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Saturday, October 10, 2026

10/09 Links Pt2: An Abusable Past; Mamdani spit on the graves of October 7 victims; Rabbi Soloveichik on "Fauda" and the Jewish Return to History

From Ian:

Allan Arkush: An Abusable Past
Anti-Zionism has been around almost as long as Zionism and has a respectable Jewish pedigree. When Zionists deny this and decry today’s Jewish anti-Zionists as self-hating Jews or even antisemites, those under attack can point, with some justification, to history. But usually they go further and return the insult. It is the Zionists, they say, who are tainted by antisemitism. It’s bad enough when such distortions are the stuff of sloganeering. It’s worse when they appear in books that educated people take seriously.

One such book is Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which The New York Times’s reviewer called a “terrific . . . authoritative history.”Despite her book’s subtitle, Crabapple is almost as interested in telling a story about the nefarious history of Zionism as she is about the noble history of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland. Another that has just appeared and that seems destined to get a lot of attention is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a book pervaded by hatred of Zionism. Both books depict Zionism as a Jewish form of racism, not only resembling Gentile racism but in cahoots with it. Both not only use history for political purposes, but abuse it.

Molly Crabapple never met her remarkable great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, but he opened a portal to an entrancing Jewish past of which she had known very little. A post-Impressionist painter of the lost world of the shtetl, he had been a Bundist activist before he came to America. Intrigued by his reference in one of his manuscripts to an Eastern European Jewish “underground,” Crabapple discovered the Bund (officially, the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), the Jewish socialist movement founded in 1897. It was a lost Jewish world that gave her something that she never got from the synagogue or Israel. Its heroes became her heroes, whose graves (some of which are located, due to the vicissitudes of history, in and around New York) she continues to visit.

The Bund, founded in the same year as the World Zionist Organization, was the product of Jewish Marxists, who promoted not emigration but revolution as the solution to Russia’s Jewish problem. But unlike the more famous Russian Jewish communists, such as Trotsky, the Bund leaders believed that the Jews had the right and the need to take part in the revolutionary movement not as mere proletarians but as a separate (nonterritorial) national group. The Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov called them seasick Zionists and tried to win them over to ideological orthodoxy.

In the eyes of the tsarist regime, the Bund was a subversive force that had to be uprooted. But it managed to survive government persecution while maintaining its independence as a distinct revolutionary movement, until the tsar fell. What the Bund couldn’t survive was the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in the Soviet Union. In independent Poland, however, between the world wars, the Bund had its heyday, and in its later resistance to the Nazis it made an unforgettable mark, before being all but completely extinguished.

The Bundists were, as Crabapple reminds us, admirable, often heroic, idealists. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s leading ideologue, was born into a family of opportunistic converts and raised as a Christian, “yet turned his back on a posh upbringing to devote his life to a small and persecuted people,” at great personal cost. Tiny Anna Lipshitz, whose older sister had been tortured to death by the police, was only twenty-two years old in 1905 but already the movement’s best orator. Dispatched to Odessa to inspire revolutionary activists there, she was nicknamed “the Fury” by local newspapers. One of the characters in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, identified by the script only as “a Bundist,” apparently represents her.

In the revolutionary year of 1917, the Bund fought for the preservation of the nascent Russian democracy but was helpless in the face of the Bolshevik onslaught in October, which one of its leaders, Henryk Erlich, described as a “monstrous calamity.” Erlich soon moved to Poland, where he became one of the leaders of the now legal Bund, which ran for elections to both the Polish Parliament (where it never won a seat), and within the country’s Jewish communities, where it sometimes did well. On the subpolitical level, the Bund set up economic cooperatives, day care centers, sanitariums, sports clubs, libraries, and schools. Crabapple writes: “In the words of Victor Gilinsky, son of Bundist leader Shloyme Gilinsky, “[t]he Bund was your union, your education and your church.”

But it also fought for you. One of the Bundists to whom Crabapple devotes the most attention was not a political leader or a social activist but Bernard Goldstein, a leader of its battle squads, which saw action first against the Jewish communists, the Bund’s bitter enemies in peacetime, and eventually, in wartime, against the Nazis. The communists were so enraged by Goldstein’s activities that they passed a death sentence on him. After one of them tried to assassinate him outside of his apartment, “Bernard shot back, wounding the communist, who left a trail of blood across the pavement. When the cops showed up, Bernard refused to reveal the identity of his attacker.” In the Warsaw Ghetto, after he was smuggled out (because he was too hard to conceal), Goldstein’s disciple Marek Edelman led the Bundist fighters. Both men miraculously survived the war. Goldstein despaired of a decent future for anyone in a communist Poland and moved to the Bronx, where he became “an honorary grandfather to his comrades’ children,” while Edelman become a cardiologist and eventually a leader of Solidarity in Poland.
Better the Devil You Can See By Abe Greenwald
Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
Which is why I like when my enemies come out of hiding and make themselves known. So two days ago, I found myself strangely satisfied by Zohran Mamdani’s October 7 denunciation of Israeli “genocide,” his statement of solidarity with its victims, and his dinner at an obsessively anti-Semitic Palestinian restaurant in New York.

