Several progressive Jewish organizations have planned a protest at a plaza outside the United Nations, where Israeli media reported that the minister would be attending a conference on policing. Meanwhile, other left-wing groups have planned their own demonstrations and circulated an open letter with thousands of signatures calling for State Attorney General Letitia James to prosecute Ben-Gvir for war crimes upon his arrival.

But it’s unclear whether Ben-Gvir is coming at all.

“To our knowledge, Minister Ben-Gvir is not coming to New York at the moment,” a staffer for the Consulate General of Israel in New York wrote the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an email on Thursday.

Separately, a UN official confirmed to JTA on Thursday that Ben-Gvir was not yet registered for the UN Chiefs of Police Summit, which brings together ministers and law enforcement leaders from around the world. The conference is taking place on July 7 and 8, though it is still possible for him to register in the coming days.

Ben-Gvir, a highly controversial figure in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet, is the leader of the country’s far-right “Otzma Yehudit,” or “Jewish Power” party. Before he entered the Knesset he was convicted of supporting a terrorist group and other offenses, and since taking office he has advocated for policies such as renewed Jewish settlement in Gaza and has been sanctioned for allegedly “inciting extremist violence” against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Liberal Jewish groups have come out in vocal opposition to the idea of him setting foot in the Big Apple following Haaretz’s initial reporting that Ben-Gvir was coming.

“It’s really important for people, both American Jews and Israelis, to say that extremists like Ben-Gvir aren’t accepted in our community,” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, head of the progressive rabbinic human rights group T’ruah, told JTA in an interview. “He just doesn’t belong in New York, or in the Israeli government, or espousing his views anywhere in Jewish society,” 

T’ruah is co-organizing a protest outside the UN’s summit on Tuesday, along with close to a dozen other liberal Jewish groups. Among them are New York Jewish Agenda, J Street, Israelis for Peace and the Union for Reform Judaism.

Jacobs said she believes the demonstration will be particularly impactful because it’s coming from “people who are not looking to destroy the state, who are not anti-Israel in any way,” but who envision a “place of both Israelis and Palestinians being safe.”

Another planned protest scheduled just hours later at the same plaza is being led by left-wing groups more sharply critical of Israel. Anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace is among the organizations promoting it. Their open letter calling on James to prosecute Ben-Gvir has more than 6,500 signatures.

The last time Ben-Gvir visited New York City, just over a year ago, his presence drew a series of heated protests and counter-protests. A few of them took place in Crown Heights, the neighborhood where he visited 770 Eastern Parkway, the headquarters of the Chabad Hasidic movement. 

He also made pit stops at another Chabad institution and the gravesite of the movement’s late leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as well as at a Midwood kosher restaurant, where he drew a friendlier crowd. A number of other planned events during that trip were canceled the week before.

The same coalition of liberal Jewish groups held a rally last year outside a Wall Street restaurant where Ben-Gvir was speaking. New York Rep. Jerry Nadler introduced legislation during that rally aimed at combating settler violence in the West Bank.

Margo Hughes-Robinson, who’s now the executive director of NYJA, co-emceed last year’s demonstration. She said in an interview on Thursday that she hopes that elected officials attend this year’s and make clear that “what he represents, and his worldview, is anathema to our Jewish values, it’s anathema to the vision of Israel that we support.”

Ben-Gvir was slated to make another trip to the U.S. more recently for a wedding, though he ended up canceling the trip after he was asked to provide his fingerprints in order to obtain a visa.

Unlike during Ben-Gvir’s last visit, New York’s mayor is now an anti-Zionist who has vowed to arrest Netanyahu if he steps foot in Israel due to his outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant, even though the US is not a party to the ICC. (There is no reported ICC arrest warrant for Ben-Gvir.) Following the election of Zohran Mamdani, Ben-Gvir described the result as “a moment when antisemitism triumphed over common sense.”

Mamdani’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. 

A number of local officials spoke out following the most recent appearance of a far-right Israeli minister in New York, condemning finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who attended the Israel Day parade. None have weighed in so far on Ben-Gvir’s possible return next week.

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Loay Abdel Fattah Alnaji, 54, of Moorpark, California, pleaded guilty in May to felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury for the death of Kessler, as part of a plea deal that was sharply criticized by local Jewish leaders.

Alnaji admitted to striking Kessler, a 69-year-old Jewish pro-Israel activist, in the head with a megaphone during dueling pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrations in a Los Angeles suburb in November 2023. Kessler later died of his injuries. His death became the first tied to U.S. demonstrations surrounding the war in Gaza.

“There are no words to describe the pain of losing a husband in such a sudden and violent way,” Kessler’s wife wrote in an impact statement prior to the sentencing. “The grief is relentless. The silence in our house, the absence of his voice, his companionship, his love and the future we had planned together are losses I carry with me every day.”

Ventura County Superior Court Judge Derek Malan said during the June 30 sentencing that he had received 132 emails from community members regarding the case, many of which advocated for a harsher sentence for Alnaji and called the case a murder or hate crime.

Malan said that while he understood that the Jewish community could see his sentence as a devaluing of human life, the case was not “a Jewish life versus a Muslim life,” according to the VC Star.

“When we try to equate a life with a number, we fail,” Malan said during the June 30 sentencing, according to the VC Star. “The rules do support a grant of probation in this case.”

The Anti-Defamation League of California decried the ruling in a post on Instagram, writing that it was “little more than a slap on the wrist and not in proportion with the enormity of this crime.”

“It’s especially concerning that the Court spent much of the sentencing hearing expressing dismay with the letters received from the Jewish community and asking the DA’s Office to correct the perceptions of those who expressed how this woefully inadequate sentence would impact the Jewish community,” the post continued.

Alnaji’s defense attorney, Ron Bamieh, told Malan that his client was a “good person,” and that the November 2023 incident was “isolated,” according to the VC Star. He also read aloud a letter Alnaji wrote to Malan.

“I never wanted to harm anyone,” Bamieh said, reading Alnaji’s letter. “The grief I carry from that day is something I will live with always.”

Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko objected to the sentencing of Alnaji in a statement Tuesday.

“Mr. Kessler lost his life in a violent attack that took him from his family and his wife of 43 years,” Nasarenko said. “Given the circumstances of this case and the death that resulted, we believe a state prison commitment was the appropriate and just sentence.”

Bamieh addressed the ruling in a post on Instagram Tuesday, writing that “Kessler’s death is a tragedy. Nothing about this case changes that, and Dr. Alnaji has never pretended otherwise.”

“The court was clear today: this was never a murder case —no intent to kill could be proven. It was never a hate crime — no evidence of hate,” Bamieh wrote. “It was a battery that led to an accidental, tragic death.”

Rabbi Noah Farkas, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, told JTA in a statement that the case was a “stark reminder that hateful rhetoric has tragic, real-world consequences.”

“While we had hoped for a sentence that more fully reflected the seriousness of the crime, we hope the outcome offers some comfort to Kessler’s family, friends, and the Jewish community,” Farkas said.

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Catherine Beth Washburn, 37, of Irondequoit, New York, allegedly sent more than $30,000 in cryptocurrency across 80 transactions to an individual who identified as a Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighter in Gaza and claimed to have engaged in attacks against Israel, according to the Justice Department.

She was charged with attempting to provide material support and resources, namely currency, to a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

“As alleged in the complaint, this defendant, fueled by her self-described hate of Israel and Jewish people, went to great lengths to attempt to provide financial support to terrorist organizations that use violence to further their agendas, including the Palestine Islamic Jihad,” Michael DiGiacomo, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York, said in a statement.

Despite Washburn’s alleged attempts to “support violent extremism,” he added, she was “stopped.”

In February and March 2026, the FBI obtained alleged communications between Washburn and the Islamic Jihad fighter in which she told him that she wished “every day were October 7th.”

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is an Iran-backed Palestinian terror group that attacked Israel alongside Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, during which its fighters abducted and killed Israeli citizens, including Dror Or, who was killed in Kibbutz Be’eri, and Oded Lifshitz, who was killed in captivity, and Gadi Mozes and Arbel Yehud, who were abducted by the group and released in January 2025.

“[I]f I lived in Gaza, I would fight alongside the resistance,” Washburn allegedly wrote, adding that she hated Jews “very much,” and that she wished Israel “would disappear.”

In one message, Washburn allegedly stated, “I feel excited every time I see news of the killing of an occupation soldier.”

Attempts to reach Washburn for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency were unsuccessful.

According to the criminal complaint, Washburn is a leader of the Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation, an extremist anti-Zionist group. The group, which operates in the United States and abroad, was launched last spring and engages in “direct action” to “protest, attack, destory [sic], sabotage and shut down Zionist and U.S infrastructures & business and all its affiliates,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.

In August 2025, an affiliate of the group, Jermaiah Yusuf Sawaqed, 25, of Everett, Massachusetts, was charged with vandalizing the Massachusetts State House with paint.

Washburn made an initial appearance Tuesday afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark W. Pedersen and was detained.

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In a letter sent last Thursday to the school community, East Brook Middle School Principal Ryan Aupperlee said that the school in Paramus had launched an investigation into the incident in “coordination with law enforcement.”

“Adolf Hitler represents hatred, antisemitism, and the horrors of the Holocaust, including the murder of six million Jews,” Aupperlee wrote in the letter obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “An image of him has no place in a yearbook created for our students. It does not reflect who we are or what East Brook stands for, and we condemn its inclusion without reservation.”

Sean Adams, the superintendent of Paramus Public Schools, told JTA in an emailed statement that the yearbooks were taken back from the students “the same day they were distributed, before the students left school for the day.”

“We are working with the yearbook company to develop a solution that will allow us to redistribute the yearbooks after removing the offensive content while still allowing students to retain the handwritten, personalized messages their classmates and teachers had already written in their yearbooks,” Adams said.

Adams said that an investigation into the incident was “ongoing,” and that “any details related to students must remain confidential.”

The incident comes amid a spate of allegations of antisemitism in New Jersey schools in recent years. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into Teaneck Public Schools after parents alleged the system had fostered an antisemitic climate since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacres in Israel. The same year, teachers at Fort Lee High School presented a lesson that described Hamas as a “Palestinian political party and armed resistance movement.”

A high school yearbook in East Brunswick, New Jersey, also drew condemnation and was recalled in 2024 after a photo of the “Jewish Student Association” was replaced with one of a Muslim student group.

Jason Shames, the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, said that the incident was “shocking people to the core.”

“I’m not rushing to judgment, but again, if I know that it’s a minor, I want consequences. If I know that’s an adult, I want consequences,” Shames said, adding that the Jewish community “demands” to see accountability.

On Friday, Paramus Mayor Chris DiPiazza condemned the incident in a post on Facebook, writing that, “Any examples, like yesterday’s, does not reflect Paramus.”

Shames said that while he felt the school “handled it right,” he was still looking to other state leaders for a statement condemning the incident.

“There should be global condemnation,” Shames said. “If the school has already done it, and the mayor’s already done it, where’s the uproar?”

He said the incident reflected a broader normalization of antisemitism.

“It’s infuriating that it’s come to this. There’s a bigger statement about the illness in American society today, and the antisemitism, and the hate that’s involved in this,” Shames said. “Even if it winds up being two middle school kids who thought it was funny, we have a problem now with people thinking Hitler and Nazi jokes are funny.”

Rabbi Arthur Weiner, the leader of the Conservative Congregation Beth Tikvah in Paramus, said that he was first alerted to the yearbook by a congregant whose child attends the school.

On Monday, Weiner sent a letter to congregants saying that he was “angered by this blatant antisemitic incident,” and had been in contact with the school district and local elected leaders about their response.

“Events like these are of great concern to us both personally and as a community,” Weiner wrote. “Incidents involving Nazi imagery or references to Hitler are not merely offensive. They touch deep historical wounds and remind us why vigilance remains so important.”

Weiner said that the local Jewish community could “take heart in the reaction of the authorities to this particular event.”

“We have not always seen that clear and unambiguous response from school districts when similar incidents of antisemitism and bias have occurred,” Weiner told JTA. “I think we’ve been very, very proud of the response.”

Rabbi Shmuel Goldstein of the Modern Orthodox Congregation Beth Tefillah in Paramus said that while many parents at his congregation had expressed “frustration,” “hurt,” and “concern” over the incident, they also felt “supported by the local government.”

Goldstein said that he nonetheless did “not feel that there’s nearly enough proactive measures in the local school systems.”

“These incidents don’t happen in a vacuum,” Goldstein said. “They happen because someone is taught at home on social media or informally amongst peers at schools, that it is okay to hurt Jewish people, that has to be made clear, that that is unacceptable.”

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For three decades, Debbie Findling led with it. 

The Wexner Heritage Program appeared on her CV, LinkedIn page and professional biography. Her participation in it was part of her Jewish identity, a marker of belonging to an elite network of leaders chosen to carry forward the values of the American Jewish community and a useful credential in her work as an adviser to Bay Area Jewish philanthropies. 

But over the last several years, the ties between the program’s sponsor, billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein came into focus for Findling. The two men had a close relationship for years. Wexner was instrumental in Epstein’s rise to wealth and prominence, while Epstein managed Wexner’s finances and later served as a trustee of the Wexner Foundation. 

Wexner has denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, including those against minors, and has testified that he severed financial and legal ties with Epstein in 2007. 

Still, Findling’s pride has soured into something closer to shame.

“I’ve lost something that I was really proud of — it was taken away from me,” Findling said, describing a sense that something “sinister” has corrupted such a positive experience. “I feel like the rug got pulled out from under me.”

