a synagogue in Vancouver, and multiple firebombings at a synagogue in Montreal. Such incidents—which are alarming, but have not resulted in any casualties—were cited by the federal government’s March “statement of intent on combatting antisemitism,” which noted that Jews had experienced a 71% increase in hate crimes reported to police in 2023 compared to 2022. For Brym, this is not necessarily surprising: His analysis found that in Canada, like elsewhere in the world, “spikes in anti-Jewish incidents including hate crimes are associated with Israeli military campaigns against Palestinians—and troughs are associated with the cessation of hostilities.” Brym wrote that, “based on past experience, one should expect a decline in the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes” once Israel’s war on Gaza ends.

This is no comfort to Canadian Jews: A key result of Brym’s survey was that “Canadian Jews today tend to feel unsafe and victimized.” In 2018, Canadian Jews saw themselves as the minority group facing the fifth-most discrimination in the country; last year, they viewed themselves as the group facing the most discrimination. Yet Brym also discovered that the “degree to which Canadian Jews feel they are unsafe is strongly associated with their emotional attachment to Israel.” As an example, his survey found that up to 69% of Canadian Jews regard “extreme negative statements about the state of Israel—denying the need for a Jewish state, referring to Israel as an apartheid state, supporting the boycott of Israel products, and asserting that Israel is committing genocide in its treatment of Palestinians—as antisemitic.” Brym concluded that because Zionism is key to many Canadian Jews’ identity, challenges to Israel’s existence are “often perceived as a threat to the existence of the Jewish people and therefore as antisemitic.”

That view is dominant among Canada’s major Jewish institutions—including B’nai Brith, CIJA, and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center—which frequently describe political actions to hold Israel accountable and pro-Palestine protest activity as antisemitic. For example, after activists vandalized the window of a store owned by a woman who funds scholarships for IDF soldiers, CIJA compared the vandalism to Kristallnacht. For Sheryl Nestel, a member of the anti-Zionist Independent Jewish Voices Canada who has critiqued B’nai Brith’s antisemitism audits, the institutional Jewish community bears responsibility for creating panic about antisemitism in Canada. “If you look at the [mainstream Jewish community’s] descriptors for the situation, it’s Germany in 1933,” she told Jewish Currents.

At least some of the communal alarm seems to stem from a shift in the Canadian government’s posture towards Israel. A decade ago, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party was known for his staunch defense of Israel—a fact that pushed more Canadian Jews, historically aligned with the Liberal Party, to vote Conservative. (Today, Canadian Jews’ voting patterns tend to be varied and split.) The Harper government sided with Israel on a host of UN resolutions, which is believed by some to have cost Canada a seat on the UN Security Council in 2010. “We joke that Canada was more pro-Israel than Israel under Harper,” said Corey Balsam, the national coordinator for IJV. When Trudeau was elected in 2015, he adopted a more moderate tone but similarly pro-Israel policies: He continued to vote nay on most UN resolutions that sought to hold Israel accountable, and he condemned the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

Yet a decade later, at the end of Trudeau’s long tenure and the beginning of his Liberal successor’s, the Canadian government has begun to shift its posture. While Trudeau initially expressed strong support for Israel’s military after October 7th, in December 2023, Canada voted at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in favor of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At the start of 2024, Canada said that it would stop approving new permits for Canadian companies to sell military goods to Israel; that September, the federal government went further and announced that they had suspended around 30 permits previously approved before the pause. This June, Canada joined Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK in imposing sanctions on Israeli cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and a month later, Canada joined 25 countries in calling for an end to the war in Gaza. Canada has also cracked down on domestic Israel advocacy organizations: Last August, the Canada Revenue Agency stripped the Jewish National Fund Canada of its charitable status, claiming that the organization was “engaged in activities that are not in furtherance of charitable purposes,” which commenters have speculated refers to the group’s involvement in funding infrastructure projects on Israeli military bases. The organization has since lost two appeals to overturn this decision. Most recently, Carney rebuked Israel by announcing at the end of July that Canada would soon recognize a Palestinian state at the UNGA.

According to Independent Senator Yuen Pau Woo, appointed by the Liberal government, the statehood recognition is an indication of how politics in Canada have evolved in a short period of time. “There was a motion in March 2024 to recognize Palestinian statehood, among other actions related to Palestine, but that provision was deemed too controversial,” he told Jewish Currents. A letter sent to Carney the day before his declaration from 173 former Canadian ambassadors and diplomats captures the sea change among Canada’s political class. They wrote that they are concerned that “longstanding Canadian values and interests in a world order that respected international law and the rights and dignity of all peoples” are being “abandoned daily” in Gaza, and that while Canada has long supported Israel, “this cannot include a dispensation to forsake its responsibilities under International Humanitarian Law to protect civilians.”

The impact of these changes remains limited. A new report released in July from Arms Embargo Now, a coalition of Canadian pro-Palestine groups, found that arms shipments continued to flow to Israel through “hundreds of previously approved permits” even after the government announced its pause. Meanwhile, Carney has said that his declaration on Palestine statehood was contingent on the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to hold general elections in 2026 without Hamas’s participation and on the demilitarization of the future state, conditions which are unlikely to be met soon by either the PA or Hamas, and which critics have said perpetuates a power imbalance while Israel remains armed. Even so, such policies have raised hackles in both Canada’s Jewish institutions and the Israeli government. The section on Canada compiled by CIJA for the international J7 Annual Report on Antisemitism states that one of the top three “antisemitic challenges and concerns” in the country is “anti-Israel actions taken by the federal government that display a double standard towards the Jewish state, such as the imposition of an arms embargo.” For its part, Israel updated its travel warning for Canada in May, citing “an increased threat by terrorists against Israelis and Jews in Canada,” and urging “all Israelis traveling to Canada [to] exercise increased precautionary measures, avoid displaying Jewish and Israeli symbols . . . and remain extra vigilant while in public.”

Still, not even the Jewish community is immune to Canada’s shifting political tides on Israel/Palestine. A December 2024 poll conducted by Canada’s progressive Zionist organizations, for which Brym was a consultant, found clear generational divides on Israel among Canadian Jews: While 94% supported Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state,” that number dropped to 81% for respondents under 35. The 18-24 age group reported significantly lower levels of attachment to Israel than older respondents, with 64% “very” or “somewhat” attached, compared to 78% for those 25–34, and 86% for those over 34. And despite strong support for Israel’s “right to exist,” only 51% of Canadian Jews said that they identify as Zionist, a result that the survey’s commissioners admitted left them “puzzled.” Ultimately, the survey concluded, “In many cases, we see no majority opinion as well as high levels of uncertainty. Therefore, not only are claims of monolithic support misrepresentations of Canadian Jewish diversity, they also erase the spirited nature of Jewish life in Canada.” For Balsam of IJV, the threat of intracommunal dissent offers one explanation as to why the fraudulent 670% figure from the Mashlat report remains a potent tool for pro-Israel groups. “Exaggeration of the situation with made-up or unreliable statistics serves a number of purposes,” said Balsam. “One is keeping Canadian Jews in the fold.”

This article has been updated to clarify Trudeau's position on Israel-related UN resolutions.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

Give $9 Give $18 Give Any Amount

Blake Lambert is a college professor at Humber Polytechnic and university instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto who co-authors the More Life Substack.

blakejlambert

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/a-canadian-antisemitism-statistic-went-viral-but-it-has-no-source at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 1 AUG 2025, 5:51 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 17 AUG 2025, 7:45 PM UTC

Anatomy of a Red Scare

As the Trump administration escalates its anti-radical crackdowns, past moments of repression offer a preview of what’s to come.

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Los Angeles County Sheriffs launch tear gas at protesters at a demonstration against continued ICE raids and the deployment of the National Guard and Marines to LA, June 14th, 2025.

Photo: Caylo Seals/Sipa USA

As thousands of people took to the streets of Los Angeles to defend their communities against state-sanctioned abductions of immigrants this June, the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism (SSCC) put three organizations—Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), and the independent political organization Unión del Barrio (UdB)—on notice. Led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the SSCC normally oversees anti-terrorism enforcement and policy, and directs the work of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Justice Department Criminal Division. But in a letter dated June 11th, the SSCC accused the three leftist organizations of supporting “coordinated protests and riots” against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal law enforcement agencies. The letter called the LA uprisings “lawless mob actions,” and demanded the organizations “cease and desist” any further actions “aiding and abetting” the “criminal” protests. Even more notably, the three groups were instructed to preserve all communications and contractual, financial, travel, and strategy information related to their role in “planning, coordinating, or funding” the protests; failure to do so could result in a criminal investigation.

On the surface, the SSCC letter appeared to home in on a grassroots resistance campaign against the Trump regime’s escalation of the US’s already draconian immigration policies. However, the commitment of government resources to criminalize, harass, and intimidate social justice organizations, and the express intent to seize their communications, signals a broader campaign of anti-radical repression—one that has historically been known by the name “red scare.” Though “red scare” is commonly used to refer to discrete historical moments of anti-left attack, most notably the periods of 1919-1920 and 1950-1954, historian Robbie Lieberman has argued that the term can be used more broadly to characterize any campaign of “attack on civil liberties in the name of Americanism aimed at undermining movements for justice and equality.” This broader definition illuminates how red scares have been an enduring feature of 20th and 21st century US politics, and clarifies the outlines of the iteration that is developing in our own time.

Historically, red scares arise to suppress protest movements that emerge at the intersection of war, economic turmoil, and racialized violence. The red scare of 1919-1920, for instance, took place in the aftermath of World War I and amidst US intervention in Russia against the Bolsheviks in 1918, in a period also characterized by high inflation and the “Red Summer” of anti-Black riots across the US in 1919. At the time, organizations including the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the African Blood Brotherhood arose to challenge US imperialism, racism, and capitalist exploitation, drawing the ire of the government and triggering a red scare. Similarly, in 1950-1954, another red scare emerged as the Korean and Cold Wars took off alongside a fierce capitalist class assault on unions and rampant state and societal violence against African Americans that the 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition described as constituting genocide. Once again, movements for peace, racial justice, economic redistribution, and international solidarity emerged, only to find themselves facing a protracted campaign of anti-radical repression.

The resulting red scares routinely codified militant challenges to US racial capitalism as foreign-inspired or otherwise un-American. In the 1919-1920 red scare, for example, the Overman Committee, a subsidiary of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was created to investigate un-American activities and the influence of Bolshevism in the US. In the 1950-1954 red scare, the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, a compilation of primarily leftwing organizations deemed threatening to the order and stability of the United States, identified groups for censure. These efforts launched congressional hearings meant to discredit dissident organizations, leading to left groups being blacklisted, their members barred from participation in other groups and institutions, hounded by the FBI, and worse. (Indeed, as evident in the case of the Peekskill Riot in 1949—where civil society, police, and the New York governor colluded to violently attack accused communists, leading to attempted lynchings and thousands of injuries from knives, rocks, and fists—such red scares could even legitimate the use of armed force to crush radical protest.) Through the use of such anti-left committees and a range of other repressive measures—the convergence of all three branches of government in curtailing freedom of speech, assembly, and association; the central role of the corporate media in demonizing “enemies”; bans on “heretical” literature; and anti-intellectualism and attacks on the university—past red scares wreaked havoc on progressive politics in the US. They encouraged the expulsion of accused communists, who were some of the left’s most effective organizers, from mainstream organizations. They also led to the narrowing of the struggle for racial justice by removing its internationalist focus; created the groundwork for a repeated misconstruing of domestic peace protest as abetting the enemies of the US; and generally cultivated an atmosphere of fear and suspicion that discouraged militancy over the decades.

Today, we are in another such red scare conjuncture. The US is the enthusiastic partner of Zionist aggression across historic Palestine and the region more broadly, including the genocide in Gaza, the savage bombing of Lebanon and Syria, and most recently, the “12-Day War” between Israel and Iran. The US has also used bombing as a key instrument of foreign policy, launching more than 500 airstrikes in 249 locations, from Somalia to Yemen, in the past seven months; imposing and maintaining brutal and deadly sanctions on more than two dozen countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe; and most recently, taking aim at international institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court in an effort to illegitimize them. Domestically, meanwhile, the government has eroded almost all social safety nets; promoted deregulation and corporate price gouging, leading to inflation and widespread economic suffering; engaged in mass firings and layoffs; and escalated its bid to weaken a resurgent labor movement. All this has been accompanied by escalating government and vigilante white supremacist assaults on racialized minorities, including migrants (documented and undocumented), Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and Black people.

As in the past, the violence and dehumanization of US imperialism has not gone uncontested. There have been mass mobilizations, like those in LA, against ICE; rebellion against the construction of “cop cities,” most prominently in Atlanta; and nationwide student encampments and grassroots campaigns fighting for Palestinian liberation. Black and brown people have confronted white nationalist vigilantism; women and LGBTQ+ folks have established national networks to protect their rights and bodies; and workers and labor unions have launched strikes for better wages and conditions. Unsurprisingly, another red scare has emerged that aims to degrade and demoralize these movements with well-worn tactics of red-baiting, charges of conspiracy, targeted harassment, criminalization, deportation, and other repressive measures. As this anti-radical campaign escalates, it becomes important to look back into how these tactics have been deployed in the past. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Red scares recast legitimate political thought and action as threats and conspiracies. Speaking in 1949 before the House Committee on Foreign Relations, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black intellectual and co-chair of the Council on African Affairs (CAA), referred to this practice of mischaracterization as the invention of “witchwords.” “If in 1850 an American disliked slavery, the word of exorcism was ‘abolitionist.’ He was a ‘nigger lover.’ He believed in free love and murder of kind slave masters. He ought to be lynched and mobbed,” Du Bois said. “Today the word is ‘communist’. . . If anybody questions the power of wealth, wants to build more [Tennessee Valley Authorities], or advocates civil rights for Negroes, he is a communist, a revolutionist, a scoundrel, and is liable to lose his job or land in jail.”

In the red scare moments after World War I, in the midst of the Great Depression, during the early Cold War, at the start of the civil rights movement, and beyond, such witchwords have allowed the state to circumscribe the rights and privileges of its critics. That trend continues into the present, with today’s witchwords including diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” aimed at crushing any modicum of power, privilege, or access gained by minoritized people, particularly Black women; “antisemitism,” bastardized to mean any criticism of Israel or Zionism; “wokeness,” meant to denigrate racialized people generally, and Black people particularly, who challenge racial domination; and “domestic terrorism,” applied to any number of militant protestors, from those who reject cop cities to those who support Palestinian liberation. Prior to the June 2025 LA uprising, PSL had already been accused of antisemitism by mainstream media outlets for its pro-Palestine positions, demonstrating the way that witchwords help establish narratives of subversiveness that red scares can later capitalize on.

In addition to using witchwords, red scares justify crackdowns against left militancy by casting it as a pre-eminent threat to the law and its enforcement. Starting in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover, the founding and longest-serving director of the FBI (formerly the Bureau of Investigation) who worked closely with various anti-radical Congressional committees, continually asserted that it was the violent criminal elements that believed in and proffered radical doctrines like communism. “Disrespect for law and order is a fundamental cornerstone of communist tactics,” Hoover asserted. “Charges of ‘police brutality,’ ‘illegal arrest,’ and ‘persecution’ have long echoed in the Party press. These false communist charges, unfortunately, have been taken up by other groups whose basic purpose is to destroy law and order and to create chaos.” In its June letter, the SSCC employed the same line of argumentation, casting anti-ICE protests as “lawless mob action” and “criminal conduct,” and construing protestors as a danger to law enforcement—despite the latter maintaining a monopoly on force and violence.

Alongside the witchwords and accusations of lawlessness used to vilify radicals, red scares are marked by the deployment of Congressional committees to harass, humiliate, and discredit radicals through vicious, biased interrogations intent on establishing their “un-Americanness.” Examples of such committees abound. The 1918 Overman Committee was organized to investigate “pro-German” and “Bolshevik” elements in the United States. The 1930 Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States, also known as the Fish Committee, was convened at the urging of American Federation of Labor leader Matthew Woll to investigate radicals accused of being funded by the Soviet Union. In 1934, the McCormack-Dickenstein Committee was formed to investigate Nazi propaganda in the United States but quickly turned its attention to the “dangers” of communism. There was the 1938 Dies Committee, which was a select committee organized to investigate “subversive” and “un-American” activity and was later transformed into the permanent House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1945, perhaps the most notorious and damaging of the anti-radical committees. The Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) was formed as a result of the passage of the McCarran Act of 1950, and required communist and communist “front” organizations to register with the government or face five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee was created in 1951 to oversee the enforcement of the McCarran Act and to investigate subversive activities including espionage, sabotage, and infiltration by those under the control of a foreign government or organization. The list goes on.

Congressional committees continue to be used to anti-radical ends today. In addition to the SSCC, the House Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee, which oversees the Department of Homeland Security’s effectiveness in fulfilling domestic security and counterterrorism measures, recently held a hearing on “The Rise of Anti-Israel Extremist Groups and Their Threat to US National Security,” which conflated advocacy for Palestinian liberation with antisemitism and support for terrorism. Likewise, the Committee on Education and the Workforce, charged with overseeing an array of programs and policies related to legislation such as the National Labor Relations Act, the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, and the Higher Education Act, convened the hostile show hearings investigating “antisemitism” on college campuses, in addition to the hearing “Examining the Policies and Priorities of the Department of Labor,” which aimed to further curtail the power of unions and to root out the “radical DEI agenda” from the workforce. Taken together, these committees continue what American Studies scholar Michael Paul Rogin called a “countersubversive political tradition” aimed at creating, stigmatizing, and revoking the rights of critics of the US government.

Throughout the 20th century, the dissidents who most interested red scare committees were those organizing on behalf of racialized groups. For instance, W. Alphaeus Hunton (dubbed the “unsung valiant” by his wife and biographer Dorothy Hunton), who worked alongside the likes of famed singer and activist Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois from the 1930s to the1960s in movements on behalf of Black equality, workers’ rights, and African decolonization, faced more than two decades of government attack in his role as the chairman of the labor committee of the Washington, DC, chapter of the National Negro Congress (NNC), trustee of the Civil Rights Bail Fund, and educational director of the CAA. In particular, during World War II, Hunton was branded a communist and a subversive by the Fish Committee because of his instrumental role in organizing Black workers in a campaign against the Glen Martin Aircraft Factory for refusing to hire them. The NNC was accused of attempting to sabotage the defense industry by infiltrating the factory with Black communist workers, leading Hunton to later note that “the history of all the congressional investigating committees from Martin Dies on down to the present McCarthy and Velde committees has been one of victimizing the fighters against Jim Crow.” Hunton’s assessment can be just as easily applied to today’s SSCC, which seeks to intimidate and discipline PSL, CHIRLA, and UdB for opposing the United States’ racist, imperialist immigration policy and the cruel and unusual tactics being used to enforce it.

Red scare committees used a variety of tactics to subdue their radical foes. The Fish Committee, for instance, did not call Hunton to testify, but it nonetheless spread “slanderous testimony without making the slightest effort to corroborate facts,” in the words of Dorothy Hunton; it was only when Hunton insisted that he had the right to face his accusers that he was told he had been “exonerated” of charges of subversion and disloyalty. More aggressive techniques were also used: In 1951, Hunton was imprisoned for contempt for six months for refusing to “name names” during a HUAC hearing. Specifically, he would not disclose the names of those who donated to the Civil Rights Bail Fund, which had been organized in 1946 to aid in the legal defense of those radicals who were rejected by private bond companies because of their politics. Here, HUAC not only turned Hunton’s activism into a crime, but also reframed the right to confidentiality into a threat to national security as it sought to expose radical groups’ donors to potential harassment and persecution. In demanding the same type of information from PSL, CHIRLA, and UdB on pain of a criminal investigation, the SSCC is similarly poised to cast a pall of criminality on radical organizations and their associates alike.

Indeed, compelling troves of data from radical movements has long been a core red scare tactic. The purpose of this is twofold. First, access to these records allows investigative committees to establish guilt by association to criminalize not only direct targets, but also anyone affiliated with the organization, however loosely, through donations, sympathy, indirect engagement (such as being on a mailing list), and so forth. Second, demanding an astronomical amount of information allows red scare committees to drain left organizations of resources, time, and manpower; to distract them from important organizing work; and to open them up to penalty for non-compliance. An example of the effectiveness of this tactic is the Subversive Activities Control Board’s demand for all correspondence between Hunton’s CAA and the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress. The committee demanded all communications and materials published and circulated from 1946 to 1955, and all records of funds sent internationally; it later accused the CAA of potentially violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act in order to gain access to the organization’s records. The resulting pressure was so insurmountable that in 1955, on Hunton’s recommendation, the CAA closed down after 18 years because ongoing government harassment had made it “difficult if not impossible to function.” Read in this context, it becomes clear that the SSCC’s attempt to strongarm sensitive information from a handful of left organizations portends a much broader strategy aimed at creating a wide dragnet to extirpate today’s radical movements.

The cumulative effect of these red scare tactics has been devastating for the US left. As a result of these anti-radical campaigns, some of the ablest organizers in the US’s long civil rights movement were ostracized and abandoned; the Black struggle for human rights was diluted to narrowly focus on civil rights; the peace movement was sidelined by charges of Soviet inspiration; and anti-colonialism became tolerable only when it was framed as a means of combatting communist influence in the Global South. It became commonplace for the threats of incarceration, deportation, passport suspension, and financial ruin to stalk those who levied militant challenges to the status quo, and these threats routinely discouraged everyday citizens from taking on political views that could be construed as “un-American” or subversive (or, in today’s parlance, “woke”). The aim of red scares, past and present, has been to get the public to become quiescent in the face of interlinked crises; it is a goal at which the government has too often succeeded.

But government success is not totalizing, especially when the oppressed fight back. One relevant lesson would be a willingness to work together across sectarian differences in order to combat state repression. In Hunton’s time, progressive groups such as the NAACP and the International Labor Defense worked together despite stark ideological differences to combat white supremacy. We should continue that practice today; the collaboration of PSL, CHIARA, and UdB during the anti-ICE protests demonstrates its efficacy. Secondly, mid-century radicals knew that in the face of government repression, the left needed to mount a defensive front. To that end, they organized defense committees and bail funds, mobilized the grassroots, and cultivated national and international allies in the cause of mutual protection. Collectivized resources, people power, and knowledge sharing are our best hope for effectively combatting US government attacks.

Finally, Hunton and his comrades recognized that no matter the witchwords used to claim otherwise, the fight against rising racial fascism in the United States was inextricable from an end to racialized and colonial oppression everywhere. As the “We Charge Genocide” petition put it, “The lyncher and the atom bomber are related. The first cannot murder unpunished and unrebuked without so encouraging the latter that the peace of the world and the lives of millions are endangered.” The struggle against today’s “lyncher and atom bomber” includes, for example, linking the genocide in Gaza with ICE raids at home; the ongoing Western occupation of Haiti with the colonization of our neighborhoods by cop cities. All forms of resistance—from organizing protests and circulating petitions to supporting liberation struggles and engaging in self-defense—should be pursued with a mind toward rejecting the false distinction between domestic and foreign policy, expanding our cartography of struggle, and tapping into the global majority who suffer under Western imperialism. These strategies and more are necessary to fortify ourselves against current and future red scares, especially as the American descent from authoritarianism to fascism proceeds apace.

Charisse Burden-Stelly is an associate professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and the author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States. Her public scholarship has appeared in Essence, The Nation, Monthly Review, Teen Vogue, Boston Review, Hammer & Hope, and Black Agenda Report.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/anatomy-of-a-red-scare at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

REPORT | 29 JUL 2025, 12:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 AUG 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

July 29, 2025

Egypt’s Hidden Refugee Crisis

Thousands of Palestinian evacuees are living in limbo on Cairo’s peripheries, neither able to return to Gaza nor allowed to build lives in Egypt.

Emad Mekay

All photos courtesy of the author.

The Tadamoun complex housing Palestinian medical evacuees in Obour City, northeast of Cairo.

Palestinians living in the new housing complex call it “Tadamoun,” Arabic for solidarity. The apartments are located on the outskirts of Obour City, northeast of Cairo. The rooms inside are freshly painted, the furniture still stiff with newness. Residents do not pay rent or utilities, something 36-year-old Alaa[1]—who was evacuated from Gaza nearly 16 months ago—really likes. But every time she leaves or returns, Alaa must sign a thick, cardboard-bound ledger where her movements are recorded in columns of looping handwriting. The same goes for the few visitors who are ever allowed in. Egyptians and non-Palestinians are generally barred without special permission from the senior guard, a restriction this reporter navigated to gain a rare first look inside. And even after gaining pre-approval, visitors must still list their contact information in the ledger and hand over ID cards to the uniformed security guards standing at the makeshift gate, walkie-talkies in hand and eyes full of distrust.