Critics of Mamdani’s daylong stunt suggested that he “should have read the room,” released a statement of sympathy for victims of Hamas’s massacre, and just let the Jews grieve for one day. Or if he couldn’t do that, they offered, he should just have said nothing.

Why? Why despair that an anti-Semite chose not to hide his hatred? So we can go on playing pretend with evil people, helping them accrue more and more legitimacy until they can do large-scale harm?

Does every statement of anti-Jewish incitement put Jews at risk? Yes. But if our weapon of choice is urging our enemies not to say harmful things about us, the risk will become far worse.

Had Mamdani done what media critics suggested, he alone would have benefited from the con. Instead, his act of blatant anti-Semitism woke up a bunch of fence-sitting liberals (Jews and non-Jews alike) and sent them into our camp. I’ve spoken to some such people since, and it was the first time I heard “You were right” from any of them on any topic in ages.

I know exactly how those exchanges would have gone had Mamdani instead kept up the good-guy act. Liberal friends and family would have sent me screenshots of his pacifying mush along with digs about my unhinged position on him. I’d weigh the benefits of responding obnoxiously or trying to disarm with civility, knowing that either choice would only leave them in their ignorance. But Mamdani’s choice snapped them out of it for me. And while it’s tempting to punish such former Mamdani supporters for their blindness up till now, the truth is that we need them. So, I say, welcome to the land of the real and the side of the right.
Jonathan Tobin: A satire about Anne Frank explains woke antisemitism
A ‘secret’ ending
The producers of the play ask that critics not reveal the ending of the show so as to ensure that audiences fully register the “shock” of some of its denouement. But the secret ending of the play isn’t comparable to the last minutes of Agatha Christie’s “Witness For The Prosecution,” in which the true identity of the murderer and the eponymous witness is revealed. So, I don’t feel obligated to play by their rules.

What those who have lauded the play as “clever, gleefully provocative” or even “the most important new show around” aren’t telling you is what happens in the play’s final scenes.

Margot finally speaks, only to give an oration about the need to go to Palestine to displace and oppress its indigenous Arab population once the war ends. Anne then realizes that her family shouldn’t survive and betrays them herself, leading to their deaths. But then, after the bodies fall (they are shot on the spot rather than gassed or tortured and starved in the camps), Hitler turns up and, having shed his male identity and become a trans woman, he “cancels the Holocaust’ so the Jews don’t have to commit suicide to save humanity from the evils of Zionism.

Cue the applause, and the actors all turn up for a final chorus wearing t-shirts with woke slogans, including one reading “by any means necessary,” something that is embraced by those cheering for Hamas’s efforts to slaughter the contemporary living Jews that are not as popular as the dead Anne.

Sure, we’re not supposed to take any of this seriously except to embrace the notion that no one is 100% correct and that all causes are suspect. But the reaction of the audience to the mention of “Palestine” and the cheers that greeted Anne’s claim that the “seven million colonizers” currently committing crimes there are the result of the six million dead Jews told you all you need to know about the impact of this play at this moment.

Despite the hopes of some who lauded the play, and believed it to be a jab at the tweet that inspired it,the audience wasn’t acknowledging that Jews don’t have “white privilege.” Rather, they were nodding along at the false claim that Jews have no right to live in Israel. And this is because Jews are now wrongly viewed as “white” oppressors.

Contrary to its press clippings, “Slam Frank” is not an equal-opportunity offender. It may be poking fun at most things, but the one thing it is deadly serious about is denying the Jews their stories, as well as the right to mourn their dead with dignity and to live in freedom in their own country without being smeared as monsters and targeted for genocide.

Would they do this to another group?
Moreover, could anyone imagine someone putting on a play today in which black or Hispanic victims of racist crimes were portrayed as Jews or any identity other than their own? Would they deny them their culture and history and use them as stand-ins for more fashionable identities? Of course not.

Such a play, even if it claimed to be a satire, would be denounced as racist. Even the hit musical comedy “The Book of Mormon” by the creators of the cartoon satire “South Park,” to which “Slam Frank” has been compared, is kinder to its targets—the adherents of that faith—than Fox and Sinesky are to the objects of their scorn. But you can do this to Jews with impunity and still be applauded by liberal critics as having accomplished an act of creative genius.

This isn’t the first time the story of Anne Frank has been utilized to advance a non-Jewish agenda. The aforementioned play and movie adaptations of the Diary deliberately downplayed the Jewish elements of the story and sought to universalize Anne as a girl just like everyone else. That pleased Anne’s father, Otto, who had little use for Judaism or Jewish identity. It also drove writer Meyer Levin, who had worked to promote the book and wanted to write a more Jewish play, nearly out of his mind.

Yet, just like those adaptations of Anne’s story that came at a time when Jews were eager to fit in and be seen as the same as everyone else, “Slam Frank” speaks just as loudly to the current desire of many, including some Jews, to erase not just Israel but also Jewish peoplehood itself.

