NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s bogus threat against Israel’s prime minister revealed something essential about his political career — and even more about his sycophants. When Mamdani promised to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu should he set foot in the United States, only to admit that this would be both impossible and illegal just days later, his fan club did not blink, much less assess whether he was prone to reckless, false claims. They simply moved on.

That indifferent reaction is the point: Mamdani’s followers are not impressed by truth or history.

A fact-free mob is dangerous, often more likely to justify violence than to condemn it. One can expect that they will respond to his new call for “protest” by conducting themselves like those described on CNN as “mostly peaceful” while stores burned in the background. As NYPD Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry put it, “violent agitators will assume they have permission to cause as much havoc as possible.” Already, a deranged man yelling Allahu Akbar attacked bystanders (including a Jew coming from prayers) in NYC just days after Mamdani’s racist tirade.

And Mamdani must have known he was inciting his crowd. He gave them not only permission but pretense, stating as fact that Netanyahu was a “war criminal,” deserving of a violent welcome. He claimed that Israel’s rescue of hostages being tortured, starved and raped, and the elimination of the terrorists responsible, constituted a “genocide.”

He wants us to imagine that it’s simply coincidence that the victims whose rescue he condemned were primarily Jews. Surely he would deny being the monster and sexual deviant that such condemnation makes him out to be.

But, crucially, his entire effort is based upon such obvious lies. Equating the neutralization of terrorists to murder of civilians is the least of his problems.

That honor goes to the underlying narrative of “Palestine,” which Mamdani and his followers defend with fervor and without curiosity.

The Bible refers to Israel thousands of times as both a nation and a homeland. “Palestine,” on the other hand, was invented by Greco-Roman colonialists, and instituted by Hadrian to replace the indigenous name Judea, identified with the Jews he was driving out.

The “Palestinian” flag flown at rallies is derived from that of the Arab Revolt of 1916, representing no new identity, but the Jihadists’ dream of a unified Arab kingdom from Syria to Yemen. Old administrative maps of the British Mandate, and similar bureaucratic charts dating back hundreds of years, are exploited to rewrite the historical record of the land they depict.

The history of the region called Palestine is real — and overwhelmingly Jewish. It produced the Palestinian Talmud (also called the Jerusalem Talmud) and the Palestinian Gaonate.

The four central cities of Jewish scholarship — Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias — fundraised together for centuries as “the Four Holy Cities of Palestine.” Maimonides, Rabbi Yosef Karo, the Ari, and Rabbi Moshe Cordovero all lived and taught there. Safed alone produced a revolution in Jewish mysticism.

None of the foregoing related to “Palestine” as anything more than the name used by Greco-Roman and Christian scholars. And notably, there is no parallel Arab or Muslim, much less “Palestinian,” intellectual tradition tied to the region, until Arafat’s PLO determined that manufacturing one would serve their bigoted cause.

In other words, the modern Palestinian national narrative is a mid-20th-century political fiction, built upon the erasure of two millennia of Jewish history and the denial of the land’s holy status to Jews as their homeland and center of Jewish religious practice. That is not a judgment about any individual Arab or Muslim, much less “Islamophobia.” It is simply historical fact.

Thus it is fair and accurate to describe Mamdani’s followers as indifferent to the truth. The tragedy is not that Mamdani is so wrong, so malevolent, and so clearly adversarial towards American values, but that his followers have lost the ability to care.

That is why his reelection isn’t just plausible, but likely — at least until New Yorkers recognize that following in the historical footsteps of Berlin and Moscow is a truly bad idea.

Photo: Zohran Mamdani Speaking at a DSA 101 Meeting at the Church of the Village in NYC by Bingjiefu He, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are moments when you leave a gathering feeling not simply encouraged, but genuinely inspired. Less than three years after the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and amid a worldwide resurgence of antisemitism, attending Christians United for Israel’s annual conference was one of those moments. This is not simply because CUFI is home to millions of admirers and supporters of the beleaguered Jewish community, but because of the courage found among them.

