Three dozen former leaders of prominent American Jewish organizations have signed a letter calling on the groups they once led to “resist the exploitation of Jewish fears.”

The letter, which was published as a full-page ad on Thursday in The New York Times, included signatures from past chairs and CEOs of some of the largest Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Agency for Israel, the American Jewish Committee, Hillel International, the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

“With few exceptions, major Jewish organizations have been far too silent about the stunning assault on democratic norms and the rule of law,” the letter read. “While modest declarations of ‘respecting the rule of law’ and similar phrases have been included in multiple organizational statements, we believe the present moment requires far more.”

The letter added, “We urge Jewish leadership to forcefully and publicly reaffirm the historic and continuing commitment of the American Jewish community to academic freedom, to the rule of law, to ensure due process to anyone accused of breaking the law, to freedom of speech and the press.”

Some liberal and centrist American Jewish groups — including the rabbinical associations of the Reform and Conservative movements — have condemned the Trump administration’s recent crackdown on campus antisemitism, which has included billions of dollars in funding cuts and arrests of campus pro-Palestinian protesters.

Others have aired more guarded criticism. Last month, Hillel CEO Adam Lehman expressed “concern” over planned deportations and federal funding freezes.

The former CEO of Hillel International, Wayne L. Firestone, and its former chair, Randall Kaplan, signed the letter urging more action. The list of signatories also included:

• Charles Ratner, former board chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel
• Seymour D. Reich, former chair of the Conference of Presidents
• Alisa Doctoroff, former board chair of the Jim Joseph Foundation
• John Ruskay, former CEO of UJA-Federation of New York
• Robert Sugarman, former ADL national chair
• Ruth Messinger, former Manhattan borough president and American Jewish World Service CEO

The letter also included signatures from past leaders of local Jewish Federations in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami.

The Israeli electronic surveillance company NSO Group was ordered to pay $167 million in damages to WhatsApp and its parent company Meta, bringing a close to six years of litigation.

WhatsApp filed suit against NSO in 2019 in U.S. federal court, alleging it hacked 1,400 WhatsApp users, including journalists and government officials, using its Pegasus surveillance tool.

The ruling Tuesday marks a major win for privacy advocates that have fought against the company’s spyware. It is also the latest setback for NSO, which was sanctioned by the United States in November 2021 after revelations that its products enabled repressive regimes to spy on dissidents, journalists and humanitarian workers.

The same month, Apple also filed a lawsuit against NSO seeking to prevent the company from using Apple software. In September, Apple sought to drop the suit, arguing that its disclosures could aid NSO.

WhatsApp Head Will Cathcart said in a post on X that “the jury’s verdict today to punish NSO is a critical deterrent to the spyware industry against their illegal acts aimed at American companies and our users worldwide.”

The ruling, which was delivered by Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, found that the company had broken cybersecurity laws and used its “zero-click” spyware to hack the accounts.

Pegasus is able to remotely infect user’s devices without their knowledge. NSO vehemently denied the allegations during the trial, and argued that it was not responsible for how its customers used the spyware.

“We will carefully examine the verdict’s details and pursue appropriate legal remedies, including further proceedings and an appeal,” said Gil Lainer, NSO vice president for global communication, in a statement. “We firmly believe that our technology plays a critical role in preventing serious crime and terrorism and is deployed responsibly by authorized government agencies.”

NSO was ordered to pay $167 million in punitive damages to WhatsApp as well as $444,000 in compensatory damages.

In a blog post following the verdict, WhatsApp said it will make a donation to “digital rights organizations that are working to defend people against such attacks around the world,” and will seek a court order preventing NSO from attacking WhatsApp again.

Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood announced the cancellation of shows with an Israeli musician in the United Kingdom after he said a campaign by a pro-Palestinian group led to “enough credible threats to conclude that it’s not safe to proceed.”

Greenwood said he would no longer perform in Bristol and London in June with longtime collaborator Dudu Tassa, an Israeli rock star, as well as an ensemble of singers from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait and Iraq.

The campaign was carried out by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which decried the musician’s collaboration with Tassa, the grandson of famed Iraqi Jewish composer Daoud Al-Kuwaity, who emigrated to Israel in 1951.

