The Latest From @MacTaskForce
Real change happens when students choose unity over division, and build relationships grounded in mutual respect, understanding, and shared values.
Maccabee Task Force Fellows at Hunter College are seeking to expand their already flourishing interfaith collaborations for next year, including with the Sikh Students Association. Members of the Sikh Students Association were early-adopters into the interfaith partnership, helping our fellows to create a campus culture where Jewish and Sikh students stand together against hate and extremism.
Strong communities are built through dialogue, solidarity, and partnership. Our student leaders are helping lead the way, with many more communities already represented in the coalition.
Jewish houses of worship are increasingly being forced to operate behind barricades, security patrols, and police presence simply because they are Jewish institutions. That should alarm everyone.
When synagogues become targets for intimidation, vandalism, and extremist demonstrations, it reflects a broader normalization of antisemitism that extends far beyond one building or one community.
Defending Jewish communal spaces is not political, it’s a matter of civil rights, religious freedom, and basic public safety.
A newly released report by Israel’s Civil Commission has fully revealed the systematic sexual violence and torture perpetrated by Hamas against young Israeli women on October 7. Compiled from testimony by more than 430 survivors, witnesses, medical professionals, and experts, the report documents atrocities so horrific that many media outlets refuse to print them in full.
“Heads were decapitated. Pelvic bones shattered. Even after death, sexual assault continued….. At Kibbutz Be’eri, nails, sharp objects, and pieces of metal and plastic were embedded in a woman whose body was discovered naked and bound. On another victim, grenades were used.” - Daily Mail
For more than two years, survivors and investigators have fought to ensure these crimes were neither denied nor buried by international silence. The Civil Commission found that women were stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned. They were executed both during and after rape.
As difficult as these accounts are to read, looking away only enables denial, distortion, and the normalization of terror. The victims of October 7 deserve truth, accountability, and a world willing to confront the full depravity of what was done to them.
Anti-Israel demonstrators marched through Flatbush, Brooklyn, where many Jewish families live and reside.
No Jewish family should fear that mobs propagating lies about the Jewish state will march by the hundreds down their street.
Tonight, Israeli Eurovision representative Noam Bettan will take the stage in the first semi-final while once again facing the kind of hostility no artist should have to endure simply because of their nationality.
For Israeli performers, Eurovision has increasingly become more than a music competition. Amid boycotts, protests, and relentless political targeting, just appearing on stage as an Israeli has become an act of resilience.
Music is supposed to bring people together, not become another excuse to normalize hatred toward Jews and Israelis. Wishing Noam Bettan success tonight as he proudly represents Israel on one of the world’s biggest stages.
Lebanese Druze journalist Inas Al-Jarmakani is one of the growing voices in the Middle East pushing back against extremist agendas and speaking openly about peace with Israel. Addressing accusations of being a “Zionist,” she emphasized that she cares more about building a stable, safe, and worthwhile life for Lebanese people in Lebanon, instead of promoting endless conflict with Israel driven by the regime of Iran, other foreign interests, and terror groups.
She also pointed to Israeli Druze coming to the defense of the Druze community in Sweida, Syria when they were under attack by various armed factions. Inas’ voice is being shared around the world, in a powerful example of one Middle Eastern woman’s voice rising above division and extremism.
British politician Kemi Badenoch, the opposition party leader in the UK, once again stood up against antisemitism publicly.
She spoke truth to power about those people who want Jews to be afraid to go about their lives, and emphasizes that she will never allow them to win.
She expressed simply and critically that she stands with the Jews of Britain.
In 2022, 24-year-old Kowsar Eftekhari was shot in the eye by the Islamic Republic regime in Iran, and then she escaped.
Now she’s being harassed and abused in Germany by “pro-Palestine” activists who think they know better.
This is the attempted erasure of victims’ voices. We stand with Kowsar against the Islamic Republic’s mass slaughter and torture.