The answer to the question as to why antisemitism is flourishing in a way that it hasn’t since the Holocaust is that contemporary Western culture is willing to mock everything but not the lie that Jews, as both Hitler and woke ideologues alike have claimed, are “weaponizing antisemitism.”

While some Jews thought the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7 against Jews by a genocidal Islamo-fascist terror group and its supporters would generate sympathy for the victims, the opposite has occurred. The shedding of their blood in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t shame or deter antisemites; it excited them.

And though the movement to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state on the planet had been building toward this for several decades, the explosion of antisemitism shouldn’t have surprised anyone—since, for the chattering classes, the Jews remain a metaphor, rather than a people with rights.

A product of this moment in cultural history
A world in which “Slam Frank” is acclaimed as a work of comic genius is not only one in which nothing sacred to the Jews is granted even minimal respect. It’s one in which people, including New York theater audiences who think of themselves as enlightened liberals, can believe blood libels about Jews committing “genocide,” and that the war to eradicate the sole Jewish state and to commit another Holocaust against its people is a righteous one.

“Slam Frank” seems unlikely to have a long afterlife or hold the stage in the future, and not merely because it isn’t as clever as its admirers think it is. Rather, because it is a product of this particular moment in cultural history.

Since Oct. 7 three years ago, it has once again become permissible to strip Jews of their past and identity and to smear them as “colonizers” and oppressors. We can only hope that this episode passes quickly, ensuring that this travesty is relegated to the trash heap of theatrical history, where it belongs.


Herzog honors six heroes who saved flydubai flight from disaster
Eight days after a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv nearly ended in catastrophe, six Israeli passengers who helped prevent disaster were honored on Thursday at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem.

The ceremony drew a large media presence and was livestreamed, but for the families and six honorees gathered inside, the occasion was deeply personal. There were hugs, photographs and selfies as President Isaac Herzog presented the Presidential Award for Civilian Heroism to the passengers whose actions helped save 174 lives.

“They were seemingly ordinary individuals,” Herzog said, “who revealed themselves as extraordinary heroes.”

The six recipients—Tali Manes, Zvika Manes, Yaniv Hayun, Dr. Shota Musayev, Asaf Rejwan and Or Pardilov—had been traveling as ordinary passengers on Sept. 30 when events aboard flydubai Flight FZ1073 suddenly placed their lives and those of everyone on board in jeopardy.

After the Omani co-pilot attacked Indian Capt. Smit Machchhar in the cockpit, seriously wounding him, the captain managed to unlock the cockpit door before collapsing. The aircraft then plunged sharply, and a passenger’s warning brought others rushing forward.

Tali Manes, who was near the front of the aircraft with her young daughter, heard screams and realized something was terribly wrong. Her warning alerted those around her, prompting passengers to rush toward the cockpit.

Her husband, Zvika Manes, joined the effort after securing their daughter. Yaniv Hayun, a plumber from Ness Ziona, rushed into the cockpit and helped overpower and restrain the attacker. Rejwan and Pardilov also helped subdue the co-pilot.

Dr. Shota Musayev, a dentist and the only medical professional aboard, rushed forward to treat the badly wounded captain, working to control his bleeding and keep him conscious.

Hayun subsequently helped stabilize the aircraft, drawing on knowledge he had picked up from watching the television program “Air Crash Investigation.”

Two off-duty pilots traveling aboard the aircraft then took control and flew it to an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, averting what Israeli officials described as a potential mass-casualty terrorist attack.


Hero who helped subdue flydubai terrorist says he told investigators about suspicious crew members
Asaf Rajuan, one of the Israeli heroes who helped subdued the terrorist who tried to crash a flydubai flight full of Israelis, says he told investigators about his concerns regarding two of the flight attendants.

In an interview with Channel 12 news, Rajuan describes the two crew members as “strapping,” saying they weren’t the “typecast” of flight attendants.

He also says that in retrospect the two acted unusually during beverage and food service, but acknowledges there was nothing they did that was particularly suspicious.

“Something there smelled off,” he says, alleging the two crew members were exchanging nervous glances and that one of them asked in an accusatory manner if he was a police officer.

According to Rajuan, he told security officials the two had a code to enter the cockpit and were “coming and going,” which he says should be looked into.

It’s not always clear from his remarks at what point on the flight he is referring to.

He also says one of the flight attendants brought an unidentified pill — which he notes could’ve been Aspirin — to Captain Smit Machchhar as Dr. Shota Musayev, an Israeli dentist, was treating the wounds he sustained when attacked by his Omani copilot. Rajuan points out that Machchhar had an oxygen mask on, which they yelled at the crew member.

Additionally, Rajuan says it was suspicious how the crew yelled at passengers not to film and alleges that one flight attendant was “slowly loosening” the zip ties that those who thwarted the attack used to bind the terrorist.

“We said to him, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ It drove us crazy, we almost jumped on him.”

“We were afraid of them. They were beasts. You touch him, you feel like you’re touching a rock… One of my fears is that one of them would take a weapon, take out a knife, something,” Rajuan continues.

