Experts in the field of combating antisemitism gathered on June 22 at the JNS 2026 International Policy Summit in Jerusalem to discuss strategies for confronting the surge in the oldest hatred that followed the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, onslaught on Israel.
The Combating Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Forum panel was chaired by former Israeli Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism Michal Cotler-Wunsh and co-chaired by Elana Heideman, executive director of the Israel Forever Foundation.
“People must understand that antisemitism is a symptom and a weapon. We must fight this war at the source. We are facing this as a people, whether we live in Israel or elsewhere in the world. We are on the front lines of what needs to be made accessible to all the countries in which we live, including the democracies that are actually threatened by what antisemitism predicts,” Cotler-Wunsh told JNS at the forum.
“Antisemitism, whether it comes from the extreme right, the extreme left or extreme Islamists, openly declares its intent to destroy our civilization and build on its ruins an alternate reality,” she continued. “Our role right now is to make obvious to our friends, our colleagues, our peers why this is about them and not just about us.”
The forum featured Michael Dickson, executive director of StandWithUs Israel; Paul Goldenberg, a global security and law enforcement expert and the deputy director of Rutgers University Miller Center on Policing; Adam Levick, co-editor of CAMERA UK; Rabbi Raphael Shore, founder of OpenDor Media; Lizzy Savetsky, a Jewish activist and social media influencer; and Marcus Sheff, chief executive officer of IMPACT-se.
“The Jewish world has invested hundreds of millions of dollars every year in fighting antisemitism and in Holocaust education. The result is that there is way more antisemitism than there ever was and much less Holocaust knowledge than there ever was,” Shore told JNS.
“The strategy is not working, and at the same time, the young Jewish generation is assimilating in numbers as never before. To me, the No. 1 issue is that the effects of antisemitism and the effects of anti-Zionism have a psychological impact on every young Jew, which depletes their identity,” he continued.
“We have not given them the education to have the moral backbone, to have the strength to understand antisemitism, to understand the double standards, to understand that there is an obsession with the Jews because we are special,” said Shore.
Savetsky emphasized the need for Jews to stop being apologetic in the fight against hatred.
“There are two factors we need to be thinking about when we are talking about the fight against antisemitism. The first one, by far the most important, is understanding who we are as Jews and making sure that our primary effort goes into building up our children,” Savetsky told JNS.
“As much as antisemitism is a threat to our continuity, the bigger threat to our continuity is our children not knowing who they are,” she continued.
“We need to start standing up, standing strong and unapologetically fighting back, tooth and nail. Diplomacy is over. We have [Zoran] Mamdani as mayor of New York; we cannot fight diplomatically, we need to play dirty,” Savetsky said.
Reclaiming the global narrative
The forum proposed several key pillars aimed at strengthening institutional accountability and reclaiming the global narrative. These included universal adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism as a legal baseline, enabling organizations such as StopAntisemitism to hold perpetrators accountable professionally and reputationally; curricular reforms to counter state-sponsored incitement in educational materials worldwide; and the creation of a standardized lexicon that would classify Oct. 7 revisionism in a manner similar to Holocaust denial. Participants also proposed recognizing May 14, the date on which the reestablishment of Israel was declared in 1948, as “Declaration Day” to reinforce Israel’s legitimacy as the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.
Panelists argued that safeguarding the Judeo-Christian values underpinning Western civilization requires a shift from conflict management to proactive disruption, and that a unified command structure is necessary to counter what they described as an existential threat to democratic stability.
Goldenberg highlighted insufficient measures taken to protect synagogues. “In my time, if one was protesting outside of a synagogue and one American Jew said he feared for his safety, that protest was no longer legal,” he said.
Goldenberg is also involved in an initiative that trains police officers from around the world and brings them to the March of the Living in Poland to learn about the Holocaust and gain a deeper understanding of the Jewish communities they help protect.
Sheff told attendees that one of the international community’s greatest failures was not preventing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from teaching hate in Gaza. He noted that many of those who carried out the Oct. 7 attacks were educated using UNRWA textbooks that dehumanize Jews and portray them as subhuman.
Sheff stressed that textbooks are uniquely authoritative educational tools that can also serve as instruments of deradicalization, citing Saudi Arabia as a leading example of educational reform.
Dickson emphasized the importance of instilling Jewish pride in the next generation.
“I have a daughter and son fighting in combat units in the Israel Defense Forces. We have to adopt the same mentality, giving the same sense of identity and pride that these young men and women have to Diaspora Jews as well,” he said.
Levick criticized international media coverage of the Oct. 7 massacre, arguing that within a week, many outlets had reframed the atrocities committed by Hamas as accusations of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Among the trends he identified were the minimization of Jewish suffering and the disappearance of Hamas from much of the coverage, replaced by images of Israeli soldiers portrayed as aggressors despite Hamas having carried out what he described as the worst act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust.
“We need to recapture the truth of what happened on Oct. 7,” said Levick.
