November 19, 2025

Our collective arms are tired and weakening from spending the last two years — and most of the last decade — playing the carnival game whack-a-mole. Almost every Jewish organization today is combating antisemitism and fighting from a constant state of reaction.

It is time to invest significant communal energy and resources, proactively focusing on what we are fighting for.  We must be open to self-reflection and bold and fearless in acknowledging and addressing our challenges.  We need to be ready to embrace new and unforeseen opportunities.

Six months ago, after a three-year planned hiatus from Jewish communal leadership, I became the president of American Jewish University (AJU) with only one goal: to reimagine and rebuild the foundation of Jewish life in North America.  A dear friend and major Jewish leader implored me to be true to myself and my reputation as a disruptor who doesn’t mince words.  So here it goes: We are facing major challenges we were not prepared for and it’s clear that we are investing many of our resources on the present at the expense of the future.

AJU is an institution with a rich history inspired by two giants, Drs. Mordecai Kaplan and Shlomo Bardin.  These two had one thing in common.  They were committed to reimagination, creativity, and communal transformation.  Today, AJU is leaning back into those roots to propel ourselves and the community forward.  

We are embracing our hybrid model as both a university of higher education and a living laboratory — where Jewish wisdom meets innovation, and experiential education connects timeless tradition with the world we are shaping today.  

We’re building something entirely new — an educational model that lives in the classroom, online and in residence at our 2,700-acre Brandeis-Bardin Campus — one of the largest pieces of land that is Jewish-owned outside of Israel. As a living laboratory, we are bringing together the most influential and thoughtful leaders, thinkers, creators, practitioners and philanthropists to turn bold ideas into action for the future of Jewish life in North America.

AJU transformed Jewish learning when it launched the first intensive class for interfaith couples and individuals exploring conversion — helping countless people build Jewish homes and families.  Today, we’re expanding that vision, creating more welcoming pathways for anyone Jewish, Jew-ish and Jew-curious and nurturing the earliest steps of every Jewish journey. 

We are singularly focused on the Jewish future.

This is not just a new catch phrase.  It is our mission.  We are devoting ourselves to our own reimagination process, to disrupting the Jewish communal world, and to identifying, inspiring and educating our next generation of leaders while creating innovative and engaging pathways to learning and living Jewishly.

For too long, Jewish institutions have been selling rotary phones on a stoop while the world waits in line for the newest generation iPhone — no longer. We can’t expect people to reconnect with Jewish life if what we offer feels outdated or disconnected from their lives. It’s time to win them back—with something rooted in our deepest traditions but designed for the future.

We must stop lecturing and expecting — instead, we need to begin listening and learning from those in our community who care and those we fear may be drifting away.

We must stop searching for a mythical “best and brightest” and start engaging the passionate, the committed, and the curious.

We need a new generation to lead us.  We need leaders who are capable of dreaming about a rich, meaningful, open and engaging Jewish future and have the tools, knowledge and creativity to make that dream come true.

So, it’s time to put down the mallet, grab some cotton candy and play a different carnival game — one where we don’t just react to what pops up, but build something enduring, hopeful, and deeply Jewish.

Jay Sanderson is the president of American Jewish University.

At long last, the masks are off.

Well before, and especially since the pogrom of October 7, 2023, public figures on the left have insisted that their issue was merely with “Zionism” or “the Netanyahu government.” They hid behind the language of critique, behind the idea that their grievances were purely political. But we all knew that “From The River To The Sea” wasn’t a chant against a particular government, but against the very idea of a Jewish State—specifically, one with the will and the capacity to defend itself. We all knew that “Globalize the Intifada” wasn’t a benign comment on policy. It is a clear call to commit violence against Jews and their supporters. But wouldn’t you know it. It took the far right to bring an end to that game.

Now, thanks to Tuck, Candy, and Nick, there is no need to beat around the bush. They have made it possible for everyone to withdraw the pernicious poison from the medicine cabinet of history and inject it directly into the cultural and political bloodstream of America. No need to whisper. I hear it spoken brazenly, almost with a sigh of relief. Recently, I overheard a guy in the locker room at my local YMCA whispering to someone about the Rothschilds. “Jewish money, man. That’s the whole problem.”

So yes.

Thank you, Tucker.

Thank you, Candace.

Thank you, Nick.

You have finally said the quiet parts loudly enough that no one can pretend not to hear them.

Tucker Carlson—who has regularly elevated guests immersed in conspiratorial thinking about Jews—now responds to questions about antisemitism not with clarity, but with simpering, wounded indignation. In one 2024 exchange, when pressed about his role in amplifying such rhetoric, he snapped, “I don’t even like talking about Israel because no matter what I say, I’ll be called an antisemite.” It is an old trick: make oneself the victim of the accusation rather than the source of the atmosphere that prompts it.