Asked if it was possible that the crew members were similarly stressed, he responds that it’s possible. “Therefore I’m not coming out with declarations, I’m telling you my feelings and what we saw.”
UAE confirms flydubai copilot was planning 9/11-style ‘suicide attack’ on Ben Gurion Airport
The United Arab Emirates said on Friday that the Omani first officer of flydubai’s Flight 1073 had planned to seize the flight on September 30 and crash it into a terminal at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, in a suicide attack inspired by the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, before he was thwarted by his fellow pilot and several passengers.

The statement covered by the UAE’s state news agency confirmed multiple reports on the matter from the start of the week.

Attorney General Hamad Saif al-Shamsi’s statement did not appear to implicate flydubai in any wrongdoing, and contained the most detailed account yet from prosecutors about what they believe to have happened.

Flydubai was not immediately available for comment.

Al-Shamsi said the suspect used two previous flights to Tel Aviv to “familiarize himself with the flight route and the airport” before attempting to carry out his attack.

The suspect, identified as Hamam al-Hammami, confessed to acting alone, the UAE said, but the attorney general said an investigation was still ongoing into possible accomplices.

Al-Shamsi said the suspect told investigators he had prepared psychologically and physically for the attack by viewing material promoting terrorism and taking boxing lessons.

The attorney general said the suspect worked for several airlines in different countries in the past, including Oman Air and Royal Air Maroc, before joining flydubai in January 2026.

The investigation found there were signs of the suspect drifting toward “extremism and terrorism” as early as 2017, while he was studying in Australia.

Royal Air Maroc said he underwent three months of training there in 2025, adding that his application to work for the airline thereafter was rejected.


Tikvah Podcast: Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on "Fauda" and the Jewish Return to History Fauda is one of the most surprising and interesting success stories of the streaming age. When conventional opinion looks with such studied contempt on Jewish expressions of strength and violence for the sake of national security, Netflix somehow greenlit a show that brings unvarnished depictions of precisely that to screens across the globe. It follows a unit of Israeli counterterrorism agents who embed among Arabic-speaking adversaries to gather intelligence and neutralize threats. The show is fabulously well done. And, well before October 7, 2023, one of its narrative arcs explored the presence of Hamas operatives in and underneath a major hospital complex in Gaza.

This week's podcast discusses the final episode of the latest season of Fauda, but not from the perspective of intelligence and counterintelligence, or from the perspective of Israeli security, or even from the perspective of the Zionist exercise of power—all of which would be worthy angles of analysis. This week, we discuss the latest season's final moments from the perspective of Jewish ritual and Jewish religious ideas

Today's guest is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who has just published an article about Fauda in the October 2026 edition of Commentary, titled "This Is Not Fauda, This Is Real Life." We discuss the relationship of art to truth, kaddish and covenant, whether the Jewish state can ever be a normal state, operating in the normal canons of politics, and what Fauda reveals about the Jewish return to history.

How the New Middle East Was Made | Bari Weiss and Simon Sebag Montefiore
Last week I had the privilege of sitting down with one of the foremost historians of our time, Simon Sebag Montefiore. As I write this, his work has never felt more urgent.

“We’re in a new world of counterhistory,” he said recently. “A new world of counterhistory where neither historical facts nor present-time facts matter if they don’t fit the ideological orthodoxy.”

It is “our responsibility as historians,” he said, “to stand up and be unafraid to contradict conventional wisdom, surging conspiracies, witch hunts, purity tests, pile-ons that are used to crush debate . . . and to say persuasively, ‘This is what happened.’ ”

And that is what he does in his brilliant new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.

But don’t worry. This is Sebag. I promise you this is not some serious, dry textbook. There is a chapter in his book called “Fat Fucker” (which was the CIA’s code name for King Farouk of Egypt). You will learn in his pages that a Palestine Liberation Organization terrorist was married to a Miss Universe. That Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and President John F. Kennedy were both johns at Madame Claude’s Parisian brothel. And that Saddam Hussein was raised by an uncle who wrote a pamphlet titled “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies.” Okay, maybe that last one was predictable.

Sebag has said that this book is the hardest he has ever written, and is a subject that only someone “bonkers” would tackle. Bonkers or brilliant or both: You’ll decide.

Sebag is, of course, the author of over a dozen other books such as Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great & Potemkin, which are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature.

I asked him how he makes sense of the fight within Islam itself, why we’re so fixated on this region, whether the Middle East’s plight is the product of Western intervention or the choices of its own leaders, how the Gulf States came to ally with Israel and Iran with China and Russia, who is winning the current war, and much more.


Jack Carr: Danger Close | THE CAULDRON | Simon Sebag Montefiore
In today’s episode, I am joined by bestselling author Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his latest work of nonfiction, THE CAULDRON - THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST, my October selection for the Jack Carr Book Club. 📚

THE CAULDRON tackles one of the most complex regions in the world, providing historical context to present-day events.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough and will be revisiting the pages of THE CAULDRON for years to come.


Ask Haviv Anything: 152: Is Israeli society tearing itself apart? With Micah Goodman
Most Israelis agree on almost everything that matters. So why does it feel like the country is coming apart? Two weeks before election day, Dr. Micah Goodman returns with two stories about Israel that contradict each other and are both true.