Now Findling, 62, is leading what may be the largest organized accountability effort to emerge so far in the Jewish community’s reckoning with Wexner’s ties to Epstein. She’s doing so in partnership with Jan Reicher, 61, also a Bay Area Wexner Heritage alum, as well as a longtime community leader and the immediate past president of Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area.

The two women have circulated a public letter to the foundation signed by 80 Wexner alumni so far, including 50 from the Bay Area, urging the organization to take meaningful action to support survivors of sexual violence and trafficking. 

They also launched in May what they call Tikkun Funds — directing donations to three nonprofits that support survivors of sexual violence or trafficking — and asked fellow alumni to contribute $36,000 each. More than $356,000 has been pledged so far. A parallel effort, the ASHRU Fund, is being run by alumni of a separate Wexner fellowship for professionals at Jewish communal organizations.

The Wexner Foundation has not responded substantively to the letter’s demands and declined to comment for this story. The foundation held meetings with alumni after the revelations of Wexner’s deep ties with Epstein first emerged in 2019. 

Part of what makes the campaign remarkable is that open conversations about Wexner’s legacy amid the Epstein scandal have been rare. Alumni discussed the implications of the revelations in their immediate aftermath, in group chats and on social media. A number of alumni have made donations to groups, including for survivors of sex trafficking.

The Bay Area initiative appears to be the broadest and most robust so far.

Evan Segal, a Wexner Heritage participant in the Bay Area who left the program after its first year for a job in the Obama administration, said the discomfort stems from how many people in Jewish communal life are close to the issue. 

“If you want to know why the Jewish philanthropic world has been crickets, it’s because many of the big names that people have respected for years are tied — some more directly, some indirectly — to this scandal,” said Segal, who didn’t qualify to sign the open letter because he isn’t an alum. 

The silence, he suggested, is also about what the Wexner name has come to mean.

“For years, the Wexner name has been put in a pantheon of mensch-y philanthropists. People carry it on their resumes as a badge of honor,” he said. “Now it is 180 degrees of that.”

Findling and Reicher’s campaign is not aimed at dismantling the Wexner Foundation, the two women said, nor at repudiating the education they received and the community they formed. 

Instead, they describe it as an attempt to apply the very values the program instilled in them. 

“I feel like I am acting in the leadership capacity that Wexner taught me, which is to stand up for those who are less fortunate, to stand up for survivors, to stand up for truth,” Findling said. 

For decades, the Wexner name occupied a singular place in organized Jewish life. The retail magnate behind the rise of Victoria’s Secret and other major brands, such as The Limited, Abercrombie & Fitch and Bath & Body Works, became one of the most influential funders of Jewish leadership development in North America and Israel. His name was pervasive in his home city of Columbus, Ohio, where a Jewish nursing home still bears his name, as does the Jewish student center at Ohio State University. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum named a learning center for Wexner.

Beginning in the 1980s, the Wexner Foundation built a constellation of fellowships and leadership programs for Jewish clergy, professionals, philanthropists and lay leaders. Thousands of participants moved through those programs and into prominent positions across Jewish institutions and wider society.

Among the most visible of them was the Wexner Heritage Program, which combined Jewish learning, leadership development and community building. The program, which is offered for free, has attracted almost 2,500 participants across 35 North American cities. 

The San Francisco hub, which launched in the late 1990s, became one of its strongest. When the Wexner Foundation began seeking local matching grants, the San Francisco Jewish community set a “stellar example of commitment by creating an endowment,” according to the foundation. The Jewish Federation Bay Area’s efforts ensured there would be a new cohort every few years. Today, the Bay Area is among the regions with the most alumni.  

Among the 10 Wexner Heritage participants interviewed for this story, all described the experience as monumental. Or as Ellen Kahn, a member of Findling’s 1997-1999 cohort, put it, “absolutely life changing.”

“Leslie Wexner, in my view, was this bigger-than-life man who created something that was so extraordinary,” Kahn said. 

Alumni describe the far-reaching impact of their two-year Wexner program: It inspired them to serve on nonprofit boards, engage in philanthropy and build both friendships and community networks. 

Reicher, who joined the program in 2003 after helping found San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay, described the Wexner Heritage Program as formative. 

“For me, the biggest thing really was the cohort that we created,” she said. Her group still studies together, supports one another’s institutions and gathers socially.

It took until this January for Reicher to “wake up” about the implications of Wexner’s relationship with Epstein. She was reading court testimony from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the most outspoken and prominent survivors of abuse by Epstein and his enablers. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, had testified that she was trafficked to Wexner multiple times, a charge he has denied. 

Wexner has not been charged with any crime in connection with the allegations. 

“Oh my God,” Reicher kept repeating aloud to herself, growing more disgusted and horrified with what she was reading in the testimony. She phoned Findling and said, “We’ve got to do something.”

For Reicher, the decision to act has been bound up with her own experience as a rape survivor. She said she came “within inches of losing my life” at 18 but ultimately did not press charges after her father urged her against it. 

“That person that I was at 18 didn’t stand up for herself,” she said. “So now I have this other layer as a survivor that I need to stick up for other survivors, even if it causes me harm, even if it causes me trauma.”

The accountability campaign was launched amid intensifying scrutiny of Wexner, whose name appears 1,746 times in the publicly released Epstein files on the U.S. Justice Department website. 

In February, Wexner sat for a five-hour filmed deposition before the U.S. House Oversight Committee, where he denied any knowledge that Epstein was a sexual predator or committed sexual crimes. 

The accusations that Epstein raped, abused and trafficked girls and young women across many years are extensive. He was convicted of sex crimes with minors in 2008. Eleven years later, he was charged with sex trafficking of minors but died by suicide before trial. 

“I was conned by the world Olympic, all-time con artist,” Wexner testified during the Feb. 18 deposition, which was made public. 

Around the same time, the Wexner Foundation announced it would hold a series of private listening sessions over Zoom for alumni who had concerns about Wexner’s ties to Epstein. “Together with my colleagues, we want to listen, to take in your thinking aspiring to move forward even if along a different path,” foundation president Elka Abrahamson wrote in an email to alumni first reported by Jewish Currents.

Neither Reicher nor Findling attended a listening session, believing the events would be counterproductive and that no change would result.

“Listening is an essential component of responsible leadership,” they wrote in the open letter. “But listening is not enough. When sworn testimony and public records raise serious moral and ethical questions, silence risks complicity. Our community needs more than private reflection — it needs visible ethical conviction and action from the Wexner Foundation.”

Some Jewish leaders have emerged since February to defend Wexner, albeit with qualifications.

Wexner deserves the Jewish community’s continued admiration based on the principal of “hakarat hatov,” recognition of good even among those who are flawed, David J. Butler, a lawyer who is member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, wrote in an opinion for the small chain of Jewish newspapers last month.

Jewish ethics “asks people to live within tension. To condemn wrongdoing without erasing merit. To acknowledge failure without pretending that flawed individuals never contributed profound good to the world around them,” Butler wrote.

When Findling and Reicher brought their appeal to fellow alumni in late February, they found a community divided. While dozens signed quickly, the response did not grow beyond an initial burst of support, and the vast majority of alumni have not joined the effort.

For Marci Dollinger, 61, an elementary school teacher at Brandeis Marin Jewish Day School in San Rafael and a board member of several local Jewish organizations, the decision to sign the letter was obvious. It’s a matter of “not being silent when serious concerns arise,” she said. But she added that many alumni she knows were reluctant to sign.

“Even some in my cohort [declined to sign], and it was upsetting because to me it just seemed like why would you be on the wrong side of this? But they have their reasons,” Dollinger said.

Few of those reluctant to sign were willing to go on the record. 

Howard Steiermann, 67, of San Francisco said he didn’t want to sign it initially because he doesn’t feel that the program’s name is tainted. 

“I’m not sure that my feeling toward the program or the man has changed,” said Steiermann, who added that he has read through the allegations. “For me, I can’t tell you why, it doesn’t tarnish my memory or appreciation for the program that I went through.”

But he ultimately added his name out of a sense of allyship. 

“I do believe in innocence until proven guilty,” said Steiermann, who was ordained as a rabbi in 2015, more than a decade after his Wexner graduation. “That said, I think our culture has had such a horrible track record of not listening to women around abuse.” 

He added that he wanted to be an ally to what “too many people see as a woman’s issue.”

While Steiermann ultimately signed, his reluctance reflects a wider pattern among some male alumni.

Wayne Feinstein, who said he signed it with no hesitation, noticed that pattern.

Feinstein, 74, served as executive vice president of the Jewish Federation Bay Area from 1991 to 2000 and grew up attending the same Columbus, Ohio, synagogue as Wexner. 

“To me, it was an ethical question, plain and simple,” he said. 

Feinstein, one of only about two dozen men out of 80 signatories, was disappointed to learn that many male Wexner alumni had refused. They were “reluctant or fearful,” he said, to condemn a businessman in the Jewish community where they themselves worked.

He spent an hour on the phone trying to convince a male friend who kept pushing back. The friend said, “There’s no proof that Leslie Wexner did any of this.” Feinstein replied to him: 

“That’s not a reason not to do this.”

Findling and Reicher said they’re not working toward persuading the many holdouts. 

“I want to activate the people who signed, who are with me, into meaningful repair,” Findling said. 

Their call to action encouraged gifts of $36,000, the amount the program spent on each Wexner Heritage participant, offering alumni their choice of three vetted nonprofits: World Without Exploitation, a national organization supporting Epstein survivors through advocacy, legislative action and public awareness; the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, the national umbrella organization that has been a leader in supporting sexual violence survivors of Oct. 7, 2023; and Shalom Bayit, a prominent Jewish voice on gender-based violence prevention and response based in the Bay Area.

Tricia Gibbs, 67, a Wexner Heritage alum and co-founder of the San Francisco Free Clinic, donated to all three nonprofits and signed the letter — her first time signing anything like it.

“In a way we’d be doing more harm to the program by not standing up, because we wouldn’t show that we learned anything,” she said. “There’s a deeply rooted ethic in Torah that tells us to protect the vulnerable.”

When they began writing the letter, Reicher worried about the impact on the Jewish community. Calling upon fellow alumni meant acknowledging painful truths. “Does this hurt the Jews more?” she asked herself.

A major source of consternation for the Jewish community has been that Epstein, Wexner and a number of other men connected to the scandal — though far from a majority — have been Jews and have had meaningful ties to Jewish institutions. 

“It’s incongruous with how we were all raised,” Kahn said.

Naomi Tucker, co-founder and executive director of Shalom Bayit, hears it often. 

“We have the exact same rates of violence against women in the Jewish community as everywhere else,” she said. “We would like to think we are better or different. But unfortunately these things happen everywhere.”

One in four Jewish women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, Tucker noted, and one in three will face sexual assault or harassment — all consistent with national figures for all women.

Many alumni continue to reckon with what the program means to them. 

“Do I wish the Wexner name no longer was attached to the foundation? Yes,” Kahn said.

That may come to pass. 

On May 21, the foundation announced that all Wexner leadership programs will spin off into an independent nonprofit on Jan. 1, 2027, under a new name yet to be released. Wexner and his wife are contributing $40 million to launch the new organization.

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Jews in smaller communities were “lacking a sense of allyship in the communities around them,” said Mimi Kravetz, the chief impact and growth officer for JFNA.

“Jews in small communities tell us that they feel deeply concerned that they’re looking for support, that their leadership is looking for network and resources, because it can feel like they’re on their own,” Kravetz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The JFNA survey, which was compiled from its March 2025 study of Jewish Life in North America, found that 22% of Jews live in small communities. Defined as Jewish communities with fewer than 5,000 Jews living within five miles of their zip code, small Jewish communities are also more likely to be found in the South or in rural or suburban areas.

Although the survey found no statistically significant difference in the antisemitism experienced by Jews in smaller and larger communities, it found that Jews in small communities are more likely to feel that antisemitism is invalidated or dismissed.

Among respondents, 58% of Jews in small communities reported feeling more likely to be invalidated, compared with 48% of Jews overall.

Jews in small communities were also less likely to express confidence in local law enforcement’s responses to antisemitism. Just 39% of Jews in small communities say local law enforcement takes antisemitism seriously, compared with 47% of Jews in larger communities.

Leaders of small Jewish communities also feel less physically safe in Jewish spaces than their big city counterparts: 60% of those small-community leaders said they feel safe, compared to 86% of community leaders overall.

While the survey found that 50% of Jews in smaller communities report being unengaged in Jewish life, compared to 36% of Jewish respondents overall, they were just as likely to say they wanted greater connection to Jewish life.

The survey suggested that geographic constraints and limited availability of Jewish life likely caused the disparity in engagement, even as Jews sought out Jewish connections in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.

Kravetz said Jews in small communities were just as likely as Jews in big communities to crave those connections.

“What’s needed in small Jewish communities is more leadership infrastructure and support for Jewish life,” Kravetz said.

The survey was conducted before the January arson attack on Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, which drew renewed attention to the security challenges facing smaller Jewish communities.

Michele Schipper, the CEO of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a nonprofit that supports Jewish communities across the South and was housed inside Beth Israel Congregation prior to the arson attack, said security remains a challenge for some smaller congregations.

“For some of those smaller communities, they may not be able to have personnel on site every time they’re open,” Schipper said. “It may be an older building. Not everyone is able to get one of the secure community grants,” she said, referring to federal and state government grants to nonprofits seen as vulnerable to attack.

