For a brief moment on Wednesday, it looked like Iran talks were off. Tehran wanted to move their location from Turkey to Oman and narrow the scope of the negotiations to its nuclear program. The Trump administration saw this as a bad sign, and anonymous American officials began leaking to the media that Iran wasn’t taking the negotiations seriously.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that the negotiations were uncertain in remarks to the press at the Critical Minerals Ministerial, a conference of 43 foreign and other ministers: “As far as the talks are concerned, I think the Iranians had agreed to a certain format. For whatever reason, it changed … We’ll see if we can get back to the right place. The U.S. is prepared to meet them,” he said.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump relayed a warning to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a prerecorded interview with NBC News: “I would say he should be very worried.”

It didn’t take long – just over two hours, to be precise – between the news of the apparent collapse of talks between the U.S. and Iran and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s announcement on X that they were back on: “Nuclear talks with the United States are scheduled to be held in Muscat on about 10 am Friday.” Anonymous American sources then confirmed to various media that negotiations were set to take place, after leaders of Arab and Muslim countries urged the Trump administration to give them a chance, despite Iran’s prevarications.

Still, Araghchi’s statement alludes to one of the major reasons that the talks were, briefly, called off: Are they only “nuclear talks” or are they about a range of malign behavior by the Islamic Republic? 

The Iranian answer to that question is clear, but the Trump administration sent mixed messages.

The Trump interview with NBC provided few clues. The president expressed support for the protesters against the Iranian regime, saying “we’ve had their back.” 

Yet, in a bit of revisionist history, he portrayed his recent threats to Iran as being solely about the nuclear file: “They were thinking of starting a new [nuclear] site in a different part of the country. We found out about it and said, ‘you do that, we’re going to do very bad things to you,'” Trump said. He didn’t mention ballistic missiles in the interview.

Rubio, however, specified that “as far as the topics [of negotiations] and what the agenda needs to be, I think that in order for talks to actually lead to something meaningful, they will have to include certain things, and that includes the range of their ballistic missiles, that includes the sponsorship of terrorist organizations across the region, that includes the nuclear program and that includes the treatment of their own people.”

“Beyond that,” Rubio said, “the president retains a number of options as to how to respond to [the violent crackdown on protesters] and future events.”

Vice President JD Vance told Megyn Kelly that stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon was the main concern: “In a perfect world, would I love it if a bunch of freedom-loving Iranians… had a government that was much more friendly to the United States of America? Would that be a good thing? Absolutely.”

“But fundamentally,” he added, “the president has been focused …  on this question of ensuring that they don’t get a nuclear weapon. .. I feel 100% confident that even if the Iranians were rushing toward a nuclear weapon, they couldn’t get one during the Trump administration. But we’re not thinking about the next three years; we’re thinking about the next 30 years.” 

Vance argued that “global nuclear proliferation” is “the biggest threat to the world,” and as such, Trump is seeking to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons so that other countries in the region do not seek to attain them, as well, and is willing to work with unfriendly countries like Russia and China to achieve that because it is “the most important thing you can do for peace and stability.” 

The lack of clarity is reason for concern in Jerusalem, where the line on any potential American agreement with Iran, going back to the Obama-era negotiations, has long been zero enrichment and extensive limitations on ballistic missiles and regional proxy activity. 

Israel regarded U.S.-Iran negotiations with deep skepticism even before the latest bumps on the road to Oman, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff during his visit to Israel on Tuesday that “Iran proved time after time that its promises cannot be trusted.” Talks that do not include missiles and proxies will likely be viewed with alarm. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined on Wednesday what the Trump administration views as the minimum requirements for successful nuclear negotiations with Iran, insisting that any deal with Tehran be comprehensive and address its ballistic missile capabilities, support for regional terrorism and repression of its people, in addition to the nuclear issue.

“In order for talks to actually lead to something meaningful, they will have to include certain things,” Rubio said during his remarks at an event on critical minerals supply chains, which Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attended. “That includes the range of their ballistic missiles, that includes their sponsorship of terrorist organizations across the region, that includes the nuclear program and that includes the treatment of their own people.”

U.S. and Iranian officials are expected to meet Friday for talks aimed at negotiating a new nuclear agreement, with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff leading the delegations. While Iran has insisted the discussions be limited strictly to its nuclear program, the United States has pushed to include Tehran’s ballistic missile capabilities and support for regional proxy groups.

Iran has also demanded that the meeting location be moved from Turkey to Oman and that talks take place in a strictly bilateral format, excluding Arab mediators. Rubio acknowledged the shift on Wednesday, saying Washington remains prepared to engage despite the uncertainty.

“The Iranians had agreed to a certain format and for whatever reasons changed in their system,” Rubio said. “We’ll see if we can get back to the right place, but the United States is prepared to meet with them.”

The diplomatic maneuvering has unfolded against a backdrop of heightened military tensions between the two parties in recent days. On Tuesday, a U.S. F-35 fighter jet shot down an Iranian drone aggressively approaching the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea.

Later that day, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) deployed two fast-attack boats and a drone towards a U.S.-flagged commercial tanker, the Stena Imperative, in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. officials said the IRGC appeared to be attempting to potentially seize the vessel before a U.S. missile destroyer intervened and escorted the tanker out of the area.

Israel has voiced skepticism over the prospects of renewed talks. During White House envoy Steve Witkoff’s visit to Israel on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told him that “Iran proved time after time that its promises cannot be trusted,” according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office.

Experts have also questioned whether negotiations with Tehran could lead to a meaningful outcome. Andrea Stricker, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, previously told Jewish Insider that the Trump administration’s demands that Iran abandon its nuclear program, cap its missile program, halt support for regional proxies and terrorism and stop executing its people are “nonstarters for the regime.”

Should negotiations falter, experts have warned that U.S. military action against Iran remains a possibility. Rubio said that President Donald Trump retains “a number of options” for responding to “future events.” 

Rubio also touched on what he described as fundamental differences between the despotic Iranian regime and the Iranian people, underscoring that Washington’s strategy is focused on confronting the regime rather than civilians.

“I remind everybody what I’ve been saying through my entire career in public service: the Iranian people and the Iranian regime are very unalike,” Rubio said. “This is a culture with deep history. I know of no other country where there’s a bigger difference between the people that lead the country and the people who live there.”

He added that the regime’s priorities remain a central obstacle to improving living conditions for Iranians.

“One of the reasons why the Iranian regime cannot provide the people of Iran the quality of life that they deserve is because they’re spending all their money,” Rubio said. “They’re spending all their resources, of what is a rich country, sponsoring terrorism, sponsoring all these proxy groups around the world, exporting, as they call it, a revolution.”

Despite the Trump administration’s willingness to diplomatically engage with Iranian officials, leading Middle East experts told Jewish Insider on Monday that military action against Tehran still remains a very real possibility.

“I can’t tell you what I’m going to do,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday evening when asked about the threshold for an Iran strike. 

“We have a tremendous force going there [to the Middle East], just like we did in Venezuela,” said Trump. “I’d like to see a deal negotiated. But right now, we’re talking to [Iran] and if we could work something out, that’d be great. If we can’t, probably bad things will happen.”

White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi are expected to meet in Istanbul on Friday to discuss a potential new nuclear agreement, according to reports. Jared Kushner, who has played a key role in recent high-profile diplomatic negotiations, is also expected to attend, alongside the foreign ministers of Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, in the first meeting between the U.S. and Iran since U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last June.

The planned talks come as the administration continues to exert pressure on Tehran — in response to Iran’s violent crackdown on protesters last month, Trump has publicly weighed the possibility of U.S. military intervention, ordering the movement of additional military assets into the region and issuing a series of stark warnings on social media indicating that U.S. forces are “ready, willing and able to rapidly fulfill [their] mission, with speed and violence” should a deal fail to be made. 

While the administration has emphasized diplomacy as its preferred path, analysts caution that negotiations do not necessarily signal that the U.S. will not strike.

“Military intervention remains likely in light of President Trump’s demonstrated willingness to use force and the U.S. military buildup in the region,” said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum. “Given the gulf between the American and Iranian positions and the general hard-line position of the Iranian regime on nuclear issues, it is hard to tag a nuclear deal as a likely outcome.” 