Alaa’s journey to Tadamoun was paved with horrors. She recalled that it was 10 am on a Monday in December 2023 when an Israeli missile buried her and her five children in the rubble of their Deir al-Balah home. She emerged clawing through concrete to find nine-year-old Dua bleeding profusely from severe wounds in her leg, and her then two-month-old infant son, Ahmed, flung across the room. “Only God saved Ahmed from that strike,” Alaa told me. At the hospital in Gaza, doctors immediately scrambled, through the Palestinian Health Ministry, to coordinate with Egypt on the emergency evacuation that was needed to save Dua’s leg. Eventually, Alaa and her children were sent in an ambulance through the Rafah crossing, the Gaza Strip’s only window to the outside world, into Egypt, a trip the family made “with only the house gown I was wearing; not even identity documents with us,” Alaa said. The health ministry assigned the family to a government-run hospital in Tanta, 55 miles north of Cairo. And after 11 months of treatment there, during which Dua’s leg underwent several operations and was fused with twelve surgical nails and a platinum rod, the family were sent to the Tadamoun complex, where Dua awaits reconstructive surgery. “Thanks to Egypt, we have a roof over our heads. We don’t have to worry about kids having to sleep on the streets,” said Alaa. “But we feel isolated. We live in uncertainty not knowing what tomorrow is hiding for us.”

The family’s case was one of hundreds of such wartime evacuations the Egyptian Health Ministry allowed before Israel seized control of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing on May 7th, 2024. According to a press release from the Egyptian Health Ministry, prior to last May, medical evacuees—a term that covers the injured, the chronically ill, and those otherwise vulnerable—crossed Rafah at the rate of at least 50 people per day, 60% of them children. A recent WHO report estimated that by April 2025, 4,045 of Gaza’s 7,229 medical evacuees remained in Egypt (the rest were ultimately treated in a third country after transiting through Egypt). Many medical evacuees were in need of burn care, reconstructive surgery, and treatment for serious illnesses such as cancer or cardiovascular conditions, much of which was unavailable in Gaza even before the war. Once in Egypt, these Palestinians were scattered across some 160 hospitals in areas ranging from Sinai near the Gaza border to Luxor 600 miles south—and when discharged, many of them landed in the Tadamoun complex.

Indeed, while the complex’s 28 seven-story concrete blocks were originally built to absorb Cairo’s population overflow, Jewish Currents has found that ten of these buildings have now been quietly repurposed as an ad hoc shelter for at least 1,500 medical evacuees from Gaza, according to residents’ and food distribution volunteers’ estimates. Over the years, Egyptian leaders have taken pride in declaring that Egypt does not have refugee camps on its soil. “Egypt has continuously offered refuge to those fleeing conflict and persecution, adopting an out-of-camp policy and implementing inclusive policies,” Ambassador Wael Badawi, Deputy Assistant Foreign Minister for Migration and Refugee Affairs, told the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) just last month. But the existence of Tadamoun—which Egypt has not revealed to its public—calls this claim into question. (Neither the Egyptian Health Ministry, in charge of receiving medical evacuees at Rafah, nor government spokespeople or officials of the Red Crescent who operate at the complex, returned multiple phone calls seeking clarification about it.)

The Tadamoun complex’s 28 seven-story concrete blocks were originally built to absorb Cairo’s population overflow, but ten of these buildings have now been quietly repurposed as an ad hoc shelter for around 1,500 medical evacuees from Gaza.

The Egyptian government’s decision to receive Palestinians from Gaza while concealing their presence reflects a broader pattern in which officials are trying to support evacuees while ensuring their stay in the country remains uncontroversial, and more importantly, brief. “Egypt has repeatedly emphasized the temporary nature of any Palestinian stay,” said Oroub El-Abed, Professor of International Migration and Refugee Studies at Birzeit University. This is true not only for the thousands of medical evacuees from Gaza—who have largely come to Egypt either without visas or on tourist visas secured with the help of humanitarian organizations—but also of the more than 100,000 non-medical evacuees who have entered after paying steep fees of up to $5,000 per adult to the Egyptian coordination company Hala. Like their medical evacuee counterparts, these Palestinians have also been denied refugee status, which would come with obligations to provide them with permission to work, access to courts and education, and other basic rights.

The result has been a hidden refugee crisis, unfolding not in white tents marked with telltale UN flags, but instead in isolated housing complexes like Tadamoun and Cairo neighborhoods like Nasr City, home to a large population of new Palestinian arrivals. In these areas, Palestinian evacuees have been living for months on expired visas. Lacking residency documents, they are prevented from getting a job or new shelter; accessing public schools, hospitals, and universities; and other basic tasks such as opening bank accounts or obtaining SIM cards in their name. Many have burned through their savings to escape, and are living on dwindling support from relatives and friends in what feels like a permanent limbo, where both returning to Gaza and building a life in Egypt remain equally unviable. Kelsey P. Norman of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy told Jewish Currents that, by leaving Palestinians “unable to access basic assistance or employment, Egypt—despite its outwardly pro-Palestinian stance—ultimately hopes they will be forced to return to Gaza.” In the process, Jeff Crisp, former head of Policy Development at UNHCR, told Jewish Currents, “many of the basic principles of international humanitarian, human rights, and refugee law have been routinely violated.”

Egypt wasn’t always so hostile to Palestinians. “Historically, Egypt welcomed Palestinian refugees, particularly under [former President Gamal Abdel] Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s, treating them almost as nationals with access to employment and public services,” El-Abed said. But that policy underwent a stark shift after the 1979 peace agreement Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat signed with Israel—and especially after a Palestinian militant faction assassinated a key Sadat advisor. Afterwards, Palestinians living in Egypt were swiftly stripped of fundamental rights, including access to public education, state employment, and essential services, and from that point forward, they have largely been treated as foreigners. El-Abed noted that “this restrictive posture continued under successive governments,” becoming particularly prominent under President Abdel Fatah Sisi, whose close alliance with the US and Israel has reinforced “a securitized, politically cautious approach to Palestinians, avoiding any policy that could antagonize these allies or appear to support Palestinian militarism.”

At the same time, however, Egypt cannot wholly ignore the Palestinian cause, which enjoys immense support among its people. Thus, analysts say that the country has had to strike a careful balance since October 7th to manage public outrage over the devastation in Gaza and ensure that it didn’t turn into mass protests. “They’re afraid of the street,” said Mahienour El-Massry, a lawyer and activist based in Cairo. “Their popularity is already dangerously low because of the bad economy. Add to that the repressive political climate and any movement by the people starts to look like a threat to their hold on power.” As a result, El-Massry said, “from the beginning of the genocidal Gaza war, El-Sisi’s government has projected a posture of public solidarity with the Palestinians,” tolerating mild forms of support for the Palestinians—donations, aid convoys, Friday sermons, and grassroots relief efforts—while still adhering to Israel’s security demands that prevent the movement of goods and people through the Rafah crossing, refusing to take any diplomatic action against Israel, and harshly cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests at home.

The issue of Palestinian evacuees from Gaza has only compounded Egypt’s dilemma. Starting in October 2023, Israel has repeatedly pressed Palestinians to leave Gaza while relentlessly bombing and starving the enclave. Under the Trump administration, the US has joined in, proposing total ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population and the transformation of the area into a luxury “Gaza riviera.” Any of these plans would require Egypt to accept Palestinians en masse. So far, the country has refused to do so. Experts say that this position has to do with a fear of internal instability alongside the concern, per El-Abed, that “hosting refugees permanently or creating camps in Sinai could be seen as absolving Israel of its obligations under international law and undermining any remaining claim to a two-state solution.” But even as it has refused to help empty Gaza thus far, “today’s Egypt lacks both the capacity and the courage to confront the policies of Israel and the US,” said Dima Alsajdeya, a researcher at the Paris-based Collège de France. This is evident in the fact that Egypt has still had to accept over 100,000 Palestinians fleeing Israeli assaults that it cannot meaningfully oppose. Egypt’s strategy in dealing with these evacuees has been one of containment: Take them in but keep them secluded and quiet; overlook visa overstays but deny any path to a more permanent resettlement.

Egypt’s strategy in dealing with Palestinian evacuees has been one of containment: Take them in but keep them secluded and quiet; overlook visa overstays but deny any path to a more permanent resettlement.

For displaced Palestinians in Egypt, this set of political conditions has offered a paradoxical life: safe, yet stifling; livable, but only just; an exile disguised as a short-term stay. Alaa articulated these ambivalent feelings over several conversations we had in Tadamoun, describing how the restrictions of her new situation became obvious as soon as the family arrived in Cairo on Eid al-Fitr. The day should have signaled joy and presents from relatives. Instead, the six members of the family were confined to one hospital room for nearly 11 months, never allowed outside “not even close to the elevator’s door,” Alaa said. Nadia, 37, who was also confined in the same hospital for a rare blood disorder, said patients were told the regulations came from “the health ministry and from the [Palestinian] embassy. We had to comply.” Over time, as Alaa and Nadia developed a relationship with sympathetic nurses and other patients, the restrictions became a bit easier to navigate: Once, Alaa recalled, a nurse helped them sneak past the hospital’s surveillance cameras to go get extra groceries, while another took the children to a local park.

This combination of care and constraint has followed Alaa, Nadia, and their fellow medical evacuees to Tadamoun. Residents are relieved the Egyptian government doesn’t charge for their stay, but say there are no schools, clinics, shops, or public transportation amenities nearby. The unmarked complex stands in relative isolation, accessible only by private car or tuk-tuk along a desert toll road connecting Cairo and Belbis. This remoteness, coupled with their lack of funds and legal status, effectively prevent them from integrating into Egyptian society.

In this situation, many residents rely on aid for survival. In interviews, Palestinians housed in the complex said they receive some humanitarian supplies, but it is only a trickle compared to the scale of their need: a single food box every three weeks from the Egyptian Red Crescent with rice, noodles, tea, and some sugar. A few cash handouts from private individuals arrive, too: 200 Egyptian pounds ($4) here and 500 ($10) there, brought by NGO staff, volunteers, and distant relatives who can make the journey. Nadia said that she and her five kids end up chasing tips for assistance. “Every day, we fill out forms for aid online. Every day, there’s a new link to follow,” Nadia said. “We tried everything. Nothing leads to anything.” Nadia is particularly on the lookout for extra help because her 13-year-old daughter, Amina, has cerebral palsy and requires diapers, frequent hospital visits, and physical therapy. She is also gradually losing her sight. “She now finds her way by touching the walls,” Nadia said.

In her Tadamoun apartment, medical evacuee Alaa cradles her two-year-old Ahmed.

It is not just the medical evacuees who are struggling to subsist in their precarious new lives in Egypt. For the tens of thousands of non-medical evacuees, too, survival has been tough. Most, like Umar, a 23-year-old engineering student from Khan Younis, now lives with his mother and brother in a small apartment they’ve rented for 15,000 Egyptian pounds ($300) a month. But, like many other families, after their 45-day tourist visas expired, their lives came to a halt. The expiration date on the triangle-shaped Egyptian entry stamp has now become an impassable wall: “Without it, you can’t apply for anything,” Umar said. “Not internet, not utilities.” In Gaza, Umar had two years left on his degree. In Egypt, universities refused his credits, requiring him to start over and pay exorbitant international student fees that he cannot afford.

According to statements by Diab al-Louh, Palestinian ambassador in Egypt, Umar is one of some 7,000 Gaza university students who crossed Rafah into Egypt; the vast majority of them are still unable to finish their degrees. Another 25,000 school-age minors came as well, al-Louh said. He told me that Egypt’s al-Azhar Islamic University, which operates its own nationwide 1-12 grade school system, agreed to admit 6,000 Gazan students as auditors. Others have enrolled in online classes affiliated with the Palestinian Authority’s education system in the West Bank. The rest have been left adrift, forced to figure out a way to educate themselves through homeschooling or expensive private tutors.

As a result, Umar, like many others, has given up on education for now. Instead, he paces Nasr City’s streets, knocking on shop doors for work. “Our biggest problem now is finding a job,” he said. Without a permit, he would need to find employment in Egypt’s vast informal economy. Many others in his position are doing the same, seeking work as day laborers, sellers of traditional dishes or clothing via social media, or unlicensed drivers. These jobs are often a step-down from incomes families had in Gaza. For instance, 31-year old Moin—son of a retired university professor—was an accountant in Gaza. Now, in the Cairo neighborhood of Al Rehab, the only work he has found is as a part-time car driver. His mother, Umm Moin, supplements the family’s income by selling baked goods online on Palestinian groups, but the money is still too little: “Education fees for foreigners are high. Rent is very high. Fees for everything are high,” Umm Moin said. Her 77-year-old husband is severely depressed. “At this age, he was not expecting that kind of torment for us . . . the loss of everything in just one day,” she said. “By God, we are exhausted financially and psychologically.”

Had these families had refugee status, they might have secured some access to formal international aid. But such assistance, whether from the UNHCR or other NGOs, is not typically provided to visa holders. Support from the Palestinian Authority’s embassy in Cairo has been largely confined to a one-time $100 payment, and Palestinians say that additional help from the embassy is limited to those with contacts in Mahmoud Abbas’s Ramallah-based government. (Two embassy officials declined to comment on these allegations, and directed Jewish Currents to recent Palestine TV interviews with al-Louh, in which he blamed the shortfalls on limited resources.)

Absent an income and sufficient aid, many Palestinians in Egypt are currently living on funds from family members living abroad. For instance, Umar’s family’s survival now depends on another brother who works in Saudi Arabia and wires them enough money to keep them afloat. Others rely on the charity of strangers, such as the Egyptian nurses who took pity on Alaa and Nadia and began giving them Zakat money (the 2.5% yearly share of savings that practicing Muslims must give to the poor and the needy), or the volunteers who have begun holding classes for children every day in Tadamoun. And yet, it is not enough: Facebook and Telegram groups for Palestinian in Egypt remain rife with requests for help from charities and NGOs.

Rabab, a Palestinian evacuee, watches a video of her son left behind in Gaza.

As they eke out lives on Cairo’s dusty margins, many Palestinians are also dealing with the trauma of separation. Umar, for instance, left behind an older brother, who was married with three children and was priced out of the $17,250 fee Hala required to provide passage and secure visas for his family of five. Likewise, Rabab, 42, had to accompany her cancer-stricken sister to Egypt; she was allowed to bring along only her five-year-old daughter Hafa while leaving behind four sons and a husband, her mother, and father. “I taste death every day,” she says, as she wakes up every morning wondering if her children survived the last Israeli strike. She broke down sharing a video of one of her sons still in Gaza pleading: “I want water and food. We’re hungry. Rescue us, Mom!”

Despite this daily witnessing of Gaza’s devastation, however, many of the uprooted still think of returning to Gaza, especially given the precariousness of their lives in Egypt. “If the Rafah Crossing opens tomorrow morning, I’d be the first in line,” Alaa said, cradling Ahmed in one arm. “There, we won’t be guests like we are here.” Nadia, Umar, Rabab, and many others interviewed for this article echoed similar resolve: Gaza is their home. When pressed that Gaza has become unlivable, with no roads, schools or hospitals, these evacuees did not waver. “At least there, we’d be with our loved ones and could pray beside the graves of the many people we lost. If we die, it will be on our land,” Alaa said. Evidence of the strength of this feeling comes from November 2023, when the Rafah Crossing briefly reopened during the first ceasefire. Then, some 1,760 people returned to Gaza within the first six days alone, according to al-Louh’s public statements. “That was a clear sign to us and to the Israelis that many will return,” he said. “Those who had arrived from Gaza in Egypt came for humanitarian reasons and were not part of any willful immigration.”

Whether these Palestinians will have that opportunity to return remains unclear. For now, their reality remains one of displacement and a lack of legal status in Egypt: Children going without schools, parents without work, medical problems compounding. According to Norman from Rice University, Israel ultimately bears responsibility for this situation, as the country that made it impossible for Gazans to be treated in Gaza. But, she added, “Egypt, as the host state, should also bear responsibility for providing a more formal status for Palestinians effectively stuck there. Instead, Egypt has left them in an intentional legal limbo.” As a result of this abdication, “Palestinians in Gaza have been almost completely abandoned,” Crisp said. “They have been denied what is supposed to be a universal right to seek asylum elsewhere.”

Footnotes

1

Pseudonyms are being used for all Palestinian evacuees to protect their safety.

Emad Mekay is an independent journalist with extensive experience reporting from the Middle East and US. He has served as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg and his recent work has appeared in outlets including Euronews and Global Insight.

@MekaEUSA

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/egypts-hidden-refugee-crisis at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

POETRY | 25 JUL 2025, 4:00 AM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 AUG 2025, 9:29 PM UTC

Siblings

Andrea Cohen

Jürgen Schindler/Alamy

An early memory: My brother and I sit side by side, legs outstretched. I try to move my leg up and down, but it doesn’t budge. I am determined, try again, but my leg remains still. Suddenly I realize I’ve been looking not at my own limbs, but at my brother’s. Yet something unsettling persists past this clarification—why can’t my mind move him? That my brother and I are not the same person is a lesson I have only partially learned. At times, this is a tremendous frustration; at others, an impossible thrill. “Extreme familiarity with extreme strangeness,” writes Hélène Cixous, thinking of dreams, but she might as well have been reflecting on the uncanny experience of siblinghood.

Andrea Cohen’s “Siblings” deftly enacts this distinctive knot of intimacy and distance. The poem is small, and when I first came across it, I encountered it not in order, but like an image, all at once: In a single glance, I took in its thin form stacked atop the final, set-apart line: “one roof.” The surreal quality of that initial brush—that image of a house teetering upside down—inflects my subsequent linear readings. Now when I read the poem, meeting its contradictory meaning, I’m aware that as I descend through the brief text, I am also ascending. What awaits is not a pure root, but something stranger. Both subterranean and otherworldly, the sibling is childhood’s impossible return, askew—the realization of an impossible dream, a peculiar density that, like language itself, differentiates as it shares, a hazy trace of where the self ends.

— Claire Schwartz

Listen to Andrea Cohen read "Siblings."

Siblings

We lived in many houses beneath one roof.

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Andrea Cohen is the author of eight books of poetry, including, most recently, The Sorrow Apartments (2024). A new poetry collection, Sugar, will be out in early 2026.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/siblings at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

REPORT | 23 JUL 2025, 4:24 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 AUG 2025, 9:30 PM UTC

The Gazans Trapped in Sheba Hospital

By showcasing its treatment of a few Palestinian patients, Israel masks its destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system—and its obligations under international law.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman

A Palestinian child from Gaza being treated in the Sheba Medical Center’s Pediatric Hemato-Oncology Institute during Israel’s 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip.

Nir Alon/ZUMA Wire

When I visited Khadija,[1] an elderly woman from northern Gaza, at Sheba Medical Center in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan in late April, she told me her cancer treatment had been working. Going forward, she would only need a checkup every two months. But her improvement offered little solace. “Inshallah, after the next checkup, we will go home. To where? I don’t know,” she muttered as she scrolled through WhatsApp photos of flattened buildings and rubble sent by family and friends. Sitting on the opposite bed, her sister Naila flipped her phone screen toward me: The image was of a few sad-looking onions with numbers sharpied on them: 56, 39, 62—the astronomical cost, in shekels, for a single one.

Khadija and Naila live in a faded row of white British Mandate-era barracks that, for the last 21 months, have housed around 20 Gazan patients and select accompanying family members as the patients undergo treatment for chronic illnesses and rare forms of cancer. For Khadija, like for many other Gazan patients, Sheba was her last option: After being diagnosed with stage-three leukemia in May 2023, she went through a grueling process to obtain a medical permit to receive treatment at a hospital in the West Bank city of Nablus, where she traveled with her sister, the sole escort allowed by her permit. But her cancer was aggressive, and the hospital ran out of treatment options for her. She was directed to Sheba, where she arrived in August 2023 and where she has been stuck ever since. The sisters cannot go back to Gaza, nor can they leave the 200-acre hospital complex. Doing so—to grab a bite to eat, to visit a park, to sit at the sea a few miles away—would violate the strict terms of their permit. As is standard for medical permits granted to Gazans, their documents only cover the grounds of the hospital. Unable to return home, the patients and their families are now essentially imprisoned within the confines of Sheba.

Inside the hospital, the rhythms of life have taken on a strange normalcy—with critical limits. There are some activities that happen throughout the day, but participation has dwindled over time. Khadija once joined weekly workshops—yoga, drawing, handicrafts—led by Israeli and Palestinian volunteers. Now, she mostly stays in the courtyard, sitting in a lawn chair outside her door and quietly altering old clothes with a needle and thread. As for the ten or so Gazan children being treated at Sheba, aside from a few hours of English class each week, they have had no formal schooling since their hospitalization. They find ways to entertain themselves, always within the confines of the hospital. The children I met could effortlessly navigate to the hospital’s playground and small shopping center. But when I told them it was time for me to leave and asked them to point me toward the exit, they simply shrugged. One asked if I spoke Hebrew and suggested I ask a staff member.

Meals tend to be shared in the courtyard that adjoins the tiny apartments, but the hospital doesn’t provide food to the patients’ families. While some food donations come from Shefa ‘Amr, Tamra, and other Palestinian towns in northern Israel, most of the families’ provisions come from an elderly Jewish Israeli man named Buma Inbar, who has taken it upon himself to deliver fruit, vegetables, and pantry staples to the families. Inbar got involved in arranging medical care for Palestinians in Israel in 1995, after his son Yotam was killed in action in Lebanon and he connected to a group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families. “These meetings with bereaved Palestinian mothers really broke me . . . All of the sudden, I encountered the pain that was so familiar from home somewhere completely different,” Inbar told me.

Inbar’s act of charity, set against a backdrop of neglect, dramatizes the ethos guiding Israel’s treatment of Palestinian patients, in which altruism replaces obligation. This speaks to a much darker reality—one that complicates the story Israel tells about its humanitarian treatment of Palestinian patients. In late February 2024, a group of Israeli and Jewish physicians responded to South Africa’s International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide by emphasizing that “thousands of Palestinians from [the West Bank and Gaza] receive care in publicly funded Israeli public hospitals.” But this narrative of benevolence falters in the face of a violent reality: For the Gazan patients at Sheba, medical care exists in the shadow of Israel’s systematic denial of Palestinian health rights and its utter devastation of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. The Sheba administration and Israel’s medical establishment have remained largely silent as Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza has continued over the past 21 months. In some cases, they have gone further—calling on the Israeli military to bomb Palestinian hospitals, as “the residents of Gaza saw fit to turn hospitals into terrorist nests to take advantage of western morality,” in the words of a November 2023 open letter to military and political officials signed by dozens of Jewish Israeli doctors.

Focusing on the care provided to Palestinian patients helps sustain the illusion that Israeli institutions are graciously extending aid to a neighboring population. But as global health expert Yara Asi told me, this framing ignores the deeper power imbalance: “Israel and Palestine are not neighboring countries that need to help each other,” she said. “Often, Palestinians benefiting from medical treatment in Israel have no other option.” Moreover, Israel is required to provide medical care to the occupied Palestinian population under international law. By framing this treatment as a generous gesture, Israel repackages a legal obligation as an act of charity—and takes credit for addressing a crisis of its own making. “We take a few Palestinians, put them in [Israeli] hospitals, and then deny another 12,000 seriously injured the ability to leave, while destroying their entire medical system,” Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of international human rights and humanitarian law at Queen Mary University in London, told me. “The fact that a few patients receive treatment in Israel then becomes a display of our supposed moral superiority.”

By framing treatment of Palestinians as generosity, Israel repackages a legal obligation as an act of charity—and takes credit for addressing a crisis of its own making.

Israel and its supporters have long pointed to the medical treatment of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza—as well as Syrians, Iraqis, and Lebanese—in its world-class hospitals as evidence of the state’s magnanimity. According to the World Health Organization and the medical NGO Project Rozana, prior to October 7th, Israel treated around 70 patients a day from Gaza, with a total of some 100,000 Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank receiving specialized treatment in Israeli and East Jerusalem hospitals every year. Sheba regularly treats Palestinians and other patients from countries with which Israel does not have diplomatic relations, promoting their work under the motto “hospitalization without borders.” The Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital at Sheba is particularly known for providing pediatric oncology and cardiac surgical treatment to Palestinian children—who, as of 2010 (the last year for which data was available), often made up one third of the patients being treated.

After October 7th, when Israel began arresting and deporting thousands of stranded Gazan workers, the fate of Gazan medical patients began to look similarly grim. In early November 2023, Israeli police arrested and expelled several patients from Gaza who were receiving care at the Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem. Then, in March 2024, Israel’s security establishment ordered some 20 cancer patients, including children, who were undergoing treatment at Sheba to pack up within 24 hours to be bussed back to Gaza, claiming that their treatment had ended. Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI) quickly intervened, securing an injunction from the High Court to prevent the evacuation of Gazans being treated at Israeli hospitals.

