Holding up her phone while tossing her hair over her shoulder, a young woman records a TikTok of herself. On the screen appears a list of “Things that are spiritually Israeli: Snapchat, Gracie Abrams, any kind of AI, League of Legends, Jeremiah Fisher, QR code menus, Sigmund Freud, the May 22nd Mustafa Daniel Caesar concert, men, and choice feminism.” 

Her TikTok post received almost 80,000 likes. 

Across a number of social media platforms, posters use “spiritually Israeli” to describe something they find suspicious or soulless, or to assert their dislike of a trend, person or idea. It doesn’t matter if the thing being described has any connection to Israel or Jews. “Israeli” has become its own kind of pejorative. 

For Jewish teens encountering this trend online, it has raised some complicated feelings.

Melanie Gross, a Jewish high school student from Harrington Park, New Jersey, is deeply irritated at the rising popularity of the phrase.

“It makes me feel very annoyed, because people just tend to copy whatever they see,” Gross said. “They’re like, ‘oh, this trend is gaining a lot of attention, so it’s probably an accurate depiction of Israelis.’”

The site knowyourmeme.com says “spiritually Israeli” is used as an insult to call celebrities, trends, products and other things “vapid” or “culturally empty.” Examples are seen frequently on TikTok:  “I hate when I get a matcha and it tastes spiritually Israeli”; “The way you played the victim felt spiritually Israeli,” and “I can’t explain it but girls who look down on other girls for wearing makeup everyday are spiritually Israeli” are just a few examples. 

According to the American Jewish Committee, 73% of American Jews have experienced antisemitism online. As antisemitic language becomes more common across social media, Jewish teens have also been encountering it more frequently in their feeds. This exposure not only affects their comfortability online, but also their sense of safety in their everyday lives. 

“Trends like this one make it hard to express my Judaism,” said Gross. “Sometimes if I’m wearing a star of David necklace, there’s certain places where I’d tuck it beneath my shirt.”

As anti-Jewish harassment has risen not only online, but also in schools and public spaces, many Jewish teens are struggling to navigate a reality where online hostility is leaching into their daily lives.

Sixteen-year-old twins Sophie and Julia Ofeck, Israeli-American high school students from Old Tappan, New Jersey, both said that this phrase feels like a personal attack. “This trend gives people a negative perception of Israelis when they see the word ‘Israeli’ being used as a negative adjective,” said Sophie. She sometimes feels uncomfortable sharing her Israeli heritage with people she doesn’t know. “I’m scared of what they’ve seen on social media,” Sophie said. 

Her twin sister, Julia, makes the distinction that “the term isn’t ‘spiritually Israeli government,’ it’s ‘spiritually Israeli.’ This difference is incredibly significant because it leads to widespread negative perceptions of Israeli people as this type of language becomes more common.”

More: Read a teen’s guide to the antisemitic memes flourishing on social media.

Some have defended the use of the phrase. Vocal Politics, an Independent media outlet covering the “Global South,” asserted in a TikTok video that the phrase is “a cultural response born from 2 years of witnessing Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and wars across multiple fronts. “

Calling something “spiritually Israeli,” the video continued, “has become shorthand for corruption, deceit, colonial arrogance, or just criticising stuff they hate.”  

And yet even if those using the phrase may think they are criticizing the Israeli government, the language is still dangerous because it is so vague, the Ofecks and other Jewish teens told JTA.

“People online need to draw a line between ‘dark humor’ and hate.” Sophie said, “People shouldn’t be talking about things they aren’t educated about. None of this is a joke, and it’s very hurtful to see.” 

Meanwhile, some proud Israelis and Jews are responding by embracing the label as an ironic badge of honor. 

On Reddit’s r/Israel community, a user recently suggested that Jews should “push back” and use the phrase “to describe odd quirks of Israeli culture that we love nonetheless.”

The suggestions poured in, from the Israeli love of cucumbers, to the average Israeli’s aversion to rain, to wearing shorts and a t-shirt to a wedding. 

“They’ll get tired of using this phrase soon,” wrote a Redditor describing themselves as an “American-Israeli.” “I don’t think it’s going to become mainstream and it’s better that we just ignore it in my opinion.”

Nevertheless, although she was raised to be proud of being an Israeli, New Jersey high school student Zoe Geallat said that trends like these leave her “often ashamed and embarrassed, even though that shouldn’t be the case.”

“It’s very upsetting when I see things being said about my heritage,” Geallat said. “People just believe whatever it is they see, and then the hate keeps rising.”

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Earlier this year Roberto, a high school student in Chicago, liked an Instagram post that called someone “low-key spiritually Israeli.”

Roberto, who isn’t Jewish, had seen many videos using the phrase and viewed it as an ordinary meme. He understood that the phrase wasn’t a compliment, but it wasn’t until a Jewish friend pointed out that the phrase “spiritually Israeli” is meant as an insult to Israeli and Jewish culture  that he regretted his actions. (Roberto asked not to have his full name published to keep his personal information private.)

In recent years, “spiritually Israeli,” a way of indicating that something is culturally hollow or inauthentic, joined a growing list of dog whistles, or phrases designed to circumvent censors and subversively spread antisemitism.

For teens active on social media, it is hard to escape such coded language, which can be used to describe people and things not even associated with Israel or Palestinians. As criticism of Israel exploded after the Oct. 7 attacks and the war that followed, these dog whistles multiplied.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center Study, almost half of young adults get their news off of TikTok. Moreover, a 2023 American Jewish Committee survey analysis found that “62% of American Jews reported seeing or hearing antisemitism online or on social media in the past 12 months.” 

TikTok and Instagram posts spread and validate antisemitism to millions, with coded language that often escapes the attention of content moderators.

“Without additional context, no social media platform is going to move against [coded language] at scale,” said Tal-Or Montemayor, CEO of Cyberwell, a company that works with social media platforms to help them enforce their policies against anti-semitism. 

Here’s a glossary of some of the more common social media phrases and trends that many users and Jewish watchdog groups consider antisemitic.

Coded Phrases

“109 countries”

The phrase “109 countries” is a reference to the false claim that Jews have been expelled from 109 countries, and a suggestion that they deserved it. 

In one typical use of this phrase, a creator says, “If a person gets banned from 109 bars, is it the person’s fault, or is it the bar’s fault?” 

Raphael Jankelovics, a Jewish teen from Chicago, often hears such jokes online. 

The phrase, he said, “removes nuance from a situation and it frames it in a way that puts the blame on the Jews. That’s obviously hateful.’” 

“3,000 years ago”

“Promised 3,000 years ago” is a sarcastic reference to the Jewish connection to Israel, mocking the Jewish claim that their attachment to the Holy Land is as old as the Torah.

It is meant to ridicule the idea that someone deserves something because it was “promised [to them] 3,000 years ago.” 

The phrase does double duty: It questions the Jewish connection to Israel, and it suggests that Jews use history to create a false sense of entitlement. That message is compounded when the phrase is used in videos that mimic Jewish culture by featuring characters wearing fake payes or ironically playing “Hava Nagila” in the background. 

The phrase “3,000 years ago” was spread by users who leveraged the generative-AI model Veo3 to transform the antisemitic trope into video and other content, said Cyberwell’s Montemayor. “The guardrails around the specific generative AI tool were not in place in order to identify that this is actually promoting antisemitism,” she said. 

“Only 271,000”

“Only 271,000” is a popular meme meant to deny the Holocaust. It claims that only 271,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust, supposedly based on death certificates issued by the Nazi concentration camps, instead of the true 6 million. 

Some use the phrase unironically to deny the extent of the Holocaust; others drop it into a comment to taunt a Jewish post or account. According to the Blue Square Alliance, from 2022 to 2024, the use of the phrase “271,000” increased by 1250% on social media.  

Creators use this number in either text on top of a video or in a hashtag in the captions of the video. The numbers seem random, but it signifies their hateful intention to other users who understand the meaning. 

“A lot of coded language that Cyberwell has detected has been around Holocaust denial,” Montemayor said. “Why people psychologically get behind numbers or expressions without a lot of context is connected to AI slop of phrases that become catchy, easy to throw out, and are not meant to actually produce discussion. They’re meant to produce mockery, rejection and dehumanization.”

“7k” or “$7,000”

In October, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft alleged that a pro-Israel, “influencer campaign” initiated by the Israeli government was paying creators up to $7,000 per post to promote Israel on social media. Critics of the report acknowledged that Israel had a budget for a pro-Israel marketing campaign, but denied that direct payments were being made to influencers. 

Nevertheless, “$7,000” became a way to discredit anything positive posted about Israel, or any Jewish videos in general. Comment sections of Jewish posts on social media are flooded with “+7k.” 

“When people in any kind of way criticize antisemitism, people comment ‘+7k’,” said Carlos Munoz, a student at Chicago’s Northside College Prep High School.

“It seems like a dismissive and antisemitic way to respond to any statements” about Jews, said Renee Rakowitz, a student at Northside College Prep. 

Visual Dog Whistles

A new TikTok photo commenting mode now allows users to comment on posts with photos, enabling unchecked antisemitism by giving users a chance to bypass community guidelines. 

Montemayor explained that after the Bondi Beach attack, social media saw “repeat images and GIFs comparing Jews to pigs.” 

In response to antisemitic GIFs, CyberWell alerted the oversight board at Meta — Facebook and Instagram’s parent company — noting how users were using rat, monkey and pig emojis to make coded reference to Jews, said Montemayor. 

According to the Anti Defamation League, “The prevalence of hateful content in Photo Mode suggests that TikTok enforces its policies more effectively in videos.” Here are some trending photos and phrases that have taken over countless comment sections:

“”

The juice box emoji is a frequently used way of substituting the word Jew without being filtered out by moderation guidelines. This is because the word “juice” sounds similar to the word “Jews.” 

“It’s just a way to get around a video being taken down for explicitly using the real word,” said Jankelovic from Chicago. 

For Aviva Rubenfel, a Jewish teen from Chicago, these dog whistles are just a new iteration of a constant struggle for Jews. 

“The way that I was taught to think about these things,” she said, “is that antisemitism is always going to be there, and that should feel hurtful, but it’s more a strength because they can’t break us down.”

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The letter, which J Street shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday, accused Leiter, a Netanyahu appointee and former settler leader, of using language that “dehumanizes fellow Jews” during his remarks in Washington, D.C., on Monday.

J Street is the leading liberal pro-Israel lobby, and has increasingly staked out positions that have departed from other mainstream pro-Israel groups. Last month, the group announced its  opposition to continued U.S. military aid to Israel, which Leiter decried in his remarks.

