There is no consensus about how to deal with these threats—even within the Jewish community. There are some who think we’re still operating in a world in which the old rules apply. Who have hope that the liberal order that has seen Jews flourish in America might yet prevail. That the war in Israel will drop from the headlines; that we’ll soon be able to go back to the pre–October 7 world.

Then there are those who believe that projecting strength is the only option for ensuring Jewish survival. That antisemitism can’t be argued or ignored out of existence, that Jews cannot live with their heads down, and that sheer might is the only way to keep Jews safe in a world in which hatred reemerges time and time again.

Jews disagree about most matters, even those that are much more trivial than our safety and security, so it’s no surprise that there is very little agreement on one of such weight. But the ways that this lack of consensus manifests are important.

Some Jews are happy to contribute to ever-increasing bills for synagogue security teams, but would never carry a gun. Others believe the Jewish community should take a Christian approach and turn the other cheek, and rely on law enforcement to restore order. Others still seek comfort in guns or self-defense classes, resigned to the idea that they may one day have to stop an attack on themselves or their families.

To a certain extent, all of these solutions are Band-Aids; they are ways to treat the symptoms of Jew-hatred while the disease itself continues to spread. But while they may feel like a drop in the bucket compared to the tsunami of radicalization and hate that many Jews are facing, they also signify something important: that Jews are not only unwilling to take it lying down, but that they have more resources to fight back than ever before—especially in America.

This week, we’re bringing you a story about Jews doing just that. Over the last few months, my colleague, video journalist Tanya Lukyanova, has been delving into the burgeoning network of Jews in New York City who are responding to the rise in antisemitic hate crimes by taking up arms. First, she visited a Brooklyn gun store that opened less than two years ago—the first in the borough in nearly four decades. There, she spoke with owner Michael Bergida, who estimates that roughly 60 percent of his new clients are Jewish first-time gun owners.

Elsewhere, Tanya found that enrollment in Israeli self-defense classes has doubled since October 7. She later met with a firearms instructor who calls himself the Tactical Rabbi and has amassed thousands of social media followers teaching defensive shooting to Jewish Americans.

Tanya also spoke to Jewish New Yorkers who are skeptical that gun ownership will solve the societal problem of Jew-hate, saying that their gun control views trumped their feelings of personal safety. Historically, Jews have the lowest rate of gun ownership of all religious groups in America. But in a post–October 7 world, is that beginning to change?

You can watch Tanya’s full video here:

UNITED STATES

DOJ Opens Title VI Investigation Into University of Washington

Assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon announced on April 20 that she had ordered a federal investigation into the University of Washington after the student group Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return University of Washington (SUPER UW) held a fundraiser calling on supporters to materially support “the Lebanese resistance.” Dhillon noted the group “has a history of violent antisemitic activity” on campus, including a 2025 building occupation in which protesters ignited dumpster fires and 21 students were arrested. The group is also scheduled to host Raed Abduljalil, a Palestinian terrorist released from prison last February after serving 23 years for participating in attacks that killed and injured Israelis.

UCLA Student Government Condemns a Former Hamas Hostage’s Testimony

The UCLA Students Associated Council formally condemned a Yom HaShoah event featuring Omer Shem Tov, 23, who was abducted from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, and held in Hamas captivity for 505 days. The council called the decision to highlight his testimony “selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence” and said it “serves to legitimize and normalize ongoing atrocities.”

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In this week’s installment, in response to yet another attack on a synagogue in the United Kingdom, we’re leading with an essay by the newsletter’s editor, Josh Kaplan. He lives in London and has witnessed firsthand the sharp rise in anti-Jewish hatred and violence, from arson attacks and vandalism to relentless online abuse. Over time, he has watched public reaction shift from shock and outrage to fatigue—and, in some cases, acceptance.

For some of Britain’s Jews, the conclusion is obvious: It’s time to leave. But for Josh, and many others living through it, that answer is unacceptable. Today, he reflects on what he’s seen, how it has reshaped his country, what it reveals about the West’s values, and why the Jewish diaspora has to endure. —The Editors

Last year, I flew to Israel from my home in London. In one of the now seemingly rare lulls in the war, I went to explore how the country’s tourism industry was trying to bounce back. I came with endless questions about what life was like, how people were coping, and what, if anything, could entice Westerners to visit. But time after time, the only thing Israelis wanted to discuss was “How can you still live in the UK?”

