The JNS Visionary Leadership Assembly, held on the background of a hostile U.N. General Assembly, brought together leaders, journalists and influential voices to speak out about the twin threats of surging antisemitism and global demonization of Israel, at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Sept. 28.
Several speakers called for devoting more resources to an “eighth front,” a term coined by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to describe the information war for public opinion between the Jewish state and its enemies.
The participants agreed that it’s a war Israel is currently losing, given the media Goliath arrayed against it, a host of major outlets from Al Jazeera to The New York Times to the BBC.
Netanyahu, who was scheduled to attend but was obliged to bow out to prepare for his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday, addressed the conference by video, thanking JNS, which hosted the conference, for doing its part in fighting the information war.
“We must fight, and we must fight on all fronts until we achieve victory,” the prime minister said. “And the most important place where we have to fight is the battle for truth, the battle against the vilifications and the lies that are hurled at our people.”
While these lies have evolved over millennia, they historically preceded massacres, pogroms, and ultimately, “the worst massacre of all, the Holocaust,” Netanyahu said, noting that the difference now, with the rise of Israel, is that Jews can challenge the lies and defend themselves.
Opening the conference, JNS CEO Alex Traiman also addressed the urgency of ramping up efforts in the information arena.
“It is this eighth front where our enemies believe they can actually defeat the Jewish state,” Traiman said.
Just as Israel has invested heavily to maintain its military edge, it must now make a massive investment in the “information battlefield,” Traiman said. Opponents dominate mainstream media, universities and social media, so Israel and its supporters must use their technological expertise and resources to launch a major counter-information campaign, he added.
Though results may not be immediate, sustained effort can ultimately win back public opinion, Traiman said.
Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, thanked JNS “for doing what all media should be doing, reporting on stories based on fact.”
He, too, spoke of the “eighth front,” one filled with “lies and misinformation being spread by many international leaders and media.” They have turned the world upside down, he said, where truth is treated as lies and lies are accepted as truth.
He said that history will judge harshly those countries that recognized a Palestinian state, a reward for terror and a modern version of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1937 Munich Agreement, which sold out Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler.
“This is the year 2025, and Israel will not be the Czech Republic,” Akunis said to applause.
Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division in the United States Department of Justice, was particularly bleak in his assessment of the performance of those who support Israel and the Jewish people.
“I used to be a school teacher. On the information battlefield, I give us an ‘F,’ a big, fat ‘F,’” Terrell said.
Terrell, who leads the Trump administration’s multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, said he’s never seen antisemitism so bad. The hate is “well financed” and “well organized,” he said, driven by groups spreading lies aimed not just at destroying the Jewish community but ultimately America and Western civilization.
JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin noted that JNS provides a rare voice by reporting the truth about Israel and antisemitism when the legacy media has abandoned truth for advocacy.
Unlike much of the liberal corporate press or even some Jewish outlets, JNS does so “free of left-wing bias or the spirit of partisanship,” ensuring that Israel’s security and Jewish rights are not sacrificed to political trends, he said.
The bad news, he said, is that unlike past bias, current bias is driven by ideology. “The legacy media has been totally taken over by the woke left, whether they admit it or not, and it’s not a matter of catching their mistakes. These mistakes are deliberate.”
Holding up Netanyahu’s defiant speech on Sept. 26 at the United Nations as a model of how to face modern antisemitic blood libels, Tobin said that the “same spirit” demonstrated by Israel’s prime minister also propels news coverage, opinion, commentary and the staff at JNS.
Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told Tobin in a one-on-one conversation that Israel must improve its public relations, but that it is more important for Israel to win the actual war.
“I prefer to have control over the high ground than the PR ground,” Danon said. “Ideally, we can win both of them. But if I have to choose, I prefer to be where we are today, where the IDF troops are around Gaza, rather than where we were on Oct. 8, [2023, the day after the Hamas massacre.]”
Danon acknowledged the “toxic” climate on social media and at anti-Israel demonstrations, but insisted Israel must focus on victory on the battlefield. “At the end of the day, we will prevail. We will overcome this noise and the hostility. But we cannot lose this war.”
He said he regularly tells his colleagues in Jerusalem to ignore the condemnations and concentrate on defeating the enemy. “We are strong. We are not broken. And I think we’re getting very close to the point where we can declare a victory,” he added.