In a post on X, PACBI denied that its campaign had led to safety threats but said Greenwood and Tassa bear “well-documented complicity in artwashing genocide.”

Greenwood and Tassa said in their extensive statement that they had also received backlash from “some on the right” who say the duo’s recent Arabic folk album is “too inclusive.” The album features a host of musicians from across the Middle East including a Palestinian singer, Nour Freteikh.

“This project has always had a difficult, narrow channel to navigate. We find ourselves in the odd position of being condemned by both ends of the political spectrum,” they wrote.

“For some on the right, we’re playing the ‘wrong’ kind of music — too inclusive, too aware of the rich and beautiful diversity of Middle Eastern culture. For some on the left, we’re only playing it to absolve ourselves of our collective sins,” the duo continued. “We dread the weaponization of this cancellation by reactionary figures as much as we lament its celebration by some progressives.”

They called for freedom of expression for artists “regardless of their citizenship or their religion — and certainly regardless of the decisions made by their government.”

Greenwood, who is married to Israeli visual artist Sharona Katan, has repeatedly faced — and rebuffed — criticism over his stance on Israel.

In 2017, Tassa and Israeli musician Shye Ben Tzur opened for Radiohead and were targeted by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. Ahead of the band’s 2017 concert in Tel Aviv, lead singer Thom Yorke called the criticism “offensive.”

Last summer, Greenwood rejected calls to cancel his tour with Tassa after the pair made an album together titled “Jarak Qaribak,” or “Your Neighbor is Your Friend” in Arabic.

The new controversy comes as other prominent musicians face criticism for their activism surrounding the war in Gaza. Last month, the Irish rap group Kneecap received backlash for cheering, “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” at a concert last year. They also projected “F–k Israel. Free Palestine.” during their Coachella performance last month. Following criticism, they denounced Hamas and Hezbollah.

Greenwood and Tassa cited the Kneecap controversy in their address on X, noting that dozens of artists denounced “political repression of artistic freedom” in a statement supporting the band.

“We have no judgment to pass on Kneecap but note how sad it is that those supporting their freedom of expression are the same ones most determined to restrict ours,” the pair wrote.

Cardinal Robert Prevost, who was just elected as Pope Leo XIV, studied under a pioneer in Jewish-Catholic relations when he attended seminary in Chicago. 

The Rev. John T. Pawlikowski, who taught for nearly half a century at the Catholic Theological Union until his retirement in 2017, served as co-founder and director of the school’s Catholic-Jewish Studies Program and also served four terms on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

More than 40 years after Leo’s ordination as a priest, Pawlikowski remembers the new pope as a good student with an open mind. 

“I do remember him as a pretty bright student,” Pawlikowski said in an interview shortly after his former student was introduced to the world as the sitting bishop of Rome. 

Pawlikowski added later, “My experience of him was he’s a very open-minded person who’s very much in the context of Vatican II.”

Vatican II, or the Second Vatican Council, inaugurated a new era in Jewish-Catholic relations in 1965 when it issued a document, Nostra Aetate, repudiating antisemitism and stating that the Jewish people were not responsible for Jesus’ death. Ties between the two religious communities were blossoming at the time when Leo was studying for the priesthood in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. 

Under Pawlikowski, Leo studied Catholic social teaching, which focuses on social and economic issues. Pawlikowski says relations with Jews are relevant to that field. CTU has also had a commitment to Catholic-Jewish relations since its founding and launched its formal program in the field in 1968.

“’I’ve always argued that antisemitism is something that has to be counted as part of the Catholic commitment to social justice and human dignity,” he said. “My work on Catholic social teaching did include always the issue of antisemitism.”

The pope spent much of his career in Peru and is thought of as a relative centrist and Vatican insider. He hasn’t been a prominent figure in Jewish-Catholic dialogue or fighting antisemitism, and doesn’t appear to have commented publicly on Israel or the war in Gaza. Pope Francis, his predecessor, did opine on those issues and had relations with Jewish leaders in his native Argentina.

But Leo’s coming of age in the era of Vatican II — plus his roots in Chicago, which has a large Jewish community, also lead Rabbi Noam Marans, the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious and intergroup relations, to feel optimistic. 

