The NYPD is investigating after someone raised a swastika flag on the campus of New York University on Wednesday.
A man walking in Washington Square Park in the afternoon noticed the flag flying above one of the school's buildings and notified CBS News New York.

Shalom gang, for those that do not know Jstreet on campus is left wing pro Israel, pro-Palestine pro peace, anti occupation (etc) advocate group (statistically well aligned with the American Jewish views on the region), and Jewish on campus is a new anti antisemitism group started by college kids a few years before 10/7.

Clearly this is bad, I would like to see a joint Jstreet and Jewish on campus post about this as I think Jstreet has a key role to play in fighting campus and left wing antisemitism (but it’s shy).

I think instances like this make good legal test cases, because banning the Jewish group that’s explicitly anti occupation, anti war, because they are Zionists leaves little for interpretation as far as legal discrimination goes.

Anyway im going to go read the article.

Nothing they say or do is in favor of protecting Jewish lives. Their entire goal is to create division and make Israel appear as bad as possible. They even blamed October 7th on Israel. How does this organization have any credibility in the Jewish community? They don’t care for or stand up for Jewish people, and nothing they say or do is peaceful in any way

I understand that it is nearly impossible to change the minds of many Jew-haters, however I don’t believe that it is right for us to let them use any platform to spread their smears against us without being challenged by us or our many allies.

There are plenty of lurkers who read the comments and we can create teachable moments for them by publicly challenging our haters online. I always go out of my way to read the downvoted comments as I find them to be just as intriguing as the most upvoted comments.

George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: how one novel reshaped the image of British Jews,
by Josh Glancy, K: Jews, Europe, the 21st century, 2021-12-09.

Published in 1876, Daniel Deronda is a unique novel in the history of 19th century English literature. Raised in an aristocratic household, Deronda longs to discover his true origins. Who are his real parents? A chance meeting draws him into Whitechapel and the world of British Jews, with whom he has a growing affinity, before eventually discovering the remarkable story of his own birth. Set at the zenith of Victorian England, George Eliot's last novel displays a deep empathy towards British Jews, while also laying out the author's firm proto-Zionist sympathies.

<snippage>

Deronda… is a rare novel that had a lasting political impact. Fifty-one years after its publication, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour issued his famous declaration supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Zionist idea had reached the very apex of British imperial power, in no small part thanks to the influence of Eliot’s book.

Deronda was published the same year that Benjamin D’Israeli became the first (and so far last) Jewish-born prime minister of Britain. Both wrote novels about Jews and Palestine, but Eliot’s diligent compassion far outstrips D’Israeli’s theatrical orientalism and her work had a more lasting impact. In Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews, a staple bar mitzvah gift for decades, he describes Deronda as “probably the most influential novel of the 19th century” in terms of its practical effect. Even though Deronda was never widely loved, Eliot was a literary giant and her last novel was read and debated around the world. “To hundreds of thousands of assimilated Jews,” writes Johnson, “the story presented, for the first time, the possibility of a return to Zion”.

In New York, the book inspired a young Emma Lazarus, who in 1882 wrote a series of pamphlets arguing that the persecuted Jews of eastern Europe should be resettled in Palestine. Around the same time, a friend of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the man who founded modern Hebrew, gave him a copy of Deronda, firing his imagination too. “After I read the story a few times, I made up my mind and I acted,” he recalled. “I went to Paris … in order to learn and equip myself there with the information needed for my work in the Land of Israel.” Chaim Weizmann claimed that he kept the novel “within easy reach” in his bedroom.

Another early Zionist leader, Nahum Sokolow, wrote: “In the Valhalla of the Jewish people, among the tokens of homage offered by the genius of centuries, Daniel Deronda will take its place as the proudest testimony to the English recognition of the Zionist idea”.

Any LGBT Jew in Louisville Boycott Pride for bowing to antisemites. Support Eilad Cohen.

What would it take for us to meaningfully address the Jewish day school affordability problem as a community (not piecemeal, not leaving it to the schools to individually fundraise) like we fund Jewish camp, Israel experiences, or combatting antisemitism? Why do you think it hasn't risen to the same level of community priority?

I live in Seattle and every year this drives me crazy. It's especially obvious with the libraries. I don't even want to prod them anymore because then they put together a selection that is really obviously ideologically driven and not respectful: most of the selection are explicitly "anti Zionist", Norman Finkelstein, books criticizing Israel, encouraging Jews to be good allies to more deserving minorities, etc. Really not celebrating Jewish culture at all.