The episode at Sheba underscored the tension between state officials and the Israeli doctors who have been treating Gazan patients, many of whom demonstrated in the lobby of Safra Children’s Hospital against the scheduled deportation. “Compassion over everything,” read the Hebrew sign held by protesters. As one doctor, who explained that his patient had indeed finished treatment but needed close monitoring, told Ynet: “We are here because we are treating [these patients] and cannot send them to their deaths . . . This is not our war, and the war is not with them.”

But beyond the callousness of sending sick children into a war zone, the doctors also mentioned something else: Israel was fumbling an opportunity to demonstrate its humanity to the world. “We all understand the immediate implications of [the patients’] return [to Gaza],” an anonymous source familiar with the details of the case told Ynet. “Their lives are at stake, but it’s also . . . a serious blow to Israeli hasbara,” the Hebrew term for state propaganda efforts. Noting that Gazan children at Sheba received permission to be there from the Ministry of Defense, the doctors argued that “if anything, this is the time for the State of Israel to seize an opportunity to be humane in the midst of a war situation.”

After being named a top ten hospital in the world by Newsweek in 2024—an accolade it again received in 2025, as Israel’s war on Gaza raged on—Sheba doubled down on its self-styled image of inclusivity and benevolence. The hospital’s Director General, Yitshak Kreiss, reiterated its “mission to provide healthcare without boundaries,” and championed the diversity of both the staff and patients: “Jewish and Arab personnel are working side by side 24/7 to save the lives of civilians and soldiers—Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike.” Commenting on a transplant performed on a young boy from Gaza following October 7th, he added: “Sheba is a hospital of peace and a symbol of coexistence where medical treatment is provided to everyone. We treat Palestinians, we cooperate with Palestinians, and we host Palestinians. We share the same fate.”

The involvement of Israeli doctors in treating Palestinians and the diverse makeup of Israeli hospital staff have often been used to whitewash the realities of military occupation. This practice, sometimes called “medical hasbara,” functions as a form of soft power that, as anthropologist Avram Bornstein has shown, aims to perpetuate Palestinian subordination. In the first decades of Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza, those leading medical hasbara efforts framed the occupation as a force for modernization which introduced medical technologies, training programs, and immunization campaigns to Palestinian communities in the occupied territories. In more recent years, medical hasbara has shifted to counter claims of Israeli human rights abuses by spotlighting the permits Israel grants to Palestinians to travel to Israeli hospitals. “Israeli media, and especially COGAT [an Israeli military body that manages civilian control in the West Bank and Gaza], use the treatment of a very limited number of Palestinians, especially children, as a propaganda tool,” explained Aseel Abu Rass, the director of the occupied Palestinian territories department at PHRI. “Israel’s Foreign Ministry highlights these cases in meetings with UN and EU officials to say, ‘Look at the humanitarian gestures we’re making.’” This practice has continued into the current war, with the Israeli military boasting of its role in facilitating the medical evacuations of Palestinians who need treatment outside of Gaza, even as it spreads death, injury, and starvation in the Strip.

Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of the Field Hospitals Department in Gaza, surveys the destruction inside the surgical building of Nasser Hospital, a day after it was struck by an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, March 24th, 2025.

Abdel Kareem Hana/AP Photo

It is precisely this contradiction that has overshadowed hasbarists’ best efforts. The scope of Israel’s destruction is particularly stark when considering attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, and patients: Between October 7th, 2023, and May 7th, 2025, Israeli forces struck 122 health facilities and 180 ambulances in Gaza in 686 separate attacks. Seven mass graves have been found inside medical complexes. More than 1,400 medical workers have been killed. Earlier this month, Israeli forces killed Marwan Al-Sultan, the director of the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, along with his family, making him the 70th healthcare worker to be murdered in a span of 50 days. Hundreds of other Palestinian healthcare workers have been detained and tortured, some to death, in Israeli prisons and detention camps. Hussam Abu Safiya, head of pediatrics at Kamal Adwan Hospital, for example, has been held without charge for more than six months. His lawyer told +972 Magazine that Abu Safiya was “attacked brutally and savagely” by prison guards last month and appears to have lost close to 90 pounds; his colleagues say they fear for his life. Doctors in Gaza who have not yet been killed or kidnapped must provide medical care without gloves, hand soap, running water, and sometimes even anesthetics or electricity. They have had patients killed in their hospital beds by Israeli blasts and have treated countless young children with high velocity bullets in their heads or chests. As Mimi Sayed, an emergency medicine physician who deployed to Gaza twice over the past year, testified at the recent Sarajevo Gaza Tribunal: “I have seen more brain matter out of the skulls of small children due to shrapnel injuries than I ever thought possible in my lifetime.”

As Israel’s military continues to inflict untold damage on Gaza’s health infrastructure, its medical establishment has spoken out only tepidly and indirectly. In May 2025—a month after Israeli forces executed 15 medics in Rafah, and with the official Palestinian death toll surpassing 53,000—the Israel Medical Association (IMA), which represents 95% of physicians in Israel, issued a terse statement calling for the safe passage of humanitarian aid to “innocent civilians.” (Notably, the word “Gaza” does not appear once in the statement.) But even this mild appeal was couched in language echoing Israeli military claims that Hamas operates out of health facilities. On June 19th, after an Iranian ballistic missile struck Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva, the IMA reiterated these claims. “Unlike many hospitals in Gaza which have tragically been conscripted by Hamas, the strike on Soroka is an entirely unjustified attack on civilians,” Zion Hagay, president of the association, wrote in a request to the World Medical Association to condemn the strike. Later, in response to a PHRI newsletter that both criticized the missile strike on Soroka Hospital while also stressing the need to protect medical facilities in Gaza, Hagay wrote a sharply-worded letter to PHRI director Guy Shalev, a copy of which PHRI provided to Jewish Currents. Hagay explained that while he agreed that “every life is precious,” it was also a fact that “a hospital is not always a hospital.”

The reticence of Israeli medical leadership is underscored by how openly the country’s hospitals have embraced their role in supporting the war. Sheba’s website and social media pages post regular updates on how the hospital has stepped up its activities during “Operation Iron Swords,” the Israeli military’s name for the war on Gaza. The hospital touts the frontline role of Sheba’s trauma unit in treating injured Israeli soldiers, the importance of whole blood transfusions in reducing battlefield fatalities, and its work providing simulation-based training to military medics and doctors on army bases at the Gaza border before they enter the Strip. (This wartime posture is not new: Before Sheba was repurposed for civilian use in 1953, it was Israel’s “Military Hospital Number 5.”)

“Sheba is integrated with the Israel Defense Forces,” its American philanthropic counterpart explains. “Supporting the IDF” is one of the nonprofit’s six core principles, among others that include “humanitarian missions” and “fostering coexistence.”

The cover of a July 2024 issue of the Rambam hospital magazine.

Sheba’s messaging is not limited to treating the injured. The hospital “support[s] our doctors who have been called up or volunteered to join the forces,” according to the caption of a YouTube video released in early 2024. Its American philanthropic counterpart, founded in the early 1970s, is decidedly less subtle: “Sheba is integrated with the Israel Defense Forces,” it explains, noting that the hospital houses Israel’s National Center for the Rehabilitation of Injured Soldiers. “Supporting the IDF” is one of the nonprofit’s six core principles, among others that include “humanitarian missions” and “fostering coexistence.” Two hours north of Sheba, at Rambam Hospital, Haifa’s largest medical center, the patriotic sentiment is no less strong. The 2024 issue of the hospital’s magazine declares that since October 7th, the hospital’s management and staff have demonstrated a “united front and commitment to the national cause.” In a section titled “From Military Uniform to Hospital Scrubs,” the publication features a few of the hundreds of physicians who transitioned back and forth between their roles as civilian doctors and soldiers. “Rambam’s medical ‘superheroes’ fight on two fronts,” it boasts. As Abu Rass explained, “The army is intertwined in all aspects of Israeli life. Many senior Israeli doctors, including those who hold high positions in the IMA, are reserve officers or military doctors.” Because of this, she was unsurprised by the Israeli medical establishment’s silence. “They’ve always used the language and logic of the Israeli military,” she said, recalling a case from August 2022, when an unusually high number of parents were denied permits to accompany their children to medical treatment outside of Gaza. “We sent a letter to the IMA, asking them to condemn the policy. But instead of addressing the children’s inability to leave [the Strip without their parents], they echoed the military’s line—blaming Hamas for using the children as human shields.”

When I spoke with Raz Somech, an Israeli physician at Sheba who has treated hundreds of Palestinian children with genetic diseases, he expressed not just a continued commitment to his Palestinian patients but also a deep sense of pride. Over decades of work, Somech has built enduring relationships with Palestinian families and doctors across Gaza and the West Bank. Toward the end of our conversation, he handed me a printed copy of an article he published in April 2024 in the Journal of Clinical Immunology, titled “Was It All for Nothing?,” in which he describes a recent collaboration with Palestinian colleagues to implement a newborn screening program for certain genetic conditions. “It was clear to us that helping our Palestinian neighbors in Gaza is what we should do—for patients, for us, for decent values as human beings, and as doctors,” he wrote. The October 7th attacks, however, shook him. “I am deeply saddened by the fact that this violence and bloodshed has made me question the bridges we have built. Was it all a farce? Was it all for nothing?” His answer is no. “I still believe that, on both sides, we, as doctors and colleagues, should promise to continue treating everyone,” he writes.

And yet, within Somech’s anguished question—“Was it all for nothing?”—is the suggestion that medical professionals who treat Palestinian patients and nurture professional relationships with their doctors are “going the extra mile” in an act that may exceed their professional duties. In the context of increasing Israeli racism and repeated cases of Israeli practitioners refusing to provide medical care to Palestinian prisoners, the continued commitment of Somech and others like him to treating Palestinians can appear brave or morally commendable in contrast. But, in reality, withholding care or severing cooperation would be a serious violation of Israel’s obligation under international law to provide for the health and welfare of Palestinians living in the territory it occupies. As then-UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk reminded the UN General Assembly in October 2020, following reports from health officials in Gaza about shortages of lab equipment, medications, and supplies to treat COVID-19, “Israel as the occupying power has the primary responsibility to ensure respect, protection, and fulfillment of the right to health of Palestinians in Gaza,” in accordance with Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That is, when Sheba uses the slogan “hospitalization without borders” it is taking an Israeli legal obligation and recasting it as a humanitarian favor. As Abu Rass pointed out to me, the fact that the Palestinian Authority (PA) foots the bill when Palestinians are treated in Israel is a further dereliction of Israel’s duty. “As an occupied population, all Palestinians should receive medical treatment as a matter of right, not be charged as if they were foreign patients,” she said.

Israel’s failure to uphold Palestinians’ right to health goes back decades. Following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel revealingly placed Palestinian healthcare under the Israeli Ministry of Defense, rather than the Ministry of Health. As the founder of PHRI, Ruchama Marton, has observed, Israel intentionally created a reality of Palestinian dependency on Israeli health services through the use of severe budget restrictions, referrals to Israeli hospitals for specialized care, and restrictions on licenses for new medical projects, ensuring that Palestinian healthcare remained stunted and underdeveloped. In the decades that followed, Palestinians living under occupation, especially children, suffered from high levels of infectious diseases and malnutrition disorders, and many died from treatable health maladies.

Then in the mid-1990s, as part of the processes surrounding the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) was established, offering new hope for the development of Palestinian healthcare. Between 1994 and 1998, donors committed $353 million to rebuild the ailing sector, disbursing about half that amount to build new hospitals and primary care clinics across the West Bank and Gaza. The plan was for the new MoH, in tandem with other nascent Palestinian institutions, to assume more and more responsibilities over the following five years as part of the process of establishing a Palestinian state. But part of the problem, explained Gordon, who worked closely with Palestinian negotiators, was that the Palestinian delegation, under pressure from Israel and eager to prove their own sovereignty, “accepted taking on the medical system without any conditions.” After decades of Israeli control, the system they inherited was severely deficient—yet there were no Israeli commitments to help rebuild the sector it had destroyed over the previous years or to ensure the freedom of movement for medical professionals and patients that would be necessary going forward.

Since the failure of Oslo, Israel has maintained effective control of the occupied Palestinian territories, including over its external borders and thus over all international trade, while local Palestinian authorities—currently the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza—exercise limited sovereignty. Thus, Israel formally washed its hands of responsibility for Palestinians’ healthcare by handing it over to Palestinians, but retained ultimate control over the movement of patients, medical personnel, and supplies. In the case of Gaza, the stringent air, land, and sea blockade that Israel has imposed on the enclave since 2006 has severely limited Gaza’s ability to import medical technology, especially tools for advanced imaging like PET and CAT scanners. Asi noted the restrictions include some raw materials——concrete, wires, and pipes—needed to even construct a hospital building. All of this, Asi explained, “created an artificial health deficit in Gaza that could only be filled by applying for Israeli permits to train or get care in Israel.”

The process of obtaining a medical permit is opaque and cumbersome: For a patient from Gaza, for instance, local physicians must refer patients to an Israeli military body that files the request with the Israeli authorities for an entry permit. Some applicants are then summoned for interrogation at Erez Crossing by the Shin Bet, Israel’s national security agency. At any point in the application process, the patient may be refused without explanation. Their family members, including the parents of sick children, may also be denied a permit to accompany them. (Because of this, the medical permit system has historically been a key way that Israel recruits collaborators, as the Shin Bet pressures people to provide intelligence in exchange for access to life-saving treatment for their loved ones.) According to the World Health Organization, between 2008 and 2022, over 70,000 permit applications—around 30%—from Gaza were denied. Even more patient companion applications—nearly 115,000, representing 44% of requests—were delayed or denied in the same period. This has deadly consequences: Cancer patients from Gaza whose permits for chemotherapy or radiation were initially delayed or denied between 2015 and 2017 were 1.5 times less likely to survive. “There are hundreds of people every month who don’t get access to life-saving care—surgeries, cancer treatments,” said Abu Rass. “Not letting them out is basically a death sentence.”

Once the Oslo Accords transferred formal responsibility for healthcare from Israel to the PA, targeting medical infrastructure no longer carried the same political or legal weight. This ethos laid the groundwork for the current decimation of Gaza.

In addition to codifying the permit regime, the Oslo Accords marked a turning point in the Israeli military’s approach to Palestinian medical infrastructure. Prior to Oslo, Israel had largely avoided bombing hospitals and clinics—not out of goodwill, but because it was directly responsible for the institutions providing health services to Palestinians. “Even if the infrastructure was minimal or underdeveloped, it was the mechanism through which Israel fulfilled obligations set forth in international law,” Gordon explained. “Destroying it would have meant dismantling Israel’s own tool of governance.” But once Oslo transferred formal responsibility for healthcare to the PA, that impediment dissolved. What followed was a shift in practice and mindset: Targeting medical infrastructure no longer carried the same political or legal weight. This new ethos laid the groundwork for the current decimation of Gaza, in which the destruction of the healthcare system is not collateral damage, but a deliberate, punitive strategy.

If it was mostly advanced care that was nonexistent in Gaza before October 7th, Israel’s continued assault on the Strip has rendered Gaza’s medical system largely nonfunctional. Between October 7th, 2023, and mid-April 2024, more than 7,200 Palestinians were medically evacuated from Gaza to other countries, including Egypt, Qatar, Algeria, Turkey, and several EU states. The majority of these patients are being treated for trauma injuries, while hundreds of others are suffering from cancer, as well as cardiovascular and blood diseases. Twelve thousand Palestinians, many of whom are severely wounded, ill, and malnourished, are currently awaiting treatment they cannot get inside Gaza. But the line between those in urgent need of medical evacuation and the rest of Gaza’s population is quickly fading. Hunger is widespread, and illness is rampant. People are now collapsing on the streets—and dying—from starvation. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, in a single 24-hour period this week, 18 people died from famine.

Only a few dozen miles separate that reality from the daily rhythms at Sheba, where life carries on, even through sorrow. Gazan mothers and their children sit and chat in the courtyard, sipping orange soda, playing endless rounds of Connect Four, and chasing each other in “al-ghumayda” (hide-and-seek). One afternoon, a Palestinian restaurant owner from Jaffa stopped by, delivering a bundle of fresh fish to the Gazan families. I watched as the mothers prepared the whole denise fish in a traditional Gazan spice blend, serving it with dagga, a fiery sauce of crushed green chiles, garlic, and lemon—a visceral reminder of an unreachable home.

There is no question that Sheba’s walls are safer than anywhere in Gaza. But physical safety doesn’t ameliorate the pain of having been cut off from family for almost two years. Many of the Gazans at Sheba have lost relatives, and contact with other loved ones has been reduced to evening phone calls. Often, when Naila handed me the phone to introduce a relative in Gaza, I’d find them sitting in the dark, without any electricity. But despite the horrors happening back home that they witness through their screens, many of the patients I spoke to expressed a fervent desire to return. “I cannot put into words what our families in Gaza are going through,” said Iman, who accompanied a grandchild receiving cancer treatment at Sheba. “Still, we ask God every day to let us go back home. My granddaughter wants to go back to her house, to sit on her bed.”

One evening visit, my conversation with Naila, Khadija, and a few others was cut short by the wail of an air raid siren—an incoming projectile, likely launched from Yemen. In a quiet panic, I scanned their faces for direction, assuming we would all hurriedly shuffle over to the nearest shelter. “Where do you all go?” I squeaked. Naila smiled gently, almost sheepishly. “We don’t go anywhere,” she said. Sensing my unease, she motioned toward a mobile safe room. I booked it and stood inside with a few Jewish Israelis. When I returned to the picnic table a few minutes later, the women were sitting exactly as I’d left them.

If most of the Gazan patients were able to ignore the missiles launched intermittently from Yemen, the same could not be said for the ballistic missiles from Iran in June—a number of which landed in various neighborhoods of Ramat Gan, near the hospital. “This time we always went to the shelters. We were genuinely scared, especially for the children,” said Rama, whose ten-year-old daughter is being treated for cancer. Some children were so frightened by the escalation that they had vomited. “The young children were quite traumatized by the sirens, perhaps more than the booms of the interceptions or the missiles themselves,” she told me. “We don’t have such sirens in Gaza.”

Footnotes

1

Pseudonyms are being used for all Palestinian patients to protect their safety.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman is an editorial fellow at +972 Magazine based in Haifa.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/the-gazans-trapped-in-sheba-hospital at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

REPORT | 22 JUL 2025, 2:57 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 17 AUG 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

Ayman Odeh’s Failed Impeachment Is a “Win-Win” for the Right

Experts say the attempt was a means of suppressing the vote of Palestinian citizens of Israel and delegitimizing their political participation.

Elisheva Goldberg

MK Ayman Odeh speaks during his impeachment hearing at the Knesset in Jerusalem, July 14th, 2025.

Ohad Zwigenberg/AP Photo

At around 10 pm on Monday, July 14th, members of Israel’s Knesset gathered in the main plenum for a vote on the impeachment of Ayman Odeh, the most prominent Arab lawmaker in the country. The chamber was raucous. Odeh, head of the Communist Hadash-Ta’al party and longtime advocate for Jewish–Arab political partnership, was granted 15 minutes to speak. But he could barely get out a sentence without being interrupted. “You represent Hamas!” yelled MK Tali Gottlieb, a member of the leading Likud Party. A dozen MKs were called to order. Three were ejected for unruly behavior.

The official reason for the impeachment effort was a tweet Odeh posted on January 19th, the day Hamas released three Israeli hostages and Israel released 90 Palestinian prisoners, to begin an eight-week ceasefire. “Happy for the release of the hostages and prisoners. Now we must free both peoples from the yoke of occupation. We were all born free,” he wrote. The right claimed he was equating Israeli hostages with Palestinian “terrorists,” and accused him of “supporting terror.” (Most of the Palestinian prisoners—69 women and 21 teenagers and children—had never been charged with anything.)

Odeh’s speech was less a defense than a restatement of principle: “This is not Arabs against Jews, and not Jews against Arabs . . . Only together will we defeat fascism and Kahanism, and build here a future of peace and democracy,” he said from the podium. “We have a dream, and our dream has three words: equality, partnership, peace!” He closed with a stanza from the poem “I Believe” by 20th-century Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, which socialists, like those in the Hashomer Hatzair movement, have long proposed as alternative or additive to Israel’s national anthem, “Hativka”: “For my soul still yearns for freedom / I have not sold it for a golden calf / For I still believe in humankind / In its spirit, a mighty spirit.” Next to the podium was Ofir Katz, chair of the Likud Party and the governing coalition, who had overseen the impeachment hearings in committee. “This is what a terrorist in a suit sounds like,” he announced.

Then they voted. Seventy-three members of Knesset—including prominent members of the opposition like MK Pnina Tamano-Shata (Blue and White) and Simon Davidson (Yesh Atid)—voted to impeach, shy of the 90 votes necessary for removal. But Odeh’s survival was not the result of a groundswell of support. Only 14 members voted against impeachment—all 10 Arab MKs and all four MKs from the liberal Labor Party. The only reason the measure failed was abstention: The ultra-Orthodox refused to vote with the coalition because of a continued boycott over mandatory military conscription, and most of the “center” parties simply didn’t show up.

In the wake of the impeachment hearing, experts say that the effort was an attempt to delegitimize Odeh’s identity as a Palestinian citizen of Israel—one who felt deep relief at seeing both Israelis and Palestinians freed—and a challenge the permissibility of his vision for political equality. “They want to show us that we are not part of the political game and that our representatives are not legitimate in the Knesset,” said Nassreen Hadad Haj-Yaya, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and longtime researcher of Arab society. Odeh himself put it more bluntly in an interview with Jewish Currents: “They are taking advantage of the war to strengthen Jewish supremacy and put us in the position of subjects, not citizens.” He said that he’d seen photos of his likeness in public areas of the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak wearing a Hezbollah uniform. “It reminds me of Rabin with the SS,” he said—a reference to the infamous anti-Oslo Accords poster that circulated in the months before the assasination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, depicting him in a Nazi uniform.

But Hadad also said the attempt was intended to put a finger on the scale of the upcoming elections. Israel’s next elections are currently scheduled for late October 2026, though there’s a strong chance they’ll happen sooner. Polls show that if elections were held today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would lose to Naftali Bennett, who briefly served as prime minister from 2021-22 in an anti-Netanyahu coalition. But if Palestinian citizens of Israel stay home, the relative weight of each vote for Netanyahu’s far-right coalition increases. Banishing Odeh would demoralize his constituency. “It was a calculated move,” Hadad said, “the intention was to suppress the Arab vote in Israel.”

Polling done by Hebrew University’s aChord Center bears this out. An aChord poll from April found that 59% of Palestinian citizens of Israel planned to vote in the next election. But, when asked whether they would vote if the Knesset prevented a top Arab political leader or party from running, that number dropped to 41%. Yaniv Roznai, a constitutional law scholar at Reichman University, said he wouldn’t rule out further efforts to suppress the Arab vote, including changes to election rules, legislation to exclude Arab parties, and circulated rumors about violence at Arab polling places. “It’s enough that voter turnout drops by 10%, the story’s over,” he said. Odeh, too, is highly concerned. “Election day will be difficult,” he said. “They aren’t going to let the democratic process run smoothly. We’re preparing. We have to do everything we can to increase voter turnout.” Netanyahu won the 2022 election in part because two small parties—the secular socialist Meretz and the Palestinian nationalist Balad—failed to cross the electoral threshold by a fraction of a percentage point. “If they had passed,” Roznai told me, “the whole map would’ve looked different.”

Even Odeh’s accusers seemed to know that their claims against him wouldn’t hold. His statements did not constitute “support for terrorism,” and would likely have been overturned by the courts. Odeh told Jewish Currents that this would have created another venue for the right’s continued assault on the judiciary. “They wanted my case to reach the court,” he said. “So they can say: ‘Who decides? Ninety elected representatives or seven unelected judges?’”

Though their effort failed, it was still “a win-win for the coalition,” according to Roznai. “It positioned all the members of the opposition [who voted for Odeh] as disloyal,” and now “they are afraid.” Indeed, opposition leader Yair Lapid announced days before the vote that he would be voting for impeachment. It was only once he understood that it would not pass due to ultra-Orthodox abstention that he allowed the MKs in his party, Yesh Atid, to vote their conscience, or absent themselves entirely. On the day of the vote, 32 MKs were no-shows. “From [the right’s] perspective it’s excellent. It’s political propaganda. Why not push [impeachment] every day? It’s cheap,” said Roznai.

