The House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence will hold a hearing on Wednesday morning probing the rising influence of anti-Israel extremist groups as a threat to U.S. national security.

The hearing is set to include testimony from representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, Secure Community Network, American Jewish Committee and the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the Project Esther proposal to combat antisemitism.

Based on written testimony reviewed by Jewish Insider, SCN’s deputy director of intelligence, Kerry Sleeper, is planning to highlight data showing that threats to the lives of Jews are likely to increase 40% in 2025 in comparison with the previous year, that 6,000 violent online threats to the Jewish community were posted following the Capital Jewish Museum murders last month and that domestic antisemitic radicalization has surged in the past year, increasing the likelihood of further attacks.

Sleeper will recommend that the administration put together a national strategy to ensure Jewish security, with input from all levels of law enforcement and Jewish security organizations, to be implemented by a dedicated national task force; improve intelligence sharing among security groups and federal and local law enforcement; establish a dedicated analysis unit at the Department of Homeland Security to monitor antisemitic threats; address the role of online extremist networks; and establish a task force on Jewish security including federal, state and local law enforcement.

Julie Fishman Rayman, AJC’s senior vice president for policy and political affairs, will highlight the threat posed by terrorist and anti-Israel groups to Jewish safety, as well as data showing that Jews are equally afraid of threats from the political left and right, an AJC spokesperson said.

Fishman Rayman will also urge Congress to provide at least $500 million for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program; support the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) at the Department of Homeland Security, aimed at preventing terrorism through partnerships between law enforcement, the private sector and communities; advocate for an interagency national strategy and coordinator to combat antisemitism; and pass legislation limiting legal protections for social media.

ProPublica recently revealed that the administration picked a 22-year-old recent college graduate who lacks any apparent national security expertise to lead CP3.

Oren Segal, the senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the ADL, will highlight recent antisemitic attacks tied to anti-Israel extremism and the ways that the attacks have been normalized and justified on social media. 

“They fuel an environment where targeted attacks against the Jewish community become increasingly likely,” Segal will say, per his prepared remarks. “While the grievances driving this violence are often framed as opposition to Israel, they frequently include expressions dehumanizing Zionists and Jews, and support for terrorist groups. When Jews are blamed for the policies of Israel, it is not only antisemitic — it is dangerous.”

He will point to the way that the groups Samidoun and Unity of Fields as well as some Students for Justice in Palestine chapters have spread terrorist propaganda and received funding with little oversight or examination.

“Despite years of warnings and mounting data, antisemitism, and the violence it often animates, continues to be dismissed, minimized, and politicized,” he will testify.

Segal will call for Congress to increase NSGP funding, fund programs like CP3, “empower” the administration’s antisemitism task force with a mandate and resources to work across agencies, pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act and the HEAL Act, address antisemitism on social media and crack down on those who provide material support for terrorism.

James Carafano, a senior counselor and fellow at Heritage, will be testifying on behalf of the think tank. Heritage did not provide a preview of his testimony, but directed JI to his past public writings, which have called for refocusing U.S. counterterrorism efforts against Islamist extremism and described the conservative movement as a home for American Jews.

Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), who chairs the subcommittee, told The Daily Signal that the antisemitic threat level is the highest it’s been in decades.

Pfluger said the hearing aims to analyze potential connections “between this terrorist style mindset, illegal immigration, online radicalization, and those that would perpetrate crimes that are associated with an anti-Jewish, antisemitic type of narrative,” with the goal of understanding the radicalization process.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sharply denounced the anti-Israel movement on Tuesday, describing it as making common cause with terrorists and putting “a bounty on the heads of peace-loving Jewish Americans.”

Johnson gathered on the steps of the Capitol with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), dozens of members of Congress, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter, American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch, hostage family members including Ronen Neutra and staff from the Israeli Embassy and AJC for a vigil honoring Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the Israeli Embassy employees killed by an anti-Israel activist outside an AJC event at the Capital Jewish Museum last month.

“It’s a dangerous time to be a Jewish American,” Johnson said, noting that the House had taken extra precautions to keep the event under wraps for security reasons. Visible and covert security surrounded the gathering.

“The monster who murdered [Lischinsky and Milgrim] was not motivated by peace, [but] something very different. He went to a Jewish museum to hunt down Jewish people, and we want to be crystal clear tonight: This is targeted antisemitic terrorism,” Johnson said. “There are no shades of gray. There is no other way to describe it, as we’ve seen in the weeks since this violence is definitely not isolated.”

He said that the D.C. shooter and the individual who attacked a march for the hostages in Gaza in Boulder, Colo., were “united in their sick hatred of the Jewish people.” He highlighted that both shouted “Free Palestine” during their attacks, a slogan he noted has proliferated at protests on college campuses and in American cities.

