It was the latest escalation in a pitched battle between Hebrew Union College and the state attorney general’s office, which has accused HUC of violating nonprofit law by shuttering degree-granting programs on its historic Cincinnati campus.

The suit, HUC argues, “violates the First Amendment by entangling government and religion.”

The suit was originally filed in April by then-Ohio AG Dave Yost — his second against the college related to its controversial plan to wind down its Cincinnati operations in favor of its New York and Los Angeles campuses. Yost claimed HUC’s actions in Cincinnati misled its donors by leaving a city where they were actively fundraising to support operations, and also violated its charter, which states that the school would “permanently maintain” a residence there.  

The state seeks to seize HUC’s assets in Ohio and redirect them to a new, yet-to-be-decided nonprofit with a similar mission; an upstart rabbinical school founded by HUC alums says it wants them. 

Such a move “is an unconstitutional and illegal governmental assault upon religion,” HUC’s strongly worded motion reads. 

It continues, “The Attorney General has no role in dictating the religious affairs of institutions like HUC. The Court should reject his overreach into religious matters and should dismiss the Complaint because it is unconstitutional and unlawful.”

HUC also argues its vote to shutter the Cincinnati campus was done in full compliance with the law, adding that it intends to maintain the campus’s other assets, including the Klau Library, the American Jewish Archives and the Skirball Museum. In addition, citing a passage in the Torah that states “God will come to his people wherever they welcome him,” the school argues that considering “Jewish demographic realities” is part of its religious mission.

“These decisions were made thoughtfully and responsibly to ensure the long-term success of the institution and our ability to continue graduating strong Jewish leaders,” HUC president Andrew Rehfeld said in a statement accompanying the motion. The lawsuit, he added, “improperly seeks to interfere in the decisions of a religious organization, and this cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.”

Yost himself resigned as AG this week to join the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that, in 2022, represented a Tennessee adoption agency that refused to foster a child to a Jewish couple. The suit against HUC continues under the state AG’s office.

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On social media, however, the incident quickly drew a slew of antisemitic comments.

“They can’t help it. Roaches and rats love the sewers,” wrote one Facebook user on a post by the Rockland Daily.

“Those tunnels were promised to them 3,000 years ago,” another user wrote, referencing the common online antisemitic phrase ridiculing the Jewish connection to Israel.

Many of the comments also referenced the 2024 incident at the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s world headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in which a group from the movement attempted to dig an unauthorized tunnel beneath the building.

“From the tunnels in Brooklyn to the tunnels in nyack! The black coats never disappoint ,” one user wrote. “There drawn to tunnels. Natural instinct,” another wrote.

The girls, students from the Toras Emachu school in Monsey, New York, had been visiting Nyack Memorial Park on a school trip when they entered a large drainage culvert located in the park, according to the Orangetown Police Department.

While walking through the tunnel system, the students got lost but were heard by individuals in the town who alerted police, according to Nyack Mayor Joseph Rand.

“First responders immediately came to the scene and located all the girls at various points in Nyack,” Rand wrote in a post on Facebook. “Technically, none of the girls were ‘rescued,’ because they all came out in their own power, but everyone’s lucky that the authorities responded and figured out where all the girls were as quickly as they did.”

Rand said that roughly 70 students were on the trip, and there were no serious injuries beyond some “cuts and scrapes.”

Nyack Village Administrator Andy Stewart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the school group had not been given a permit to host a field trip in the park Wednesday, and while there was “definitely concern over the violation of that law,” he wasn’t sure how the local government would follow up with the school.

“This is a group that did not have a permit, and so we didn’t know they were there, and they made no plans with the village,” Stewart said.

The Toras Emachu school did not respond to numerous requests for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

But while local town officials handle the response to the incident, for some Jewish groups, the online response underscored how an innocuous incident can become a vehicle for antisemitic rhetoric.

“Unfortunately, internet comment sections have become havens for antisemitic memes and conspiracies, and commenters emboldened by relative anonymity will jump at any opportunity to demonize Jews,” Nate Wolfson, the communications director for the Nexus Project, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the incident. “In this case, a story of dozens of children getting lost on a field trip is appallingly used to spread stereotypes about Jews, including comparing them to rats.”