The signatories wrote that while Judaism embraces vigorous debate, disagreements must be conducted with “humanity, humility and respect for the dignity of every Jew.”

“At this painful and polarized moment in Jewish life, leaders on both sides of the ocean bear a heightened responsibility to lower the flames rather than fan them further,” the letter read. “We therefore call on you to retract your remarks and issue a public apology to the many American Jews, rabbis, cantors and communal leaders who have been hurt by them.”

Among the signatories were New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, former U.S. ambassadors to Israel Daniel Kurtzer and Tom Nides, National Council of Jewish Women CEO Jody Rabhan, Union for Reform Judaism President Rabbi Rick Jacobs and Rabbi David Saperstein, the director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami told JTA that his initial reaction to Leiter’s comments was “simply dismay on behalf of Israel and on behalf of the Jewish community.”

“It’s a shame, because Israel, right now, needs all the friends it can get, and it really needs diplomats who seek to open doors and not slam them in people’s faces,” Ben-Ami said.

The Israeli Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from JTA.

The comments from Leiter follow a long history of criticism of the lobby from pro-Israel officials. In 2017, former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman called the group “worse than kapos,” a reference to Jews who aided the Nazis during WWII.

While Ben-Ami said that the latest attack was “not new,” he felt spurred to craft a communal rebuke of Leiter’s rhetoric because he felt it was “breaking” not just the US-Israel relationship, but the relationship between the “American Jewish community and the Israeli Jewish community.”

“Within 24 hours we had hundreds and hundreds of people, and I think it just shows what a raw nerve Ambassador Leiter has touched here, and just what a big mistake it is for the Israeli government to write off the majority of Jewish Americans who are deeply critical of the government but supportive of the state and the people,” Ben-Ami said of the number of signatories.

While Ben-Ami said that J Street had long been invited to meet with former Israeli ambassadors, he claimed that since Leiter arrived, the group had been “blacklisted by the Embassy, and there’s been no engagement whatsoever.”

The letter comes as J Street has also faced scrutiny from across the political aisle, with the Zionist Organization of America calling for Hillels, Jewish Community Relations Councils and federations to cease relations with the group, while the student government of Sarah Lawrence College rejected an application to form a chapter of the group on its campus.

“There’s going to be people to our left who are intolerant and you know engage in similar tactics to folks on the right who are intolerant and try to shut out those they disagree with, and that is just as disturbing,” Ben-Ami said.

Looking ahead, Ben-Ami said that he hoped the letter would serve as a reminder that Jewish leaders need to make room for ideological differences rather than treat dissent as disloyalty.

“The message more broadly here is, we need to embrace the diversity of opinion,” Ben-Ami said. “We need to embrace our disagreements and recognize that that is indeed part of Jewish tradition.”

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The United States should cut off weapons sales to Israel as long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not relieve Palestinian suffering, Frank told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this month, using his imminent death to state bluntly what he believed other Democrats could not.

“It’s what the Democrats should be doing, it’s what America should be doing, and it should be what the Democrats are advocating, is giving an ultimatum that [Netanyahu] either changes things substantially in Gaza and the West Bank, or we cut off any aid,” the onetime congressional powerhouse said in a May 8 phone call from his home in Ogunquit, Maine.

“I’ve been talking about the importance of repudiating positions from the left and from the far left, but the Israel one is almost 180 degrees” different, he said. “It’s the one area where we are not doing enough in terms of making our position clear.”

Jewish lawmakers criticizing Netanyahu’s Israel was extraordinary a decade or so ago but has become commonplace. Frank’s plea, however, came from a lawmaker who grew up in a Zionist household and who was throughout a decades-long career in the U.S. House of Representatives solidly pro-Israel, albeit with occasional deviations from the pro-Israel lobby’s orthodoxy.

In one of his final interviews, he acknowledged being heartbroken by Israel under Netanyahu, recalling his family’s support for the struggle to shuck off the British mandate and create a Jewish state.

“We had a ‘boycott Britain’ bumper sticker on our car,” he said. His older sister, Ann Lewis, brought the family into the Zionist fold after a summer at a Habonim camp. “During my congressional career, I was very supportive, emotionally as well as politically and for a while earlier in this century, I volunteered and traveled at the request of Hillel to a couple of college campuses to defend Judaism and Israel.”

That would be hard to do in the current moment, he said. “I guess I held on longer than I should have to, ‘Well, we can work with them, etc’,” he said. “But it’s become clear to me, particularly due to what they’re allowing to happen in the West Bank, that it is important morally and politically to repudiate the policy of supporting Israel’s military activity.”

Rep. Barney Frank speaks to a Harvard Students for Israel rally in Harvard Yard, Oct. 23, 2000. The Harvard Society of Arab Students stood silently in protest, holding signs with the names of Palestinian and Israeli victims of recent violence. (Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

From the home he shared with his husband in Ogunquit, Frank in his final days took calls from the media well ahead of the scheduled publication of his book, “The Hard Path to Unity.”

He freely admitted he was doing a virtual publicity tour because his survival until the September launch date was unlikely. He knew he was leveraging his decline to be heard, and he didn’t mind that at all.

“Frankly, if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention,” Frank told The New York Times earlier this month.

His message in many of those conversations: Don’t make or break viable Democratic candidates on issues like transgender rights or Medicare for all.

“The key to liberal democracy being able to come back is to get rid of the perception, that we have allowed to grow, that the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable,” he told the Times.

Asked at the outset of his interview with JTA if that advice extends to the pressure from some of the Democratic base on candidates to pledge to cut assistance to Israel, he offered a vigorous “almost the opposite” because of his conviction that the party should be more vocal in its opposition to the current Israeli government.

Frank was a fighter during his congressional career from 1981 to 2013. The leadership made him the lead antagonist to Newt Gingrich during Gingrich’s consequential speakership in the 1990s. Frank ascended to the leadership of the House Financial Services Committee at a key time, during the late 2000s financial crisis. He coauthored the last major banking reform bill, 2010’s Dodd-Frank.

He was a progressive lion, championing the battles against income inequality and for civil rights. He came out in 1987 as gay, the first sitting member of Congress to do so. He had a reputation as a curmudgeon, once silencing a Holocaust survivor for exceeding his time in congressional testimony.

Frank believed that incremental moves are more likely to bring about change than full-on advocacy for far-reaching changes. He had noted in interviews that the same-sex marriage he enjoyed with his husband came about because of a slow roll of change in LGBTQ rights, including ones he championed, like allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

The onetime leading progressive endorsed moderates in this year’s elections, backing AIPAC-supported U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary. In his own state’s Senate race, he also backed Gov. Janet Mills, who recently ceded the primary to Graham Platner, an ascendant figure on the party’s left.

Frank believed anti-Israel orthodoxies could be as damaging as the far-left orthodoxies he decried. He remained appalled at voters disgruntled with the Biden administration’s pro-Israel policies who stayed away from the polls or even voted for President Donald Trump, and he used their example as one of two to illustrate why purity tests backfire. (The other is voters who faulted President Joe Biden for not doing enough to address climate change.)

“People who voted against [Kamala] Harris because they thought the administration had been too supportive of Israel achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted,” Frank said, referring to the former vice president who faced Trump in 2024. “She would have begun by now to have cut back substantially on aid to Israel.”

He made clear in his interview that he rejected the extremes of Israel criticism emerging among Democrats, including accusations it has committed genocide in the war Hamas launched in 2023, and the argument that it should not exist as a Jewish state.

“Genocide is trying to wipe out the whole people,” he said. “The Holocaust was killing every Jew. Israel is not trying to kill every Palestinian. What they’re doing – I do not think its genocide, but it’s certainly unacceptable, morally and very damaging, politically.”

But he argued that in order to effectively confront the anti-Israel left in the party, Democrats must address what he says is the main enabler of its rise: Netanyahu and his policies.

“Netanyahu has been their enabler,” he said of prominent anti-Israel Democrats, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

Frank was especially exercised by attacks by some settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, attacks he said are enabled by Netanyahu and his coalition partnership with far-right patrons of the extremist settlers.

“My recommendation to Democrats would be to say, if Netanyahu does not reverse the harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank and substantially cut back on the military attacks, America should announce that we are no longer going to supply him with arms or be otherwise supportive,” he said.

“We’ve now gone to the point where supporting Israel has become unpopular, and that’s all Netanyahu’s doing,” Frank said. “No question that what he’s done is legitimize opposition to the whole notion of Israel, beyond disagreement with the specific actions.”

He sympathized with Jewish voters who feel alienated by Democrats and who could never bring themselves to vote for Trump (whom he reviled — he told reporters that his one regret is that he will not live to see Trump implode.) But he said the way forward is to cut off Netanyahu.

“I understand the dilemma people face if the choice is supporting Israel and everything that Netanyahu is doing and repudiating that,” he said. “We should make it clear that the right position here is to support Israel’s right to exist, but to be unwilling to facilitate what they’re doing militarily and to give them an ultimatum.”

Frank said the United States should actively support Netanyahu’s opposition as a means of leverage. He cited as an example the campaign he helped lead for the release of the spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard.

Frank spearheaded congressional pressure on President Barack Obama in 2010 mostly because he believed Pollard’s sentence was unjust. But he also thought that it would serve as an incentive to Netanyahu to cooperate more closely with the Obama administration on other issues. (The Obama administration engineered Pollard’s parole in 2015 and he now lives in Israel.)

Instead, Netanyahu became even more confrontational and moved further to the right. Now, Frank said, he would dangle the prospect of Pollard’s release before the Israeli electorate as a means of ousting Netanyahu.

“I now think America’s effort should be to support the opposition to Netanyahu,” he said.

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The Jewish American Security Act is sponsored by James Lankford, a Republican from Oregon, and Jacky Rosen, a Jewish Democrat from Nevada. It would require the federal education department to adopt a civil rights strategy to fight antisemitism and would force social media platforms to share more details about how they handle antisemitism online.

The legislation also proposes $1 billion in security funding for houses of worship and other at-risk nonprofits, a key demand in a six-point security proposal that Jewish Federations of North America has been promoting on Capitol Hill.

The legislation was announced Tuesday as hundreds of Jewish advocates traveled to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to promote the call for the $1 billion allocation, which would triple the amount appropriated by Congress this year for security at houses of worship.

“Jewish Americans are being targeted, attacked, and killed simply because of who they are. This alarming trend demands a comprehensive, bipartisan approach that addresses both the seeds and the impacts of this vile hatred,” Rosen, who is famously a former synagogue president, said in a statement.