When antisemitism is surging around the globe, Jewish students are harassed on college campuses, and synagogues require heightened security, the easy course is to keep one’s distance. Some would even call that prudent. CUFI celebrates those who do just the opposite, who lean in against those who threaten us. CUFI’s founder and creator, Pastor John Hagee, put it this way: “If a line has to be drawn, draw it around Christians and Jews. We are united.”

In the federal FACE Act case born from the mob that blocked access in November 2024 to a synagogue in West Orange, N.J., the defendants are asking the courts to abandon the constitutional protections of religious freedom that make America great, while disregarding Jewish law, prayer and lived experience. One could hardly seek better proof that the defendants in this instance discarded both the law and America’s founding principles in their pursuit of antisemitic bigotry.

The legislation was initially designed to protect people entering abortion clinics from being harassed; eventually, it was expanded to apply to the entrances to houses of worship.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation New Jersey, American Muslims for Palestine New Jersey and numerous individual defendants all outrageously insist that the synagogue event they disrupted—one that memorialized a murdered Israeli rabbi and encouraged Jewish life in Israel—was not religious at all. They arrogate for themselves the right to decide what Judaism is, what Jews believe and which parts of Jewish life count as religious. That is not a legal defense, but an act of erasure, as antisemitic as it is unconstitutional.

The court filings could hardly make their intent and animus more blatant. One defendant asserts therein that encouraging Jews to live in the Holy Land “could not plausibly be interpreted” as a religious activity. Another compares such a real estate fair to “bingo night in a church basement.” A third faults the government for failing to prove, from Jewish law, that it’s a mitzvah (“commandment”) for Jews to live in the land of Israel, as if U.S. attorneys should be expected to research Jewish sources to establish basic Jewish tenets.

All of these attempt to force the courts into unconstitutional entanglement with religious doctrine, while denying and distorting obvious Jewish beliefs.

The First Amendment, to be certain, forbids the courts from wading into this argument; they cannot be called upon to determine what is or is not a Jewish religious activity. American courts cannot claim expertise in the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel, the relevant mitzvot (“biblical commandments”) or how they apply today.

At the same time, the defendants’ attitude is so obviously at odds with Jewish belief and so dismissive of the Jewish experience as to prove antisemitic bias. The desire to live on holy ground is a theme that saturates Jewish prayer, holy texts and halachah (“Jewish law”). Antisemitism does not only target Jews as individuals, but Judaism as a religion, and the defense filings openly express that the defendants share this familiar and repugnant hostility.

To claim that a synagogue event about land in Israel is “not religious” requires, first of all, that one deny the mitzvah of yishuv ha’aretz, “settling the land,” affirmed by the Ramban and rooted in Torah. It demands nullification of the pleas for rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple, restoration of the Davidic Kingdom and return of the Divine Presence that are at the core of every Jewish prayer service, every day of the year.

And, of course, it erases religious expression by Jews. Whether those making aliyah come from the United States, France, Ethiopia, Ukraine, Argentina or anywhere else, political Zionism is rarely even a secondary concern. The overwhelming majority move either to escape Jew-hatred or to fulfill numerous religious commandments, including living in the Land of Israel and participating in its rebuilding. Maimonides, Rav Ovadiah of Bartenura, Rav Yosef Karo, in addition to the hundreds of students of the Vilna Gaon and Ba’al Shem Tov who moved to the Land of Israel, all did so exclusively as an expression of their Jewish religious beliefs.

Most fundamentally, to insist that their motivations are “not religious” is to tell the Jews targeted at Congregation Ohr Torah that their own lives, fears, hopes, beliefs and commitments do not matter. That is not a defense. It is an expression of transparent—and transparently hateful—disregard for Jewish humanity.

The FACE Act protects all forms of religious exercise, not only ritual. Congress enacted it to protect houses of worship and religious communities from intimidation and obstruction. This protection is not limited to prayer services, but encompasses the full spectrum of religious life, including gatherings that express, celebrate or advance a community’s religious identity. A synagogue event discussing Jewish life in Israel is unquestionably part of that spectrum.