“‘Free Palestine’ is the chant of a violent movement that has found common cause with Hamas,” Johnson said. “It’s a movement that has lost hold of the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and darkness … They proclaim that violence is righteous, that rape is justice and that murder is liberation. They have created a culture of lies that puts a bounty on the heads of peace-loving Jewish Americans.”

Jeffries described the shooting as domestic terrorism and said Lischinsky and Milgrim were “victims of the same deadly antisemitism that fueled the attacks in Boulder, the attack at Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in Pennsylvania, at synagogues, yeshivas, businesses and communities all across America.”

“Antisemitism has been a painful reality of Jewish life throughout the world for thousands of years, but now too many of our Jewish brothers and sisters here in America fear for their safety,” Jeffries said. “In this country, antisemitism has been metastasizing like a malignant tumor, and we must all work together to eradicate this cancer.”

Referencing the week’s Torah portion, when God instructed Moses to appoint elders to help him lead the Jewish people through the desert after leaving Mount Sinai, Jeffries said that lawmakers from both parties need to step up to help the Jewish community fight antisemitism.

“We will not let you shoulder this burden alone,” Jeffries said. “That’s a moral necessity here in the United States of America.”

Leiter said that “the intifada has been globalized, and like [George] Orwell’s ‘1984,’ ‘Free, free Palestine’ means ‘Death, death Israel,’ and it is now incumbent upon all of us to confront it,” Leiter said. “Today we are challenged to act, to honor the fallen, not just with words, but with a renewed commitment to fighting the scourge of hate, fighting the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel.”

AJC’s Deutch said that “antisemitism is antisemitism, period. There should be no more debate about which kind of antisemitism is more dangerous, or which we need to be more afraid of.”

“It is clear every antisemitism is and has been deadly, from the extreme left to the extreme right,” Deutch said. “Both must be condemned by everyone, no excuses, because if you can only see antisemitism when it is convenient then you’re not seeing it at all.”

He described the demonization of Israel and trends of blaming it for “every injustice in the world” as the “current socially acceptable form of antisemitism,” which has “sanitized” the hatred.

“There is a straight line from the demonization of Israel, the dangerous lies that people peddle about the one Jewish state to the antisemitic violence that impacts real people,” Deutch said. “When calls to globalize the intifada and chants [of] ‘from the river to the sea’ are screamed at protests, these must be called out for what they are. They are not slogans for a social justice movement. They are incitement to violence. Everyone must call that out forcefully and with clarity.”

Deutch said he appreciates Congress’ work to improve Jewish communal security, but argued that it is not normal nor acceptable for any religious group to need armed guards and security checkpoints to gather and practice their faith.

Lischinsky and Milgrim’s supervisors at the embassy shared statements from their families, highlighting their lives, the positive impacts they had on their communities and their passion for their work at the Israeli Embassy.

Protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations that have engulfed San Francisco’s streets this week took an antisemitic turn on Monday night when a local Jewish-owned civic engagement hub and community space had its windows smashed and walls defaced with slurs including “Die Zio,” “The Only Good Settler is a Dead One,” “Death 2 Israel is a Promise” and “Intifada.” 

“There is no justification for attacking me other than the fact that I am Jewish,” Manny Yekutiel, owner of the Mission District event space Manny’s, which is in disrepair following the vandalism and break-in, told Jewish Insider. “My business is not a pro-Israel business. I am not Israeli. This is not a space that represents Israel in any way.”

The space was also the target of antisemitic graffiti in October around the one year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks. The most recent attack is currently being investigated as a hate crime. 

In the Bay Area, over 150 people were arrested on Sunday and Monday following protests against President Donald Trump’s travel ban, latest immigration policies and ICE raids. Similar protests spread across the country — including in Los Angeles where 4,000 National Guard members and 700 U.S. Marines were deployed on Monday. 

Yekutiel believes the protests against ICE are “necessary” because ongoing deportations are “stoking hatred” and “we need to stand with immigrants.” While Yekutiel says he will continue identifying with left-wing causes, he also said the attack on his business makes the protests concerning for Jews.

The attack on Manny’s “undermines the very values such movements claim to uphold” such as “justice and welcome the stranger,” the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area said in a statement.

Monday’s vandalism in San Francisco comes as the Jewish community faces an “elevated threat” following a surge of violent antisemitic attacks across the country in recent weeks, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned last week. Last month, two Israeli Embassy employees were killed in a shooting in Washington. Days later in Boulder, Colo., 15 people advocating for the release of hostages in Gaza were injured in a firebombing by an Egyptian national who overstayed his visa in the U.S. 

Trump announced his travel ban — which bars nationals of 12 countries from entering the U.S. — last week following the Boulder attack.

“The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” Trump said. “We don’t want them.”

In an unprecedented move, the Florida Board of Governors rejected the confirmation of Santa Ono, the former president of the University of Michigan, as the University of Florida’s next president.

