The face of a slave is—or should be—unforgettable.

On Oct. 7, graphic, heartrending videos circulated social media, but none seemed crueler than the video of a screaming Noa Argamani, begging not to be killed, her arm reaching in vain for her boyfriend as Hamas murderers dragged her away on a motorcycle.

While most hostages had been kidnapped in circumstances left to the world’s imagination, Noa, her dark eyes so wide with terror, was taken in front of the world. Her face—whether captured hauntingly from the video or pictured in happier times on posters so often ripped down—became the symbol of all the hostages torn from those who loved them.

Yet, mercifully, on June 8, one of the most daring Israeli Special Forces operations since the Entebbe raid in 1976 rescued Noa and three other hostages. Where they had wept for her eight months and a day earlier, the decent people of the world wept with Noa as the Internet flooded with precious images of her reunited with her jubilant father. Her mother’s dying wish, to see her stolen daughter again, was granted.

In the days after she returned home, however, it was revealed that not only had she been starved and rarely allowed to bathe, but she was also kept as a slave. Forced to wash dishes and cook for the “civilian” family holding her when she was rescued, she was washing dishes, she said, when she heard the Special Forces squad entering the apartment.

While Noa’s face, for the most bittersweet of reasons, is world-famous, the fact that her jailers had enslaved her is barely mentioned in the media. So, too, is the face of another young woman whose story of denigration is brutishly similar to Noa’s. Indeed, her nightmare has never ended.

On Feb. 19, 2018, 14-year-old Leah Sharibu was kidnapped by Boko Haram along with 109 of her classmates in a bloody raid on her boarding school in the village of Dapchi. The terrorists released all of the other children (minus five girls killed in the attack) once the government had paid a ransom. But Leah, now 20, has never come home.

Because she refused to trade her Christian faith for her freedom, her captors would not release her, even threatening to murder her in the months after her abduction. Then, in October of 2018, Boko Haram announced that she would instead be a “slave for life” in light of her refusal to convert to Islam. Despite desperate pleas from her family, it was reported in 2021 that Leah had been forcibly married to a Boko Haram warrior and given birth to two children. As of now, she remains a slave; her family has created the LEAH Foundation in her honor.

Though separated by nearly 4,000 miles, Noa and Leah’s stories are united by one thing: jihad. Like Noa, Leah was kidnapped in a brutal act of violence directed against non-Muslims. Like her Jewish counterpart, those who abducted her humiliate and degrade their captives as fair game in a “holy war” with the Kafir. And, like her sister from across the Maghreb, Leah was made a slave to her tormentors.

What history, both recent and antique, shows is that “October 7”—like “9/11” before it—is only the most recent name we can give to barbarism committed in the cause of Allah. The truth is that the grim similarities between Noa and Leah’s stories demonstrate that “October 7” has been happening across the globe since the beginning of Islam.

In fact, the very first slaves of Islam were Jews. One spring morning in 628 C.E., Muhammad and his army attacked the oasis town of Khaibar in northern Arabia, where those Jews whom he had not yet expelled from the peninsula worked their rich date-palm plantations. After the besieged Jews surrendered, Muhammad ordered every single Jew who had fought in the battle to be bound and beheaded. According to differing accounts, between 600 and 900 Jewish men and boys were slaughtered that day.

The Jewish women were then distributed as sex slaves for Muhammad’s soldiers. Muhammad himself took a trophy of two teenage girls for his harem: Raihaneh bint Zaid and Safiyah bint Huyai. Safiyah was the new bride of Kenanah ibn ar-Rabi’, her tribe’s treasurer. Muhammad ordered Kenanah tortured to death—in vain—for the whereabouts of the tribe’s hoard of gold and silver by means of a fire kindled on his chest.

It is this massacre of Jews to which supporters of Hamas refer when they chant Khaibar, Khaibar, ya Yahud! Jaish Muhammd sawfa ya‘ud!(“[Remember] Khaibar, Khaibar, oh, Jews! The army of Muhammad shall return!”) And it is this massacre of Jews that established the precedent for the kidnapping, enslavement, and rape of non-Muslim women—Leah Sharibu included.

Not two decades afterward, Muhammad’s followers invaded Africa, and, over the ensuing centuries, Arabs and then their black converts pushed deep into the continent, reducing multitudes of non-Muslim blacks to slavery along the way. It represented a 1,400-year abomination that would castrate untold thousands (itself amounting to genocide), facilitate the trans-Atlantic slave trade and help disperse around 25 million captive Africans across the planet from Brazil to China. No one may ever know how many blacks died as a result of Islam’s conquest of Africa; one (likely low) calculation is 120 million.