If a court accepted the defendants’ framing, that would set a chilling precedent. Jewish prayer would be protected, but attempts to realize the commitments expressed in those prayers would not. That would hamper Jewish religious liberty no less than attacks on circumcision or kosher meat. It would have the courts annul the parts of Judaism that anti‑Israel activists find inconvenient.

The defendants’ argument is unconstitutional because it asks the court to define Judaism, and antisemitic because it expressly denies both Judaism’s own self‑definition and the religious beliefs of the targeted Jews. In other words, the defendants want the courts to declare their activities not to be hateful or bigoted, precisely because they are.

This is dangerous not only for Jews who seek to fulfill mitzvot, but for all Americans who share the reverence of the country’s Founding Fathers for religious freedom and tolerance.

Consider that without those principles, Pilgrims in Massachusetts, Mennonites in Pennsylvania and Anglicans in Virginia could not have united to build the world’s dominant superpower. The defendants have thus proven both their guilt and their hostility towards Judaism, Jewish life and the values that make America great.

By the time Tucker Carlson trashed the Book of Esther, describing the source of the Jewish festival of Purim, it was already Passover. But timing was the least of his errors, and since he took it upon himself to rewrite Scripture and misinform the masses, those who revere the Holy Bible must now take a stand for God and his Word.

Carlson told his listeners that the Book of Esther was “controversial,” that the Book describes: A Genocide of Persians. Oh yeah, 75,000 Persians… Not just people who committed crimes but people who were Persian, and that’s why they were killed.

I would suggest that such a grievous misreading requires not only a “low IQ,” as President Trump recently put it, but a mind burdened by hate. Call it “Jew Derangement Syndrome.” And far from being an affliction limited to Carlson and a few others, this particular mental illness afflicts the multitudes claiming Israel committed a “genocide” in Gaza, rather than Persia. And that is why it is so crucial that those who wish to learn from the Bible, rather than rewrite it to serve their own bigoted interests, emphatically correct the record.

The account in the Book of Esther is quite the opposite of Carlson’s. There was indeed a planned genocide, but of the Jews, architected by the evil Haman. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, King Ahasuerus was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves.

The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

Perhaps Carlson’s greatest offense was to claim that the mob was targeted because they were Persian. “That’s why they were killed,” he said. Scripture could not be more clear; those killed were “of those who hated them,” says Esther 9:16. They came from all 127 nationalities of the empire; their unifying characteristic was murderous hatred for Jews.

The obvious motivation for this inversion, misportraying a genocidal band of antisemites as innocent victims of Jewish bigotry, is that Carlson shares their same hate. Allowing Jews to defend themselves is what he terms “genocide.” By telling a lie so obvious, Carlson exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people.

The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability and hateful motivations of those that launched the attack is ignored. Context is ignored, in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain.

This is just as obvious in media reports relying upon the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry as it is in Carlson’s dystopian version of Esther. This type of inversion is found not only in the charge of genocide, but also in the details. For example, it is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit war crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To offer a specific illustration, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, outlets from the BBC to NPR to CNN reported the “outrage” that Israel bombed a “hospital” and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

The Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune—the oppressed rising up against their would‐be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter. And that is the account found in the most published Book on earth.

Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, tells us how dangerous misinformation can be, especially when motivated by hate.

Newscasters can reverse victims and villains. Pundits can invert the moral order of a story. And podcasters can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers both modern lessons, and an obligation to stand up in its defense.

When Tucker Carlson described the Book of Esther as celebrating a “genocide of Persians,” he did the world a favor. Not because his perspective was correct or well-informed, but just the opposite. His obvious lie, so clearly detached from reality, unwittingly revealed the true nature of the more contemporary charges of genocide leveled at the same People of Israel.