Wolfson added that the references to the Chabad tunnel incident had been “especially troubling,” adding that the story had been “routinely used by antisemites to spread truly vicious and dangerous conspiracies about child sex trafficking.”

Some Nyack residents also called out the spate of antisemitic comments about the incident online.

“This was not hard to find. It was not buried. It was not one bad comment from one bad actor. It was thread after thread of people in this county saying the same old bullshit about Jewish people like it was nothing,” wrote one resident in a post on Facebook alongside a series of screenshots of antisemitic comments. “If all it takes is one local news story for your contempt to come spilling out, the contempt was already there.”

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“It doesn’t exist,” the Jewish comedian said, laughing.

He was responding to a request from a streamer, FinesseFave, who spotted him outside the arena where Seinfeld watched the Knicks’ NBA finals comeback to defeat the San Antonio Spurs. “Can we get a ‘free Palestine’?” FitnessFave asked, appearing to urge Seinfeld to repeat the slogan.

The exchange soon amassed millions of views on X, where it was shared by Jackson Hinkle, a prominent anti-Israel influencer, among others. It was Seinfeld’s second viral moment of the night, after fans shared photos of him with his jaw dropped following OG Anonuby’s stunning game-winning shot.

The exchange added to a number of dismissive comments by Seinfeld toward pro-Palestinian advocates in recent years. The entertainer has become one of Hollywood’s most prominent supporters of Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. He visited Israel in December 2023 and met with families of hostages held in Gaza. 

In February, an Instagram influencer said “Free Palestine” while taking a selfie with him outside Radio City Music Hall. Seinfeld responded, “I don’t care about Palestine.” 

Seinfeld compared pro-Palestinian activists with the Ku Klux Klan during an appearance at Duke University in September with Omer Shem Tov, a freed Israeli hostage. While introducing Shem Tov, Seinfeld said, “Free Palestine is, to me, just — you’re free to say you don’t like Jews. Just say you don’t like Jews.”

He went on, “Compared to the Ku Klux Klan, I’m actually thinking the Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK, that’s honest.” 

The remarks were criticized by Duke students as well as a Democratic North Carolina state senator who also spoke during the event.

In 2024, at the height of the pro-Palestinian campus movement, about 100 Duke graduates walked out of their graduation ceremony in protest against Seinfeld delivering the commencement address. 

Seinfeld did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.

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The charges were filed May 20 and unsealed Wednesday following arrests in multiple states. According to the charging documents, the defendants “used encrypted messages, social media platforms, and overseas collaboration platforms to research, target, and attack their victims.” The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit was included in the indictment as one target of the demonstrators.

The charging documents allege that the eight defendants hunted down information about multiple targets; described to each other how they would “kill,” “torment,” and “terrorize” their targets; and carried out some of their plans.

In one message, Ahmet Korkaya, who was at the time a medical student, allegedly wrote to another defendant about a member of the university’s Board of Regents that he would “poison her ass slowly.” His co-defendant allegedly replied that the group needed to “get into that house then burn it down.”

“In America, we rule by law not by fear. These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American,” U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr., of the FBI’s Detroit office said in a statement.

The eight people charged include three men and five women all between the ages of 21 and 28. They were arrested in multiple locations in Michigan as well as in Chicago and Milwaukee.

The indictment alleges that the defendants were responsible for vandalism of the Jewish federation building on Oct. 7, 2024, the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.

In addition to the federation, the targets named in the indictment include the university’s former president, Santa Ono; its chief investment officer and provost; members of its Board of Regents and their businesses; a campus police officer; and multiple companies.

The TAHRIR Coalition, a pro-Palestinian collective at the University of Michigan that has coordinated much of the campus’s protest activity, rallied supporters Wednesday to protest outside courthouses in Detroit and Milwaukee where the suspects had been detained.

Jordan Acker, a Jewish university regent, is not named in the indictment. But one of the incidents described is the vandalism of his law office in June 2024. (Acker’s car was also vandalized with pro-Palestinian grafitti while he and his children were home, just a few months later.)