The bill follows several other recent attempts to advance antisemitism legislation in Congress.

In December, four progressives in the House of Representatives introduced the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act, which calls for fully funding the federal Office of Civil Rights while also repudiating the Trump administration’s tactics around antisemitism that progressives say “weaponize” antisemitism in support of a repressive agenda. It has not advanced in the Republican-led House.

A Senate bill sponsored by Chuck Schumer, the Antisemitism Awareness Act, meanwhile, failed to advance despite intense advocacy by Jewish groups. It would have enshrined the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which is contested on both the left and the right for its citation of some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic and examples that some conservative Christians say would constrain their religious expression.

A wide swath of Jewish groups are endorsing the Jewish American Security Act, including JFNA, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Organizations affiliated with the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements of Judaism — which are often split politically — also signed on.

“At this perilous moment of violent antisemitism experienced by congregants, clergy, and congregations in our own Reform Jewish community and beyond, the need for meaningful steps to bolster security and the fight against hate is vital,” Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said in a statement. “The Jewish American Security Act strengthens the government tools and funding that will be available to help us meet this moment and uphold the American commitment to religious freedom.”

One group that opposed the Antisemitism Awareness Act is listed among supporters of the new legislation: the Nexus Project, which launched to fight antisemitism and simultaneously “speak out when fears of antisemitism are cynically exploited to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel or US policy.” It is a critic of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Unlike the Antisemitism Awareness Act, the new legislation does not seek to enshrine IHRA into law. While the legislation’s prognosis is not clear, the omission could prove to be one less hurdle in a Congress where appearing to support Israel is increasingly a third rail.

Lankford said in a statement that Jewish Americans are facing “an unprecedented surge in antisemitism” and that action was needed.

“These are not just numbers, these are real stories impacting real people,” he said.

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According to a New York Times/Siena poll published Monday, 38% of potential Republican voters said they would like to see the next Republican candidate for president move “in a new direction” on Israel, as opposed to following Trump’s lead.

Nearly a third of potential Republican voters also said they believed Trump had been “too supportive of Israel,” according to the poll of 1,500 U.S. voters this month, which has a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.

The poll adds to growing signals that Israel is becoming a fault line within the Republican Party as well as on the left, where it has been increasingly divisive for years. In a sign of tensions surrounding the split by Republican leadership, Congress’ most anti-Israel Republican is facing a steep primary challenge from a Trump-backed Republican on Tuesday.

MAGA-aligned Republicans who support Trump in particular are more likely than other Trump voters to back the Israeli government, according to a different poll released last week by Politico.

The survey asked respondents who voted for Trump whether they identified with the president’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Just over half said they identified as MAGA.

The Politico poll, which was conducted in partnership with Public First, an independent polling company headquartered in London, found that nearly half of MAGA Trump voters say they back Israel and approve of the actions of its current government, while just 29% of non-MAGA Trump voters say the same.

The Politico poll found that 41% of MAGA Trump voters believe that Israel is justified in its military campaign in Gaza, compared to 31% of non-Maga Trump voters. The poll surveyed 2,035 U.S. adults online from April 11 to 14 and had an overall margin of sampling error of ±2.2 percentage points.

Trump voters were also split over the perceived influence of the Israeli government over U.S. foreign policy, with 22% of MAGA voters saying they believed the Israeli government had too much influence, compared to 32% of non-MAGA voters.

When asked about the spending of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, on U.S. elections, a topic that has increasingly split American Jews, 20% of MAGA Trump voters said they oppose the group’s “efforts to influence US elections,” compared to 31% of non-MAGA voters. AIPAC has increasingly emerged as a bogeyman in U.S. politics.

The New York Times/Siena poll found Trump’s overall approval rating had sunk to 37%, with 64% of American voters saying they believed Trump made the wrong decision entering the Iran war. Among Republicans, support for Trump’s decision to enter the war was much higher, at 70%.

The Times poll also also found that Americans are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians  over Israelis, with 37% saying they sympathized more with Palestinians compared with 35% who say they sympathize more with Israelis.

The finding is in line with a growing number since the beginning of the war with Gaza that have shown growing sympathy for Palestinians among American voters.

When asked whether the United States should provide additional economic and military support to Israel, 57% of American voters overall said they opposed doing so, compared with 37% who supported it.  Among Republicans, 66% said they supported additional support to Israel versus 30% who opposed.

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Speaking at the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism meeting at Museum of the Bible in Washington, Leiter decried J Street’s recent opposition to continued U.S. military subsidies to Israel, a position that has been echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent months.

“How can you be pro-Israel and advocate for an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies?” Leiter said.

Leiter, a Netanyahu appointee and former settler leader, also criticized the group’s self-description as “pro-Israel, pro-peace and pro-democracy,” telling those gathered in Washington D.C. that “if they said that they were pro-Palestinian, I wouldn’t have a problem meeting with them.”

“But when you come and say in such a two-faced manner, ‘We’re pro-Israel, we’re pro democracy,’ there’s a democratically elected government in Israel,” Leiter continued. “You don’t like Netanyahu, make aliyah, vote in the next election and express yourself. Don’t say you’re ‘pro-democracy’ and decry and defy the position of the democratic government of Israel.”

Leiter’s criticism of the pro-Israel lobby comes as the group has increasingly departed from the positions of other mainstream pro-Israel groups. Last year, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said that he had been “persuaded” by arguments that Israel had committed a genocide in Gaza.

Ben-Ami shot back at Leiter’s remarks in a post on X Monday, writing that the Israeli ambassador should be “engaging seriously with us” instead of “calling us names.”

J Street is a longtime target of the Israeli government. In early 2023, Diaspora minister Amichai Chikli called the group a “hostile organization that harms the interests of the state of Israel” after it criticized him online.

Ben-Ami wrote Monday that the group represents a “large and growing segment of the American Jewish community that supports and cares deeply about Israel but opposes policies we believe are making it less secure and more isolated.”

“Serving effectively as Israel’s ambassador to the US requires engaging with those disagreements, not attacking the patriotism or integrity of fellow Jews,” Ben-Ami added.

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Police in San Diego said they are investigating the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego as a hate crime. San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said two teenagers, ages 17 and 19, who appeared to have carried out the attack were found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a car nearby.

“We are heartbroken by today’s attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego. Islamophobia has no place in California or anywhere in this country,” Jesse Gabriel, chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to working with our colleagues to strengthen protections for houses of worship and combat hate-motivated violence.”

The attack, which occurred at about 12:30 p.m. local time, sent five area schools into lockdown, including a Hebrew charter school.

“We’re safe and we’re following the direction of the police,” a representative for Kavod Hebrew Charter School told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by phone on Monday afternoon. Kavod is a non-religious bilingual K-8 school that employs a number of Jewish and Israeli educators.

A synagogue that houses a school in an adjacent neighborhood also said it was briefly locked down in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

The mosque attack comes two months after a man rammed an explosives-laden truck into one of the largest synagogues in the United States, Temple Israel in Michigan. There, the synagogue’s robust security training was credited with halting the attack. Children were inside the adjacent preschool at the time.

“The images coming from San Diego are all too familiar to us,” Temple Israel said in a message to its community that it posted to social media. It said that one of its rabbis, Jen Lader, was in Washington, D.C., to lobby for $1 billion in federal security funding for houses of worship.

Jewish Federations of North America said it had more than 400 local Jewish leaders in Washington to lobby for the security funding, which it said was necessary to protect religious communities from threats that are “real, urgent, and growing.” The $1 billion ask is a centerpiece of JFNA’s response to growing security concerns and would represent more than a doubling of federal spending on security needs for houses of worship.

“To anyone who feels this is excessive, what happened to Temple Israel two months ago, and now, the Islamic Center of San Diego, proves that it is not optional funding,” Temple Israel said. “Every dollar will be necessary to protect houses of worship all over the country.”

Imam Taha Hassane of the Islamic Center of San Diego, which includes a mosque and the adjacent Al Rashid School, said teachers, students and school staff were safe.

“At this moment, all that I can say is sending our prayers and standing in solidarity with all the families in our community here, and also the other mosques and all the places of worship in our beautiful city,” Hassane said during a press conference Monday afternoon. “They should always be protected. It is extremely outrageous to target a place of worship. Our Islamic Center is a place of worship. People come to the Islamic Center to pray, to celebrate, to learn.”

Law enforcement across the country are tightening security measures in response to the attack in San Diego.

“While there is currently no known nexus to NYC or specific threats to NYC houses of worship, out of an abundance of caution, the NYPD is increasing deployments to mosques across the city,” the New York Police Department said in a statement.

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Rabbi Meir Soloveichik leads New York City’s Congregation Shearith Israel and is a senior fellow at Tikvah, the conservative Jewish think tank. He also sits on the Religious Liberty Commission that President Donald Trump convened last year.

Speaking to the crowd who had assembled for a rally on the National Mall called “Rededicate 250” that aims to put faith at the center of celebrations to mark this year’s semiquincentennial of the United States, Soloveichik described the Jewish history of one of the country’s most iconic songs.

“God Bless America” was written by Irving Berlin, who as a child witnessed his home village in Russia burned in a pogrom and wanted to thank the country that gave him refuge, Soloveichik explained. He said that decades after writing the lyrics, Berlin resurrected them as the Nazis expanded their ambitions in the late 1930s, premiering the song on the radio the day after the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938.

“At the very moment when darkness deepened abroad, America raised its voice, united in the song that Irving Berlin wrote,” Soloveichik said. A few moments later, he noted, “The prayer that is ‘God Bless America’ was carried by American soldiers who defeated evil, liberating Europe and the world. And it is a reminder as hatred of Jews makes itself manifest again that antisemitism is utterly un-American.”

The line drew substantial applause, according to multiple videos of the event.

The rally along with Trump’s call for Jews to observe “Shabbat 250” the day before drew mixed reactions from American Jews. Some, particularly in the Orthodox world, said they appreciated any effort to increase Shabbat and religious observance. Others said the events represented an inappropriate merger of church and state, as well as an appropriation of Jewish values in service of Christian nationalism.

Soloveichik did not directly address any of the debates during his four-minute address. But he did say that the staying power of Berlin’s song points to a unique feature of the American character.

“The power and popularity of ‘God Bless America’ reveals to us,” he said, “that America’s passion for prayer and its love of liberty are always intertwined.”

