October 21, 2026

When my family fled Iran, we never imagined that one day I would question whether my children could live openly and safely as Jews in Los Angeles. I believed I was building a life where their Jewish identity would be a source of pride, without the fear that had shaped so many Jewish lives before theirs.

Raising four daughters, I held on to that confidence. Now, I find myself questioning something I once took for granted.

When my eldest was little, school drop-off meant ordinary worries: friendships, homework, a forgotten lunch. With my youngest, my thoughts turn to emergency plans. What happens if there is a shooter? What happens if someone calls in a bomb threat? How will I know she is safe?

My children no longer attend a Jewish day school. But leaving Jewish day school did not mean leaving those concerns behind.

On Oct. 12, Milken Community School in Los Angeles went into lockdown following a reported bomb threat. Police found no threat, and LAPD described the incident as an apparent swatting call. Thank God. But “hoax” is a word families get to use afterward. Until the all-clear comes, nobody has the comfort of knowing that the danger is imaginary.

We do not yet know who was responsible or what motivated the threat. But I do not need those answers to understand why news of a lockdown at a Jewish school shakes a Jewish mother.

I want my daughters to feel comfortable in Jewish spaces. I want them to embrace their traditions without wondering whether being visibly Jewish makes them vulnerable. I never expected that this would feel like something I had to fight to preserve in Los Angeles.

Public leadership matters in creating that confidence. So does the way leaders speak about issues that touch our community.

At the Sept. 29 mayoral forum at the Skirball Cultural Center, before an audience of Jewish Angelenos, Nithya Raman defended her use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Karen Bass rejected that characterization. Experts have made it clear that there was not a genocide. 

Raman’s position should be a red flag for all Jews. I want leaders to understand why this language carries such weight for families like mine. Disagreement with Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic. But Jewish Angelenos must never be treated as representatives of a foreign government or held responsible for its decisions.

The DSA’s published program also concerns me. It calls for ending all U.S. military and economic aid to Israel and for prosecuting American and Israeli leaders it holds responsible for “genocide” in Gaza. Those are concrete anti-Israel positions that were formed from the “red green alliance” of Marxists and Islamists. 

I will not give any candidate my vote simply because of the letter beside their name. As a Jew and an American, I don’t have the privilege to vote down party lines. DSA candidates are running with a D next to their names, but they are not from the Clinton era moderate Dems.The DSA’s stated goals of abolishing police and replacing capitalism are radical gambles that would undermine public safety and deepen the homelessness crisis families need leaders to solve.

Life-long Dems, like myself, just need to read the open letter from the Islamic Republic to Americans urging us to vote DSA this midterm election. The biggest enemy of the United States is spending money to elect people like Mamdani to spread their ideology.  Believe them when they chant “Death to America. Death to Israel.” They don’t want America to prosper and neither do their candidates. 

My Jewish identity and my daughters’ future shape the questions I ask. I want clear answers about protecting Jewish life, confronting antisemitism and keeping schools and public spaces safe. This November, my vote must be earned through actions, not assurances.

As an Iranian-born Jewish American, I cherish the right to participate in choosing our leaders. I consider exercising that right a privilege and a responsibility. I want my daughters to see me approach it thoughtfully.

That means researching candidates, understanding the powers of each office and expecting promises to be matched by follow-through. It means remaining engaged after Election Day, when campaign language becomes the responsibility of governing.

I cannot personally investigate every threat or secure every campus. But I can refuse to become indifferent. I can ask questions and expect answers.

When I watch my youngest daughter walk into school, I want to think about the future she is building. When she enters a Jewish space, I want her to feel belonging and joy.

That is the life I believed I was building when I came to Los Angeles. I still believe my daughters deserve it.

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Shirin Yadegar is the founder of LA Mom Magazine and a political commentator.

An open letter to Jewish parents of teenagers.

This fall I read more than 2,000 posts by Jewish parents.

