Weeks after the Coast Guard commandant personally called lawmakers to reassure them that swastikas and nooses would remain banned hate symbols within the service, the Guard quietly broke its pledge and diminished the severity of such displays as “potentially divisive” instead — the very language that had prompted outrage from lawmakers and the Jewish community.

Leading Democrats erupted in outrage on the news of the Coast Guard’s policy shift, while Republicans have thus far been silent. Several Republicans who spoke out against the initial policy change did not respond to JI’s requests for comment on the latest development on Tuesday.

The co-chairs of the House Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism are urging Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to act more forcefully to protect Australia’s Jewish community and implement months-old recommendations from the country’s antisemitism envoy.

In a letter to Albanese sent Monday, the ten lawmakers said that the attack, which killed at least 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration, “comes in the wake of the Australian Jewish community repeatedly raising the alarm and urging swift action to counter the spread of unchecked antisemitic rhetoric and demonstrations occurring in Australia for far too long.”

The massacre in which 15 people were killed at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday has once again brought the Jewish community’s security vulnerabilities into stark focus.

But for the American Jewish community, the prospects for much-needed help from the federal government in the form of additional Nonprofit Security Grant Program funding remain unclear.

Pocket your kippah. Tuck your Star of David into your shirt. Keep your head down as you walk through the quad, That’s just some of the advice Jewish college students around the country told the Soviet-born writer and activist Izabella Tabarovsky they were given by the leaders of major Jewish organizations as a strategy to weather the anti-Israel and antisemitic storms that have raged on campus since Oct. 7, 2023.

Tabarovsky’s counter-message: Don’t hide. Reclaim your Zionism. And take inspiration from the Soviet refuseniks of the 1980s who stared down Communist Party strongman Leonid Brezhnev, held fast to their Judaism and eventually won their freedom.

The deadly terrorist attack during a Hanukkah celebration in Australia on Sunday is sparking a renewed debate within the Democratic Party over anti-Israel slogans including “globalize the intifada,” and whether such extreme rhetoric fuels antisemitic prejudice that can lead to violence against Jews.

Some candidates and elected officials in New York City, where recent anti-Israel demonstrations have raised alarms within the largest Jewish community in the world, are tying such rhetoric directly to the carnage at Bondi Beach in Sydney — after two gunmen killed at least 15 people and wounded more than three dozen in the deadliest attack against the Jewish community in Australian history.

In a series of social media posts, Vice President JD Vance linked data finding increased antisemitism among young people on both sides of the aisle to immigration, and said that there is a difference between “not liking Israel” and being antisemitic.

Responding to excerpts from an Atlantic story highlighting the increase in antisemitic attitudes among young people, Vance said, “Mainstream journalism is just profoundly uninteresting and lame, consumed by its own pieties.”

During a Friday sermon at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Saleh bin Abdullah bin Humaid — one of the nine imams of the mosque — urged Muslims to view Palestinian children as role models in the face of what he described as an “oppressive and brutal Zionist enemy.”

“Among the most joyful examples and noble images are the young children of Palestine,” said bin Humaid. “Heroic children whose fathers were killed while they watched and whose homes were demolished while they witnessed. Jerusalem and Palestine will remain high and lofty in the hearts of Arabs and Muslims.”

A senior State Department official and two GOP members of Congress met Friday with members of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has long faced accusations of extremism and pro-Nazi sympathies.

The State Department meeting is in line with the recently released National Security Strategy, which stated that it would be U.S. policy to boost anti-European Union and anti-immigration parties in the European Union.