While we can only estimate quantities, “October 7” is the perfect way to describe quality: surprise raids on defenseless non-Muslim civilians, involving mass murder, gang rape, and the taking of slaves. “October 7” was the very means by which Arab armies conquered roughly half of Africa, indeed about two-thirds of the known world as of 750 C.E.

As Simon Deng, a native of South Sudan, himself kidnapped and enslaved as a child in the 1960s, reminisces:

I will not forget that day when Arab Sudanese government troops came and raided my village. We didn’t know what was going on until we heard gunshots from every direction. I was only 9 years old, but the militiamen were shooting anybody they saw, including children …

On Oct. 7, 2023, I watched the news and was sick. Seeing the video of the attack on the music festival in Israel, everything welled up inside me. … I will never forget the fires and the burned bodies: They looked exactly like what I saw the day my village was destroyed.

While the jihad against Deng’s people officially ended in 2005, “October 7” is a daily occurrence throughout many parts of Africa, especially in Nigeria. Non-Boko Haram terrorists of the Fulani ethnicity have killed Christians by the dozen, burned down churches, raped women, leveled villages, murdered clergymen and engaged in mass hostage abductions—100 people at one time, according to one report from 2022. Of these, some are kidnapped for ransom, while others, young girls like Leah, are made to “marry” their captors and convert to Islam. Similarly, recognizable acts of jihad plague other countries like Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Somalia and Sudan.

Both Noa and Leah are victims of the same terror—one which has menaced humanity for even more years than the innocents hacked and burned to death on that defiled, searing Shabbat. Likewise, where Jews were the first slaves of jihad, Africans, if not the second, have been so bonded ever since. And those who enslaved both Noa and Leah are, so far as their slaves are concerned, a fungible threat. With history having “cycled” back around again, it is not too much to ask that the world should apply only a fragment of the passion it devotes to ordering Israel’s surrender to imploring its enemies to cease setting Africa afire.

The reason that Leah Sharibu is almost unknown in the West is because the anti-Israel media used the Israeli hostages’ faces to berate Israel for daring to fight those who stole them. It is only an ironic byproduct of their perverse obsession that Noa’s face should receive so much fame. Because Leah’s plight is useless to the cause of shaming Israel into suicide, “#FreeLeah” is sadly but an obscure X hashtag known mostly to Nigerians and Christian human-rights activists. Though Michelle Obama proudly promoted “#BringBackOurGirls” after Boko Haram kidnapped 276 Christian schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014, her interest disappeared as quickly as it materialized—perhaps once she realized that jihad was involved.

With so few friends and beset from all sides, Africans and Jews must join one another in an alliance of mutual defense and advocacy. For if Israeli hostages can rely on no one other than Israeli Special Forces to bring them home, then Africans like Leah have no one at all.

Both peoples, united by such dark histories—seeing that almost nobody else seems willing—have no choice but to be voices for each other.

Also in the series: Jihadists massacre hundreds in Burkina Faso

In his press briefing on Friday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked about how the Biden administration is responding to the dire situation for women in the Islamic Republic. The journalist referred to the latest report by a United Nations fact-finding mission on the increase in suppression of women’s and girls’ rights in Iran.

She prefaced her question by mentioning the second anniversary of the Sept. 16, 2022 murder of Mahsa Amini.

Amini was a 22-year-old woman from Saqez in Iran’s Kurdistan Province. While on a trip with her family to Tehran, she was arrested by the regime’s “morality police” for not having her head covered properly. According to eyewitnesses, she was beaten as soon as she entered the van that was transporting her to the station for “education”—mullah-style. Three days later, she was dead.

One can only imagine the kind of torture she endured before she was taken to the Kasra Hospital in northern Tehran. Photos that emerged of her lying in a coma matched the medical center’s statement that when she was admitted on Sept. 13, she showed “no vital signs.”

This notice was removed from the hospital’s social-media pages after hardliners called its staff “anti-regime agents.” In parallel, police denied having beaten Amini to death, insisting that she had passed away from a heart attack. It was a lie, of course, and everybody knew it.