Andrea Stricker, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JI that a strike does remain on the table. She said that a deal could be difficult to reach and the upcoming meeting in Istanbul is unlikely to yield meaningful results or concessions from Iran. 

“The planned meeting is likely a diplomatic box-checking exercise and smokescreen to enable a continued U.S. military buildup before Trump authorizes strikes,” Stricker said. “The administration’s demands that Iran abandon nuclear enrichment, cap its missile program, and halt support for regional proxies and terrorism, as well as stop executing its people, are nonstarters for the regime.”

Koplow said the administration’s “mixed signals” on whether it will seek diplomacy or take military action are likely “not a ruse or a diversion,” but instead a signal that Trump “has not actually made up his mind” and is “unsure what his end goal is.”

Jason Greenblatt, who served as White House Middle East envoy in the first Trump administration, asserted that “there’s no mixed signals,” arguing that the president’s messaging has been clear. 

“President Trump has made the choice clear: a real, enforceable deal that ends Iran’s nuclear and missile threats and protects the U.S., our allies, and the Iranian people — or decisive action,” said Greenblatt, who emphasized that while Trump is reluctant to engage in war, the president will not accept an agreement he views as insufficient.

“He is not a war president,” Greenblatt said, “but he will not accept a weak deal. Iran’s leadership should understand by now that President Trump means exactly what he says.”

Stricker also noted that Trump has consistently sought to avoid prolonged conflict, but argued that Iran’s internal repression and continued nuclear advances may push the president toward decisive action. On Saturday, satellite images revealed new activity at Iranian nuclear sites, a potential sign that Tehran is aiming to salvage remaining materials from the June strikes. 

“President Trump favors stability and prioritizes ending violence in global affairs,” she said. “After achieving the defanging of Tehran’s nuclear program, the regime has shown it remains a threat — the ongoing massacre is too much for Trump to tolerate as the leader of the free world.” “The president will likely ensure the regime pays a price, but whether the price is regime change remains to be seen,” she added.

When detailing what potential U.S. military intervention could look like, Koplow said that it would likely be “limited” in scope.  

“Any U.S. action is likely going to fall short of what the Israelis would like to see, which is a campaign that doesn’t stop until the regime has fallen,” said Koplow. “Trump seems to favor quick strikes, and he is also facing wall-to-wall opposition from Arab states regarding the prospects of a long campaign that destabilizes the region and damages prospects for trade, investment, and growth.”

However, other analysts read the shift to negotiations as a signal that intervention is increasingly unlikely. Jonathan Ruhe, a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America told JI that U.S. military action is “unlikely for the moment.”

“An even bigger concern now is that military action could be off the table indefinitely, in a way it wasn’t just a day or two ago, as renewed talks now seem more likely,” said Ruhe. 

Ruhe also noted that a key indicator of Trump’s intentions will be “how long he keeps the ‘armada’ within striking distance,” referring to the U.S. military assets in the region. He added that negotiating with Tehran will likely result in an unfavorable outcome for the U.S. 

“Negotiating with Iran is absolutely the worst possible option for the United States now, because Iran’s regime will go from being on the ropes to thinking it prevailed,” said Ruhe, noting that Tehran is unlikely to agree to an “acceptable deal,” instead using the “prospect of talks to stave off military threats.”

“[Iran] is trying to do what it always does, playing for time and seeing what concessions it can wrangle without ever giving up anything itself,” Ruhe added. “This leaves zero upside for the U.S., since Iran is too emboldened to agree to serious concessions. There’s plenty of downside, too, since U.S. credibility would be dangerously eroded in Tehran’s eyes if Trump fails to fulfill his earlier threats.”

Koplow said Jerusalem is also concerned about a potential nuclear deal and is likely to perceive Iran’s willingness to enter talks as a way of “dragging out the process indefinitely.”

“[The Israelis] are concerned that Trump will back off his threats to take action or end up signing a deal that falls short of addressing the entire basket of issues — nuclear, missiles, and proxies,” said Koplow. 

Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, had said Tehran would strike Israel in response to any U.S. military action, in an interview with the Lebanese-based Al Mayadeen.

Stricker warned that any agreement that falls short of dismantling the regime’s power structure and fails to address key issues would be problematic not only for the U.S. and Israel, but for the Iranian public.

“Any deal with the Islamic Republic would represent a historic betrayal of the Iranian people,” Stricker said. “The only negotiation America should entertain with Tehran is the exit of top regime officials from Iran and their relinquishing of power prior to an orderly transition to democracy.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, alleged on Friday that the Trump administration sidestepped standard congressional review procedures to fast-track a $6 billion arms sale to Israel.

“Just one hour before doing so, the Trump Administration informed me it would disregard Congressional oversight and years of standing practice, and immediately notify over $6 billion dollars in arms sales to Israel,” Meeks said in a statement.

Traditionally, the top members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are given advance notice of arms sales and are able to informally place holds on them before formal notification of such sales is sent to Congress. Meeks has, at times, temporarily placed such holds on sales to Israel during the war in Gaza, seeking additional information or assurances.

“Shamefully, this is now the second time the Trump Administration has blatantly ignored long-standing Congressional prerogatives while also refusing to engage Congress on critical questions about the next steps in Gaza and broader U.S.-Israel policy,” Meeks said.

He added that the administration has refused to provide the committee with briefings with White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff or other senior administration officials and failed to provide a reason for bypassing standard procedures.

“In the United States we do not have kings — we are a democracy rooted in the Constitution, governed by laws,” Meeks continued. “Our founding fathers enshrined Congress’ role first in our Constitution — in Article I. Through his actions, President Trump has again made abundantly clear his disregard for Congress as a coequal branch of government and for the American people we represent.”

He also criticized Republican colleagues for not speaking out about the Trump administration’s moves.

The sale to Israel, announced by the administration on Friday, includes dozens of Apache attack helicopters, light utility helicopters, more than 3,000 light tactical vehicles and power packs for Namer armored personnel carriers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“The proposed sale will enhance Israel’s capability to meet current and future threats by improving its ability to defend Israel’s borders, vital infrastructure, and population centers,” the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a statement. “This proposed sale will increase interoperability with U.S. forces and conveys U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and armed forces modernization. Israel will have no difficulty absorbing this equipment into its armed forces.”

The Pentagon said the sale “will not alter the basic military balance in the region.”

The administration also notified Congress of a $9 billion sale of Patriot interceptor missiles planned to Saudi Arabia.

The weapons in question would likely not be delivered to either country for multiple years.

A burgeoning legal battle between the University of Pennsylvania and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission escalated last week when the Ivy League university called the agency’s methods of investigating whether the school permitted an antisemitic work environment “extraordinary and unconstitutional.” 

The EEOC subpoenaed the university to turn over lists of Jewish employees and members of Jewish organizations, along with detailed identifying and contact information, saying the information is needed for the agency to contact potential victims of antisemitic discrimination. The university’s president and trustees — with the support of Jewish campus organizations Hillel, Chabad and Meor, as well as the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia — refused to do so. 

Handing over those names would disregard “the frightening and well-documented history of governmental entities that undertook efforts to identify and assemble information regarding persons of Jewish ancestry,” the university asserted in a legal filing last Tuesday. 

What may appear to be an arcane legal issue illuminates the tension at the heart of the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to combating campus antisemitism, with even some of the victims of that discrimination concerned that the methods of countering it have gone too far. While the EEOC said it is committed to doing whatever it can to investigate antisemitism among faculty and staff of the elite university, Jewish faculty and students see something worrisome.

“We are deeply concerned that the EEOC is now seeking lists of individuals identified as Jewish, including their personal home addresses, phone numbers, and private emails, based solely on their affiliation with Jewish organizations on campus — and without their consent,” Hillel and Meor wrote in a social media post in November. “Across history, the compelled cataloging of Jews has been a source of profound danger, and collection of Jews’ private information carries echoes of the very patterns that made Jewish communities vulnerable for centuries.” 

Why does the EEOC, which examines complaints of discrimination and civil rights violations at American workplaces, want Penn to provide the lists of Jewish university affiliates? And why are Jewish faculty members — including some who support the federal government’s efforts to investigate antisemitism at their place of work — urging their employer not to comply? 