During a three hour meeting on Tuesday, Ono was questioned by the board, which oversees the state’s 12 public universities, about an anti-Israel encampment last year that remained on the Michigan campus for a month, as well as his stance on antisemitism. 

Alan Levine, vice chair of the board, grilled Ono about what he described as an inadequate response to antisemitism at Michigan during Ono’s tenure to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel, The Gainesville Sun reported.

“What happened on Oct. 7 deeply affected the members of my community and me personally, and so at UF I would be consistently focused on making sure antisemitism does not rear its head again,” Ono responded. 

Ono also faced criticism from conservatives on the board for his longtime support of diversity, equity and inclusion programs while leading the Ann Arbor university, although Ono has said he would not bring DEI to the Gainesville school. In March, under pressure from the Trump administration, Ono eliminated centralized DEI offices at Michigan — which have come under intense scrutiny on campuses nationwide for failing to address rising anti-Jewish hate, and at times perpetuating it.  

Ono denounced antisemitism in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed last month. He wrote, “I’ve worked closely with Jewish students, faculty and community leaders to ensure that campuses are places of respect, safety and inclusion for all.”

Prominent conservatives who raised objections to Ono included Donald Trump Jr. and Florida Reps. Byron Donalds, Greg Steube and Jimmy Patronis. His confirmation was not publicly opposed by the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

The decision by the 17-member Florida Board of Governors comes a week after UF’s Board of Trustees had unanimously approved Ono as its president-elect. The vote to confirm Ono failed 10-6, the first time that the Board of Governors has ever voted down a university trustee board’s leadership selection.

Ono was seen as an ally of Michigan’s pro-Israel community who was quick to condemn acts of antisemitism — leading to pro-Palestinian vandals attacking his home on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. In November, he visited the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Detroit alongside several students.

Under the leadership of Ben Sasse, a former Nebraska senator who served as UF president until stepping down last year, Ono wrote that the school has been a “national leader in this regard — setting a gold standard in standing firmly against antisemitism and hate.” Sasse was among the first university presidents to immediately condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack — as other campus leaders seemed paralyzed over how to respond.  

“That standard will not change under my leadership,” Ono said last month. He pledged to “continue to ensure that UF is a place where Jewish students feel fully supported, and where all forms of hatred and discrimination are confronted clearly and without hesitation.” Nearly 20% of the university’s student body is Jewish. 

The search for University of Florida’s 14th president will now start over.

For a brief moment, it looked like 2024 all over again: Tents were erected at Yale University’s central plaza on Tuesday night, with anti-Israel activists hoping to loudly protest the visit of far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to campus. Videos of students in keffiyehs, shouting protest slogans, started to spread online on Tuesday night.

But then something unexpected happened. University administrators showed up, threatening disciplinary action, and the protesters were told to leave — or face consequences. So they left. The new encampment didn’t last a couple hours, let alone overnight. The next day, Yale announced that it had revoked its recognition of Yalies4Palestine, the student group that organized the protest. (On Wednesday night, a large protest occurred outside the off-campus building where Ben-Gvir was speaking.)

Meanwhile, at Cornell University, President Michael Kotlikoff announced on Wednesday that he had canceled an upcoming campus performance by R&B singer Kehlani because of her history of anti-Israel social media posts. He wrote in an email to Cornell affiliates that he had heard from many people who were “angry, hurt and confused” that the school’s annual spring music festival “would feature a performer who has espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos and on social media.” 

The quick decisions from administrators at Yale and Cornell to shut down anti-Israel activity reflect something of a vibe shift on American campuses. One year ago, anti-Israel encampments were, for a few weeks, de rigueur on campus quads across the nation. University leaders seemed paralyzed, unsure of how to handle protests that in many cases explicitly excluded Jewish or Zionist students and at times became violent. That’s a markedly different environment from what’s happening at those same schools so far this spring. 

“In general, protest activity is way down this year as compared to last year,” Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman told Jewish Insider. 

There is no single reason that protests have subsided. Jewish students, campus Jewish leaders and professionals at Jewish advocacy organizations attribute the change to a mix of factors: stricter consequences from university leaders, fear of running afoul of President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport pro-Hamas foreign students and the issue generally losing steam and cachet among easily distracted students. 

Last spring, an encampment at The George Washington University was only dismantled after the university faced threats from Congress. Now, no such protest is taking place — which Daniel Schwartz, a Jewish history professor, said was likely due in part to the “sense that the university was going to be responding much more fiercely to anything resembling what happened last year.” 

“For the most part, the enforcement of rules, the understanding of what the rules are, what you can do, what you can’t do, requiring people to get permits for protests, has really calmed things down [from] the sort of violence that we saw last year,” said Jordan Acker, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, who has faced antisemitic vandalism and targeted, personal protests from Michigan students.

