This is an issue of the Antisemitism Project newsletter. To receive this vital resource in your inbox, please visit the Antisemitism Project website.
Introducing a new feature of Moment’s Antisemitism Project! Twice a month, Sharon S. Nazarian, PhD, will report on antisemitism news as she travels the country and the world advocating for Jewish communities and combating prejudice and hate. Nazarian is the president of the Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation and serves as vice chair on the national board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League, having previously served as ADL’s senior vice president of international affairs. She also teaches as an adjunct professor at UCLA and is a Moment Institute senior fellow.
Dispatch #1
• THEY’RE MOVING WHERE?
As Jews around the world continue to feel their lives turned upside down following the horrors of October 7, Jewish communities in Europe have been facing a historically steep rise in antisemitic incidents for almost a decade. Today, many are seriously asking whether Europe can remain a safe home for its Jews.
On a recent ADL delegation visit to Brussels, Belgium, the leaders of its small and vulnerable Jewish community shared that they were asking themselves a similar question: Should they stay in Brussels, or should they go? (See image at top taken in the Belgian Parliament in Brussels.) After reporting that a majority of Jewish families were considering leaving, we were shocked to hear where they were thinking of going: not to Israel, not to the United States, not to Canada or Australia, but to Hungary or Poland. Those were the countries where they felt they would be safe and protected.
Of course, we were utterly alarmed to hear this, but it brought us to the stark realization that western European democracies are no longer seen as able to protect Jews due to the large influx of Arab and Muslim refugees. And it is that determination that drives the Belgian Jews and perhaps others in western Europe to consider Hungary and Poland, the former a quasi democracy at best but both known for strictly limiting the number of Muslim refugees.
• ENLISTING AMERICA’S MAYORS
Last week, as part of the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s (CAM’s) fifth annual Summit of Mayors, I was privileged to address 150 U.S. mayors who gathered in Beverly Hills, CA, for a three-day day summit on ways to combat antisemitism in their cities and municipalities. The unique and strategic approach of CAM to focus on mayors and cities has been paying off. This year’s summit drew more mayors than ever, who, along with members of their staffs, attended panel discussions ranging from “City Hall’s Role in Combating Antisemitism” to “IHRA Definition of Antisemitism: A Tool for Local Action” to “Threat Analysis: Essential Strategies for Mayors in Law Enforcement.”
My panel focused on education and the role mayors can play in addressing antisemitism in schools and universities. I shared the stage with Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel of the San Fernando Valley and University of California Regent and United Talent Agency partner Jay Sures, both articulate speakers. We each spoke about ways municipal leaders can confront the divisive, anti-Israel and often antisemitic demonstrations and encampments that took place on many U.S. campuses last year.
• WHAT IS HAPPENING IN AUSTRALIA?
Jews around the world are seeing one report after another of violent antisemitic incidents targeting the Jewish communities of Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne. The most horrifying incident took place on December 6, when Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue was set on fire. It is believed to have been a deliberate arson attack that has since been labeled a terrorist act.
Most of us are sadly used to hearing about violent antisemitic attacks against Jewish communities in Europe, in the United States and in Canada. But Australia? The first hint of its antisemitism problem came on October 9, 2023, with what would prove to be one of many anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrations. This one erupted on the steps of the world-famous Sydney Opera House where throngs waving Hamas flags chanted “Gas the Jews!” and “F-ck the Jews!” That quiet, safe and integrated community was simply paralyzed as they witnessed police telling Jewish residents to go home and stay away since they could not be kept safe.
Six months to the day, I was invited to participate as a keynote speaker at a large gathering of the Sydney Jewish community. The event’s theme was “Taking Back the Opera House” and it was held at the revered performance hall. Looking back to that gathering, which was filled with shock and fear on one hand and solidarity and coming together on the other, it’s hard to believe what that community has had to go through since. As someone who has travelled the world engaging with and supporting Jewish communities as the ADL’s senior vice president for international affairs, Australia was always considered one of the safest and most secure communities on my list. I guess the alarming acts we’ve recently witnessed testify to the post-October 7 upside-down world we’re living in.
• REKINDLING ALLIANCES
One of the realities many Jewish communal leaders have been heartbroken about is the fact that many of our coalition partners, with whom the Jewish community has stood shoulder to shoulder throughout American history, simply did not show up for us after October 7. As the rates of antisemitic incidents have risen through our cities and communities, on campuses and against our businesses, we have felt so alone and abandoned.
Well, there is some good news: I was privileged to meet the founder and director of an NGO called Rekindle, Matt Fieldman, who, along with his cofounder Charmaine Rice, is committed to Black-Jewish dialogue. Their mission is to address what really divides and unites the Black and Jewish communities. My meetings with Matt have included other members of the Rekindle family, including Reverend Jerome Skyes, who has brought many Black pastors to Israel for firsthand experiences and hopes to bring more than 100 pastors from the Cleveland area there in 2026.