The dispute dates back to December 2023, when the EEOC pledged to investigate whether Jewish employees at Penn had been subjected “to an unlawful hostile work environment.” 

The inquiry was opened the same week that then-Penn President Liz Magill testified before Congress about her handling of antisemitism at the Philadelphia university in the weeks that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel. The investigation continued quietly for nearly two years, overseen by EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas, who last year was appointed chair of the agency by President Donald Trump. 

It spilled into public view in November when the EEOC filed suit against Penn, seeking to force the university to finally compile and hand over the lists of Jewish faculty members and students that the EEOC said are crucial to its investigation. 

The sought-after lists would include the members of all Jewish clubs and student groups, the names of everyone who participated in confidential university listening sessions about antisemitism, faculty members who were criticized and doxxed in a social media post from an anti-Israel student group and all employees and faculty of the Jewish studies program. Karen McDonough, deputy director of the EEOC’s Philadelphia office, said in a legal filing that the university’s refusal to turn over the lists has “severely hampered” the investigation. 

Penn disagrees. The university called the demand “not only disconcerting but entirely unnecessary,” pledging instead that it would send a message to all university employees telling them how to get in touch with the EEOC to share instances of antisemitism they experienced or witnessed. The university said it has “cooperated extensively” with the agency by turning over more than 100 documents. 

A more typical investigation might involve agency officials interviewing people who issued complaints directly with the agency, then visiting the campus and publicizing their investigation, according to Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan with expertise in employment law. 

“If there are those claims that should be followed up, they should definitely be followed up, and they should be followed up according to usual investigative practices and not this dragnet of, ‘Let’s compile a list of all the Jews at Penn,’” Bagenstos told Jewish Insider last week. “It’s an incredibly unusual, if not completely unprecedented, request. It’s not tailored at all to any particular allegations of discrimination.” 

An EEOC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. 

The agency appeared to follow a similar playbook last year when it investigated antisemitism among staff at Columbia University and the affiliated Barnard College. Employees from both institutions received text messages from the EEOC on their personal phones asking them to fill out a survey identifying whether they are Jewish or Israeli, and if they have faced antisemitic harassment. 

In that case, university officials had agreed to hand over employee data. Columbia’s associate general counsel and deputy general counsel told the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, that the university complied with a subpoena to share employee information with the EEOC. But because the dispute ended in July with a settlement — and not with legal action — the EEOC’s methods of information-gathering at Columbia and Barnard never became public. (Columbia agreed to pay $21 million to resolve antisemitism charges.)

The Penn faculty members and employees opposed to the efforts by the federal government to obtain the controversial lists are not saying that the university is free from antisemitism. The Penn Faculty Alliance to Combat Antisemitism, which formed after Oct. 7 in response to rising anti-Jewish antagonism on campus, filed a brief supporting the university, and its members said that while they want to see the EEOC’s efforts to combat antisemitism at Penn continue, they oppose the methods being used by the agency.

“While the Alliance supports the EEOC’s efforts to combat antisemitism at Penn, its members are gravely concerned that the scope of the EEOC subpoena, which effectively seeks full lists of Jewish individuals at Penn and their personal information, invokes the troubling historical persecution of Jews, and threatens the personal security of the Alliance’s members,” the group wrote in a legal filing last week. 

As the case moves forward in federal court, Penn and the EEOC are poised to test the boundaries of how far a civil rights investigation can go in the name of protecting a vulnerable group.

The Trump administration labeled three Muslim Brotherhood branches as terrorist organizations, including chapters in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan. 

The move follows an executive order President Donald Trump signed in November, which tasked Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with identifying whether branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt should be designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and which should be deemed Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

Those determinations were released on Tuesday: Jordanian and Egyptian branches were placed under the category of Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), with the State Department citing their provision of “material support to Hamas.”

Meanwhile, the organization’s branch in Lebanon received the more stringent label of Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), a stronger categorization that makes it a criminal offense to provide material support to the group. The organization’s leader in Lebanon, Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh, was named an SDGT. 

“These designations reflect the opening actions of an ongoing, sustained effort to thwart Muslim Brotherhood chapters’ violence and destabilization wherever it occurs,” Rubio said in a statement. “The United States will use all available tools to deprive these Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism.”

Edmund Fitton-Brown, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Jewish Insider that while the organization poses a threat in all three countries, Lebanon’s determination was “more far reaching.”

“In the case of Lebanon, you can see why it’s been singled out, because the Lebanese chapter was directly involved in violence in the recent conflict between Hezbollah and Israel,” said Fitton-Brown. “In the case of the Jordanian and Egyptian chapters, they’re not necessarily a lesser threat, but the State Department evidently didn’t find enough information to justify a finding that they are a Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

Fitton-Brown added that this is just the “beginning” of the process, noting that the administration has moved “pretty quickly” and there is potentially “more to follow.” 

“I understand that there is still interest in the [administration] in other chapters,” said Fitton-Brown. “This could be the first of a number of initiatives. We might see an initiative that looks at other specific chapters. One that’s been mentioned is Yemen, another that’s been mentioned is Libya.”

Dr. Charles Small, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy, praised Trump and Rubio’s efforts, stating that the administration has taken an “enormous step to confront the threat the the Muslim Brotherhood poses around the world.”

“The Muslim Brotherhood works from within open and free societies to subvert the values that America and other Western democracies cherish, while advocating for the subjugation of women, the oppression of LGBTQ+ people, and the murder of Jews,” said Small. “We are hopeful that these vital efforts will continue, and ISGAP will keep supporting executive and legislative actions in Washington that aim to dismantle the Brotherhood’s networks and stop its continuing plan to undermine our way of life.”

As protests continue to spread throughout Iran and the geopolitical repercussions of the Trump administration’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ripple across world capitals, the sentiment around the Middle East and in Washington is that renewed conflict with the Islamic Republic may well be on the horizon.

While smaller than previous nationwide protests in 2019 and 2022, the newest demonstrations come as Iran is facing economic instability, crushing international sanctions and record droughts. The protests that have spread across the country in recent days are the first major demonstrations since the 12-day war between Iran and Israel, with an assist from the U.S., last June that damaged the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and further destabilized Iran.

The protests in Iran were already gaining steam at the time a Delta Force team apprehended Maduro and his wife on Saturday and brought them to the U.S. to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. But the Trump administration’s decision to send elite forces into Caracas and forcibly remove Maduro signals to Tehran — as well as Moscow and Beijing — that Washington is taking a tougher approach to regimes it sees as destabilizing and threatening to U.S. interests.

The world is watching this geopolitical high-wire act with uncertainty. In Israel, officials are closely monitoring the instability in Iran, concerned that the regime in Tehran could move to strike Israel in an effort to consolidate domestic support and quell the protests; Israel could also see a window of opportunity to strike Iran at a weak moment, either of which could reignite warfare between Jerusalem and Tehran. It was less than a week ago that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and discussed the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic missile program.

In his weekly Cabinet meeting yesterday, Netanyahu addressed Iran in the context of his Palm Beach meeting last week, saying that Israel “reiterated our joint position of zero enrichment on one hand, and the need to remove the 400 kilograms of enriched material from Iran and oversee the sites with tight and genuine supervision.” 

Noting that his sit-down with Trump was taking place as anti-government protests broke out in Iran, Netanyahu added, “The Government of Israel, the State of Israel, and my policy, we identify with the struggle of the Iranian people, with their aspirations for freedom, liberty, and justice. It is very possible that we are standing at the moment when the Iranian people are taking their fate into their own hands.”

With an eye toward Washington, the question is whether Trump will back future military action in Iran, after his success ousting Maduro in Caracas. Despite the widespread protests in Iran, there is no consolidated opposition, where the regime’s opponents are, as The Atlantic’s Arash Azizi writes, “hopelessly disorganized and disunited.” 

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One last night, Trump reiterated his recent comments that the U.S. would intervene if Iranian officials were to kill protesters, having said on his Truth Social site on Friday that “If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.” 

The Associated Press, citing human rights activists, reported that 15 people had been killed as of Saturday, the same day that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made his first public comments since the outbreak of protests, saying that “rioters must be put in their place.”

