Naomi Reice Buchwald, a federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued a temporary restraining order on Tuesday blocking the Trump administration from detaining Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia University and anti-Israel activist, who faces deportation. 

A women’s studies major who emigrated to the United States with her family from South Korea as a child, Chung was arrested at an anti-Israel protest at Barnard College’s library on March 5.  

A senior spokesperson at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told JNS that Chung engaged in “concerning conduct” at the time of her arrest. 

“She is being sought for removal proceedings under the immigration laws,” the spokesperson said. “Chung will have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge.”

Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will “investigate individuals engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization,” the spokesperson told JNS. “Based on investigative findings, the Department of State may make a determination which may result in visa revocation or other action impacting the immigration status of an alien in the United States.”

Dozens of anti-Israel protesters took over the library building in March to protest disciplinary measures the school took against anti-Israel student activists on campus. Protesters handed out pamphlets from Hamas, praising the “Al-Aqsa flood,” the Oct. 7. 2023 terror attack on Southern Israel. 

Chung is a lawful permanent resident, who attended the anti-Israel protest, per a complaint she filed against the Trump administration. 

“Ms. Chung was outside the building on that day to protest what she believed to be the excessive punishments meted out by the Columbia administration to student protesters facing campus disciplinary proceedings,” the complaint states. 

“She herself had previously faced a university disciplinary process, which resulted in a finding that Ms. Chung was not in violation of any university policy, and wanted to support her fellow students by attending the protest,” the complaint adds.

The New York City Police Department told JNS that Chung was arrested on March 5 and charged with obstructing governmental administration.

A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled last week that Debra Gassman, an assistant public defender in Cook County, Ill., can proceed with a lawsuit alleging that her rights were violated when she was ordered to remove a photo of herself during her volunteer service in the Israel Defense Forces.

Gassman filed a complaint against the Illinois county and the public defender’s office in February 2024 after, she said, she was told to remove the photo of herself—holding a gun and standing in front of an Israeli flag—from an area near employee mailboxes. She placed the image there, she said, after Oct. 7 “to raise awareness of what happened in Israel,” per the 2024 complaint. 

David Fish, an attorney for Gassman, said that the ruling is a victory for religious expression in public employment.

“Being a Jewish voice in a liberal progressive city like Chicago is not very popular when you stand up for Israel,” he told JNS. “This lawsuit makes the point that because you are viewing Israel as something you’re proud of, that shouldn’t mean you should be treated differently than people who have a different viewpoint.”

Gassman’s lawsuit will move forward into the discovery phase, which will include depositions, according to Fish.

“It’s a shame that the public defender’s office had to treat Gassman differently when  what she wanted was to just be able to keep her photo up and display it,” he told JNS. “She never wanted to make a federal case over it.”

“They have decided to spend taxpayer resources defending where the location of a photograph should be,” he added. “We are committed to taking this case all the way to trial.”

In this week’s episode of “The Meira K Show,” Meira breaks down the wild week in Israel as only she can—raw, real and full of energy. From “QatarGate” and whether Netanyahu’s office is being secretly funded by Qatari lobbyists to mass protests, Ronen Bar’s firing and Israel’s military re-engagement in Gaza and Lebanon. Nothing is off the table.

We dive deep into:

• What Qatar is really doing to infiltrate the West
  
• Is Netanyahu being sabotaged or sabotaging himself?
  
• Why Israel is back at war on multiple fronts
  
• Should Israel annex Gaza to get hostages back?
  
• Who’s winning the Bennett vs. Amit Segal Twitter feud?
  
• Trump’s crackdown on antisemitism and woke universities
  
• Why Columbia (and others) are suddenly reversing course
  
• The Supreme Court drama and what it means for Israeli democracy
  

Plus: reaction clips, tweet of the week and the stories mainstream media won’t tell you.

JNS will host its inaugural International Policy Summit on Monday, April 28, 2025. This daylong event will convene government officials, policymakers, diplomats, security experts, leaders of pro-Israel organizations, and influencers for vital discussions aimed at addressing Israel’s critical challenges and opportunities in a post-Oct. 7 world.