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Their descendants now number in the millions and live across the globe—including among our colleagues. Today, we’re sharing the remarkable story of one of them: Free Press data and analytics lead Gabrielle Markel. Here, she reflects on her grandfather’s story of survival, and the extraordinary role it ended up playing in her marriage. —The Editors

On the morning of June 2, 1942, German soldiers and local police surrounded the Jewish ghetto in Miory, a small town in what is now Belarus. Every Jew was ordered to assemble. They were told that anyone who did not would be shot. Even the sick and elderly were forced to come.

My grandfather, Israel Lulinski, was 7 years old. He was confined in the ghetto with his father, Reb Yosef, his mother, Pearl, and his brothers and sisters. Also there that morning was a young man named Isaac Aron, then 26, a close friend of my grandfather’s family. Both my grandfather and Isaac would be among the few to survive what happened next. And their lives, from that day forward, would be forever intertwined.

Before the war, Miory had a small but vibrant Jewish community, with merchants, farmers, and tradespeople. There were synagogues and houses of study. Most children were raised observant, steeped in Jewish tradition.

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This week, we’re bringing you reflections from someone who has recently felt the horrendous effects of antisemitism firsthand. Rabbi Jen Lader, who serves the community of Michigan’s Temple Israel, recently found herself in a situation that many Jewish leaders pray they will never know. On March 12, a man affiliated with Hezbollah drove a truck into her synagogue, where hundreds of children were attending preschool. In the days after, she said that the community was heartbroken, but not surprised.

Weeks later, the effects still reverberate. One of the many politicians offering support and condemning antisemitism in the immediate aftermath was Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. But now he’s changed his tune, minimizing the attack by saying: “Hurt people hurt people.”

This is a story about a feeling that most Jews know all too well: the disappointment of realizing that support for the Jewish people is contingent on political convenience, and the underlying assumption that sympathy rests on being a perfect victim. Today, we’re proud to bring you Lader’s story, in her own words.

—Josh Kaplan

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This year, for the first time, I invited my (non-Jewish) fiancée to celebrate Passover at our local Chabad in London. I wanted her to experience the joy and the warmth that a proper seder could bring. To explain to her the traditions that, one day, I hope our children will come to embrace.

But I hesitated, in a way that I’m not sure I would have a year ago. Was I putting her at risk? The invitation felt more of a burden to place on her shoulders than a gift. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised: In recent years, life for Jews has felt more under threat than at any point in my lifetime.

But even by post–October 7 standards, it feels different this year. Why?

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Despite this backdrop, too few politicians are willing to accurately describe the problem, instead offering platitudes and thoughts and prayers whenever another horrific incident occurs. That makes interventions from those offering plain truths about the problem all the more valuable. That’s what former prime minister Tony Blair did in our pages last week. And it’s what Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, is doing today. On the occasion of Passover, she has written an open letter to Britain’s Jews. We think it is a robust and coherent response to the problem, which is why we’re publishing.

— The Editors

Why is this year different from all other years?

Because in other years, we haven’t seen Jews murdered in a synagogue on their holiest day. Because in other years, we haven’t seen Hatzolah ambulances torched in the middle of a Jewish area. And because in no other year have I met so many Jews asking me whether it’s safe for them to stay in the UK.

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It would have sounded absurd. And yet.

A viral piece by Jesse Brown in The Atlantic this week describes how antisemitism has seeped into nearly every level of what was once considered one of the world’s most progressive societies. It has manifested not only in synagogue attacks and shootings—of which there are many—but in the quiet withdrawal of Jews from Canadian society “without any glass or bones being broken,” simply because the evidence that they are no longer welcome has become overwhelming.

What does that look like? It looks like a Holocaust commemoration ceremony at a Montréal college—held annually for more than 30 years—being canceled this week because of what administrators called a “volatile geopolitical climate.” It looks like 80 percent of Jewish doctors and medical students in Ontario experiencing antisemitism at work since October 7. It looks like the McGill Law Students Association voting this week to boycott Israeli universities following years of escalating campus hostility, including activists telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland,” and graffiti stating “kill all Jews” on bathroom stalls.

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Last year in the UK there were more than 3,700 incidents of antisemitism, with a sharp increase in attacks on visibly Jewish people and public figures, including the attack on a Manchester synagogue in October.

France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands have seen similar spikes in antisemitic attacks and incidents following the October 7, 2023, terrorist assault on Israel.

Each high-profile incident is followed by ritualistic condemnation by political leaders. I have no doubt they mean what they say. But their words haven’t stopped the attacks.