Earlier this month leaders from Jewish communities across the South convened at the ISJL’s annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Schipper said they discussed strategies for keeping smaller communities safe.

“One of the things we really did share is how important it is not to isolate ourselves in these communities, but to continually build relationships with the local community, with local law enforcement, so that when, God forbid, something happens, you’re not starting to reach out or wait for somebody to contact you,” Schipper said.

Looking ahead, Schipper said her message to Jews in small communities was to “continue to build relationships in your own local community, and just continue to participate in the Jewish community and stay strong and positive.”

The study, which was conducted online by JFNA from March 5-25, 2025, surveyed 5,798 total U.S. adults, of which 1,877 identified as Jewish. The margin of error for Jewish adults was ± 2.26%, and samples were weighted to be representative of the U.S. population and Jewish community.

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The organizers of the San Francisco Trans March downplayed the harassment of gay Jewish congressional candidate Scott Wiener at their event last weekend, saying that “many working class LGBTQ people” believe “he does not represent their interests.”

In a follow-up statement, one organizer also clarified that they objected to Wiener’s past support for Israel as well as his support of a controversial statewide bill intended to address antisemitism in education.

The remarks from the Trans March, relayed in two parts on Tuesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, marked the organization’s first direct comment on the subject since the California state senator’s treatment at the march was roundly condemned by local and national Jewish and LGBTQ leaders. The incident, captured in a viral video of Wiener enduring taunts, reignited Pride-themed concerns about Jewish inclusion in LGBTQ and left-wing spaces.

In their first statement, the march’s organizers said they were “aware that some community members verbally confronted Scott Wiener about his policies in Dolores Park on Friday,” adding, “Wiener is criticized by his constituents everywhere he goes in San Francisco.” 

They added, “He has made many choices throughout his political career that have led many working class LGBTQ people to feel he does not represent their interests, and he hears about that everywhere he goes.” 

The march’s organizers did not initially specify which “choices” of Wiener’s they were referring to in their statement. In the filmed confrontation at the Friday march, most of Wiener’s hecklers referred to Israel and Gaza.

“Your policy on the genocide in Gaza is terrible,” one activist, who filmed and posted the encounter, tells Wiener in the video, adding, “You do not belong here.” Another yells, “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel.”

The confrontation caused Wiener to leave the event rather than attend a scheduled Pride Shabbat. He later told CNN he believed he was targeted for being Jewish. In the aftermath of the video going viral, Wiener’s campaign said they registered their largest single day of donations as he gears up for the November election for former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s seat.

The march’s initial remarks to JTA were unsigned. In response to a follow-up query, the organizers added, “Our safety team takes the safety and wellbeing of our participants very seriously,” but said that Wiener “had a security detail with him and was at no point in danger.”

Organizer StormMiguel Florez further criticized Wiener for his role in co-authoring AB 715, the statewide antisemitism in education bill, which Florez said “censors public educators from teaching about Israeli policy and genocide.” Florez also dismissed Wiener’s evolution on Israel as insignificant.

“His very recent shift to finally admitting there is a genocide in Gaza holds no water without accountability for the harm he has caused regarding censorship around Palestine,” Florez’s statement continued. “I’m disgusted that Scott Weiner is using this moment to center himself and fundraise for his political campaign.”

Also in their follow-up remarks, the march’s organizers said they had previously taken issue with aspects of Wiener’s “housing, homelessness, and development issues” as far back as 2016. “Trans March participants holding politicians accountable is nothing new,” they said.

They further criticized Wiener for fundraising off the harassment “instead of engaging Trans March directly to resolve his concerns” and for failing to publicly condemn arrests that were made at the march for unrelated matters after he was chased away from the scene.

A spokesperson for Wiener’s campaign did not immediately return a JTA request for comment on the march organizers’ remarks. In his time as state senator, Wiener has advocated for trans issues and helped pass legislation supporting the trans community, something the lead instigator of the heckling acknowledged in his video and posts attacking the candidate. In his own statement, Wiener noted that he had attended the Trans March every year without incident since its inception 22 years ago, until Friday.

Wiener has moved to the left on Israel during his primary campaign, concluding that the country has committed genocide in Gaza — a stance that cost him some local Jewish support and a leadership role in the statehouse’s Jewish caucus. In remarks to JTA on Monday, the head of a local Jewish advocacy group that had opposed Wiener’s Israel stance suggested that this didn’t matter to his hecklers.

“We were critical of Wiener’s statements on Israel, but we have seen that even he is not we [sic] immune to the wrath of the DSA mob, which cannot be appeased,” Tali Klima, a spokesperson for the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, told JTA in a statement. “It is not about criticism of Israel or humanitarian concerns. It is Jew hatred, pure and simple, that seeks to oust Jewish lawmakers from public life.” She referred to the Democratic Socialists of America, a faction that has in recent years become stridently anti-Israel.

Wiener’s opponent, San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, was also at the Trans March and received a warmer reception there. Asked if Wiener’s treatment at the march was antisemitic, a Chan spokesperson told JTA, “In this moment, what matters is how State Senator Scott Wiener felt and feels about the interactions. We must stand in solidarity against hate whenever someone tells us they are experiencing hate.”

The march’s organizers added, “What is important for us as organizers of the Trans March is that we are organizing to build a world that fosters community, love, growth, and self-determination for all people. This world can only be built on a system where everyone has housing, healthcare, education, food — all the basic needs of human existence as basic human rights.”

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Wiener’s political opponent, meanwhile, did not condemn the incident directly when asked, instead disavowing “threats of violence and hate speech” more generally.

Wiener had been filmed at the march while several activists, including the man filming him, surrounded him and yelled at him about Gaza and Israel; he ultimately left the scene. The incident followed another at which Wiener was accused of supporting genocide while at a sports bar, and preceded a filmed anti-Zionist harassment of another local Jewish LGBTQ politician at a San Francisco Pride march.

The incidents have retriggered discourse about Jewish inclusion in LGBTQ and other left-wing spaces as anti-Zionist activists become more numerous and strident. 

Assigned Media, a popular trans news outlet, denounced the Trans March harassment of Wiener led by local activist Dimitry Yakoushkin as “left antisemitism.” 

“We need to reckon with the fact that Yakoushkin was able to incite an outpouring of rage against a Jewish man by mentioning Gaza,” the author, Evan Urquhart, wrote on Monday. “The only explanation for that is antisemitism. Enough attendees at the Trans Pride March were open to seeing a Jewish man as a proxy for Israel that Yakoushkin was able to whip them into a frenzy for his own purposes.” 

Donations have also poured into Wiener’s campaign following the incident, with his campaign telling the San Francisco Standard that he received his highest single-day donation numbers afterward. Yet the harassment has raised questions about the viability of Jewish candidates like Wiener, who has said Israel committed genocide in Gaza while still seeking to maintaining a liberal Zionist identity.

People gather at state Senator Scott Wiener’s election party at his campaign headquarters on election night in San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday, June 2, 2026. (Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Wiener, who is gay and is running for the seat being vacated by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wrote in a lengthy statement that he had been chased out of the annual Trans March event while on his way to a Pride Shabbat. It was, he said, the first time he had been unable to participate in the event since it launched 22 years ago.

“They were so physically and verbally aggressive that it was impossible for me to safely remain in the park,” Wiener said in his statement, noting the protesters had “made statements about my ‘Israeli handlers,’ among many other inaccurate, extreme, and vile statements.” In a Monday interview with CNN, Wiener said he believed he was singled out because he is Jewish.

“There were elected officials in that march who have not taken the positions that I’ve taken, and they were left alone. It was only me who was targeted,” he told CNN. “So, was it antisemitic? Absolutely. And it’s really tragic.”

The California Senate’s Democratic statehouse caucus condemned the harassment as “unacceptable,” calling Wiener “a fearless champion for the LGBTQ+ community even when it was not politically popular.” The caucus did not mention Israel or antisemitism in its statement.

“We are saddened and appalled that Senator Scott Wiener experienced antisemitic invectives, harassment, and physical intimidation while attempting to join the Trans March,” Jaimie Krass, president of the LGBTQ Jewish organization Keshet, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

San Francisco’s Jewish mayor Daniel Lurie, the local Jewish Community Relations Council, and The Nexus Project, a national antisemitism watchdog group that is more forgiving of anti-Zionist critiques than the Anti-Defamation League, all called Wiener’s harassment antisemitic. Some Jewish groups that had disapproved of Wiener’s stances on Israel also spoke out.

“We were critical of Wiener’s statements on Israel, but we have seen that even he is not we [sic] immune to the wrath of the DSA mob, which cannot be appeased,” Tali Klima, a spokesperson for Bay Area Jewish Coalition, told JTA in a statement using the abbreviation for the Democratic Socialists of America.

Klima added, “It is not about criticism of Israel or humanitarian concerns. It is Jew hatred, pure and simple, that seeks to oust Jewish lawmakers from public life.”

At a Pride breakfast Sunday morning hosted by a historic San Francisco LGBTQ Democratic group, other local and national leaders expressed support for Wiener. 

“Hate has no place in our community,” Imani Rupert-Gordon, president of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told Wiener at the breakfast, according to the Bay Area Reporter, a local LGBTQ news site. “Scott, you were treated horribly.” 

San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Rafael Mandelson, who is gay and Jewish, said that what happened to Wiener “happens to gay Jewish electeds far too often. It is about Jew hatred. It is wrong.” Wiener himself did not mention either of his harassment incidents in his speech at the breakfast, according to the Reporter. 

A spokesperson for Wiener did not respond to a JTA request for further comment. A request for comment to the Trans March was also unreturned; the march has released a statement on a separate incident, in which several participants were arrested following an altercation with police.

The targeting of Wiener was especially notable given that he has been celebrated locally for years as a lawmaker with a strong record on trans rights — something acknowledged by Yakoushkin, who in a video he filmed and posted, yells, “I think your policy on the genocide in Gaza is terrible,” as others yell expletives at the state senator.

“It’s sad because while he’s written some good legislation for queers, hes [sic] ultimately a genocidal-supporting center right shill,” Yakoushkin wrote on social media in a post accompanying his video of himself harassing Wiener. On Instagram, Yakoushkin called Wiener a “Yimby zionist,” using a shorthand for activists who push for more housing.

A JTA request to Yakoushkin for comment was not returned. A life coach, Yakoushkin told one critic on X, “i[f] he was great on Gaza I’d still roast his ass.” 

Wiener had said during his primary campaign earlier in the month, in which he came in first, that he believed Israel had committed genocide in Gaza — a shift that came after pressure from the left and one that cost him a leadership role in the statehouse’s Jewish caucus and led to backlash from the Bay Area Jewish community. 

Local anti-Zionist activists have continued to target him. The Trans March incident was the second such harassment Wiener faced in the past week. Days earlier, a local artist filmed himself confronting the candidate at a sports bar, shouting, “Wiener, you gotta get the f-ck up out my hood, bro,” and “It’s free Palestine here, you already know what it is — we against the genocide.” 

The artist, Jesus “Frisco Lens” Coba, did not return a JTA request for comment. In his statement, Wiener said that Coba had in 2023 “stalked me on a plane and in an airport, shouting at me about my ‘tainted bloodline.’”

San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who is running against Wiener in the November congressional runoff, did not directly address Wiener’s harassment in a statement she sent after JTA requested comment. 

“As an elected leader, and a candidate running for office, I have experienced the rough and tumble of San Francisco politics including folks who disagree with us publicly and sometimes vehemently,” she said. “And I accept and understand this responsibility. And as someone who has been a target of hate and threats of violence, I stand firm against threats of violence and hate speech. There is no place for hate and violence in our City.”

Chan had also attended the Trans March and was feted there, including by some of the activists who harassed Wiener on camera. Asked by JTA if the harassment of Wiener was antisemitic, a Chan spokesperson responded, “In this moment, what matters is how State Senator Scott Wiener felt and feels about the interactions. We must stand in solidarity against hate whenever someone tells us they are experiencing hate.”

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents a different Bay Area district, called the harassment of Wiener “simply wrong.” In the same statement, he promoted legislation to end the sale of military weapons to Israel.

“There is no place for harrasment [sic] or physical violence in our democracy,” Khanna, among the House’s fiercest Israel critics, wrote on X. “Let’s focus on passing @RepThomasMassie amendment to zero aid to Israel. Hold elected officials accountable. But do so in the spirit of building a politics of conviction and dignity, not insult and aggression.” A representative for Khanna did not return a JTA request for further comment.

A campaign ad for Jewish restauranteur Manny Yekutiel, a candidate for San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, September 21, 2025. (Screenshot via YouTube)

Also over the weekend, an anti-Zionist activist filmed themselves harassing Manny Yekutiel, a local Jewish restaurateur running for San Francisco’s board of supervisors, while Yekutiel marched in a Pride event. The activist criticized Yekutiel, who is also queer, over having hosted Hen Mazzig, an LGBTQ pro-Israel activist, at his restaurant, because Mazzig served in the Israel Defense Forces.

Yekutiel’s campaign did not return a JTA request for comment; Yekutiel’s restaurant, Manny’s, has been targeted multiple times by anti-Zionists in the past. 

“The person that you’re talking about, he was Israeli. I didn’t know that he was an IDF soldier,” he told the activist who confronted him in video from the march. The activist responded, “Well, maybe having Israelis at the cafe isn’t a good idea because it’s an apartheid state committing a genocide.”