Registration at this point is for invitees only. However, you can submit a request for registration using the following link.

Watch more  @JNS_TV  - don’t forget to hit the subscribe button!

Among those who forcibly occupied Trump Tower recently to protest the deportation of a violent antisemite, were members of the Jewish Voice for Peace, who, along with other far-left groups like IfNotNow, have been parading support for Hamas since its Oct. 7 attack. The scene was a chilling reminder of the giant rift splitting American Jewry.

On one side of this rift are American Jews of all denominations, including secular ones, who love Israel as our ancestral homeland and the United States as the greatest country on earth.

On the other side are Jews who have embraced the globalist concept of tikkun olam, “making the world a better place,” as the central or only tenet of their Judaism.

Over the decades, the tikkun olam Jews spoke out for those less fortunate. After all, American Jews have been at the forefront of fighting for labor, for women’s rights, for other minorities and civil rights, and, in the past, for other Jews.

But some of these Jews have warped the ideal of tikkun olam beyond all recognition. They see Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as a Jewish sin. They believe that if Israel was a little bit nicer, a little more tolerant to the Palestinians and gave them just a little more land, then, one day, the jihadists would see how great the Jews and Israelis are and lay down their weapons. Palestinians would accept Western liberal values, and we would all live in a utopic one-state fantasyland without any borders.

These Jews continue to nurse this vision despite repeated Palestinian rejections of any kind of peace treaty. In 2005, the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon even pulled every single Jew from Gaza. Instead of peace, the response has been rockets and rape.

They falsely claim that in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, that the Jewish state is committing a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and starving the population. This, despite the fact that Israel has helped administer half-a-million polio vaccines to children in Gaza and Hamas members have been caught stealing the food deliveries.

To tikkun olam Jews, though, it’s all Israel’s fault. How could this be?

Baby boomer Jews tended to grow up in two different kinds of households. One had parents who were Zionists. They saw the foundation of the State of Israel, after 2,000 years of exile and the murder of Six Million of their brothers and sisters in the Holocaust, as a miracle they were lucky enough to behold with their own eyes.

The other households were made up of Communist Jews, who, to beef up their Marxist credentials, shed their religion and their American patriotism. Tikkun olam fit very nicely in this worldview and let them hold on to nominal Jewishness. Abandoning their Jewish ethnicity and belief helped them conform to the greater global cause of anti-capitalist revolution.

The tikkun Olam Jews’ disconnect from liturgy has led to a near-total ignorance of canonical Judaism, despite their claim that “we know our history.” They do not, which explains their comfort in claiming that Jews have no connection to Israel and that we are just “settler colonists” in the Jewish homeland. Yet, the longing to return to Zion has been integral to Judaism since the Babylonian exile of 586 B.C. (see Psalm 137, for example), more than 1,100 years before the birth of Islam.

My grandfather was a pioneer in the development of lecithin, an innovation that led to the production of dried food like powdered eggs, which helped feed American troops as they battled the Nazis during World War II. Even so, my grandfather told me that with a last name like “Goldenberg,” he could not get work as a chemist.

Until 1948.

That’s when Americans witnessed Jewish strength for the first time as bedraggled Zionist underdogs fought off seven Arab armies to win Israeli independence. The average American started to respect Jews, and Jews entered the mainstream of American society. Jews also started to be thought of as white.

The United States would soon develop a military alliance with Israel that field-tested American military hardware against the Soviet-armed Arabs.

In 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, Israel hammered Arab armies and provided the United States with invaluable lessons and even Soviet hardware like an intact MiG-21.

Soviet propaganda spun against Israel, and once the Soviet Union collapsed, the annihilationist ideology of radical Islam took its place as the threat to the free world. Israel and the United States, both incompatible with Sharia law, continued to find themselves on the same side of the fight.