Michael Simon, the executive director at Northwestern Hillel, came into the school year with a “big question mark” of how the school’s new policies, which provide strict guidance for student protests and the type of behavior allowed at them, would be applied. “I’m going to say it with a real hedging: at least up until now, I would say we’ve seen the lower end of what I would have expected,” he said of campus anti-Israel protests.

Many major universities like Northwestern spent last summer honing their campus codes of conduct and their regulations for student protests, making clear at the start of the school year that similar actions would not be tolerated again. In February, for instance, Barnard College expelled two students who loudly disrupted an Israeli history class at Columbia,. 

“For the most part, the enforcement of rules, the understanding of what the rules are, what you can do, what you can’t do, requiring people to get permits for protests, has really calmed things down [from] the sort of violence that we saw last year,” said Jordan Acker, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, who has faced antisemitic vandalism and targeted, personal protests from Michigan students.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has pressured top universities to crack down on antisemitic activity. The president’s threats to revoke federal funding if universities don’t get antisemitism under control has drawn pushback — Harvard is suing the Trump administration over its decision to withhold $2.2 billion in federal funds from the school — but it has also led universities to take action to address the problem. 

Sharon Nazarian, an adjunct professor at UCLA and the vice chair of the Anti-Defamation League’s board of directors, said there is “no question” that “the national atmosphere of fear among university administrators for castigation and targeting by the [Trump] administration is also present” at UCLA and other University of California campuses.

“My sense is that being anti-Israel is not as much of the popular thing anymore,” Evan Cohen, a senior at the University of Michigan, said at a Wednesday webinar hosted by Hillel International for Jewish high school seniors. “On my campus, there are other hot topic issues. There might be more focus on what’s happening with U.S. domestic politics.” 

Rule-breaking student activists also face a heightened risk of law enforcement action. A dozen anti-Israel student protesters were charged with felonies this month for vandalizing the Stanford University president’s office last June. On Wednesday, local, state and federal law enforcement officials in Michigan raided the homes of three people connected to anti-Israel protests at the University of Michigan. Protesters’ extreme tactics  have scared off some would-be allies.

“I think some of the most activist students went too far at the end of last year with the takeover of the president’s office and a lot of pretty intense graffiti in important places on campus,” said Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, the executive director of Hillel at Stanford. “I think a lot of other students looked at that and said, ‘Oh, this is perhaps not where we want to be.’”

Students’ priorities shift each year, and other issues beyond Israel are also vying for their attention. Trump’s policies targeting foreign students are drawing ire from students at liberal universities, many of which have large populations of international students.

“My sense is that being anti-Israel is not as much of the popular thing anymore,” Evan Cohen, a senior at the University of Michigan, said at a Wednesday webinar hosted by Hillel International for Jewish high school seniors. “On my campus, there are other hot topic issues. There might be more focus on what’s happening with U.S. domestic politics.” 

But the lack of protests does not mean that campus life has returned to normal for Jewish students, many of whom still fear — and face — opprobrium for their pro-Israel views.

“It’s easy to avoid the protests but if you are an Israeli student or a Jewish student perceived to be a Zionist, you should expect to be discriminated against in social spaces at the university,” Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, told JI. “That is the most powerful way students are impacted by all of this.”

Ken Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which since Oct. 7 has represented dozens of Jewish students in Title VI civil rights cases against their universities, said that campus-related lawsuits are only faintly slowing down this semester. 

“A lot of the staff and the administration think that, ‘OK, since there’s no protest outside, all the Jewish students must feel OK, and let’s put all this stuff that happened in the spring behind us.’ It’s really not the case,” said Or Yahalom, a senior at Northwestern University who was born in Israel. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all better for students. Jewish students are increasingly afraid to speak openly about their identity or connection to Israel, except in private, safe Jewish spaces.”

“Some campuses have been less intense than during last year’s historically awful period, but others have been bad enough,” Marcus told JI. “I believe that the federal crackdown, coupled with the impact of lawsuits and Title VI cases, has had a favorable impact at many campuses, but the problems have hardly gone away.”

Or Yahalom, a senior at Northwestern University who was born in Israel, recently attended a dinner with Northwestern President Michael Schill, who has faced criticism from Jewish Northwestern affiliates — including several members of its antisemitism advisory committee — for what they saw as the administration’s failure to adequately address antisemitism. 

“A lot of the staff and the administration think that, ‘OK, since there’s no protest outside, all the Jewish students must feel OK, and let’s put all this stuff that happened in the spring behind us.’ It’s really not the case,” said Yahalom. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all better for students. Jewish students are increasingly afraid to speak openly about their identity or connection to Israel, except in private, safe Jewish spaces.” 