Some local politicians jointly condemned the harassment of both Wiener and Yekutiel, linking their identities as Jews. 

“The harassment campaign against Jewish candidates @Scott_Wiener + Manny Yekutiel is gross and unacceptable,” Trevor Chandler, a member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, wrote on X. Chandler added that the local Democratic group “condemns antisemitism.”

The day after Wiener’s harassment, two different groups of LGBTQ Jews had contrasting   receptions at a New York Pride march. 

One, Jewish Queer Youth, experienced a largely peaceful march; a second, fronted by Zioness, a more explicitly Zionist group, faced harassment. Another prominent Pride event, the NYC Dyke March, was staged on Saturday without many of its longtime Jewish participants, the Forward reported, after organizers stated for the second year in a row that anti-Zionism was a core value of the event; many Jewish former Dyke March organizers split away to form their own group.

Some Jewish LGBTQ leaders say the majority of such spaces remain welcoming. Krass, the Keshet president, said in her statement to JTA that “nearly every instance” of the “nearly 100 Pride events Keshet has organized this year” were “met almost entirely with celebration.” 

Dillon Perez waves a Jewish pride flag at the New York City Pride March on June 29, 2026. (Grace Gilson)

In a newsletter on Monday, Krass told Keshet’s followers that she was “appalled” by some of the reactions to Wiener’s harassment. 

“Some people are refusing to acknowledge that antisemitism played any role. Others are using this incident as an opportunity to project false, harmful generalizations onto the entire trans community,” Krass wrote. “I have even seen fellow Jews call for the Jewish community to abandon the LGBTQ+ community and our shared fight for equality. This is not the way.”

This story has been updated with additional comment from Scott Wiener and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition.

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The appointment, announced Monday by National Editor Nestor Ramos, creates a dedicated beat focused on American Jews at a moment when questions of antisemitism, Israel, religious identity and political polarization have moved to the center of public debate. 

It is the first time that the newspaper, published in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population, has a beat dedicated to Jews.

“Over the course of 15 years chronicling Jewish life in America and abroad, Yair has taken on the biggest, thorniest stories on the beat,” Ramos wrote in a memo to staff. “Now, Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention.”

The move brings Rosenberg to a publication that he has occasionally criticized for its coverage of Jewish affairs, but without echoing some critics’ charges of institutional bias.

For the past five years Rosenberg has written The Atlantic’s “Deep Shtetl” newsletter, blending coverage of antisemitism, American politics and Jewish culture with essays on history, religion and popular culture. Before joining The Atlantic in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Tablet, a magazine of Jewish affairs. 

Over the years, Rosenberg has broken or advanced reporting on online extremism and antisemitism while also becoming known for explaining Jewish issues to a broad audience. His work has ranged from investigations into antisemitic disinformation networks to historical features. He has written about antisemitism on the far left and on the Republican right.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, an Anti-Defamation League study found Rosenberg was among the Jewish journalists most frequently targeted with antisemitic abuse on Twitter. Rosenberg became known for responding publicly to trolls and for developing technological tools — including an “Impostor Buster” bot — designed to expose white supremacists posing online as minorities in order to inflame social tensions. The effort drew widespread attention before Twitter eventually suspended the tool.

He later described those experiences in a New York Times guest essay titled “Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter,” and has remained a frequent public speaker on combating online hate while preserving free expression.

Ramos’s announcement emphasized that Rosenberg’s beat would extend beyond antisemitism.

“Yair knows better than most that these fraught moments are not all that define Jewish life today—not even close,” Ramos wrote, citing stories on Hanukkah traditions, Jewish representation in popular culture and other facets of American Jewish life.

The Times’ editorial director of newsletters, Jodi Rudoren — who returned to the Times after serving as editor in chief of the Jewish newspaper The Forward — praised Rosenberg in the announcement.

“There is no reporter with sharper insights about what animates American Jews,” Rudoren said. “I was jealous of everything he filed. Every. Single. Thing.”

The Times, through a spokesman, declined to comment beyond Monday’s announcement. Rosenberg did not respond to a request for an interview by press time.

The hire comes as The New York Times continues to navigate a complicated relationship with many Jewish readers.

For decades the newspaper has occupied an outsized place in American Jewish public life, employing prominent Jewish reporters and editors while producing influential coverage of religion, Israel and antisemitism. Yet the newspaper has also faced sustained criticism from parts of the Jewish community over its Israel coverage, criticism that intensified after Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.

Media watchdog organizations, some Jewish communal leaders and a number of current and former journalists have accused the Times of factual errors, headline framing and insufficient skepticism toward claims made by Hamas officials in some early coverage of the conflict. 

A May 2026 column by Nicholas Kristof, alleging systemic sexual violence by Israeli authorities against Palestinian detainees, was widely criticized for amplifying unverified claims and platforming biased sources. The Times stood by Kristof’s column in an editorial note. 

Defenders of the Times argue that accusations of institutional anti-Israel bias often conflate disagreement over editorial judgments with evidence of systemic prejudice. 

At Tablet and The Atlantic, Rosenberg occasionally criticized aspects of the Times’ reporting on both Israel and antisemitism. In a 2018 Tablet article he criticized The New York Times Book Review for offering a platform for the novelist Alice Walker to recommend a book by the English author David Icke that was heavily saturated in antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

The next year he called out the Times for a profile of former CIA officer and would-be congressional candidate Valerie Plame that failed to mention her history of tweets sharing antisemitic theories. He has also regretted that the Times in 1937 dropped its subscription to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency syndication service because of the perception at the time that JTA’s coverage of Nazi Europe was alarmist.

Unlike some Jewish media watchdog groups, however, Rosenberg has not argued that the Times is institutionally or inherently biased against Israel or Jews. Against that backdrop, Rosenberg’s hiring is likely to be watched closely by Jewish readers across the political spectrum.

According to Ramos, Rosenberg will begin work July 20 and will be based in New York while traveling nationally for the beat.

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“Democratic Socialists of America now says they no longer favor a two-state solution. “Is that the way you see it as well? Karl asked in the interview, which came days after Mamdani’s endorsed Democratic socialist candidates for Congress swept their New York Democratic primaries. 

Among them, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier campaigned on platforms that included opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and support for Palestinian rights.

Mamdani replied to Karl: “The way I see it is equal rights for all people. And I think that that’s the truth for Israel. It’s the truth for any country in the world.”

When pressed by Karl that Israel is in fact a Jewish state and “that’s in the charter, that’s the way it is now,” Mamdani said he has consistently stated he supports “the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”

However, he added, “I believe that any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.” 

The backlash to Mamdani’s comments was quick. In a statement Sunday, Ambassador Ofir Akunis, Consul General of Israel in New York, said, “Mamdani, we do not need your recognition of the Jewish state. If you knew a little history, instead of spending all day inciting and spreading hatred, you would know that Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed full equality for all its citizens. That has been the reality since the day our state was established.”

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations responded on X, saying, “Recently, Mamdani used blatant antisemitic language against AIPAC, calling them “monsters moving dark money.” He then expressed sorrow over the elimination of a Hamas terrorist, and now says he does not support Israel as a Jewish state.

“When you connect all the dots, it becomes very easy to understand who @NYCMayor does support.”

Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, posted on X, “Mamdani is either willfully ignorant or maliciously mendacious,” adding that “Israel has no official state religion.”

He also stated that there are multiple countries for which Islam is the state religion, with additional Muslim-majority countries declaring Islam as the state religion in their constitutions.

Karl also asked Mamdani about his broader views on Israel, which became a prominent issue during the New York Democratic primaries, particularly among candidates who support Israel and continued U.S. military aid.

Mamdani said voters made it clear that “they were tired of tens of billions of dollars being spent in our taxpayer dollars to violate international law to kill thousands of civilians.”

He added that currently “Palestine is described as if there is a ceasefire,” but more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during it. He said New Yorkers want to “follow international law, to believe in the humanity for all.”

Karl also pressed the mayor on the Poetica coffee shop incident in Brooklyn last week, where staff refused to take New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman’s money for a coffee purchase, calling him a “genocide enabler” because he supports Israel.

Mamdani said while he has “political disagreements” with Goldman (who lost his seat to Mamdani-backed Brad Lander), “I do believe that that’s a response that goes beyond that.”

And when asked about rising antisemitism in New York City, the mayor said that while Jews are a minority of the city’s population, they  constitute a majority of victims of the hate crimes committed in the city. ”That’s something that’s unacceptable,” he said.

Akunis said, however, that “The surge in antisemitism across the United States, and particularly in New York, is the result of ignorance and a lack of knowledge, combined with a fundamental hatred of the Jewish people.”

He added, “I once again warn that Mamdani’s inflammatory rhetoric will end in very serious and violent acts against Jewish and Israeli communities throughout the city.”

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The big birthday is breathing new life into old debates over religious freedom, such as the one that took place around President Donald Trump’s recent national prayer rally and proclamation of “Shabbat 250,”

There’s definitely a good mood deficit all around: 77% of Americans say the founders would be “disappointed” in the state of the union, crossing party lines.

Still, Jewish organizations across the country are marking the semiquincentennial and long history of Jewish contributions to American democracy with a variety of events, including cultural programming and civic education rooted in Jewish texts.

The Jewish Museum
Oct. 24, 2025 – Aug. 9, 2026

Currently on view at New York City’s recently renovated Jewish Museum is the “Circa 1776” exhibit, which explores themes of Jewish colonial and postcolonial life in America. This exhibit includes portraits, artifacts, and documents together with the “Identity, Culture, and Community” exhibit currently on view. Included in the latter exhibit are letters from 1790 between the new American President George Washington and Moses Seixas, the president of what is now the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island — the oldest synagogue in the United States.

Seixas congratulated Washington on his new presidency, and expressed hope and optimism at the prospect of religious freedom in their new country.

“May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants —,” Washington wrote in response, adding a quotation from scripture, “while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

The exchange has become the ur text of American Jewish belonging, surfacing in virtually every instance Jewish Americans have faced challenges about their place in the national fabric.

On June 29, the museum will hold a ticketed lecture exploring the lives of Jews in Colonial America, co-hosted with the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, Congregation Shearith Israel.

Entry to the museum is free on Saturdays.

Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History
April 23, 2026 – April 2027

Philadelphia’s Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, a Smithsonian affiliate currently under consideration to become a full member of the Smithsonian Institution, has a slate of exhibits focused on Jewish involvement during the American Revolutionary period.

Aside from the core exhibition, which spans 1654 to 1945 and focuses on themes of freedom and religion, there is also the “Only in America” Gallery — a hall of fame of American Jews such as singer-songwriter Irving Berlin, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, actor and singer Barbra Streisand, and Henrietta Szold, the founder of the Zionist Hadassah movement.

“The First Salute” exhibit explores a little-known story of a group of Sephardic merchants on the Caribbean island of Sint Eustatius, who helped supply the Continental Army with weapons. On November 16, 1776, an American ship entering the harbor and flying a precursor to the American flag was thought to be the first American cannon salute to be recognized by a foreign nation. The ship sent out a 13-gun salute, and was returned with one by the Dutch governor. “The First Salute” will be on view until April 2027.

The core exhibition is viewable online, as is the “Only in America” Gallery.

Repair the World
June 10, 2026 – July 10, 2026

The Jewish service movement that connects young adults to community service events around the United States has launched Serve 250, a themed campaign offering service and learning opportunities throughout the month. Repair the World is also partnering with A More Perfect Union to provide democracy and civic engagement resources.

Volunteers with Repair the World will march at the Detroit and New York City Pride parades, pack vegetarian lunches in Chicago, visit families of veterans in Los Angeles, and host an online discussion about the value of service.

The Center for Jewish History and American Jewish Historical Society
July 21, 2026 – Dec. 31, 2026

A new exhibit at New York City’s Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society will explore the history of Jewish political life in the United States, and how the Jewish community has engaged with civic and political issues like citizenship, immigration, labor rights, voting access, civil rights, and religious freedom.

Through seven thematic sections, “All We Have Standing Between Us” will feature letters and artifacts from former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Nixon, and Barack Obama, as well as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; Picasso drawings of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish couple convicted of spying for the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War; and texts and digital media highlighting the work of Sephardic poet Emma Lazarus, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., and feminist writer Betty Friedan.

The exhibit will be accompanied by an eight-episode podcast launching July 1.

Congregation Mikveh Israel
July 26, 2026

Philadelphia’s oldest synagogue is hosting a celebration for America’s 250th Independence Day from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. with vendors, food, art, and music. This event is all-ages friendly.

Congregation Mikveh Israel is the oldest continuous synagogue in the United States founded in 1740 by Spanish and Portuguese immigrants. It was once led by Gershom Mendes Seixas, the first American-born Jewish religious leader in America and a founder of what later became Columbia University in New York and the cantor at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York. (The Seixas family was also involved in a number of other important Jewish and secular establishments, including the founding of the New York Stock Exchange, the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, and Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island.)

The synagogue is also hosting a July 4 Independence Day weekend Shabbat service, with Friday night and Saturday morning services. A “Faith and Freedom” exhibit detailing the Jewish contributions to the American Revolution and onward is currently on display at the synagogue.

Year-round events

Shalom Hartman Institute

The Hartman Beit Midrash for America at 250 has created a digital library of Jewish texts and ideas, and developed a series of public programs, essays, in-person events, holiday guides, podcast episodes. There will be a special America 250 edition of Hartman’s journal “Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.”