Iran’s political leadership appears at an impasse in its efforts to contain the demonstrations — or improve the conditions that led to them — with the hands of President Masoud Pezeshkian and other senior officials largely tied by the supreme leader. That could push the regime to act out of desperation — or to collapse entirely. 

An increasingly unlikely scenario is that the protests fizzle out and Khamenei reasserts control — a move that would likely need to occur alongside an economic upturn to pull the rial up from record lows.

The first days of 2026 have seen tens of thousands of protesters taking to the streets across Iran and an administration in Washington flexing its military power, setting the stage for a potential power realignment in the Middle East and around the world. 

One of Washington’s few remaining bipartisan traditions is the annual clamoring for a ticket to the White House Hanukkah party — an affair that was smaller than usual this year after the Trump administration tore down the East Wing, prompting disappointment even from some Republican allies who did not score an invite. If you’re a member of the opposing political party, forget about it.  

But even as power changes hands in Washington, one person is a fixture at Republican and Democratic White House Hanukkah parties, as well as Hanukkah gatherings all across the Beltway, from the Pentagon to the Justice Department to the Capitol. That’s Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), the Washington arm of the global Chabad movement, and Washington’s unofficial menorah-lighter-in-chief.

“I was raised during the Bicentennial, and I got a very patriotic education in our day school. I felt very American, and I thought this was a strong public expression of a deep Jewish pride that I was able to enjoy,” Shemtov said during Hanukkah last week. “I come from grandfathers on both sides of my family who were arrested and imprisoned, tortured and exiled for being Jews and for practicing Judaism and for leading Jewish communities. So I wasn’t going to let the freedom we are so fortunate to have here just pass without my active participation in it.”

In an interview with Jewish Insider, Shemtov reflected on the importance of spreading a Hanukkah message of light in a region where that’s often missing: the halls of power in Washington. 

During Hanukkah this year Shemtov attended as many as four events in a day, shuttling between government institutions and reciting the blessings in front of dignitaries including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Attorney General Pam Bondi. He led a bipartisan menorah lighting on Capitol Hill with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). 

“The menorah itself is a symbol of bipartisanship, in my opinion, because you almost always have four branches on one side, four branches on the other, and a shamash in the middle,” Shemtov reflected. “In the time of the Temple, we are told that the flames used to point towards the center from either side, and the center flame used to point towards heaven. And that was the connection of divinity with this world.”

“When we point towards the center,” Shemtov continued, “we bring more sensibility and, therefore, divinity to our existence across the board. That’s why, especially when we do this with the two leaders, the speaker and the minority leader together, I think it sends a very powerful message to whoever sees it that there’s hope for togetherness, even in a time of divisiveness.” 

It was Shemtov’s father, Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, who is most responsible for bringing public observances of Hanukkah to Washington. In 1979, Abraham Shemtov participated in the first National Menorah Lighting with President Jimmy Carter, a tradition that his son now leads on the Ellipse, outside the White House, each year. 

But this year’s National Menorah Lighting would be different than the usual large, boisterous affair. Shemtov knew that as soon as he woke up. 

“I was able to tell that it was going to be a very cold day, but that was a small problem compared to what I saw was an unprecedented vicious terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia. Sydney is very close to me,” Shemtov said. His wife Nechama is from Sydney and lived down the street from Bondi Beach, where 15 people were killed on the first day of the holiday by terrorists who reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. 

But the brutality of that day, which sent his wife’s family huddling together for safety, did not keep Shemtov from spreading the message of Hanukkah around Washington. “I think that it’s an important opportunity to bring a message of life, unity, warmth and positivity in a way which might otherwise not even be possible,” Shemtov said. 

It’s no longer a surprise to arrive at the White House or the Naval Observatory and find kosher brisket, freshly made latkes and sufganiyot in a variety of flavors. But the White House Hanukkah party is a relatively recent invention. The first one took place in 2001, hosted by President George W. Bush. It would be a few more years before the event was certified kosher — by Rabbi Shemtov, of course. It’s a responsibility he oversees regardless of who is president.

“They say about the White House, etc., that the moment you don’t feel it’s special to walk into these places — the White House, the Capitol, VPR [the vice president’s residence] — you should stop working there,” said Shemtov. “Access, acceptance and prominence within these hallowed and rarefied quarters of society is something our forebears can only have dreamed of in an ambitious fantasy, and here we are, able to live it. We just have to want to be proud enough to do so, and that’s why, of course, it’s always an honor to be invited, involved, participating and particularly in helping organize such respectable recognitions of our faith.” 

Shemtov’s job is to drive for hours around the Beltway, helping Jews in positions of power practice their faith proudly and publicly. This year, he made it a priority to also be home in time to light his own menorah. 

“I have to have a Jewish home as well, not just a Jewish expression to the outside world. And to do that takes effort because scheduling is so crazy,” said Shemtov. “We have to remember it’s like an airplane. You have to put your own oxygen mask on, or else you won’t be able to help anyone at all.”

Jeremy Carl, a Trump administration nominee for a senior position at the State Department, has expressed a range of derogatory views of the Jewish community, characterizing in writings and public interviews the community as holding a victim mentality, downplaying the significance of the Holocaust to the Jewish story and experience, musing about the need to address the what he called the “Jewish Question” and characterizing Jews as religiously incorrect and in need of conversion.

Carl also rejected the argument that Israel is the United States’ strongest ally and was deeply critical of Christian Zionism. He has additionally espoused a view of the United States as a white, Christian nation, claiming that white people are undergoing a “cultural genocide” and deliberate replacement.

Carl was nominated to be the assistant secretary of state for international organizations in June, but did not move forward to a hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before the end of this year’s Senate session. Should the Trump administration still want Carl in the role, it will have to re-file his nomination in the new year. Carl said in a response on X that neither he nor the administration have decided whether to resubmit the nomination. Carl served as deputy assistant secretary of the Interior in the first Trump administration.

“Jews have often loved to play the victim rather than accept that they are participants in history. That means that at times of course they’ve been victims but they also can be perpetrators,” Carl, who was raised in a secular Jewish household but converted to Christianity, said in a 2024 interview with “The Christian Ghetto” podcast, saying that some Christians have been “understandably” resentful of Jews throughout history.

“I think it’s inevitable of course that people will always take their own side in [a] historical quarrel. The Jewish community has kind of done [that] to an unusual extent,” Carl continued. 

While he offered disclaimers that he was not speaking about all Jews, he generally painted with a broad brush, characterizing the majority of the Jewish community in largely pejorative ways.

He said that the Holocaust “kind of dominates so much of modern Jewish thinking,” adding that he believed it to be “very unhealthy.” 

“Now, when you’re getting to this next generation — everybody has traumas in their past. How much are we going to relitigate them?” Carl asked rhetorically. “There’s a level of [self]-involvement there that I kind of find a little distasteful.”

He also said that he feels that “mainline Christian[s]” do not expect as much from Jews as they could and are “very reluctant to criticize Jews or Jewish communal behavior even when, in my view, that might be very warranted.”

Carl said that Jews, meanwhile, “tend to see evangelical Christians in a very negative light … and I frankly think reflects poorly on the Jewish community.” 

He claimed that the Jewish community is afraid of Christian communal unity as a legacy of past conversion efforts.

Carl also declared that Jews have never been oppressed in the U.S. and added that “the notion that Jews are the downtrodden here just doesn’t really match with actual reality. I understand why this type of attitude can cause resentment among some Christians who observe it. … Even when I was Jewish, I found it distasteful.”

In a lengthy response on X, Carl dismissed Jewish Insider’s reporting as a misleading and agenda-driven smear.

“I have never ‘downplayed’ the Holocaust, one of the great horrors of modern history, except in the overactive imagination and perhaps bad faith portrayal of the author,” Carl said.

At the same time, in “The Christian Ghetto” interview he claimed to reject conspiracy theories about the Jewish community as a whole and the neo-Nazi Groyper movement, saying that adherents go too far in their hatred of Jews in unproductive ways.

“Nobody can just take a small sip of the drink in front of them, which is the ‘Jewish Question,’ and imbibe carefully and have a mature discussion on it,” Carl said. “[They] need to overdose massively on it, to the point that they just begin saying completely ridiculous and absurd things.”