Roznai said that the shift towards inclusive democracy must come from the so-called Israeli “center.” “As long as Arab parties are not perceived as an integral part,” he told me, “as long as there’s not a joint Jewish-Arab party that clearly can be part of the coalition, there will be no change in the political map. No dramatic shift.” For his part, Odeh insists that Palestinian citizens of Israel are key players in the push to make Israel a place that can call itself a democracy with integrity, and in any just transformation in the region. He told me that the unique position of his constituency—Palestinians who make up 20% of the citizenry of Israel, and 20% to 25% of all Palestinians between the river and the sea—is that they can speak to the aspirations of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians. “That’s our job. To tell both nations: Excuse me, we know both of you very well and we know that you want the same peace,” he said.

But Odeh’s hope is constantly being caught in the net of reality. This past Saturday, Odeh was assaulted by right-wing protesters as he traveled to an anti-war protest in Ness Tziona in central Israel. Chants of “death to Arabs” and curses could be heard as they attacked him, spit on him, and cracked the windshield of his car. Odeh had to leave under police escort. The next day, on Israel’s channel 13, Odeh responded to the attack: “Against facism, we stand strong. We do not bow.”

Elisheva Goldberg is the media and policy director for the New Israel Fund and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents. She was an aide to former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and has written for The Daily Beast, The Forward, The New Republic, and The Atlantic.

ShevGoldberg

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/ayman-odehs-failed-impeachment-is-a-win-win-for-the-right at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

HISTORY | 18 JUL 2025, 5:55 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 AUG 2025, 9:33 PM UTC

Lessons from La Guardia

Can Zohran Mamdani reshape New York—and national—politics like Mayor Fiorello La Guardia once did?

Kim Phillips-Fein

New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia testifies before Congress in 1939.

Alamy

Zohran Mamdani has no shortage of enemies. The Queens assembly member and democratic socialist, who handily beat disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in the contest to become the Democratic candidate in New York City’s upcoming mayoral race, can count few supporters among Wall Street tycoons or real estate magnates. Nor does he have deep roots in establishment Democratic Party circles. The prevailing attitude among New York’s financiers, lawyers, and corporate executives toward the nominee was summed up by Kathryn Wylde, president of the business-friendly Partnership for a Better New York, to CNBC on Primary Day: “Terror is the feeling.” In the coming months ahead, the vicious campaign against him is likely to be driven not just by Mamdani’s opponents within the city, but also by national political dynamics. President Donald Trump has insinuated that Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and moved to New York with his family at seven, is “here illegally,” promising investigations of his immigration status and threatening to arrest the candidate if, once elected, he tries to block ICE from operating in the city. The president has also threatened to block federal funding to New York if the “communist lunatic” gets elected.

As a result, though Mamdani is now consolidating support from certain establishment Democratic politicians and centrist unions who recognize him as the fair-and-square winner of the nomination, nothing about the upcoming election can be taken for granted. And if Mamdani does manage to triumph over the split opposition of Cuomo, also-disgraced current mayor Eric Adams, and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, the question remains: How will he govern? What would it mean to have a mayor who has so openly criticized some of the city’s most significant power centers—the financial industry, real estate, the police? Can his agenda overcome these roadblocks?

In thinking through these questions, it’s helpful to consider that, while Mamdani’s ascent has been shocking to an entrenched political order, it also echoes a major shift in New York politics a century ago—one with consequences that transformed the city. Like Mamdani, Fiorello La Guardia, who ran an unexpectedly successful mayoral campaign in 1933, faced significant opposition from the city’s political establishment while running for office, and his candidacy likewise elicited dire warnings of imminent socialist takeover. Less of a political unknown than Mamdani, having staged two previous bids for mayor and served in Congress, La Guardia took over City Hall at a moment when New York was ravaged by the Depression, its finances in shambles. He built a political coalition that united immigrant workers, left-leaning activists, and an influential faction of the city’s upper-middle class, drawing them together in opposition to a corrupt Democratic political machine and offering them a radical vision of New York as a working-class city, a city of immigrants, and—as such—an emblem of American democracy and possibility. Today, almost 100 years later, La Guardia’s legacy can be felt in the city’s physical infrastructure (its highways, bridges, tunnels, and airports; its schools, zoos, and playgrounds; the campuses of Brooklyn and Queens College); its social programs, from public housing to health clinics to investment in the arts; and perhaps most of all, in the ambient stubborn optimism that the city might become a democratic place in which working people of varied backgrounds could live lives of decency and abundance. For those wondering what lies ahead for Mamdani, La Guardia’s triumph may offer some lessons.

Often, La Guardia’s success is attributed to the New Deal-era generosity of the federal government. That federal spending was real, and it was transformative. But this explanation for the accomplishments of the “Little Flower” (as the mayor was nicknamed) does not give La Guardia—or New Yorkers—enough credit. The vision of a New York for its people came from within the city, not from Washington, and the mayor’s political mobilization of New Yorkers in the 1930s played as key a role as federal dollars in building New Deal institutions there. At the same time, La Guardia enjoyed certain political advantages that Mamdani, if he wins, will not. Despite the epithets aimed his way on the campaign trail, La Guardia never considered himself a socialist. While he did stand for working-class politics—he called for New York City to become a “100 percent union town”—he linked this to a vision of a modernized city that used public power to reduce disorder, municipal waste, corruption, and crime in ways that appealed to the upper-middle classes and New York business leaders. While Mamdani has also expressed a desire to reclaim “quality of life” issues for the left, his politics, by contrast, are more deeply based in class antagonism: The call to take back the city from the very rich for working people is central to his campaign. And while La Guardia was the first major Italian American political leader from New York, winning power at a moment when Italian immigrants were still viewed as subordinate to native Anglo-Saxons, he was not perceived as a distinct racial other; Mamdani, on the other hand, is a person of color, a Muslim, and a Palestine supporter, and as such he represents a political identity that many constituencies within the city have long oriented themselves against.

Most significantly, La Guardia came to power at a moment when the city’s old economic elites were reeling under the Depression, the New Deal Democratic Party was emerging, and the president had every reason to ally with New York. Today, the city is home to a phenomenally wealthy upper class that has been growing more powerful rather than less, the Democratic Party is divided, and Washington can anticipate political rewards from attacking New York. Still, if the challenges are real, so are the possibilities, just as they were in the 1930s. La Guardia’s mayoralty offers a framework for thinking about how what might seem to be fixed political alignments can, in moments of popular discontent, shift radically, bringing real change even to a city as large and complex as New York. His tenure is also a reminder that what happens here has implications far beyond the five boroughs—that it can, under certain circumstances, both anticipate and spur political transformations for the country as a whole.

Like Mamdani, La Guardia did not himself hail from the city’s working classes. He was born in Greenwich Village to well-educated immigrant Italian parents (his mother was Jewish, his father was not), but his family moved to Arizona when he was a young child, and he grew up in the West. When he returned to the city as a young man, he joined a political milieu shaped by the socialist and other left-wing currents that roiled New York in the years before World War I. He met his first wife on an Amalgamated Clothing Workers picket line. But his approach to politics was also shaped by the reform tradition in the city, which opposed the Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall for its systematic corruption and abuse of city funds through patronage, kickbacks, fraud, and bribery. Reform politics were dominated by upper- and middle-class New Yorkers, including both those who disliked the machine for its endemic inefficiency and those who were morally outraged that it siphoned resources from poor people while doing little to relieve their conditions. Because of La Guardia’s opposition to the machine (which was Irish-dominated and would not have tolerated an Italian standard-bearer under any circumstances) and his identification with Progressive Republicans on the model of Theodore Roosevelt, he first ran for office as a Republican.

Early in his political career, La Guardia, like Mamdani, cultivated a reputation as a radical. In Congress, where he served before running for mayor, he opposed the sweeping immigration restrictions of 1924, which he denounced for their “fixed obsession on Anglo-Saxon superiority”; sponsored the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, which protected certain rights to unionize and picket; and called for progressive taxation (“Soak the rich!”). All of this led much of the city’s business leadership to oppose his run for mayor in 1933. In various New York Times articles about the race, La Guardia’s opponents claimed that he would back “every radical and socialistic nostrum,” and that he was “a Communist at heart, an irresponsible and dangerous radical” who would refuse to use the police to restrain his “comrades.” A subtext of the race was the idea that La Guardia, as an Italian, represented the disorderly lower classes of the city—often imagined, only a few years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, to be connected to anarchist circles.

But the political rot in New York’s Democratic machine ultimately facilitated La Guardia’s path to victory. The mayor who preceded him—Jimmy Walker, a high-living singer and nightlife devotee better known as Beau James—was compelled by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to resign following a judicial investigation that revealed widespread corruption. The Great Depression had almost bankrupted the city, which turned over financial control to major banks to get funds for basic needs and economic relief. Tammany Hall ran a nondescript hack to replace Walker, but New York’s elite reformers settled on La Guardia as their candidate, backing him on a third-party ballot line bolstered by Republican support. In response, business leaders—who opposed Tammany due to its rampant waste but did not want union-friendly La Guardia in charge of New York—worked with the Roosevelt-backed wing of the Democratic Party to run a third candidate as another independent, a former party leader who came out of political retirement to warn that La Guardia would bend to the “importunities of the mob.”

La Guardia, who raised less money than either of his major adversaries, nonetheless trounced the opposition, largely by mobilizing the new immigrant population of the city. Millions of Eastern European Jews and southern Italians had flooded into New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but were shut out of city politics as Tammany Hall remained almost entirely Irish. With La Guardia as a candidate, the “lodges, churches, trade unions, businesses, neighborhoods, athletic teams, and extended families” of Italian New York transformed into “campaign machinery,” as historian Arthur Mann put it. (“When you used to give those boxes of spaghetti to my poor children…[you never thought] it would be a trump card for you,” one campaign worker wrote.) La Guardia appealed not only to Italians who identified with him, but allied himself with immigrants more generally. He spoke Spanish, Yiddish, and Italian among other languages, having worked as a translator on Ellis Island while attending law school at night at NYU; he identified himself with the cause of the newcomer, the new American. At the same time, he spoke to the reforming middle classes of the city, who were tired of the tent cities and Hoovervilles that were spreading throughout the city. Turnout in wealthier city neighborhoods was especially high in the 1933 mayoral race, and much of this went to La Guardia.

Finally, La Guardia marshaled the protest politics of the early 1930s—the unemployed marches, anti-eviction rallies, and overall vigorous left-wing scene that included rival Socialist and Communist wings—and turned it toward electoral ends. He spoke of “wresting control” from the political bosses and making the city “a great big, beautiful, kind New York.” The labor movement intensified in the city over the 1930s, expanding from its base in skilled trades and the garment industry to include transit workers, teachers, department store workers, elevator operators, restaurant workers, and even the maintenance staff at Columbia University. These constituencies—sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct—rallied behind La Guardia’s idea of a city that, as he put it in a campaign speech during an earlier mayoral run, would “provide more music and beauty for the people, more parks and more light and air and all the things the framers of the constitution meant when they put in that phrase ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”

All these are instructive points of comparison to Mamdani. Over the past 50 years, New York City has been remade by immigrant communities from around the world: the Middle East; Latin America; the West Indies; all across Asia and Africa. Those communities are now under siege, but even before Trump’s recent onslaught, they have gone largely unrepresented in city politics. At the same time, Mamdani draws on the reforming traditions of the city and its long history of support for social welfare. Calling for social order can mean sweeping people off the street through aggressive policing; it can also mean, in Mamdani’s case, creating a society in which people are not forced to live on the street to begin with.

Mamdani’s campaign, like La Guardia’s, has emerged out of a period of public upheaval in New York City and across the country. The last few months have seen massive marches protesting the Trump administration; the last two years, countless demonstrations against the war on Gaza. Although in many ways the city’s labor movement remains more quiescent than it should be, the Amazon union election victory on Staten Island, the Starbucks organizing drive, the academic labor movement, and organizing campaigns at quirky retail outlets (the Strand, gaming stores, REI) have all provided a jolt of energy. Meanwhile, the revival of the Democratic Socialists of America—which over the past seven years helped get Mamdani and five other socialists into the state legislature, and more recently played a pivotal role in Mamdani’s primary campaign —has provided a steady organizing presence. All this has created a political culture in which today’s Democratic establishment—which, as in Tammany days, expects a supine working class easily bought off with symbols and favors—cannot run the city, or even its own party, unchallenged.

Once La Guardia took office in 1934, he embarked on a remarkable expansion of the city’s physical and social infrastructure, building schools, zoos, playgrounds, health centers, highways, tunnels, an airport, City Center, and the glorious swimming pools that help New Yorkers cool down in the summers even today. He quickly moved to establish the New York City Housing Authority, the first public housing authority in the country, which would come to build and administer thousands of units of low-income housing. La Guardia pressed for more public relief, rent control, low-cost transit, and efficient, effective public services available to all; he passed a 2% sales tax increase to give the city more room to maneuver financially. He modernized and professionalized the city’s civil service, opening it to the children of immigrants who had previously been shut out—the Italian and Jewish “Depression geniuses,” as they would later become known.

All of this was intrinsically linked to his love of the city itself and his ability to tap into its frenetic energy, showing up at a fire here, a concert there, a relief office the day after. As historian Mason Williams has shown in his 2013 book City of Ambition, this ubiquitous presence, along with the public works he sponsored, helped La Guardia expand his base, in particular mobilizing working-class Black and Jewish voters, and in 1937 he won re-election with a resounding majority. Mamdani’s well-publicized social media efforts—diving into the ocean at Coney Island, walking the length of Manhattan, popping up in Morningside Heights to denounce the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil—have demonstrated the continued power of such efforts, which in the 1930s as today create the effect of a public servant channeling or even becoming the city.

Yet there was another aspect to La Guardia’s success: his ability to present himself to many audiences as not being a radical at all. While he galvanized the city’s immigrant working class, La Guardia also tapped into support from some wealthier New Yorkers, which grew out of their mutual disdain for the dense neighborhood loyalties, personal favors, bribes, and patronage on which the Democratic machine relied to stay in power. He was a familiar type in city politics: a good-government politician, bent on reform and on transparent governance. In a 1936 interview with the Times, he said that he sought to run the city in a “business-like way.” One of the first things he did in office was move to balance the city budget and restore the conditions for New York to issue bonds. The crusade against political corruption also became a campaign to create a more orderly, virtuous city by restraining nightlife, breaking up gambling rings, arresting prostitutes, and policing poor people.

Some of La Guardia’s calls for order were benign enough. He sought to clean up the pushcarts that crowded the narrow streets of the Lower East Side and East Harlem by reducing their permits and redirecting vendors to his public “indoor markets” (an idea that bears some similarity to Mamdani’s call for city-owned grocery stores). Others, though, reflect the uglier side of New-Deal-era New York. His public housing authority was racially segregated—as one of its early leaders told Harlem activists, the city believed white tenants would refuse to live in integrated projects—and it took two riots in Harlem, in 1935 and 1942, for him to begin to pay attention to the distinct problems of Black New Yorkers. (In a telling false start after the first of these riots, he put together a commission of Black and white social scientists to study the causes of distress leading up to it—and then refused to release the report, deeming it inflammatory.) Historian Emily Brooks has shown how La Guardia emphasized “morals policing” of crimes such as disorderly conduct, gambling, and sex work, using tactics that fell most harshly on the city’s Black and Puerto Rican population. And at the outbreak of World War II, La Guardia moved quickly to detain Japanese immigrants and even Japanese-Americans, turning Ellis Island into a detention camp. Yet even despite his ability to appeal to affluent New Yorkers with his law-and-order sensibility, La Guardia never did establish a local tax base capable of financing the generous local government he created, which caused serious problems after federal funding slowed—and ultimately helped lead to the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

La Guardia, then, represents both the high point of New York’s 20th-century liberalism and its limits—and understanding these internal contradictions also helps us see more clearly the challenges confronting Mamdani today. Mamdani cannot draw in city elites by leading the charge against a corrupt political machine. The mainstream Democratic Party still in some ways functions like a political machine of old: It manages to mobilize and deliver working-class votes without doing anything substantive for the working population of the city. But it is still very different from the Tammany Hall of the early 20th century, which used public funds to buy patronage and favors; today’s Democratic Party, by contrast, has been more fully captured by business interests as a whole—which thus have little incentive to join a crusade against the establishment. And when it comes to social disorder, not only would Mamdani himself reject a strategy based on promising to enforce order via intrusive policing as morally wrong; politically, his supporters would reject this turn, even if he wanted to make it. What’s more, Mamdani’s opponents— particularly those outside New York who want nothing more than to punish the city for its political transgressions—have little incentive to compromise with him; at least right now, he is worth far more to them as an enemy than a potential ally.

Imagining a Mamdani mayoralty, then, means imagining a politically mobilized city that can push for real social change without needing permission from elites—a city in which the balance of forces has shifted so that an investment in public services comes to seem like common sense. This might seem implausible, but given the intense economic pressure of life in New York today for everyone who is not extremely rich, might it be possible to convince small business owners, middle-class professionals, and homeowners to see themselves in solidarity with immigrants, union members, renters, poor people, and the legions of people working in the city’s service sector? Just as La Guardia mobilized against the “bosses,” could Mamdani build an emergent coalition to challenge the vast power of concentrated wealth?

In terms of policy, if he is able to marshal sufficient political support within the city, there is in fact much that Mamdani could in principle do on the local level to raise money to cover free buses and even universal childcare. Freezing the rent, for its part, takes political backbone, but it likewise does not necessitate funding from the state or federal governments (though constructing new low-cost housing probably would). New revenue streams can be found by taxing the wealthiest New Yorkers, yes, but also by hiring new auditors to bring in unpaid taxes that are due already, ending rental assistance for charter schools, allowing certain tax abatements to expire, or raising the “mansion tax” for the most expensive apartments. As far as experience goes, Mamdani, should he win, would be able to draw on the knowledge and ability of longtime leaders in the city—starting with city comptroller Brad Lander, a Democratic primary rival who became one of his most public and enthusiastic supporters—who might be able to help him negotiate the complexities of governing New York.

But to realize his most ambitious proposals, Mamdani clearly would need support in Albany—since most changes to the tax code must be passed at the state level—and in the end, he would have to confront the federal government. To do this, to take on Trump, he would thus need to make the case that his politics can provide a way forward for the Democrats outside New York City as well as within. But here, too, history is helpful. The Democrats were a divided party in the 1930s, split between the immigrant working classes represented by the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the one-party “Solid South” based on Jim Crow and disenfranchisement of Black voters. La Guardia’s success in New York helped to strengthen the former—and the party ultimately recomposed itself in a way that pushed out Southern segregationists altogether. It is anybody’s guess whether the leadership of today’s Democratic Party will be able to recognize, in Mamdani’s vision of an egalitarian, culturally rich, diverse, and affordable New York City, a way forward for the country, a rejection of the privatized excess and loony sociobiology offered by Trump and his ilk. But they should, and if they do, perhaps in time the national situation might become less bleak than it is today.

Kim Phillips-Fein is a professor of history at Columbia University. She is the author of Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan, 2017).

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/lessons-from-la-guardia at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

FICTION | 16 JUL 2025, 3:43 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 AUG 2025, 9:33 PM UTC

Two Empty Rooms

“A real live Jewish woman! She used to live here.”

Edith Bruck Translated from the Italian by Jeanne Bonner

A Hungarian village street, 1956.

Dave Bagnall Collection / Alamy

In her 1999 memoir Signora Auschwitz, survivor Edith Bruck likens living with the memory of the Holocaust to “an interminable pregnancy” in which she’s forced to carry a “monster” that can never be expelled. Her body of work reckoning with this experience constitutes, in the words of her friend Primo Levi, an “unforgettable testimony of her descent into the underworld.” Born Edith Steinschreiber in the Hungarian village of Tiszabercel in 1931, she was sent with her family to Auschwitz at the age of 13, and later transferred to a series of camps; the Nazis murdered her parents and one of her brothers. After the war, she wandered widely—first back to Hungary, then to Czechoslovakia and Israel, where she married an acquaintance with the surname Bruck to defer her military service—until 1954, when she settled in Rome and began writing in Italian. According to scholar Philip Balma, this newly adopted tongue became a “shield that would allow her to dive back into her painful past without directly reliving the suffering.” In 1959, she published the memoir Chi Ti Ama Così (Who Loves You Like This), the first of roughly two dozen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to date; some scholars have called her the most prolific writer of the Holocaust in the Italian language.

While many of Bruck’s narratives plumb the horrors of the Nazi genocide itself, others explore the often absurd reality of survival—what Levi, in his preface to her 1974 short story collection Due Stanze Vuote (Two Empty Rooms), calls “an uprooting that can’t be remedied.” The titular tale, excerpted below, follows a Holocaust survivor’s postwar return to her native village. Bruck’s rendering of this moment is stunningly unsentimental; as Levi writes, “nothing here is idealized, nothing is simplified.” While the protagonist joyfully reunites with friends who feared her dead, she also confronts a chorus of sheepish acquaintances and strangers seeking absolution for their failure to help her family. The townspeople’s unsettling reactions—“Things turned out well for you, in any case,” says one; “Is the story about the death camps real?” ask others—highlight the impossibility of easy redemption or repair.

In Italy, the 94-year-old Bruck is a living legend, mentioned in the same breath as Levi, and a prominent public voice on issues relating to the Holocaust, Italian Jewry, and Israel. (Most recently, she condemned the EU for failing to intervene in the war on Gaza, attributing this inaction to historical guilt.) Yet despite her stature—and the fact that many critics and scholars consider the story “This Darkness Will Never End,” from her debut collection, to be an inspiration for Robert Benigni’s Oscar-winning film Life Is Beautiful—she is virtually unknown in the anglophone world. Indeed, only four of her many books have appeared in English, including my own translation of that first story collection, out this past spring (my translation of the collection Two Empty Rooms is currently unpublished). The ignorance of her work is part of a broader neglect of women’s stories of survival—an inattention that her devoted translators aim to help correct.

– Jeanne Bonner

The dark vehicle slowly made its way down the dusty road. The driver charged with following the young woman’s directions obeyed her—sometimes with a doubtful air, other times with distaste—as she gestured hesitantly and with confusion while describing their approach to an almost fairy tale-like village. The two men seated in the rear, Marco and Kalman, wore a particular expression, one shaded with love, protectiveness, pity, and concerted calm, as if to guide the woman to be more rational and take a more thoughtful approach, since no one knew that part of the country except her.

“So, my sweet little Judith,” the driver said, “where is your house? We don’t have much time to lose. Please tell me your last name and we’ll ask someone for directions.” He leaned out the window, searching for someone.

“Turn back,” an old farmer told them. “The house you’re looking for is that one with the new hedge.”

“So it was that one!” Judith shouted. “How could it be my house? I remember it being bigger. Everything seems diminished.”

“Everything is the way it was before,” Marco said. “It’s you who have grown. Stay strong.”

“There’s a limit even to desperation,” Judith replied. “I’ll only reach this limit today.”

She opened the passenger door then, as the car inched forward, and jumped out, immediately followed by a group of ten stunned people who were intrigued by the strange visit to the village. Wordlessly, they watched the elegant lady as she raced toward the tiny house where 20 years ago the large family of Schreiber the Jew had lived. Behind the hedge, an enormous German shepherd got ready to jump up on the visitor with the unfamiliar smell. The driver grabbed Judith firmly and steered her back into the car.

“The dog won’t let me enter the house,” Judith shouted. “The house, my house! No one’s there. The windows are shut, the glass covered in black paper like before. I want to go inside. Let me go inside for a moment!”

“No one’s home,” an old peasant woman said. “What do you want? Are the gentlemen looking for someone? Everyone’s in the fields.”

“Do you know who lived in this house 20 years ago?” Judith asked, shaken.

Fearful, the woman replied, “I don’t know anything. I don’t remember anything. I didn’t know those people.”

“Don’t you recognize me?”

“Oh!” the woman cried out as she made the sign of the cross. “You look like your mother! But you’re not your mother.” She drew back, as though she’d seen a ghost.

Turning, the old woman shouted to a group of people, “Come here! It’s one of the Schreiber girls.”

The dog quieted down, like the people, whose numbers swelled around Judith until, within a few seconds, she found herself surrounded. Country folk emerged from every house and corner. Some remained behind the hedge like back on that final foggy dawn.

Some of the children broke away from the group and ran to spread the big news. “There’s a Jewish woman from the village,” a little girl was shouting. “A real live Jewish woman! She used to live here. Her name is Judith!”

The news spread to the fields, where farmers interrupted their work to see the Schreiber girl, daughter of the poor Jewish man.

“Who are you?” asked a stout, old woman who was panting. “Oh, don’t tell me—I’ll have to guess which of the many Schreiber children you are. Oh, my saintly child, my precious one, you’re the one who would come to my house to get milk. I recognize the eyes that followed me around the barn and watched as I washed my hands, making sure when I poured out the milk that I didn’t mix in any water. Your mother, may she rest in peace, was also suspicious of me.”

Another plump woman had in the meantime elbowed her way through the small crowd. “Do you recognize me?” the woman went on, as her flushed face neared Judith’s pale one. “It’s good we can find each other alive again after all these years. So do you know who I am?”