In partnership with the civic education nonprofit A More Perfect Union, Hartman has also established a cohort — the American Jewish Civics Seminar (AJCS) — based on Jewish teachings to provide a framework for understanding civic and democratic issues.

Included as part of this project is a resource library with essays about how American Jewish institutions are engaging with civic learning, like the four-week voter student learning series and voter engagement project MitzVote at Hillel International.

Pardes Institute

Though not based in the United States, the Jerusalem-based yeshiva Pardes Institute has created the Talmud of America, a collection of commentaries inspired by the Declaration of Independence and Jewish texts. This essay collection comes with source sheets and is available to download for free, either in bulk for large community settings like summer camps or synagogues, or individual copies for solo study.

Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center

New York’s largest synagogue is hosting a variety of events through their “Celebrate America at 250” series.

The synagogue will hold a July 3 Friday night Shabbat service, and is also hosting a lecture series with events scheduled into 2027. The free lecture series includes opportunities to learn about the Jews of Savannah, Charleston, Newport, and Philadelphia, and how Jews left a mark on American pop culture.

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The decision has drawn vigorous objections from some of the state’s Jews. Several local rabbis and other Jewish leaders pushed back on the proposal during the public comment period in the lead-up to the vote this week because of concerns including injecting Christian content into the schools.

In a vote Friday of nine to five, the Republican-controlled state education board approved the list, mandating reading selections usually left to individual schools and teachers. The curriculum will go into effect in 2030 and apply to the roughly 5.5 million schoolchildren in Texas public schools.

The move comes as the board has increasingly sought to incorporate Christianity into the state’s public schools, including in 2024 when it approved an optional Bible curriculum for elementary schools that drew pushback from Jewish parents and advocates. Last year, Republican lawmakers in the state also required the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom.

The passage of the reading list follows an effort by the state’s conservative education leaders to reverse a nationwide decline in the number of books read or assigned in class and exercise control over the texts students are exposed to.

In recent years, Texas has been at the forefront of the national wave of book removals, with several districts pulling books about the Holocaust and Jewish history, including versions of Anne Frank’s diary. Decisions by the state education board have historically had an effect on schools nationwide, in part because of the vast population of school age students in the state.

The new reading list, which spans over 150 titles, includes Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night”; Lois Lowry’s young-reader Holocaust novel “Number the Stars”; George Washington’s letter to a Rhode Island synagogue in 1790, and the “original edition” of Frank’s diary. Conservatives, including in Texas, have objected to a graphic novel version that illustrates passages in which the diarist describes her sexual longings.

Other books on the list include “Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.

Beginning in the fourth grade, students will also be required to read numerous passages from both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, a requirement that has drawn fierce opposition from some Texas Jewish leaders.

Board members continued to propose last-minute additions to the list right up until the vote Friday afternoon, adding the Biblical parable Jonah and the Whale to the first grade curriculum.

The final reading list was pared down from roughly 300 texts after the board initially discussed the proposal in February. At the time, state education board leaders told JTA that they had consulted with experts including the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a state government body.

On Monday, a host of rabbis and Jewish leaders attended a Board of Education meeting to voice their opposition to the reading list, including Joshua Fixler, a rabbi at Houston’s Reform Congregation Emanu El.

“There is a difference between teaching about religion and teaching religion, and these texts are going to put Texas teachers in the position of teaching religion to our kids,” Fixler told JTA following Friday’s vote.

Fixler said he believed the required reading list would cause children of all faiths to feel “alienated and isolated” because they would “see the state endorsement of one particular religious tradition.”

Fixler particularly objected to “Night” being part of the same eighth-grade unit as chapter three of the Book of Lamentations, which discusses the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem as God’s punishment for the sins of the Jews.

“To associate that with a Holocaust text like Elie Wiesel’s classic work of ‘Night’ is to imply that the Jews might in some way be responsible for the Holocaust,” Fixler, who has three children in Texas public schools, explained.

Rabbi Neil F. Blumofe, the senior rabbi of Conservative Congregation Agudas Achim in Austin, said that he was concerned that the list’s focus on Holocaust-based text would reduce students’ understanding of Jewish history.

“If one only teaches the Jewish civilization or religion as catastrophe-based, I think that that gives a narrow focus, and also can cause issues of what Judaism is and what its relevancy is currently versus what it used to be in the past,” Blumofe said.

Blumofe added that he had “yet to see an effective curriculum or teacher’s guide or ways to sensitively recognize that these are works of civilization versus works of a particular theology.”

Laney Hawes, the co-founder of Texas Freedom to Read Project, told JTA that she was “seething” over the result of Friday’s vote.

“The lists are promoting a singular narrow ideology,” Hawes said, adding that while proponents of the required reading stressed that it promoted “Judeo-Christian values,” she believed it excluded Jewish perspectives.

“I want my children to have a worldview that is vast and diverse,” Hawes, who is not Jewish,  said. “If they’re going to be forced to read certain books, I want those books to represent a plethora of perspectives, not just one world view.”

Fixler and Hawes said that they planned to gather with other local advocates to consider ways to fight the new curriculum. For Fixler, he hoped the outcome would emphasize for others the importance of voting in school board elections.

“I think that this should be a wake-up call to people who have been sleeping about the ways in which Christian nationalism is shaping policy on local, state and federal levels,” he said.

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The flyers led to a dramatic showdown at a local GOP meeting, including a state lawmaker’s cry of “I am a Jew!” and a rejoinder from Austin Lee, the young man behind the flyers: “We will not fight wars for you.” Cops escorted the provocateur out.

“Let’s face it, we read about antisemitism and anti-Black or white nationalism, right?” the lawmaker, State Rep. Scott Cepicky, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We hear about this stuff, and people are like, ‘Well, you know, that’s over there, or that’s in another state, that’s not here.’ Let me tell you something. It came to Maury County.”

The mailers, which encouraged recipients to “support” Lee, also said “Stop the Great Replacement” (a reference to the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory), “Ban Islam and Hinduism” and “Men in charge.”

“Nonwhite foreigners have invaded our country and are replacing White Americans,” read the flyers, viewed by JTA and reportedly sent to around 2,000 households with young white men. “Efforts at mass deportations have failed. No one is coming to save us; we must solve this problem ourselves.”

The flyers were mailed mainly in Maury County, 50 miles south of Nashville, as well as some surrounding counties. In addition to Lee’s name and an invitation to join the Maury County Young Republicans, they contained the prominent logo of the Tennessee Young Republicans — invoking broader concerns that a younger generation of Republicans are trending toward antisemitic and white nationalist ideas.

However, local Republican leaders told JTA the mailers were sent out without permission; that Lee holds no formal leadership role in the county GOP; and that the county’s Young Republicans chapter is currently inactive. 

The county GOP chair strongly denounced the content of the mailers to JTA.

“It’s appalling that somebody would send this out,” Jason Gilliam told JTA about his reaction to the flyers. “This kind of thing really disgusts me. I mean, I have an Israeli flag on my bumper — not that that means anything.”

Gilliam said he first became aware of the flyers on Sunday, after households had begun receiving them. At a local GOP meeting the next day, Cepicky condemned the flyers by invoking his own Jewish ancestry.

Tennessee GOP state Rep. Scott Cepicky, March 25, 2026. (Screenshot via YouTube)

“I’m a Jew, I’m an Ashkenazi Jew,” Cepicky told the crowd at the GOP meeting in a video taken and later posted by Lee himself. “My family left Israel, moved to Central Europe. In the 30s, you know what happened in Central Europe with Jews. My family immigrated to the United States.” 

After Cepicky threatened to “pursue the law on these individuals” who distributed the mailer, Lee, who was also in attendance at the meeting, identified himself. 

Cepicky accused Lee of spreading rhetoric “espoused in Europe” in the 1930s. Lee responded, “It was right then, and it is right now. We will not fight wars for you.” Lee was later escorted from the event by law enforcement. Lee has on social media cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “war for Jews.”

Cepicky told JTA he felt compelled to denounce Lee’s antisemitism in part because he was standing in front of a replica of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at the meeting.

“It was behind me, and it spurred me to say, ‘That doesn’t say, “We the Christians,” or, “We the Jews,” or, “We the Islamics,” or, “We the men, we the women.” It doesn’t say that,’” he said. “It says, ‘We the people.’”

Cepicky told JTA that he is a practicing Christian who discovered his Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on 23andMe. He said his family arrived sometime after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He made his first trip to Israel in 2024, to visit the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and helped found the Tennessee Israel Caucus in the state legislature shortly thereafter.

Austin Lee, a Tennessee Republican who distributed antisemitic mailers, promotes the Great Replacement theory in a social media video, June 16, 2026. (Screenshot via X)

Gilliam and Cepicky both described Lee to JTA as an infrequent attendee at county GOP meetings who holds no leadership role with the party, and said the county Young Republicans chapter was inactive. They added they would be pushing for an investigation into what they said was his unauthorized use of the county and state Young Republicans name on his mailers. 

In social media posts and other interviews following the meeting, Lee continued to assert that he was the president of Maury County Young Republicans. He also referred to Cepicky multiple times as “Jewish Representative Scott Cepicky.” 

“I took over that chapter,” Lee said in an interview Wednesday with a local radio station, claiming he had used a “process” to reactivate the local Young Republicans group. He declined to answer questions about who funded his mailers. 

In a statement to media, the statewide Tennessee Young Republicans said the use of their logo “was not authorized” and said the group “did not, and does not, authorize, endorse, or support the recent communications published by the Maury County Young Republicans.” 

As of press time, the Tennessee Young Republicans list Maury County as an active chapter on their website. Efforts by JTA to contact the group’s statewide director were unsuccessful. In recent months, official Young Republicans chapters across the country have become embroiled in antisemitism controversies.

Whether Lee has any more solid connection with local GOP officials was a matter of dispute. Gilliam claimed he had first been introduced to Lee by Aaron Miller, a local elected GOP county commissioner with whom Gilliam has since had a falling-out over unrelated matters. Asked about his relationship to Miller on the radio, Lee declined to comment.

Reached by JTA on Friday, Miller denied he had any connection to Lee beyond that “we had beers a couple of times.”

“I don’t agree with his politics. I don’t agree with his approach,” Miller told JTA. “I got a mailer and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, this is interesting.’”

Lee did not respond to a JTA request for comment.

Miller did say that young men, feeling unrepresented by the current Republican Party, are seeking out “alternatives to liberal democracy.” He has advocated for the county GOP to reach out more to the population, he said. 

“Anything where you’re going to approach an entire group of people with a blanket mindset, I think that’s wicked,” he said. “We’re all made in God’s image.”

Gilliam and Cepicky told JTA that, in addition to the antisemitism, they strongly objected to the mailers’ anti-immigrant rhetoric and misogyny. At a time of Republican-led immigration crackdowns on the national level, and as national figures including Vice President JD Vance have downplayed the rise of antisemitism within the party, these local GOP leaders loudly insisted such forces should be stamped out.

“This kind of stuff is absolutely not going to be allowed. I will not stand for it,” Gilliam said. “If you don’t cut the head off the snake, it’s going to come back, right? It’s not going to stop. It’s only going to fester. It’s going to grow. And this kind of thing, the roots need to be yanked out of the ground.”

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Only in the 1980s and ‘90s did they formally and informally acknowledge the role of Austrians as perpetrators and supporters of Nazi crimes. 

In 1998, at the peak of this reckoning, the Austrian Service Abroad program was established to provide young Austrians the chance to work with nonprofit organizations that preserve the memory of the Holocaust and its victims.

 Young Austrians  just out of high school can choose the program as an alternative to military service. They work in non-profits around the world for 10 months, 34 hours each week at no cost to the receiving organization. 

“It has been a big boon to our work and allows us to greatly expand our Holocaust educational offerings,” said Olivia Mattis, the president and CEO of the Sousa Mendes Foundation, a Long Island-based nonprofit that perpetuates the memory of Holocaust rescuer Aristides de Sousa Mendes. The Portuguese diplomat issued visas to thousands of refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied France.

“There are things we can now do having this extra hand that we were not able to do before,” said Mattis, whose father was rescued by Sousa Mendes.

This year the foundation, which has been part of the program 2022, has welcomed Robin Bigga-Piskernig, 19, as its fifth Austrian participant.

Bigga-Piskernig said he views the program as a way for Austria to “make amends” for its actions during World War II. He’s available for whatever the foundation needs, which includes the production of various educational materials.   

“We just now finished new translations for a graphic novel that’s going to be published in an English version as well as French and German,” said Bigga-Piskernig. “Right now there’s a project that involves old passports from the 1940s and an upcoming program about Freud and how he was saved during the Holocaust.”

Jean Lou Cloos, managing director of Austrian Service Abroad, said in an email interview that there is a direct connection between the program and the country’s belated efforts to come to terms with its past. 

The program “grew out of Austria’s long and difficult process of confronting National Socialism and the Holocaust,” Cloos said. “For decades after 1945, Austria often emphasized its own victimhood under Nazi Germany. Later, public and political debate became clearer about the fact that Austrians had also been perpetrators, supporters and beneficiaries of Nazi crimes.”

Some 1,323 Austrians 17 and older have taken part in the program since its founding, 85% of them men. Austrians in the program are now in 66 countries, including Germany and Italy.

“Our volunteers work in Holocaust memorials, Jewish museums, archives, research institutions, survivor-related organizations and educational institutions,” he said. “Volunteers serve where memory is preserved, researched and passed on, whether that is Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, a Jewish museum in Europe, or a Holocaust education center in the United States.”