Carl said that such activity makes him shy away from “critique” of the Jewish community “because you don’t want to be lumped in with these clowns.” He declared that Jewish activists “love the Groypers because they’re just so discrediting of anyone who would ask questions about any of this,” referring to Jewish political activism.

He also claimed that Jews are “more susceptible to political radicalisms of all types and political ultra-enthusiasms” due to a “misplaced religious impulse” of Judaism “searching for the Messiah that had actually been found.”

“I have, of course, been very critical of the political activities of much of the establishment Jewish community since most of the community is liberal and I am a conservative. This should surprise nobody, nor is it a scandal. I have also been critical of the extreme neoconservatives such as those who seem to be pushing this hit piece,” Carl said in his response.

Carl also said on “The Christian Ghetto” podcast the U.S. should have less of a relationship with Israel, and was highly critical of Christian Zionist ideology that attaches a theological dimension to support for Israel.

He said that while from a secular perspective, he feels “vaguely positively disposed to Israel,” he rejects Christian Zionism and the “theological trappings that some Christians put around Israel.”

“At a basis, I have a very pro-Israel view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in abstract, I just don’t want us involved in it that much,” Carl said. “The amount of time and energy that America spends on this question — often to the detriment of our own national interest. Nor do I accept that Israel is our greatest ally.”

He characterized himself as a “Buchananite” and a “Paul-ite” in his ideology.

Carl said in his response that he is fully supportive of the Trump administration’s foreign policy and support for Israel, including the administration’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court and the UN’s “Israel monomania.”

He said in an interview with “The Will Spencer Podcast” that conversion from Judaism is a “very fraught thing” and that, in many Jewish families, “it would be easier to convert to Satanism honestly, in some ways.” 

He said on “The Christian Ghetto” podcast that Jews have been a “particularly thorny problem” in their resistance to conversion to Christianity. He said he does not believe, from a theological perspective, in religious pluralism, and characterized Judaism as an incorrect and invalid religious practice, arguing that Christians should be trying to convert Jews “where we can.”

In his response, Carl said, “As a Christian I want everyone to embrace the Christian faith, especially my family and friends, because I believe Christianity to be true, and other religions false. Again, this is not a scandal except perhaps in the minds of the author and his editors who evidently believe that standard beliefs held by the vast majority of Christians throughout history are scandalous.”

Carl has also espoused a vision of America as a white, Christian nation, and asserted that white people in America are subject to “persecution” and a “cultural genocide.”

“American whites are victims of a cultural genocide,” Carl said at the 2024 National Conservatism conference. “I’m suggesting this partially again to troll any leftist media who might be in the room and furiously scribbling my unforgivable hate speech in their notebooks. But I’m not saying it entirely for that purpose.”

He’s the author of The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart, which dismisses the idea of rising white supremacy and focuses on the thesis that anti-white policies are endemic in modern America.

The original title of the book, Carl revealed in a 2024 essay, was It’s Okay to Be White, which has become a slogan used by white supremacists. 

He states in that essay that demographic shifts in the country are the result of “a great replacement of whites,” referencing the conspiracy theory that a shadowy force is attempting to replace the country’s white population with immigrants. He declared that the great replacement is “a fact” and “a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”

“I can understand why [Indian President Narendra] Modi wants India to be a Hindu nation, because I want America to be a Christian nation, defined not in total but in part by its European historic identity,” he continued. 

He added in “The Christian Ghetto” podcast interview that he does not “really believe in Judeo-Christian — I think America is a Christian nation.”

He said in “The Will Spencer Podcast” interview that his book was designed to help white people “figure out a way as a white person to navigate around the issue and also understand that you’re not crazy. The sorts of things you’re experiencing in terms of discrimination or racism, etc. are very real and that you don’t need to put up with that.”

At the same time, Carl did acknowledge in that interview that America would never be an “ethnically uniform” or “racially uniform” way and “that’s okay, that’s manageable,” but that the country should have a “sense of a majority tradition … majority religious practice” and a “tolerance for other minority groups to all be within that culture.”

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

CNN previously reported that Carl scrubbed thousands of inflammatory posts after his nomination.

This article was updated on 12/21/2025 to include Carl’s response.

A group of 136 House Republicans released a joint statement on Friday calling for increased oversight of and accountability from Syria, days after voting to repeal the last major sanctions package on the country as part of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.

The Trump administration had pushed Congress to repeal the so-called Caesar Act sanctions, an action finalized when Trump signed the 2026 NDAA Thursday evening, but some lawmakers on the Hill have harbored continued reservations about the new government in Syria and ensuring it continues to make progress on democracy building.

The statement indicates that a significant number of Republican lawmakers remain concerned about the Syrian government’s conduct going forward. It follows an attack by ISIS affiliates who also reportedly had ties to the Syrian government that killed two U.S. service members and a civilian interpreter in Syria last weekend. The statement has been in the works since last week, shortly after the House voted to pass the NDAA, a source familiar with the situation told Jewish Insider.

“Bringing religious freedom into Syria is the only way the country will fully stabilize. The sanctions repealed by the NDAA will help economically, but violence will not cease until [Syrian President Ahmad] al-Sharaa uses his position to denounce religiously motivated attacks,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), a co-lead of the joint statement, told Jewish Insider.

The lawmakers, led by Stutzman and Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK), said in the joint statement that members of Congress interested in protecting religious minorities in the region “worked with the Trump Administration and House leadership to secure assurances that snapback conditions … would be enforced if Syria does not comply with the terms highlighted in the repeal language.”

The NDAA includes language calling for the administration to reimpose sanctions on Syria if a variety of human rights, security and anti-corruption conditions are not met, and for reporting to Congress on those benchmarks — but the language is not binding and the strict and sweeping Caesar Act sanctions could not be reimposed by executive authority without another act of Congress.

The lawmakers said that the “the mass murder of the Syrian Christians, Druze, Alawites, Kurds, and other religious and ethnic minorities must be a thing of the past” and that they are “committed to keeping a watchful eye on the new al-Sharaa Administration to ensure protections for religious and ethnic minorities.”

They said they would like to travel to Syria to see firsthand that religious protections are being upheld, particularly in Suweida, the city with a substantial Druze population where government-aligned forces carried out mass atrocities earlier this year.

“We look forward to confirming that these terms have not been squandered by the Syrian government — whether by their president or by rogue military officials — and seeing for ourselves that the al-Sharaa Administration has created a safe environment for the religious and ethnic minorities historically persecuted in the region,” the statement continued.

The lawmakers also said that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-FL) had agreed to hold a hearing on “the verified change of treatment for religious minorities in Syria.”

Mast himself, who had been the last major roadblock on the Hill to sanctions repeal and pushed for the nonbinding snapback language to be included, is one of the first signatories on the statement.

Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement that the “unconditional” sanctions repeal is a significant step, while highlighting the congressional oversight and monitoring obligations.

“After long and serious consideration, we have worked closely with the Trump Administration to responsibly repeal the Caesar Act, which played an important role in the fall of the Assad Regime,” Risch said. “This unconditional repeal removes a significant roadblock to U.S. and international commercial investments in Syria. It also increases reporting and monitoring on benchmarks such as ethnic and religious persecution to ensure Syria remains on the path to becoming a U.S. partner that makes America safer, stronger, and more prosperous.”

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom held a hearing with Syrian minority group leaders last month, where representatives of the Syrian Druze, Christian and Alawite communities warned of systemic religious persecution by the new government and urged Congress to place conditions on the repeal of sanctions.

But others, including the Jewish Heritage in Syria Foundation (JHS), a group of U.S.-based Syrian Jews working to restore Jewish sites and relics in Syria, celebrated the sanctions repeal.

“Once President Trump signs the bill into law, we will be able to increase our efforts to preserve Jewish heritage, continue the search for those we have lost, and move forward with healing and restoration,” JHS said in a statement. “We can now begin rebuilding our synagogues, especially the ancient and historic Jobar Synagogue, one of the oldest Jewish sites in the world.”

Other leaders in the Syrian Jewish community have distanced themselves from the leadership of JHS and its affiliates, claiming they do not speak for the Syrian Jewish community in the U.S. at large.

A new bill introduced by several prominent House progressives blasts the Trump administration’s agenda and actions on combating antisemitism, while also implementing new posts and requirements across a series of federal departments to fight Jewish hate.