“Yes, I think so. You’re Mrs. Koloni. I am the youngest of the Schreiber girls—the one who would come for the milk.”

“Judith!” they all yelled in unison. “It’s Judith! It’s really her. She didn’t die. She’s here. Come! It’s the Schreiber girl. Let us give you a kiss. Let us touch you, blessed daughter.”

“Light of my life, my beloved one. Do you know who I am? I’m Ilonka’s mother. She was your classmate, your best friend. Come, my child, come to our house. Come—you came back for us, no? Who else was a greater friend to you? Hurry, hurry, our house is your house, just like before. There’s nothing you can scold us for, isn’t that right, beloved child? I’m talking to you like a mother so listen to me. Come to our house—we deserve a visit more than everyone else.”

A younger woman shouted at her, “I thought you were dead!”

A path was forced open to get closer to Judith, who stood in the center of the crowd of people. By then, she was sobbing and laughing in the same breath, and even the peasant women began to cry.

“May I give you a kiss?” the young woman asked. “I’m Marta and I was a friend of your older sister. You’re still beautiful like no time has passed while I—we—compared to you, we’re old.”

A wrinkled, toothless peasant woman made her way to the front, trembling all over. “I’m Mrs. Kardos.”

“I know who you all are. I recognize many of you. You, ma’am, you’re Mrs. Nemeth,” Judith said, pointing at a woman who withdrew as though she didn’t want to be recognized. “And you’re Sandor. You—you’re Bela.”

The two men she had named shook her hand. “So you’re alive,” said one.

“As you can see.”

The other man was silent, looking down at the ground.

“Let me go, let me go,” shouted a new arrival who had tucked under her arm a bloody goose, carried by its broken neck. Her face blood-spattered, the woman asked, “Do you recognize me, child? This goose is for you. I slaughtered it for your dinner. I believe you are no longer religious and will eat with us.”

Judith was surprised that she didn’t recognize the woman offering her the goose.

“Now, listen. You can’t be angry with me!” the woman said. “I wasn’t very close to your family but I also wasn’t against you. I was wanting to have you over for dinner since I may be happier than many others to see you alive. My daughter, Eta, was friends with your sister, Eva.”

“Let me touch you,” said a voice, “it’ll bring good luck.”

“Ah yes, you’re Mrs. Kantor!” Judith shouted happily, as she kissed her. The woman was relieved, as if freed from a baseless accusation.

Judith’s head was spinning, and her eyes were burning.

“What about your mother?” another peasant woman asked. “Is it true that you’re all safe and sound in America? Grunberg’s son is in America and one of the Reis children, too. We’ve been told they are doing well for themselves. You’re all really impressive. Fire can’t even burn you and just like cats, you always land on your feet!”

“What are you saying?” exclaimed Judith sharply, with a defiant tone. Shouting, she continued, “Only one of the 11 Reis siblings survived. My parents and my brother were burnt alive! The Grunbergs never made it back and you talk about them doing well for themselves?”

“I knew it,” said another old woman tearfully. “I was very fond of them. They were my neighbors. They were my Jews.”

“Let me touch you,” said a voice, “it’ll bring good luck.”

A little girl with dark braids said, “I’m Dobai’s daughter.”

“Come here so I can hug you. Where is your mother? How is everyone? What about your father? And your brother? Did you know when he was a little boy he used to spit on me? Your mother would cry out in distress.”

Someone was heard to say, “Around here, they say you live in America. Lucky you.”

“I slaughtered a hen,” someone else in the crowd said. “I’d like to have you over for dinner.”

“Let me through,” stammered an old woman dressed all in black. “Here are four eggs for you.” She held out something wrapped in newspaper. “How hungry you were before you were taken away and I never gave you anything unless it was on loan. Wretched me. My conscience has been eating away at me ever since. Take these, and free me from my sin. I am old and I will die soon. I don’t want to stand before God with this remorse. Now I’ve been given grace and I can make amends. Accept this, please—I beg of you. All of us are poor now so at the very least, let me die in peace. Please say something—don’t look at me this way.”

“I don’t need it, Mrs. Gal,” Judith replied coolly. She had recognized the miserly woman whose husband was more respectful and sympathetic.

“You can’t refuse,” the woman persisted, wailing. “We have all sinned. All of us!”

“Of course,” Judith replied, accepting the package proffered by the unsteady hand. Then, with a kinder tone, “And what about your husband?”

“He’s over there, watching you,” the old woman replied, her face glowing. “I don’t think you’ll recognize him, poor thing.”

Judith called out to the driver and had him bring one of the two shopping bags full of gifts.

“I have some tobacco,” Judith said. “You used to smoke a pipe, isn’t that right?”

The old man was moved, and he mumbled something, his eyes sharp and alive for a moment. The villagers guffawed like children as they enjoyed the greeting between the young woman and the old man.

A woman with a limp approached Judith so she could touch her, and from behind, the others pushed closer so they could feel her with their own hands, as if her presence alone couldn’t confirm she’d survived.

Judith leaned against Marco. More than ever, she needed to feel Marco; it was no longer enough knowing he was there. She needed to touch him, to lean on him lightly but completely, in an effort to resist the astonishment she had provoked.

“You’re really alive,” said a woman who stroked her arm at length, before adding, “But your coat is made of fine fabric. You . . . and yours managed all right.”

“And what a beautiful blouse!” another voice said. “It’s made of silk. Show us how it was made, and open your coat. Oh, and your bag—it’s made of real leather.”

Another woman shouted, “I would never have thought one of Schreiber’s daughters would become a real lady.”

“When they took you away, I thought, Finally I won’t see them suffering anymore.”

“You’re simple but elegant,” said a woman wearing a clear rain slicker. “Your family always paid attention to appearances. I remember you wore a pale blue, pleated skirt and a red blouse at the end of the school year in 1942. I had to look for the same fabric for weeks because my daughter wanted to look like you. Do you recognize me? My husband was a gendarme—a person with power back then. Now I’m widowed. I never wished bad luck on you. You always made me feel great pity, and when they took you away, I thought, Finally I won’t see them suffering anymore.” She went on, “My husband wasn’t cruel, he just wanted to get ahead in work, and wearing a uniform, he felt like someone.”

“I’m not here to accuse you,” Judith stammered.

“Things turned out well for you, in any case,” she continued. “If you had stayed here, you wouldn’t have traveled the world.”

“You wouldn’t have beautiful clothes,” said another woman, jumping up.

“You’d be ignorant like us,” a third woman said.

“I see,” Judith replied meekly. “Things turned out well for me, in any case.” Then she shouted, “But how is it that everyone is alive? The old, the young, the good, the wicked, everyone? The luck is in living, not dying.”

“Thank God,” came the reply. “We only lost a few people. But the village now is all old people. The young people left for the city. They’re going to university or are working. This regime is doing something right, you have to admit.”

“But tell the truth,” they persisted, “is the story about the death camps real?”

“Ask your children,” Judith replied. “They’ve studied.”

“Not on your life,” they responded. “They don’t trust us, and they know nothing about the war. They’ve become part of the bourgeoisie like you! They criticize us and don’t give us the respect we deserve.”

“Oh my Lord,” said a woman who was running toward the crowd. “It’s a miracle! A miracle. I thought you were dead. Hold me tight. I want to know if your blood is warm!”

The woman who had just arrived was overly excited, laughing and crying chaotically. Judith looked at the people before her one by one: men and women dressed in black as if in mourning, their faces toothless and weathered. The circle widened, with young people who were Judith’s age but appeared much older. She called them by name, wanting to be sure they were in fact her old playmates. But the young ones who seemed to be 10 years older than her were standoffish even when Judith extended her hand and showed she was happy to see them. She didn’t know how to interpret their strange behavior, stiff and ashamed. She felt their calloused hands and analyzed their dazed faces, and the distance they immediately imposed so they could stand behind the hedge with vacant expressions. Perhaps they would have preferred she visit on a holiday when they would look fresher and be dressed up.

“Is the doctor still alive? And Batak, the schoolmaster?” Judith was speaking quickly to rid herself of questions, almost as though she didn’t even want responses.

“They’re alive,” said one of the country women, “and they are doing well. Batak’s son is an engineer in Debrecen. It’s a shame he’s not here. He went to university and could better converse with you. The doctor’s son is old now and a doctor, like his father.”

“But as a child, the son was also a bastard,” she replied quietly, as if disappointed they were still alive.

Stunned, a woman asked, “What are you saying?”

“Oh nothing,” Judith said, sensing they didn’t understand the reason for her bitterness. “Here’s Uncle Imre,” she shouted, suddenly radiant, and she ran to embrace him.

They held each other at length, shattered by tears.

“Don’t stand here in the middle of the street,” Uncle Imre said. “They’re all waiting for you. My home is your home, too, as always. Enough with all the talk. Let’s get going—don’t torment yourself. You’re trembling! Are you cold? Hungry? Come now, let’s go. Even if you’re grown up now, I can talk to you like a father. I was a true friend, you know, to poor Schreiber.”

“Leave her alone,” the stout, panting woman began again. “Don’t you obey him, too. Everything is just swell for him because his son is a professor. He was your classmate. He teaches Marxism or Leninism or whatever the hell they call their new religion. He kept his land on account of his son. The shotgun he uses to threaten people who approach his house is also his. My dear, some outrageous things have happened here!”

“Dinner is ready,” said a woman who lived next to Judith’s childhood home. “I’ll be offended for the rest of my life if you don’t eat at my house.”

“She would have been offended at one time if I did eat there,” Judith said to Marco in Italian.

“She even speaks foreign,” a peasant woman marveled. “Say something in a foreign tongue, won’t you? Maybe you could even sing a song. You had a beautiful voice as a child.”

“We get the radio,” said the woman in the raincoat. “We can even hear Italy!”

Judith didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“I have a dessert in the oven,” a second woman announced.

“They’re going to eat at my house,” the first woman said.

“And at my house after that.”

“And then at my house,” said a third woman.

Uncle Imre waited in silence until Judith was free to follow him.

“I made chicken paprika and a dessert with jam,” said Judith’s neighbor.

“We also made chicken paprika,” Uncle Imre said, “with dumplings, which Judith likes very much.”

Annoyed, the women replied, “We all made dumplings.”

A thin man arrived on a bike while they argued in the middle of the street, still prodding Judith and kissing her and undressing her.

“It’s him,” the villagers shouted.

The thin man stopped suddenly. “What do you want?” he asked suspiciously.

“It’s him, it’s him,” they repeated. “He’s the one who lives in your family’s house.”

“I’m not from here,” said the man, timidly approaching Judith. “I bought the house, ma’am. No one gave it to me. What do they want with me? I didn’t steal anything from anyone!”

“Would you let me in for a moment?” Judith asked, her face pale and tense.

“If it means something to you,” he said indifferently. “It’s a mess, though. I haven’t finished it yet. I’ve only lived in the village for two years. I’ll hold back the dog while you go inside. Please come in.”

Leaning on Marco, Judith moved toward the house, followed by 30 people, including Kalman and the driver.

In the dark, the village appeared even more desolate. To save money, the villagers didn’t turn on the oil lamps or other lights in their homes. They were used to it, sometimes even eating their dinner in the dark.

Judith stepped into the kitchen, her knees buckling. For her, it was like entering . . . a funeral chapel? A shrine? A fortress? A beloved place, with beautiful and ghastly memories? She knew every corner, every inch of the dirt floor. She knew the walls, the door, and the wooden column in the middle of the kitchen holding up a part of the roof that caved in after the house was built with the help of nomads. Inside, there was nothing but a bed, a table, and a stove.

“This is our lamp,” she shouted desperately, as if spotting an island after a shipwreck.

“All the houses are full of oil lamps,” Marco said to her. “It’s not necessarily your old one. Let’s go now, cara. Lean on me.”

“The poor dear,” the country women called out, in tears.

Judith clung to the column, as if she couldn’t or wouldn’t ever move again. She held tight to the wooden shaft, searching with her fingers for something mysterious.

“Here’s Mama,” Judith stammered. “Here’s Daddy. Here are my sisters, my brothers.” She was stroking the names carved into the wood. “My mother didn’t want us to carve our names,” she told Marco. “She always said it was bad luck, a tombstone’s inscription. Here’s the date: 1943. Exactly 20 years ago.”

“Come outside,” Marco begged her, but Judith didn’t move.

She stood, rooted to the earth, her lips murmuring something incomprehensible. Maybe she was speaking to the ghosts of the past. She was calling them and saying a prayer for them for the first time in 20 years. She’d lost it all there, not somewhere else. The grave couldn’t be anywhere else, and she wouldn’t search for it anywhere else, as if her parents were buried there beneath those meager square feet of dirt floor. She had learned between those walls how to love, how to suffer, how to rejoice, and how to fear death. Happy memories and sorrowful ones were bound together in that place. What happened afterwards was too different, too inhumane, too unbelievable to constitute the same lifetime.

She moved slowly toward the other room, the only one there besides the kitchen. It was empty. On the windows was the dark paper that they’d left behind 20 years before. From the ceiling hung a black uniform that was swinging through the air in the half-light like a hanged man. Judith covered her face with her hands.

Her eyes shut, she turned around and shouted, “Let’s go quickly.”

She began running with new strength, an iron will on her face, as if her very life were in danger and she couldn’t spend another minute in that darkened house.

Her closest childhood friend arrived by surprise and she managed to distract her, even managing to make her laugh by recalling their childhood.

“Do you remember the diarrhea from the plums?” Gisella asked her. “Just today I was making jam and I took it off the stove to run over here. Are you married? Do you have children?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Judith said. “What about you?”

“I have two. My husband works in a shoe store because we now have a shoe store. What do you think about that? We’ve made progress!”

“Gisella’s husband is a spy,” an old woman said. “He once filed a complaint about people who were going to church.”

“It’s like before,” Gisella said, paying no mind to her. “We’re still nasty and ignorant. Lucky you—you’re not condemned to live here. Don’t listen to their idle chatter—they’re evil. That’s why they pray so much! Don’t think going to church is forbidden. My girls were baptized and they go to church regularly.”

“This blouse is for your older daughter,” Judith said, interrupting her chatty friend.

“Wonderful! She’ll wear it for her communion. My Judith is a fine little lady. If you could see how tall she is!”

“Judith who?”

“I baptized them that way as a means of remembering you . . . Forgive me, you all have such beautiful names, unlike us. The village is full of Jewish names.”

“My daughter is named Judith,” Gisella said. “I named the other one Eva after your older sister. I baptized them that way as a means of remembering you . . . Forgive me, you all have such beautiful names, unlike us. The village is full of Jewish names, I mean names that you and yours would choose. I did it out of affection; my daughter reminds me of my best friend. Do you see?”

“Of course,” Judith said, absent-mindedly. “The handkerchief is for you. This other blouse is for your mother and these gloves are for Eva.”

A peasant woman reached for the gift that Judith was removing from the trunk. “I have a daughter who is the same age as Eva—her name is Flora,” she said.

Judith was so surrounded by people that she couldn’t breathe. Everyone was recalling moments that in some way involved her.

“I hid your father from the police,” one man said.

“Here’s a tie,” Judith replied.

“I didn’t say it to get something,” the man protested.

“Nor do I give it to you for that reason. It’s a memento, nothing more. There are deeds that can never be repaid.”

The voice of an old woman was heard to say, “I gave you some milk right up to the end when the others refused to sell you food.”

“Exactly,” Judith replied automatically. “I remembered you by bringing you a pair of woolen tights that you will like.”

She continued to give out gifts while at the same time receiving whole chickens fried, desserts, watermelon, pears, apples, pillow shams, and two hand sewn aprons. She emptied the trunk and refilled it with hot dishes.

The crowd was following her toward Mrs. Porosi’s house, which was attached on one side to hers. Motionless, Mrs. Porosi’s elderly father stared with glassy eyes at the unexpected visitor.

“My dear Mr. Porosi,” Judith said, leaning down to kiss the old man. “I brought you a stately tie. Do you know who I am?”

“He’s like a child now,” his daughter interjected. “Please come in. The table is already set,” adding, “Bring me two more glasses.”

They were gathering as if for a performance in the Porosis’ single room, and while the guests struggled to swallow chicken and dumplings, the others looked on in silence or told stories from Judith’s childhood.

There were pregnant women, children, and old ladies.

“Eat, blessed child,” said Mrs. Porosi as she cried profusely and blew her nose on the corner of her apron.

Kalman and the driver were eating with gusto while Marco searched his plate with a stunned look. Judith was forcing herself to swallow something so as not to offend the lady of the house.

When the wary children sat down beside her to get a slice of cake, Judith was happy to pass out everything she had piled on her plate.

“Let her eat,” Mrs. Porosi kept shouting. “They are my son Bela’s children. Do you remember him?”

“Oh really?” she said, surprised. It was only then that she thought of Mrs. Porosi’s four children whom she had been friendly with, especially the youngest two: Antal and Bela.

“This is my daughter-in-law,” she said, pointing to a stout pregnant woman.

Judith offered her a flower-patterned handkerchief. “Your husband Bela was a close friend of my brother who’s no longer alive. They were the same age.”

The woman snatched the handkerchief as if fearful Judith would forget to give her the gift as she reminisced.

“You don’t have anything for children, ma’am?” the daughter-in-law asked, reddening.

“Disgraceful,” her mother-in-law said. Shooting the woman a dirty look, she added, “Do you like the dumplings? I know Judith likes them but perhaps they don’t appeal to you gentlemen. When have you ever seen such a mountain of meat on your plate? To think, you often came over to complain that your mother never gave you more than a wing! The poor dear, she had to divide a meager hen into 20 portions. Isn’t that right, Judith? But eat up now, my dear daughter. Eat all of it and you will remember me!”

“Don’t talk about the past,” a woman interrupted. “Don’t you see how she’s dressed? She wants for nothing. They moved on, with better lives than us while we stayed poor. Not as poor but still poor. The rich aren’t as rich but they’re still rich and that’s the truth. After the war, all they did was take away and redistribute land and shuffle and reshuffle. You still have rich and poor people!”

“What kind of talk is this?” said Uncle Imre, who was still patiently waiting for Judith to follow him after dinner. He understood Judith could not offend anyone. Then he added, “Maybe I should go.”

“No, wait for me, Uncle Imre.”

“I’ll be waiting for you at home. Do you remember where we live?”

“I remember and I’ll meet you there shortly.”

“We need to leave soon,” the driver said. “It’s already night.”

“I have to visit the Dobais, Gisella, and Uncle Imre, and then we can be off.”

“My poor thing. So many stops you still need to make. You’re pale, your eyes are red,” Mrs. Porosi said. “You’re like Nemesy’s daughter. Do you remember that rich porker? You also worked his land—it wasn’t only us. And you worked it good; who would ever guess now that you touched a hoe with these snow-white hands! Now all of us have a small tract of land that we own. The rest, we work jointly for a fairly decent wage. We’ve got to admit it: The Russians have ushered in some advances. What do they say where you live about these programs?”

“There are still overlords,” yelled the pregnant daughter-in-law. The panting, chubby woman added, “I’ll tell you how things are. Do you perhaps have a handkerchief?”

“I still have some things in the bag.”

Mrs. Porosi raised her hand shyly to signal that she, too, wanted a handkerchief.

“Drink to the memory of your father who gladly drank,” the rotund woman said. “We won’t talk about politics if you don’t want to but your father was a socialist. There’s no reason to hide it now. Quite the opposite. The ones who used to think very differently now brag about it. I think, though, you Jews invented all kinds of things and this socialist communism is something you also invented.”

“Let her eat!” said Mrs. Porosi. “You mustn’t remind her of the dead and you mustn’t talk to her about politics. She is like my oldest son—she believes in social justice since she lives abroad! Things look better from afar, no?”

The old man came out of the kitchen to join the conversation. He was leaning on a knotty cane and dragged himself over with difficulty. “Seeing you will allow me to live longer,” he stammered.

“Oh stop it,” shouted his daughter. “You’ve been on your deathbed for 10 years. But you never die! Whenever he eats too much, he has me call the priest because he doesn’t feel well! His character has grown much worse and he alone keeps me busier than my four children.”

She’d become red with anger. She bent over Judith as if to confide a secret.

“If you knew,” she said under her breath, “that since they took you away, I can’t think of anything but your family’s house and you know why? It’s next to mine. I’d need only to get rid of the hedge. But believe it or not, I haven’t been able to scrape together the money to buy it yet. Don’t you think I have more of a right to live there than the others? At least I cared about your family. The new owners had lights installed and at my house, we don’t have electricity yet. And do you know why the yard is smaller? When they took you away, the neighbors moved the hedge, snatching a couple of meters on all sides. Back then, no one said anything. I took barely a meter, not even a meter. I was afraid.”

A new arrival said, “I kept merchandise for you in my house. Goods your father sold on the sly. My name is Zoli. Do you remember me?”

“Here’s a nice lighter,” said Judith. “It’s an excellent lighter—it will last the rest of your life.”

“I didn’t say—”

“It’s a memento.”

A woman wearing layers of colorful skirts said, “I want to give you a nice embroidered pillow. I never gave you anything, it’s true, and I have some of your linens. Nothing beyond your sister’s trousseau fell to us to take and I gave it to my daughter when she was about to get married. Here, I’ll give you this pillow with all my heart. Those were difficult times. If I didn’t do it, there were 10 others ready to do the same so nothing would have been left for you anyway.”

Judith took the pillow without replying to the woman with the layers of skirts. She could no longer distinguish names or faces, nor the heroes from the villains, and in the end, maybe the kindest ones were those who came by to say hello and bring her something to put their conscience at ease, to atone—with a chicken—for the years of hatred and humiliation.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.

If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you.

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Edith Bruck has written more than twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, many of which reflect her life-long commitment to Holocaust testimony, including Who Loves You Like This. Her books have been translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, and Hebrew. She lives in Rome.

Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor, and literary translator. Her translation of Edith Bruck’s The Darkness Will Never End was published this spring. Her essays and reporting have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, American Scholar, Longreads, Marketplace, NPR, and CNN.

This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/two-empty-rooms at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

ANALYSIS | 8 JUL 2025, 4:00 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 AUG 2025, 9:34 PM UTC

Auditing the Hindu American Foundation’s Claims of “Hinduphobia”

The group regularly misclassifies anti-Asian racism, anti-Muslim violence, and criticism of Hindu nationalism as anti-Hindu hate.

Mukta Joshi

Hindu Americans gather in Times Square to celebrate the consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, India, January 21st, 2024.

Photo by Mukta Joshi

On a summer evening in 2022, a group of Bengali-speaking Indian American women wrapped up dinner at a restaurant in Plano, Texas. They had just stepped into the parking lot to head back home when they were accosted by a non-Indian woman who began to verbally abuse them, mocking their accents and telling them to “go back to India,” saying, “We don’t want you here.” When the women told her to “get lost,” she began hitting one of them, shouting racist profanities. “Were you born here?” she can be heard asking one of the women in a video of the incident that went viral online. When asked in return, “How do you know we weren’t born here?” the harasser responded, “Because of the way you speak.”

Among the many reacting with outrage to this instance of harassment—which resulted in the perpetrator being charged with hate crimes—was the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), the largest and most vocal organization advocating for Hindus in the United States. The group posted a tweet denouncing the incident, and, notably, lumping it together with another viral occurrence from the same week, this time from Fremont, California. There, a Hindu man waiting in line at a Taco Bell was verbally abused by a fellow Indian American, who called him a “dirty ass fucking Hindu” and a “cow-piss drinker,” and taunted him about not eating beef. HAF wrote that the Plano and Fremont incidents represented the same “seething hatred,” both involving “racist & #Hinduphobic invectives.”

But some have objected to the events being rolled together under one blanket characterization. An immediate family member of one of the Bengali women, who asked to remain anonymous fearing retaliation from the Hindu right, told Jewish Currents that the Plano attack “wasn’t ‘Hinduphobia.’” Instead, the attack on the women targeted “the color of their skin, and the language they were speaking,” they said. The family member expressed concern that defining the incident as specifically anti-Hindu—rather than primarily about anti-Indian racism—could thwart efforts to prevent such harassment: “If the diagnosis is wrong, misguided, or politicized for an agenda, then the solution won’t be successful.”