The Book of Esther offers no possibility for error regarding who was responsible for the violence. It tells us that Haman convinced the Persian king, whose empire stretched to the very limits of the civilized world, to issue a decree seeking annihilation of the Jews. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, the king was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves. The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

The text emphasizes this in the same verse that tells us that 75,000 were killed (Esther 9:16). It tells us that, contrary to Carlson’s delusional retelling, the dead were neither Persians nor members of any one nation or faith. Instead, the casualties are described as “from those who hated them.” Their one unifying characteristic was that they had come out to kill Jews.

Yet in Carlson’s twisted version, all of this context was erased. The initiating threat vanished. The murderous mob disappeared. All that remained was a single statistic reframed as evidence of Jewish aggression, self-defense recast as “genocide.” Carlson only found the Book of Esther “controversial” after he had deprived the sacred text of both meaning and value.

This was no innocent misreading of the Bible. On the contrary, it exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people. The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability of those that launched the attack is ignored. The mechanism is simple: remove chronology, agency, and intent. Reduce everything to a single, emotionally charged statistic, and then use that casualty figure to invert reality.

And that brings us to the recent conflict in Gaza.

Here, too, numbers were presented without the events that produced them. The initiating attack was omitted, along with the stated intent of the attacking party. The distinction between targeting civilians and combatants was blurred or erased. And what remained was a false narrative in which the party responding to violence was portrayed as the aggressor, while the party that initiated the violence was treated as a passive backdrop.

To be clear, the parallel is not between Esther and Gaza as historical events, but between the use of the same rhetorical mechanism to distort them. In both cases, context is erased in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain. Numbers alone determine guilt, while history is deemed irrelevant.

Reality, of course, does not work that way, but all too many political and media figures routinely partner with Haman’s ideological descendants to demonize Jews.

It is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Moreover, once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit such crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To take a specific example, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, CNN reported upon the “outrage” that Israel bombed a hospital and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

The Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune-the oppressed rising up against their would‑be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter.

When Carlson stripped away that context, he was not offering a “new interpretation” but a grotesque distortion. He took a story of self‑defense and deliverance and turned it into a false tale of aggression.

The lesson of Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, is not that numbers are irrelevant, but that numbers without context are dangerous. They can reverse victims and villains. They can invert the moral order of a story. And they can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers practical lessons as applicable today as at any time in the past.

Image Credit: Book of Esther by Anita Gould with CC BY-NC 2.0 license on Flickr

As both President of Princeton University and the immediate past Chair of the Association of American Universities Board of Directors, Chris Eisgruber has a powerful voice in the academic world. And at least thus far, Princeton has been only a minor target of government investigations of antisemitism.

This has positioned Eisgruber to lead the pushback from university administrators and faculty against demands from the Trump Administration and Congress that they do more to combat Jew-hatred if they wish further federal funding. And he is guiding America’s most elite educational institutions along a predictable path to failure.

Princeton historically prided itself on excellence, and shaped my understanding of political movements, public policy, and technology in ways that influence my work every day.

This is why I find Eisgruber’s monotonous drumbeat of cries for “academic freedom” so disappointing.

Academic freedom is valuable when it enables pursuit of truth, not as cover for bigotry. The ability to spout hate does not obligate the American taxpayer to support it. Stripped of high-sounding verbiage, Eisgruber is advocating for the “right” of antisemites to inculcate hatred in America’s future leaders, free from the pesky burdens of America’s civil rights laws.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits an institution receiving federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

The Trump Administration clarified that Jews do not lose this protection for also sharing religious practices. A university that supports denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, characterizing Zionism as a racist endeavor, or otherwise judging Israel by arbitrary standards applied nowhere else, is rightly ineligible for government funding.

It is that simple.

History provides a sobering precedent.

Germany stood at the pinnacle of academia for nearly two centuries. But then, even before but especially after the First World War, ancient and pernicious hatred rebranded itself as a meritorious academic discipline: “Anti-Semitism.” This gave Hitler’s genocidal evil an intellectual veneer; half of the architects of his Final Solution held doctorates from Germany’s, and the world’s, finest schools.