In addition to “God Bless America,” Berlin is famous for authoring one of the most enduring Christmas songs in the American canon, “White Christmas.” Less well known is an anti-lynching anthem that he wrote around the same time as he popularized “God Bless America.” Berlin also dedicated songs to Ellin Mackay, the Catholic socialite he wed in 1926 in an intermarriage that sparked both familial tensions and national scrutiny.

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A criminal complaint that was unsealed on Friday claims that Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, 32, is a commander in the Iraq-based Kataib Hezbollah that functions as a proxy for Iran. The complaint was unsealed when al-Saadi appeared in federal court in Manhattan.

The complaint alleges that al-Saadi is responsible in part for organizing the attacks in Europe that have been claimed by a new group, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya. It marks the first major disclosure of intelligence information tying the group directly to the Quds Force, the overseas arm of the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and includes multiple photographs of al-Saadi meeting in person with IRGC leaders.

Attacks that al-Saadi organized include 18 in Europe that Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya publicly claimed, as well as the stabbing of two Jews in London last month, the complaint alleges. He also organized multiple attacks in Canada that were carried out and plotted others that did not take place, the complaint alleged.

Al-Saadi is charged with six crimes, including conspiracy to provide support for acts of terror and conspiracy to provide support for a foreign terrorist organization. (The Trump administration declared the IRGC a terrorist organization in 2019.) He did not speak during his first court appearance on Friday, according to The New York Times, which reported that his attorney called him “a political prisoner and prisoner of war.”

“As alleged in the complaint, Al-Saadi directed and urged others to attack U.S. and Israeli interests and to kill Americans and Jews in the U.S. and abroad, and in doing so advance the terrorist goals of Kata’ib Hizballah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement on Friday. “These charges show American law enforcement will never let such evil go unchecked and will use all tools to disrupt and dismantle foreign terrorist organizations and their leaders.”

The incidents targeting Jews came amid warnings that Iran, which has a long record of organizing terror attacks abroad, would retaliate against the United States, Israel and Jews around the world.

The complaint, reflecting a sworn affidavit from Kathryn McDonald, an FBI special agent, says al-Saadi offered to pay online contacts $10,000 to stage attacks on U.S. Jewish targets.

According to the criminal complaint, al-Saadi sent a $3,000 down payment in cryptocurrency to an agent who was posing as someone willing to stage attacks on Jewish targets in New York, Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona, in April.

Al-Saadi allegedly told the agent that “things are working for us here” in Europe but that he was looking for more assistance in the United States and Canada. He shared a picture of what the complaint says is a “prominent Jewish synagogue” in New York and said he had selected it as a target because it supported “the right for Israel to exist.” The agent initially agreed to stage an attack but stopped communicating with al-Saadi after sending a picture showing that the synagogue was guarded by police officers.

The Community Security Initiative, a group coordinating security for Jews in New York, sent a “community security bulletin” on Friday after al-Saadi appeared in federal court in Manhattan, saying that the arrest did not come as a surprise.

“CSI has been in contact with FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York since April 2026 regarding this plot, and they have been keeping us apprised as events have evolved,” CEO Mitchell Silber said in the bulletin. He added, “At this time, we are not at liberty to disclose the targeted location.”

Kataib Hezbollah is the group that abducted and held a Russian-Israeli Princeton University researcher, Elizabeth Tsurkov, for more than two years until September. Following the revelation of al-Saadi’s arrest, she praised the FBI agents who worked the case, including one who also investigated her kidnapping.

“This ginger angel kept doggedly working my case because she knew I needed her and she knew that solving the case would help US national security interests. Indeed, owing to the incredible stupidity of my torturers, they provided me with a plethora of information about their operations, which I happily provided to the FBI after my release,” Tsurkov tweeted. “The American people are lucky to have such dedicated agents helping to keep them safe.”

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On Friday, hundreds of congregants are carrying their Torah scrolls back into the building that became a symbol of the Los Angeles neighborhood that was devastated by fire in January 2025.

While the synagogue suffered significant smoke damage from the fires, the building, constructed in 1950, remained standing, providing desperately needed continuity for the roughly 250 congregants who lost their homes and 250 others who were temporarily displaced.

All three of the synagogue’s clergy members, including Rabbi Daniel Sher, lost their homes in the fires, a tragedy that Sher said imbued Friday’s reopening ceremony with mixed emotions.

“It’s a mixed blessing. I’m going to move back into my place of work before I break ground on my home,” Sher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But Judaism knows how to survive hardship, and so our job is to take this tradition and take 1000s of years of understanding that and put it into action.”

The reopening of the synagogue after months of repairs and renovations will also carry added weight as it coincides with a celebration honoring Cantor Chayim Frenkel and his wife, Marsi, for 40 years of service to the congregation.

“I feel very honored and proud,” Frenkel told JTA. “They’re dedicating the new ark to me and my wife, so that’ll be something in perpetuity that I’m honored to — if I’m blessed with grandchildren — to have them go in there and say, my daddy and my grandfather participated in working with others to create a very meaningful and a very loving and a very heimish shul filled with Yiddishkeit, a Zionistic, just a beautiful community.”

Cantor Chayim Frenkel will celebrate his 40th anniversary at Kehillat Israel on May 15, 2026. (Courtesy of Kehillat Israel)

In the months after the fires, Kehillat Israel became what Frenkel jokingly called a “wandering” congregation, holding services in the Santa Monica mall while its religious school borrowed space from a Los Angeles public school. Clergy also held b’nai mitzvah services in neighboring synagogues, homes, hotels and even a restaurant.

“I can’t help but feel like it was this strangely entrepreneurial, energetic space in which this initial point of grief and loss very quickly manifested into a communal excitement and connection and has changed the way we will forever operate as a community, even once we’re back in our own sacred space,” Sher said.

Frenkel said that many of his congregants had told him that the “one of the main reasons they’re coming back to the Palisades to rebuild is because the synagogue did not burn.”

“That was a huge component for them to go through the rebuilding process, because they knew they had their synagogue,” Frenkel said.

As some congregants prepare to move back to the area, Sher said he had received hundreds of donated mezuzahs that clergy plan to distribute to families returning to rebuilt homes, helping them rededicate their spaces after months of displacement.

“For the families, the home is a mikdash me’at, it’s a small sanctuary, and I always tell our kids that there is an invisible bridge that leads from the synagogue directly to their home,” Frenkel said. “And now that their homes have burned or are being rebuilt, those bridges are being rebuilt, and that mezuzah is helping create that.”

But even as some of the congregation remains displaced around Los Angeles, Sher said the reopening ceremony was about much more than restoring a building. Instead, he said, it serves as a declaration that the community was “still here,” and that they had “never actually left.”

“For us as people who work there, but for congregants who have put a piece of their emotional connection into that building, they get something to still remain as home,” Sher said. “So our reopening isn’t just that statement, it’s saying, if you want home to be there still, it is.”

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But if Galindo becomes the nominee, she’ll be without the support of the state’s most prominent Democrat: U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico.

“This antisemitic rhetoric has no place in our politics. We need leadership in both parties willing to stand up and call out hate wherever it rears its ugly head,” the Texas state representative, whose own surging campaign has garnered national attention, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency when asked about Galindo. 

Talarico’s campaign confirmed to JTA that he would not campaign with Galindo if she wins her May 26 runoff, in a district Democrats are hoping to flip following Republican-led redistricting in the state.

Talarico, a pastor, has sought to carve out a lane for himself as a religious progressive. While his interactions with the Jewish community have been minimal, his rejection of Galindo comes after he swore off support from pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and expressed criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

It was a forceful rebuke of an outsider candidate who has quickly personified an extreme in antisemitic rhetoric among Democrats as the party, caught up in hopes for a “blue wave” in the midterms, is also facing a delicate moment in its relationship with Jews. 

Galindo, a sex and family therapist and single mother who rose to local prominence after fighting a proposed redevelopment project affecting her affordable housing, so far has spent only around $11,000 on her campaign. Yet she came in first in the 35th District’s heated Democratic primary in March with 29.2% of the vote. 

Her runoff opponent, sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia, received 27% of the vote. The third- and fourth-place finishers endorsed Galindo after conceding. Local progressives have suggested that Garcia’s early endorsement from Democratic Majority for Israel along with his positioning as an establishment moderate may have hurt his standing among Democratic voters, while Galindo’s anti-establishment stances may have helped her.

Asked about Talarico’s rejection of her, Galindo told JTA that his stance “says he might be Zionist affiliated so I’ll move around him accordingly.”

“I wouldn’t have been running with anyone anyway,” she wrote in an email. “I run autonomous campaigns so I can maintain my freedom. That’s what people like about me.”

Galindo also told JTA that “coordinated media attacks declaring my anti-Zionist rhetoric as anti-Semitic” were “causing MORE harm to the Jews of San Antonio by playing into all the stigmas that they own the media.”

“Zionists WANT us to blame all Jews to shield them from the violence they perpetrate on Semites across the Middle East,” Galindo continued. “I’m not falling for it and will continue to protect all Jews from their corrupted leaders by constantly reminding folks that its NOT ALL JEWS. We need to be LOUD about our anti-Zionism in these times to protect our neighbors.”

The candidate has also disparaged other groups, including Latino men, whom she has said have a “colonizer mentality.” 

When it comes to Jews and Zionists, the candidate has made no secret of her views.

“It’s all very complex. But it’s my perception that Zionist billionaires run the world,” she told the San Antonio Current this week, several days after The New York Times and other outlets publicized her past rhetoric to a national audience. “They’re of all religions. But especially Israeli, Jewish billionaire Zionists who disproportionately and factually own a lot of Hollywood production studios, media companies and banks.” 

On social media this week she wrote, “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS.” She has elsewhere referred to the “synagogue of Satan,” a phrase with Biblical origins that was popularized by Louis Farrakhan to promote the idea that today’s Jews are inauthentic, and said that “Israeli leaders are not real Jews.”

On Instagram Wednesday Galindo wrote that, if elected, she would “write legislation so that all Zionism and support of Zionism is undoubtedly Anti-Semitic, since it’s Zionists harming the Semites.” The candidate added that she would turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” adding in parentheses, “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

Appearing on Texas Public Radio this week, she refuted accusations of antisemitism while reaffirming that she opposes “Zionist Jews.”

“I’m not antisemitic. In fact my last serious relationship was with a Jewish man,” Galindo said. “I’m against Zionist Jews. When I said that the Jews who own Hollywood are doing this, do all Jews own Hollywood? No. The Zionist Jews do. The Zionist Jews own our media, our banks and all of our politicians.” 

She added, “There’s plenty of evidence for what I’m saying in the Epstein files.”