I was so inspired and heartened to learn that Matt and Rev. Skyes don’t beat around the bush in their dialogues. In fact, they zero in on the tough issues. Questions such as “Is power a zero-sum game?” hit me hard. As we see the divisive binary framework many anti-Israel activists have used to frame Jews and Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians as the oppressed, embodied in the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and others, finding new frameworks that break down the dogmatic and illiberal nature of those structures has become an imperative. I believe groups like Rekindle can do just that.
—Sharon S. Nazarian
SELECT INCIDENTS
Canada, December 9
A third of Ontario’s Jewish medical practitioners say they have considered leaving Canada because of rising antisemitism in their field of practice.
United Kingdom, December 7
Israeli author alleges antisemitic treatment by security staff at Luton airport.
United States, December 6
ADL study finds job seekers with Jewish or Israeli names are less likely to get a response from possible employers.
READ FULL ANTISEMITISM MONITOR REPORT
Cover Story by Amy E. Schwartz
Many years ago, as a young reporter, I had the arresting experience of watching in real time as a random group of people spontaneously enforced the American taboo against antisemitism.
It was 1996. I’d gone with a friend to Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC, to hear a famous English baritone sing a concert of lieder, or art songs. Most of the pieces were in French or German, but one was a cycle of English folk songs, in a musical setting by the composer Benjamin Britten. The lyrics to the French and German lieder were printed in the program, along with translations. The English folk-song lyrics were not, so it was a complete surprise to all present when the second song in the cycle turned out to be about “Little Sir William,” who goes to visit “the Jew’s wife,” who kills him and cuts him up in little pieces.
There was dead silence after the baritone finished the three verses of “Little Sir William” and paused for the conventional few seconds between items in a set. If it hadn’t been for that pause—in which a well-trained audience knows not to clap, but to sit in appreciative quiet—maybe the audience would have let it go. Instead, a gentle “Boo” floated into the silence. “Boo,” responded two other people, almost conversationally.
The singer resumed, but by the time he made it to the next pause, a woman down near the front had apparently had time to think. She stood up and shouted, “That song is nothing but a blood libel! People have been murdered because of stories like that. How dare you come here and sing a blood libel?”
The singer and his accompanist bolted into the wings. Chaos broke out—well, what passes for chaos at that kind of event. There were shouts of “Let him alone!” and “No, she’s right!” Six or eight other people jumped to their feet; others cringed down into their seats. A few couples got up in and left. Others started up a drumbeat of applause, which quenched the protesters and eventually reached the artist. He slunk back on stage and unenthusiastically finished the program. The evening was ruined.
It turned out later that the whole thing was a series of mistakes: The Britten piece was often performed with alternative lyrics that referred only to a “school-wife,” and they appeared that way in the printed version of the music and in the lone recording from the 1940s. In that pre-Google era, no one involved in planning the concert on this side of the Atlantic had any inkling that another version existed. (The friend who took me to the concert, who had done the program notes, felt particularly blindsided.) The baritone, for his part, had performed the original version all over England and Europe without encountering any trouble or picking up any asterisks; in fact, he had been awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. He was as surprised as anybody, apparently, to walk into an invisible wall between a culture with no inhibitions against singing this kind of thing in public and a culture where it was definitely not allowed.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like much of a story now, when every day brings its cargo of fresh outrage at antisemitic statements or physical attacks on Jews. But the incident has stayed with me as a kind of template for how decent people react when confronted with a taboo that we as a society take seriously. Especially these days, when so much public debate is a meta-debate over what is or is not forbidden to do or say—free speech or hate speech, censorship or cancel culture, snowflakery and whataboutism, the “Palestine exception” and cultural appropriation—it’s clarifying and bracing to be reminded what a functioning taboo really looks like.
KEEP READING “The Vanishing Antisemitism Taboo”
Jewish Life in a Democracy:
Lessons in Confronting Antisemitism
In the award-winning play Prayer for the French Republic, a French Jewish family grapples with past and present threats to their security in the shadow of an antisemitic attack. Theater J Artistic Director Hayley Finn and American University Jewish historian Lauren Strauss join Moment’s Amy E. Schwartz for a discussion of the probing—and timely—questions it raises.
What We’re Reading
Stories from around the Web
The Free Press: “The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada”
Hadassah Report: “From Fear to Resilience: Women Facing Antisemitism”
What We’re Running
Recent Moment Stories on Antisemitism
“Q&A | Peter Wertheim on Antisemitism in Australia”
“Why Do Campus Protesters Want to #DropHillel?”