When the Nazis purged Jews from government positions and universities in 1933, they cast prejudice as beneficial, calling their edict the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”

The truth was precisely the opposite: the brain drain of scholars like Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Lise Meitner permanently ended Germany’s status as the global leader in scientific research. German universities ruined their own reputation by prioritizing bigotry over scholarship.

The parallel is obvious.

Today America’s elite universities demand “academic freedom” to teach “Anti-Zionism” instead. And the brain drain is already happening, on Eisgruber’s watch and under his nose.

When Princeton joins other leading schools putting antisemitic mythology on the curriculum, giving tenure to hateful professors, and supporting student organizations that back Hamas terrorism against Jews, Jewish students rightly choose to go elsewhere.

American academia suffers the consequences.

Today we are seeing hesitation in the face of harassment, equivocation where there should be enforcement. Formerly elite universities, in and beyond the Ivy League, now substitute antisemitic indoctrination for anthropology, archaeology, history, religion, sociology, and a host of other academic disciplines.

To claim that this comports with the reputed priorities of the Ivy League is laughable.

If academic freedom means tolerance for anti-Jewish discrimination, its schools will follow Germany’s in reputation and authority. Yet learned professors obfuscate, blaming government control rather than hatred for Germany’s lost academic prowess.

They have it backwards.

The Nazis put university-grown hatred into practice; President Trump and Congress are fighting to save American academia from that same bigotry. Their demands are as simple as they are morally proper: enforce Title VI. Protect Jewish students as they would any other group. Draw the line between free expression and harassment. And ensure compliance with the law that is a core prerequisite of federal funding.

As an alumnus, I am not condemning the university, but “speaking up,” in the words of its recent campaign, for what it is supposed to represent. The Ivy League should be leading the way in upholding civil rights, rather than fighting against what is both necessary and right.

Princeton University Graduate College by Zeete, via Wikimedia Commons with CC BY-SA 4.0

As we prepared this piece for submission, Israelis were repeatedly forced to seek shelter, while gunmen attacked Jews in both Israel and the United States. We pray for all of our safety.

We also find it particularly distressing to discuss attacks upon the layout and usage of the Western Wall prayer area, which was recently closed due to missile threats, at this time. Yet even with Israel at war, American Reform leaders and allies are delivering speeches and interviews warning of “radicals” in Israel who wish to uphold traditional practice at the Western Wall. At a moment when Israel faces immediate and existential danger, this is more than a needless distraction.

Efforts to alter the character of the Kotel rest upon the false premise that there are millions of Jews, primarily in the Diaspora, whose support for Israel will wane if longstanding Jewish tradition is not abandoned. But portraying sincere Jewish religious expression as hostile to Israel’s future perfectly inverts reality. Right now, we need more prayer, not challenges to Jewish tradition outlining how prayer is appropriately done.

The Western Wall is not a civic square or public park. It is the last accessible remnant of the Beit HaMikdash (Holy Temple) and the spiritual center of Jewish memory for nearly two millennia. Ever since Israel gained control of the site in 1967, restoring religious freedom to Jews and all others, prayer arrangements at the wall have been conducted according to halachic (Jewish legal) practice.

How this came to be, and why there is a dignified and welcoming plaza there at all, is no mystery. Construction was not driven by political horse trading in the Knesset, nor was the plaza the brainchild of a functionary in the Religious Services Ministry. People voted with their feet, coming to pray there every day, rain or shine, throughout the year – and the space was built to serve them.

No matter how meaningful other uses may be, the primary purpose of the Western Wall site is not to be an archaeological garden or a place to swear in new IDF soldiers, but to be a sanctuary for heartfelt prayer and devotion.

This framework has been maintained by Israeli governments of the Left, the Center, and the Right. And thus, the Knesset initiatives under discussion do not introduce a new religious order at the wall. Neither do they submit the plaza to extreme or arbitrary standards, as Reform leaders claim. And to portray them as a plan to imprison Jews for prayer, as some have done, is simply beyond the pale of rational discourse. To the contrary, the proposed legislation responds to threats by progressive activists against the very things that make the Western Wall plaza appealing to those anxious to pray there.