The participants bring a perspective to Holocaust education that is useful in reaching young people like them. As a result of the work of Bigga-Piskernig and his predecessors, Mattis said her organization since 2024 has had an active Instagram account that enables it to post its “hero of the week,” a rescuer during the Holocaust.

Recently it highlighted Michael Ber Weissmandl, an Orthodox rabbi from present-day Solovakia, who helped Jews escape deportation by bribing Nazis and their local collaborators. “He wrote desperate letters through Switzerland to Allied powers asking that they bomb the gas chambers and the train tracks — and of course that never happened,” said Mattis.

Ber Weissmandl is also featured in a set of 52 poker-sized playing cards, each containing a photo of a Holocaust rescue, created and printed by the Sousa Mendes Foundation. The cards would not have been possible without the effort of the Austrian service workers.

“They researched the background of each of the rescuers,” she said.

The Austrian interns were also “absolutely integral” to the foundation in creating graphic novels that tell the story of Sousa Mendes and the families he saved. “We want to get them into bar mitzvah training programs,” said Mattis.

Workers plant an Anne Frank Sapling on the grounds of the Museu Aristides de Sousa Mendes in Cabanas de Viriato, Portugal. The dedication of the tree will take place on July 9, 2026, as part of the foundation’s Educators’ Institute in Portugal. (Courtesy Sousa Mendes Foundation)

In addition, the foundation helps to produce Sunday film-and-discussion programs on stories of rescue and resistance. It also developed a children’s picture book about Sousa Mendes and his work, and another about Anne Frank and the Anne Frank Sapling Project.

“When she was in hiding with her family from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam,” Mattis said, “there was only one piece of nature outside that she could see. It was a tree and watching it was how she could mark the change of seasons. It lived to age 170, dying in 2010. At that point, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam took saplings from that tree and sent them to sites of remembrance so the Anne Frank story could travel all over the world.”

One of these trees is to be planted at the Sousa Mendes Museum in Portugal and dedicated in July. The foundations invited 20 teachers to the dedication.

“The reason we were so anxious to get this tree is because Anne Frank had a cousin, Jean-Michel Frank, the first cousin of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, and he got his visa from our hero, Sousa Mendes. So we are combining both Anne Frank and Sousa Mendes through this tree.”

Asked about his experience in Austrian Service Abroad, Bigga-Piskernig said his work and the education he has received at the Sousa Mendes Foundation “has helped me better understand the Holocaust and the role of education in helping to reduce antisemitism.”

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Within Prizmah’s network of 305 Jewish day schools, which includes 122 nondenominational schools and 153 Orthodox schools, enrollment increased from 94,008 students in the 2021-2022 school year to approximately 101,041 students in 2025-2026, marking an increase of 7,000 students, or 7.5%. In the 2025-2026 school year, overall enrollment grew by more than 1,000 students.

The report found that non-Orthodox school enrollment has increased by 3% from 2021 to 2024, while Orthodox schools have seen a 7% increase. Reform day school enrollment has also risen by 5%, reversing years of declining trends. The report marked the first time that Prizmah had reported growth across decades charting enrollment across the denominational spectrum of Jewish day schools.

Paul Bernstein, the CEO of Prizmah, attributed the growth to several factors, including rises in the Jewish population of some communities, the declining quality of education in certain public school systems and new philanthropic investments in Jewish day schools.

While Bernstein said that there had been an influx in enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic, spurred in part by parents seeking in-person learning, he said the continued enrollment growth in the years since had reflected a broader shift.

“We’ve had growth in enrolment every single year in the last five years, and that’s because the understanding of the quality of day schools and the value of having an education in a Jewish day school is really much clearer to families,” Bernstein said.

Bernstein noted that until now, enrollment had been declining consistently in the non-Orthodox systems. ”There were people out there who questioned whether day schools, and in particular non-Orthodox day schools, might have a future,” he said.

Indeed, the now-shuttered Avi Chai Foundation reported in its 2018-2019 census of Jewish day school enrollment in the United States that enrollment in non-Orthodox Jewish day schools had fallen by over 16% over a 20-year period.

Part of the challenge with attending day schools has been one of cost, with affordability becoming the defining challenge for many. But some communities have seen heavy investments from local philanthropies as a result, including $90 million from the Mandel Foundation in Cleveland, the Generations Trust in Toronto and tuition subsidy programs in Chicago and Seattle.

Rabbi Mitchel Malkus, the head of school at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland, pointed to cost as keeping away even more prospective students. The average Jewish day school tuition for the last school year was over $23,000, according to Prizmah.

“One reason that we hear a lot that people don’t choose our school is just the cost, that the costs are very, very significant,” Malkus said. “A lot of people who would like to enroll their kids can’t come,”

The Prizmah report found that in Florida, which has statewide private school vouchers, Jewish day school enrollment had increased by 1,370 students, or 15%, from 2021 to 2024.

Bernstein also said some families’ experiences of antisemitism post-Oct. 7 had contributed to a surge in engagement, a trend that has been widely reported by American Jewish philanthropies.

“There is an element of the negative, the experience of antisemitism,” Bernstein acknowledged.  “But actually, what the research on the surge really shows, is that actually there’s a real positive involved in this, which is people wanting to be more connected to the Jewish community,”

Rabbi Leonard Matanky, the dean of Ida Crown Jewish Academy, a Modern Orthodox High School in Skokie, Illinois, said that enrollment at his school had risen from 214 in 2021 to 254 last school year, or by just under 20%.

Matanky attributed the consistent growth in recent years to factors including “the quality of education, the desire for connection by parents, and the understanding of the ever-growing importance of being in a Jewish school.”

For some parents, Matanky said, concerns about the broader social climate in public schools had also made Jewish education more appealing for parents.

Last summer, Chicago saw the launch of a new Jewish high school within city limits, a project that some parents said reflected growing demand for Jewish education amid allegations of antisemitism in the city’s private and public schools.

“When you’re living in a society that unfortunately doesn’t always share values, with what used to be assumed values, the public schools are not as safe of an environment as once upon a time,” Matanky said. “It isn’t necessarily physical safety, it can be communal safety, it can be a sense of acceptance.”

The Chicago Jewish Day School, a multi-denominational school that serves junior kindergarten through eighth grade, also reported rising enrollment, from 220 students in the 2024-2024 school year to 254 for the coming year.

Cortney Stark Cope, the director of admissions at the school, said the “unique” amount of growth stemmed from a collaboration between local Jewish day schools in marketing to parents and a new “Tuition Accessibility Program” launched three years ago by the Crown Family Philanthropies that had helped offset tuition costs.

She also said rising antisemitism in non-Jewish schools had spurred some parents to seek alternatives, particularly in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023.

Gila Ogle, a fellow at Prizmah’s Day School Leadership Training Institute and the head of the Silver Academy, a Jewish day school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said that enrollment had nearly doubled over the past year, from 34 students in the 2024-2025 school year to 64 this year.

“The Jewish engagement we have is a definite factor for families who are looking for a safer environment,” Ogle said. “It’s not just a safe Jewish environment, but a safe environment overall for their kids.”

Looking ahead, Bernstein said he expects to see more of the same if philanthropic investment in day schools continues.

“We’re extremely optimistic that the growth will not only be sustained but actually could accelerate,” Bernstein said.

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The incident at William Diamond Middle School in Lexington, Massachusetts, initially prompted some Jewish social media accounts and conservative news outlets to conclude the principal, Dr. Johnny Cole, was apologizing for teaching about the Holocaust.

A local media outlet, however, reported Thursday that Cole’s apology was not related to the Holocaust at all. Rather, he had apologized for a lesson on modern-day antisemitism the school had contracted a local third-party Jewish group to teach.

Following the lesson, the Lexington Observer reported, a dozen families had objected to the group’s use of material from the Blue Square Alliance, an antisemitism advocacy and monitoring organization — because its founder, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, is a prominent supporter of Israel. This prompted Cole to write “We are sorry” to students who, he wrote, “felt like your own history, your identity, or your community was left out or erased.”

Cole continued, “Every one of you deserves to walk into this school and feel that who you are matters — Arab students; Jewish students; Lebanese students; Muslim students; Palestinian students — every student.” The Observer verified and published his apology.

The Boston Jewish Community Relations Council shed further light on the specifics of his apology.

“We now understand that the letter itself — which, as written, was deeply disturbing and offensive to many members of our Jewish community — was in fact poorly worded and not reflective of the facts and context,” the JCRC said in a statement shared with JTA.

Neither Cole, nor multiple representatives of the middle school committee, nor the district superintendent, nor the school’s parent-teacher organization responded to JTA requests for comment. None of the listed personnel associated with TribeTalk, the antisemitism education group contracted by the school district, responded to multiple JTA requests for comment Thursday. Representatives for the Blue Square Alliance also did not return a JTA request for comment.

But the details of why TribeTalk was called into the school, and what the lesson consisted of, were provided by the Observer. Citing Cole and other school officials, the paper reported that TribeTalk’s visit had been prompted by the recent discovery of graffiti of a neo-Nazi symbol, as well as what Cole had described as “a racist anti-Black epithet,” in the school’s boys’ bathroom this spring.

According to its website, TribeTalk receives support from several Jewish funders, some with direct ties to Israel, including Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, the regional federation arm; Jewish National Fund USA, which funds land projects in Israel; the Jewish United Fund; and several family foundations. TribeTalk personnel consulted with the school’s social studies teachers on the contents of the lesson, the Observer reported.

A summary of the approved lesson, published by the Observer, provides a window into how institutionally backed Jewish groups are teaching about antisemitism and Zionism to public school students in the post-Oct. 7 era.

The lesson defines antisemitism as “negative assumptions or opinions aimed at the Jewish community.” Zionism, the lesson notes, “recognizes the Jewish people as a people” and “recognizes their deep-rooted ties to their indigenous homeland in Israel.”

It further provides examples of when criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, according to TribeTalk, which lists “criticism of the Prime Minister or other politicians,” “advocating for a separate Palestinian state” and “advocating for ceasefires” as “NOT antisemitic.”

The lesson summary goes on to describe breakout sessions in which students discussed whether hypothetical situations were antisemitic. It included two inspired by local real-life incidents: a football team using “Auschwitz” as a play call and a teen posting “#FreePalestine” under someone else’s photo of challah. Further discussion points included a breakdown of the history of the swastika.

None of the students complained or expressed discomfort during the lessons, according to the Observer. In feedback notes published by the paper, some students indicated they wanted to learn more about topics including “Zionism,” “Palestine,” and “the history of antisemitism.” Overall feedback from hundreds of students was appreciative.

Afterwards, the school said it heard from 12 concerned parents “whose students felt really harmed by the presentation because they didn’t feel that their perspective, family background, and history was seen,” Cole told the paper. Those concerns, he said, prompted the school’s apology.

According to the Observer, some parents were also concerned because TribeTalk “sent students home with Blue Square Alliance stickers after the talk.”

Those stickers, Cole said he told TribeTalk, could be perceived as “challenging for some families.”

“If there’s a conflation of these things, I’m worried it will make more people have resentment and associate Judaism with the actions of a military,” a district parent, Andrew Harris, told the Observer.

In its own statement, Boston’s JCRC did not dig into the specifics of the lesson but thanked the school district for its work “to address antisemitism and all forms of hatred” and noted that such conversations “are difficult and complex.” JTA requests for comment to two local antisemitism activist groups, Lexington United Against Antisemitism and Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism, as well as to the Anti-Defamation League’s New England branch, were not returned by deadline.

StopAntisemitism, a popular X account that was an initial driver of inaccurate information behind the Lexington story, doubled down on Thursday afternoon, hours after the Observer’s story and JCRC’s statement had been published.

“Where is the superintendent? Where is the school board?” the account wrote, referencing a day-old Fox News story about the incident that inaccurately claimed the apology was directed to “students offended by Holocaust lesson.”

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Wall-sized screens, refreshed every minute, show live updates on public conversation topics related to antisemitism. Tweets featuring antisemitic dog whistles are also blasted onto an enormous dashboard — hand-me-down technology formerly used by the Patriots during team practice to run plays.

The command center is where the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate monitors more than 1 billion social media posts every day.  It’s a project of the Patriots’ Jewish owner Robert Kraft, the Boston-area philanthropist who founded the alliance in 2019.

On Tuesday, the nonprofit anti-hate organization announced the formation of a new advisory board featuring a slate of high-profile names: former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav; Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; and Dentons CEO Kate Barton.

The advisory board will guide the organization on strategy and “deepen institutional relationships,” its website said.

The statement said the board will help further the mission of the roughly dozen analysts who staff the command center. They monitor trends in antisemitic rhetoric online, craft research reports based on their findings, and use search engine optimization to make links with their resources float to the top of Google search results. The wall-sized screens are filled with word clouds, pie charts, bar graphs, tweets, and Facebook posts, detailing what everyday Americans encounter online.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Blue Square Alliance has been on particularly high alert, monitoring shifts in the online conversation around antisemitism, which often included ordinary social media users swapping the word “Zionist” for “Jew” in derogatory ways, the group says. But in late February, when the United States and Israel entered the war with Iran, the Blue Square Alliance began noticing new trends in their data.

“What we saw, especially right after the operation began, is Hitler glorification was the first thing to spike,” Rotem Leiba, a lead analyst at Blue Square Alliance said. “In terms of all the antisemitic things we’ve seen happening at this time, Hitler glorification was the first to spike.”