We look at two Israels: the one held together by sacrifice and solidarity, the one consumed by grievance, fear, and political loyalty – and the millions of Israelis who live in both mental worlds simultaneously. And we ask a harder question: How much of our division is real and how much is cultivated by leaders whose power depends on it? A conversation about Israel’s hidden consensus, its failing politics, and the peace Israelis need to make with one another.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the social and political currents in Israel
04:09 The new consensus and deep divides in Israeli society
07:00 Technology, territory, and the surprise of October 7th
09:24 Myth of a shrinking army and the need for land
12:17 The undeterrable enemy and the new security paradigm
15:40 The crisis of military service and societal cohesion
16:36 The collapse of myths and the new political architecture
20:11 Unity in Israeli society and the political polarization
22:58 The Israeli consensus and the future of political stability
27:17 Historical narratives and the Israeli right’s identity
28:12 The Mizrachi and Ashkenazi divide and their political implications
30:14 The disengagement from Gaza and religious Zionism
33:36 Demographic shifts and the future of Israeli society
35:01 The political climate crisis and the cycle of crisis
36:26 The American influence on Israeli polarization
40:30 The epistemic crisis and the illusion of control
43:22 The future of Israeli political architecture
45:01 Historical lessons from past crises and elections
48:44 The bottom-up solidarity and Israeli resilience
50:37 The narratives of division and unity in Israel
54:17 The systemic issues and the need for trust
01:00:00 The artificial nature of Israeli divisions
01:01:02 The American polarization pattern and its Israeli reflection
01:02:30 The hope for a new political architecture in Israel
01:04:21 The importance of trust and shared narratives
01:05:45 The cycle of crisis and the need for systemic change
01:07:13 The resilience and agency of ordinary Israelis
01:08:11 The failure of leadership and the hope for unity




‘Utterly disgusting’: Outrage as Amsterdam crowds chant ‘long live October 7’
News24 host Rowan Dean reacts to the “utterly disgusting and repugnant” chants on the third anniversary of October 7, as crowds in Amsterdam call out “long live the seventh of October”.


More anti-Israel bias from taxpayer-funded ABC
News24 Media Watch Dog Columnist Gerard Henderson has criticised the continued anti-Israel bias from the national broadcaster.


Presidential Hopeful Van Hollen Headlines Notorious ‘Arab World’ Gala With Group that Issued ‘Most Wanted’ List of Jewish Americans
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), who's actively considering a 2028 presidential run, was the keynote speaker this week at a gala hosted by the virulently anti-Israel organization Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), which notoriously targeted prominent Jewish Americans affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) by slapping their names and faces on a deck of playing cards à la the famous U.S. hit list on Iraqi leaders like Saddam Hussein.

The Monday evening gala featured a rogues' gallery of antisemites and Israel-haters, including the United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, and Council on American-Islamic Relations executive director Nihad Awad, who said he was "happy to see" Hamas's Oct. 7 terror spree just weeks after the attack. Other featured guests included radical D.C. restaurateur Anas "Andy" Shallal, owner of the far-left hangout Busboys and Poets, and former DAWN executive director Sarah Leah Whitson, who bizarrely griped during the COVID pandemic that Israelis were not sufficiently suffering, saying the nation was "missing a tablespoon of blood."

Before that crowd, Van Hollen cemented his anti-Israel bona fides by delivering a keynote address, though no video has been publicly posted and the senator's office did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon inquiry about the content of his remarks. Van Hollen's office also would not address DAWN's infamous 2025 deck of playing cards, which listed the identities of more than 50 AIPAC leaders, fueling significant concerns about their safety amid rising antisemitic violence across the United States, fueled in part by claims the pro-Israel lobbying group manipulates American foreign policy. Van Hollen has positioned himself in recent years as one of the Democratic Party's leading Israel critics, most recently in a video calling Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu "a wanted war criminal."

Last week, Van Hollen told the fiercely anti-Israel firebrand Mehdi Hasan that he is "kicking the tires on a 2028 national campaign." Should Van Hollen seek the Democratic nomination, he will likely have to face off with fellow Marylander Wes Moore, who's widely believed to be planning a run himself.

Van Hollen's decision to hobnob with DAWN drew backlash from multiple watchdog groups that spoke to the Free Beacon.

"Senator Chris Van Hollen's decision to keynote DAWN's gala is a slap in the face to his Jewish constituents and Jewish communities nationwide," the organization StopAntisemitism told the Free Beacon in a statement. "It is deeply troubling that a senator who claims to be committed to combating antisemitism would use his Senate platform to support an organization whose campaigns have targeted Jewish and pro-Israel advocates, including its 'Faces of AIPAC' initiative, which invoked longstanding tropes about Jewish political power. By choosing to stand with DAWN, Senator Van Hollen is sending a deeply troubling message to the Jewish community about whose concerns he is willing to take seriously."

During the gala, DAWN presented its "Jamal Khashoggi Defender of Justice Award" to Tanya Haj-Hassan, a Jordanian-American doctor who has peddled claims that Israel is wantonly targeting health care workers in Gaza. The second recipient, Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, routinely chastises Western media outlets for protecting Israel from criticism.


