A majority of American Jews believe antisemitism has become a “very serious” problem in the U.S. and young American Jews seem to bear the brunt of it. Here are four stories that illustrate some of this year’s troubling findings.
Amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, questions have been raised about UNRWA's ties with Hamas, and what function, if any, it would fulfill in a post-war Gaza. On January 26, the U.S. announced it would temporarily pause funding to UNRWA after Israel revealed that at least a dozen employees were allegedly involved in the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.
Given the prevalence of misinformation on social media and the one-sided reports in news outlets, it’s not unreasonable for some people to think that Zionism—the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland—is controversial among Jews and that anti-Israel attitudes are mainstream in the American Jewish community. Yet these Jews do not represent the vast majority of the Jewish community and they reside in small but loud echo chambers.
And if Israel was truly a settler-colonialist state dominated by white Europeans, that would make it hard to explain how 21% of Israelis are Palestinian Arabs, who have the same rights and responsibilities as Jewish Israelis. That includes serving in the military, the Knesset, and Israel’s Supreme Court. But that is yet another inconvenient truth for those who hated Israel even before Hamas went on its spree of murder, rape and kidnapping.
American Jewish Committee (AJC) is outraged by the revelations that twelve employees of UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East – were involved in the horrific October 7 terror attacks perpetrated by Hamas against Israel.