“As you have heard us say before, Mahsa Amini’s story did not end with her death,” Miller responded to the reporter. “She inspired a historic movement that has impacted Iran and influenced people across the globe who are advocating for gender equality, respect for human rights, and particularly, the respect for human rights inside Iran.”

He went on to say, “so, that [U.N.] report is absolutely right. We continue to see a crackdown on women and women’s rights in Iran.”

However, he added, “I would just say the new president of Iran has at various times signaled that he wants to change his approach, and wants to reach out to the West and have a different relationship with the West. There are obviously a number of actions he could take in that regard when it comes to Iran’s destabilizing activities outside of its own borders, but one of the actions he could take would be to stop the crackdown on women and women’s rights inside Iran’s borders.”

How he was able to utter those words without hanging his head in shame is beyond comprehension.

In the first place, even the clueless State Department knows by now that it’s the “supreme leader”—Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—who calls the shots in Iran, regardless of the identity of the president.

Secondly, as the powers-that-be in Tehran are busy completing their nuclear-weapons program while engaged in a multi-front war against Israel (directly and via proxies), the only comments about the regime that should be coming out of the mouths of U.S. officials are threats.

Any expressions of hope for an improvement in “human rights” in the Islamic Republic make Washington worse than a laughing stock. That’s precisely why Khamenei and his goons are hot for a Kamala Harris victory in November and have a target on Donald Trump’s head.

Trump, when he held the reins in the White House, ended the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries in May 2018. He also imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign on the regime, progressively adding sanctions, to starve the coffers so heartily filled by Obama.

Third, Miller must be aware of the State Department report, provided this week to Congress, revealing that American trade with the Islamic Republic increased by 43% last year, reaching more than $81 million. According to The Washington Free Beacon, which reviewed the “unclassified but not disseminated publicly” report, this “significant jump … suggests the Biden-Harris administration is bypassing tough American sanctions on Tehran in order to stimulate its flagging economy and provide the hardline regime with a financial lifeline.”

Keeping the ayatollahs in clover is hardly the way to assist the women and girls of Iran to show their faces and remove their chains. The least that the likes of Miller could do is shed the hypocrisy where their fate and well-being are concerned.

A top aide to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson apologized for referring to police as “f***ing pigs” but denies charges that she heckled the only Jewish member of the Chicago City Council, WTTW News reported.

While Kennedy Bartley, 29, the mayor’s managing deputy for external relations, “apologized for her anti-police remarks, she declined to express regret for posting ‘From the river to the sea. Palestine will be free. Amen!’ on her private account on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, on Oct. 9—just two days after the Hamas attacks on Israel,” per WTTW.

“Bartley said she does not agree with some Jewish American groups that the phrase is antisemitic,” the news organization reported. “Bartley said it is a call for freedom for Palestinians and the establishment of a Palestinian state, not a call for the destruction of Israel.”

“Bartley said she did not understand when she made that post that the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ had been ‘weaponized’ by those who want Israel to cease to exist. That is the stated goal of Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government,” WTTW added. “While Bartley said she would be more ‘mindful’ of that context in the future, she declined to say she would never use the phrase again.”

Debra Silverstein, an alderman and the Chicago City Council’s lone Jewish member, said of Bartley’s post that “to me and, I’m sure, to the majority of the mainstream Jewish community, it was similar to a congratulations to Hamas, an internationally known terrorist organization,” per the Chicago Sun-Times.

Scott Waguespack, another city alderman, told the Sun-Times that he heard Bartley and others “snapping and whistling and jeering” while Silverstein spoke before the City Council, before the mayor cast the tie-breaking vote to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

“That’s why I yelled. That was the first time I’ve sort of been like, ‘Hey, be quiet and don’t be disrespectful,’” Waguespack told the Sun-Times. “I thought it was extremely disrespectful and trying to shout her down.”

“I’m not Jewish, but I don’t understand this. I would think that the community would see that behavior as deep behavior that’s not gonna go away with an apology,” Waguespack told the paper.

Silverstein told the Sun-Times that Bartley tried to call her but that “I’m not forgiving that fast.”

News sites reported from the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 8 that “Jewish American film director Sarah Friedland used her acceptance speech … to strongly criticize Israel’s ongoing military actions in Gaza, calling them as genocide.” Yet another young Jew has exposed herself as a modern anti-Zionist.