In debate, Ossoff punts on ‘genocide’ but accuses Israel of violating armed conflict law
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) accused Israel of violating international law in Gaza in a debate with Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) on Thursday, but declined to say if he thought the Jewish state had committed “genocide.”

Ossoff, who is Jewish, was asked about the “betrayal” felt by many Jews in the state due to his votes to block arms shipments to Israel and if he agreed with the growing number of Democrats who accuse Israel of “genocide.”

“The question of genocide is a question of whether a government has the specific intent to destroy a national or ethnic group, and that is a question for the International Criminal Court,” Ossoff said. “There is no doubt in my mind that Israeli forces prosecuting the war in Gaza violated the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law.”

Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, an independent judicial body in The Hague. The Jewish state has rejected the court’s efforts to assert jurisdiction over its conduct in Gaza.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the ICC on Friday, citing an executive order that accused the court of illegitimately targeting the United States and Israel.

Jewish groups, including the Jewish Community Relations Council of Atlanta and the local Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee chapters, condemned Ossoff in 2024 for voting to cut off the sale of tank shells and mortar rounds to Israel.

In 2025, when he voted against a sale of rifles to Israel, he accused the country of causing the “starvation of children” in Gaza.

Ossoff, who is frequently discussed as a potential Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2028, said at the debate on Friday that he would “make no apology” for his votes.

“I care deeply about the security of the Israeli people, among whom are members of my family,” he said. “I also care about innocent Palestinian life.”

Polls suggest Ossoff has about a 10-point lead over Collins, a two-term congressman whose district covers the mostly suburban and rural area between Atlanta and Augusta.


Mamdani spit on the graves of October 7 victims
Antisemites just can’t help themselves. That’s what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s disgraceful “message" for the anniversary of the October 7 massacre proves.

Instead of acknowledging the true horror of the atrocities committed, Mamdani belittled them and abused the anniversary to “contextualize" the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and to attack Israel for daring to respond to barbaric monsters who slaughtered its civilians and for trying to get the 251 hostages back.

Even in his opening paragraph, the one cited by many as “starting off well," the Mayor of New York downplayed the scale of the massacre, rounding the number of victims down to “1,100" where most would say “about 1,200" to more accurately reflect the true number of victims, which is 1,195. Mamdani won’t say which of the 95 murdered souls do not count in his eyes, but it would hardly be the first or the last time he spat on the graves of the victims of October 7.

He immediately moved on to saying that “the suffering did not begin nor end that day," putting the genocidal butchery of Hamas in the same “context" antisemites have tried to use to justify Hamas’s crimes against humanity every day for the last three years. And not a word criticizing Hamas or acknowledging the actual victims of that day was to be found after the first paragraph. The final three were about how “evil" Israel is in his eyes for not rolling over and dying.

Mamdani cannot make a simple acknowledgement of the reality of what happened on October 7, he cannot make even one statement on the anniversary that is even mostly - let alone entirely - devoted to remembering the victims. Because to him, Israelis by definition are never victims. Hamas is always the victim.

In the upside-down world inhabited by Mamdani and his fellow antisemites, 9-month-old Kfir Bibas is not an innocent victim, but Yahya Sinwar, the “butcher of Khan Younis," is a "victim" of the fake “genocide." That is the message he was conveying in his brief mention of October 7 and the far more detail he devoted to spreading lies about the war that followed.

He could not be bothered to describe the families burned alive in their homes, the young concert-goers shot down, and their bodies burned in the hundreds at a music festival, the grenades thrown into roadside shelters to kill the civilians hiding inside. He could not be bothered to utter a word about the mass rapes, or to describe the horrors the hostages endured.

Acknowledging the reality of who the aggressors were, the scale and barbaric nature of the atrocities they committed, and the basic humanity of the victims, would put the war into a “context" Mamdani and those like him can never admit. He would much rather spit on all their graves for the sake of his fantasy of righteous Islamists "resisting" and fighting back against the evil Jews.
'I Speak for the Whole African & Arab Diaspora': Abdul El-Sayed Called France a 'Colonizer' During World Cup, Cheered for Morocco and Not US in Deleted Posts
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed denounced France as "the colonizer" and said he spoke "for the whole African & Arab diaspora" during the 2022 World Cup, according to deleted social media posts. El-Sayed, who has a history of anti-Western and anti-American remarks, was rooting for upstart Morocco in its matches against former Western imperial powers.

El-Sayed, who has claimed multiple times to have "dual citizenship" in the United States and Egypt (which he now denies), issued a broadside against France ahead of its semifinal match against Morocco.

"We are all #Morocco," El-Sayed wrote on Dec. 10, 2022, after Morocco defeated Portugal 1-0. "Can't wait to watch them take it to the colonizer in the #WorldCup semifinal."

Morocco lost to France 2-0 in the match and fell to Croatia in a third-place match days later. While El-Sayed backed Morocco, a semi-constitutional monarchy whose king holds "full dominance" over the state and society, offered no such support for the United States during the 2022 tournament, even after its Nov. 29, 2022, victory over Iran.