Using Brandwatch, the social media monitoring software, the team found that terms like “Hitler was right,” “We owe Hitler an apology,” and “Hitler knew what he was doing” appeared with increasing frequency — more than it did in the aftermath of Oct. 7. A new term, “Hitler in heaven,” also began popping up across social media, topping similar sentiments at 21.4 million impressions.

A close-up view of the real-time dashboard at the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate command center in Foxborough, Massachusetts. (Jackie Hajdenberg)

One area they are still investigating is bots: studies have shown that automated software programs frequently amplify levels of hate speech.

“We are starting to talk to other partners that can help us understand who are the actors behind these conversations and … their echo chambers, and who’s the one publishing it,” Leiba said.

Efforts to manipulate public opinion and inflame social tensions are often pinned on Russia, Iran and other countries, although most of those bots Blue Square is tracking appear to be homegrown, Leiba explained. “Even some of the bots that we have seen in some reports amplifying content are bots that are created domestically, not necessarily from foreign actors.”

As Israel and the United States joined forces to attack Iran, and Israel pursued its proxies in Lebanon, rhetoric dehumanizing Jews also spiked. CyberWell, a compliance partner to social media organizations that helps them follow content moderation and regulatory policies, also found similar results.

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and executive director of CyberWell, said the users would compare Jews to “rats, pigs, monkeys, or cockroaches in the comments section — that’s human beings being really disgusting.”

The Foxborough-based command center resembles that of the Secure Community Network in Chicago, where the group that coordinates security for Jewish institutions set up an office in 2021 to monitor antisemitic threats.

At the stadium, which will also have hosted seven matches by the end of the current FIFA World Cup, it’s clearly Kraft’s team’s turf. Photos of Kraft, framed op-eds he wrote about antisemitism on college campuses and pictures from his alma mater, Columbia University, decorate the office. Blown-up images of the Patriots’ Super Bowl rings adorn the hallways leading into the command center.

The alliance is part of a crowded field of antisemitism watchdogs that includes Cyberwell, the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the Secure Community Network and the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Antisemitism Research. The ADL and Blue Square Alliance announced the formation of a partnership in February to expand educational programming on antisemitism prevention in schools and providing support for synagogues and faith communities.

“They’ve built delivery trucks going to all these different places, and the trucks aren’t full,” Katz said, referring to their blue square pins and other “blue square content” and “blue square messaging.” “We have stuff we’re trying to get onto delivery trucks to get to these places. It’s an obvious match.”

Their efforts are based on the idea that monitoring can help identify rising risks of violence and detect dangerous trends before they escalate. Susan Benesch, who directs the Dangerous Speech Project at Harvard University, has written that such early warning systems are helpful, but only so long as they are matched by actions.

In a working paper for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Benesch suggested steps like promoting “counterspeech” by influential members of a community, changing the design of social media platforms that amplify such speech, or strengthening social norms in the communities from which the hate speech and misinformation emerges.

Blue Square may be the most public-facing of these monitoring efforts, and, with Kraft’s money and platform, the best known, thanks to its Super Bowl ads and its association with America’s most popular sport.

Having captured the public’s attention, the alliance is seeking to shape its discourse. When regular internet users look up an antisemitic conspiracy theory or a trending dog whistle, Blue Square wants its results to be the first they see.

“Our default use case is: what does mainstream America see and hear on this topic?” explained the group’s president, Adam Katz.

Steven Fransblow, chief data and technology officer at the Blue Square Alliance, provided a typical example.

“We’re trying to crack the code on: how can we continue to be surfaced when Candace Owens says, ‘go research this,’” Fransblow explained. “They’re finding us, versus Reddit.”

Owens, a far-right commentator who frequently promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories, has nearly eight million followers on Twitter, and nearly six million subscribers on YouTube. Once a well-regarded voice in the conservative political space, she has been disavowed by her former supporters in more recent years as her content has become increasingly anti-Israel and antisemitic.

In January, Owens suggested that her former employer, the conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, sought to grab the mantle of Turning Point USA’s slain founder Charlie Kirk, saying Shapiro was acting as if he was promised the role “3,000 years ago.”  The “3,000 years ago” phrase is an antisemitic meme, mocking Jews for claiming ancestral ties to the Land of Israel and alleging they exploit history to assert a nefarious agenda. That phrase, which Blue Square says arose as early as 2014, but took off after Oct. 7, is one that the organization is working to counteract with its web presence.

Search “3,000 years ago” and “Jews” in Google and hits explaining its antisemitic intent pop up from the American Jewish Committee, CyberWell, the Times of Israel and social media sites like Reddit and Quora. This week, anyway, Blue Square’s explanation of the term showed up on the second page of search results.

The alliance has its critics. A controversial $15 million Super Bowl ad, which aired in February, featured a Jewish high school student who discovers a Post-It note scrawled with the words “Dirty Jew.” Critics of the word choice found it outdated or unrealistic, or called the ad spending outlandish, arguing that there are better ways to address antisemitism or help the Jewish community.

Katz defended the ad, saying it was a vindication of the “command center” and its data-driven  approach to monitoring antisemitic language and memes.

“We were looking at what are the most ubiquitous slurs on social media that are happening with high volume and frequency and are understandable by everybody,” Katz said. “And that’s why we went with ‘dirty Jew.’”

According to BSA’s research, the phrase “dirty Jew” made nearly 500 million impressions across 140,000 posts on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, Bluesky, and 4Chan between 2023 and 2025 — an increase, Fransblow said, of 174% from the previous three years.

“With the Super Bowl, you have 30 seconds,” Katz added. “It’s got to hit and land with as close to 140 million people as possible. So you’re trying to find language that is recognizable, that is ubiquitous, that is common, that is inarguably antisemitic.”

Added Katz, “We can’t afford to be too subtle.”

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That’s one side of the artist rendering of what will be a Holocaust monument. On the other side, train tracks lead to the entrance of the Nazis’ largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. A message across the top reads, “They were here. We remember.”

The sculpture by artists David Wilson and Stephen Hayes, called “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” is emotional on its own. But what makes the project planned for Charlotte, North Carolina, especially noteworthy is what will be alongside it.

Charlotte is the planned home for what its organizers believe is the first memorial plaza in the United States to both honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and remember the Holocaust in the same space. The Circle of Humanity: Monuments for Unity and Remembrance in Marshall Park will feature the 8-foot bronze statue of King currently in the park plus the new Holocaust monument. 

Linking the two will be paved walkways, educational reflections and digital resources on the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement and the combined history of African Americans and Jews in the U.S. School and tour groups will take part in interactive educational experiences. 

To those who might wonder why these monuments belong together, Rabbi Ya’aqov Walker points to a common inheritance. “You could just describe it plainly: white supremacy in continental Europe and white supremacy in the southeastern United States,” said Walker, who is Black and serves on the project’s education committee.

The groups also share deep resilience and desire for change, he said, which led to a significant Jewish presence in the civil rights movement in the United States 20 years after the Holocaust. 

“It was very prescient in their minds, from King to any major civil rights leader who was committed to nonviolence, to study and learn what the Jewish experience was, and to build relationships with rabbis as fellow spiritual leaders,” said Walker, who co-leads the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance. 

The new monument will replace a small one dedicated in 1979 that’s hidden in overgrown foliage. Project partners include the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance, Mecklenburg County, Queens University of Charlotte, the Stan Greenspon Holocaust Education Center, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg branch of the NAACP. 

After a national search for artists that yielded 57 design proposals, a review committee narrowed the choices to eight finalists. Wilson and Hayes, who are Black and live in Durham, North Carolina, were one of two teams asked to submit their concepts. Though they had never designed a sculpture based on a Jewish theme, they were compelled by its juxtaposition to the King monument, “creating a broader dialogue about injustice, courage and the consequences of hatred,” Wilson told county commissioners during a recent public meeting. 

David Wilson, left, and Stephen Hayes are the designers of “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” the winning design for the Circle of Humanity memorial in Charlotte’s Marshall Park. (Courtesy Circle of Humanity)

Their presentation moved Commissioner Leigh Altman, who is white, to reveal that her great-grandparents and many of their children were murdered in the Holocaust. About 25 to 30 Holocaust survivors live in the Charlotte area today.

“This shared partnership for me is a reminder across one of history’s worst genocides and the worst legacy of what America has done wrong, and brought it together to find a commonality, which was a failed obligation to recognize the humanity of others and to fight for it,” she said.

The second finalist team, Miriam Gusevich and Sal Pirrone from Washington, D.C., envisioned an abstract sculpture with thousands of silver circles to represent those killed by the Nazis. The proposed structure opened to a skylight in the shape of a Star of David. Members of Gusevich’s family died in the Holocaust.

“Circle of Humanity” organizers held 12 community feedback sessions, including at synagogues, a Black church and Johnson C. Smith University, a historically Black university. About 850 community members participated. More than 100 completed written surveys on their preferences. Ultimately, a majority favored the rail car image. At one session, participants audibly gasped when “In Transit” was revealed. 

It’s yet to be determined which materials will be used to render the piece. Options range from cast and fabricated metal to large-scale 3-D printing. What likely won’t change is the sculpture’s bronze hue and structure. 

“The skin tones can be interpreted in many ways, and it looks very similar to an auction block” used in the trafficking of enslaved people, Walker noted. He recalled that during a feedback session at a Black church, some church members teared up to see the reminder of family separation.

Urban Design Partners in collaboration with Groundworks Studio will develop the plaza, in a design called “Woven Histories.” Potential elements include a stone walkway with a plaid design. The plaid pays tribute to the dress that civil rights pioneer Dorothy Counts-Scoggins wore on the day in 1957 when she faced down an angry white mob to become the first Black student to attend a segregated high school in Charlotte. 

The plaza will include benches and may incorporate decorative stone books. Like the monument design, the concept is still open to changes based on additional community feedback. The planned budget is just under $1 million, including a $100,000 endowment for programming and maintenance. If fundraising efforts are successful and the timeline stays on track, the plaza is scheduled to open in May 2027.

Marshall Park has particular resonance as the setting. It is part of the former Brooklyn, a Black neighborhood razed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal. More recently, Marshall Park has been a familiar site for protests and political demonstrations.

The idea for the innovative combination began with a discussion between Rev. Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NACCP, and Rabbi Judy Schindler, Sklut professor of Jewish studies at Queens University of Charlotte and executive director of Spill the Honey, a national non-profit which produces arts and educational materials intended to empower the Black-Jewish alliance to combat racism and antisemitism.

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial statue in Charlotte’s Marshall Park, created by renowned sculptor Selma Burke, was dedicated on April 5, 1980. (Courtesy Arrowmount School of Arts and Crafts)

“It all came out of the same conversation, looking at the Civil Rights movement, looking at the rise in racial slurs and antisemitism, and just really understanding that we have to do something to elevate the importance of not only our cultures, but what love would look like in this country,” Mack said. “I thought it was important that we went back to the root of the civil rights movement, which was us collaborating.”

She acknowledges a few phone calls from members of Charlotte’s Black community who expressed concern about the collaboration in light of the war and political divides opened after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Others were unclear about the benefits of bringing the two histories together. But no vocal opposition has emerged to the project. Organizers say on-site education about the history of Black-Jewish ties in America is essential.

Charlotte has its own claims to this history. Humorist and social critic Harry Golden lived in the city and published his commentaries in The Carolina Israelite, a newspaper whose subscribers included Congressional members and well-known writers. In “The Vertical Negro Plan” in 1956, he pointedly noted that whites seemed to have no trouble standing next to Black Americans. It was only when Black people wanted to sit “that the fur begins to fly.” His tongue-in-cheek solution? Remove the seats at schools and lunch counters.

In 1971, attorney Adam Stein, father of N.C. Gov. Josh Stein, was part of the legal team who argued Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education before the Supreme Court. The case began the era of busing for school integration nationwide. Busing for that purpose officially ended in Charlotte in 2002, when the Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to  lower-court ruling recognizing local schools as adequately desegregated .

Now, supporters hope the Circle of Humanity will be a catalyst for Black-Jewish collaborations in other cities. Schindler, named after a great-aunt who was killed during the Holocaust, wants the gathering spot to be a place not only for remembrance, but for inspiration and beginnings. 

“It’s really important to me that we bring joy to this work,” she said, envisioning the opening ceremony filled with klezmer music as well as both soul food and Jewish noshes. She cautions against “letting those to seek to harm us control our thoughts and our struggles and our fears. We need to celebrate our culture and who we are with pride and joy, so I pray that this will be a centerpiece for cultural celebration of all sorts.”

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The survey published Wednesday by Quinnipiac University also found that 60% of respondents reported that military intervention in Iran was “not worth it” as opposed to 34% of voters who said it was “worth it.”

The number of respondents who think the U.S. support of Israel is about right is 38%, while just 7% think the U.S. is not supportive enough of Israel, the poll found. 

Broken down by party, 66% of Democrats think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, while 9% think it is not supportive enough and 18% think U.S. support for Israel is about right.

Among Republicans, 20% think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, 69% think American support for Israel is “about right,” and 6% think the U.S. is not supportive enough.

Among independent voters, 55% think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, 34% think U.S. support for Israel is about right, and 7% think the U.S. is not supportive enough.

The poll data were released one day after three Democrats critical of Israel swept their House primary races in New York City, and in races around the country even some reliably pro-Israel Democratic candidates distanced themselves from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.

A survey last year by Gallup found dwindling support for Israel among Democrats,  as well as waning support among Republicans.