Even without massive encampments, disruptive anti-Israel protests and campus actions have not gone away entirely, though they have been more infrequent this academic year. A Northwestern academic building housing the school’s Holocaust center was vandalized with “DEATH TO ISRAEL” graffiti last week. The office of Joseph Pelzman, an economist at The George Washington University who authored a plan calling for the U.S. to relocate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and redevelop the enclave, was vandalized in February. The Georgetown University Student Government Association is slated to hold a campus-wide referendum on university divestment from companies and academic institutions with ties to Israel at the end of the month. Smaller-scale protests continue at Columbia, with students chaining themselves to the Manhattan university’s main gate this week to protest the ICE detention of ​​Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, two foreign students who had led protests last year. 

Leaders of the University of Michigan’s anti-Israel coalition held a sham trial for the university president and Board of Regents members in the middle of the Diag, the main campus quad, this week. The event took place without issue, and the activists left when it ended. 

“I wouldn’t want to say that it’s perfect,” said Acker, the Board of Regents member. “But it’s certainly much better than a year ago.” 

The school year isn’t over. Some students at Columbia are planning to erect another encampment this month, NBC News reported on Wednesday. 

But they’ll be doing so at an institution with new leadership, weeks after Columbia reached an agreement with the Trump administration, where the Ivy League university pledged to take stronger action against antisemitism to avoid a massive funding cut. The pressure on Columbia to crack down on any encampment will be massive.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog called Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Sunday, a week after an arsonist motivated by anti-Israel animus set the governor’s mansion on fire. 

Herzog expressed solidarity with Shapiro after the attack, which took place hours after the governor hosted a Passover Seder. 

Shapiro told Herzog he greatly appreciated the call, a spokesperson for the president told Jewish Insider.

The man who set fire to the governor’s mansion last weekend said in a 911 call that he “will not take part in [Shapiro’s] plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.” 

While Shapiro quoted the Jewish priestly blessing following the attack, he stopped short of attributing the attack to antisemitism in an interview on Friday with ABC News and rebuffed a call by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to have Attorney General Pam Bondi investigate the attack as a hate crime.

Herzog was the first Israeli official to call Shapiro after the attack. 

Ofir Akunis, the Israeli consul general in New York, sent a letter to Shapiro last week, saying that he was “deeply shocked and saddened to learn of the arson attack.”

“This appalling act of violence, carried out during one of the most meaningful nights of the Jewish calendar, could have resulted in a far greater tragedy,” Akunis added. “We commend law enforcement for their swift and effective response, and we stand in full solidarity with you and your family.”

The man accused of setting fire to the governor’s residence in Harrisburg, Pa., hours after Gov. Josh Shapiro hosted a Passover Seder there for family and friends did so to protest Shapiro’s stance toward the Palestinians, according to a police search warrant. 

Cody Balmer, the suspect, allegedly threw homemade explosives into the mansion in the middle of the night, igniting a fire that caused severe damage to the home. On a 911 call, Balmer said that Shapiro “needs to know that he ‘will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,’” the warrant says. 

Balmer then added that Shapiro “needs to stop having my friends killed, and ‘our people have been put through too much by that monster,’” referring to Shapiro, according to the warrant. After Balmer turned himself in to police, he “admitted to harboring hatred” of Shapiro, and claimed he would’ve attacked Shapiro with a hammer if he had encountered him. 

Hours before Shapiro, his wife and their children were forced to evacuate their home during the fire, they hosted a Seder in the state dining room, one of the rooms that sustained heavy damage. A photo released by the governor’s office showed a charred piano, burnt furniture and ashes covering the floor. The windows were shattered. 

Balmer, 38, who lives in Harrisburg, is charged with attempted murder, aggravated arson, terrorism and other offenses. In a press conference on Wednesday, Shapiro declined to say whether he believed he was targeted for practicing his faith, or whether Balmer should face hate crime charges, saying that is a question prosecutors will have to answer. 

“I continue to find strength in my faith as we go forward here,” Shapiro said, noting that his family still had a Seder on Sunday evening for the second night of Passover, though not specifying where. “The prosecutors will ultimately determine what motivated this — the district attorney, the Department of Justice can comment on that further. But right now I think what we’re trying to do is find the good in society, not be deterred from our work, not be deterred from practicing our faith proudly and to continue to move forward as parents and continue to move forward as governor and first lady.”

Shapiro said he has heard from many Jewish families concerned about the attack and its timing on Passover.

“I want them to see that my wife and I and our kids continue to celebrate our faith proudly and openly,” said Shapiro. “I want them to see that people from all different faiths have reached out to condemn this act and to lift up our family in prayer, and that’s the Pennsylvania way.” 

As investigators assess the damage at the home, Shapiro is still unsure what was lost in the fire. “I don’t know if our Seder plates or any of our other materials were damaged, melted, destroyed in the fire,” he said. “We brought Seder plates and other ritual items from our home, from our personal home there, to celebrate with family and the community that we had invited to the Seder there.”