On the same program, Garcia, Galindo’s opponent, condemned her for having made “antisemitic remarks” and said he had spoken to concerned local Jews about her rhetoric.

“It gets people to sit out of elections and lose faith in the Democratic Party,” Garcia said. “And my reassurance to them was, look, I understand how bad we lost you in 2024. We saw people leaving our party in droves. … These comments, it’s hurtful, and it does nothing good for our Democratic Party.” 

On social media, Galindo has gone after Garcia by depicting him standing in front of U.S. and Israeli flags and saying he “took money from Israel to get into Congress & fund Israeli wars.”

Democratic Majority For Israel is mounting an 11th-hour mobilization effort against Galindo, launching a new six-figure ad campaign for Garcia.

“Maureen Galindo espouses vile, hateful views. She has claimed Jews ‘own Hollywood,’ that they ‘worship the synagogue of Satan,’ and accused Zionists of running human trafficking networks. Antisemitic conspiracy theories like these are disqualifying and have no place in either Party or in Congress,” DMFI head Brian Romick told JTA in a statement. “Democrats should unify behind pro-Israel Democrat Johnny Garcia.”

Galindo has received support from Lean Left, a new Florida-based super PAC with unclear origins that has been linked to Republicans.

Asked about Galindo, the San Antonio Jewish Community Relations Council told JTA that it “condemns any and all hateful speech, including the use of antisemitic tropes, in public discourse.” It did not name any candidate in its statement. 

San Antonio is home to an estimated 11,000 Jews, who were shaken last year by a mass shooting threat directed at a Jewish community center.

Since Galindo’s record of remarks has come to light, one of her former primary opponents rescinded his endorsement of her. “Over the course of the runoff, I have become increasingly troubled by a series of derogatory, inflammatory and conspiratorial statements directed toward Jewish people and others,” John Lira, a former Small Business Administration staffer, said in a statement. 

Lira did not endorse Garcia, instead affirming he would “remain neutral in this runoff election.”

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The Ivy League school’s Board of Trustees issued a statement of support for Michael Kotlikoff following an investigation into the April 30 incident. Kotlikoff had recused himself from the investigation, which wrapped after eight days.

“President Kotlikoff has shown a steadfast commitment to Cornell’s values and principles, and we are confident he will continue to lead with integrity,” a Friday statement from the board’s ad-hoc investigation committee concludes.

The investigation also cleared the protesters, a mix of students and non-students, of any wrongdoing, even as it found that their actions “are inconsistent with university policies governing expressive activity and our standards for respectful conduct, safety, and the prohibition of intimidation.” 

Kotlikoff will not be pursuing any complaints against the students involved, Cornell’s board said. The president himself did not immediately release a statement on the investigation’s results, and a spokesperson for the university declined to comment further.

The report’s release sought to quickly close the book on a whirlwind controversy at the Ithaca, New York, university, as long-simmering tensions between Kotlikoff and the campus’s pro-Palestinian contingent boiled over into a rare physical altercation between students and a college president. 

The incident that prompted the investigation was the second part of a two-session debate on Israel, sponsored by the non-partisan Cornell Political Union. Kotlikoff was present to introduce the guest speaker, Jewish pro-Palestinian academic and activist Norman Finkelstein. 

Multiple video sources from the Finkelstein event showed that, following the talk, members of the protest group Students for a Democratic Cornell followed the president to his car and appeared to try to block its path. When he did edge his way out of his parking spot, they said he bumped some of the protesters with his vehicle, releasing video to the student newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun to back up the allegation. 

Kotlikoff issued a statement the next day calling the incident one of “harassment and intimidation,” while some of the protesters accused him of injuring them and running over one person’s foot. The university released its own footage from a security camera in a scene that presented a different view than that of the students, though the exact nature of the confrontation remains murky.  

A video released by Cornell University shows one angle on an interaction between President Michael Kotlikoff and student protesters on April 30, 2026. (Screenshot)

The Cornell trustees who conducted the investigation said the protesters’ initial claims of wrongdoing on Kotlikoff’s part could not be verified by campus police, in part because the affected individuals “refused medical treatment from the EMS team and refused to provide sworn statements as to their account of the incident.” 

The board added, “None of the individuals at the scene have provided sworn statements to CUPD [campus police], despite CUPD’s repeated attempts to collect sworn statements in the days following the incident.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has reached out to Students for a Democratic Cornell for comment.

Some campus groups including the graduate student union and its affiliated labor union had called on Kotlikoff to resign. Some campus graduate student associations cited what they called an “explicit act of violence against these students” and what they felt was the “misleading nature” of Kotlikoff’s own statement. Cornell’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors also criticized the president’s actions.

But Kotlikoff had his supporters, too. National outlets including The Washington Post’s editorial board celebrated him for having “stood up to campus bullies.” A faculty and student petition supporting him also circulated this week. The petition, which was shared with JTA, says Kotlikoff acted appropriately in the face of “physical intimidation.”

“If we characterize the obstruction of a vehicle and the pursuit of an individual as ‘peaceful protest,’ we erode the safety of our entire campus,” reads the petition, whose signatories, including the number, have not yet been made public. “This is not a matter of siding with a specific policy or a specific person. It is about whether Cornell remains a place where any member of our community (student, faculty or staff) can move freely without fear of being surrounded or harassed.”

Since his appointment as Cornell’s president in 2024, initially on an interim basis, Kotlikoff has weathered a series of Israel-related controversies. He drew blowback from academic freedom advocates for criticizing a planned class to be taught on Gaza by a Jewish pro-Palestinian professor, and in March vetoed two anti-Israel student government resolutions. Under his watch the university also struck a controversial deal to pay $60 million to the Trump administration to resolve antisemitism investigations.

Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct professor at Cornell’s law school and former general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, is one of Kotlikoff’s backers on campus. Rosensaft told JTA that, though Kotlikoff has made clear his own pro-Israel views, he remains committed to free expression on campus — which he argued the protesters were trying to silence.

“People who have an agenda don’t like those who don’t have an agenda, and who just want to play it straight down the middle,” Rosensaft said. “Mike has played it straight down the middle and he is doing it appropriately. The university is lucky to have him and I’m pleased to say that the board agrees.”

Kotlikoff’s commitment to the debate series on Israel, despite his personal disagreements with Finkelstein, was proof of this, Rosensaft suggested. The first part of the series had featured Israeli historian Benny Morris, and the debate series boasted an unusually diverse list of ideological partners, ranging from Students for Justice in Palestine to the Zionist Organization of America, pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs and Cornell’s Jewish Studies program.

Cornell’s commencement is set for May 23. Kotlikoff is scheduled to deliver an address.

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But first, Trump is calling on Jews to mark Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest from sundown Friday to nightfall Saturday, and encouraging other Americans to consider embracing the ritual as well.

“In special honor of 250 glorious years of American independence and on the weekend of Rededicate 250 — a national jubilee of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving — Jewish Americans are encouraged to observe a national Sabbath,” Trump said in his Jewish American Heritage Month proclamation on May 4.

“From sundown on May 15 to nightfall on May 16, friends, families, and communities of all backgrounds may come together in gratitude for our great Nation,” he continued. “This day will recognize the sacred Jewish tradition of setting aside time for rest, reflection, and gratitude to the Almighty.”

The call marked the first time that an American president has formally urged the celebration of Shabbat. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner, now a prominent Trump advisor, reportedly observes Shabbat according to traditional interpretations of Jewish law.

Trump’s call echoes the legacy of conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot in September. Kirk’s book detailing his own observance of a “Jewish Sabbath” every week was published posthumously.

The exhortation has received mixed reviews from the American Jewish community. Some Jews have said they appreciate the gesture and recognition of a central tradition to Judaism, and even are promoting their own Shabbat services as part of “Shabbat 250.”

Others say Trump is appropriating Judaism to promote conservative political goals and Christian nationalism, a movement backed by a portion of Trump’s base that scholars say could push the country in a direction that is less hospitable to Jews.

Support for the initiative has been strongest among Orthodox Jews, who tend to be more politically conservative. Rabbi Josh Joseph, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, endorsed Trump’s call soon after it was made.

“This weekend, following President Trump’s encouragement, we will mark Shabbat 250,” he said in a statement earlier this week. “We will pause to acknowledge all the blessings that the Almighty has provided American Jews through the unique devotion to liberty embedded in this nation.”

Some Orthodox synagogues, including many affiliated with the Chabad Hasidic movement, have announced “Shabbat 250” programming, such as dinners and special speakers. The group Young Jewish Conservatives, meanwhile, doled out $180 grants to conservative Jews under 35 who committed to hosting at least five people for a Shabbat dinner in their homes.

More than 7,500 people have declared on a new website, Shabbat250.org, their intention to observe Shabbat. Some Orthodox commentators tied Trump’s proclamation to the week’s Torah portion, which describes how the Israelites, having been freed from Egypt, took a census of themselves in the desert as their new nation came into focus.

“Today we celebrate the numbers, the 250th anniversary, but like a census, this milestone must also be a springboard from which to consider where America is going,” wrote Jonathan Feldstein, president of the Genesis 123 Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to build ties between Jews and Christians, on his Substack.

On the other side, Rabbi Jonah Pesner of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is among the faith leaders scheduled to participate in a virtual event Friday morning opposing the Sunday prayer rally that organizers say will “explain why so many religious Americans of diverse faiths are alarmed and alienated by attempts to use America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to frame the US as a ‘Christian nation’ and to misrepresent the approach to religious tolerance and freedom adopted by our founders and Constitution.”

The perspective is shared widely on the Jewish left, where many leaders say it is inappropriate and harmful for Trump to involve himself in Shabbat.

“When the state meddles in our sacred affairs, blurring the already fuzzy lines between church and state, it doesn’t elevate the Sabbath; it diminishes the democracy that 250 years of history were supposed to protect,” Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of the progressive Lab/Shul wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “I suggest we each adapt this ‘National Shabbat’ in our own unique way – not because a leader commanded it, but because our humanity demands it.”

The debate comes ahead of the prayer rally planned for the National Mall on Sunday. The event, called Rededicate 250, is organized by a nonprofit called Freedom 250, which is advertising an event lineup featuring Christian music as well as “Freedom Trucks” that provide educational material provided by the conservative advocacy group PragerU and the Christian classical school Hillsdale College.

Organizers are also promoting performances by U.S. military bands as well as participation from several Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump himself is set to appear by video, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, will also take the stage.

Of the 33 prayer leaders set to appear, about half are of evangelical or non-denominational evangelical Christian practice. Baptist, Catholic and Seventh Day Adventist speakers will also speak.