Zionist and tikkun olam Jews had an uneasy relationship, invisible from mainstream America for decades. Since Oct. 7, however, this fault line has ruptured into full view. Tikkun olam Jews are so committed to sacrificing themselves on the misplaced altar of white guilt that they see all Palestinians as victims, no matter their words or actions. They blame Israel for the sins of Islamist terrorists. They blame America. They blame themselves.

Ironically, socialist Jews are now the useful idiots of jihadists.

I walk around campus these days through a gauntlet of faculty and students proclaiming their wish to rid the world of Jews and destroy Israel. I go online and see colleagues and people I consider friends wishing for the same. Professors take over the faculty senate to share

their dreams of destroying Israel and then complain that they have no free speech. It’s become daily life on campus. I now understand the Jewish concept of L’dor v’dor, “From generation to generation.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced on Tuesday that more than $2.1 million in awards were provided to 43 faith-based and nonprofit organizations throughout New York to “improve public access to essential technologies.”

“Technology is rapidly advancing, and we need to make sure that everyone has a fair chance at taking advantage of its resources,” Hochul said. “From doctors appointments to opportunities in education and professional development, we are making these resources easily accessible for all New Yorkers.”

Each grant, provided through the New York State Office of Faith and Nonprofit Development Services, is a maximum of $50,000 and “will allow these organizations to further break down barriers for people in need of technology.”

Among the 43 organizations are four Jewish nonprofits: Westchester Jewish Community Services, Inc. ($50,000); Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty ($41,253); Jewish Community Council of the Rockaway Peninsula ($50,000); and Jewish Family Services of Western New York ($50,000).

A.R. Bernard, president of New York State Interfaith Council, applauded Hochul’s “visionary leadership and commitment to strengthening New York’s communities.”

“This initiative reflects a deep understanding that communities thrive when faith-based and nonprofit partners are empowered to serve,” he said.

Scholar and author Linda Maizels has joined the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism as its inaugural managing director, the university announced on Monday.

“We are so fortunate to have hired someone like Linda, who, first of all, has a Ph.D. in antisemitism, which is very rare,” said YPSA Director Maurice Samuels. “With Linda on board, we’re poised to do so much more.”

Maizels earned her doctorate—focused on the historical roots of contemporary antisemitism on college campuses—at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a member of the advisory council for the Brandeis University Presidential Initiative to Counter Antisemitism in Higher Education and most recently worked in the U.S. Department of State for the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy.

As managing director, Maizels will work with the program to “expand its efforts in response to the growing problem of contemporary antisemitism” and develop “new resources to address the challenges of the present moment and beyond,” according to the university.

“We want to find new ways to involve Yale undergraduate students,” she said. “We can provide resources and research support to them, but we also want to be a resource: a spot students can come to comfortably discuss issues related to antisemitism.”

A recent poll showed that almost three-quarters of Jewish college students believe that antisemitism is a serious problem on campus.

On Oct. 7, 2023, the world witnessed what Hamas terrorists are capable of, as armed Gazans gleefully bragged about their ability to torture, murder, mutilate, burn alive, rape and kidnap unarmed civilian children, women and men.

And the world saw the unthinkable murderous scenes and reacted. And the reaction was wicked.

On Oct. 8, 2023, the truth began to come out loud and clear. The central truth was that anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, global antisemitism was lying so close to the surface, that it was ready to erupt if it had a reason.

The Oct. 7 massacre of Jews in their homeland gave haters a reason, which led to the eruption of worldwide antisemitic protests. From the streets, protesters told us that Jewish life has no value and Jews must not defend themselves. They also told us, based on atrocious lies, that terrorism, what Hamas perpetrated in Israel, was justified.

The global antisemitism truth erupted into ferocious protests, in which the masses came out on the streets and on college grounds to justify the heinous murder of Jews by the Hamas brutes in the name of Allahu Akbar, “God is great” in Arabic. They came out to profess the “truth,” that to erase off the map the state of the Jewish people, Israel, is justified and to be anti-Israel and hate Jews is a good diversion from civility.