HAF’s 2022 tweet was just one among scores of claims of “Hinduphobia” that right-wing Hindu American groups have made in recent years. According to a Jewish Currents review of HAF’s public communications, the group labelled more than 200 separate incidents as “Hinduphobic” or anti-Hindu in press releases, website text, and social media posts between 2019 to 2024. Of the flagged incidents, 161 took place in the United States, and 51 were in other countries, mostly Muslim-majority areas of South Asia. “Stop the bigotry. End #Hinduphobia,” HAF posted in December 2021, in response to widespread criticism of American Chargé d’Affaires Atul Keshap’s visit to the headquarters of a Hindu nationalist organization in India. In 2019, when New York Magazine published an article exploring the influence of a fringe, Hinduism-inspired new-age group on Tulsi Gabbard’s life, HAF tweeted a response post by a right-wing Hindu academic called “Today in Hinduphobia . . . New York Magazine’s Sly Attack on Hindus.” Dozens of other HAF communications followed this pattern, and other groups have joined in: The Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA), for example, began collating incidents of “hate and violence against Hindus” on their website in 2020, and a student-led group called Hindu on Campus set up a “Hinduphobia tracker” focused on campus incidents starting in 2021.

Over time, these groups’ attempts to raise the alarm about alleged Hinduphobia have translated into policy. In the past few years, HAF has promoted multiple successful resolutions recognizing Hinduphobia at city and state levels. Recently, Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) introduced House Resolution 1131, a first of its kind attempt to get the US Congress to recognize Hinduphobia. Speaking to Jewish Currents in February, Thanedar confirmed that he had engaged with HAF as well as CoHNA in generating the resolution. “I have been observant about the rise of hate against Hindus over the last couple decades,” he said. “That’s why I approached some of the Hindu groups, and we had a very meaningful discussion with their policy people. That resulted in me taking it upon myself to represent them as strongly as I can in the US Congress.”

However, even as HAF’s narrative around rising Hinduphobia has reached lawmakers, independent verification by Jewish Currents found that a full 75% of the 161 incidents that HAF has condemned as Hinduphobia in the United States did not meet the group’s own definition of the term. Twenty of the incidents involved criticisms of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva—the virulently anti-Muslim ideology that dominates Indian politics both in the subcontinent and diaspora—many of them by academics and journalists. An additional 12 allegations of Hinduphobia were leveled at activists aiming to ban caste discrimination in the US, a move that some diaspora Hindus, adherents of the caste supremacist ideology of Hindutva, brand as biased against Hinduism. Furthermore, while 93 incidents highlighted by HAF did appear to be unambiguously fueled by hateful and discriminatory attitudes, 36 of those featured hate directed not at a person’s religious identity but rather their race, immigrant status, or national origin. An additional 29 of the hateful incidents HAF presented as evidence of systemic Hinduphobia consisted of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab language, many occuring in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (Jewish Currents was unable to find more information about an additional 24 allegedly Hinduphobic incidents in the US that HAF has condemned. Despite the events still being mentioned on its website, HAF declined to provide sources, with spokesperson Mat McDermott writing: “We don’t have the staff resources to go back and do this research for you, about incidents, for some of them, [sic] are more than two decades ago.”)

According to the more than a dozen scholars, experts, and activists Jewish Currents spoke to for this story, HAF has political incentives to describe as many incidents as anti-Hindu as possible. For decades, the positions of the group’s founders have been aligned with Hindu nationalism. As such, HAF has consistently supported supremacist policies of Narendra Modi’s government in India, eventually earning a place on the Congressional Research Service’s list of Hindu nationalist groups operating in the United States in 2024. Pratik Sinha, co-founder and editor of the Indian fact-checking platform Alt News, told Jewish Currents that “the whole Hindu nationalist project is one of misrepresentation and misinformation,” and that groups like HAF create a narrative of Hindu victimhood in order to advance their politics.

Some experts trace this politics to the very definition of Hinduphobia that HAF has adopted. The group defines “Hinduphobia” as “a set of antagonistic, destructive, and derogatory attitudes towards Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism) and Hindus that may manifest as prejudice, fear or hatred.” But Rohit Chopra, a professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University whose research focuses on global Hindu nationalist and far-right online communities, pointed out that HAF’s “Hinduphobia glossary” of terms that supposedly connote anti-Hindu hate includes the words “Hindutvavadi,” which means Hindu nationalist, and “Brahmanism,” which refers to Brahmins, who dominate the caste hierarchy. “This definition of Hinduphobia is applied to silence criticisms of Hindu nationalism and Hindu nationalist policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Indian government, critiques of the caste system, and anti-caste measures,” he said. Chopra added that any sweeping definition that categorizes an “antagonistic attitude” towards a religious doctrine as hatred can, if used without nuance, “silence any and all criticism and critical discussion of” the religion in question.

HAF’s attempt to use hate crime allegations to advance right-wing politics has parallels with the work of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which “HAF has explicitly modeled itself on,” said journalist Azad Essa, author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel. Specifically, the ADL conflates the criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Jewish hate, and, as a result, the group regularly classifies an inflated number of incidents as antisemitic. The ADL’s antisemitism audits “strip out any ideological specificity and history to antisemitism so that it appears ubiquitous and everywhere,” said journalist and filmmaker Shane Burley, one of the authors of Jewish Currents’ 2024 examination of ADL’s antisemitism audit. Yet, he said, the ADL has succeeded in playing a large role in telling the Jewish community what it should feel threatened by and encouraging it to associate its Jewishness with Israel and Zionism. Essa agreed, adding that “both the ADL and HAF employ progressive political language to present themselves as intersectional and inclusive. But they are, in fact, organizations invested primarily in preserving the reputations of India and Israel.”

Experts say that the similarity between the ADL and HAF’s tactics speak to a broader right-wing strategy of weaponizing certain minority identities. “When there were criticisms about structures of exclusion and discrimination affecting Black people, Latinos, and other people of color, the right dismissed those concerns,” said Daniel HoSang, a professor of ethnicity, race, and migration at Yale University. Now, however, the multiracial right, which includes Jews and Hindus, is advancing narratives of anti-racism toward its own purposes, “taking advantage of a depleted media environment where allegations of antisemitism or Hinduphobia are no longer investigated,” HoSang said. The result of this appropriation, he noted, is a new defense of “hierarchical and authoritarian” practices, one framed “in the language of cultural autonomy, liberal multiculturalism—and even anti-racism.”

The multiracial right, which includes Jews and Hindus, is defending “hierarchical and authoritarian” practices “in the language of cultural autonomy, liberal multiculturalism—and even anti-racism.”

HAF’s Hinduphobia analysis begins with events that are more than a century old. On a webpage titled “A History of Hinduphobia in the United States,” which collects 91 of its 161 alleged anti-Hindu incidents in the US, HAF begins its list with the Naturalization Act of 1906, which restricted naturalized US citizenship only to “free white persons” and “persons of African nativity,” and then the Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented additional immigration from South Asia and the Middle East. But far from being specifically “Hinduphobic,” these laws, by HAF’s own admission, also impacted Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians from across Asia and the Middle East. Additionally, the laws were passed “under pressure from the Asiatic Exclusion League”—clearly motivated by general anti-Asian sentiment. “Race is the operative term, and was the basis of exclusion and all of that legislation,” HoSang said. Race also motivated the 1907 Bellingham riots, another early incident on HAF’s website. During these riots in Washington State, a mob of hundreds of white men, led by the Asiatic Exclusion League, violently attacked South Asian immigrants to try and exclude them from the labor force of local lumber mills. Most of the victims were Sikh, but local newspapers reported that “Hindus” were driven out, “because the term ‘Hindu’ historically operated as a shorthand for brown people,” HoSang said. It is a misnomer that HAF has capitalized on, claiming that all of these historical incidents are in fact “Hinduphobic.”

This pattern of characterizing general anti-Asian racism as “Hinduphobia” recurs nearly a dozen times throughout HAF’s allegations. The group counts a racist 2017 campaign mailer sent out around Edison, New Jersey in the Hinduphobia tally on its website, even though the mailer said nothing about Hindus and instead claimed Chinese and Indian populations were taking over local schools while calling to deport two minority school board candidates. In 2020, HAF similarly alleged that Covid-19 related conspiracy theories spread by white supremacist groups were “threats to Hindu Americans,” despite significant evidence that these forms of hate were directed at people of East Asian descent or towards racial minorities as a whole.

Even when incidents are targeted specifically at South Asians, HAF often misclassifies them as being religiously rather than racially motivated. For instance, in 2017, an Indian store owner was found dead outside of his Lancaster, South Carolina home, and it was revealed that the three people charged in his murder allegedly planned to “smash an Indian.” But HAF characterized this incident as Hinduphobic. More recently, in 2023, graffiti was seen in a public restroom in Wilson Park, California that talked about jobs being stolen by Indians. HAF accurately labeled the sentiment “xenophobic,” but also called this xenophobia “the conjoined twin of Hinduphobia” when it shared the incident on its social media. According to Pooja Chaudhuri, a researcher at the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group Bellingcat whose work has focused on misinformation in India, HAF’s continual peddling of such misleading claims create an environment in which it’s difficult to offer an alternate narrative. “When faced with a barrage of lies, a fact-check or correction has little power to change the mind of the average news consumer,” Chaudhuri said.

HAF’s tendency to obfuscate has been particularly notable in its misclassification of 29 explicitly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents as “Hinduphobia.” These incidents, often violent, involved a perpetrator shouting phrases such as “towelhead,” “terrorist,” “relatives of Osama Bin Laden” and “ISIS, get out of my country” at a Hindu or Indian person. Eighteen of these incidents took place in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. “9/11 led to the emergence of a new enemy, and a new target of hate: Muslims and Arabs,” said Ilir Disha, a professor of criminal justice at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and an expert on the politics of hate crimes. “The victim could have been Hindu, they could even be Hispanic and appear to be Muslim—but the hate crimes they faced were likely to be anti-Muslim hate crimes.” Disha noted that such “cases of mistaken identity” could be deadly, as with Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man from Arizona, who was murdered four days after 9/11 on suspicion of being Muslim. “A broad cultural solidarity could emerge from this sort of demonization and scapegoating,” HoSang said. “But there is an effort on the right to cleave it off—to instead try and distance itself from the groups being demonized.”

Hindu nationalists’ misappropriation of anti-Muslim sentiment into an umbrella of anti-Hindu bias is particularly remarkable given the fact that much of the time, the goal of Hinduphobia allegations is to shore up the deeply anti-Muslim project of Hindutva. “The Hindutva movement has manufactured imaginary grievances of Hindus throughout its history to advance the persecution of Muslims,” said Angana Chatterji, a scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. These efforts have ramped up since 2019, when Modi’s far-right government in India was elected to its second term in office and its actions started coming under widespread scrutiny in human rights spaces. This led to growing attempts by diaspora Hindu nationalists to redirect such criticism. “If anything happens in India, be it communal riots, lynchings in the name of cow protection or caste violence, the reflex and default response of most Indian Americans is to defend India’s reputation,” wrote Varghese K. George, an editor of the Indian daily The Hindu, in 2020. “Quite often, this leads to defending activities of the Hindutva brigade.”

For HAF, this has often meant classifying criticisms of Hindu nationalism or the anti-minority policies of the BJP-led Indian government as anti-Hindu. The group has slapped that label on 20 incidents, including US House resolutions urging India to end its human rights violations against minorities; public criticisms of US politicians receiving funding from Hindutva organizations; critiques of US officials visiting the headquarters of the BJP’s parent organization; press coverage of discriminatory citizenship laws in India; scholarship critical of Hindutva; and pro-Palestine protest slogans calling for an end to Zionism and Hindutva. At the same time, HAF has itself turned to selective human rights advocacy over the years to draw attention to the state of Hindu minorities in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh by releasing reports, seeking condemnations from lawmakers and the international community, and even lobbying congressional offices to ban weapon sales and maintenance packages to Pakistan. Critics, like Sunita Viswanath—founder of the progressive group Hindus for Human Rights—say that HAF does this work “in bad faith.” Viswanath noted that HAF’s appropriation of human rights language is “actively damaging, because their zero-sum framing cheapens and instrumentalizes the pressing cause of Hindu minorities in other parts of South Asia” while using their plight to “oppose the very values of justice and pluralism for others.”

In fact, HAF often levels its “Hinduphobia” accusations against Indian minorities, especially those organizing against Hindu supremacy. In recent years, activists seeking to ban caste discrimination in the US have become a particular target, with 12 incidents of HAF-alleged “Hinduphobia” referring to anti-caste efforts. In 2020, for example, when the California Civil Rights Department filed a lawsuit against the tech firm Cisco for allegedly allowing caste discrimination against an oppressed-caste employee, HAF claimed that the suit “uniquely endangers Hindus & Indians.” This position, according to Karthikeyan Shanmugam, convener of the anti-caste group Ambedkar King Study Circle, categorically excludes oppressed-caste individuals from the very definition of “Hindu” or “Indian.” HAF has similarly claimed that efforts to include caste as a protected category in government and university anti-discrimination statutes are “discriminatory against Hindus,” and has lobbied against such measures. (Sometimes, HAF has condemned anti-caste policies that don’t appear to exist: In a 2022 tweet that was reposted over 200 times, the group claimed that “tech companies like Apple are creating policies that, for example, consider vegetarianism casteist” without providing any sources or justification for the claim.)

Additionally, the group has singled out individual minority activists to smear them as Hinduphobes. This includes Dalits, who come from marginalized castes at the very bottom of the caste hierarchy. Following the publication of a New York Times article about how caste and religion influence the politics of food in India, for example, HAF called Kancha Ilaiah—a Dalit rights activist who was quoted in the article and who has criticized Hinduism for its practice of caste discrimination—an “anti-Hindu ideologue.” But Anantanand Rambachan, a professor of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at St. Olaf College, said that anti-caste criticisms of Hinduism do not constitute “hate.” “We need critical tools to be aware of the assumptions that inform the interpretation of religious doctrines,” Rambachan said. Shanmugam added that HAF’s framing of anti-caste activism as “anti-Hindu” “makes clear that their campaign to popularize ‘Hinduphobia’ is not about fighting bigotry, but something much more sinister: monopolizing power and advancing the interests of some Hindus over others.”

Some of HAF’s allegations against other South Asian minorities were also leveled at supporters of an independent Sikh state of Khalistan. Five of these cases featured vandalism of Hindu temples, including defacement by black graffiti and expressions of support for the Sikh militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, often accompanied by language such as “Hindus go back” and “Modi is a terrorist.” Such incidents likely have their roots in a broader political context: Many diaspora Sikhs are suspicious of the Indian state, partly due to anti-Sikh violence within India, epitomized by a pogrom in 1984. These anti-Sikh currents have continued to develop under Modi, with the BJP government demonizing Sikh protestors in India as “Khalistani” terrorists in order to justify violence against them, and the Indian government allegedly carrying out the targeted assassination of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada. Such events have only heightened diasporic tensions: As Harman Singh of the New York-based Sikh Coalition told Jewish Currents, even when members of the Sikh community have stood by their Hindu neighbors and helped clean up after the aforementioned vandalism incidents, it hasn’t stopped Hindutva groups from conflating Sikh separatism with the wider Sikh community.

The routine casting of Indian minorities as “Hinduphobic” is evidence of Hindu nationalists’ attempts to reframe political conflicts from the subcontinent as American bigotry; indeed, HAF itself has attributed “increasing Hinduphobic attacks” to “international spillover of domestic Indian political sentiment, ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan, and interreligious tensions in South Asia more broadly.” In August 2022, for instance, six men vandalized a statue of Mohandas Gandhi outside a Hindu temple in Queens, New York, toppling it with a sledgehammer and defacing it with spray paint. Gandhi, a leading figure in the Indian independence movement, is known for his non-violent approach and role in defeating British colonialism, but is also criticized for his anti-Black views, defense of a caste hierarchy, and relationship to some Indian minority groups. As a result, the installation of Gandhi statues in US cities has sometimes faced local opposition from Indian minority groups. The Queens incident was one among several recent vandalisms of Gandhi statues in North America—which were sometimes undertaken as part of protests of Indian government policy, and sometimes with references to Khalistan. Hindu right groups quickly converged on these incidents, claiming they were attacks on the Hindu community. But activist Tushar Gandhi, Gandhi’s great-grandson, called the allegation that the statue vandalism constituted Hinduphobia, “bullshit.” In an interview with Jewish Currents, he said that this was part of Hindu nationalist groups’ longstanding pattern of “selectively adopting and discarding” Gandhi to advance their politics. (Gandhi has been despised by Hindu nationalists for his support of religious pluralism, and it was a Hindu nationalist who assassinated him in 1948.) “Whenever it suits them, they make him a Hindu icon,” Tushar said. “But among themselves, they refer to him as the biggest enemy of Hinduism.”

Ultimately, experts say that what the clamor about Hinduphobia in the West misses is the simple fact that it is not Indian minorities, Hindutva critics, or progressives who pose the greatest danger to Hindu Americans, but the Christian and white supremacist right. Such groups have long considered Hinduism a pagan, heathen, or satanic religion—a belief that has manifested, on many occasions, in abuse and harassment. FBI data reveals that among reported anti-Hindu hate crimes in the past 10 years, 59% of perpetrators have been white, and Jewish Currents’ analysis shows that at least 47% of the incidents that HAF called out in the US that were undoubtedly anti-Hindu came from Christian supremacists, white nationalists, and conservatives. This includes temple attacks that included Nazi and devil worship symbolism, as well as a number of instances of bigotry and harassment directed at Hindu Americans running for public office. “If HAF was genuinely interested in the civil rights of Hindu Americans, they would name Christian nationalism and white supremacy as threats,” said Pranay Somayajula, an organizer with Hindus for Human Rights and the anti-Hindutva Savera coalition.

Scholars and activists suggested that focusing on these threats would not only diagnose the sources of hate correctly, but would also provide Hindu and Indian Americans a basis of solidarity with other oppressed groups. “If you acknowledge that this discrimination is taking place on the basis of race, you could imagine these political solidarities also on the basis of race, and acknowledge obligations and political connections to many other peoples and sites and places,” said HoSang. Instead of cultivating such connections, however, HAF has used its “Hinduphobia” discourse to advance a narrative of specifically Hindu victimhood. In the process, “Hindu supremacists have empowered the very right-wing forces that endanger the South Asian community, and now want us to fight each other,” said Prachi Patankar, also with the Savera coalition. But, she added, “if Hindutva wins, Hindus lose too.”

This story has been updated to include nine additional incidents featured on HAF's website that had previously been missed. Accordingly, the total number of US-based incidents HAF has called Hinduphobic is 161, not 152. All percentages, including in pie charts, have been updated to reflect the higher total number of incidents. Further, since six of the missed incidents were instances of anti-Hindu hate (all perpetrated by Christian supremacists or conservatives), the percentage of incidents that are not anti-Hindu under HAF's definition has been updated from 77% to 75%.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Mukta Joshi is a lawyer trained in India and an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today.

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Inside the New Group Giving Antisemitism Trainings at Harvard

Project Shema, increasingly a presence on university campuses, uses progressive language while foregrounding the “harm” of anti-Zionism.

Emily Wilder

Harvard Yard Gaza solidarity encampment in April 2024

Ben Curtis / AP Photo

In September 2024, Nass Taskin, a Jewish special education teacher at Northampton High School in western Massachusetts, attended an antisemitism training for school district staff. The training—organized in response to parent complaints about various post-October 7th incidents they believed to be antisemitic, including a student-organized walkout for Gaza—was provided by Project Shema, a relatively new educational nonprofit that boasts having run hundreds of workshops on antisemitism for companies, schools, and Jewish communities since its launch in 2020. The training covered a variety of examples of antisemitic tropes and anti-Jewish violence in history. However, according to video footage provided by Taskin to Jewish Currents, the facilitator also emphasized the connection between Jews and Zionism and advised that many criticisms of the latter are harmful to Jews. Though she opened the training with a disclaimer that the “suffering and pain” of Palestinians “absolutely matter,” the workshop’s focus would be helping the audience “understand our [Jewish] community and where we come from,” she said. She told attendees that because the “vast majority” of Jews have “a relationship with Israel,” statements such as “Zionists are racists,” “Israelis are Nazis,” or “Israel intentionally kills Palestinian children” exclude Jews from “good society,” with the result “that Jews are feeling that we are alone in the world—that we don’t have a place.”

During the Q&A, Taskin voiced his objections to these statements to the facilitator, April Powers, Project Shema’s vice president of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). In an exchange caught on video, Taskin said he felt “deeply uncomfortable” to hear the position that Zionism is racism—a position that for him was “rooted [in] compassion, respect, and rage at genocide and apartheid”—be reduced to “doing antisemitism.” Powers responded, “Within the Jewish community, we have a variety of voices, and it’s important to listen to those voices.” But she maintained he was in the minority as a Jewish anti-Zionist and that his argument that “Zionism is racism” was still “an antisemitic trope.” Taskin was left with the feeling, he recently told Jewish Currents, that the Project Shema training was “just blatant propaganda dressed up in this woke, DEI veneer.” (Powers did not respond to a request for comment on the exchange.)

Months later, an April 29th report from the Harvard University task force on “combating antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias” at the school has revealed that the university is contracting Project Shema to instruct students, faculty, and staff on antisemitism. In an appendix section nearly 200 pages into the 311-page report, the task force notes that various campus departments and offices have held such workshops with the group since October 7th. Altogether, Project Shema has led or co-led at least ten events regarding Jewish identity and antisemitism at the university in the last 20 months, according to the task force report and event listings reviewed by Jewish Currents, and has plans for more programming at Harvard in the coming school year.

On a campus that has been a focal point for political battles over Palestine-related activism, antisemitism allegations, and DEI in higher education, Project Shema’s trainings have mostly flown under the radar, stirring little controversy. But they have received some criticism: In October 2024, a group of Harvard faculty signed an ultimately unsuccessful petition to cancel an antisemitism and Islamophobia workshop organized by the school’s DEI office and co-led by Project Shema. The petitioners accused Project Shema of conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism and called out the group for previous collaborations with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Since 2021, a progressive campaign has pushed institutions to “drop the ADL” as a partner due to its strident Israel advocacy, and the ADL’s increasingly hawkish post-October 7th posture, including its initial support of the Trump administration’s deportations of student protesters, has turned off even some liberals who were once sympathetic. The organization’s credibility among the public has decreased: Wikipedia officially deemed the ADL an “unreliable source” on the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” last year. During this tumultuous period for the ADL, Project Shema was featured at the ADL’s annual conference in March 2024; the organization has also co-organized events with local ADL chapters and its trainings have been recommended in official ADL materials. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt shouted out Project Shema as an example of communal innovation in a January 2025 interview with Jewish Insider. Yet Project Shema has tried to put distance between the ADL’s stances and its own: While speaking at the ADL’s 2024 summit, for example, Shema co-founder Oren Jacobson publicly objected to Greenblatt’s honoring former Trump adviser Jared Kushner during that same event, saying that “focusing on and elevating . . . one of the premiere enablers of a conspiratorial anti-democratic movement and person doesn’t help our community, with all due respect.” In response to criticism like that in the Harvard petition, Project Shema rejects attempts to equate it to the ADL: “We have delivered programs for and with hundreds of organizations, including the ADL—who we are not affiliated with,” a spokesperson for the organization wrote in a May 29th email to Jewish Currents. “We believe in the power of modeling respectful disagreement and advocating for empathy across divides. That has included programs with the ADL in which we’ve explicitly shared our view that anti-Zionism is not always antisemitism.”

A Jewish faculty member at a university that hosted a Project Shema workshop described their four-hour session with Project Shema as “a very gentle and skillful version of propaganda.”

Indeed, Project Shema’s materials often strike a more progressive tone than that of the contemporary ADL. Shema does not reflexively condemn the pro-Palestine protests roiling campuses as antisemitic, and makes room for some expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. The group’s educational materials admit, at points, that “some Israeli politicians use dehumanizing language” and that “the loss of innocent life in Gaza is horrific.” At a Harvard workshop, attendees reported that Jacobson acknowledged, when challenged by questions about Gaza, that “the impact of Israel is a miracle for Jews and a catastrophe for Palestinians” and that “the war is disproportionately harming Palestinians.” Shema’s offerings make broad use of concepts that have become common in liberal anti-racist trainings, such as the idea that intent is less important than impact when assessing offensive language.

Yet despite this fluency in progressive language, people who attended Project Shema trainings at Harvard and elsewhere raised concerns in interviews with Jewish Currents that the group’s approach conflates Jewish identity and Zionism and ultimately seeks to dissuade students and educators from engaging in certain kinds of political speech. This includes the argument, now widespread among top human rights organizations, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, as well as popular protest slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” For some workshop attendees, Shema’s softer approach has caused even more unease than the ADL’s straightforward pro-Israel politics. A Jewish faculty member at a university that hosted a Project Shema workshop, who asked that their name and university be kept anonymous to avoid retaliation, described their four-hour session with Project Shema as “a very gentle and skillful version of propaganda.” Lesley Williams, an anti-racism educator and contributor to PARCEO’s “Antisemitism Through the Lens of Collective Liberation” curriculum, posited that the reputational decline of the ADL—historically the top purveyor of antisemitism workshops in liberal institutions—may be leading anti-antisemitism groups like Project Shema to turn to a new “marketing approach,” in which finding a “kinder, gentler way of doing the same thing” as the ADL is politically expedient.