The new bill, the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act, is led by Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Becca Balint (D-VT) and Maxwell Frost (D-FL).

The legislation accuses the Trump administration, at length, of weaponizing antisemitism to “pursue ideological and partisan political objectives unrelated to protecting Jewish communities,” including attacking educational institutions, suppressing speech and enforcing “ideological conformity.”

Citing the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther report, which the legislation describes as the framework for the administration’s strategy, the lawmakers link the Trump administration’s actions to a “Christian Zionism theology and beliefs that Jewish presence in the Holy Land will precipitate End Times.”

It claims the administration has used the “false pretext of antisemitism investigations” to undermine academic freedom on college campuses, eliminate diversity and Middle Eastern studies programs and silence criticism of Israel.

The legislators also allege the Trump administration “inappropriately appropriated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as a tool for immigration enforcement and deportation proceedings,” citing the administration’s efforts to deport students engaged in antisemitic and anti-Israel activity and scrutinize the social media activity of visa applicants.

They accuse the administration of holding Jewish institutions’ security “hostage” to political objectives through new conditions on Nonprofit Security Grant Program funding.

The legislation downplays the IHRA definition of antisemitism, describing it as one of “several definitions of antisemitism which serve as valuable tools to raise awareness and increase understanding of antisemitism,” despite widespread adoption by the mainstream Jewish community and its use by multiple administrations of both parties.

The bill describes various definitions, also naming the Nexus Document, as “valuable tools to raise awareness and increase understanding of antisemitism” which “should be utilized by Federal, State, and local agencies” and as “non-legally binding educational tools [which] should not be applied in punitive legal contexts.”

It further emphasizes that “criticism of Israeli government policies, when not motivated by or expressed through antisemitic tropes or discrimination against Jews, is a form of political speech protected by the First Amendment and does not constitute antisemitism.”

And it states that “the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to pursue partisan political agendas undermines genuine efforts to protect Jewish communities and breeds additional antisemitism.”

The legislation includes some provisions which have enjoyed bipartisan support, including several aspects of the Protecting Students on Campus Act: requiring universities to publicize to students how to file discrimination complaints and to report annually to the Department of Education on the complaints they have received and for the Department of Education to report to Congress monthly for a year on the complaints it has received and how long they remain open.

The Protecting Students on Campus Act was re-introduced by its bipartisan sponsors — Reps. Lucy McBath (D-GA), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Don Bacon (R-NE), Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) and Haley Stevens (D-MI) — on Thursday, the same day Nadler’s legislation was announced.

The Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act additionally requires the administration to create an office in the Department of Justice to combat antisemitism, to be headed by a career DOJ official as the full-time national coordinator to counter antisemitism, similar to a provision previously sought by the mainstream Jewish community and included in bipartisan legislation in the prior Congress.

The bill requires the Department of Education to reopen and staff all regional offices of the Office for Civil Rights that were closed earlier in the Trump administration, and prevents the department from closing such offices going forward. It proposes providing $280 million for the program annually.

It also requires colleges and universities to designate a Title VI coordinator to handle complaints.

Additionally, it requires the FBI to establish a hate crimes reporting center, to be led by a designated coordinator, for the purpose of collecting and overseeing hate crimes data. It proposes $50 million in funding annually for the office.

Regarding the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, the legislation requires the administration to ensure sufficient personnel to support the implementation of the program and prohibits the imposition of conditions on DEI, immigration, political advocacy or affiliation or protected characteristics for grant awardees. It mandates the administration provide specific detail to Congress on approved and rejected grant applications.

It proposes providing $500 million for the program annually. 

The legislation makes repeated reference to the Biden administration’s national strategy on antisemitism, and is framed as an effort to build off of that approach.

“This bill shows that moderates and those aligned with the current Israeli government do not enjoy a monopoly over the fight against antisemitism and hate,” Nadler said in a statement. “I am proud to introduce, with my cherished colleagues, the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act, which embodies a comprehensive and principled framework — one that steadfastly upholds and celebrates progressive values without compromise, diminution, or equivocation.” 

DeLauro said the bill “lays out a national strategy for combating the rising threat of antisemitism while protecting freedom of speech, and calls out the Trump Administration’s co-opting of antisemitism for its own political agenda.”

Balint said the legislation would provide critical resources while also implementing “strong Congressional oversight and guardrails to prevent any administration from politicizing antisemitism to further attack their opponents.”

Frost said the legislation “creates a coordinated, whole-of-government response to confront antisemitism wherever it appears in our communities. Unity is our greatest strength, and when we act together, hate has nowhere to take hold.”

As the Trump administration ratchets up its efforts to influence higher education, the latest White House proposal for colleges and universities is being met with skepticism from academics — even as its authors say its implementation should be a no-brainer.

That’s in reference to a White House document called the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a 10-point plan that the federal government is asking universities to sign in order to get preferential treatment for the federal funds upon which many research universities rely. 

If the schools don’t agree to the terms in the compact — which include commitments to end race-based hiring and admissions, limits on foreign enrollment and a pledge to foster greater ideological diversity — they risk losing billions of dollars.

The compact reflects an evolution of a familiar Trump administration argument: that America’s preeminent educational institutions have strayed from their mission, letting politics interfere with their raison d’etre as centers of academic excellence. Combating antisemitism on college campuses — a cause the White House has prioritized this year — provided President Donald Trump a foray into greater oversight of higher education. But there appears to be no direct line from that fight against antisemitism to the broader ideological framework in this compact, which makes only a passing reference to antisemitism.

A White House official who worked on the compact called it a “basic, basic easy low hurdle,” telling Jewish Insider that the document is “a nonpartisan, neutral concept.” 

Many academics, including several who have spoken out against antisemitism and against universities’ handling of it in recent years, don’t agree. 

“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth said last week, making MIT the first university to formally reject the compact. 

The White House wrote to MIT and eight other campuses this month, giving them early access. Brown University joined MIT in rejecting the compact on Wednesday, but the other seven universities haven’t yet responded ahead of the Oct. 20 deadline. 

With the compact, Trump is making the case that universities have a fiduciary responsibility to American citizens that they have not met, as academia has “lost its way,” according to the administration official. 

“It’s for the taxpayers,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak openly about a negotiating process that is mostly taking place behind closed doors. “This administration is here to support research … but at the same time we also can’t abdicate our responsibility to you and myself. There are a lot of people who are cutting checks to the IRS because that’s what they have to do, and they don’t even go to college.” 

But where the Trump administration sees “good hygiene,” according to the official, many academics worry the compact’s far-reaching goals could amount to an overreach that impinges on free speech and academic freedom.

“It’s something that everybody’s talking about, and people are taking it very seriously,” said David Myers, a professor and the chair of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It really seems to touch upon one of the cardinal principles of university governance, which is autonomy and independence.” 

Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor who teaches about antisemitism and the Holocaust at Cornell University, called the compact “overkill, with a number of positive items in it, but overall problematic for any independent university of college.” 

Rosensaft questioned how the compact addresses antisemitism, if at all: Antisemitism is only mentioned in a section about foreign students, which accuses those who are “not properly vetted” with “saturating the campus with noxious values such as antisemitism and other anti-American values.”

Academics concerned about antisemitism told JI that the Trump administration is right to point out that severe problems exist in higher education. But many are unsure how this compact will address the issues Jewish students face. 

“I often wonder if a compact like this had come out of the Biden administration or a Harris administration, whether, from the faculty, there’d be that same kind of knee-jerk reaction [that] we have to oppose everything that comes out of the administration — when actually, when you read this line by line, there’s a lot of things we can agree with,” said Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse University. 

“If you look at certain things individually, they’re OK. I don’t have any problem with freezing tuition, for example, or with arresting grade inflation. I don’t have any problem with teaching [Western civilization]. The problem is that, as a whole package, it’s kind of the antithesis of what universities are meant to do,” said Norman Goda, a historian and professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida. “And if the addressing of antisemitism is one of the aims of this, then I don’t know how that is done.”

Miriam Elman, a former political science professor at Syracuse University, said that some of the immediate skepticism of the compact is likely due to politics. But that doesn’t alleviate all of her concerns.