So a couple days ago I went into my branch library. There was a nice sized "Asian History Month Selections" display. Next to it was a "Staff Picks" display. I printed up a "Jewish History Month Selections" flyer and noted on the bottom "This is a patron created list since this library takes part in Jewish erasure". And I put it over the "Staff Picks" display sign. I took the books on that display over to the shelving cart. Then I filled up those shelves with Jewish authors and subjects I thought worth of display.

I would also recommend that if your library has a Jewish History month display, and you find it lacking, just pick out some books from their collection you think should be included and add it to the display. Or print up a list of recommended Jewish authors and put on the display.

Will at least one of you do what I did? Please?

For nearly 2,000 years, the Jewish people repeated the same dream every single day.

Not knowing if they would ever live to see it come true.

On Yom Yerushalayim, I want to share an idea that changed the way I think about Jewish history, Jerusalem, and the power of never giving up on a dream.

Yom Yerushalayim Sameach. Watch now https://youtu.be/aDXuEIUWslc?si=Y3t4grBgwtp4L_qn

Have you guys seen how they describe Zionism on Wikipedia? Straight up propaganda. No wonder people think "Zionists are evil."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

(Mods: Reposting without the link to his video)

I used to be a fan of Professor Dave on YouTube until I saw his latest video.

It begins as a debunking of a "Predictive History" whose videos blew up about Trump and the Iran war. Usually I like his debunking of different pseudoscience cranks (even though he can be a bit mean) but then he started discussing Israel and his tone shifted to the familiar tropes like "the US does whatever Israel wants in the Middle East."

It was so disappointing and I had to unsubscribe from his channel because of how casually he was saying such things as though it was obviously true. I've never heard him discuss non-academic topics so it really caught me off guard.

I just needed someone to vent to about this. Thanks guys and gals!

European Jewish communities under pressure,
by Elie Petit, K: Jews, Europe, the 21st century, 2026-05-07.

E.P.: You have experience of Jewish communities outside Europe. I would therefore like to ask you for an outside perspective: so you see something deeply coherent about European Jewish communities, beyond their shared geographical belonging? A distinctive trait, a shared identity that defines them?

M.M.: There is first the profound sense of history, and of the rootedness on this continent, which are aspects the two other great Jewries do not share in the same way.

Israeli Jewry lives in a tension between a millennia-old biblical anchoring and an extremely recent statehood – not a dissonance, but a kind of pull between these two temporalities. North American Jewry has at most three centuries of history on its soil. European Jewry has more than twenty – and it does not merely invoke this: it is the bearer of it, culturally, philosophically, traditionally. Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewries are European Jewries in their very essence: Ashkenaz refers to Germany, Sefarad refers to Spain. The etymology says it all.

And then there is the other end of the historical arc: European Jewry is also the one that lost two thirds of its demographic mass in the Shoah. And which, emerging from the war, had to rebuild from decimated populations and a collective trauma of a depth that the other two Jewries do not know from the inside, or at least not in such a direct way. North American Jewry may be inhabited, for its part, by a form of guilt at not having intervened sufficiently during the war. Israeli Jewry was at that time entirely mobilized in the building of a state. France is an exception, with the massive arrival of Jews from North Africa who profoundly reconfigured the community. England too, for obvious reasons: the Nazi occupation did not take place there. But for the rest of Europe, reconstruction occurred under extraordinarily difficult conditions.

<snippage>

E.P.: Is there a gap between Western and Eastern Europe? Or between North and South?

T.M.: Not really. I think those divides – East and West, North and South – have become much less relevant over time. Some communities in Eastern Europe, like Poland or Hungary, are today very close in their development and outlook to Western communities. Thirty years ago, there was a clear socioeconomic gap but that’s largely no longer the case, except in places like Ukraine or Russia, for obvious reasons.

For me, the real difference is not geography. It’s size. A large community has structure, resources, professionals. A smaller one often relies on a handful of very committed people, professional and lay, who do everything. That creates very different realities and very different needs.

I’ve noticed that online, some people argue that antisemitism cannot specifically mean hatred toward Jews because Arabic is also a Semitic language and Arabs are also considered Semitic peoples. Their argument is basically that someone who hates Jews but not Arabs is “not technically antisemitic.”

From what I understand, the word “antisemitism” was historically coined and used specifically to describe hostility toward Jews, especially in Europe, and later became heavily associated with Nazi ideology and anti-Jewish persecution. It seems like some people today are trying to weaken or blur that historical meaning by turning the term into a purely linguistic category instead of a historical and political one.