The mass protests on U.S. college campuses, which we watched on TV screens and via social media, in which the participants expressed support for Hamas’s murderous activities, told us that the next generation of Americans—the future leaders of America—are being brought up to think erroneously and hate a particular group of people—the Jews, the Zionists. Their behavior and the slogans they yelled were guided by an indoctrination of lies in which they came to believe; lies that are unfamiliar to most Americans.

The West denies the fact it is facing the spread of Islamic holy war. Could it be due to the West’s fear it can’t win against the 1.8 billion Muslims who are at odds with its Judeo-Christian tenet and, therefore, choose not to even try to fight?

Instead, the West is shielding itself behind the comforting fiction that if Israel just puts its head under the Islamic butcher’s cleaver, the Hamas-style radical Islam will not be so bad to others.

Here is advice to the West: Remove the neckerchief keffiyeh symbol of terrorism, connect the dots, and fight like Israel to prevail.

Since Oct. 8, 2023, the campaigners in U.S. city squares and university campuses celebrated Hamas as freedom fighters rather than murderous terrorists. Their message was clear: Jews deserve the inhumanity they experienced at the hands of Hamas.

The lies written on the protesters’ placards made it clear that we are witnessing modern antisemitism. For instance, anti-Zionism is the modern antisemitism definition. Zionism is the Jews’ self-determination right in their homeland, Israel. Translated, if there is no Zionism, then Jews have no right to defend themselves and exist in their sovereign land. That transforms it into modern-day antisemitism.

The scope and magnitude of Islam’s threat to Western civilization are greatly embedded within the American college campus and the mainstream media. Islam is in a “Holy War” with Western culture reinforced by the mainstream and instigated by a failing education system.

Today, the Islamic war attacks the Jews, easily made into a convenient assault target group. Tomorrow they will attack the Christians and all other non-Islamic people, as they currently do throughout Africa and the Middle East. Radical Islam is not a peaceful political religion; it is dedicated to global domination and the destruction of all those they call infidels.

The documentary film “October 8” is not political. Rather an eye-opener of what we watched erupt following Hamas’s atrocities in Israel. And what erupted should scare us all. It is a reality we cannot live with if we wish to continue being a civilized society.

The documentary bears the question: How did we, in America, arrive at this moment where murderous Hamas are celebrated as “freedom fighters” and not the savage terrorists they are? Don’t the protesters have enough moral attributes to perceive that this fight is about primitive darkness versus enlightened civility?

“October 8” has a broader scope than just the Jews and Israel. It is collectively about all of us, how so many people became blinded by their baffling hate for Israel that they can't find empathy for the innocents who were murdered or kidnapped on Oct. 7. Today, the hate is directed at Jews; tomorrow, the same hate will be directed at who? What does that mean for all Americans? For humanity?

“October 8” tells us that the world may have lost its mind. That it is regressing, not progressing, and sinking into a very dangerous territory. It is an eye-opener to a reality we either do not want to recognize exists or that we are indifferent to it. Either way, “October 8” tells us that too many Americans have lost their moral compass. More than that, we are in a fight for the soul of America, for humanity’s soul.

The leaders of the U.S. intelligence community testified at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that their discussions about airstrikes in Yemen on a private messaging application were “permitted” and that the messages mistakenly shared with a journalist did not include classified material. 

Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, offered more details under questioning from senators on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the Atlantic’s bombshell report on Monday that the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a cabinet-level chat on Signal about airstrikes on Houthi terrorists in Yemen.

“One of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers,” Ratcliffe said in response to questions from the committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). 

“One of the things that I was briefed on very early, senator, was by the CIA records management folks about the use of Signal as a permissible work use—it is,” he said. “That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.” 

“It is permissible to use to communicate and coordinate for work purposes, provided, senator, that any decisions that are made are also recorded through formal channels,” he added. “My communications, to be clear, in a Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

Gabbard went further, stating that “there was no classified material that was shared in that group chat.”

The Atlantic’s Goldberg reported on Monday that Mike Waltz, the U.S. national security advisor, added Goldberg to a message group called “Houthi PC small group” on March 11. The group name was an apparent reference to the principals committee of the National Security Council.