The only non-Christian speaker on the lineup is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, an Orthodox rabbi and senior scholar at the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish think tank, who also sits on the Religious Liberty Commission that Trump created last year.

Rachel Laser, the Jewish CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, denounced the rally as part of a rising tide of Christian nationalism.

“If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish in our country,” she said in a statement. “Instead, they continue to threaten this foundational principle by advancing a Christian Nationalist crusade to impose one narrow version of Christianity on all Americans.”

The rally comes as Americans are growing more appreciative of religion, even if they do not necessarily practice any themselves. A new Pew Research Center report out this week shows that an increasing minority of American adults say religion is “gaining influence in American life” and more than half of Americans say religion plays a positive role in society.

The proportion of Americans who believe Christianity should be declared the official religion of the United States has grown slightly in recent years and now stands at 17%, according to the survey. A much larger proportion of Americans, 43%, said they believe Christianity should not be an official religion but that the government should promote Christian moral values.

The White House will host a reception to mark the start of Shabbat 250 late Friday afternoon.

The attention to Shabbat jolted by Trump’s proclamation has spurred a wave of non-political attention to Shabbat, too. The writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis, for example, explained rabbinic teachings in a column in the Washington Post urging non-Jews to consider adopting Shabbat as a mindfulness practice.

“Shabbat is a Jewish tradition,” Davis wrote. “But the case for a weekly day of rest, taking a formal break from worldly concerns, is universal.”

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“Today I instructed my legal advisers to consider the harshest legal action against The New York Times and Nicholas Kristof,” Netanyahu wrote in a post on X Thursday morning. “They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers.”

Netanyahu’s legal warning, which followed a similar allegation of defamation over the paper’s coverage of starvation in Gaza last year, was dismissed by the Times in a statement distributed during a rally against the newspaper outside its Times Square headquarters late Thursday afternoon.

“This threat, similar to one made last year, is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the paper. “Any such legal claim would be without merit.”

The statement went on to defend Kristof’s column, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” calling it “deeply reported” and describing him as “widely regarded as one of the world’s best on-the-ground journalists in documenting and bearing witness to sexual abuse experienced by women and men in war and conflict zones.”

A Jewish legal scholar, Jed Rubenfeld, said in an essay in The Free Press that Netanyahu’s threatened lawsuit, if filed, would be “dead in the water” based on legal precedent.

Despite the New York Times’ repeated defense of the column, which chronicled detailed accounts of sexual abuse by Israeli guards, many Jewish groups and leaders have said it relied on biased sourcing to advance claims made by Palestinian detainees, including that guards trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

The backlash spilled onto the streets of Manhattan Thursday evening, when more than 100 protesters waving Israeli flags and carrying signs reading “#End Jew Hatred” gathered outside the New York Times headquarters to demand the paper retract the column.

While the Times has previously faced blowback from pro-Israel voices for its reports alleging widespread starvation in Gaza, recent demonstrations at its headquarters have more often come from pro-Palestinian activists that accused the paper of having a bias toward Israel.

Thursday’s protest, organized by Pro-Israel groups including EndJewHatred, Stop Antizionism, Hineni and the Movement Against Antizionism, featured impassioned chants of “shame on Kristof” and “we demand action” amid steady drumbeats.

A man holds up signs in front of the New York Times’ Manhattan offices on May 14, 2026. (Grace Gilson)

“We want to say that we are saying no to this,” Adam Louis-Klein, the founder of the Movement Against Antizionism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We are saying no to anti-Zionist libels, and we are making the connection that is inherent between anti-Zionist libels and the violence and hatred that Jews are being subjected to every single day.”

Many attendees carried signs that read “J’accuse” next to the Times’ logo, a reference to the Dreyfus affair, as well as others that read “When did the New York Times become Der Sturmer?” a reference to the notorious Nazi newspaper.

Ellis Shrem, a 30-year-old rally participant, said Kristof’s column was enough to make him cancel his Times subscription altogether.

“I’ve been a New York Times subscriber for a long time, and I know they’re left-leaning, fine, but when you print blood libel, like, that’s just another, I just canceled the subscription,” Shrem said. “It just threw me over the edge, and that they refuse to retract, refuse to give an inch on something that they know they printed is evil. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Anya Levitov, a 52-year-old participant, said that she had been “enraged” not just by Kristof’s column, but also by the many comments supporting the piece in its comments section. She said that the experience had felt “worse than it was in my childhood in Soviet Union,” when anti-Zionist propaganda reigned, fueling local antisemitism.

“It’s just so absurd and so beyond the pale that it was hard for me to imagine that so many people — that they will print it in the first place — but so many people will buy it,” Levitov said.

The protest drew heckles from some passersby, including a child who yelled into the crowd “F–ck the Jews” and a taxi driver that shouted from his vehicle “Zionist pigs.” One woman who passed the group shouted, “You guys are depending on U.S. taxes, losers.”

For many at the rally, the underlying call for the paper to retract Kristof’s piece was rooted in a fear that it would further inflame antisemitism online and beyond, a sentiment echoed in signs reading, “Antizionism gets Jews killed!”

“It’s a watershed moment for The Times, New York and for the culture to do the right thing and correct the record on the story, because it’s not just The Times’ reputation that’s at risk, but Jewish safety,” attendee Michael Wigotsky told JTA.

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The ruling last week by a California Superior Court judge found that Kars4Kids had violated the state’s false advertising and unfair competition laws by failing to disclose where it allocated funds from its donations.

The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by a California donor, Bruce Puterbaugh, who argued that he would not have donated his vehicle to the nonprofit if he had known that the funds were “directed at a Jewish organization in New York.”

Esti Landau, the chief operating officer of Kars4Kids, testified that the nonprofit serves as the primary funding mechanism for Oorah, a Jewish outreach nonprofit that runs a summer camp in upstate New York, according to court filings. Kars4Kids is based in the heavily Orthodox city of Lakewood, New Jersey.

Landau said in the filing that Oorah’s programs include “matchmaking” for young adults as well as “gap year” trips to Israel for 17- and 18-year-olds and that the nonprofit operates no functional programs in California.

“The failure to disclose that funds benefit adults and families — and that this support is contingent upon a specific religious affiliation — is a material omission,” Judge Gassia Apkarian said in her ruling. “A reasonable consumer donating to a ‘kids’ charity would attach importance to the fact that their donation is actually supporting adult matchmaking and general family subsidies.”

Kars4Kids was given 30 days to stop airing ads that do not disclose its religious affiliation, the location of its beneficiaries or the beneficiaries’ ages.

In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Kars4Kids denounced the decision and said it planned to appeal.

“We believe this decision is deeply flawed, ignores the facts, and misapplies the law,” said Wendy Kirman, the organization’s communications director. “It’s well known that we are a Jewish organization and our website makes it abundantly clear.”

The organization’s website includes this line: “Kars4Kids is a registered nonprofit Jewish organization who, together with Oorah, our sister charity, help thousands of children develop into productive members of the community.”

The California lawsuit was not the first time that Kars4Kids has faced allegations of false advertising. In 2009, Pennsylvania and Oregon fined the organization for deceptive advertising, accusing the nonprofit of obscuring that most of the money it raises goes to Orthodox outreach rather than needy children.

And in 2017, the Minnesota attorney general said she was “concerned and troubled” by the organization’s practices after finding that only 1% of its funding went to children in the state.

The California ruling is separate from a federal class action lawsuit filed in Northern California last year accusing Kars4Kids and Oorah of deceptive fundraising practices.

In 2023, Kars4Kids’ founder, Eliyohu Mintz, who is also the CEO of Oorah, filed a lawsuit challenging New York state’s concealed carry law, alleging that it left children vulnerable to antisemitic attacks. That lawsuit is ongoing.

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She wasn’t girding herself for the kind of “cute overload” responses that once littered online posts about adorable animals.

Instead, she was expecting exactly what happened: Her Instagram post quickly drew dozens of antisemitic comments, including one user who wrote “kike” six times and another who commented “HEIL AUSTRIAN PAINTER.”

Emily, the Jewish content creator behind “Sprinkles the Weenie,” an account with 240,000 followers that chronicles her dog’s life, said she had come to expect that kind of response whenever she posts Jewish content of Sprinkles online.

“I’ve been posting Jewish content for years. I’m never surprised,” said Emily, who requested anonymity because she does not publicly post her full name. “Part of being a Jewish content creator, you’re opening yourself up to, you know, there’s a lot of ignorance out there.”

While many Jewish content creators, including Jewish children’s music creator Ms. Sara, drew a similar flood of antisemitic comments this month, the backlash was hardly limited to Jewish accounts.

“F–ck Israel and f–ck Jews,” wrote one user on an Instagram post featuring President Donald Trump’s statement commemorating Jewish American Heritage month.

“Jews are the most vile & evil creatures that has ever existed. ,” wrote another user on a post by “Sesame Street” featuring Jewish actress Kat Graham and the puppet Abby Cadabby commemorating the month.

“F–ck all these motherfu***** j**ish artists and f–ck u too,” wrote a user on a post by the Grammys honoring Jewish American “artists, producers, and innovators who helped shape the sound of music as we know it.”

The comments were not isolated examples. According to an analysis of 537 “high-visibility” posts about Jewish American Heritage Month by the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, a nonprofit that monitors and fights antisemitism, 33% of the comments on them were either antisemitic or “hostile.”

Among the hateful comments analyzed by the group, 45% were “direct hate speech,” including comments praising Hitler or accusing Jews of being “satanic,” while another 21% consisted of anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian “deflections” on otherwise apolitical posts, according to Steven Fransblow, the chief data and technology officer at the Blue Square Alliance.

“The original poster could be ‘Sesame’ Street, could be a political group, could be a politician themselves, or any other group. They could be posting [something] that’s quite supportive, but then you get down to the comments, and it becomes very hostile very quickly,” Fransblow said.

Israel has been an online third rail for years. But Fransblow said the spate of antisemitic comments on seemingly “innocuous” posts commemorating this year’s Jewish American Heritage Month has added to what his group has flagged as a growing trend: mainstream social media comment sections becoming flooded with anti-Jewish rhetoric, even on posts unrelated to Israel.

The same trend appeared around Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Fransblow said. For the first time this year, the Blue Square Alliance’s analysis of Yom Hashoah posts found that comments denying or distorting the Holocaust outnumbered those that commemorated the day by two to one.