“I often wonder if a compact like this had come out of the Biden administration or a Harris administration, whether, from the faculty, there’d be that same kind of knee-jerk reaction [that] we have to oppose everything that comes out of the administration — when actually, when you read this line by line, there’s a lot of things we can agree with,” said Elman, who is the executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which fights academic boycotts of Israel. 

“But we also are not naive. The Trump administration does have an agenda. It does have priorities, and it is wrapping those priorities into the fight against campus antisemitism. So there is a lot of concern.” 

The compact appears to be primarily directed at undergraduate programs. Dr. Philip Greenland, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University, said his colleagues at the medical school are generally not worried about the compact in the way many humanities professors are. “It could affect the medical school in a secondary way: If Northwestern is drawn into this and doesn’t comply, we may never get our federal funding back,” said Greenland. The Trump administration froze $790 million in federal funding for Northwestern in April. 

“Although the compact doesn’t seem to be talking about antisemitism, in the end, people will remember: How did the administration go after the universities?” said Pamela Nadell, the chair in women’s and gender history at American University and the author of a new book about antisemitism in America. “They said that they were promoting antisemitism.”

“I think it’s in some sense a good thing that it doesn’t call out, specifically, that this is about antisemitism,” Greenland continued. “What the compact seems to be more about is a claim, which is justifiable, that universities have become very, very ideological in one direction … People are claiming that the compact will deprive them of their free speech. But what that doesn’t recognize is that the current situation deprives other people of their free speech and their free expression.” 

The Trump administration official told JI that the compact is “all-encompassing,” and argued that its broad mandate includes antisemitism — but not only that.

“It overlaps, but the compact isn’t a compact to stop antisemitism. It’s a compact to return to lawful academic excellence and a marketplace of ideas, [and] that includes eradicating antisemitism,” said the official. 

Pamela Nadell, the chair in women’s and gender history at American University and the author of a new book about antisemitism in America, argued that the Trump administration’s earlier actions targeting antisemitism will come to be viewed as the pretext for what is now a much larger and more strategic rewriting of federal policy toward institutions of higher education. 

“Although the compact doesn’t seem to be talking about antisemitism, in the end, people will remember: How did the administration go after the universities?” said Nadell. “They said that they were promoting antisemitism.”

The Trump administration’s settlements with Ivy League universities, negotiated in response to alleged violations of federal civil rights law, are meant primarily as an attention-grabbing measure — a way to get more people to pay attention to President Donald Trump’s aggressive approach to tackling discrimination in higher education, according to an architect of those settlements.

“When you see numbers like that, then you pay attention, and you look, and then you’re able to learn a little bit more, something maybe you wouldn’t normally learn,” May Mailman, a conservative attorney who until last month served as a senior White House strategist, told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat on an episode of his “Interesting Times” podcast that was released on Thursday. 

The Trump administration has so far secured a $221 million payment from Columbia and a $50 million commitment from Brown. A deal with Harvard has been under negotiation for months, but no agreement has yet been reached. 

These deals have included commitments from the universities on antisemitism policy, race-based hiring and admissions standards and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. What remains unclear is how they will be enforced. But Mailman told Douthat that the optics alone mark a significant achievement for the Trump administration.

“A settlement on its own without a fine might not be taken as seriously by the public or by other universities as when there is a fine,” said Mailman. “These are small dollar figures compared to the amounts that they are getting every year from the federal government and from their donors — but I think it provides a seriousness and a focus on these in ways that promises only wouldn’t.” 

The deals have not included a recognition of fault on the part of the universities. But, Mailman added, they convey to the public “a sense of acknowledgment of wrongdoing, not a legal sense but sort of a moral sense of, ‘We’ve taken all this money, and we did it in ways that were not merit based, or they weren’t safe for our students, and so we’re paying a small amount of it back.’”

Douthat engaged Mailman in a conversation about what he called the “very blurry zone of critiques of the policies of the state of Israel and critiques of Zionism,” and suggested that the Trump administration had been “micromanaging” academic departments by asking them to discipline “radical critics of Israel.” Mailman seemed to acknowledge that some of those efforts appear to some as an infringement on free speech.

“I acknowledge that there are some letters that were sent by the antisemitism task force, in some way, that either incorporated the IHRA definition or otherwise were perceived to have been speech codes,” Mailman said, referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which some on the left and right have argued marks a threat to free speech.

Still, she added that the deal at Columbia did not create a “speech code.” (Columbia did announce its adoption of the IHRA definition this summer, but that was not formally articulated in its deal with the federal government.)

“The Columbia deal — and I think everyone would acknowledge that Columbia had a major antisemitism problem — but the Columbia deal in no way creates any speech code, whether it be on Israel or anything else,” said Mailman. “It does not — it specifically says that this is not intended to create any First Amendment conflict or otherwise govern speech on Columbia’s campus.”

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter offered a strong defense of Israel’s strike on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, as the Israeli government doubled down on the strategy in the face of strong pushback from the Trump administration.

Speaking at an American Jewish Committee event on Capitol Hill, Leiter argued that, in carrying out the strike, Israel was only doing what it and other countries have always done in the past: hunting down terrorists who perpetrate attacks on them wherever they may be.

He made repeated reference to Jordan’s King Hussein’s Black September campaign against Palestinian terrorists in Jordan, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir pursuing those responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics attack and the U.S. launching wars to hunt down those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

“Israel acted in the context of what any normal country does, it pursues terrorists and eliminates them, like King Hussein, like Golda Meir, like the United States of America,” Leiter said.

Leiter also highlighted U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, presented by the U.S. and passed weeks after the 9/11 attacks, which “obligates states to prevent and suppress the financing and support of terrorism, including the harboring of terrorists.”

“Now what is Qatar doing if not financing and supporting terrorism by playing host to Hamas, the very people who sent the terrorists who murdered six people sitting at a bus stop in Jerusalem, waiting to go about their business?” Leiter said, referencing a Hamas-linked attack days before the Israeli strike in Doha. 

“Who sent them? The terrorists we targeted in Doha. They celebrated the murder of these six innocents the same way they celebrated, on camera, the slaughter of 1,200 innocents on Oct. 7,” Leiter added.

Leiter said that, in striking Hamas leaders in Doha, “We are acting in the context of the U.N. charter, of international law, in the cause of sanity and morality.”

He noted that the campaigns by both Jordan against Palestinian terrorists and the United States against terrorist groups in Iraq could also have been considered “disproportionate,” a criticism that some in the international community have leveled over Israel’s operations in Gaza.

Leiter also argued that Israel’s ongoing military operations in the Middle East increase, rather than hurt, the prospects for expanded normalization, “because we are empowering the moderate elements within Islam.” The AJC event was a celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Abraham Accords.

Addressing criticisms that Israel has failed to properly plan for the day after the war in Gaza, Leiter insisted that those plans are in place — but can’t be safely discussed in public.

“We’re preparing for the day after. The day after is going to be brilliant and for it to succeed, we can’t talk too much about it, and it certainly can’t be an Israel-sponsored day after to enjoy success,” Leiter said.

Over the weekend, The New York Times published a story contending that the momentum for settlements with elite universities was stalling amid divisions between those in the Trump administration looking to make a deal and those looking for more meaningful reforms in combating antisemitism. 

The story glossed over the related development we’ve been hearing from officials involved in the negotiating process: that a zeal for dealmaking from some officials is overshadowing the main reason the Trump administration was playing hardball with these schools in the first place — the rampant antisemitism that has been festering on campus.

In fact, the word “antisemitism” was hardly mentioned in the lengthy NYT story, a sign in itself of the administration’s flagging focus.

Indeed, many of the deals struck — along with the outlines of potential future deals — have focused on the dollar amounts in the settlement, without requiring many significant reforms that would deal with antisemitism at the elite schools.

Columbia University agreed in July, following a lengthy legal battle, to pay a $200 million settlement over three years to the federal government. In addition to the legal penalty, the Ivy League school — which did not admit to wrongdoing in the resolution agreement — pledged to implement a series of commitments aimed at protecting Jewish students. 