“He studied at CTU under John Pawlikowski and in the post-Nostra Aetate era, in the country where Catholic-Jewish relations is preeminent,” Marans said in an interview. “An American pope bodes well for the future of Catholic-Jewish relations. More than anywhere in the world, the relationship between Catholics and Jews has flourished and set a gold standard in the United States.”

While Francis was outspoken in his opposition to antisemitism and his promotion of ties with Jews, he raised the ire of some Jewish leaders in recent years for his criticism of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. One of his last acts as pope was to donate his popemobile to Gaza as a mobile medical unit. 

Pawlikowski said he believes “there’s a desire to carry on” with Catholic-Jewish relations, though he added, “the situation in Israel and Gaza has had a dramatic effect.”

Will his former student begin a new chapter in Catholic-Jewish ties? Pawlikowski said it’s too soon to tell, given that Leo has not thus far focused on the issue. 

“He hasn’t really been stationed in any area where there was a really pronounced Jewish community,” he said. “On the question of interreligious [affairs], he’ll have to show us where he is, but I would assume he had an outgoing, positive attitude generally.”

In his first address as pope, Leo issued a call to dialogue. 

“Help us as well—help one another—to build bridges through dialogue, through encounter, uniting everyone to be one single people always in peace,” he said. 

Rabbi Joshua Stanton, associate vice president for interfaith and intergroup initiatives at the Jewish Federations of North America, saw that as a sign that the pope is committed to Catholic-Jewish relations. He noted that this year is Nostra Aetate’s 60th anniversary, which he hopes Leo commemorates in an active way. 

“I’m very hopeful that he referenced the importance of dialogue and reaching out beyond the Catholic Church to other religious communities,” Stanton said. Stanton noted that Leo has a reputation for “quiet efficacy,” and as he settles into his position, Stanton said he’ll be looking at how the pontiff acts. 

“Does he invite Jewish leaders to the Vatican to meet with him?” he said. “Does he invite leaders from other traditions? Does he try to bring multiple groups together at the same time?”

The focus of Leo’s address on Thursday was peace. With war raging in Gaza, Marans did not take that as a specific reference to the Middle East. 

“All popes want peace,” he said. “May I add, all Catholics, Jews, rabbis want peace.”

Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, continued his string of antisemitic provocations on Thursday as he released a new music video for a song called “Heil Hitler.”

“All my n****s Nazis, n***a, heil Hitler,” Ye sings on the song’s synth-heavy chorus, over video of three rows of Black men wearing animal skins and repeating the lyrics. 

The track ends with a lengthy sample from a Hitler speech, which Ye also quoted on his X account: ‘Whether you think my work is right, whether you believe that I have been diligent. That I have worked, that I have stood up for you during these years, that I have used my time decently in the service of my people. You cast your vote now, if yes, then stand up for me as I stood up for you.’ “

Ye was one of the most popular and influential musicians in the world before publicly embracing antisemitic beliefs in 2022. Since then he has lost lucrative corporate partnerships, the support of much of the music industry and, he claims, custody of his children from ex-wife Kim Kardashian, while continuing to spread antisemitism despite the occasional promise to stop.

Ye aired some of those grievances on the track, which opens with the lines, “Man these people took my kids from me, then they froze my bank account. I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out. Think I’m stuck in the matrix.” 

He soon segues into the line, “So I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain.”

As of Thursday afternoon the music video was still playable on Ye’s X account, though not on his YouTube account. Multiple versions of the song uploaded to SoundCloud also appear to have been removed; on X, Ye claimed it had been “banned by all digital streaming platforms.”

Ye’s team says the song will be featured on his upcoming album “Cuck” (Internet slang for “cuckold,” a term for a husband whose wife is unfaithful) which also includes tracks titled “Gas Chambers,” “WW3” and “Hitler Ye and Jesus.” The album art depicts two figures wearing hooded Ku Klux Klan-like robes in different colors, while the art for the “Heil Hitler” song shows a swastika-like doodle.

The American Jewish Committee quickly condemned the song. “This is blatant antisemitism, and it’s disgusting,” CEO Ted Deutch said in a statement. “Ye is profiting off of Jew-hatred, and the music industry needs to step up and speak out against this obscenity.”