They came from two online groups I belong to: a large national group of Jewish parents focused on campus antisemitism, and a large Jewish parenting group for families of older teens and young adults. I sorted every post by topic and noted which ones drew the longest, most anguished threads.

I have spent fifteen years working with Jewish teenagers. I wanted to know whether what I see in them matches what their parents are thinking about. It doesn’t. And that gap is the most important problem in Jewish parenting that almost no one is discussing.

Here is what parents are worried about.

Safety, first. They trade reports of encampments, vandalism, professors who teach that Israel should not exist, and commencement speeches turned into rallies. They organize letter campaigns and track lawsuits.

Above all, they worry about picking the right college. The most common question in the larger group was some version of “How is Jewish life at this school?” It was asked about roughly 150 campuses. Is there a Hillel? Is Chabad active? How did the administration handle the protests?

These are reasonable worries. But they begin in junior year of high school, when the college list is built. They peak senior spring, when deposits are due.

Here is what is missing.

In the parenting group, I sorted every post from a recent ten-week stretch. About one in seven was about admissions: test scores, tutors, essay coaches. Posts about shaping a high schooler’s Jewish identity came to roughly two in a hundred. And that’s counting generously: I included logistics posts — packing lists, flights, registration glitches — on the assumption that those teens were headed to programs that would strengthen their identity.

Jewish identity shows up at two moments. At 17, as a filter on the college list: “a decent Jewish presence.” And in the twenties, as a social network: where can my daughter meet Jewish friends in a new city?

The years in between, 13 to 17, are nearly empty. Those are precisely the years when a young person decides who they are.

One post captured it better than any statistic. A mother wrote that her son, freshly bar mitzvahed, was done with Hebrew school. She suggested a popular, purely social Jewish youth group; he said no. She was fine with his choice, she wrote, but didn’t want him to lose his Jewish identity. What should she do?

The question tells the story. For many families, the bar mitzvah has become a graduation. Jewish education is something you complete at 13, like a vaccine schedule, before moving on to what “counts”: grades, sports, the résumé.

The cost of those empty years shows up later.

In both groups, parents asked whether their children should leave Judaism off their college applications. One senior who had written her essay about Israel feared it would be held against her. Another parent asked how to “position” a near-perfect applicant’s identity. A third wondered whether her daughter should even take a Jewish history elective in high school, for fear it would show up on her transcript: “…we are scared some vile antisemite in admissions will reject her just because she took that class.” A Jewish teenager’s identity is now treated as a liability to manage, not a strength to stand on.

Then come the harder posts. A high school senior suddenly playing down being Jewish around new friends. A college graduate with no interest in ever visiting Israel. Young adults so hostile to Israel that their mother doesn’t know where to begin. These threads ran past a hundred comments, full of parents saying the same thing: me too.

None of this started in college. A child who reaches 18 without knowing why being Jewish matters, without the words to answer a classmate, and without Jewish friends of their own was vulnerable all along. Campus is simply where it shows.

Underneath it all is a quiet assumption: someone else will handle it. The rabbi until 13. Hillel at 18. Birthright at 22.

I deeply respect Hillel and Chabad professionals; several answered parents’ questions in these groups with real generosity. But Hillel can only host a student who walks through its door. It cannot give an 18-year-old the reason to walk in. By the time a freshman is choosing between Shabbat dinner and everything else college offers, the decision has largely been made.

This month, Michigan’s Hillel said it would end formal ties with student groups engaged in Israel advocacy. Whatever you think of that decision, it makes the point: no campus institution can be counted on to do this work for your child.

I have seen what a prepared student looks like. For years, UC Berkeley has offered a student-led course for credit called “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis,” which teaches Zionism as colonialism and asks what “decolonization” might mean. Campaigns to shut it down went nowhere. So Avi, a Club Z graduate, did something better. Four years in our program, four national conferences and an Israel trip had given him the knowledge to answer it. He put together a course of his own. For four springs now, Berkeley students have earned credit in “Israeli Military History,” reading Herzl, Jabotinsky and primary sources, and tracing Israel’s history from the ancient time to today. Avi didn’t wait for the administration to protect him. He knew the material well enough to teach it.