Martin Marks, special assistant to the president and White House director of Jewish engagement, called Trump “one of the greatest friends of Israel that has been in the White House” and “one of the greatest friends of the Jewish people since Darius the Great.”
The administration is deeply committed to combating antisemitism and standing with Israel, Marks said, adding, “I’m here to just tell you that this isn’t a unique sentiment, that this is felt across the administration.”
This was affirmed by a series of Trump administration officials, past and present, who took the podium to speak out against antisemitism and for the State of Israel.
Among them were Yehuda Kaploun, an Orthodox rabbi and Trump’s nominee for U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, and Kiron Skinner, director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in the first Trump administration.
Skinner noted that while the 20th century saw the defeat of fascism, Nazism and communism, the West failed to confront the rise of radical Islam. After 9/11, the Bush administration wouldn’t call it by its name, referring instead to ‘the global war on terror.’
“What we didn’t understand is that the global war on terror was a symptom, not the problem, and that the problem was radical Islam,” she said. “But you couldn’t say it, so if you look at the government documents of that era and even beyond it’s ‘global war on terror,’ never radical Islam, never Islamism, never Islamist. But that’s what we’re facing now.”
She warned of the profound danger of antisemitism, “the canary in the coal mine,” whose “twin is racism against African Americans.” Once those two gain traction, it creates a “sickness in society that can’t be beat.”
While antisemitism of the Islamist variety is a danger, Skinner said that it wouldn’t stand a chance if not for Western-style antisemitism, prevalent on the political left and spreading on the right. “What’s happening in the West is just as deadly, if not more, because it’s better organized, and ... it’s well financed,” she said.
Julie Strauss Levin, co-chair of the conference, who served on two Presidential Commissions as well as the Virginia Commission to Combat Antisemitism, painted a grim picture of antisemitism’s advance through America’s school system.
“Post-secondary education has been conquered,” she said, noting that grade school students from kindergarten on up are experiencing antisemitism at “levels that are shocking.”
Teachers, principals and administrators are doing nothing about it, she said, telling Jewish students to “sit down.” Jewish groups expected to provide leadership instead tell the parents to sit down, that the crisis will pass, but “it’s not going to go away,” Strauss Levin said.
As an example, she provided the National Education Association (NEA) definition of the Holocaust from its 2025 handbook, issued this past summer.
“The Holocaust took more than 12 million victims of different faiths,” she said, quoting from the handbook. “What’s missing? The word ‘Jews.’ The NEA handbook doesn’t even mention Jews. The word ‘Jew’ was nowhere to be found. The NEA is the largest teachers’ union in our country. This is what we are up against.”
Strauss Levin introduced her husband, Mark Levin, host of “The Mark Levin Show” as well as “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Fox News.
Levin said antisemitism is “spreading like a poison” throughout Europe, which he blamed on the political left, which opened borders, providing a path into their societies for Islamists.
He spoke of the green-red alliance between Marxists and Islamists, who have joined forces to destroy the West. “They won’t win, not in America anyway. There’s just too damn many stubborn, red-blooded Americans to put up with,” he said. His prediction for Europe was less rosy— “aren’t a lot of red-blooded Americans over there.”
Levin also spoke of the antisemitism problem on the right in America with podcasters such as Tucker Carlson (whom he referred to as “Qatarlson”) and Candace Owens. “They affect our young people, and then they say, ‘Look, all these young people are turning against Israel.’”
Antisemitism is growing in America because it’s funded, particularly by Qatar, Levin said.
“This is a cancer. We need to fight it. We need to speak out against it. ... We need to make sure our younger generation isn’t corrupted by these people,” he said.
As for the Democratic Party, Levin said it’s “gone” as far as Israel is concerned, aside from a few pro-Israel individuals such as U.S. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. New York City, “the city with more Jews in the United States than any other city in the country,” is about to elect a “Marxist, Islamist Jew-hater,” he said, referring to the Democratic Party nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
“We have to crush them. We have to defeat them. We have to use our brains. We have to use our capabilities. We have to use our media. We have to use everything we have,” Levin said.
“I know the enemy, and I know evil when I see it. Victory is the only way to do it. They’re very thin-skinned, by the way, very thin-skinned, which is why mocking them is a very good thing,” he added.
Levin heaped praise on Netanyahu and Trump, describing the former as “the Churchill of our time” and comparing the relationship between the two to that of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“We are deeply lucky to have these two men,” he said.