Carlson’s largest interview audience, across platforms, now exceeds 20 million weekly viewers—which makes what he says, and who he platforms, matter. During his interview with British commentator David Clews—a man who has called the Holocaust a “hoax” and endorsed the idea that Jews “invented” the numbers—Carlson’s response was breathtakingly benign: “Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I’m always open to hearing other views.” No pushback. No recoil. Just the easy permissiveness of someone willing to let the oldest hatred air itself out in his living room.

Candace Owens, who once claimed she “never talks about Jews,” now talks about little else. Her shift after October 7 was swift, almost revelatory in its bluntness. Among her statements, one stands out for its clarity: “There is a very small ring of specific people who use the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism.” When Jews objected, she answered not with reflection but escalation, describing them as “people who scream antisemitism because they’re actually the real racial supremacists.”

Owens now commands an audience of 12 million followers across platforms—a number large enough to turn slander into cultural consensus. In two short sentences, she revived medieval blood-libel logic and Klan-era mythology while congratulating herself for “saying what no one else will.”

And then there is Nick Fuentes, who dispenses with pretense altogether. He does not hint or suggest. He states plainly: “Jews are running the country. That’s just a fact.” In another recording, he went further: “When we take power, the people responsible for what’s happened—most of them Jewish—should face the death penalty.”

Fuentes speaks with pride to a young and fervent audience that—across Telegram, Rumble, Gab, and his livestreams—numbers over 500,000 dedicated followers, many of whom treat his every utterance as prophecy. It is difficult to find language so nakedly violent outside of 20th-century Europe. Yet here it is, as casual as a summer stroll.

What makes this moment uniquely dangerous is not merely the antisemitism itself, but the convergence. The far right and the far left—groups who despise one another on every other point—are suddenly meeting in a single place: their certainty that Jewish identity, Jewish continuity, and Jewish self-defense are unacceptable. On the left, Jews are cast as colonialists. On the right, Jews are cast as conspirators. Different vocabulary, same target. And in the middle stand millions of Jewish men, women, and children who refuse to relinquish their heritage or abandon their connection to Israel, their ancestral homeland and the world’s only Jewish State.

These are people who, since 10/7, find themselves politically homeless—as if the ground beneath them has shifted, leaving them no safe place to stand. One needn’t use too much imagination to see the parallels to 1930s Germany: a divided and demoralized country on the lookout for someone to blame. Who better than the Jews? The Christ-killers, the wealthy, the poverty-stricken, the stateless, the powerful, the damned.

This dislocation might have been softened by a moment of moral clarity after October 7. But moral clarity, always a rarity, was not to be found, even then, as protests began on streets and campuses worldwide only days after the pogrom. The greatest irony—the deepest and cruelest inversion—is that the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Shoah did not produce solidarity. It became an invitation for history’s oldest, most unrelenting hatred to step forward, unmasked, and claim the stage once again.

In this environment, the language of Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes is not incidental. It normalizes what was once unspeakable. It shifts the Overton window until ancient slander becomes contemporary insight. And suddenly, what would have been recognized five years ago as fringe rhetoric is now part of the national—and international—conversation.

And when hatred reaches this stage—when it is unembarrassed, unmasked, unafraid—violence is no longer unthinkable. It is simply the next step in a progression that history knows all too well.

In Jewish thought—from the Zohar to the commentaries on the Tree of Knowledge—the mingling of good and evil is described as the most dangerous spiritual condition. Separation, not blending, is what restores clarity.

Thank you Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes for your honesty—your bold, clear, unvarnished ugliness. Because by speaking plainly, you have done us a dark favor. You have shown us that the old hatred was not gone; it was merely waiting for permission. And now, in your hands, and in this moment, permission has been granted. And of course, we must thank our president as well for his “diplomatic” comments pertaining to Mr. Carlson: “You can’t tell him who to interview. If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out. People have to decide.”

For Jews everywhere—for those who support Israel, and for those who simply wish to live without succumbing to a groundswell of moral insanity—this is the warning:

It isn’t coming. It is here.

Listen closely.

Speak out with clarity.

Never hide from your essential self.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author. 

“Tell me what you accuse the Jews of — I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” 

This 1959 observation by novelist Vasily Grossman, often quoted by writer Douglas Murray, was vividly illustrated at UCLA last week. An ignominious band of university departments including its School of Law sponsored a talk by Rutgers professor Noura Erakat — an activist posing as a scholar — who teaches the gullible that Israel is a settler colonial project. Erakat’s faux lecture, “Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination,” was timed to honor the fiftieth anniversary of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379 — the since-rescinded-but-never-dead screed that declared Zionism a form of racism. 