Friedland, to be exact, has declared: “As a Jewish American, I’m accepting this award on the 336th day of Israel’s genocide … and 76th year of occupation. I believe it is our responsibility as filmmakers to use the institutional platforms through which we work to redress Israel’s impunity on the global stage. I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their struggle for liberation,” echoing Howard Jacobson’s 2010 novel, The Finkler Question, wherein he coined the term “Ashamed Jew.” David Aronovitch shortened it to “Asajew.”

Her mother, as it happens, is sculptress Harriet Feigenbaum, who in 1988 designed an Auschwitz Camp memorial for the Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State. Jewish history cannot be assumed to have been lacking in her life, even if that memorial is titled “Memorial to Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust,” thus advancing a more all-inclusive membership of those who were victims of a “Holocaust.”

Yet something was missing, it appears. She told an interviewer in 2018 that “growing up … the history of the Nakba was completely missing from her education regarding the founding of the State of Israel.” Friedland is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and a director of Lyd in Exile, which makes her statement, if not understandable, unsurprising.

This claim of “you never told us about the Nakba” is a frequent one coming from Jewish anti-Zionists. As Donna Nevel, a founding member of the Facing the Nakba project, Jews Say No! and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, has written, “Like many Jews, I had an extensive Jewish education and learned about Israel without ever learning about the Nakba … [since then] I have listened to and learned from the stories and experiences of Palestinians who had been expelled from their homeland.” In truth, all she learned was the false, misinformed and biased narrative of Palestine Mandate Arabs, and subsequently, settled in a new radical and exciting ideology, and refused to learn the truth.

Moreover, I cannot believe that all these turncoats could not pick up a few history books and read a little. There are even books by non-Jews, like that by Conor Cruise O’Brien, if they were too sensitive to Jewish writers.

It is not a lack of education that is their problem but a profound underlying inability to feel comfortable and even proud of being authentically Jewish.

In a recent Instagram post, IfNotNow had this message under a poster reading “Together we rise”: “You’re joining a powerful movement committed to organizing the U.S. Jewish community to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system … a community rooted in Jewish values and ritual that serves as a political, spiritual, and cultural home to resist the oppression of Palestinians…through solidarity and togetherness. You’re building the Jewish future.”They joined the anti-AIPAC campaign, labeling it pro-war, skirting into antisemitic territory.

As with other anti-Zionist groups, Jewish liberation has become invidiously predicated on ending a conflict the Arabs initiated by a solution that depends on what they term as a complete Israeli decolonization and the formation of a state of Palestine. T’ruah is busy mobilizing rabbis to pressure the United Jewish Appeal to intervene on behalf of a ceasefire deal by pressuring Israel. Hamas, which refuses a deal, gets a free pass for its ongoing recalcitrance.

In the past, the majority of Jews who rejected Zionism expressed themselves in ways that would not compromise their Judaism. They adopted a universalist ideology, championed tikkun olam, rejected nationalism and bemoaned actions of Israel they viewed as negative to Judaism. On the other hand, today’s crop of anti-Zionists, in addition to negating Jewish national identity, labor to find new ways literally to hate Israel’s existence and to cause non-Jews to hate it, too.

What we are witnessing is not opposition to Israeli policies and actions but rather the negation of Israel. IfNotNow’s mentor, Peter Beinart, summed up their ant-Zionism as a misrepresented throwback to Ahad Ha’Am, writing in The New York Times: “A Jewish state has become the dominant form of Zionism. But it is not the essence of Zionism. The essence of Zionism is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society.” How that society could survive, as if depending on Arab-Muslim goodwill, is indicative of the irrationality of this goal. One of their poster girls even admits on Instagram that she was “confused.”

These are Jews with unsettled souls and a recent New Yorker piece on Jewish Currents provides insight. How difficult is it to grasp that the declared aim of Arabs referring to themselves as Palestinians and their supporters is the disappearance of Israel? That they wish to denude Israel of its defenses? That at this time, Jews who support them, who assist them, who attack Israel and other Jews and their institutions for being Zionist ultimately share that goal. They are profoundly lost, caught up in a vortex of irrationality and psychological inferiority.

They should reflect on Michael Gawenda, a former political reporter, senior editor at Time magazine and editor-in-chief of Australia’s The Age who was “determined not to be a Jewish journalist,” as he admits in his memoir. A former anti-Zionist Bundist and leftist, he now knows that “Jews like me no longer feel welcome on the left” and he knows the reason: Today’s anti-Zionists are “fundamentally in favor of the elimination of the State of Israel as a Jewish state—whether that is by force or by some pie in the sky idea that, in the end, Israelis will be convinced that their future is in some sort of Palestinian state where Jews are a minority.”