The song follows a brief effort by Ye, a onetime fashion maven, to sell swastika-emblazoned T-shirts online. He purchased a Super Bowl television ad this year to sell the shirts.

In recent weeks Ye has posted media of himself with white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, with whom he dined with President Donald Trump in 2022. “I’m here with my white supremacist homeboy Nick. We’re back,” Ye said while wearing a swastika necklace in a video he posted, then deleted, last month. 

Fuentes celebrated the new song on X in advance of its release, writing, “Imagine 50,000 people in a stadium on their feet singing every word.”

While promoting “Heil Hitler,” Ye also took a moment to praise Jewish livestreamer Adin Ross, calling him “a positive person” and celebrating a recent livestream Ross held with the Jewish rapper Drake. In February during a feud with Ross, Ye wrote on X, “JEWS ARE ARROGANT AND THINK THEY CAN SPEAK TO ANYONE THEY WANT ANY KIND OF WAY THATS WHY EVERY JEWISH WIFE IS A BITCH,” and posted a photo of him texting the streamer a Holocaust reference: “HOW YALL SAY IT NEVER AGAIN.” 

A man who self-identified as a “Jew hater” and attacked Jewish pro-Israel protesters at three separate pro-Palestinian rallies has been charged with three counts of committing hate crimes.

Tarek Bazrouk, 20, of New York City, had been arrested at three different protests over a period of nine months where he kicked and punched Jewish pro-Israel demonstrators, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. On Wednesday, he was arrested again and charged with hate crimes in connection with the incidents.

“Despite being arrested after each incident, Bazrouk allegedly remained undeterred and quickly returned to using violence to target Jews in New York City,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York in a statement.

During the first assault, which took place near the New York Stock Exchange on April 15, 2024, Bazrouk allegedly wore the green headband associated with Hamas and was arrested by police after he allegedly lunged at a group of pro-Israel protesters. As he was escorted by police, he then allegedly kicked a Jewish college student in the stomach.

On Dec. 9, 2024, at another pro-Palestinian protest near Columbia University, Bazrouk stole an Israeli flag from a Jewish Columbia student, punched him in the face and hurled antisemitic slurs after the student pursued him.

The final assault occurred near NYU Tisch Hospital when it was targeted by activists on Jan. 6, 2025. Bazrouk allegedly punched a Jewish pro-Israel protester in the nose after the individual pushed Bazrouk off of him. He was arrested after all three assaults.

Within Our Lifetime, an extremist anti-Israel activist group that regularly targets Jewish sites and features antisemitism at its rallies, organized or participated in protests in each location on those dates.

According to an investigation by law enforcement after the string of attacks, text messages on Bazrouk’s phone allegedly showed him identifying as a “Jew hater” and labelling Jews as “worthless.” He also allegedly called on “Allah” to “get us rid of [Jews],” called someone a “f—ing Jew” and instructed a friend to “slap that bitch” in reference to a woman with an Israeli sticker on her laptop, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

His phone also included several examples of pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah propaganda, and said he was “mad happy” after learning during a trip to the West Bank in 2024 that his relatives were a part of Hamas, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Bazrouk pleaded not guilty to the three hate crime charges Wednesday, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

In New York, tensions over the war in Gaza have escalated to physical violence on several occasions, and have led to prosecutions for antisemitic hate crimes. At Columbia on Wednesday, two officers were hurt in a protest at the school’s library. Last month, following an anti-Zionist demonstration in Crown Heights, one protester was arrested, and a viral video circulated showing Jewish men assaulting a woman.

An Israeli released from Hamas captivity earlier this year is objecting to the Pulitzer Prize awarded this week to Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, charging that he is “the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier” because of his derisive comments about her and other hostages.

Emily Damari issued an open letter to the members of the Pulitzer Prize board on social media on Thursday, saying that she had felt “shock and pain” when she saw that Abu Toha had received the prestigious award. She wrote:

This is a man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity. He posted about me on Facebook and asked, “How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” He has denied the murder of the Bibas family. He has questioned whether Agam Berger was truly a hostage. These are not word games – they are outright denials of documented atrocities.

You claim to honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity. And yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.