The group’s rising influence at Harvard and other universities—the organization has run recent workshops at Columbia University, Tufts University, University of Oregon and others—demonstrates the appeal of that approach to schools trying to thread a delicate needle in their DEI programming around antisemitism. Project Shema, which frames itself as qualified to respond with nuance to the problem of “anti-Jewish ideas emerging on the left,” was well-positioned to benefit from a post-October 7th boom in political attention to and philanthropic funding for addressing alleged campus antisemitism. As arrests, detentions, and threats of deportation of students speaking out for Palestine have provoked a liberal outcry, many institutions are turning to the group to prove that they are responding to pro-Israel students’ complaints without caving to right-wing pressure.

Project Shema was well-positioned to benefit from a post-October 7th boom in political attention to and philanthropic funding for addressing alleged campus antisemitism.

“At this moment, [universities] are facing an energized faculty and student protest movement in solidarity with Palestinians while they’re facing massive authoritarian pressure from the Trump administration and the pro-Israel movement,” said Ben Lorber, an antisemitism researcher and author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism in an interview. “They want to satisfy both camps and they want to maintain a veneer of positive progressivism. A training like this can check off all those boxes.” But beneath that veneer, the instruction Project Shema provides still seeks to restrain the protest movement in subtler terms, according to Williams. “I don’t think the goal of Project Shema is about ending antisemitism. It’s about keeping people from saying anything that makes people uncomfortable, and that is the opposite of education,” Williams said. “This is why you can’t say ‘river to the sea’ or ‘Zionism is racism.’ The goal is to have those symbols and that language go away.”

Israel politics have been central to Project Shema since its founding. When its website first launched in 2020, the organization declared that it was created in response to “the feeling that some in the progressive movement don’t understand or support Jewish national self-determination in Israel,” and that its workshops hoped to strengthen bonds between Jews and the progressive movement while helping “the American Jewish community better engage the American progressive movement on issues of core concern, like Israel and antisemitism.” Its co-founders, Oren Jacobson, Zachary Schaffer, and Brianna Goodlin, have backgrounds working in various Jewish and liberal causes—Jacobson in the reproductive rights movement, Schaffer for the Jewish Federations of North America and the Council of Young Jewish Presidents, and Goodlin in DEI consulting roles. Their politics appear to include a strong investment in Israel and a distaste for the country’s right wing: The three founders have each taken to Jewish and Israeli media to advance liberal Zionist perspectives, with Jacobson penning an article in 2021 asserting that “when people attack Zionists, we hear ‘Jews’”; Schaffer arguing in 2020 that “Zionism is as much about empowerment as it is about politics”; and Goodlin writing in 2019 that Netanyahu’s policies could “threaten the sustainability of a strong US-Israel relationship.” The organization’s top brass includes other liberal politicos and corporate DEI professionals, such as Powers, a former chief equity and inclusion officer at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). (Powers attracted attention when she posted from the SCBWI account about antisemitism shortly after Israel’s May 2021 bombing of Gaza and quarreled with commenters who asked for a similar statement about Islamophobia, a controversy that led her to publicly resign.) Much of Project Shema’s programming and materials emphasizes diversity in the Jewish community, a focus reflected in their racially and ethnically diverse leadership.

Between its founding and October 2023, Project Shema had a fairly low profile in a crowded landscape of anti-antisemitism organizations, even as it organized speaking engagements at Jewish federations, community centers, and synagogues. After October 7th, however, as widespread protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza prompted panic in Jewish communities, the organization received an infusion of financial support for programming it was developing to meet the moment. A new group called Artists Against Antisemitism, formed in November 2023 in response to what it described as a spike in antisemitism in the arts, devoted most of the $120,000 raised in its inaugural auction to supporting Project Shema, funding the creation of Shema on Campus, a series of workshops aiming to “combat anti-Jewish ideas” at universities. Project Shema also benefited from a number of other post-October 7th Jewish philanthropic initiatives, including grants from the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund, a San Francisco-based funder of Jewish and progressive causes that, Jewish Currents has reported, began preventing grantees from questioning Israel’s “legitimacy” as a “secure, independent, democratic Jewish state” in fall 2023.

With these resources, the group’s materials and programming grew more ambitious. In addition to piloting Shema on Campus, it created or updated online guides, including a 94-page document on “addressing antisemitism during this time of crisis”; developed tips for building Jewish Employee Resource Groups at workplaces; and advertised coaching services with facilitators and “confidential” counsel to non-Jewish progressives on engaging with Jews and antisemitism. Perhaps most significantly, the group hired new facilitators, and, according to its annual report, ran 215 trainings at different institutions—including, increasingly, schools and universities—between October 2023 and March 2024. This speaks to a potentially lucrative period for the organization: Project Shema charged Northampton Public Schools $3,500 for three hours of training with Powers, the facilitator, according to the contract obtained by Jewish Currents.

In the spring of 2024, Project Shema landed a contract with the Harvard Business School, around the same time that students created a Gaza solidarity encampment on Harvard Yard and a few months after President Claudine Gay resigned in part due to accusations that she abetted antisemitism on campus. This partnership was secured after alumni recommended the group to the school’s DEI team, the Project Shema spokesperson said. The group’s work for Harvard was funded in part by the Center for Combating Antisemitism at Combined Jewish Philanthropy, the Boston-area Jewish federation. “After well-received workshops” at the business school, the Shema spokesperson said, the organization was invited to “provide similar programs” across the rest of the Harvard university system, including for university staff. (A spokesperson for Harvard Business School declined to answer questions about the partnership.) According to the task force report, that included trainings for the proctors and tutors that live with and support undergraduate students in Harvard dorms. The university’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, since renamed the Office of Community and Campus Life (CCL) after right-wing anti-DEI backlash, also invited Project Shema to join the Islamic Network Group (ING), a Muslim-led interfaith organization that frequently collaborates with Jewish groups, to deliver seven sessions across Harvard on antisemitism and Islamophobia called “Honoring Our Shared Humanity.” (Neither Harvard CCL administrators nor ING responded to requests for comment.)

The group hired new facilitators and ran 215 trainings at different institutions—including, increasingly, schools and universities—between October 2023 and March 2024.

Next year, the Harvard T.H. Chan School for Public Health—which, as the host of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights and a magnet for left-leaning students and faculty, was the target of numerous Jewish student complaints referenced in the antisemitism task force report—plans to bring in the organization for three intensive workshops. One is planned for the summer and will be tailored to senior leadership of the school, and two will follow in the fall for students, faculty, and staff, a spokesperson said. The content, they said, has not yet been finalized.

In October 2024, as Harvard was advertising an upcoming Shema/ING session at the school’s Longwood Campus, site of the medical, dental, and public health schools, at least 485 anonymous faculty members signed on to a letter requesting President Alan Garber and the DEI office cancel the session. Among the petition’s contentions was that Project Shema “partners with the controversial Anti-Defamation League . . . whose materials have conflated Judaism with Zionism” and that “these conflations harmfully erase the perspectives of Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, and many other community members.” The letter came on the heels of previous public campaigns to cancel Project Shema’s appearances at a Northampton high school, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and for the Vancouver School Board’s District Parent Advisory Council, which made similar arguments about Project Shema’s affiliations and content. When the Harvard petition received no response and the event carried on as planned, members of the Palestinian solidarity community on the Longwood Campus decided to attend “to pump the temperature up a bit,” said Eben Philbin, an Israeli American researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health and member of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

Philbin and a Harvard faculty member who attended—the latter of whom asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from the school—reported that, despite Project Shema’s longtime focus on Israel and Zionism, much of its portion of the event avoided the topic entirely. Jacobson, the group’s co-founder and CEO, acted as facilitator, speaking mostly about Jewish history, Jewish diversity, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and historical examples of anti-Jewish violence worldwide. The attendees said Israel initially came up only when Jacobson presented examples of “binary thinking” that could veer into antisemitism. While criticizing Israel or advocating for Palestinians should not be considered antisemitic, Jacobson said, he suggested that calling Israel itself and “all Zionists” racist or genocidal would be an example of black-and-white antisemitic thinking. Attendees felt that a more substantial conversation about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians would have been totally avoided if they hadn’t raised it during the Q&A session, when they pushed Jacobson to define Zionism directly. In reply, according to Philbin, Jacobson characterized it as a “2,000-year-old ideology all Jews hold in their heart,” which became a political movement in the late 1800s as a response to “millennia of exclusion” of European Jews. Attendees of Project Shema programming at other institutions said facilitators presented similar definitions of Zionism as authoritative. In the September 2024 Northampton Public Schools workshop, Powers repeated the claim that Zionism is “a 2,000-year-old yearning to return to our ancient homeland on some portion of that land,” according to the video. “It’s not a rallying call against any other group; it’s just Jewish self-determination on some portion of our ancestral homeland.” Harvard attendees told Jewish Currents they believe this definition of Zionism sidestepped how Zionism as a political ideology has affected Palestinians and erased non-Zionist Jewish history, merging Zionism with Judaism. “They don’t recognize the impact of Zionism in its most common manifestation,” said the anonymous Harvard faculty member. To Philbin, the training was attempting to make Zionism “appeal to the emotions,” rather than deal with the material impacts of Zionism on Palestinians. (Jacobson did not respond to a request to discuss the content of the workshop and attendees’ criticisms.)

Shema’s materials often caution against using certain language to describe Israel’s actions, including “genocide” and “settler colonialism,” because of how such terms might land for Jews

Project Shema also emphasizes a connection between the vast majority of Jews and Zionism in other materials, including one discussion guide that says that “85% to 95% of Jews on earth support Israel’s right to exist and consider Israel an important part of their Jewish identity.” (The guide does not provide a source for these statistics.) Similarly, Shema’s “guide for allies” says that highlighting anti-Zionist Jewish voices can be a form of “tokenization” that “erase[s] the truth that the vast majority of Jews worldwide” support a Jewish state. At times, the curricula reinforces the implication that attacks on Israel are, by extension, attacks on Jews. For example, Shema’s materials often caution against using certain language to describe Israel’s actions, including “genocide” and “settler colonialism,” because of how such terms might land for Jews. In a November 21st, 2023, resource guide addressing the claim of genocide—which was becoming increasingly common at the time in response to dehumanizing rhetoric from top Israeli officials, orders for population transfer of Gazans, and mounting evidence of the Israeli military’s targeting of civilians—Project Shema wrote that most Jews experience genocide accusations against Israel as “harmful.” The accusation, the guide said,

doesn’t land in a vacuum; it is said in a world conditioned to see Jews as evil. Regardless of intent, this language taps into latent antisemitism. Claiming a nation is committing genocide, or a people supports genocide, places them outside the community of the good. This can quickly lead to demonization and ostracization.

In response to emailed questions about whether such analysis is meant to imply that no group of Jews should ever be accused of genocide, a Project Shema spokesperson repeatedly denied that the organization considers accusing Israel of genocide to be antisemitic, despite the guide’s invocation of “latent antisemitism.” “We do, however, explore how holding individual Jews accountable for the actions of the Israeli government or accusing all Jews, Zionists, or Jewish institutions of inherently supporting genocide can undermine Jewish safety, inclusion, and belonging,” the spokesperson wrote.

Shema does not categorically paint protesters and Palestinian grievances as antisemitic: Its guide for university administrators from January 2025 denied that protests are “inherently anti-Jewish” and rejected “all efforts to discredit or erase Palestinians’ lived experiences.” But, the organization argued, the language protesters use, “regardless of one’s intent, can perpetuate anti-Jewish biases that undermine Jewish inclusion and safety.” The group maintained in the same guide that criticisms of Israel and Zionism and slogans associated with the Palestinian liberation movement, including “globalize the intifada,” “decolonization by any means necessary,” “from the river to the sea,” and “Zionism is racism and colonialism,” are “part of a single connected story undermining Jewish inclusion and safety.” And while Project Shema has likewise stated that anti-Zionism is not always antisemitic, the first edition of its new online publication, Translations, will concern “the conditions and contexts under which anti-Zionism can become harmful to Jews,” according to an email obtained by Jewish Currents. At Harvard, some workshop attendees ultimately concluded that while Shema made room for criticism of Israel and some expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, the organization deemed most opposition to Zionism or calls for decolonization unacceptable. “The problem is we can’t talk about what the ICJ has said is plausibly genocide,” said the anonymous Harvard faculty member. “Asking people undergoing and watching genocide to tone police—you’re kind of missing the larger point.”

Lorber said this fixation on empathy can “blunt some necessary political critique of realities on the ground, turning it into a giant listening circle while Gaza continues to burn.”

Project Shema’s dialogue guides on terms like “genocide”—meant to help Jews uncomfortable with such language speak to their progressive friends—encourage the audience to “start with empathy” by expressing “shared concerns for Palestinian lived experiences and trauma” before raising concerns that language like “genocide” can be harmful. According to anti-racist educator Williams, while empathy plays an important role in political education, Project Shema pays only “lip service [to] valuing the Palestinian perspective,” while ultimately making an exclusive demand for empathy toward Jews. Attendees are advised to avoid an indictment of genocide because of how that is experienced by Jews, she pointed out, but not consider how Palestinians experience, say, the Star of David, a symbol that has been graffitied on Palestinian homes, bulldozed into Palestinian land by the invading military, and branded on a Palestinian prisoner’s cheeks. Indeed, antisemitism researcher Lorber said this fixation on empathy can “blunt some necessary political critique of realities on the ground, turning it into a giant listening circle while Gaza continues to burn.” The Jewish professor who requested anonymity for their university expressed frustration that their training did not include specifics about the Nakba—when Zionist forces expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in the process of the Israeli state’s founding—and that it included “no discussion” of the current disastrous conditions in Gaza, even as it discussed the acceptability of language around them. They were also concerned that Project Shema’s approach elides the power dynamics of such discourses in the United States, in light of the Trump administration’s move to detain and deport international pro-Palestine students and faculty: “It’s all very well and good to say this rhetoric hurts people’s feelings, but when we have an administration saying that this rhetoric should mean you’re abducted, it’s egregious to leave that out,” they said.

Project Shema declined to answer more specific questions about its work at Harvard or attendees’ critiques of its training materials. But it’s clear that the Shema trainings, and other Harvard administration efforts, have not convinced students to give up their activism—including those from corners of the school the administration has especially sought to quiet. On Tuesday, May 27th, for example, several affiliates of the public health and medical schools joined in organizing a 24-hour livestreamed vigil in Harvard Square, where they read “the names of Palestinian children killed in the genocide.” Harvard’s efforts have also failed to convince Trump to end his campaign to crush the school in the name of fighting antisemitism. In May, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s move to revoke the immigration status of all international students at Harvard and prohibit it from admitting any more; now, the president has issued an executive order attempting to find another route to blocking Harvard’s admission of international students, a major source of revenue for the school. On June 30th, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had found Harvard in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for “deliberate indifference towards harassment of Jewish and Israeli students.” The administration’s bulletin noted specifically that the various antisemitism trainings Harvard has pledged to provide on campus during the 2025–2026 school year “are unlikely to remedy the deep structural issues [the Office of Civil Rights] has identified.” All in all, even as Harvard has enlisted Project Shema’s help in responding to demands by pro-Israel stakeholders, outside right-wing interests, and the US government—all while maintaining its liberal bona fides—it’s unclear whether such a group can appeal to any of them. “Ultimately, the authoritarian regime won’t be satisfied by mere antisemitism trainings,” Lorber said. “They’re going to increasingly demand the liquidation of student groups, the dismantling of entire departments, the firing of professors. That’s where we’re headed.”

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Emily Wilder is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles.

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This article was downloaded from https://jewishcurrents.org/inside-the-new-group-giving-antisemitism-trainings-at-harvard at 17 September 2025, 11:20 PM UTC.

ROUNDTABLE | 1 JUL 2025, 3:43 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

UPDATED 8 AUG 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

Left Electoralism After Mamdani: A Roundtable

A strategy discussion on the opportunities and risks created by the DSA candidate’s primary win in New York City.

Alex Kane

Zohran Mamdani speaks at his primary day election party.

Heather Khalifa/Associated Press

On June 24th, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Zohran Mamdani, an assemblyman from Queens, became the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor of New York City. It is the biggest victory yet for DSA’s project of using the Democratic Party ballot line to dislodge centrist Democrats and advance pro-worker, pro-tenant, and pro-Palestinian policies.

But even if Mamdani wins the general election in November against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, the new mayor will have to navigate the contradictions inherent in leading the richest city in the world as a democratic socialist. This is not a new problem: Since 2018, when DSA-backed candidate Julia Salazar won a state senate seat, the group’s New York chapter has had to navigate the difficulties inherent in socialist governance. For example, in 2022, Salazar backed legislation enabling the New York City Housing Authority to sell bonds to investors for public housing repairs; this led to criticism from some DSA members, who argued the legislation could lead to the privatization of public housing. At times, the relationship between DSA and the elected officials it backs has broken down over such challenges, such as when former Congressman Jamaal Bowman traveled to Israel with J Street, prompting a rebuke from DSA’s national body. Such questions are certain to recur if Mamdani wins the mayoralty in November. How can Mamdani hold together the diffuse and diverse coalition that powered his victory, and mobilize it to defeat the inevitable opposition to his agenda? How can he avoid the missteps that other progressive mayors have made? Is it possible for him to challenge the power of the billionaire class and govern the New York Police Department (NYPD)? And how will DSA react if Mamdani breaks with their program once in office?

To discuss these questions, Jewish Currents organized a roundtable discussion with Max Rivlin-Nadler, a reporter and co-founder of news website Hell Gate; the political strategist Emily Mayer; and NYC DSA steering committee member Batul Hassan. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Alex Kane: What were the keys to Mamdani’s success—and what part did the electoral prowess of the NYC DSA play in the story?

Max Rivlin-Nadler: One thing that worked well for Mamdani is his incredibly effective social media campaign. He is a charismatic personality who put together straightforward, often funny, well-edited social media clips that have traveled extremely far. But that’s just one part of it. You can become famous, but you actually need to convince people to vote, and that part is the culmination of eight years of work that NYC DSA has been doing across the city to build out the city’s most powerful canvassing program. Residents in his core areas had their doors knocked four or five times—that was how tenacious DSA was.

In the past few city and state district races where DSA endorsed candidates, the endorsement just wasn’t enough. What was different here was that the group expanded its ground game citywide; all of a sudden there were new areas open to DSA, such as along the F line in Queens, where you saw a ton of South Asians being activated. DSA was building off of what it had done previously at the very local level. It was a huge refutation of the strategy of just flooding the airwaves.

Batul Hassan: We at DSA have taken the development of this electoral project very seriously. Since 2017 we’ve run 21 elections in New York, and we’ve won 11 of them. Over the course of this project we’ve developed a level of skill and organizing capacity that we were really able to flex in this campaign. And we’ve developed organizers themselves. A lot of Mamdani’s staff came from DSA. Mamdani himself developed his political organizing skills through DSA.

One pillar in all of our campaigns is having really clear socialist messaging that speaks directly to people’s material needs. We had a really robust field program that motivated about 60,000 people to give up their evenings and their weekends to share that message directly with people through one-on-one conversations. In a lot of my conversations, it was easy to connect the demands that Mamdani was making in his platform to what New Yorkers want to hear about: the rising cost of rent and childcare, the poorly managed bus system, and so forth. We were able to raise people’s expectations by speaking directly to them on these terms.

Emily Mayer: The only thing I would add is that the quality of the candidate really matters. The difference between a DSA loss or a DSA win in the last eight years of the electoral project has to do with the magnetism of actual candidates. It’s undeniable that Mamdani is a generational talent. New Yorkers, especially in a post-Trump moment, are craving authenticity and a sense that their elected officials are going to fight for them, and that’s not something that can be faked. Secondly, we’re in a very unique political moment. The Democratic base over the past year and a half has grown increasingly disillusioned with the leadership of the party. People are tired of a gerontocracy that feels set in its ways and unable to push back successfully on the authoritarianism that the right is riding. Mamdani’s leadership on everything from Gaza to the cost of living has demonstrated an authenticity that voters are deeply craving.

AK: What is the coalition that secured Mamdani’s win, and what lessons does the making of this coalition offer to the left regarding coalitional politics broadly?

EM: The coalition was largely organized by age—millennials turned out in record numbers—and by class. Mamdani brought together working-class immigrants and young progressives in the city, and that provided the numbers for a winning coalition, including a lot of people who had never voted or weren’t usual voters in Democratic primaries (and also may have voted for Trump in 2024).

The making of this coalition offers a really important lesson for progressives, which is that interests aren’t static. As an example: A lot of Asian neighborhoods that Mamdani won by big margins are some of the same neighborhoods that have held anti-asylum seeker rallies over the past four years. This might appear counterintuitive until we remember that a big reason for those rallies was elected leaders such as Adams spending significant time and energy ginning up anti-immigrant sentiment. These politicians framed the immigration debate as one of “good immigrants” who came here legally versus “bad immigrants” who skirted the system, which later led to these districts turning towards Trump in 2024. But then the Mamdani campaign came around, and it foregrounded the dignity of the immigrant experience overall. This created a sense of solidarity between the vastly different communities that make up New York. The campaign’s success with this strategy clarifies that our job as progressives is to use leadership and messaging to forge common interests and solidarity, rather than narrowly or transactionally navigating pre-existing and unchanging interests.

AK: In the long term, though, how do you keep a coalition that includes both people who are in favor of immigrants’ and asylum seekers’ rights, and people who were responsive to Trump’s anti-immigrant platform?

MRN: Ultimately I’m skeptical that the Colombian business owner on Roosevelt Avenue, who is angry over immigration and who voted for Trump in November, pulled the lever for Mamdani last Tuesday. I think that person is not voting in the primary. I think this was a different electorate than what we saw in 2024, and it was an electorate motivated by what happened in November and what’s happened since then, such as immigration raids across the city and people being disappeared in lower Manhattan. That clip of Mamdani reaching out aggressively towards Trump’s border czar Tom Homan—that is what people wanted to see, an avatar of themselves trying to do something that they themselves can’t do because they are incredibly vulnerable.

AK: The specter of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson—who was elected on a platform of raising taxes to fund housing and combat homelessness, but was unable to achieve these goals—has been wielded to try to warn New Yorkers against electing Mamdani. The Chicago Tribune published an editorial saying, essentially, “don’t elect Mamdani because we saw what happened when Johnson was elected.” How can Mamdani, assuming he wins the November general election against Adams, avoid the fate of Johnson in Chicago? What lessons from the Johnson mayoralty can Mamdani take?

EM: It’s important that we not buy into the narrative that has been generated by capitalists and then adopted by mainstream media deeming Johnson’s mayoralty a failure. There’s a learning curve for any executive, and a recent poll indicated he might be clawing his way back into popularity as he takes some of the boldest action against Trump, especially on immigration. He’s been a strident defender of the city’s sanctuary status, and he’s also won lots of victories for workers that we shouldn’t overlook, like ending the practice of paying tipped workers below the minimum wage, expanding paid time off for all city workers, and increasing the pay of childcare workers.

That being said, one of the major lessons is that we should expect lots of pushback on Mamdani’s agenda from the capitalist class. One of the first Johnson initiatives was a campaign called Bring Chicago Home, which hoped to progressively tax multimillion-dollar real estate sales to fund affordable housing. The real estate lobby spent millions against that effort, and ultimately, it was an early loss that made the new mayor look weak and put him on the defensive. Those early fights really matter. Choosing fights that you can win early on is an important strategy in any new administration. Capitalists have also tried to drive a big wedge between progressive aldermen and the mayor ahead of a future election, effectively telling aldermen that if you don’t vote no on the mayor’s budget, we’ll spend millions in your next election to defeat you. A Mamdani administration should work hard to preempt that kind of inevitable opposition, and do lots of relationship building with legislative partners inside government as well as with outside groups to figure out how to push back.

MRN: One big advantage Mamdani has coming into office is that there are so many laws that were passed by the city council four years ago that Adams has just ignored, such as the “streets master plan” to install 50 miles of protected bike lanes and 30 miles of protected bus lanes, Local Law 97 that limits how much carbon large buildings can emit, and the shutdown of the Rikers Island jail. Mamdani can pick these up and begin implementing them on day one. These are things that City Hall can do in the first 100 days. He doesn’t even have to expend much political capital to make these things happen, and these can provide the early wins Emily was talking about.

AK: What should we expect from police and real estate interests under a Mamdani mayoralty? How do you think things may play out there?

MRN: That’s obviously going to be the big question. Look at the Bill de Blasio administration. He appointed Bill Bratton to appease the NYPD, and he appointed Alicia Glenn to appease real estate. But both of those totally backfired, and neither of those two groups were happy with him. So I don’t think the Mamdani campaign should be losing too much sleep about making overtures to the real estate lobby, which in any case hasn’t gotten over the rent stabilization laws in 2019, one of the great DSA victories.