France had multiple players of North African and Arab descent on its 2022 World Cup team—which lost the final match to Argentina—including the widely celebrated Kylian Mbappe, who is of Cameroonian and Algerian descent. France once controlled Algeria and Morocco.

El-Sayed's "colonizer" and "diaspora" comments offer a window into his broader hostility to the West. El-Sayed is a staunch critic of Israel and has criticized U.S. foreign policy, including in posts on the anniversaries of 9/11. This week, he suggested that Israel is a greater threat to the United States than Iran is.


Hitler 'solved the Jewish question' by exterminating European Jews, Norman Finkelstein claims
Author, political scientist, and Jewish Israel critic Norman Finkelstein claimed that there were not huge levels of antisemitism in Europe because "Hitler solved the Jewish question," during an interview on Briahna Joy Gray's podcast Bad Faith on Thursday.

Finkelstein made this point during an explanation as to the original rationale of Zionism being an attempt to avoid persecution and assimilation.

"The reason we don't have huge levels of antisemitism in Europe now, it's because Hitler solved the Jewish question," Finkelstein claimed. "Six million Jews were exterminated. That solved the Jewish question."

Finkelstein added that he suspected that if those Jews had remained in Europe, he believed levels of antisemitism would "still be quite high."


Man arrested after ‘shooting gestures’ near Bondi Chanukah massacre site
Australian police have arrested a man accused of making shooting gestures while displaying a Palestinian flag from a bridge near the site of the Bondi Beach Chanukah terror attack.

The 53-year-old was detained on Friday afternoon after officers were called to the bridge in Sydney, close to where 15 people were murdered at a Jewish celebration last December.

According to Australian outlet News24, which first reported the incident, the man hung a Palestinian flag over the side of the bridge before allegedly making gestures resembling someone firing a gun.

A witness told the outlet: “The most galling part was when I walked past him, he made shotgun gestures with his hands off the side of the bridge.”

“He did three motions os shooting a gun with his hands.”

Police arrived within minutes and approached the man, who was subsequently escorted to a police vehicle.

The witness said at least eight officers were in the area and described the police response as calm.

“They de-escalated the situation, there were no raised voices,” the witness said.

“Police confiscated the flag from him.”

New South Wales Police confirmed the man had been taken to Surry Hills Police Station, where inquiries remain ongoing.


‘Oregon Hillel not going anywhere,’ director says after protesters burn flag on Hillel lawn on Oct. 7 anniversary
Anti-Israel protesters burned an American flag outside the Hillel at the University of Oregon in Eugene on Oct. 7, on the third anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel, and called for the Hillel to be removed from campus.

In footage of the protest, two Israeli flags hung from the house’s windows, and a sukkah remained set up outside on the front lawn. Protesters appear to stand on the lawn, sidewalk and street.

In the video, a man wearing a red keffiyeh shakes a tambourine and chants in Arabic, while another man sets fire to a large American flag. A group of masked protesters chants “death to the IDF,” “we will get Hillel off campus” and “glory to the martyrs of the al-Aqsa flood,” referring to Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 attack.

The protest comes days after Lenny Steinberg, the executive director of the Oregon Hillel Foundation, was targeted with posters accusing him of supporting “the ongoing genocide in Palestine” and calling for the Hillel to be removed from campus. It also follows the theft of Oregon State University’s sukkah, which was newly donated and stolen in late September.

Steinberg released a statement on Thursday night, writing that while the protest was happening, Jewish students were gathered in Corvallis “to remember the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.”

He called the protest “harassment and intimidation” and “clearly antisemitic,” and thanked school leaders and Oregon lawmakers for their public support.

“But a statement is where accountability begins, not where it ends,” Steinberg wrote. “We expect the University of Oregon to hold students, faculty and staff responsible for intimidation and hate speech.”

“Oregon Hillel is not going anywhere,” he wrote, adding that they are working with law enforcement, the university and private security “to keep our community safe.”

“We will keep celebrating Shabbat, welcoming students and building a community where no one has to face hatred alone,” Steinberg wrote.
‘Local, programmatic decision,’ Hillel International says of University of Michigan chapter breaking with Israeli advocacy groups
The University of Michigan Hillel made a “local, programmatic decision that does not impact or govern any other Hillel” when it opted last month to sever ties with groups that lobby or organize politically, including pro-Israel groups, a spokesman for Hillel International told JNS on Thursday.

The decision of the Hillel on the public Ann Arbor, Mich., campus was first reported in Jewish Insider, which suggested that it made the decision to separate itself from J Street U, an arm of J Street.

The leader of J Street, which calls itself pro-Israel, has said that he had “been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.”

“Consistent with the Hillel movement’s leading role in Israel engagement, Michigan Hillel remains committed to substantial Israel programming, education and travel experiences,” the Hillel international spokesman told JNS.

Asked if local Hillels could set their own policies about affiliating with anti-Israel groups, the Hillel International spokesman directed JNS to its Israel guidelines, which state that Hillel won’t “partner with, house or host organizations, groups or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders,” among other anti-Israel actions.