Do you not see what this means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer. He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial.

Damari was captured from her home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7, 2023. She was shot twice, losing two fingers, and was held hostage for 471 days before being released during a temporary ceasefire in January. Since then, the gesture she made with her bandaged hand has become a symbol of defiance for many Israelis. Her best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman, are among the up to two dozen Israeli hostages thought to remain alive in Gaza.

Her post comes a day after the pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting published an expose on Abu Toha’s social media posts, showing that he had published disparaging comments about hostages. The posts it called attention to have since been removed.

Abu Toha posts on Facebook multiple times a day to chronicle Israeli strikes in Gaza, name Gazans killed there and criticize media coverage of the war. The Pulitzer committee recognized him for four essays published in the New Yorker about his experience as a Palestinian who left Gaza during the war.

Currently a visiting scholar at Syracuse University, he has said he is fearful of traveling amid a crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists by the Trump administration. A pro-Israel Jewish group, Betar US, has called for Abu Toha to be deported because of his comments.

Yaakov Kirschen’s first cartoon was published in the Jerusalem Post on Jan. 1, 1973. The comic, called “Dry Bones,” starred a Ziggy-like character named Shuldig, a bald and bristly everyman, and his dog Doobie.

I first read Dry Bones in Hebrew school, when it served as an American Jewish teen’s introduction to the mild kvetching and occasionally pointed political musings of an average “Anglo” Israeli — that is, an immigrant from an English-speaking country, like Kirschen.

Up until nearly the day he died last month at 87, Kirschen kept at it, portraying such Israelis — for good and for ill — to a mostly English-speaking audience. 

A typical “Dry Bones” cartoon was sparsely drawn, with Shuldig speaking directly to the reader, or chatting with Doobie. “With ten terrible plagues we were brought out of Egypt,” Shuldig says in one cartoon, to which Doobie replies, “…and the UN was not there to condemn us?”

He would occasionally include political figures, like a more recent panel featuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walking a tightrope between “Public Outcry” and “Iran.” 

As is the case with many newspaper comics, even popular ones, most individual “Dry Bones” panels were instantly forgettable. But as they kept on coming over the next 50 years, they formed an indelible visual vocabulary of Israel and Israelis. Or at least they did for me, a big fan of the comics page. On my first visit to Israel, shortly after college, I expected to run into people like the sardonic Shuldig; or the sun-tanned and playful sabras like Srulik, the kibbutznik character created by the Israeli cartoonist known as Dosh; or the hilarious stereotypes — bearded Hasids, hairy-chested taxi drivers, Tel Aviv hipsters — drawn by Michel Kichka. And in fact I did. 

Kirschen was born in Brooklyn in 1938, studied art at Queens College, and, after a few years of cartooning for Playboy and other outlets, moved to Israel in 1971. At its peak, “Dry Bones” appeared in some 35 newspapers in Israel and abroad, including a number of American Jewish weeklies. In recent years, appearing in the right-leaning news site Jewish News Syndicate, they took on a sharper and more hawkish edge, lionizing Donald Trump and ridiculing Isael’s critics. But for many years Kirschen was an equal-opportunity satirist, and the sort of Jew who takes antisemitism as a fact of life and Jewish defiance as a point of pride. 

His work extended beyond the four-panel cartoon, and included a “Dry Bones” Haggadah, graphic novels and, in 2004, The Dry Bones Project, a nonprofit with the goal of combatting the “lies and ugliness” of anti-Semitism through humor. (In 2006 he gave out “Shmendrik” awards to those who “have most distinguished themselves by their seemingly unwitting support of anti-Semitism.”) In 2014 he won the Bonei Zion (“Builders of Zion’) prize from Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group that encourages Jewish immigration to Israel.

In 1994, Kirschen found an unexpected audience when born-again Christians embraced his graphic novel “Trees…The Green Testament.” The book is a history of Israel told from the perspective of its trees, and, according to a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, unintentionally illustrates “several biblical signs that evangelical Christians believe will presage the Second Coming. Among them: Jews will return to Israel, Israel’s hills will be planted with trees, and its barren land will bloom.” 

Kirschen, something of an agnostic, was baffled by but ultimately grateful for the attention, appearing on Christian radio and television shows.