In the chat, participants, which included Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Waltz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, discussed the timing of planned airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen and made incendiary comments about Europe.

“I fully share your loathing of European free-loading,” Hegseth wrote in a message to the vice president. “It’s pathetic.”

The White House shared a statement with reporters on Monday that the text chain “appears to be authentic,” and Ratcliffe and Gabbard confirmed their participation in the group.

It is not clear how or why Waltz added Goldberg to the chat, though the journalist appeared on the app by his initials, which he shares with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who sits on the principals committee when international economic issues are implicated in a national security agenda item.

Waltz told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg.

Questions about the Signal group dominated Tuesday’s hearing on the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment report, with Democrats seizing on the administration’s claims that no classified material was shared in the chat and several Republicans indicating that they intended to ask questions about the messages during the classified hearing session later in the day.

“The idea somehow, well, none of this was classified, but we can’t talk about it here—you can’t have it both ways,” Warner said. “I think it strains the audience and the watching public’s credibility if we’re talking about timing packages, that somehow this would be okay to put out, or just, frankly, senior American officials trashing Europe.” 

“I’ve been around this for a while. This is not information you generally put out,” he added. “The notion there’s not even acknowledgement of, ‘hey, gosh, we screwed up,’ it’s stunning to me.”

After Gabbard testified that no classified material of any kind had been shared in the chat, the chairman of the committee, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked the witnesses about the narrower claim that they had not shared classified information from the intelligence community, as opposed to information that might have been shared by other members of the group with different classification authorities.

“They testified, it is my understanding, correct me if I’m wrong, that there was no intelligence community classified information. Is that correct?” Cotton asked.

Both Gabbard and Ratcliffe affirmed that that was correct.

That answer prompted an outburst from Sen. Angus King (D-Maine.). “That’s not correct,” he said. “She said repeatedly that there was nothing classified. Period.”

After the hearing, U.S. President Donald Trump denied that classified material was sent on the chat in a briefing with reporters at the White House.

“There was no classified information, as I understand it, they used an app,” Trump said. “The main thing was, nothing happened. The attack was totally successful.”

Tuesday’s Senate hearing also included testimony from Gabbard and Ratcliffe about their assessment of global threats to the United States, including Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

“The intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard said. “In the past year, we’ve seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus.” 

She added that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium “is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

“Iran will likely continue efforts to counter Israel and press for U.S. military withdrawal from the region by aiding, arming and helping to reconstitute its loose consortium of like-minded terrorists and militant actors, which it refers to as its Axis of Resistance.” she said. “Although weakened, this collection of actors still presents a wide range of threats, including to Israel’s population, U.S. forces deployed in Iraq and Syria and to U.S. and international military and commercial shipping and transit.”

Two anti-Israel protesters from Code Pink interrupted the start of the hearing, including a man, who said that “the greatest threat to world peace is funding Israel.”

That outburst prompted Cotton to connect the various threats to the United States to Code Pink, which reportedly receives about a quarter of its funding from a China-based philanthropist with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

“The fact that Communist China funds Code Pink, which interrupts a hearing like this about Israel, simply illustrates Director Gabbard’s points that China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other American adversaries are working in concert to greater degree than they ever have before,” Cotton said.

One of the hearing’s final questions returned to the question of accidentally inviting a journalist to a group chat about bombing terrorists in Yemen.

“Director Ratcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct?” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) asked.

“No,” Ratcliffe replied.

Thadius Wind of Eddington, Maine, was arrested on Tuesday and charged by criminal complaint after making threatening online posts about Jews, politicians, judges and others, the Justice Department announced.

Wind was charged with transmitting an interstate threat after an FBI investigation found he made numerous posts across social media that “contained threats to Jews, political figures, the Supreme Court and others.”

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, sent information to the FBI in 2024 about a Facebook user who had discussed committing violence against police and military personnel.

The FBI also received numerous online tips about threatening statements made on X, formerly Twitter. After further investigation, the bureau obtained and executed a search warrant relating to the account in November 2024 and traced it back to Wind.