I grew up in the Soviet Union, where the state understood something many American Jewish families have forgotten. Identity is not inherited. It is formed, deliberately, in adolescence, by whoever bothers to shape it. The Soviets bothered. Today TikTok, a charismatic classmate and a first-year seminar are all bothering. The question is whether we will.

So here is my ask to every parent of a 13-, 14- or 15-year-old: treat your child’s Jewish identity as seriously as you will soon treat the college list. You would not wait until senior year to think about math. Don’t wait to think about this.

1. Don’t let the bar mitzvah be the finish line. Decide now what comes next, and make it as non-negotiable as piano, soccer, or SAT prep.

2. Give them Jewish friends, not just Jewish programs. Teenagers stay where their people are. 

3. Give them knowledge, not just feelings. Pride without facts collapses at the first hostile question. Teach them their people’s history, and Israel’s, well enough to answer a classmate or a professor.

4. Get them to Israel before 18. Let them form their own relationship with the country before someone else describes it to them.

5. Let them write it on the application. A college that would hold your child’s Jewishness against them tells you everything about that college and nothing about your child.

Right now our energy goes into vetting campuses, rating Hillels and writing to university presidents. Some of that is necessary. But we can’t Jew-proof the campus. We must campus-proof our kids. And that kind of preparation is not a one-time workshop. It is years in the making.

The question is not only which campus will be safe for our children. It is who our children will be when they arrive.

 

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Masha Merkulova is the founder and CEO of Club Z, a national nonprofit that builds Jewish identity and Zionist grounding in teens.

Historical comparisons have become too commonplace when describing the toxicity of the antizionist movement in higher education. Student activists intimidate peers suspected of “Zionism” like the fascist Blackshirts and Brownshirts, while professors and their young sycophantic followers recycle long discredited Czarist and Stalinist conspiracies about sinister Jewish power. I’ve made such analogies myself. Yet these warnings seem to continue falling on deaf ears. Reminding people of modern and ancient Jewish history to generate empathy also seems to produce the opposite effect. 

But when everyone invokes history to justify their actions, how do you reach people who seem to have vaccinated themselves against any historical truths that complicate their own? More importantly, what happens when the very act of Jews voicing disagreement is treated as reason enough to be disregarded?

I want to try a slightly different approach.

Recently, I started listening to Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem,” an epic, multigenerational Chinese science fiction tale exploring how civilizations survive or perish through the breadth and quality of their scientific knowledge. It also served as my introduction to post-WWII Marxist China, where the story opens with physics professor, Ye Zhetai, facing a public struggle session in Beijing during the early days of Mao’s oppressive Cultural Revolution.

Students and even his wife, herself a physicist, condemn him for teaching theories that fail to conform to Marxist revolutionary doctrine. At one point, his wife denounces him for teaching Einstein’s theory of relativity and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, dismissing them as “reactionary idealism.” He responds that they are the explanations most consistent with experimental results, then challenges the premise of the interrogation: “Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?”

“Of course, it should be the Correct philosophy of Marxism that guides scientific experiments!” a student declares.

“That’s equivalent to saying that the ‘correct philosophy’ falls out of the sky,” the professor responds.  “This is against the idea that the truth emerges from experience. It’s counter to the principles of how Marxism seeks to understand nature.”

Frustrated and unable to answer him, one of the students strikes him with her belt, and others join in. The older Red Guard students initially stand by, afraid that intervening would make them appear insufficiently loyal to the cause. One quietly pleads with the professor to submit, who refuses, and is subsequently beaten to death in front of his daughter as the crowd of academics shouts slogans and cheers. 