Images shared by the governor’s office showed damage to some of the Passover material. One showed burnt pages from the Haggadah, left open to the final page, with the song “Chad Gadya” and Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem. Another showed a charred poster, left out from earlier in the night, inviting children to participate in Passover crafts.

The arrest on Monday of a Palestinian student at Columbia University who helped organize campus anti-Israel demonstrations was the latest front in the Trump administration’s closely scrutinized crackdown on foreign activists who have expressed sympathy for Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups. 

Mohsen Mahdawi, a 34-year-old green card holder born and raised in the West Bank, was arrested and detained by federal immigration officers on Monday after he appeared at a U.S. citizenship interview in Vermont, where he resides.

Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in an email to Jewish Insider on Tuesday that Mahdawi “was a ringleader in the Columbia protests,” sharing a New York Post article citing anonymous State Department sources claiming that he had used “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” against Jewish students.

“Due to privacy and other considerations, and visa confidentiality, we generally will not comment on Department actions with respect to specific cases,” a State Department spokesperson told JI on Tuesday.

Mahdawi’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on Monday calling his detention unlawful. “This case concerns the government’s retaliatory and targeted detention and attempted removal of Mr. Mahdawi for his constitutionally protected speech,” the petition said.    

Representatives for Columbia declined to comment on Mahdawi’s arrest, citing federal student privacy law.

Like Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder and recent Columbia University graduate arrested by federal immigration agents last month, Mahdawi has not yet been charged with a crime. Instead, he appears to have been detained on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act cited by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to justify expelling foreigners who are seen as a threat to U.S. foreign policy and national security, which the petition also challenges.

Last week, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered that Khalil can be deported, determining such arguments are sufficient grounds for his removal, in a decision that is expected to face further challenges.

A federal judge in Vermont ruled on Monday that Mahdawi must be held in the state and cannot be removed from the country for now. 

Mahdawi’s legal team did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.    

Mahdawi had been a key organizer of anti-Israel protests at Columbia that roiled the campus after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. He helped to found Columbia University Apartheid Divest and was a member of the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which has expressed pro-Hamas rhetoric, among other student anti-Israel groups. 

For his part, Mahdawi, who moved to the U.S. from a refugee camp in the West Bank in 2014, called Hamas a “product of the Israeli occupation” shortly after the attacks and reportedly helped to write a statement released by Columbia student groups on Oct. 14, 2023, claiming that the “Palestinian struggle for freedom is rooted in international law, under which occupied peoples have the right to resist the occupation of their land.”

He also appeared at a rally a month after the attack alongside Nerdeen Kiswani of Within Our Lifetime, a radical group that advocates for armed resistance against Israel. 

In an interview on “60 Minutes” in December 2023, Mahdawi voiced sympathy for Hamas’ terror attacks.

“I did not say that I justify what Hamas has done. I said I can empathize,” he said. “To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum. This is for me that path moving forward.”

On his Instagram page in August, meanwhile, Mahdawi posted photos commemorating what he called the “martyrdom” of his “cousin,” Maysara Masharqa, a field commander in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of Fatah, describing him as a “fierce resistance fighter,” according to The Washington Free Beacon. 

“Here is Mesra who offers his soul as a sacrifice for the homeland and for the blood of the martyrs as a gift for the victory of Gaza and in defense of the dignity of his homeland and his people against the vicious Israeli occupation in the West Bank,” Mahdawi wrote.

While the petition filed by his legal team notes that he stepped back from such activism in March 2024, Mahdawi’s public statements drew intense scrutiny from several antisemitism watchdog groups that are pushing the Trump administration to target campus protest leaders.

Mahdawi, who was an undergraduate at Columbia University, was planning to pursue a master’s degree in the fall, according to the petition.

His arrest drew criticism on Monday from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), who said in a statement that “he must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.” 

Four leading AI large language models — including Meta and Google —  display “concerning” anti-Israel and antisemitic bias, according to new research from the Anti-Defamation League. 

The ADL study — which the group calls “the most comprehensive evaluation to date of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in major LLMs” — asked GPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Llama (Meta) to evaluate statements 8,600 times and received a total of 34,400 responses. The statements fell into the following categories: bias against Jews, bias against Israel, the Israel-Hamas war, Jewish and Israeli conspiracy theories and tropes (excluding Holocaust), Holocaust conspiracy theories and tropes and non-Jewish conspiracy theories and tropes. Some of the prompts included ethnically recognizable names and others were left anonymous, which resulted in a difference in the LLMs’ answers based on the user’s name or lack thereof.

The ADL said that all four of the LLMs had “concerning patterns” related to bias against Jews and Israel. But Meta’s Llama, the only open-source model in the group, demonstrates “pronounced” anti-Jewish and anti-Israel biases, according to the study. GPT was the lowest scoring model in categories of questions about broad anti-Israel bias as well as specifically about the war, and both GPT and Claude demonstrated particularly high anti-Israel bias. 