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The settlement forces the university to confront what it had long denied: that Jewish students’ experiences of discrimination and harassment were real. Though the problem accelerated after Hamas’s genocidal massacre on October 7, Kenneth L. Marcus—founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center, which brought the suit—accused Berkeley law students in 2022 of having “institutionalized an ancient ideology of hate, incorporating it into the legal DNA of their major identity groups.” He listed clubs as diverse as women’s groups, Asian and Pacific Islander, African American, LGBTQ, and Middle Eastern student organizations, all of which had altered their bylaws to exclude “Zionist” members and speakers.

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Hatzolah is a Jewish charity operating in cities around the globe—they fundraise for ambulances and medical equipment to serve the communities in which they’re based, helping Jews and non-Jews alike. They are remarkably popular. And now, in London, they find themselves on the front lines of a war against Britain’s Jews.

Though firebombing and ambulance-attacking are a somewhat novel addition to the voluminous playbook of antisemitic crime in Britain, nobody here is really that surprised. We weren’t after two people were killed in a synagogue in Manchester last Yom Kippur either. Devastated, yes, heartbroken too—but not surprised.

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That’s why establishing and preserving the facts about what happened that day is so important. This week, historian, Churchill biographer, and member of the British House of Lords Andrew Roberts published a meticulous report designed to do exactly that. He writes in his foreword that “as a Gentile, I believe that it is vital to prevent the emergence of another, more modern version of Holocaust denial, namely 7 October denial. After the Holocaust, non-Jews like me owe the Jewish people nothing less. This can only be done by the kind of facts-based, evidential work in this report.”

The publication is a reminder of how the world changed on October 7—and how the event opened up a dark new chapter of antisemitism around the world. It’s also a lesson in the importance, in a world of mistruths, of stating plainly what happened. That’s what we’re aiming to do with this newsletter.

In the week since an attempted deadly attack on Jewish children in Michigan was stopped by synagogue security, we’ve seen the world react with concern and then indifference. The attackers’ actions were justified by some, downplayed by others, and quickly brushed over.

Threats to Jewish life take many forms. It can be violence or vandalism or abuse shouted in the street; but it can also be more insidious or subtle, the slow pushing of Jews out of mainstream spaces.

This week has seen both, and a rising climate of fear, especially in Europe, where the military in Belgium and Italy have been dispatched to protect Jewish sites, and a new survey revealed widespread antisemitic attitudes among British students.

—The Editors

A Jewish Synagogue and School in the Netherlands, One Day Apart

On March 14, two suspects bombed the Cheider Orthodox Jewish school in Amsterdam with police releasing surveillance footage of the pair this week. The attack came just one day after four teenagers torched a synagogue in Rotterdam, whom prosecutors have since formally charged with terrorism, saying the attacks were designed to “instill serious fear” in the Jewish community.

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The reason is that back when I started at the Statesman, just out of university and somewhat in awe of pretty much everything, I was asked to interview children’s author Roald Dahl. He’d written about a book called God Cried, concerning Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and what was supposed to be a review turned into an antisemitic scream. Dahl wrote of “a race of people” who had “switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,” and that Washington was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that the Americans “dare not defy” Israel.

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That would be the “Catholic Prayer for America Gala 2026,” hosted by a group called Catholics for Catholics. Both the host and the event sound innocuous—unless you’ve heard of social media, Jew-hating and Jew-baiting, or Candace Owens, among the featured stars of the Catholics for Catholics show. Many people long for internet fame. Owens has earned hers fair and square with statements like Mengele’s Holocaust experiments are “bizarre propaganda,” a small group of political Jews control U.S. policy, Israel or Jews were behind 9/11, and other tropes calculated for clicks and cash.

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This has become the norm in Canada, and for good reason. Just weeks later, that same synagogue, along with two others in the city, was riddled with bullets. Then, in what police are calling a “national security incident,” two suspects shot at the U.S. consulate in Toronto, leading to beefed-up protection for U.S. and Israeli diplomatic buildings in the city.

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Beth Israel members chanted the final verses of the Book of Exodus, a two-part parashah that focuses on the construction and inauguration of the Tabernacle, right after the destruction of the golden calf. And just beyond the synagogue’s property, antisemitic demonstrators targeted Beth Israel worshippers—exactly as they have done every Shabbat morning for the past 22 years.

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Last weekend: Three shootings at synagogues within a 10-mile radius in Toronto.

On Monday: In Liège, Belgium, a synagogue was bombed.

On Thursday at noon: A man with a rifle and explosives drove into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

On Thursday afternoon: In Trondheim, Norway, police arrested a man for suspicious behavior outside a synagogue.