As the commentator Rabbi David Kimchi noted in Isaiah 49:17, “Your destroyers and they that made you waste shall go forth from you.” Not “from you.” But from within you, from among you.

In early February, nearly 100 protesters who called for Pennsylvania to divest from Israel bonds were arrested at the state Capitol. “Israel is our greatest ally in the Middle East, and I will always stand with them,” Stacy Garrity, the state treasurer, said at the time. “Israel bonds are a smart, dependable investment with a proven track record, and it’s especially important to show our support at a time when the people of Israel are facing horrific terrorism.”

Pennsylvania invests some $56 million in Israel Bonds, including a $20 million investment since Oct. 7, according to an Oct. 12 press release from the state treasurer. That investment has been a frequent area in which Erin McClelland, Garrity’s Democratic challenger, has criticized the state treasurer.

McClelland, an Allegheny County Department of Human Services policy adviser, and a former substance abuse and mental-health counselor, has described Israel Bonds often as risky investments. 

“Moody’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating citing concerns of foreign political instability, governance, debt/GDP ratio since March 2023,” she wrote in February. “The increasing risk in economic indicators is not a smart, stable investment for workers’ pensions or the Pennsylvania Treasury.”

“Hyper-polarization of economic data makes for bad policy. The downgrade of Israel’s credit rating is a setback,” she wrote in another February post, sharing a quote from Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said that Israel doesn’t judge its economic strength based on how the world evaluates it.

“This disproportionate and inflammatory response from their finance minister is very alarming,” she added. “This is not where we should invest workers’ pensions and Pennsylvania tax dollars.” (JNS sought comment from McClelland several times.)

McClelland has also said that investing in Israel Bonds could make Pennsylvania a potential terror target. “We’ve seen an increase in those attacks since October,” she told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. “We saw the Aliquippa Water Authority get hacked by Iran because they use an Israeli-made software system.”

Garrity, a 30-year Army Reserve veteran, told JNS the commonwealth’s longstanding holdings of Israel Bonds are evidence of its nonpartisan nature, and state treasurers must use the “prudent investor standard” in their decisions rather than playing partisan politics with taxpayer funds.

“On both sides of the aisle, regardless of your political party, Pennsylvania has been investing in these bonds,” she told JNS. 

The Keystone State has held Israel Bonds since 1993, with a typical balance of $20 to $40 million, according to Garrity. The current balance represents about 2% of the state’s entire fixed-income allocation, and all purchases, including those after Oct. 7, fall within the state Treasury’s investment policy statement, she said.

“It’s one of the better-performing fixed-income investments that we have,” Garrity told JNS. “Israel Bonds have strong returns above market. They’re very reliable, and so they clearly meet the standard.”

Garrity added that her decision and that of her predecessors to invest in Israel Bonds goes beyond solid financial returns.

“With Israel being our greatest ally in the Middle East, I’m always going to stand with them, and that is why we invested the additional $20 million,” she told JNS. “It’s part of the reason state treasurers of both parties have invested in them for more than 30 years.”

“Investing in Israel Bonds is a great investment for the commonwealth, and it’s a great investment in democracy,” she added.

‘I don’t get so squishy’

Six months after Oct. 7, Israel Bonds said its global sales since the massacre had surpassed $3 billion, with more than 35 U.S. state and municipal bodies investing a total of $1.7 billion. 

The total figure is nearly three times the company’s average annual sales volume in recent years. 

McClelland has stated that Pennsylvania should focus on investing in American companies rather than foreign entities, insisting that her criticism of Garrity’s practices is not focused narrowly on Israel.

But Garrity told JNS that it is a best practice in investing to diversify internationally.

“Foreign markets and individual stocks are going to move in different circles in U.S. markets and reduce volatility in the portfolio,” she said. 

“Some of the world’s best companies are domiciled outside of the United States,” she added, citing companies like Nestle, Samsung, Anheuser-Busch and Airbus.

In her visits to all 67 counties in Pennsylvania, Garrity has heard broad support for Israel Bonds, she told JNS.

“They applaud when I talk about investing in Israel Bonds,” she said.

She told JNS that she was protested twice—in February at the state Capitol and in March, when activists conducted a “die-in,” pretending to lie dead on the ground, in front of the state Treasury office building.