Acker did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment. A spokesperson for the Jewish federation declined to comment.

Federal and state authorities raided three homes belonging to campus protesters in April 2025 as part of a federal probe into acts of vandalism cited in the indictment.

The unsealed indictment represents the second major set of charges made against a group of pro-Palestinian protesters at the university. In May 2025, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped state charges she had filed against seven pro-Palestinian student protesters — a different group from those arrested Wednesday. Nessel’s charges, brought the previous September, were related to the protesters’ participation in university encampments in May 2024. The attorney who defended the protesters, Amir Makled, bested Acker for the state Democratic Party’s nomination for a university oversight position this spring.

Nessel’s office was listed by the FBI as having provided “assistance” on the investigation. Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the state attorney general told JTA the office “was not involved in today’s warrant operations.”

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“It’s my great honor, maybe one of the biggest honors of my lifetime, to stand here on the floor and do something that’s 59 years overdue, to recognize the survivors and those who gave their lives on the USS Liberty,” Massie said. “Fifty-nine years ago today when they were viciously attacked by IDF jets and also after that by torpedo boats.”

The attack on the USS Liberty occurred on June 8, 1967, in the midst of Israel’s Six-Day War. The intelligence-gathering ship was stationed off the shore of the Sinai Peninsula during the conflict when it came under attack by Israeli forces, killing 34 crew members and injuring 171 more.

Israel later apologized for the attack, explaining it had mistaken the boat as Egyptian, and paid damages to the United States and the families of the victims. Multiple U.S. investigations, including by the CIA, have since determined that the attack was a mistake.

Still, the incident has become a rallying point for critics of Israel who claim the attack was deliberate and gained more adherents lately as anti-Israel sentiment has swelled. On Friday, Massie cited a host of U.S. military and intelligence officials he said had cast doubt on the outcomes of the U.S. investigations.

“None of these distinguished men think this was an accident,” Massie continued. “They think it was intentional murder by the country of Israel, either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”

Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary in Kentucky, used the anniversary of the incident to call for Congress to pass a resolution honoring the victims of the attack and for a new investigation into the circumstances surrounding it.

The USS Liberty Veterans Association praised Massie’s remarks in a post on X, writing that it was a story that “NO other member of Congress will even listen to.”

Massie is far from the only critic of Israel to use the attack as broader evidence of Israeli misconduct.

Last year, the far-right influencer Candace Owens interviewed a survivor of the attack and tweeted that there was “perhaps no story that can more enlighten you to the deceitful and despicable nature of the modern state of Israel — and its stranglehold on the American government.”

Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback has called for the attack to be taught in schools, and the antisemitic streamer Nick Fuentes has claimed that Israel initiated the attack to “conceal their troop movements.”

During his speech at Amfest in December, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who devoted part of his podcast last year to elevating the conspiracy theory that the attack was a false flag operation on the part of Israel, told attendees that asking “why a foreign government tried to sink one of our ships in 1967” does not “make you an antisemite.”

Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his organization had been concerned about the “normalization” of Carlson’s views, including his rhetoric on the USS Liberty attack.

“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” Segal said.

Following Carlson’s remarks at Amfest, the annual conference of the right-wing group Turning Point USA’s, the ADL denounced conspiracy theories about the attack that it said had swirled for decades.

“Despite official findings that the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity, these narratives continue to be amplified by actors seeking to inflame distrust and undermine U.S.-Israel relations,” the ADL said in a post on X.

At the conference, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro was also asked about the attack by an audience member, and responded that “the vast majority of people who bring this up are doing so to suggest that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship because Israel deliberately wants to harm America.”

Some of Massie’s fellow critics of Israel praised him for bringing up the incident on the floor of Congress on Monday.

“Thank you Thomas Massie for recognizing the heroic members of the USS Liberty, which was attacked by Israel, where 34 crew members were killed and 174 were wounded,” tweeted Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former member of Congress. “Why did our ‘greatest ally’ attack us??”

Other right-wing figures, including at least one member of Congress, criticized Massie’s gambit.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas tweeted that he had previously believed that Massie was “standing on heartfelt principles and had intellectual backing” even as they did not always agree.