The Kirschen cartoon I remember best was drawn during the First Gulf War, when Israelis were issued gas masks and built air-tight “safe rooms” against the possibility of a chemical weapons attack by Saddam Hussein. Israel was targeted with missiles but ultimately spared, and Kirschen imagined a new Jewish holiday in which worshippers wear replica gas masks and have a big dinner in rooms symbolically draped in plastic sheeting. Considering the actual Jewish holidays that turn near annihilation into festive ritual — essentially, as the old joke goes, all of them — the idea was not as far-fetched as it seemed.

Kirschen’s increasingly nationalist politics were not to everyone’s liking, but until the end he captured the Israelis and American Jews who either never accepted or have grown weary of “peace” talk, are angry at the Israelis and outsiders who criticize the government and are convinced that the current war is another chapter in the existential fight for Jewish survival. 

He expressed all of this in the wake of the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, but also drew a few panels with a more wistful tone — expressing confidence that the war had united Israelis with a sense of common purpose. 

Kirschen suffered a stroke earlier this year, and on his blog his wife, the artist Sali Ariel, chronicled his health challenges and decline. With the help of a graphic designer friend, “Yaakov is keeping on occasionally doing his cartoons,” she wrote on April 14. “He feels the calling to be able to help fight for the cause of the Jewish People with his satirical cartoons.”

He died later that day at a hospital near his home in Kfar Saba.

Police arrested more than 70 pro-Palestinian protesters who crowded and occupied the main library of Columbia University, thrusting the New York City campus back into the center of campus tensions over Gaza.

Two Columbia public safety officers were injured in the incident, the school said.

The mass arrest, which was authorized by Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, comes about a year after Columbia was the epicenter of student anti-Israel protests. At the beginning of May 2024, police had stormed the campus to clear out and arrest protesters who had forcibly entered a campus building, alongside an encampment protest on the quad.

Since then, protest activity at Columbia has been less frequent, as the school has contended with a Trump administration crackdown on it and other schools with high-profile pro-Palestinian protests. The demonstration at the library on Wednesday by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the school’s main pro-Palestinian coalition, appeared to be an attempt to revive that movement.

Shipman authorized the NYPD to break up the protest on Wednesday evening, hours after protesters entered a reading room in the school’s Butler Library en masse and began a demonstration there. The protest took place at a time when students are studying in advance of final exams.

The protesters beat drums and unfurling a banner reading “Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” named for a Palestinian writer killed in a gunfight by Israeli troops in the West Bank in 2017, years before the current Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Many of them wore masks, which Columbia banned in March in a bid to recover $400 million in funding frozen by the Trump administration.

Columbia officers blocked the exits and would not let protesters leave the building without showing ID. This was the first time since last May that school leaders had called in police to clear out a protest, The New York Times reported.

“The individuals who disrupted activities in Butler Reading Room 301 still refuse to identify themselves and leave the building,” Shipman’s statement said. “Columbia has taken the necessary step of requesting the presence of NYPD to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community.”

She added, “Requesting the presence of the NYPD is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community… Columbia strongly condemns violence on our campus, antisemitism and all forms of hate and discrimination, some of which we witnessed today.”

The protest and police raid occurred as campus pro-Palestinian protests are reentering the spotlight. At the University of Washington, a pro-Palestinian protest caused $1 million of damage to an engineering building, the school said. And on Wednesday, Rep. Elise Stefanik and other members of Congress threatened university presidents with the loss of federal funding, or pressure to resign, in the latest hearings on campus antisemitism.

Nationally, the Trump administration has suspended billions of dollars of federal funding at a series of schools, has arrested international students and has revoked student visas in what it says is an effort to fight campus antisemitism.

CUAD , which has embraced extreme rhetoric during this school year, decried the NYPD’s presence on campus.

“Columbia called in fascist NYPD on its own students protesting genocide—because nothing says ‘global leadership’ like brutalizing courageous youth in service of empire. Basil al-Araj lives. Honor our martyrs. The Student Intifada continues,” the group said, in a reference to two Palestinian uprisings against Israel, the latter of which included a series of lethal bombings.

Columbia Hillel’s director, Brian Cohen, praised the arrests, and called for the students involved to face consequences.