“The only die-in that happened was Oct. 7, so that really doesn’t bother me,” Garrity told JNS of the protest. “There’s just a lot of unfortunate death, but I’m former military, so I don’t get so squishy, and I think the thing to do is stand by our great ally.”

The 2,087 anti-Israel incidents of assault, vandalism, harassment, protests and divestment resolutions that the Anti-Defamation League recorded on U.S. campuses between June 1, 2023, and May 31, 2024 represent a 477% increase over the prior academic year, per a report the nonprofit released on Monday.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO and national director, stated that the level of antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment on campus in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks is unprecedented.

“Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the anti-Israel movement’s relentless harassment, vandalism, intimidations and violent physical assaults go way beyond the peaceful voicing of a political opinion,” he stated.

“Administrators and faculty need to do much better this year to ensure a safe and truly inclusive environment for all students, regardless of religion, nationality or political views,” he added. “They need to start now.”

The ADL report notes that campus activism frequently includes expressions of support for U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

“One emblematic incident occurred on April 17, 2024, at Columbia University, when protesters chanted, ‘Al-Qassam you make us proud, kill another soldier now!’” the report states, referring to a pro-Hamas chant.

“Activists also chanted ‘we are Hamas’ and ‘we will never let up and we will never let down until Palestine is free, Zionism is destroyed, and Zionists start to hide like the Nazis,’” it added.

The media and Congress have largely focused on anti-Israel protests at elite institutions like Columbia University, the ADL identified 1,418 protests in 46 states and the District of Columbia at some 360 schools. 

That included more than 150 “encampment” protests with students attempting to occupy buildings or grounds.

The report also recorded 28 assaults, 201 incidents of vandalism, 360 incidents of harassment and 80 “boycott, divestment and sanctions” resolutions against Israel. Each of those categories saw a dramatic increase from the number of incidents the ADL recorded in the previous academic year.

The police department in Ann Arbor, Mich., is “actively investigating” a “bias-motivated” assault of a student on Sunday, the department stated.

“The 19-year-old male victim reported he was walking when a group of unknown males behind him asked if he was Jewish. When the victim replied yes, the group of males proceeded to assault him,” said the department. “The suspects then fled the area on foot. The victim suffered minor injuries, and he did not require hospitalization.”

“There is absolutely no place for hate or ethnic intimidation in the City of Ann Arbor. Our department stands against antisemitism and all acts of bias-motivated crimes,” stated Andre Anderson, chief of the Ann Arbor Police Department. “We are committed to vigorously investigating this and other hate-motivated incidents.”

JNS has previously reported that inconsistencies govern when government and other entities cite “other forms of hate” as chaperones to Jew-hatred.

“Unfortunately, this incident has marred an otherwise incredible start to the new academic year,” stated Rabbi Davey Rosen, CEO of the University of Michigan Hillel. “Just this past Shabbat, we had 300 students, eating, singing, and having a great time, and today marked Hillel’s inaugural 5K run.”

“In hard times, we at Michigan Hillel draw strength from this incredible community—students, parents, alumni and friends—and that strength powers our pride and joy in being Jewish and, in particular, being Jewish at the University of Michigan,” Rosen added.

“This incident is yet another example of the persistent threats and intimidation Jewish students continue to face on campuses following Oct. 7,” the Combat Antisemitism Movement told JNS. “We call on university administrations to do more to protect Jewish students and send a clear message that there is no tolerance for on-campus hate.”

When the world saw a swell of support for Hamas after the terror organization attacked Jewish communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, it was a “secondary catastrophe,” the journalist Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press, told about 3,000 people at an event in Toronto.

“You’ll see some of the most educated, prestigious, elite members of our society standing on the side of the terrorists,” Weiss, 40, a Jewish native of Pittsburgh, said at the Sept. 11 event, during which the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto launched its 2024 annual fundraising campaign.

The elite siding with terrorists has been “the major transformation to understand that we’re living in an age of just unbelievable moral confusion,” Weiss told attendees. “The most basic case for our civilization—and its fundamental goodness—has to be made.”

Weiss added that one could never imagine something “so morally depraved” as people supporting Al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

“The gift of the darkness of this year has been the clarity of that—the absolute clarity of this moment,” said Weiss, who hosts the podcast Honestly, and who formerly was an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times who caused a national stir after she resigned from the Times in 2020, claiming an antisemitic backlash in the workplace. “Clarity about what it requires from us and a sense of purposefulness in the fight that we’re in.”