His murderers consider themselves moral agents of progress, entitled by the righteousness of their cause to punish the reasoning that their understanding of the world cannot accommodate. This is how brittle and intellectually insecure ideologies maintain power: by making disagreement dangerous.

I thought about that scene while considering what happened to two Israeli veterans who came to speak to students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, last month. The Mustangs United for Israel (MUFI) student group and the local Chabad organized a CAMERA/ZOA co-sponsored event with Belev Echad to discuss coping with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Gaza war. 

Ariel Saat developed PTSD after fighting Hamas terrorists near Kibbutz Kfar Aza and rescuing his wounded commander. Eliyahu Green suffered injuries when shrapnel entered his ear and skull while serving in Gaza. 

They weren’t there to deliver political arguments, but that distinction didn’t interest the antizionist protesters affiliated with the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). These Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated clubs made clear their demand was for all Israelis and Zionists to be kicked off campus. 

Nine masked student activists arrived with an Israeli flag covered in red paint and filled the room with easy-to-remember chants about genocide.

The organizers had, of course, anticipated a disruption and arranged for police to be present, because episodes like this have become so commonplace that CAMERA trains all of our students on how to organize security and coordinate with law enforcement.

Thankfully, police removed them quickly, the event continued, and the school’s administrators supported the MUFI students. Cal Poly deserves credit, because there are still plenty of schools making less-than-friendly choices.  

Near the end of the event, some protesters returned to ask questions; “97% of the schools in Gaza have been completely obliterated. What about the kids? Don’t the kids deserve an education?” The speakers reminded them that Hamas uses those buildings for military purposes, often building tunnels directly underneath, storing and firing rockets within and even holding hostages captive, and that nobody should blindly rely on data provided by the U.N. because it has repeatedly promoted fraudulent reports produced by Hamas. Such facts didn’t penetrate. The slogan shouting restarted immediately after the speakers had had enough. 

While asking questions is preferable to shouting down the speakers, the act alone does not necessarily signal a willingness to honestly consider its answer. 

A few days later, those two activists were interviewed in an unapologetically sympathetic student news report complaining that while they were able to get the Jews there to acknowledge atrocities and children being killed, they remained “stuck in the weeds” over facts, figures and the number harmed. In other words, the Jews will continue to be harassed and threatened until they adopt the “correct” philosophy of antizionism regardless of any inconvenient observable data.

But those “weeds” are where disagreement actually happens. Facts, definitions, competing evidence and questions of causation are not distractions from a moral argument. They are what allow us to determine whether the accusation is justified in the first place. Once the conclusion becomes morally compulsory, asking for evidence can itself be treated as evidence of guilt. A student is no longer merely wrong for rejecting the accusation; the refusal to agree becomes proof that something is wrong with them which then makes it easier to justify inflicting harm.

In this case, the intimidation continued online. 

An Instagram account reportedly operated by one of the anonymous activists circulated heavily edited clips to tens of thousands of followers. The predominantly Jewish student organizers and associated organizations received messages comparing them to cancer and vermin, wishing them dead and calling them “child raping demons.” One sender even threatened to find them if they brought another Israeli soldier to campus. 

The threats made clear that the consequences extended beyond the people in the room. Other students watching learn what it can cost to organize or attend the next event.

That distinction is why “free speech” does not quite describe the problem. The Cal Poly students and their speakers were allowed to continue. But the freedom to disagree requires more than the absence of official censorship. If expressing the wrong view predictably brings threats, ostracism or fears about one’s future, students may remain legally free to speak while becoming increasingly unwilling to exercise that freedom.

The freedom to disagree requires more than the absence of official censorship. If expressing the wrong view predictably brings threats, ostracism or fears about one’s future, students may remain legally free to speak while becoming increasingly unwilling to exercise that freedom. 

The danger in the Chinese professor’s persecution likewise extends beyond the fate of one academic or the study of physics. His attackers claim the authority to decide what everyone else must accept as true. 