“But comments like this make me question his authenticity,” Crenshaw wrote. “The USS Liberty incident is a tragic one, but it’s an incident with a clear conclusion if one uses any objective analysis of the facts. … Perhaps we are simply witnessing another example of the irresistible incentive to jump on the bandwagon of grifters that guarantee you a specific kind of social media audience and attention that ultimately results in profits.”

Adam Mossoff, a former legal fellow of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, took aim at Massie’s address in a post on X, writing that the Kentucky Republican had “fully gone down the rabbit hole of antsemitism and Jewish conspiracy theories — via the modern American antisemite’s favorite boogeyman, Israel.”

“For the American woke left and woke right, the USS Liberty is the equivalent of the Dreyfuss Affair in France,” Mossoff wrote. “It’s the cause celebres of nationalism and bigotry in which history’s greatest villains — the Jews — can be smeared again with nefarious and evil motives.”

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The deal reportedly would have allowed Israel to remain in southern Lebanon, where it has established a buffer zone, but not permit any attacks in Beirut unless Hezbollah attacked Israel within its own borders. It would also have required Hezbollah fighters to leave the buffer zone.

A top Hezbollah leader said accepting a demand to leave southern Lebanon would amount to “surrender” for the group.

“What we are concerned about is an end to the aggression, ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal,” Secretary-General Naim Qassem said in a televised statement on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. “We did not make any commitment to any party to stop resisting as long as there is occupation.”

Dozens of Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, which Hezbollah is increasingly prosecuting with the use of drones.

The rejection comes as the U.S. House of Representatives voted to rebuke President Donald Trump and his war on Iran on Wednesday, narrowly passing a resolution that limits Trump’s power to continue the war without congressional approval.

Four Republicans voted with Democrats on the bill, in a sign of how opposition to the war, which Trump launched jointly with Israel in February, is crossing party lines ahead of high-stakes midterm elections in the United States.

The bill would not require presidential signoff but is seen as unlikely to substantively change Trump’s handling of the war, which he has insisted does not require congressional approval.

Trump called the vote “meaningless” in a post on Truth Social on Thursday morning.

“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing.”

The bill now goes to the Senate, where a similar measure has advanced in recent weeks, also with support from a handful of Republicans. It comes at a delicate time, as an uncertain ceasefire struck in early April has now stretched on without a resolution for longer than active hostilities unfolded. Trump has failed to achieve the terms for a deal to permanently end the war that he said he wanted, and this week said he thought the constant negotiations had grown “very boring.” Hezbollah’s apparent rejection of a ceasefire deal is another setback.

Iran has continued to battle during its ceasefire with the United States, though not against Israel: On Wednesday, it struck Kuwait’s main airport, killing one and injuring 60.

Also on Wednesday, Trump confirmed reports that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “f—ing crazy” during a call on Monday in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to strike a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Trump told a New York Post podcast that he was “a little perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon” but that he liked Netanyahu and worked well with him.

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Outside the Palo Alto JCC in April, as hundreds of people entered the campus to celebrate Yom Haatzmaut, Israel’s 78th birthday, a group of Jewish and Israeli-American activists from the advocacy group Bay Area Jewish Coalition-Action stood at the entrance, holding yard signs for political candidates on the ballot this June.

One name that stood out among those signs: Ethan Agarwal, a tech entrepreneur and political newcomer vying to unseat Rep. Ro Khanna in Congress.

A growing number of Jewish and Israeli-American voters are putting their campaign donations and votes behind Agarwal, who has positioned himself as the pro-Israel candidate in the six-person race. Under California’s primary system, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, will advance to face each other in the general election in November.

No public polling has been conducted in California’s 17th Congressional District, but at least one prediction market and two prominent California political analysts favor Khanna to lead the field with Agarwal in second.

“Ro is the frontrunner,” said Sam Lauter, a principal at BMWL Public Affairs who has been following the race closely. “There is zero question that Ethan has the ability to give him a run for his money, and that Ro has to — has to — engage [his constituents], something he hasn’t had to do in a long time.”