Fransblow said his group had indications that the phenomenon has chilled posts in support of Jewish communities, a powerful form of representation at a time of rising antisemitism. He said the Blue Square Alliance, which was founded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, had been working to engage with “sports clubs and partners” that said they stopped posting about Jewish holidays because of “fear and their expectation of this type of reaction and comments.”

Fransblow said the hostility has consequences beyond the comment section. “It raises our concern, because this, again, is something that the average American is going to see versus folks that are just in that ecosystem of a hateful bubble because they’re following hateful accounts,” he said. “This is now coming into more and more of the mainstream.”

The Blue Square Alliance was not alone in noticing the surge of antisemitic comments on Jewish American Heritage Month posts.

In a post on Instagram, the Jewish creator behind the account “Sleepy Librarian” posted a carousel of comments left on Penguin Random House’s Jewish American Heritage Month post, including “Mossad campaign” and “I’d rather be antisemite than an anti-human.”

“Antisemitism? During Jewish American Heritage Month? Groundbreaking,” the creator behind the account, Eytan Kessler, wrote in the caption. “I am not surprised by the comments under the Penguin Random House JAHM post, it’s expected at this point. It’s just exhausting to see it every year.”

In another post on Instagram addressing the trend, Rachel Steinhardt, who runs the account “yidlitkidlet,” urged organizations whose posts had drawn antisemitic comments to “vigilantly delete” them, call them out, or turn off their comment sections altogether.

“If you don’t do these things, it begins to look like you invited the hate speech,” Steinhardt wrote. “If your response is to stop posting content because it’s too much trouble, well, you’re lazy and not a true ally. But it’s preferable to leaving the hate speech to fester on your page.”

Moderation can have its own effects, as hate speech is removed but its relics remain in the form of comments rejecting antisemitism or explaining that American Jews should not be seen as all supporting Israel.

Emily said she would not let the barrage of hateful comments change how she posts about Sprinkles. In fact, she said, the opposite was true.

“I think it brings me motivation. I’m a descendant of Holocaust survivors, and I think it’s really important to not hide our identity, not hide our culture,” Emily said. “I’m really grateful for the opportunity to spread Jewish joy and make a positive impact on people’s lives.”

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The lawsuit stemmed from a September 2024 incident at Half Hollow Hills High School West, which permitted seniors to decorate their campus parking spots. A Muslim-American student, who was a senior at the time, painted a watermelon featuring a keffiyeh pattern alongside her name in Arabic and the phrase “Peace be upon you” on her space.

At the time, protests against the war in Gaza were at a peak, and the watermelon and keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf, are both widely used symbols of Palestinian solidarity. The school painted over the artwork after it drew outcry from some Jewish parents in the district, determining that it had run afoul of the district’s rules barring political designs.

“For the school district, neutrality is the single most important issue when it comes to limiting speech,” the Half Hollow Hills School District’s attorney, Jacob Feldman, said at a school board meeting at the time, according to a contemporaneous Newsday report.

The student, who has not been identified publicly, testified at that meeting last year. “I was told by my principal that the watermelon was being interpreted as antisemitic by anonymous adults,” she said, according to the Newsday footage. “I feel deeply offended that the word antisemitic was used to describe a piece of my artwork.”

In March 2025, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a lawsuit on behalf of the student alongside Stoll, Glickman & Bellina LLP, alleging that the district had violated her free speech rights and caused her emotional distress.

“The whitewash of Plaintiff’s pro-Palestinian speech was not to prevent substantial disruption of any school activity or threatened harm to the rights of others, as Half Hollow permitted and even amplified speech on other equally, even more, controversial issues,” the lawsuit stated, according to the Associated Press.

In court filings, Steven Stern, an attorney appointed by the district’s insurance provider, wrote that the watermelon image “symbolized anti-Semitic hate speech,” arguing that the district should be able to dictate art allowed in the parking lot.

Half Hollow Hills High School West in Dix Hills, New York. (Google Streetview)

“Any student, teacher, or member of the public could have driven into the parking lot and reasonably understood the school was endorsing a political message — or worse, anti-Semitic hate speech — by allowing it,” Stern wrote, according to Newsday.

The settlement, which was approved by the Half Hollow Hills school board at a meeting on April 21, will be paid by the district’s insurance carrier, according to Superintendent John O’Farrell.

In a statement obtained by Newsday, O’Farrell said that students were no longer allowed to paint their parking spaces “following the incident and the disruption it caused.”

The lawsuit was not the first time that the school district had courted controversy over Israel-related issues. Last year, the district drew scrutiny after a study guide distributed to some 10th graders described Zionism as “an example of extreme nationalism,” prompting condemnation from Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Christina John, a staff attorney for the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which filed the lawsuit alongside Stoll, Glickman & Bellina LLP, welcomed the outcome in a statement.

“This settlement sends a clear message that viewpoint discrimination and the censorship of Palestinian expression cannot be justified under the guise of neutrality,” John said. “No student should be interrogated, silenced, or punished for peacefully expressing their identity or solidarity with oppressed people.”

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Speaking at the national conference of the Jewish Democratic Council of America in Washington, D.C., Frey recounted visiting a local grocery store shortly after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“The tiny little Jewish section, which had hummus and maybe one other product, was tagged with, ‘Why do you support genocide?’” he said. “And this was just the Jewish section, it wasn’t even the Israeli section.”

Frey continued, “So as much as people say, and have often said, ‘No we’re talking about Zionists, not Jews’ — well many of those same people are tying Zionism to Judaism. You can’t have it both ways at the same time.”

He concluded that “you can both believe in a State of Israel and support it, and simultaneously be opposed to some of the horrific acts that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has conducted.”

Frey’s comments, which came in response to a question from the audience, were some of his most extensive on Israel and his first on the topic since he took the national spotlight earlier this year for his defiant stance against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement in his city.

The fact that Frey, 44, decided to appear at JDCA’s national leadership summit itself was notable because he is a relatively young rising star in a Democratic Party where the ascendant sentiments, especially among the progressive wing and among younger voters, are critical of Israel. The JDCA promotes a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Responding to a question about anti-Israel sentiment in his party, Frey said he thought Democrats should do more to constrain fringe sentiments within the party.

“It’s easy for me, and it’s very easy for Democrats, to critique the right,” he said. “I’ve got a whole team supporting me when I said get the F out of Minneapolis. That was not a hard thing to do, that’s just what I felt. What’s harder to do is to tell your own side, sometimes your own friends that, you know what, you’ve gone too far.”

He added, “My deep concern right now is that people don’t have the guts to tell their own side what they don’t want to hear.”

Asked in an interview following the session about whether Democrats should be campaigning alongside figures like the progressive streamer Hasan Piker, who is a staunch Israel critic and has drawn accusations of antisemitism, Frey told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was not familiar with the debate around Piker nor his positions.

But Frey said he takes issue with litmus tests and opposes the villainization that comes from people on both ends of the political spectrum.

“I am uncomfortable with, ‘Get on board, say the word, say the phrase or we’re going to tar and feather you — put out this post or say on the stage this exact term, or else we’re going to consider you to be a villain,’” he said.

While Frey has drawn support from progressives over his showdown with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that staged weeks of raids in Minneapolis earlier this year, he has clashed with that wing before on Israel. In 2024, Frey blocked his city council’s resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling it “one-sided resolution that adds more division to an already fraught situation.”

On Wednesday, the primary discussion between Frey and JDCA’s treasurer Beth Kieffer Leonard, focused on the ICE presence in Minneapolis and Frey’s response.

He also offered a Jewish reason for his determination to stop ICE “dead in their tracks” so that other cities aren’t similarly targeted, citing the value of repairing the world.

“As Jews, we have an obligation through tikkun olam to stand up for it, to make the world a better place, to heal people and to recognize that when they come for one of us, that they come for all of us,” he said.

When asked about Israel and anti-Zionism during the Q&A session, Frey expanded on his belief in the State of Israel as well as his criticisms of its government.

“You can recognize the importance of a place for peace and refuge, a place where refugees by the hundreds of thousands and millions have immigrated to Israel — from both Ashkenazi countries and also Iraq, Iran and Yemen — a very mixed ethnically and culturally place,” Frey said. “You can recognize that the history is complex. That there are areas where we collectively as Jews can improve. Where policies can be improved.”

Frey continued that he is an adamant opponent of Trump but believes in America and said the same should be possible with Netanyahu and Israel.

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“My campus blew up with pro-Palestinian activism,” Toffler recalled. “I was encouraged to see my classmates engage with the issue, many for the first time, but I looked around campus and saw that there was no space for students to have conversation or nuanced dialogue.”

Last fall, Toffler and another Jewish student tried to change the situation. They decided to form a campus chapter of J Street U, the college arm of the liberal pro-Israel group. With the help of a faculty advisor, they tried to make the club a campus reality.

Nearly two dozen such J Street U chapters have formed nationwide since Oct. 7, as students have sought to promote the group’s self-described “pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian and pro-peace” outlook as an alternative to anti-Israel activism surging on campuses — as well as to hawkish campus pro-Israel activism.

But when the students applied to the student government at Sarah Lawrence, an elite progressive liberal arts college in New York’s Westchester County, to make J Street U an official club, they encountered fierce resistance.

After voicing their strong opposition to the group, the Student Senate rejected the J Street U application — the first time a J Street campus chapter has ever been rejected anywhere, according to the group. (The final vote tally was not included in the meeting minutes.) When the students appealed the decision, the senate rejected the appeal, too. And though some faculty and alumni supportive of the students have tried to lobby Sarah Lawrence’s administration to intervene, the college leadership has so far chosen not to.

The Sarah Lawrence J Street rejection offers a window into how campus politics around Israel have evolved since Oct. 7. Two years after anti-Israel protests roiled campuses, even Jewish groups that support Palestinian statehood and sharply oppose Israeli government policies can be treated as beyond the pale.

According to several Sarah Lawrence students and faculty members, it’s rare but not unprecedented for the student senate to reject a student club application. But what happened in deliberations over the J Street U application, they said, was shocking.

Student senators compared recognizing the group to approving “a white supremacist organization,” according to an audio recording and transcript of the meeting obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

One senator said they were concerned about “the whole Zionist language” of the group “that’s still furthering the same logic of Israeli sovereignty and self-determination when there is no existence or security for Israel that’s not contingent on Palestinian displacement, on apartheid, on genocide.”

The application was rejected. The Jewish students appealed to the same body. In March, their appeal was rejected, too.

The Student Senate did not return several JTA requests for comment.

The case, according to J Street, marks the first time a J Street U campus chapter has been blocked from forming.