These include further incorporating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism by requiring its Office of Institutional Equity to embrace the definition; appointing a Title VI coordinator to review alleged violations of the Civil Rights Act; requiring antisemitism training for all students, faculty and staff; and refusing to recognize or meet with anti-Israel student coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

On Columbia’s campus, some pro-Israel students expressed disappointment over those “largely symbolic” commitments, which diverged from a list of reforms initially demanded by the Trump administration. 

Soon after Columbia, Brown University entered into an agreement with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. The settlement also primarily focused on money rather than reform, although unlike Columbia, Brown was not required to pay a fine directly to the federal government. The university instead agreed to pay $50 million over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island. It also agreed to launch a third-party campus climate survey in an effort to protect Jewish students. 

Meanwhile, the conversation surrounding a possible settlement with Harvard has increasingly centered on the significant size of the potential payment — a whopping half-billion dollars — over any of the institutional changes the university will need to make. Sources familiar with the dealmaking confirm to Jewish Insider that President Donald Trump himself is increasingly enamored with the size of the payment, which has led some of his advisors to focus less on reforms and more on the money.

“There’s growing dissatisfaction with the White House letting universities buy their way out of accountability with no meaningful change. It’s clear they’ve been totally out-negotiated,” said one source familiar with the negotiations. 

Reading the Times story, the administration officials working to fight against the universities’ harassment of their Jewish students were caricatured as “ideologically driven aides,” whereas those looking to cut lucrative financial deals were portrayed as the pragmatists. 

The reality is the opposite. Securing government payouts as the primary achievement for using state power to freeze a private university’s funds makes the whole enterprise seem like extortion. Putting in the work to make sure these abuses don’t happen again is what would make the exertion of government power more justifiable.

Indeed, the outcome of this showdown with elite universities — with negotiations with Cornell and Northwestern taking place now — will be a test of whether many of the systemic abuses that led to the extraordinary freeze on research funding will be rolled back, or whether the tolerance of anti-Jewish discrimination on campus could become the new normal.

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) wrote to top trade officials in the Trump administration urging them to take action to respond to the decision by the Norges Bank Investment Fund, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, to divest from U.S. equipment firm Caterpillar because of the Israeli military’s use of its products in the West Bank and Gaza.

“As the Trump Administration continues to take bold action to rebalance global trade, I urge you to also address the disturbing politicization of sovereign wealth fund investment decisions against American companies,” McCormick said in a letter, sent Thursday, to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

He called on the administration to take Norges’ moves against American companies into account in ongoing trade negotiations with Norway, calling the effort a “form of economic warfare directed by a foreign government against the U.S. economy.”

He said that “all options should be on the table to address this issue,” including tariffs, “restrictions on Norges’ access to U.S. financial markets, and visa sanctions” on those involved in moves against American companies.

McCormick served from 2020-2022 as CEO of Bridgewater Associates, which manages portions of Norges’ portfolio. Bridgewater CIO Greg Jensen addressed Norges’ 2024 investment conference.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called publicly for similar retaliatory action last week.

McCormick said he’d confronted Norway’s prime minister about the Caterpillar decision during a visit to the country last month, and said the prime minister had told him the decision “merely followed Norges’ ethical guidelines and was not political.”

“I respectfully disagree. While I recognize the value of Norges’ investments of nearly $1 trillion of U.S. assets, I have significant concerns that these decisions are entirely political and are driven by an agenda that has consistently targeted American companies and is explicitly anti-Israel,” McCormick continued.

McCormick emphasized that Caterpillar is a frequent target of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, and noted that Norges has also previously divested from U.S. fossil fuel and defense companies — in some cases including companies that Norway itself purchases weapons systems from.

The Pennsylvania senator called on the administration to “look more broadly at instances of sovereign wealth funds adopting restrictive, unfair trade policies against U.S. companies as a result of political pressure” in other cases as well.

McCormick separately wrote to Norway’s ambassador to the United States, stating that he “remain[s] extremely concerned” by Norges’ moves against American companies, adding that he “brought this issue up directly with Prime Minister [Jonas Gahr] Støre and was unsatisfied with his response.”

The Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment on whether it plans to address Norges’ divestment from Caterpillar.

Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former Trump administration official, said that Norges’ decisions have a significant impact on global investment trends.

“Norges is such a large player … It moves capital markets with its decisions,” Goldberg explained. “It causes other sovereign wealth funds, pension funds to follow. It causes institutional investors to follow. It really does set trends in investment and an inversion of capital can have impacts.”

He said that Norges’ investment decisions in relation to Israel are a major political issue in Norway’s upcoming elections, and some of the left-wing parties who could become part of the next governing coalition are demanding divestment from a “laundry list” of other American companies over their relations to Israel.

Goldberg also argued that the “danger of weaponized sovereign wealth funds” both in terms of BDS efforts and other anti-American moves is an ongoing and growing issue, and that the administration should insist that sovereign wealth funds be covered in U.S. trade deals with foreign countries. 

“This is a long standing attack on U.S. interests, attack on American energy companies, an attack on American defense companies and now an attack on any company that does business with the State of Israel — all of this to the detriment of our national economic security, all of it politicized by the Norwegians by a state-run, state-controlled entity” Goldberg said.

If the U.S. fails to respond, he continued, “we’re literally allowing supposed democratic allies for whom we provide a blanket of freedom the ability to conduct economic warfare against America and American interests.”

George Washington University became the latest target of the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus antisemitism on Tuesday when the Department of Justice notified the D.C. private school that it is in violation of federal civil rights law. 

In a letter addressed to GW President Ellen Granberg, the DOJ described the university administration as “deliberately indifferent” to antisemitism on campus and claimed that it took “no meaningful action” to combat increased antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks. More than 25% of the undergraduate students on GW’s campus identify as Jewish. 

The letter called the anti-Israel encampment that overtook the center of GW’s campus for nearly two weeks in 2024 a “hostile environment” where “Jewish students [were] being harassed, abused, intimidated and assaulted by protesters.” The encampment, which began on April 25, was cleared on May 8 just hours before a planned Capitol Hill hearing on the D.C. government’s handling of the protest, after repeated public requests for assistance from GW’s administration. 

“Based on its investigation, the Department has concluded that GW took no meaningful action and instead was deliberately indifferent to the hostile educational environment on its campus in violation of Title VI,” the letter said.   

“We have received the letter and are currently reviewing its contents to respond in a timely manner,” Shannon McClendon, a GW spokesperson, told Jewish Insider. 

“GW condemns antisemitism, which has absolutely no place on our campuses or in a civil and humane society. Moreover, our actions clearly demonstrate our commitment to addressing antisemitic actions and promoting an inclusive campus environment by upholding a safe, respectful, and accountable environment. We have taken appropriate action under university policy and the law to hold individuals or organizations accountable, including during the encampment, and we do not tolerate behavior that threatens our community or undermines meaningful dialogue.”

Teddy Schneiderman, a rising junior at GW who is president of the campus chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, told JI that if the university makes changes in light of the government crackdown, he would like to see it provide a campus police presence at Jewish events and institutions, such as Shabbat dinners. 

“This would offer visible reassurance and protection at a time when safety is a significant concern for the Jewish community, especially following the tragic murder of two Israeli Embassy staff earlier this year in Washington, D.C. Taking such action would send a clear message that GW is committed to safeguarding all students, including the Jewish community and allow us to continue to safely demonstrate our Jewish pride,” said Schneiderman. 

Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), which oversees Chabad’s national and local activities, including on GW’s campus, told JI that during the encampment, he would have agreed with the government’s allegation of GW’s indifference. “I’ll never forget what I saw with my own eyes for weeks,” Shemtov said. “But I do believe things have slightly improved, given President Granberg’s increased focus on the problem.” 

“If the university wants to resolve this without prosecution, they are being given a very generous chance by the DOJ to do so,” said Shemtov. 

“We expect that the steps taken to resolve this matter will result in a GW that is safe and welcoming for Jewish students and faculty, and where teaching and research can thrive,” Abbey Frank, interim executive director of GW Hillel, said in a statement. 

The DOJ wrote that it seeks “immediate remediation” with the university, giving campus administration until Aug. 22 to indicate whether it would like to engage in dialogue. Similar investigations earlier this year at schools including Harvard and Columbia resulted in the Trump administration pulling millions of dollars in federal funding. It restored Columbia’s funding in July, following months of negotiations and a $200 million settlement.