Khanna has served California’s 17th district, which includes parts of Alameda and Santa Clara counties, since 2017 and won re-election comfortably in 2024. But he is also among Congress’ most vocal critics of the Israeli government and has backed legislation that would penalize Israel over what he characterizes as genocide in Gaza — a charge Israel and most pro-Israel Jews reject.

For many Israeli Americans in Silicon Valley, that posture has fueled a frustration that boiled over throughout the Gaza war — the kind of tension that surfaces in WhatsApp group chats, Facebook threads and dinner table conversations.

Tali Klima, a spokesperson for Bay Area Jewish Coalition-Action, is one of those trying to turn the frustration into votes.

“We have lost trust in his ability to represent us, and will not accept empty condemnations of antisemitism while he amplifies radical antisemitic messages at every possible turn,” Klima said in an email.

Klima was referring to Khanna’s association with social media influencers accused of promoting antisemitism. In October, Khanna shared a video clip about refusing to accept money from AIPAC that featured the antisemitic YouTuber Ian Carroll, sparking outrage from Jewish groups. Khanna has also been a repeat guest on a show hosted by Hasan Piker, a left-wing commentator who has drawn allegations of antisemitism from major Jewish organizations. (Khanna has said he would go on Piker’s show again, but that he didn’t know who Carroll was when he shared the video.)

Despite the tensions, Khanna has continued to engage with the Jewish community. Late last year, he visited local synagogues to defend his decision to say Israel had committed “genocide” in Gaza. A group of teens from Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills visited Khanna at his Washington office in March. And in April, he convened a roundtable of more than a dozen Bay Area Jewish leaders to envision “how we can build a new coalition for a just peace and a new way forward,” he said at the time.

The son of Indian immigrants, Agarwal was born in Montreal and raised in the Bay Area. Most recently a tech entrepreneur, he founded and later sold Aaptiv, a popular fitness app, and Coterie, a consumer finance technology company. But before entering tech, he interned for Sen. Dianne Feinstein while he was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University.

Agarwal attended the annual conventions in Washington in 2005 and 2006 of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has lately become a bogeyman in Democratic politics. In 2010, while at Wharton Business School, Agarwal spent 10 days traveling through Israel on a trip organized by Israeli students that he credits with increasing his commitment to a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. He has said he has criticisms of the Israeli government but does not agree with Khanna’s characterizations.

“What Israel has done in Gaza, I don’t agree with all of it. I will not call it a genocide, though, because it’s not a genocide,” he said in April. “That specific word has very specific implications and has historical precedent, and it’s not a word that should be casually thrown around. I think [Khanna] uses it again as a bit of a dog whistle, because he wants to come across as being strongly anti-Israel.”

Khanna has an advantage because primary elections tend to bring out the most ideologically motivated voters, according to Larry Gerston, professor emeritus of political science at San Jose State University.

“For Democrats, that would be progressives who are least supportive of Trump/Israel. That would probably help Khanna,” Gerston said.

Encompassing a large swath of Silicon Valley, Khanna’s district is home to one of the largest concentrations of Israeli Americans in California, though they make up only a fraction of the overall voting population.

“Generally speaking, it’s difficult to oust an incumbent without any scandal or outrageous behavior,” Gerston added. “I haven’t seen any of those with Khanna.”

Lauter expects Khanna and Agarwal, both Democrats, to be the top vote-getters in the June 2 primary and face off on the ballot in November.

Khanna has made little secret of his national ambitions. He served as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign co-chair in 2020 and has since built a profile far beyond his district — traveling to swing states, feuding with Vice President JD Vance and declining to rule out a 2028 presidential run as recently as this spring.

Lauter believes the focus on national politics has helped Khanna with campaign fundraising but cost him on the ground.

“There’s a very passionate community of people who are frankly just tired of the way Ro has conducted himself,” Lauter said. “They’re interested in having their congressperson pay attention to their district and not have an eye on other positions.”

Over Memorial Day Weekend, while Khanna was in New York City appearing on Fox News and “Meet the Press” to discuss national issues, Agarwal met with voters at the Santa Clara County farmers market and a nearby park in downtown Santa Clara.