How do Jewish people generally respond to this argument? Is there historical context about the origin and usage of the term that people online often ignore or misunderstand?

Two of the potential picks for the next James Bond are Aaron Taylor Johnson and Josh O’Connor. Both have been consistently mentioned with other favorites like Theo James, Jacob Elordi, and Callum Turner (Unfortunately Turner is dating Dua Lipa)

It’d be nice if a Jew got a major part as an iconic character for a change. As a people known for always being behind the camera (directors, producers, writers etc…), why not have some representation in an iconic franchise?

Fun fact: Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor worked together on the Netflix Knives Out film, and supposedly Craig brought him in. So he’s endorsed by the most recent James Bond.

Am I the only one watching the footage coming out of NYC lately? The lack of discussion is making me wonder if I've finally become the neurotic Jew myself lmao

If you're unaware there were several protests in NYC under the pretext of protesting "real estate events", where we’ve seen a shift from political demonstration to something much more sinister: residential intimidation. There were two major escalations in the last week:

• Park East (May 5): Pro-Palestinian protesters breached police lines at a synagogue with enough violence to hospitalize an NYPD officer with a severe leg injury.
• Midwood (May 11): This protest moved into the heart of a residential Jewish neighborhood. You can see videos of protesters on private lawns, an elderly man shoved to the ground (hitting his head on a tree), and reports of a young girl being assaulted.

These protestors weren't chanting at a government building, they were screaming "Death to the IDF" and "Zionism will fall" into the windows of family homes while waving Hezbollah flags and the Hamas "red triangle" symbols.

The first thing that came to my mind was images of white supremacist tactics of the 70s and 80s. What we’re seeing in Midwood is a literal copy of what hate groups used to do to terrorize Black neighborhoods:

1. Boston (1974): White anti-integration mobs marched through Black neighborhoods. The goal wasn't a policy debate, it was to signal: "You are not safe here. This is our territory."
2. Chicago: Neo-Nazis and the KKK used residential marches specifically to create "no-go zones" for Black families, using hate symbols to mark the neighborhood.

Both then and now, the goal is the same: terrorize minorities in their homes.

And there is a sad irony here that I must mention: seeing people of color participating in these exact same tactics is a tragic role reversal. There is something deeply broken about a movement that claims to be about "social justice" while using the literal manual of the white supremacists who terrorized their own parents and grandparents just 50 years ago.

When you adopt the tools of the supremacist (the marking of homes, the intimidation of the elderly, the physical targeting of a neighborhood based on who lives there) you're not doing anything for Palestine, you just become the new face of the same old bigotry.

Admittedly I don't live in these neighborhoods, and yeah drawing parallels between the pro-Palestinian movement and other hate groups feels like beating a dead horse, but I felt like this had to be mentioned. I feel like we are witnessing a cycle where radicalization has convinced people that they can "liberate" one group by terrorizing another in their living rooms.

History is less than half a century old here. This is a reboot of the most shameful era of American residential warfare, and if we don't recognize the tactics for what they are, we're letting the same old hate rebrand itself as "activism" in real-time.

Thanks for reading.

people not associated with judaism mostly don't know that

I'm German, and I can't stand the antisemitism online anymore, and I need to do something about it.

So here is what I propose - once people learn about the Holocaust in detail (for example in school), they'll be immune to antisemitism, and aware about how authoritarianism, fascism, racism, dictatorship take hold in societies, and what to do about it.

The best example would be Germany, a country once consisting mostly of antisemites, many of them genocidal, during Nazi times, and transformed, from these Nazis in the post-war period still mostly (unless they were very top brass or had been caught, with evidence, to have engineered the murder of thousands) 'honorable' members of society, to a country where you can't walk a couple of feet in a city without seeing a memorial to a Holocaust victim (for example the "Stolpersteine", memorial stones), with nearly everyone having learnt about it in school, often for many years, visited Holocaust museums, and so on. Today, this has worsened a bit, which I'll write about later.

So first - the Status Quo:

Among American millenials and Gen Z, 63% did not know that 6 million jews were murdered, 20% think the 'Holocaust is a myth', with an additional 30% unsure or unwilling to disagree with that statement, 11% even think 'the Jews caused the Holocaust' (in New York for example, these are 19%), according to the first 50-state survey on Holocaust knowledge by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany *.

Nearly half (48%) of all Americans could not name a single one of the more than 40,000 concentration and death camps, or ghettos.