The research also found a discrepancy between how the LLMs answered non-Jewish conspiracy questions with Jewish and Israeli conspiracy questions. Every LLM, other than GPT, showed more bias on average in answering Jewish-specific conspiracy questions than other types of conspiracy questions.  

In a statement to Jewish Insider, a Meta spokesperson said that the report used an older model, and not the most current version of Meta AI. 

“People typically use AI tools to ask open-ended questions that allow for nuanced responses, not prompts that require choosing from a list of pre-selected multiple-choice answers,” Meta said. “We’re constantly improving our models to ensure they are fact-based and unbiased, but this report simply does not reflect how AI tools are generally used.”

Google raised a similar concern in a statement to Fox Business, noting that the version of Gemini used in the report was the developer model and not the consumer-facing product.

Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI immediately responded to requests for comment. 

In 2025, all it takes to answer any factual question, no matter how trivial — Who won the 1974 World Series? Where was Taylor Swift born? — is a quick Google search and, usually, a click to Wikipedia, which has 62 million pages in English alone. But a new report from the Anti-Defamation League urges people to think twice before using the popular free encyclopedia, arguing its administrators have failed to prevent biased editors from manipulating entries related to Israel and Judaism. 

Wikipedia is maintained by an army of volunteer editors, many of whom have spent years amassing knowledge of the site’s wonky rules in order to keep its pages up-to-date and accurate. But that honor system is vulnerable to bias. The ADL found that a group of 30 editors collaborated to insert anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives and falsehoods into articles, working together in a way that may have violated Wikipedia’s policies.

“Despite Wikipedia’s efforts to ensure neutrality and impartiality, malicious editors frequently introduce biased or misleading information, which persists across hundreds if not more entries,” the report stated.

For instance, the main Wikipedia entry on Hamas was edited to downplay the Palestinian group’s terrorist activity. A subhead that was formerly ‘violence and terrorism’ is now just ‘violence’ — a change that was made on Oct. 19, 2023. ADL researchers found that the first reference of Hamas as a terrorist organization was pushed further down in the lead section, and the description of the Oct. 7 attack no longer mentions the total number of people who were killed during the massacres. Numerous other details about the attacks were also removed.

In the section titled, ‘The 2018-2019 Gaza border protests,’ an editor removed a reference to a 2018 NPR interview with a Palestinian in Gaza who was preparing to launch an incendiary balloon with a swastika on it.

A series of edit wars on Wikipedia’s main Zionism page has, since 2022, sought “to reframe Israel’s founding,” according to the report. After one editor changed the language used to describe the goal of Zionism and the Zionist movement, the editor put a 12-month discussion moratorium in place, which keeps other editors from making edits to the language.

The report issued recommendations toward policymakers, toward private companies that rely on Wikipedia’s information and toward Wikipedia itself, with the gist of its suggestions amounting to a plea to those actors to take antisemitism seriously. 

An ADL spokesperson declined to say whether the leadership of Wikipedia has been willing to engage with the group. A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, said on Monday that the organization was “not asked to provide context that might have helped allay some of the concerns raised.”

“Though our preliminary review of this report finds troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League’s data, we are currently undertaking a more thorough and detailed analysis,” the spokesperson said.

After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, Wikipedia — like social media and other platforms where Internet users go to access information — became a proxy fight for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and digital battles emerged over how its story is told to news consumers. 

A group of Wikipedia editors voted last summer to rate the ADL as an unreliable source on matters related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and antisemitism, which brought concerns about reliability and editorial integrity at the world’s largest encyclopedia to the public eye. 

In the aftermath, the ADL tried to raise the issue with leaders at the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia, which has for years taken a hands-off approach to content moderation, was not responsive to concerns from Jewish advocates. More than 40 Jewish organizations wrote to Wikimedia last June urging reform. 

The problem has not receded, according to the new ADL report. If anything, it has become more entrenched. The biased anti-Israel editors — described by the ADL as “bad faith editors” — are much more active than the average editor on Wikipedia, even more so than those who edit other controversial topics. 

These “bad faith editors” attacked other editors deemed hostile to their cause in Wikipedia discussion forums, and they often used “Zionist” as a slur to tar their opponents. They would make edits on other pages, on unrelated content, to avoid detection.

On pages dedicated to major historical events, like several Israel-Arab wars or peace negotiations, editors would make “extensive edits” in “tone, content and perspective” to advance an anti-Israel narrative, the report found.

“The larger pattern of changes demonstrates a systematic effort to skew numerous Wikipedia entries to promote a set of narratives critical of Israel, often delegitimizing Israel’s existence and actions,” the report stated. Wikipedia has a policy against advocacy, and the ADL argued that this pattern of edits violates that policy. The advocacy group’s key recommendation for Wikipedia is for the encyclopedia to enforce higher content standards and stronger moderation guardrails, although such a request is likely an impossible bar to clear, given Wikimedia’s leniency toward its editors.