On the earliest hours of Friday: There was an arson attack at a Rotterdam synagogue.

And that’s just the last seven days.

To say this is simply “rising antisemitism,” which is typically how the headlines put it, misses the speed and severity of this virus. We are living through an alarming, historic period in which the guardrails that previously kept this hate at bay have fallen away.

It’s happening in places with large Jewish communities, and those with just a handful of Jews. In America, a country once thought of as the best place in the world to be Jewish, 70 percent of all religion-based hate crimes are directed at Jews, a group that makes up less than 3 percent of the population.

It’s our job to keep up with all of it—and even we are struggling. If we can’t, and it’s our job to live and breathe this, how can you?

Thus this new, weekly round-up. This Week in Jew-Hate is meant to summarize the speed and severity of the virus. You can sign up here to receive it. Not exactly the most fun read of the week (but then you have TGIF for that). But, we think it’s work worth doing. By collecting these incidents in one place each week, we hope to restore a sense of perspective that was lost after October 7, 2023. To make sure these attacks are shown for what they are. To see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

–The Editors

Armed Attacker Rams Michigan Synagogue

Shortly after lunchtime on Thursday, an attacker armed with a rifle rammed a truck through the entrance doors of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, driving through a hallway before synagogue security opened fire. The suspect died inside the vehicle after it caught fire; the cause of death remains under investigation. A security guard was struck by the truck and knocked unconscious but is expected to recover. All 140 students at the synagogue’s early childhood center, as well as staff and teachers, were uninjured. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security responded to the scene with local police. The FBI said that it had conducted active-shooter training with Temple Israel staff earlier this year. Our contributor Polina Fradkin, who’s from West Bloomfield, wrote about why she feels safer in a bomb shelter in Israel than in her hometown.

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At 12:59 p.m. ET, I see a text in my family group chat: Just a few miles from my childhood home, Temple Israel, the biggest synagogue in Michigan and the largest Reform congregation in North America, is under attack. A shooter has rammed his truck into the synagogue. He drove his vehicle down a hallway before he was killed during a firefight—either by a guard’s bullet or because his car caught alight. The Department for Homeland Security later identified Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old Lebanese-born US citizen from Dearborn Heights, as the suspect.

The images start flooding my phone. I have never seen so many police cars in my life. My 11-year-old brother is home, writes my mom, but his Jewish school, Hillel Day School, is just a five-minute drive from the site, and on lockdown. So is the high school I went to, the Jewish Community Center, and all other synagogues in the metro Detroit area.

I’m calling my friends in a frenzy. They are inconsolable on the phone, and the group chats are streams of texts, anxiously trying to get hold of anyone who might know something. I hear that a girl from my class was teaching a group of preschoolers at Temple Israel at the time of the attack. I hear about how she led her kids to safety—out of the synagogue and across the road. I hear worries that police are still searching for possible accomplices in the area.

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That was my first thought when I heard that Tucker Carlson, in a recent podcast episode, had directed his ire over the Iran war at none other than the Chabad movement—one of the largest Jewish organizations in the world.

The reason? According to Carlson, it all stems from a small fabric patch that some members of the Israel Defense Forces have chosen to wear on their uniforms. The patch depicts the Third Temple, referring to a vision in some Jewish traditions of one day rebuilding a holy place of worship on the Temple Mount—the holiest site in Judaism, third-holiest in Islam, and the current location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

“How exactly,” Carlson asks, as images of several soldiers flash across the screen, did members of the IDF “wind up wearing patches suggesting the point of this war was the destruction of one of the holiest places in Islam, and the rebuilding of a temple that is totally anathema to Christianity?”

Naturally, he has an answer.

“This has been going on a long time in public through, in part, the efforts of a group called Chabad. C-H-A-B-A-D.”

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“The coming Holocaust 2.0?” said the subject line of the email that landed in the Chabad chapter’s general inbox on Monday.

To Greenberg, the message to Jews was clear.

“Don’t get together. We’re on to you. We know about you, and we’re coming for you,” the rabbi summarized.

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Since it was established by the president last May, the committee has held hearings on a number of key issues, including the rights to practice religion freely in the military and in our schools.

Earlier this month, the RLC held its fifth public hearing, dedicated to the issue of antisemitism. Many of the witnesses provided compelling testimony of how they suffered humiliating discrimination in recent years because they were Jews, and how the rise in antisemitism has affected their ability to keep Jewish people safe.

Every hearing held by the RLC passed without incident. Except for this one.

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