It is hardly a secret that Women of the Wall and its American financiers never intended to add to the sanctity of the place. Its leaders openly declared their intent to disrupt the prayers of others, and they bring “a folding table and a megaphone,” not to mention a media entourage, to their every “service.” There is no natural, organic support for their operation; it is not spiritual, but political.

The claim that “millions” are being disenfranchised is thus one that obfuscates rather than clarifies. Jewish life today is extraordinarily diverse, and no movement can credibly claim to speak for the entire Jewish people. But there are no millions occupying seats in today’s Reform and Conservative congregations even on the High Holy Days, much less on a daily or weekly basis. And it is obvious that Jews who rarely engage in Jewish prayer in their hometowns are not deeply troubled by how prayers are conducted by Jews in Israel.

Furthermore, the current division of the Western Wall is nearly sixty years old, and was preceded by another eighteen years during which no Jew was permitted to pray there. Given that most living Jews never experienced anything different, it is specious at best to assert that prayer practices at the wall might explain why younger Jews are joining anti-Israel rallies. Most of them have never set foot in Israel, and could not point to the Western Wall on a map.

There is, of course, one segment of the Jewish community that has only increased its attachment to Israel, and this is reflected in the current composition of the World Zionist Congress, despite entire segments of the Orthodox and Hasidic communities who would not vote in its elections, yet pray at the Western Wall frequently.

For many years, Reform and Conservative leaders, in alliance with left-wing Israeli parties, exercised dominant influence within Zionist institutions. Today, this has been reversed, despite deliberate attempts to minimize the Orthodox vote. Israel would be ill-advised to take steps that only offend the sensibilities and religious precepts of its most ardent supporters.

A site of unmatched holiness should not be subject to political maneuvering, especially at a time when prayers are so clearly needed. The administration of the Western Wall should remain responsive to public demand. This is determined by foot traffic, not PR statements. And the consistent, ongoing disuse of the Ezrat Yisrael section, the “Egalitarian Kotel” created by then-Religious Affairs minister Naftali Bennett in 2013, offers silent testimony (pun intended) to the utter lack of interest in change.

The Kotel carries profound meaning for Jews of every background. That shared attachment should encourage thoughtful and honest debate. Instead, increasingly dramatic claims portray policy disagreements as existential threats and preservation of halachic norms as religious persecution.

The Jewish people have always been capable of serious disagreement about sacred space. But those disagreements should be conducted with accuracy, proportion, and respect for the democratic and institutional frameworks through which decisions about Israel’s most sacred national sites are made – especially at a moment when Israel faces grave external threats, and the Jewish world seeks unity and clarity.

Cover Image: View of an Ancient City by Leon Natan, Accessed via Pexels with CC0 Deed

This year, the annual “All Peoples Celebration” run by Alliance San Diego (ASD) had a glaring omission: A Jewish religious leader was disinvited, due to his support for Zionism.

ASD decided that Rabbi Hanan Leberman was unfit for participation among “people of all faiths and traditions,” and that to exclude him was the best way to “embody and practice the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Dr. King must be rotating in his grave: If MLK celebrations become spaces where Jews must hide their connection to Israel in order to belong, then his legacy has been lost.

For at least the last 75 years, Zionism has been neither a dream nor a political movement. It has, rather, represented support for Jewish life in the Jewish indigenous homeland.

It is not an ideology expressed in the speeches of Theodor Herzl or the essays of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky; rather, it reflects the fervent prayers of Jews for nearly two millennia: “May our eyes behold Your [God’s] return to Zion.”

There are two primary reasons that Jews move to Israel today: To escape bigotry and persecution elsewhere, and as an expression of Jewish belief. Demanding that Jews reject that belief in order to be welcome at a civil rights celebration is thus not neutrality. It is deliberate exclusion of Jews.

This is something Dr. King knew well; he was not neutral on Zionism. He viewed it as a natural expression of civil and human rights for all.