“Ethan is an opponent he has to pay attention to,” Lauter said. Come November, “if he ignores this, if he thinks that he doesn’t have a problem, he could lose.”

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The College for Contemporary Judaism, which aims to become a new home for liberal rabbinical students in the Midwest, on Thursday added its voice to a lawsuit against HUC brought by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. The state’s suit claims that HUC, the Reform rabbinical school, violated state nonprofit law and misled its donors by shuttering its historic Cincinnati campus this year.

In its motion to intervene, the new college argues that it should be the rightful steward of HUC’s campus, as well as all other Cincinnati assets of the Reform movement mainstay. They include the Klau Library, the American Jewish Archives, the Skirball Museum and hundreds of millions of dollars given by donors who believed HUC would “permanently” remain in the city. 

“The Attorney General has appropriately stepped forward to enforce the charitable trust obligations that bind those assets to the State of Ohio and their underlying charitable mission,” CCJ argues in its brief. 

Now, the new college argued, the court “has before it a concrete, mission-aligned Ohio candidate capable of carrying forward the very charitable purpose at issue,” referring to CCJ.

A representative for HUC said the school “is responding to the Ohio attorney general’s unwarranted lawsuit and will respond appropriately to any additional filings.” A representative for Yost declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

HUC has previously criticized the state’s lawsuit against them and is fighting the state to retain its assets. The school’s president, Andrew Rehfeld, has said the allegations “mischaracterize our decision-making, misrepresent our stewardship of donor funds and ignore our sustained record of transparency and good faith.”

The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, January 21, 2019. (Warren LeMay via Creative Commons)

The College for Contemporary Judaism’s request is unusual for an institution that, for now, exists in name only. The CCJ, formally founded in 2022 in response to HUC’s closure, has no permanent home and has yet to enroll any students. It also lacks a set timeline for when its first class would start. HUC, meanwhile, with campuses in New York, Los Angeles and Jerusalem, has been the Reform movement’s foremost seminary since its founding in Cincinnati in 1875 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. 

CCJ’s founders, most of whom have deep associations with HUC, argue they are better positioned than any other party to carry on the mission of ordaining liberal rabbis in the Midwest. It’s a cause they say HUC is abandoning, in violation of its own charter language promising to “permanently maintain” a campus in Cincinnati — the same language AG Yost is drawing on in the state’s suit against the college.

“We are stepping forward and saying, ‘We are willing to undertake this role,’” Andrew Berger, a founder and board chair of CCJ, told JTA. Berger added that the state AG’s office was “aware of us.”

Berger is a former HUC board chair, while CCJ’s founding president, Rabbi Gary Zola, is the former longtime executive director of HUC’s archives. The school’s honorary president, Rabbi Sally Priesand, was ordained at HUC as the first woman rabbi in the United States. 

Such deep connections to HUC make their participation in a lawsuit against the seminary “very difficult,” Berger said. He said the school had angered many when it pulled out of Cincinnati, which he argued was “a completely unnecessary decision.” (HUC has cited financial struggles, while its opponents argue that the move didn’t result in major cost savings.)

Critics of the move have also accused HUC of abandoning Jews in the Midwest, South and Mountain West, regions where its Cincinnati graduates would often find work. The school also sparked blowback, and earlier attention from AG Yost, by proposing a sell-off of some of its rare books. 

Other graduates and staff have argued the move makes sense as the school focuses on its New York and Los Angeles campuses, which were established in the 1950s and ’60s following the college’s merger with the Jewish Institute of Religion. Prior to the closure decision, HUC said enrollment at the Cincinnati campus was falling far faster than at the L.A. and New York campuses, reflecting the preference of students to live and study at its coastal locations.

This month, four rabbis were ordained at the Cincinnati campus, and six students received their doctoral or master’s degrees, according to HUC. Nineteen rabbis and cantors were ordained in New York, and six rabbis were ordained in Los Angeles.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost in Salem, Ohio, on Friday, March 15, 2024. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

CCJ, its founders say, was formed in response to the void being left by HUC.