“We are proud of the work students do to create spaces for dialogue and diverse perspectives on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, told JTA in a statement. “J Street has long opposed efforts to curb speech and free expression on campus, and we encourage Sarah Lawrence’s administration to approve the chapter’s application.”

At other schools where student governments have recently taken aim at Jewish groups — such as when The New School’s student government tried to block funding to the campus Hillel last month — administrators have rejected their decisions.

Sarah Lawrence’s senate bylaws allow for the intervention of the school’s dean or other leadership to “grant … recognition of the organization” in cases “when it is in the best interests of the college.” Despite prodding from local J Street allies, President Crystal Collins Judd has not stepped in. On Monday, faculty members delivered a petition to Judd, drawing on those bylaws in calling on her to intervene to permit the campus J Street U chapter. Yet so far, the president has opted not to take action.

An exterior view of Sarah Lawrence College is seen on February 12, 2020 in Bronxville, New York (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

Sarah Lawrence’s administration “does not intervene in the process unless there is a clear violation of policy,” the school’s dean of students, Dave Stanfield, told JTA. Stanfield also said it was “not unusual for organizations to be denied recognition.”

He suggested that students hoping to form a J Street U chapter should explore other means of activism or try again next year.

“For students who may be disappointed by this outcome, including those nearing graduation, there are multiple avenues for community-building, programming, and engagement on campus,” he wrote in an email. “For students returning next academic year, they can reapply for organization recognition.”

Toffler graduated on Friday. “I am sad that we never got recognition as a club,” they said. “I think we could have positively contributed to the political conversation on campus.”

Jewish faculty, too, were upset about how the J Street students were treated.

“I was immediately alarmed,” Matthew Ellis, an endowed chair of Middle East studies at the college, told JTA when he heard about the rejection. “That just smacked of very obvious, blatant political discrimination.”

For the past few years, Ellis said, he had already been struggling to promote responsible campus dialogue about “the complexities of Zionism.” Some students have been receptive, he said, but a hardline pro-Palestinian contingent “has taken up all the space on campus.”

“And then the J Street thing happens,” he recalled. “I just put my palm to my head: ‘Jesus, what is going on?'”

Rejecting the J Street U chapter, the faculty petition argues, violated Sarah Lawrence’s “Principles for Mutual Respect” and its policy to “foster honest inquiry, free speech, and open discourse.” The petition, circulated to a limited number of faculty members, has garnered more than 20 signatures.

“We, the faculty — and I very much include myself — have clearly not been successful in helping students understand that the only community worth belonging to is a community in which everyone welcomes disagreement rather than trying to shut it down,” novelist Brian Morton, a longtime Sarah Lawrence professor, told JTA.

“This should be one of the bedrock ideas of higher education,” he added, “but somehow we’re failing to get it across.”

J Street occupies a complicated place in American Jewish politics.

Founded in 2008 as a liberal alternative to more hawkish pro-Israel organizations, the group has spent years advocating for a two-state solution and criticizing Israeli military operations and West Bank settlement policy. It was rejected from the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations in 2014 amid criticism that it too often sparred with other Jewish groups over Israel.

Since the Gaza war began, J Street has departed even further from the pro-Israel consensus. Last summer, before the Sarah Lawrence students applied to form their chapter, Ben-Ami said he had been “persuaded” by the argument that Israel had committed “genocide” in Gaza, a charge that Israel and its allies fiercely reject.

Last month, the organization announced that it now opposes continued U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the defensive Iron Dome system.

J Street has also criticized the Trump administration’s campus antisemitism investigations and deportation efforts targeting pro-Palestinian student activists.

Many of those stances have set J Street apart from more mainstream pro-Israel groups. But at Sarah Lawrence, student senators said they saw little distinction.

“What the students here are invested in is Palestinian liberation. And there’s no existence or advocation for Israeli or Zionist security that can co-exist with Palestinian liberation,” one student senator told the J Street students, according to audio and a transcript of the meeting where the club was rejected the first time. “The normalization of Zionism and of Israel is what students are opposed to.”

The J Street students tried to explain that they had been misunderstood. According to the official meeting minutes, they “argued that their idea of Zionism aligns fixedly with more of a textbook definition of it, rather than how it has come to be more widely defined around campus.” 

In their appeal, they continued the argument. “It is our impression that the decision to not approve J Street U at SLC relies on a caricature of our position as reflexively aligned with an extremist Israeli government and callously indifferent to Palestinian suffering and aspirations to statehood,” they wrote. “That could not be further from how we feel or what our organization hopes to work for.”

In written decisions rejecting the chapter, Sarah Lawrence senators raised concerns about J Street’s lobbying work and questioned whether the student organizers could guarantee that the campus group would remain independent from the national organization.

They also asked whether J Street U “would fulfill a unique political/cultural space on campus that doesn’t already exist across different clubs,” pointing to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, Hillel, a Humanist Jews group and the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Toffler, who also served as student president of the campus Hillel board, said the process revealed a profound ignorance about Jewish life and political diversity.

“If you can’t tell the difference between Hillel, JVP and SJP, you’re simply not doing a good job representing the one-fifth to one-fourth of your classmates who are Jewish,” they said.

Supportive faculty, including their advisor, had planned to attend the students’ March appeal meeting. But just before the meeting, according to the advisor, the senate announced that only two people would be permitted at the appeal, and they would only be granted 10 minutes to make their case. (The faculty advisor declined to be identified publicly out of fear of the repercussions for their own standing in academia.)

According to meeting minutes from March, senate chair Nora Tucker-Kellogg reiterated concerns that the chapter could eventually “more closely resemble” the national organization. Tucker-Kellogg also referenced what she described as “widespread concern” about the group. The final vote tally denying the application was, again, not recorded in the meeting minutes.

Tucker-Kellogg is also a co-plaintiff in a legal complaint against the college and a U.S. congressional committee investigating antisemitism, alleging that pro-Palestinian students and faculty have had their First Amendment rights chilled by “false accusations of antisemitism.” 

The complaint, which claims the campus is not hostile to Jews, describes Tucker-Kellogg as an organizer involved in campus encampments and building occupations related to pro-Palestinian activism.

An attorney for Tucker-Kellogg did not respond to requests for comment.

Opposition to liberal Zionism on campus predates the students’ J Street U application. 

Before Oct. 7, former Sarah Lawrence student Sammy Tweedy told JTA he was treated as a “pariah” for having gone to Israel; Tweedy, the son of rock musician Jeff Tweedy, left the school after the Hamas attacks as a result of the hostility he said he faced there. He was targeted, he said, even though he has also opposed “current Israeli government policy propaganda.”

In 2024, students protested then-Forward editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren, accusing her outlet of being “a hotspot for dangerous Zionist propaganda.” 

Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupt an event featuring liberal Jewish columnist Ezra Klein at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, January 28, 2026.(Screenshot)

Earlier this year, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who himself often criticizes Israel, visited Sarah Lawrence for a public event. Protesters interrupted the discussion, shouting “You like genocide” and calling Klein a “Nazi normalizer.” Toffler said a poster labeling Klein “a Zionist pig” remained posted on a campus bulletin board for weeks.

Following the disruption, according to video of the event, Judd, the college president, joked to Klein, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”

Both demonstrations were organized by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Last week, SJP said some participants in the Klein protest had been disciplined by the school shortly before commencement. According to the group, one student was barred from campus on graduation day while others were prohibited from attending certain events.

The chapter denounced the disciplinary actions as “racialized and Islamophobic attacks” and expressed solidarity with “those resisting ziomerica.”

Stanfield declined to comment on specific disciplinary measures but said the college takes disruptions seriously and seeks to balance free expression with mutual respect.

The atmosphere has alarmed some Jewish alumni. “It makes me very sad, and at the moment a bit angry,” said Jo-Ann Mort, a Sarah Lawrence alum, poet and longtime J Street activist. Mort did not directly advise the J Street U students but had reached out to the president and faculty about the issue as a concerned alum.

“I believe that J Street U is really useful because it can directly challenge, on these campuses, the hypothesis of the anti-Zionist left,” she told JTA. “And they’re not a comfortable fit for those willing to acknowledge there are two peoples living in one place.”

Rachel Klein, executive director of Hillels of Westchester, which serves Sarah Lawrence and nearby campuses, said she was shocked by the senate’s decision and rhetoric.

“I expected backlash and protest after the club was established,” she said. “But I did not expect the student senate, who are supposed to be representatives of the entire student body, to be so biased.”

Klein has spent years clashing with the Sarah Lawrence administration over antisemitism concerns. She said the campus Hillel has not hosted a formal Israel-related event since 2015, when an Israeli soldier’s visit to campus was targeted by protests. 

Today, she said, she doubts a Hillel chapter would be approved if proposed from scratch.

In 2024, Klein filed a federal civil rights complaint against Sarah Lawrence — a highly unusual step for a Hillel director to take — after concluding that the administration would not adequately respond to serious concerns about antisemitism. 

“I did not want to have to file a federal complaint against one of my campuses,” Klein said. “I wish I had a partner in Sarah Lawrence who believed in the equity of every student.”

The complaint triggered a federal Title VI antisemitism investigation. Sarah Lawrence also figured into a Republican-led House inquiry into campus antisemitism launched in 2025. Internally, Stanfield, the school’s dean, had told the president that Klein’s initial claims of post-Oct. 7 campus antisemitism were “exaggerated and alarmist,” according to emails later published as part of the House committee report.

Some Jews on campus say the student senate’s response to the J Street U petition must be understood in the context of the scrutiny from the federal government.

“Students hear ‘pro-Israel’ and sometimes make assumptions about what opinions that means that don’t apply to J Street,” said Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor who said he supported the students’ application.

Swanson himself criticized the congressional inquiry in a Forward op-ed, arguing that Jewish students were uncomfortable being used in national political battles. (He did not mention the J Street U saga in his Forward piece.)

“I wish we could have a more nuanced discussion about this,” he told JTA. “But the way this has been polarized through the federal climate is making that harder.”

Another Jewish professor rebutted Swanson’s defense of Sarah Lawrence in an essay in the Jewish Journal.

“The record at Sarah Lawrence is not thin,” wrote Samuel Abrams, who teaches politics, arguing that administrators had inadequately addressed repeated incidents involving Jewish students.

Toffler, who studied politics and government and spent a year studying abroad in England, said the experience has left them worried about future students who may hold opinions outside the prevailing campus consensus.

“I also worry for the next generation of Sarah Lawrence students,” they said. “Who’s going to be there for them as they strive to express opinions that differ from the mainstream on campus? I don’t know.” 

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