This is why Shao Lin, Ye Zhetai’s Marxist wife in the novel, is also such a tragic character. She represents what happens when people learn to anticipate and internalize the accusation before it comes. In their final exchange, she shouts: “You covered my eyes with your reactionary view of the world and science! But now I am awake and alert. With the help of the revolutionary youths, I want to stand on the side of the revolution, the side of the people!” 

It’s never explained whether her denunciation of her husband was genuine or political theater, but by then it doesn’t really matter. “You are truly too smart,” he tells her. “Even a few years ago, you could feel the political winds shifting in academia and prepared yourself.” Yet even teaching students “that all scientific accomplishments resulted from the wisdom of the working masses, and those capitalist academic authorities only stole these fruits and put their names on them” was not enough. 

Her prominent pre-revolutionary family and famous scholar parents still left her outside the “revolutionary mainstream,” unable to prove that she truly belonged. Desperate to survive, she performs her loyalty more aggressively, only to watch helplessly as her husband is murdered in front of her and her daughter is eventually imprisoned for refusing to sign a fraudulent report. 

That is the more enduring consequence of making disagreement dangerous: eventually silence is not enough. People learn that they must demonstrate their own correctness by helping force everyone else to conform, especially when some part of their identity leaves their loyalty permanently suspect. 

We are not in Maoist China, and the differences in violence and state power are enormous. But the demand for intellectual conformity is recognizable: repeat the approved condemnation, or have your refusal treated as evidence against you.

That is why defending pro-Israel students should matter to people unmoved by appeals to Jewish and Israeli history. The accusation may concern Israel, and the immediate targets may be “Zionists,” but the permission to bully people into agreement threatens everyone. Accept it here, and you help establish a standard under which the freedom to disagree depends on the crowd’s approval.

That attack on the freedom to disagree was stated with unusual clarity during an Oxford Union debate earlier this year over Islam’s compatibility with the West. Rather than respond directly to her opponent’s assertions, the self-identified antizionist student participant repeatedly accused him of bigotry and joked that “there is a crowd outside rioting against you tonight. And without the protection and generosity of this Muslim Palestinian President and the mostly South Asian executive committee, you would be quite literally cooked.” 

Facing potential mob violence, silence can become a kind of rational, albeit disappointing, response.

The brave and hopeful continue organizing events and CAMERA fellows will continue writing articles that challenge these morally vacuous bullies. But even those determined to speak out have started to worry more about their safety and future careers. 

Courage does not make consequences disappear, and no undergraduate owes their personal safety to a political cause. 

Unfortunately, when too many make this calculation, it means antizionism’s intimidation is working. Prolonged silence allows a critical mass of enforced conformity to look like consensus, freeing whatever local Free Palestine/Globalize the Intifada brigades there are to truly start promoting their beliefs as they promise, “by any means necessary.”

Cal Poly showed what institutions should do: the university enforced its rules, and Hillel stood by its students. But these are relatively easy steps. The most impactful improvement lies with individuals. Each of us needs to lead by example and reject the assumption that the righteousness of any cause exempts its beliefs from scrutiny. Deigning to speak with “the opposition” means little if every answer that challenges our beliefs is dismissed as an evasion, made in bad faith, or outright ignored. 

If people really want Zionists to rethink our beliefs, they must be willing to rethink theirs. We all need to ask questions whose answers could change our minds, consider what evidence would make us revise an accusation, and condemn threats without demanding political agreement from those targeted. 

The next time an antizionist student confronts me, I’ll have a question of my own: If your movement teaches you to question everything except itself, how do you know you’re not a pawn in someone else’s game?

When these kinds of interactions are no longer encouraged or even taught, we might as well admit that civil discourse has become an empty ritual that has left a vacuum for something truly evil to fill. 

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Seth B. Mendel is the Campus Editor for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.