Rabbi David Wolpe, rabbi emeritus of Sinai Temple, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles and a former member of the antisemitism advisory group at Harvard University; and Israeli actress Shira Haas, of the popular three-season series Shtisel and four-part docudrama Unorthodox, also spoke at the event.

“The year made me much more binary,” Wolpe told attendees. “It’s like, if you’re a non-Zionist or an anti-Zionist, you’re in a different category in my Marvel kingdom.”

“The year was, in fact, both painful and clarifying, which are two things that often go together,” the rabbi added.

It is essential for Jews and for Israel to have allies in the battle between good and evil, he said.

“We have more friends than we think, and when you see any public figure standing up for Israel or standing up for Jews, all I can tell you is try to find out how to send them a note of appreciation,” he said. “We have a lot of building to do with other people who really are well-disposed towards us, and it’s incredibly important.”

Weiss told attendees that “our real allies” don’t necessarily identify themselves as such on social media.

“They are people who fundamentally understand that the West, for all of its flaws, is good, that liberal democracy has provided opportunity for more human progress and human flourishing than any other kind of system of government in the world,” she said.

Potential allies could be Catholic, evangelical, Hindu, Mormon or Chinese immigrants who fled Communist China, “and who understand where woke ideology can lead,” she told the audience.

“I really believe that in North America, our allies are in the majority,” she said. “They’re just the self-silencing majority, and part of what our job is to show up for them so that they can show up for us.”

‘A sense of tremendous purposefulness’

Haas, a Golden Globe- and Emmy-nominated actress, told attendees that she saw the “solidarity of the citizens” in Israel after Oct. 7, which “I think was never like that before.”

In the past 11 months, there has been “a sense of tremendous purposefulness, meaning, connection to our history and connection to one another,” she said, but she cautioned that there is more to be done than just unifying to fight Jew-hatred.

“We were put on earth to be Jews and to be part of the Jewish story,” she said.

Wolpe likened his hope and optimism to an archaeological discovery in the Jewish state in the Valley of Hinnom, from which the Hebrew word Gehenna, or “hell,” takes its name. Some 50 years ago, Israeli archaeologists were excavating at the site—in which Canaanites sacrificed children in ancient times—and found a house that was burned down during the destruction of the First Temple in the year 586 BCE.

In that house, they found the oldest partial text from the Torah—500 years older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wolpe said. The objects, part of the Israel Museum collection in Jerusalem, contain the priestly blessing from Numbers 6:24-26: “The Lord bless and protect you. The Lord deal kindly and graciously with you. The Lord bestow his favor upon you and grant you peace.”

“In other words, the oldest bit of Torah we have in the world is a blessing of peace that was snatched from hell,” Wolpe told the audience. “That is what we have done for thousands of years, and if you ask me what the Jewish mission and destiny is, I would say to you that I have no doubt that that is what both we and our brothers and sisters in Israel will do again today.”

Weiss said that she draws hope for history, noting that it was more difficult to live as a Jew after the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E.

“That perspective gives me such a sense—and I know this word has been so corrupted and neutered of its meaning—‘privilege,’ genuine, sincere privilege to live in a world where I get to have a mezuzah at my door, send my children to a Jewish school, have the police force in my city protect them rather than turn against them,” she said.

“All of these freedoms are things that even my great-grandparents would have thought were earthly miracles,” she added. “What gives me hope is looking backward and looking at all of the forgotten sacrifices that our ancestors made for every single one of us in this room.”

That view “gives a tremendous power and a sense of a gift that has been given to me, and a sense that I want to use that gift and the privilege of that gift and those freedoms as wisely as I can,” she said.

UJA in Toronto raised more than $50 million from some 12,000 donors since Oct. 7, the Federation announced at the event. It also sent 42 tons of medical supplies and essential goods to the Jewish state, it said.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has vowed that Yemen's Houthis will pay a "heavy price" after the Iran-backed terrorist organization fired a ballistic missile into central Israel on Sunday morning.

JNS CEO and Jerusalem bureau chief Alex Traiman and Middle East correspondent Josh Hasten discuss what sets this attack apart from previous ones, as well as the wider implications for the region.

Other top stories include Israel destroying a top-secret Iranian weapons facility in Syria; further escalation in the north; and the potential end of major military operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

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