Between Republicans wanting to destroy our entire profession, and Democrats using us as a convenient rhetorical punching bag to prove their supposed moderation, those of us in higher education have to accept that everybody on all sides hates us right now.

Social media, where you can find out that beloved actor you remember from “Star Trek” is now sharing posts from Holocaust deniers.

More and more colleges and universities are cutting Religious Studies, just as current events make it more and more obvious how necessary Religious Studies education is to understand today's world.

Better late than never, I guess. www.timesofisrael.com/brussels-cat...

Putin's court philosopher is doing advanced level white supremacist theory.

A teenager is suspected of having done this.

I don't know if this prediction will come to fruition or not, but I do think there is a real chance that if the 2028 Republican presidential primaries come down a battle between Vance and Rubio, without Trump to hold the factions of MAGA together, it becomes a proxy for views on Israel.

The "New York Times" is reporting that Trump apparently believes he will be the last pro-Israel US president. (www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/u...)

Some people protesting this event would have objected to an event that only advertised property within the Green Line, and that fact lets the event organizers dismiss all criticism of them for featuring properties in the occupied West Bank, and everyone ends up stupider. forward.com/news/823165/...

This is a helpful map of the legal status of the territory undermined by the fact that it is apparently a map of Larshi.

What is so deeply wrong with the land sales at this synagogue event, and what deserves to be protested, is the fact that they show property in the occupied West Bank. Protesters chanting "We don’t want a two-state, we want ’48" undermine that. forward.com/news/823165/...

“If there was an anarchist militiaman at the border, they wouldn’t look too kindly on communist party stamps, and vice versa.” www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

As a human being and an American, I did not like the image. But as a Religious Studies professor... hard to ask for a better image to spark discussion about the relationship between religion and nationalism.

Always a bad sign when the German police are concerned about Nazi youth groups. www.bbc.com/news/article...

My feeling about this protest is that the burden of proof for protesters at houses of worship should be much higher than at, say, consular offices, but that by advertising property in the occupied West Bank, this shul has crossed it. Doing that is a far bigger chillul hashem than the protests are.

This reflects a genuinely concerning and worrisome trend, and I really wish the ADL had not so badly torched its credibility in the past few years that anything it puts out is now inherently suspect. We need an actual reliable record of this, and the ADL cannot be the source of that.

For once I want a politician to say, "We should all talk like we're in a college seminar. College seminars are good. We should aspire to lift the level of the discourse."

"Polanski is both Jewish and left wing – and therefore, it would appear, not a legitimate political figure whose identity should be respected or listened to." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I have to accept that I will forever be coded as "elite" in US political discourse because I am a New York Jewish academic with a PhD who teaches at a liberal arts college, even though I make very little money.

As a Jewish academic, I feel infinitely more threatened by higher education administrators who capitulate to federal campaigns against faculty freedom of speech than I do by professors defending student pro-Palestine protesters.

I don't think antisemitic violence is caused by Israel's actions - that removes agency from those committing it - but Simon Schama, by focusing only on those who genuinely did celebrate the violence of October 7, 2023, is ignoring the far larger number of people who became anti-Israel much later.

They are absolutely going to follow this up with a law requiring professors at public universities to treat this class as equal to AP US history - and say they are doing it to protect “academic freedom.” www.tallahassee.com/story/news/s...

I don’t like protests of synagogues, which can much too easily slide into antisemitism, and also, I don’t think synagogues can host events to sell property in the occupied West Bank, in violation of international law, then act surprised when people want to protest it. hellgatenyc.com/mamdani-oppo...

Ironically, among Generation Z voters, this is one of the issues that least divides right and left. jewishinsider.com/2026/05/ted-...

Sounds like a Pretti Good reason to oppose a government.

Only a fraction of the people condemning this speech because of one line praising student pro-Palestine protesters, taken out of context, seem to have read the whole speech, which spends more time condemning antisemitism. www.msn.com/en-us/news/u...

Hard to look at this and not conclude that German Erinnerungskultur has failed. www.ynetnews.com/article/rjhx...

What I take from this statement is that Bezalel Smotrich does not actually think that the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, were particularly bad. His words, not mine. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

I don't blame Democrats for running and winning in 2020 - they couldn't exactly just throw the election - but in retrospect, the timeline where Trump limps to a victory hobbled in 2020, without four years to make plans and build support from Heritage Foundation types, is probably the less bad one.

I truly want to believe this is all false, but I fear much of it is true, and if so, Jewish culture could well become more insular and worse off for it. www.the-independent.com/voices/golde...

No one ever asks this question unless they desperately want to will it into being that the answer is "yes."

I don’t know; I would think you two would have a lot in common, in fact.

There already is a definitive filmed adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey,” and it was made by the Coen Brothers.

Not only is this a loyalty test for American Jews, it is specifically a demand that American Jews submit to the cultural and political dominance of American Christians.

This feels like a demand for a loyalty test from American Jews, and I will not be participating in it. www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...

A lot of people ask this question because they clearly want it to be true.

There’s a real desire among a certain kind of people to distinguish clearly between morally good people (in this case, Eastern European Holocaust victims) and bad people (Western Zionists). This binary doesn’t work and people are a lot more complicated than that.

They are trying to make it illegal for trans people to exist. www.politico.com/news/2026/05...

I will not, in fact, be doing this. www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...

I love this thread so much.

Norwegian Jewish organizations are condemning the Norwegian Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities for hosting a seminar on the relationship between the Holocaust and the Nakba, and one entitled "Holocaust Memorial After Gaza." www.jpost.com/diaspora/ant...

"Teachers at secondary schools across the Netherlands are regularly confronted in class with disinformation about the Holocaust that students reportedly encounter on TikTok... according to a survey... that reached nearly all secondary schools in the country." nltimes.nl/2026/05/03/d...

This is a reply to Mayor Mamdani's statement condemning swastikas painted on a synagogue in Queens and on a plaque honoring survivors of Kristallnacht.

This is a school shooting. It should be referred to as such. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

I'm sure the people convinced Mayor Mamdani is an incorrigible antisemite will not give him any credit for this statement, but it is still very good and important that he made it.

There's a motte and bailey argument here, where Rabbi Creditor wants to define "Zionism" so broadly it just means "cultural connection to the Land." Then, having agreed to that, you are anti-Jewish if you oppose the president of the current nation-state. blogs.timesofisrael.com/antizionism-...

This is correct, and needs to be said, and I so admire this organization for saying it.

"Counterterrorism officials in Buenos Aires are investigating after a Jewish library and a Chabad center in a suburb in the Argentine capital were attacked last week." www.jta.org/2026/05/04/g...

They designed a poll specifically designed to prove that US Jews support the Iran War - defining the survey population as "connected" Jews, whose connection is defined by this one particular institute - and still they can't produce that much support for the war. www.jta.org/2026/05/04/u...

This is the most 2026 headline I have seen.