There are reasons to hope that Mamdani will be able to strike a balance. For instance, he has said that he wants to build massive amounts of social housing and do Mitchell-Lama 2.0, but he has also said we should have more market rate housing. So he’s acknowledging that the private market and social housing need to coexist, at least in the interim. When it comes to the police—I do believe there was a warm reception from rank-and-file cops to Mamdani’s idea that he doesn’t want the police to be pulling triple overtime shifts. He wants to focus on stopping violent crime and actually solving crimes at all because the clearance rate is ridiculously low, and he wants to get police out of mental health crisis situations that they’re not trained to be in and that have murderous consequences. As a journalist, I can say that the battle over that is going to be incredible to cover, because it does seem like Mamdani wants to envision a radical restructuring of the relationship between police and the urban geography, but one that I don’t think the rank-and-file are going to be that upset about, even if NYPD leadership and unions are going to be furious at any possible challenge to their authority.

AK: If Mamdani wins the general election, how can he and the DSA mobilize his army of door knockers to deal with these challenges? And more broadly, what do you think the role of DSA should be in a Mamdani mayoralty?

BH: This is a historic opportunity, maybe one that the left hasn’t had for 100 years in the US, to actually carry out a socialist agenda with support from the executive level. But having a socialist mayor is just one part of that process. If Mamdani is elected, we—DSA, workers and labor unions, tenant unions, and others—are responsible for creating the space that will be required for him to actually implement his platform. We need to be doing deep organizing in communities in order to build the political strength to pass what’s required. And it’s not just for things at the city level; there needs to be fundraising at the state level to do much of what we have set out to do. Part of our task is to show that it is actually possible to move these things.

EM: When I was progressive caucus director for the city council, I had a lot of experience trying to bridge the divide between organizing and governance. And I think it’s tricky. Legislators and the executive have a different role to play than organizations do, and it’s important to be clear about what that distinction is. In the same way that Bernie Sanders talked a lot about being organizer-in-chief, Mamdani can use the bully pulpit to push people to fight for certain things. But ultimately, being an executive and running a government is an exercise in making hard choices. The job of DSA isn’t to accommodate those choices, but rather to make the political space for electeds to be able to maneuver within the set of options that exist, and to say to capital, “I have to do this because union X is fighting for this”—in other words, to change the calculation such that there’s more space for an administration to make the right choices.

Further, I think it’s the job of DSA—and Mamdani working in partnership with DSA—to raise the visibility of some of the demands that have brought him into office at the state level, so that revenue can be secured for these policies. Here, the results of this election offer a seismic opportunity. If Democrats learn any lesson from this election, it should be that focusing on affordability and on mobilizing working class voters is in their self-interest. So if, say, Governor Kathy Hochul can see what’s good for her, she could be incentivized to move to the left in a primary election. And if she refuses to tax the rich, as she’s indicated, DSA should be able to credibly threaten her re-election. DSA has far surpassed the test of mobilizing on the scale of a mayoral election, so it’s a good next step to think about how to shoot big in the gubernatorial election in order to actually enable the mayor to have the space that he needs to deliver.

AK: What can DSA do if Mamdani breaks with the DSA line on specific issues?

EM: DSA as an advocacy organization and Mamdani as a potential mayor will have extremely different roles to play. The mayor’s job is to make sure his proposals can get over the finish line, which involves balancing a number of competing forces that are trying to influence what happens inside of City Hall. DSA’s job is to deliver the boldest version of the policy proposals that were at the center of the campaign. In order to do that, the group may need to push a potential mayor both privately and publicly to get those things done, and to get a version of them done that best serves working class people in the city. I think that DSA can do that through mobilizing their people to show up at every fight against opposing interests that seek to influence the mayor.

BH: Ultimately, we at DSA know that Mamdani becoming the Democratic nominee for mayor doesn’t mean that all of New York City has been transformed. This is still a capitalist society, and that means there will be tons of challenges in winning socialist policies. We know that the opposition that our project faces—from the landlord lobby to corporate Democrats, whether they’re in Albany or the city—is extremely powerful. In response, we’re not just fighting to win through the mayor’s office. We’re fighting to win in every place where the working class deserves to shift the existing balance of power.

Alex Kane is the senior reporter at Jewish Currents.

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ANALYSIS | 30 JUN 2025, 6:17 PM UTC | VIEW ON WEBSITE

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A New Playbook for Democratic Critics of Israel

Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory shows pro-Palestine candidates how to win without abandoning their values.

Peter Beinart

Zohran Mamdani speaking at B’nai Jeshurun, a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, at a candidate forum on June 8th, 2025.

Photo courtesy of Zohran Mamdani on X

In early June, B’nai Jeshurun, a prominent synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, hosted several Democratic candidates for mayor of New York. Early in the forum, former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson attacked his democratic socialist opponent, Zohran Mamdani, for accusing Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. When the moderators gave Mamdani the chance to respond, he cited Noy Katsman, an Israeli whose brother Hayim was killed on October 7th, but who still insisted, in Mamdani’s words, that “we must never give up on the conviction that all life, Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Arab, is equally precious.” Mamdani went on to cite two Israeli historians, Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, who have endorsed the genocide charge, as well as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who Mamdani said has called Israel’s assault “limitless, indiscriminate, cruel, and criminal.”

Tilson tried a new line of attack. He accused Mandani of ignoring the suffering in Ukraine, Darfur, and elsewhere and having an “obsession [with] the sole Jewish state.” Once again, Mamdani was ready. He said his criticism of Israel “comes from a belief” in “universal values of human rights.” He countered that he has praised Basil Seggos, a former New York State Commissioner of Environmental Conservation, who has volunteered in Ukraine and condemned Russian war crimes. And he added that, as an Indian American, he has been “very critical of the Indian government in betraying its constitutional commitment to a secular republic with dignity for all.” What links all these cases, Mamdani explained, “is the violation of a universal principle. That is what drives me.”

Tilson’s attacks drew cheers. But so did Mamdani’s retorts. Despite speaking in a mainstream synagogue, in a part of New York generally deemed more pro-Israel than the Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods that form his political base, Mamdani emerged from the exchange unscathed. And he didn’t succeed only in that forum. He garnered substantial Jewish support in the city as a whole. A poll taken in May showed Mamdani running second among Jewish voters, with 20% to Andrew Cuomo’s 31%. And given the state assemblyman’s late surge, and his cross-endorsement with Jewish comptroller Brad Lander—who, according to the same poll, garnered support from 18% of Jewish voters—it’s likely that Mamdani’s final share of the Jewish vote was even higher.

Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary last week contains a crucial message for Democrats who want to challenge unconditional US support for Israel but fear that doing so constitutes political suicide: It is possible to win without abandoning your values. It just requires strategic ingenuity. Indeed, Mamdani has written a new playbook for how to avoid the rhetorical traps set by Israel’s defenders. He did not allow pundits to exceptionalize Israel, but instead returned relentlessly to universal principles of justice and equality. Drawing on his deep knowledge of the subject, he has offered an example of how to speak in terms that at least some Jewish voters—and Democratic voters more generally—can hear.

As a Muslim, Mamdani faced particularly harsh—and sometimes racist—attacks from pro-Israel opponents and activists. And he did appear to moderate his message as the campaign went on. In one debate, he affirmed Israel’s “right to exist”—albeit as a “state with equal rights,” as opposed to a “Jewish state”—and dodged questions about whether New York City would divest from the country. Some pro-Palestine activists denounced such concessions. Still, Mamdani continued to embrace positions that go well beyond those of most progressive national Democrats. While both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders defend Americans’ right to boycott Israel, for instance, neither has endorsed the BDS movement itself. On the campaign trail, Mamdani did endorse it, repeatedly, even as he declined to explain how he would implement divestment as mayor.

His views sparked widespread condemnation. But that criticism proved less effective because Mamdani responded in ways that Democrats generally don’t. Again and again, when his critics sought to exceptionalize Israel, Mamdani invoked universal principles. Asked on Fox News why he had protested Israel’s assault on Gaza a week after October 7th, he replied, “At the core of my position about Israel, Palestine, any place in the world, is consistency, and international law and human rights because I believe that justice, freedom, safety those are things that should be applied to all people.” Asked on Good Day New York why he wouldn’t affirm Israel’s “right to exist” specifically as a Jewish state, he answered, “I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else. I think that in the way that we have in this country, equality should be enshrined in every country in the world.” Asked at B’nai Jeshurun whether he’d enforce the International Criminal Court’s warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Mamdani said, “Whether we’re speaking about Vladimir Putin or Netanyahu, I think that this should be a city in compliance with international law.” By invoking values that most of his interrogators claim to support, he made it clear that he doesn’t want to treat Israel differently from other countries; they do.

Mamdani also thwarted his antagonists by displaying a firmer grasp of the subject of Israel and Palestine than theirs. In mainstream American politics and media, certain buzzwords dominate discourse about the Jewish state. Most politicians and pundits, for instance, angrily reject charges that Israel is committing genocide. But instead of abandoning the phrase, Mamdani defended it, partially by citing Israeli academics. He also repeatedly invoked former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s harsh condemnation of Israel’s assault on Gaza. The tactic worked because few of his critics knew enough to explain why Mamdani was wrong.

There were moments when this depth of knowledge backfired. Mamdani’s attempt to bring nuance to the phrase “globalize the intifada” allowed critics to accuse him of whitewashing violence against Israelis, and perhaps even diaspora Jews. He would have been wiser to avoid engaging with the phrase, and to simply restate his commitment to the safety of everyone between the river and the sea. Meanwhile, his chosen tactic for justifying his views—routing them through Israeli sources—acquiesces to the racism that pervades American discourse, in which Israeli critics of Israel are considered more credible than Palestinian ones, even when they’re leveling charges that Palestinians leveled first. In a fairer political environment, Mamdani wouldn’t have to adhere to this discriminatory double standard. But when addressing Jewish voters—few of whom would dare call an Israeli academic or former politician antisemitic—the tactic appears to have worked.

One lesson of Mamdani’s success is that while progressive candidates may resent having to become experts on Israel and Palestine when they are motivated primarily by issues closer to home, knowing the issue well can offer a form of political protection, especially when confronting pro-Israel journalists and politicians who know little about the subject beyond the same tired talking points. In 2018, after Ocasio-Cortez first burst onto the political scene, she got into political trouble by referring to Israel’s “occupation of Palestine” without making it clear whether she meant the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or all of the land between the river and the sea. Mamdani, who co-founded his college’s branch of Students for Justice in Palestine, entered the race with a deeper background, and thus largely avoided such mistakes.

Mamdani also adeptly tackled the subject of antisemitism. Given that politicians often express greater outrage at discrimination against Jews than discrimination against Muslims, let alone Palestinians, progressives can be tempted to answer questions about antisemitism by simply condemning racism writ large, as Jeremy Corbyn sometimes did as head of Britain’s Labour Party—a choice that reinforces critics’ charge that progressives don’t care about Jews’ particular fears. Mamdani did not fall into this vicious cycle. He shrewdly spoke about antisemitism as a problem in its own right rather than a mere subset of the larger problem of bigotry. He explicitly addressed the anxieties of Jewish constituents, repeatedly citing conversations with Jews who fear antisemitic attacks and pledging to dramatically increase funding to fight hate crimes. “Antisemitism,” he told Stephen Colbert, “is not simply something that we should talk about. It’s something we should tackle.” He may never win over voters who equate anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred, but by speaking specifically and concretely about antisemitic violence, he contrasted himself with critics who are more concerned with displaying their pro-Israel bona fides than actually keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe.

Not all Democrats possess Mamdani’s political gifts, and few will face opponents as tainted as Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams. Nonetheless, Mamdani has now offered his party a manual for how to seek political office as an unapologetic defender of Palestinian freedom and prevail. With any luck, at least one Democratic candidate will consult it when seeking the presidential nomination in 2028.

I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.

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Peter Beinart is the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents.

PeterBeinart

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UPDATED 17 AUG 2025, 12:51 PM UTC

Zionism: A People Reborn

Eli Valley

Read 1 letter to the editor about “Zionism: A People Reborn”

Eli Valley is a Jewish Currents contributing writer. His comics collection Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel, and his new book, Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque, are available from OR Books.

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Egypt Cracks Down on the “Global March to Gaza”

By suppressing an effort to break the Gaza siege, activists say Egypt has once again prioritized its alignment with Israel and the US over its stated commitments to Palestinian rights.

Emad Mekay

A humanitarian convoy carrying hundreds of activists to the Gaza Strip to challenge Israel's blockade on the territory stops in Sirte, eastern Libya, after being blocked by authorities from continuing toward the eastern border with Egypt, June 15th, 2025.

Yousef Murad/AP

On June 10th, activists affiliated with the International Coalition Against the Israeli Occupation, a broad alliance of trade unions, solidarity movements, and human rights groups, tried to organize the “Global March to Gaza.” At the event, participants from more than 50 countries—including Mexico, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Tunisia, and France—would arrive in Cairo, travel 200 miles to Al-Arish on the Mediterranean, and then walk approximately 33 miles to the Rafah border crossing to deliver aid and help alleviate the widespread starvation resulting from the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Like the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which planned to bring aid to Gaza by ship before Israeli forces detained and deported its crew, the Global March was conceived as a “civilian response to global injustice,” with the goal of spotlighting Gaza’s starvation and demanding the opening of a humanitarian corridor for food, water, and medicine.

Right from the start, however, the would-be marchers were met with Egyptian repression. In the days before June 15th, the date set for marchers’ arrival at Rafah, Egyptian authorities unleashed a torrent of online and media propaganda, deploying influencers and TV personalities to smear organizers as foreign tools of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political group that has been a historical adversary of Egypt’s military establishment and that the country has designated as a terrorist organization. “There were these calls from the international terrorist organization of the Muslim Brotherhood to converge on Egypt to stir instability,” Egypt’s top TV anchor, Ahmed Moussa, said on the state-run Sada El-Balad TV. “There are different, intellectual currents that were involved in this, but they were all led by the wings of an international terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.” The rhetoric soon fueled police action. “Before the march, we had always been met with support and encouragement when we spoke to authorities,” Carola Rackete, a German member of the European Parliament and a participant in the march, told Jewish Currents, “but everything was different on the ground.” Rackete said that Egyptian authorities began snatching newly arrived activists “from the streets, at night from the hotel, and at restaurants” in order to forcefully deport them. “Some got their phones destroyed or their passports confiscated,” she added. “Not even one peaceful meeting of everyone was possible.” Other activists posted on social media that they had to change hotels every night during their stay in Egypt, or otherwise be secretly hosted by Egyptian contacts, in order to avoid arrests.

The crackdown continued as activists tried to make their way to Al-Arish. On June 13th, Melanie Johanna Schweizer, a German lawyer and spokesperson for the Global March to Gaza, told Jewish Currents that police and soldiers stopped the convoy she was traveling with between Cairo and Al-Arish. “We were held for five hours in the heat,” she said, adding that three activists subsequently collapsed and required hospitalization. Schweizer said that officers arrested some of the convoy’s participants and forced others to return to Cairo, seizing a number of people’s passports. Meanwhile, a separate contingent of 200 individuals reached Ismailia, a Suez Canal city 126 miles from Al-Arish. But by the time they arrived, the city had become an armed encampment, its streets and roads choked with checkpoints where military and police officers scrutinized identification papers and scrolled through social media feeds of suspected participants in the mass mobilization. As a result, all the activists who arrived in Ismailia were detained. In cases where campaigners refused to disperse, the authorities deployed plainclothes officers and individuals described by activists as “violent thugs in civilian clothes” to attack and remove them, a tactic seemingly intended to obscure the involvement of Egyptian police.

Egypt’s military rulers have framed this crackdown as a security issue, with the Foreign Ministry putting out a statement saying that Egypt was acting “to ensure the safety of visiting delegations due to the sensitive security conditions in this border area since the onset of the crisis in Gaza.” However, observers say that Cairo’s harsh suppression of pro-Palestine actions highlight a reality that its leaders have tried to obscure under public statements of sympathy: namely, that Egypt, which once mobilized armies for Palestine, is now working with Israel and the United States to mobilize police against Palestine’s sympathizers. “Egypt is a client state of the US, and by extension Israel,” said Eman Abdelhadi, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. “It is acting accordingly.” Indeed, Egypt’s crackdown on the Global March came after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that Israeli forces would stop the convoys themselves if Egyptian authorities failed to intercept them, a sequence that activists say clarifies Egypt’s role as an enforcer of Israeli policy in the region. So much so that when Egyptian security forces dragged activists waving Palestinian flags onto deportation flights at Cairo Airport, exiled opposition figure Mona el-Shazli offered a blistering articulation of this criticism: “This is no longer Cairo International Airport,” she said. “It’s Ben Gurion.”

Egypt did not always cooperate with Israel. Between 1948 and 1979, the two countries fought several wars, and even when there wasn’t fighting, Egypt refused full normalization with Israel and continued to be harshly critical of Israeli abuse of Palestinians. But this position, crafted under the leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, began to unravel after his successor, Anwar Sadat, signed a US sponsored settlement treaty with Israel in 1979. The agreement removed Egypt, the largest Arab military force, from the regional conflict, altering the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East in Israel’s favor over the coming decades. Many Palestinians considered the treaty a stab in the back, and local Islamists and pan-Arabists opposed it vehemently, but the country has continued to double down on its collaboration with Israel over time.

Behind Egypt’s compliance lurks a cold calculus. For a debt-burdened military dictatorship locked into strict International Monetary Fund austerity measures, the US’s $1.3 billion in annual military aid is critical. Egypt’s military also depends on American hardware to prop up its regime, with military insiders calling the bond between Egypt and the Pentagon among the region’s closest. Egypt’s ruling regime wants to keep these weapons flowing, and doing so often requires avoiding diplomatic and security disputes with Israel. “The current [Egyptian] regime is in full cooperation with Israel’s interests,” said Abdelhadi, summing up the dynamic, “and in return it receives continued military aid from the US.” These patterns have intensified since the rise of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime in the wake of the 2013 coup. “The shift began under Sadat with the Camp David Accords, but Sisi has taken normalization . . . to unprecedented levels,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, a Berlin-based Egyptian analyst. Specifically, Egypt under Sisi has significantly expanded its security cooperation with Israel, particularly in counterterrorism operations across the Sinai Peninsula. Sisi has permitted, for the first time, Israeli drone strikes in Sinai; he has also agreed to demands for military code-sharing with Washington at Tel Aviv’s behest, a measure previous Egyptian presidents reliably resisted. Economically, Egypt has emerged as a major importer of Israeli natural gas, despite longstanding public opposition to normalization with Israel: The country now gets 40% to 60% of its gas imports from Israel, which makes up 15% to 20% of consumption.

The Gaza blockade has been a major prong of this collaboration. Egypt has played such an important role in controlling aid to Palestinians through the side of the Rafah crossing it controls that Human Rights Watch has accused the country of aiding the Israeli blockade. More recent developments build on this precedent: Despite its statements calling for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, Egypt has kept the Rafah crossing closed while insisting it is Israel that is blocking the aid from the other side. Further, after Israeli urgings, Egyptian authorities say they have dismantled hundreds of smuggling tunnels linking the Sinai to Gaza, disrupting a lifeline for Hamas but also exacerbating humanitarian conditions in the blockaded enclave since many Gazans relied on food and merchandise smuggling from the Sinai. Egypt has also resisted domestic pressure to use its diplomatic clout and recall its ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza, underscoring Cairo’s prioritization of bilateral interests. “Today’s regime insists on demonstrating that the Palestinian question is not a priority and will not risk anything for it,” said Dima Al-sajdeya, a researcher at the Paris-based Collège de France.

To maintain this position, Egypt has had to suppress pro-Palestine protests at home. The ruling generals see such political expression as a danger, risking a showdown with Israel as well as their regime’s own survival in the face of mounting public dissatisfaction. In this sense, el-Hamalawy said, “Sisi’s deference to Washington and Tel Aviv reflects both strategic calculation and regime insecurity.” Egypt’s rulers have used two tactics to guard against such instability: security crackdowns, and a media barrage to temper pro-Palestine sentiment. On the former front, Egyptian forces routinely sweep up dissenters, snuffing out protests before they ignite. The repression targets any form of public sympathy with Palestinians not sanctioned by the state. For instance, in May, authorities extended the detention of Abdelgawad Al-Sahlami, a low ranking police officer who had raised a Palestinian flag in downtown Alexandria. He now faces terrorism charges, which carry a possible death penalty. While this clampdown unfolds, state TV works to deflect blame from Israel. It pummels Hamas as a regional saboteur of diplomacy and redirects criticism. In April, for example, international scholars met in Turkey and issued a religious fatwa to frame the need to help Palestinians as an Islamic duty. Cairo responded with a calculated leak of a 1970 tape featuring Nasser saying that since other Arab nations were not sharing in the burden, Egypt wouldn’t fight another war against Israel alone. The message was plain: If even the pan-Arabist icon of the ’60s balked at solo confrontations against Israel, today’s Egyptians shouldn’t agitate for a posture from that era.

Ultimately, the regime’s ongoing management of dissent—alongside its systematic crushing of pro-Palestine forces such as pan-Arabism and political Islam—means that while many Egyptians sympathize with Palestine, street protests remain rare. “The Egyptian people I met are deeply disturbed by the war crimes that are being committed by Israel in their neighbouring country,” said Rackete. “However, [because] Egypt is a military dictatorship in which protests are being suppressed, the Egyptian people are not free to make their voices heard.” El-Hamalawy concurred with this assessment, adding that “the gap between state policy and popular sentiment, especially on Palestine, widens by the day. It’s unsustainable long-term.” The recent eruption of the Gaza solidarity march may serve to demonstrate this unsustainability. The Egyptian government quickly moved to quell the march, which it viewed as a potential spark to inflame pro-Palestine sentiment in the country. But despite the suppression, images disseminated by activists—depicting people being removed from hotels, detained, or forced onto flights amidst protests—have transformed Cairo’s actions into a public spectacle, and contributed toward march organizers’ goal of “highlight[ing] Egypt’s complicity in the ongoing siege and genocide in Gaza.”

Activists have vowed to continue protest actions that highlight these contradictions. Global March to Gaza organizers, who include Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla, have said they will launch hunger strikes to continue their campaign. Meanwhile, a second, nine-bus “Solidarity Caravan,” comprising an estimated 2,000 volunteers from Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, sought to join the march by crossing into Egypt from Libya, although it was forced to return by forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, who Cairo trains and arms. A small convoy from Lebanon also announced plans to march to Gaza, but eventually turned back after the Syrian authorities refused to grant it permission. Meanwhile, Malaysian organizations have said they will plan a “Thousand Ship Flotilla” to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. While clampdowns may prevent some of these efforts, Global March participants say, they will still show that, in Rackete’s words, “hundreds of thousands . . . are ready to take to the streets and be active to stop the genocide of Palestinians.”

Emad Mekay is an independent journalist with extensive experience reporting from the Middle East and US. He has served as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg and his recent work has appeared in outlets including Euronews and Global Insight.

@MekaEUSA

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Table of Contents

Jewish Currents: 2025 Sep 12

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A Map to a Place That No Longer Exists: 2025 Sep 5

A Federal Security Grant Program Popular with Jewish Organizations May Now Require Beneficiaries to Cooperate with ICE: 2025 Aug 22

Rhetoric Without Reckoning: 2025 Aug 22

Remembering Awdah Hathaleen: 2025 Aug 21

Mount Sinai Hospital Fired Social Worker Over “Gaza Must Live” Postcard: 2025 Aug 13

The Betrayal of Light: 2025 Aug 12

How the Department of Health and Human Services Took the Lead in Trump’s Campus Crackdown: 2025 Aug 7

A Canadian Antisemitism Statistic Went Viral—But It Has No Source: 2025 Aug 6

Anatomy of a Red Scare: 2025 Aug 1

Egypt’s Hidden Refugee Crisis: 2025 Jul 29

Siblings: 2025 Jul 25

The Gazans Trapped in Sheba Hospital: 2025 Jul 23

Ayman Odeh’s Failed Impeachment Is a “Win-Win” for the Right: 2025 Jul 22

Lessons from La Guardia: 2025 Jul 18

Two Empty Rooms: 2025 Jul 16

Auditing the Hindu American Foundation’s Claims of “Hinduphobia”: 2025 Jul 8

Inside the New Group Giving Antisemitism Trainings at Harvard: 2025 Jul 2

Left Electoralism After Mamdani: A Roundtable: 2025 Jul 1

A New Playbook for Democratic Critics of Israel: 2025 Jun 30

Zionism: A People Reborn: 2025 Jun 27

Egypt Cracks Down on the “Global March to Gaza”: 2025 Jun 23