Judea Pearl, UCLA professor, Turing Prize winner and proud Israel-born Zionist, had had enough. When he learned of the “Zionism is racism” lecture, he issued a call for a countervailing event on campus the same night, Nov. 13. UCLA’s Jewish Faculty Resilience Group swung into gear, and in little over a week about a hundred people gathered at UCLA’s School of Law for a panel discussion called “Is Antizionism Racism?” Peter Savodnik of The Free Press was a thoughtful moderator, and Michael Berenbaum, Yael Lerman and Hindi Stohl Posy gave sobering, alarming, or stirring presentations. Presumably due to the imposing police presence (thank you, UCPD), antizionist protesters mostly stayed away. At least one professor in the audience felt secure enough from the keffiyeh brigade to pull out her knitting.

As Professor Pearl reported the next day on X, the event was a major success. “Two concrete outcomes became immediately evident,” he wrote. “(1) Zionist faculty and students at UCLA will now be asserting their right to a name, a voice and institutional representation on campus. (2) Antizionist faculty and students will now be facing a new, no-nonsense environment in which their rhetoric and ideology are exposed — and named — for what they are: racist.”

Because what else can you call a movement that exists solely to deny the right of self-determination to one nation — the Jewish one? That screams to isolate, boycott or attack Jews, camouflaged as “Zionists”? That champions an organization, Hamas, whose founding charter calls to kill Jews? That celebrates as “resistance” the largest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust?

Jew-haters invariably ascribe to Jews whatever they find most abhorrent. For the Nazis who obsessed about race purity, Jews were polluters of the Aryan race. Medieval Christians hated Jews as the supposed killers of Christ. For communists, Jews were capitalists; and for reactionaries, Jews were communists. Today, when society overwhelmingly rejects racism, progressives who consider it the worst of all crimes scream “Racist!” at Jews who support the existence of a Jewish state. Meanwhile they support the elimination of that same state, making their claim the epitome of projection.

Progressives who consider racism the worst of all crimes scream “Racist!” at Jews who support the existence of a Jewish state. Meanwhile they support the elimination of that same state, making their claim the epitome of projection.

It has become counterproductive to insist that “antizionism is antisemitism.” Jew-hatred is, above all, a shape-shifting pathology. When antizionists insist they’re not antisemitic, in a sense they’re telling the truth. They’re usually not antisemitic in the classical sense — they don’t consciously hate Jews, and they simply adore Jews who peddle their party line. They’ve moved on to the next, even more noxious and dangerous form of Jew-hatred: antizionism. 

More dangerous because it so effectively cloaks itself in righteousness. Because it’s hoodwinked vast swathes of respectable society, from academia to flagship media to countless seemingly noble, progressive groups and institutions, into believing that the Jewish state is singularly bloodthirsty and malign. Because it goes far beyond criticizing Israel — which might seem an innocuous if strange hobby — to calling for it to be obliterated for the salvation of mankind. As they themselves explain, seemingly unaware they refer to a people comprising 0.2% of the world’s population: “Zionism is a threat to humanity.” 

Antizionism is the latest chilling form of supersecessionism — the impulse to eliminate Jews to redeem the world. In the Middle Ages, Jew-haters disguised as pious Christians murdered Jews for the sake of uniting Christendom. In the 20th century, Jew-haters murdered Jews with the aim of ushering in a glorious Third Reich. Now Jew-haters insist that building a better world requires annihilating Israel and marginalizing those who defend its right to exist.

There can be no compromise with this inevitably genocidal solution. And there’s little point in earnestly explaining what Zionism is in the hope that antizionists recant. They are drunk on the wine of righteousness, and obsessed with a phantom having nothing to do with actual Zionism. Their movement thrives on lies that spread like forest fires, against an enemy whose very humanity is denied. 

Professor Pearl recognized years ago how pointless it is to charge antizionists with antisemitism, given that the latter easily dismiss the charges by saying, “I am a Semite too!” or “Don’t conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism” or “Some of our board members are Jewish.” Moreover, he points out, university administrators turn the charge of antisemitism into a license for inaction, as it permits them to appoint task forces that sit for years and philosophize on the nature of antisemitism, rather than deal directly with campus hostilities and attempts to purge Zionists from campus life.  

“We will continue to lose,” he wrote in 2018, “unless we assert our moral stature clearly, unabashedly and effectively by using the magic word ‘Zionophobia’ — the irrational fear of Zionism coupled with an obsessive commitment to undermine the right of Israel to exist. We do not have another word that describes the moral pathology of those who deny us statehood or even peoplehood.”

In conversation with the Jewish Journal, Professor Pearl said: “My argument with Erakat is more personal. She wants me purged from this campus — along with some 400 other professors who share the noble Zionist aspiration for Jewish self-determination. We intend to remain here, on our campus, and we call her position racist in the first degree: Any activity that demeans, defames, or invalidates the core identity of a group of faculty or students is racist — and has no place in a university.”

Many of us have wasted too much time fighting antisemitism without recognizing that Jew-hatred has mutated into a much more resilient virus. It now targets Jews not as individuals, but as a people. And it must be fought with all the strength, clarity and moral force we have.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”