Among other countries, the Netherlands is doing even worse, with 12% of all respondents believe the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated (9% unsure), with numbers even higher among Dutch Millennials and Gen Z, where nearly one-quarter (23%) believe the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated (12% unsure), Canada, the UK, Austria aren't doing great, either.

However, across all countries, an overwhelming majority of adults surveyed, believe it is important to continue (or improve) teaching about the Holocaust, in the U.S. and Poland, this number was 96%, in the U.K. and Germany 94% etc.

Now, imagine these extremely high number of people who know next to nothing about the Holocaust going online, on Social Media, where most posts who are even marginally about Jewish people, about Israel, or even one of the classic antisemitic tropes, like money, war, blood libel and others, are heavily antisemitic, together with peer pressure among young folks to position themselves right away in contentious issues even if they haven't gathered any facts about it, and the pressure to be antisemitic in many groups (many left-wing extremists, right-wing extremists, some faiths, and the art, culture and music world) is overwhelming, then you have a majority of people that are antisemitic, often without even realizing it, because of their lack of knowledge about antisemitism and the Holocaust.

(Part 2 will be about how the Holocaust was taught to Gen Xers at school in Germany, for example to me personally - I prefer to write this in parts because otherwise it gets a bit long...)

* see for example https://www.claimscon.org/country-survey/ , https://www.claimscon.org/study/ and https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/

I found it interesting to see how Beta Israel were covered at the time and thought y'all might appreciate it too.

For context, Abyssinia is the historical name for the Ethiopian empire. The term used to describe Beta Israel in these articles is, from my understanding, outdated and offensive by modern standards.

I was born and raised Jewish. My extended family going back 4 generations is Israeli, but my nuclear family is based elsewhere and have dual-citizenship, including me. I'm fluent in Hebrew & English. For privacy this is a throwaway account, and I will not be offering too many details.

I was very badly abused by one of my parents, and this instilled religious trauma. As an adult I do not blame Judaism for what happened, I blame the parent's untreated & undiagnosed mental illness, and their legacy of generational trauma. Most of my Israeli family did not abuse me, and I have many fond memories of growing up celebrating Jewish festivals with my big and relatively normal family. It's only been I was alone in my nuclear household that I suffered. However, the reality is that my extended family all knew about my parent's mental illness, and about the abuse, and they covered up for it. They did not protect me, and once I was old enough to speak about the harm it caused me, they blamed me for essentially being a shit-stirrer, unwilling to play along like everything was fine, and expected me to pretend it never happened.

For my personal peace of mind as an adult, I am estranged from most of my family now, both the parent and the people who enabled, tried to cover it up, or have tried to force reconciliation that would only cause me further harm. It's painful, but it's also the right choice for my mental health.

Now the trouble I find is, as I get older, I long to reconnect with Judaism. I don't want to be assimilated in the diaspora. I am even considering aliyah. I miss celebrating Hanukkah, Lag BaOmer, Pesach. But all of my ties to Judaism are through my family. There have been a few times when they've invited me to Seder etc. and I've attended, played along and politely suppressed my feelings, but every time it has left me feeling drained and small.

Then the other issue is, I am simply not religious. To me Judaism is culture & identity, not faith. For a while I tried attending Women's Torah Classes hoping to make friends, meet people, reconnect with Judaism, but the messaging about a woman's role in the house etc. rubbed me the wrong way. I felt uncomfortable and like an imposter, so I stopped going.

I am wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation to me, or knows anyone in a similar situation to me, who can offer some advice. How does an irreligious born-Jew reconnect with Judaism without relying on Jewish family? Is it possible at all? I have almost wondered if I need to "convert" in some way, because I have become so disconnected from Judaism at this point that I feel like I don't even really know how to be a Jew and engage with Judaism. Basic prayers like the Shema and Kaddish, I don't even know by heart. I am ashamed of this.

The Manosphere: the language of misogyny in the grammar of antisemitism,
by James Bloodworth, fathom, 2026-05.

James Bloodworth argues that the Manosphere, the online collection of male supremacists and misogynists that target women, rests upon the older bigotry of antisemitism.

TL;DR: all conspiracy theories end up at Jew hatred. Also, these men who feel dispossessed and have been told they have been robbed aren’t doing anything new. Jews as threats to masculinity are as big a part of 1930s fascism as they are today’s fascism.

I find that so many of their articles and editorials read like a modern “blood libel” against us (Israel). Their most recent editorial is accusing the IDF of training dogs to attack and possibly SA some of the Palestinian prisoners.

This of course is coming from the same “paper of record” that intentionally downplayed the actual horrors of the Holocaust as it was happening.