He spoke warmly of Israel, affirmed its right to exist in peace, and rejected efforts to single out the Jewish state for condemnation. When confronted by a young black student who condemned Zionism, King responded sharply: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking about antisemitism.”

For King, Zionism was a moral cause rooted in history, survival, and dignity. He understood the Jewish longing for a homeland through the same moral lens that shaped his own struggle: A people’s right to live freely and securely.

Excluding a Jewish leader because he supports Zionism is therefore not a minor scheduling decision. It is abandonment of King’s own moral compass.

Dr. King did not build coalitions by demanding that partners abandon their deepest convictions. He built them by insisting on mutual recognition and moral consistency. His vision of solidarity was expansive. It did not flatten differences. It honored them.

King’s bond with the Jewish community was a true partnership. Jewish leaders marched beside him, and supported the civil rights movement at real personal risk. King drew inspiration from the Hebrew prophets, and saw the Jewish story as intertwined with America’s moral journey.

That history matters.

The “All Peoples Celebration” was organized to involve all and promote unity. Its language is inclusive. Most people involved, we can presume, genuinely want to build bridges. But “unity” that requires that a community reject core elements of its identity is not unity. It is exclusion.

When organizations invoke King’s name while sidelining Jews for holding views King himself affirmed, “inclusion” becomes selective. Belonging becomes conditional. Some are welcome only if they reject fundamental parts of their identity.

At the very least, organizers chose to bow to those who demanded the exclusion of a Jew who affirmed a core Jewish belief. But as Dr. King himself taught, real unity requires courage. It requires the willingness to affirm that different histories, traumas, and hopes can coexist in the same civic space.

King did not ask America to erase differences. He asked it to elevate character, dignity and justice above fear. He believed truth, even when uncomfortable, was the only path to reconciliation.

MLK Day remembrances should embody that principle.

The civil rights movement was never about enforcing a new orthodoxy, much less rejecting one form of bigotry in favor of another. It was about expanding the circle of moral concern to encompass all.

Honoring King in today’s world means resisting the temptation to narrow that circle.

It means remembering that he stood with Jews when it was easier not to. It means acknowledging that Zionism, at its core, is an expression of human dignity. It means recognizing that inclusion is not real if it is conditional.

Dr. King dreamed of a nation where no one would be asked to apologize for their identity in order to belong. The most fitting way to honor him is to ensure that his legacy remains broad enough to include everyone he stood for, including the Jewish people and their right to a home.

Cover Image: Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site by National Parks, accessed via Flickr with CC BY 2.0 license.

Sometimes it is best to put things simply: Eduardo Martinez, mayor of Richmond, CA, is a Jew-hating bigot unfit to serve in any official position.

Were his hatred against any other minority group, he would have been expelled long ago. But because he hates Jews, other elected officials are wringing their hands.

Martinez recently shared a collection of material blaming Jews for being massacred while celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

The posts included claims that it was a “false flag attack,” part of a “history” of attacks secretly done by Israel’s “paid actors” in order “to manufacture fear and hate.”

Another said that celebrating Hanukkah on a public beach itself involves “performative assertions of dominance.” Yet another blamed Jews for 9/11.

At The Forward, however, schooling in the Orthodox Jewish world, like anything Orthodox, remains a bugbear of choice, even when there is no real story behind a censorious headline. It recently took a serious review of a tendentious film and slapped it with a title that’s pejorative and assumes the conclusion, to misportray one of Jewish education’s shining successes as not merely mundane, but a failure.

If the title of the article, “A new documentary shows what it looks like when Hasidic education fails,” wasn’t bad enough, the page title on their website was far less subtle, declaring that “Hasidic education fails children.”

The propaganda piece to which The Forward refers, however, was devoid of evidence that Chassidic education is failing anyone, much less that it “fails children” overall. Let’s be clear: By every relevant statistic, Chassidic education is markedly superior to anything offered in New York City public schools, and The Forward, like the filmmaker, simply did its level best to obfuscate the truth.