Still the party divide was also in sharp evidence in the latest poll. In responses to the question about whether the Iran war was “worth it”, Democrats disfavored military action in Iran at 93% and independents at 66%, while 75% of Republicans surveyed thought it was “worth it.”

Given a list of 10 issues and asked which, if any, they considered priorities in their decision-making process in the election for the U.S. House of Representatives, 41% of voters cited the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, above AI data centers (38%) and Donald Trump (38%). The high cost of living (70%) and health care (59%) topped the list.

The Quinnipiac poll was conducted from June 18 to 22, and includes responses from 1,165 self-identified registered voters. 

The margin of error is 3.4 percentage points.

Among those surveyed, 48% said they had an unfavorable view of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Twenty percent said they had a favorable opinion, and 30% “haven’t heard enough” about him. 

“Netanyahu gets poor marks from American voters as their appetite for supporting Israel wanes, with the share of voters who think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel hitting a new high,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy wrote in the report.

Voters were also asked about their views on the June 17 memorandum of understanding with Iran, which begins a 60-day negotiation period that does not outline an end to Iran’s nuclear program.

“After months of diplomatic fits and starts, global economic repercussions and a broad loss of life in the region, a majority of voters make their feelings clear: the Iran war was a bad idea,” Malloy wrote.

Voters who are either not confident or “not so confident” that the deal will succeed numbered 59%, and 61% think it is either likely or very likely that Iran will develop nuclear weapons.

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As a series of congressional candidates backed by progressive anti-Zionist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani notched victories, including over two pro-Israel incumbents, the future for the party’s relationship with Israel has never seemed more in question. With one of those winners, Brad Lander, being Jewish, left-wing Jews are also celebrating a new champion and a boost in electoral power.

At the same time, a new, smaller crop of pro-Israel victors could seek to carry the mantle for the liberal Jewish vote, while Jewish establishment leaders are navigating the changing political landscape.

Here are a few big Jewish takeaways from Tuesday night:

1: Are Jewish centers of power shifting?

Establishment Jewish figures and their allies were reading the tea leaves of the results Wednesday as voters seemed to shift further away from pro-Israel positions. Some downplayed any broader significance.

“Last night’s primaries indicate that DSA, Mamdani-backed candidates can win in different areas of New York City,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But I don’t think that those same candidates could win anywhere else.”

Soifer’s pro-Israel group had offered a rare primary endorsement to Rep. Dan Goldman, who was routed by former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. She added, “We know that Jewish voters feel very conflicted about the issue of Israel and the role that it’s now playing in Democratic politics.” 

She demurred on whether her organization could find a pathway to work with Lander, saying he “chose to use Israel as a wedge issue in this election, dividing Jewish voters.” In contrast to Goldman’s clearer support for Israel, Lander has called for ending aid to Israeli defense systems including the Iron Dome, a stance Soifer specifically noted would be a roadblock to collaboration. Lander describes himself as a liberal Zionist.

Other Jewish leaders were sounding notes of alarm Wednesday.

“We are deeply concerned by public leaders who vilify Jews and others who support Israel, including many who also strive for peace, support Palestinian rights, and mourn the suffering of innocent civilians,” Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center, said in a statement. “We reject the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian dignity. We will work with leaders across political and ideological lines when they share our values, and we will speak out forcefully when their words or actions undermine Jewish safety, demonize supporters of Israel, or deny Israel’s right to exist and thrive in security.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whose own endorsed candidates mostly lost on Tuesday, congratulated Lander in an interview with NY1 and gave a “salute” to Goldman. The Brooklyn lawmaker also congratulated pro-Israel centrist Democrat Cait Conley (whom he did endorse) for her win in a suburban district held by Republican Rep. Mike Lawler that Jeffries hopes to flip.

A spokesperson for Democratic pro-Israel Rep. Ritchie Torres, who’d chased off a would-be pro-Palestinian primary challenger before the race got underway, declined to comment to JTA on what the race’s results mean for Jewish leaders.

“I think we’re in a moment of a lot of uprooting of conventional beliefs and conventional norms,” Goldman told the media following his loss. Contrasting Democrats with “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he added, “The more internal division and divisiveness, internal fighting that we have, means that they’re going to continue to push forward with their agenda.”

Some Jewish pundits were more explicit about what they saw as the political threat. David Frum, a center-right columnist for The Atlantic, said before results came in that the primaries were a “test of power of Mayor Mamdani’s anti-Jewish messaging.”

Does this leave Jewish progressives in a moment of confusion — or ascension? New York Jewish Agenda, a left-leaning Jewish advocacy group whose previous director was appointed as Mamdani’s antisemitism czar, told JTA the answer might lie somewhere in the middle.

“We’re going to need to stretch in new and interesting ways in order to be effective,” Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson, the group’s director, said of NYJA’s coalition-building work. “There’s going to be unexpected bright spots and new areas of alignment in really unlikely places.” Lander and Lasher are former NYJA board members.

Hughes-Robinson acknowledged that, in the wake of wins in other congressional districts, such as that of former encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, Jews “may not receive the same warm invitation” from some of their progressive counterparts going forward. Still, she insisted, Jews should “try to be in the room and get work done.”

The results, she said, also showed that “there’s a diversity of Jewish voices, and I actually think that’s a really good thing.”

IfNotNow, though, was ebullient — and eager to anoint a new standard-bearer for the Jewish community. 

“Brad’s win is a blueprint for the future for both the Jewish community and the Democratic Party,” the pro-Palestinian Jewish group, which heavily boosted Lander, wrote on social media. “He ran a bold, unapologetically Jewish campaign that rejected pro-war lobbies like AIPAC and the endless flow of U.S. weapons to Israel. And his vision won resoundingly.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during a primary-night watch party for NYC Congressional candidate Claire Valdez at 99 Scott Studio on June 23, 2026 in the East Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

2: King Mamdani

Now is the time of Mamdani.

The anti-Zionist mayor made a big push for political influence in Tuesday’s primaries, and his bets paid off. All three congressional candidates Mamdani stumped for, who hit the campaign trail with fierce criticism of Israel as one of their major commonalities, prevailed in their contests and are virtually assured seats in the House in November given the Democratic makeup of their districts. The victories further cemented Mamdani’s status in the minds of many political analysts as a new center of power for progressive Democrats.

Congressional candidate Claire Valdez acknowledges supporters during her primary-night watch party at 99 Scott Studio on June 23, 2026 in the East Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Mamdani-backed victories include state lawmaker Claire Valdez, the democratic socialist who bested Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for the open seat in New York’s 7th Congressional District. The Associated Press called the race for Valdez early, with her pulling 56% of the vote to Reynoso’s 35% as of press time. The district’s retiring representative, Nydia Velázquez, had backed Reynoso.

“I will continue to call for Palestinian liberation,” Valdez said during her victory speech, to cheers. “We will stand up to the genocide. We will refuse to abide by apartheid. And we will use our money to improve lives here instead of destroying them abroad.”

Chevalier, the former Columbia University encampment organizer who had attended a pro-Palestinian rally at which support for Hamas was expressed on Oct. 8, 2023, also shocked the political establishment by squeaking out a win over incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the 13th district. “Free Palestine” chants broke out at her victory celebration, which was also attended by Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. (Chevalier, like Valdez, was backed by the DSA.) 

And in a matchup between two Jews that the Jewish political establishment watched closely, Lander, a frequent Mamdani surrogate, trounced Goldman, the incumbent. 

“The mayor showed that he knows how to pick winners,” Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish, told JTA on Tuesday night. “I think that’s a big takeaway, and his popularity is transferable. And that’s more power to his coalition; those who doubted his reach should rethink their assessment.”

As the mayor helps push Democrats further to the left on Israel, he has also contributed to a coarsening of political rhetoric for Jews. 

Mamdani, at his rally last week backing his preferred candidates, triggered backlash from Jewish corners for comparing pro-Israel lobbyists AIPAC to “monsters.” Jewish leaders (including, in the primary’s final hours, the Union for Reform Judaism and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt) criticized his language. 

But none of it seemed to hurt his candidates or his reach.

New York congressional candidate Micah Lasher (l) celebrates his Democratic primary victory with Jewish supporters including Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal and City Comptroller Mark Levine in Manhattan, New York, June 23, 2026. (Joseph Strauss/JTA)

3: Who will carry the torch for pro-Israel Jews in Congress?

One notable race in which Mamdani hadn’t intervened was his own congressional district: the 12th, which is also the most Jewish in the country. There, Jewish State Assembly member Micah Lasher won the race to succeed his former boss, progressive Rep. Jerry Nadler, himself a fixture of liberal Jewry. The mayor did not reveal whom he had voted for.

Lasher, who said during the race that he was “exhausted” with how the electorate seemed to be “obsessed with Israel,” will aim to thread the needle for liberal pro-Israel Jews as Nadler once did — but at a much more challenging moment for pro-Israel politics. He has pushed for “Hamas out of Gaza and Netanyahu out of the Knesset,” while also seeking protections for Jewish college students and on other fronts.

Unlike in the other races, though, Lasher’s did not explicitly pivot on Israel — making it hard to draw conclusions about his voters’ tolerance for more critical views. (One of his major sticking points with his leading primary opponent, Alex Bores, was over artificial intelligence.) Lasher’s strong bonds with the local Jewish community will also position him for a potentially crucial interlocutor role for local Jews, some said.

“I think that Micah is going to be a bridge between the Jewish community and the current city administration,” Hoylman-Sigal told JTA. “I think he’s someone who can work with the mayor, but I think he can also represent the community in a way that’s going to make us all proud.”

Cait Conley speaks to Politico Cybersecurity reporter Maggie Miller during Politico’s annual AI and Tech Summit on September 17, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Conley’s victory in the suburbs, meanwhile, could bring another pro-Israel Jewish torchbearer to Congress as the body becomes a lonelier place for that demographic population. The 17th district has a large pro-Israel Orthodox population, and is currently represented by Lawler, though Democrats are bullish on their prospects in November. Lawler is regarded as one of the most vulnerable House Republicans in the country. 

Although Conley bested a Jewish opponent, Beth Davidson, in the primary, the military veteran ran a staunchly pro-Israel campaign and has said she sees the country as a key U.S. national security ally. How Democrats, and their Jewish leaders, rally behind her in their efforts to flip the seat will serve as a telling sign of whether the party can still sell itself to pro-Israel swing voters.

4: AIPAC was everywhere … and nowhere

For all the attention AIPAC attracted in New York City this election cycle, one could be forgiven for assuming the lobbyists were spending on candidates there like crazy.

Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman votes with his family in Manhattan, June 19, 2026. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Mamdani’s now-infamous “monsters” comment preceded a Brooklyn cafe rejecting Goldman’s business on the grounds that his money for a cup of coffee was “probably coming from AIPAC” — which had endorsed Goldman. 

The progressive victors Tuesday night railed against the pro-Israel group in their speeches, but in fact, AIPAC appeared to be less involved than most progressives charged. Following accusations from Valdez that a new super PAC backing her opponent was being secretly funded by AIPAC, the PAC’s own supporters denied the charge. 

In general, the AIPAC lobbyists appear not to have funneled the kinds of primary cash into the New York-area races that they have in other cycles. The exception, a large donation to Chevalier’s opponent Espaillat, backfired with a Chevalier victory.

In its own statement on the race, AIPAC congratulated Jeffries and touted its endorsed candidates who had won elsewhere in New York and other states — many of whom ran with no serious opposition.

“While disappointed that some of our endorsed candidates did not prevail, our community is proud to support pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans who stand for our values, and we are encouraged that voters in races across the country this primary season continue to choose serious, thoughtful leaders who support a strong U.S.-Israel partnership,” the group wrote.

Liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street’s brand fared slightly better. The group congratulated Lander, whom they had endorsed — while also cross-endorsing Goldman — as well as Lasher and Conley. 

In a statement to JTA, J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami said of Lander, “We look forward to working with him toward a peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) addresses the crowd during ‘Get Out the Vote (GOTV)’ rally at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. The rally was held to support a slate of progressive candidates ahead of the New York primary election on June 23. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

5: Are progressives splitting over Israel divisions?

Even among a broader victory for Mamdani’s lane of progressivism, there were some signs of strain. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, endorsed Lander and Valdez — but not Chevalier (although he spoke at a joint rally for her and the other candidates). In a since-deleted X account, Chevalier years ago had knocked Sanders for his “liberal Zionism,” the New York Post reported. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another progressive superstar with an often rocky relationship with Jewish communities, also did not endorse Chevalier.

Meanwhile, New York’s first lady Rama Duwaji, whose social media activity has long suggested even more strident pro-Palestinian views than her husband, urged her followers to vote for Valdez and Chevalier, the two DSA-backed candidates — but she did not mention Lander, the lone Jewish candidate and most positive toward Israel of the three Mamdani endorsees. 

Lander, despite being Mamdani’s most visible Jewish ally, also showed signs of frustration with the movement during his campaign. He wouldn’t defend the mayor’s AIPAC comments, instead pushing for “a spirit of unity and humanity.” 

In the campaign’s waning hours Lander also spoke out against what he described as “over-the-top toxic” attacks that his opponent, Goldman, faced on the campaign trail, adding, “I’m pleading with people to turn it down.” Though Lander didn’t specify which kinds of attacks, Goldman’s most visible antagonists made no secret of their disdain for his pro-Israel views.

The spectrum between Lander and Chevalier suggests that in addition to support for Israel becoming a liability in the Democratic Party, another fault line could soon emerge over whether to express basic civility toward pro-Israel colleagues.

Joseph Strauss contributed reporting.

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