“There are not enough rabbis being ordained today,” Berger said. “With all the rabbinical seminaries now being on the coasts, I very much fear for Jewish life in the middle of the country. It’s always been a little difficult to recruit rabbis to the middle of the country, but it’s going to be so much harder without a seminary here.”

To make its argument for HUC’s assets, CCJ is drawing on a legal term known as “cy pres,” which permits charitable assets reclaimed by a court to be redistributed to a different nonprofit with a similar mission. Yost’s lawsuit, which he filed last month, asks the court to redistribute ownership of HUC’s campus and other assets to a different, unspecified “permanent” rabbinical seminary in Cincinnati. 

CCJ, which bills itself as a nondenominational “school for Liberal Judaism,” wants to be that home. Its ordination procedures will be administered by the school itself, rather than any particular movement. 

Though Berger said the school has not yet held direct conversations with movement leaders, he noted that, due to a general shortage of clergy, many liberal congregations today are hiring rabbis with nontraditional ordinations.

While HUC leaders sometimes spoke of their struggles to fill Cincinnati’s classrooms, CCJ is confident they can recruit their own student body.

“We’ve been approached by a number of prospective students who have said to us, ‘We would love to come to your school,’” Berger said.

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UCLA’s Jewish chancellor harshly pushed back on the lawsuit, telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency its premise was “simply wrong.”

The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims UCLA violated the students’ civil rights by failing to intervene during pro-Palestinian encampment activity in early 2024. It follows an earlier suit that focused on the university’s treatment of its Jewish and Israeli employees, and comes 10 days after the university unveiled its own “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism.”

“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to an antisemitic hostile work environment,” assistant U.S. attorney general Harmeet Dhillon said in a press release. “Now, the Department of Justice calls UCLA to account for its toleration of the equally appalling hostile educational environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.”

UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk sharply disputed the suit’s claim that the school has done nothing to combat antisemitism.

“Let me be direct: the suggestion that UCLA has been passive in the face of antisemitism is simply wrong,” Frenk told JTA in a statement. “Combating antisemitism is a moral imperative — one rooted, for me, in personal history that makes indifference unthinkable. In the past year alone, we’ve taken numerous concrete actions to combat antisemitism. We recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety. We reorganized our Civil Rights Office. We appointed a Title VI officer. And we strengthened our policies to protect both free expression and the safety of every member of our community.”

A request for comment to the Justice Department was not immediately returned.

The new suit draws on widely reported accounts of UCLA’s campus environment in spring 2024, when protesters in pro-Palestinian encampments clashed with pro-Israel counter-protesters, sparking violence and turmoil. The failure to protect Jewish students violated their Title VI civil rights, attorneys said.

Citing the report of UCLA’s own task force on antisemitism, published in response to the 2024 campus upheaval, the suit states, “UCLA’s leadership apparently preferred a do-nothing ‘de-escalation strategy’ to protecting their Jewish and Israeli students from an angry mob organized by peers armed with tasers, lumber, and a sword.”

The Justice Department is seeking several redress measures, including the return of all federal grants made to UCLA “during the time of UCLA’s noncompliance with Title VI.” The school had previously resolved several Title VI antisemitism cases under the Biden administration, and also reached a $6.13 million settlement with Jewish groups in a private suit related to the spring 2024 incidents on campus — a case cited in DOJ’s new lawsuit.

The Trump administration has sought to make a particular example of UCLA in its aggressive approach to campus antisemitism. Officials had sought to levy fines in excess of $1 billion against the public university for its alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students, until a federal judge intervened. Several DOJ lawyers have left the department over its UCLA investigation, telling reporters the case was “fraudulent,” a “sham” and driven by pressure to “find” evidence to support further legal action against UCLA.

In addition, some of the most violent clashes on the campuses included perpetrators on both sides of the conflict, leading some members of the UCLA Jewish community to complain that pro-Israel counter-protesters ultimately undercut the Jewish students’ legitimate grievances regarding the harassment they had been facing inside the campus gates. 

And the campus environment for Jews remains tense. Last month, the UCLA student senate condemned a campus visit by a freed Israeli hostage, drawing blowback from a university regent.

This story has been updated with comment from UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk.

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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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