Cindy Hughey, interim executive director of the University of Michigan Hillel, announced its policy in September.

According to Hughey, the Hillel will continue to co-sponsor programs with pro-Israel national organizations, just not have any formal student club affiliations. Hughey told JNS she is “the most pro-Israel Hillel director” and will “support students’ passion to be loud and proud pro-Israel advocates.”

She told JNS she wanted to “set the record straight about misinformation.”

J Street U was the only advocacy group affected at the time, but the restriction now applies to future affiliations with national advocacy organizations, according to Jewish Insider.

Rabbi Asher Lopatin, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, told JNS that “while in general I am in favor of Hillel having as big a tent as possible, I leave it up to the Hillel professionals and the Hillel student leadership to determine the size of that tent and whether national advocacy organizations should be within it.”

Other Hillels publicly list J Street U among their supported student groups, including the George Washington University Hillel and Brandeis University Hillel.


A US charity plans to use AI to monitor its Gaza classrooms for ‘hateful’ speech
A US charity in Gaza is worried that teachers at its schools might stray from a curriculum it says promotes peace and tolerance, so it plans to record classroom conversations and use artificial intelligence to flag speech deemed “hateful” or “inciting.”

The plans laid out by the founder of the Gaza Children Village in a webinar last month have elicited ethical, safety and privacy concerns from some Palestinian and advocacy groups and at least one of the charity’s partners.

There is no indication the charity intends to share its classrooms’ recordings with anybody else, but fears about the potential misuse of surveillance technology are heightened in Gaza after three years of war. The Israeli military has used AI to sift through intercepted communications and find suspicious speech, including to identify targets for strikes.

Palestinian rights groups have been critical of the charity’s education agenda more broadly, saying it is unaccountable to local and UN agencies that have long managed Gaza’s schools. Who controls education in Gaza is one of many unresolved questions about its postwar governance.

It is unclear when the classroom monitoring is supposed to begin, what specific language will be flagged, and whether teachers, students and their families have been told about the plans.

The charity’s founder says he seeks the ‘de-radicalization’ of Gaza

The charity’s founder and CEO is Dr. David Hasan, a neurosurgeon born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents who now teaches at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina.

He conceived the idea for the charity after volunteering at hospitals in Gaza during the war and wanting to end generations of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Hasan says he was taught at an early age to look unfavorably upon Jews and Israelis, and that it wasn’t until he attended college in the US that he learned other perspectives; he wants kids in Gaza to gain these perspectives early in life.

The charity has raised money largely from individual donors, including American Jews, and says it’s partnering with North American, Israeli and European aid organizations and hospitals. Its schools, called Academies of Hope, provide meals and medical and psychological care. The first school opened last summer.

The schools’ lessons are mostly built around the Palestinian Authority curriculum, but language that he says glorified violence or encouraged anti-Israel or antisemitic beliefs was removed, Hasan has said.

Hasan declined to comment for this story or provide examples of curriculum changes. But a 2026 report by the US Government Accountability Office that examined “problematic textbook content” flagged by the UN in Gaza identified the kinds of issues that Israel has long complained about: the use of “the number of martyrs” to teach a mathematical concept, a reference to “Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine,” and a description of a boy shot while demonstrating in support of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

On a webinar last month with humanitarian groups, Hasan said the reason to monitor classrooms is to help train teachers in how to uphold a curriculum that he had previously said was aimed at “de-radicalization.”

“I know it’s controversial, but trust me, it’s the only way we feel for us to survive and deliver this curriculum,” Hasan said.


All clear after bomb threats at two Orthodox Jewish schools in Brooklyn, NYPD says
The New York City Police Department told JNS there is “no threat” after two Orthodox Jewish schools in Brooklyn received bomb threats on Friday morning.

Officers responded to reports of a bomb threat on Friday at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, a Modern Orthodox School, and minutes later at another Jewish school, the NYPD told JNS. It said it was still investigating both incidents.

The department didn’t name the second school.

The Flatbush school told the NYPD that the threat came over the phone, the department told JNS.

“Members of the NYPD emergency service unit and K-9 units responded to the location and conducted searches,” the department told JNS. “No injuries have been reported and there are no arrests.”

Students and staff were evacuated from both schools while the NYPD searched the buildings. They have reportedly since returned to the classrooms.

“At this time, there’s no threat,” the NYPD told JNS. “Investigation remains ongoing.”

The Yeshivah of Flatbush sent a letter to parents informing them about the threat and asked them not to come to the building so police and security personnel could “manage the situation safely and effectively.”

Moshe Spern, president of United Jewish Teachers, told JNS that the timing is not coincidental. He noted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Oct. 7 statement, which leaders of major Jewish organizations have said endangers Jews.

Spern told JNS that five public schools in Jewish neighborhoods received similar threats on Tuesday.

“Now yeshivas in the same week after his statement—and not condemning the intifada pro-Hamas chants,” Spern said.


Jewish songwriter fights back against antisemitism through music
Songwriter Yehuda Meitav joined News24 host Rowan Dean to discuss his fight back against antisemitism through music.





 


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