“The values of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation reflect our commitment to integrity and accuracy, and we categorically condemn antisemitism and all forms of hate,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson said. “Content added to the site must be presented, as far as possible, without editorial bias.”

“As we have shared previously, Wikipedia is a constantly evolving, living encyclopedia based on principles of neutrality, which means content added to the site must be presented, as far as possible, without editorial bias,” they added. “Wikipedia includes more than 65 million articles and is edited by nearly 260,000 volunteers from across the world.” 

The ADL seemed to identify only limited opportunities for government officials to impact the state of affairs at Wikipedia. Policymakers “should prioritize raising additional awareness of antisemitism, and structural issues, within Wikipedia,” the ADL argued, writing that they should use their convening power to bring together academics, computer scientists, civic leaders and Wikipedians to study the issue further. 

Search engines and the large language models being used to train artificial intelligence programs should limit their use of Wikipedia, the ADL argued — and in particular, they should try to avoid citing Wikipedia as a source, instead directing users to more reputable sources. Users should be warned that Wikipedia is an unreliable source. 

A spokesperson for the ADL maintained that the report is not meant to be a repudiation of how Wikipedia currently operates. Rather, it is intended to be a very public reminder to Wikipedia “to apply its policies at scale, to prevent malicious manipulation.” 

“We are not advocating for the abandonment of Wikipedia,” said Daniel Kelley, the interim head of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Security. “We want Wikipedia to address these issues, but we would urge people to use caution with contentious articles.” 

Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve contributed to this report.

A Middle East reporter for The Washington Post is facing scrutiny for online commentary in which she has called Israel an illegal state, openly identified as an anti-Zionist and signaled support for Hamas and Hezbollah, among other posts now raising questions about the objectivity of her coverage on the region.

In an extensive series of social media remarks mostly published between 2012 and 2014, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, a reporter and researcher in the Post’s Cairo bureau whose recent coverage largely focuses on Israel and Hamas, frequently inveighed against Israel, saying it was “not a point of view” but “a fact” that the country is a “colonial, illegal” state. She also described Zionism as “racism,” while dismissing her critics as “Zio-Nazis” — a pejorative deemed by some watchdog groups as antisemitic.

“If my anti-Zionist views hurt your Zio-Nazi feelings, FUCK OFF & SHUT THE FUCK UP!” she wrote in an aggressively worded post in September 2012. “Better, go live in #Israel & see how they’d treat a brown man.”

“Call me a Nazi, call me a terrorist, call me backward, but still, fuck your illegal ‘state’ of #Israel,” she said in another post published the same day.

Elsewhere, Mahfouz claimed that Israel “despises #African #Jews and any dark skinned Jew,” and compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust. “‘Never again,’ said the Zionist settler who is killing Palestinians now in a genocide,” she wrote in November 2012, ending her comment with the words “Holocaust” and “Gaza.”

Mahfouz has otherwise expressed alignment with Hamas and Hezbollah, according to translated posts first written in Arabic. While she voiced disapproval of what she called “Hamas’ social suppression of the Palestinians,” Mahfouz wrote in May 2013 that she was “always and forever with the resistance as long as it is against the Zionist entity,” according to one translation.

“With the resistance always and forever,” Mahfouz said in a separate post published the following year. “And with Hamas and Hezbollah if their weapons are against Israel and not against Arabs like them.”

Mahfouz, now 34, began working at the Post in August 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile. Months before, she had publicly identified as “anti-Zionist” on her Twitter page, according to archived screenshots — a description she removed after joining the paper.

A spokesperson for the Post confirmed to Jewish Insider on Monday that the newspaper is “aware of the alleged social media posts and” is “looking into” the matter. The spokesperson added that the paper would provide additional information “should there be a development to share.”

Several posts were first uncovered last week by Eitan Fischberger, a writer and pro-Israel activist. Mahfouz has since locked her X account — though Fischberger and JI preserved many of her posts via screenshots.

Since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, the Post has sparked backlash for its reporting on Israel and the war in Gaza, which critics have accused of veering into activism and presenting a one-sided picture of the conflict, among other issues. The paper has also dealt with a series of factual errors that have drawn major corrections — contributing to a perception of systemic sloppiness in its Middle East coverage. 

Mahfouz’s newly unearthed social media comments underscore how the paper is continuing to navigate such issues, even as its new CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, has reportedly voiced private concerns about coverage he and others have interpreted as suffering from anti-Israel bias.

The Post, meanwhile, has been shedding several top editors and reporters amid internal discontent with changes implemented by its owner, Jeff Bezos, who has faced accusations of seeking to curry favor with President Donald Trump — after taking a more adversarial approach to his first administration.
Since January, Mahfouz’s byline has appeared on 13 Post stories, all of which have been focused on Israel and Gaza.