“Earlier today, masked protesters took over Butler Library while Columbia students were studying for finals,” he tweeted. Once again, protesters violated many University rules and infringed on the rights of Jewish students to study for exams without being screamed at and harassed. We are grateful to the public safety officers who, at great risk to themselves, tried to stop the protesters from storming the library.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik is perhaps best known for grilling the leaders of three elite universities about campus antisemitism in December 2023, prompting two of them to step down.

On Wednesday, she warned the latest set of campus presidents sitting before her that they could meet the same fate.

The hearing on Wednesday was the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s eighth on campus antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023. It brought the presidents of Haverford College, DePaul University, and California Polytechnic State University to Capitol Hill to field a volley of questions regarding their response to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests.

In a heated exchange, Stefanik, a New York Republican, shot a series of questions at Haverford President Wendy Raymond about the school’s disciplinary policy. In one question, Stefanik referenced a professor who, in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, had allegedly said, “We should never have to apologize for celebrating these scenes of an imprisoned people breaking free from their chains.”

Stefanik repeatedly asked Raymond to describe the disciplinary action taken against the professor, but Raymond refused.

“Respectfully, representative, I will not be talking about individual cases,” Raymond said.

Stefanik shot back: “Respectfully, president of Haverford, many people have sat in this position who are no longer in the positions as president of universities for their failure to answer straightforward questions.”

During the hearing, Republican representatives accused the schools of failing to address antisemitism on their campuses. Many zeroed-in on one incident at Depaul last November in which two Jewish DePaul students were allegedly beaten after one showed support for Israel.

The committee chair, Republican Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, also alleged that at Haverford a professor equated Zionism to Nazism and a Cal Poly faculty member was “complicit” in the harassment of Jewish students who were trying to attend a lecture about Israel.

Other representatives invoked the Trump administration’s recent string of funding cuts to universities, purportedly over their handling of pro-Palestinian protests and antisemitic incidents. While DePaul and Cal Poly’s presidents provided records of the disciplinary actions taken against pro-Palestinian student protestors, Raymond declined.

Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, a Pennsylvania Republican, asked Raymond whether her school received federal funding, to which she replied, “we do in a wonderful partnership with the federal government.”

In response, Mackenzie said, “that partnership may be in jeopardy, because if you will not provide transparency and accountability like your other colleagues here, it calls into question your actions on your campus.”

Rep. Bob Onder, a Missouri Republican, also took aim at Raymond. He asked her about the disciplinary process for a gender studies professor who allegedly said, “Blacks and gays have, in the past, not felt safe on campus. It is now the turn of Jewish students to experience that feeling.”

Raymond denied the professor had made the statement. But when asked by Onder whether someone who made such a statement would be fired, suspended or disciplined in some way, Raymond responded, “statements of discrimination and harassment are unacceptable.”

Onder replied, “I suppose it’s your first Amendment right to be evasive, but it’s also our right to decide that such institutions are not deserving of taxpayer money.”

Several Democratic representatives questioned the premise of the hearing, with many arguing that the Trump administration’s recent cuts to the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which handles discrimination complaints, is evidence that antisemitism is being mishandled.

“This administration is in the process of dismantling the Office of Civil Rights, and it raises reasonable doubt about the plans for addressing antisemitism on campus,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the committee.

Scott also asked the presidents whether they considered their schools “hotbeds” of antisemitism, to which all three said that they were not.

Other Democratic representatives also accused colleagues across the aisle of not adequately responding to other instances of antisemitism, and only focusing on campus issues.

“If my Republican colleagues want to stop the spread of antisemitism, maybe they should stop apologizing for and promoting antisemites,” said Rep. Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat, after referencing President Donald Trump’s pardoning of an antisemitic rioter on Jan. 6, 2021.

Ahead of the hearing, members of Haverford’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, published a letter in the school’s student newspaper, the Haverford Clerk, rejecting Congress’ “weaponization of antisemitism.”

“The Committee cites incidents that are not, in fact, antisemitic to justify their interrogation of President Raymond,” the students wrote. “By painting events that criticize the state of Israel as antisemitic, the Committee erases the range of views about the State of Israel, especially amongst Jewish people.”