I spoke to the reporter, Jon Kalish, at some length, and the story he told was considerably more balanced than the documentary itself, to say nothing of the title The Forward attached to his work.

He recounts the filmmaker’s discussions with a woman with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and psychology and another with a doctorate in English, both former members of the Chassidic community. The most ardent secularist would hardly call a high school graduate able to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, much less a Ph.D., an educational failure.

Kalish also noted that although Naftuli Moster, who founded the group Young Advocates for Fair Education (Yaffed), makes frequent appearances throughout the film as an advocate for changes to yeshivah education, Moster now concedes his approach was misguided. He even acknowledged to Kalish that the Chassidic community “is thriving despite the chaos and dysfunction surrounding us.” Needless to say, the documentary did not share Moster’s frank assessment of the community’s success.

What is most striking, though, is that neither the filmmaker, nor the reporter, nor his editors questioned the false assumption at the film’s heart. A good education is not measured by arbitrary bureaucratic assumptions, but by clear and inarguable indicators of adult success: The ability to hold a job, earn a good and stable income, avoid crime, nourish intellectual interests, demonstrate good study habits and cultivate critical thinking. Yeshivah graduates outperform in each and every one of these areas.

Yeshivahs also teach other skills that produce a happier outcome for students and society, yet remain sadly neglected in American public education. George Washington, Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., all believed, for example, that education should nurture virtue and character, core elements of the yeshivah curriculum.

How to build and maintain a marriage, too, is taught in yeshivahs but not the public schools, despite mountainous evidence of the personal and societal benefits of providing a loving two-parent household to the next generation. Yeshivah students not only learn far more about legal proceedings and transactions, but they also learn the importance of being law-abiding citizens.

One of the best ways to authenticate a falsehood, however, is through accurate but irrelevant statistics. Thus, the film, like anti-yeshivah advocates, paid great attention to the poverty line, a somewhat arbitrary number that swells with family size, but not to income, as the figure that actually correlates with educational success.

On this basis, it misportrayed Chassidic Jews as hapless victims, denied the education they need to support themselves, and not so subtly belittled them for having more children. Though Hasidic neighborhoods are hardly the slums that the word “poverty” implies.

A skewed agenda was obvious throughout. On screen, a supposedly learned professor bemoaned that defenders of Chassidic education had failed to address the criticisms found in The New York Times, instead simply calling the paper antisemitic. As the author of a piece that addressed the Gray Lady’s lies and distortions, I know that his assertion was robustly false; it was the professor himself who ignored inconvenient evidence.

While I certainly highlighted the antisemitic tropes behind the caricature of Chassidim as foreign, money-grubbing, incapable of independent decision-making and worthy of the hatred directed against them, I also detailed how the Times had twisted reality.

For example, it claimed that yeshivahs were “flush with public money” by misrepresenting school bussing, COVID relief and school lunch funding as if they were pilfered from the public till. All of these government programs are or were offered universally, and were acclaimed by the Times and most New Yorkers, until the recipients were Chassidic Jewish schoolchildren.

Only willful blindness could explain a failure to perceive antisemitic bias in that shift. In actuality, parents sending their children to Jewish schools save the public nearly $3 billion a year in New York City alone.

Simply by putting a different title upon the writer’s work, The Forward could have offered a more dispassionate look at a biased film. By asking a few more critical questions, the reporter could have penetrated beyond the one-sided interviews and selected answers.

Ultimately, by conducting interviews with people on both sides of the question, the film could have offered a detailed and balanced assessment of reality worthy of being termed a documentary. All of these, of course, are valid critiques even before considering the abysmal state of New York’s public schools.

There were, indeed, profound failures throughout the process, but none pertained to Chassidic education. The Forward, like the filmmaker, owes an apology to the schools, to the parents and to their readers and viewers. This is especially true at a time when their defamatory portrayal offers antisemites a convenient pretense to rationalize bigotry and hatred against the Jewish community.

Image credit: A school bus for a yeshivah in New York. Oleg Yunakov via Wikimedia Commons.