While Zibby Owens’ latest book opens with her intimate and sometimes humorous essays on divorce, motherhood and midlife weight gain, it gradually reveals a broader, weightier theme — the reality of life as a Jew in post-Oct. 7 America.  

“I want them to feel outraged,” Owens told Jewish Insider — the reaction she’s hoping for from readers by the time they reach “How It Feels to Be Jewish Right Now,” an essay in her new collection that names chants like “From the River to the Sea” as warning signs. Her book has a deliberate sequencing, Owens said: opening with universal chapters before turning to antisemitism, so that “by the time they get to the Jewish piece of it, they already are relating and it feels more personal because they might feel like [antisemitism] is happening to a friend.”

On Monday morning — as Jews around the world marked Yom Kippur — Politico published a pointed attack targeting David Milstein, an observant Jew who serves as senior advisor to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, labeling his actions as a “national security threat” while failing to provide evidence for the claim.

In a WhatsApp message sent to wedding invitees, Milstein, who lives in Israel, wrote that those who wanted to give a “monetary wedding gift” in either “U.S. dollars or Israeli shekels” to the couple could do so through a provided QR code, Politico’s Adam Wren reported. 

Two of Seattle’s top Jewish leaders are sounding the alarm about the costs of ignoring rising antisemitism, offering up their own city as a “canary in the coal mine”  — a warning of how Jewish communal apathy can allow individual acts of discrimination to slowly erode Jewish life. 

“I’ve been stunned by the effort to erase the Jewish community in so many parts of civic life across the country,” Joe Schocken, one of the authors of a new eJewishPhilanthropy op-ed laying out the stark warning, told Jewish Insider in an interview last week. “I’ve been deeply involved in many aspects of the Jewish community, and sadly steeped in Jewish history. That this effort to push the Jewish community out, this effort to scapegoat the Jewish community, has happened so quickly is just stunning to me.”

Saudi Arabia is facing an escalating Houthi offensive along the Red Sea coast and direct attacks on its own territory, in what regional analysts describe as a turning point in Riyadh’s conflict with the Iran-backed terror group — and a crisis they say was created in part by Riyadh’s own miscalculations.

The Houthis recently gained major ground along the Red Sea, including the port city of Mokha and around the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and escalated their attacks over the weekend by directly striking Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport.

The Treasury Department in early September issued a proposed regulation that would rescind tax-exempt status from private universities and schools that “engage in racial discrimination,” another escalation of the administration’s efforts to roll back Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in academia.

Some advocates in the Jewish community have urged similar steps in the case of schools that fail to take action against antisemitism, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law urged the Treasury in a letter sent last week to apply the new policy in such cases.

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), a co-chair of the Senate antisemitism task force, visited Poland last month to discuss antisemitism and the Holocaust, including a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

She told Jewish Insider in an interview last week that the trip was designed to “really think about and witness for myself firsthand what … this extreme hate can really do,” with a focus on the experiences of Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. Rosen’s trip included visits to both Warsaw and Krakow.

Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa blamed Israel for the difficulties in the bilateral relationship between Damascus and Jerusalem, and said that Israeli operations inside Syria and elsewhere in the region are making Israel less safe.

Al-Sharaa also rebuffed President Donald Trump’s call for Syrian forces to move into Lebanon to help combat Hezbollah and the U.S.’ 2019 recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that she is endorsing Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s high-profile Senate contest, after having previously voiced reservations over his views on Israel and antisemitism.

Nessel, a Jewish Democrat whose eight years in office will conclude at the end of December, made the announcement while appearing with El-Sayed in an episode of the “For the Sake of the Argument with Lori Goldman” podcast released on Tuesday.