The Miscellany News

To the editor:

On March 12, 2026 in Detroit, a terrorist drove a truck into Temple Israel, a large Reform synagogue. Over 100 preschool children, along with teachers and synagogue staff, were inside when this happened. Thankfully, none were killed. 

On Dec. 14, 2025, two Islamic State-inspired terrorists murdered 15 Jews and wounded 44 others, shooting into a crowd of thousands of Jews celebrating Chanukah on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. One of the wounded was a friend of mine, who has since had to deal with what has become a common phenomenon on the far-left and far-right—people online accusing him of faking his injuries. Vassar College students might know about Bondi Beach. They might not know that the Australian Jewish community, once considered one of the safest in the world, has experienced an unprecedented rise in antisemitism in recent years, including a mass doxxing attack by anti-Zionists. 

In Toronto, three synagogues have taken gunfire since February, the latest in a spate of antisemitic attacks in that city.  

On May 21, 2025, a radical pro-Palestinian activist murdered Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Leschinsky at a young professionals event hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in Washington, D.C. That one really hit home because I myself have been to many similar events in New York, where I was an active AJC volunteer for years. 

Last year, as Governor Josh Shapiro slept, a terrorist set fire to his mansion. 

On Oct. 27, 2018, a far-right extremist murdered 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.  

These are only the highest profile examples of a worldwide spike in antisemitic attacks that has been going on since… no, not 2023, when Hamas committed one of the worst terrorist attacks in history, murdering 1,200 people; kidnapping 250 men, women and children; and committing numerous acts of rape, but since at least 2002, when antisemitism began to rise in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community. I can remember when the journalist Marie Brenner first wrote about it in Vanity Fair in 2003, when I was a law student. I can also remember the decade-plus of excuses French authorities made as things got worse and worse. 

But, the world was far from perfect even before that. 

In 2000, I traveled to London with the Vassar College Choir. While I was there, I went to visit one of the synagogues in Central London. To enter a London synagogue, I had to pass through a layer of plainclothes security and enter through a back entrance. Two years before that, I visited Vienna. To enter the single synagogue left standing of the 93 Viennese synagogues that existed before Kristallnacht—just to walk inside—I had to answer a battery of questions posed by a security guard behind bulletproof glass, ostensibly to show I was Jewish. Security guards stand on opposite ends of the synagogue’s street. Why? Because terrorists attacked the synagogue in 1981, killing two Jews. They also attacked the synagogue in Rome in 1982; I could not visit that synagogue at all when I went there on my honeymoon. 

Since 2000, 70,000 French Jews of a community of 500,000—some 14 percent—have left France for Israel. Many Jews in the United States, facing rising antisemitism and an increasingly unstable political system, talk with one another about emigrating. Some, particularly religious Jews, are moving to Israel. Others are looking into whether they qualify for citizenship  elsewhere. 

In 1998 I remember thinking, when I first encountered hardened houses of worship like a synagogue in Vienna, how lucky I was to live in America, a place where going to synagogue did not require police and security protection. 

This is no longer. In recent years, faced with growing threats, including what the police commissioner in New York City described as an unprecedented threat environment, Jewish institutions have spent more than $760 million each year on security guards, anti car-ramming ballasts, camera systems and more. Everyone who regularly attends a synagogue knows that there is generally only one door they can enter through, because it is safest to limit entry and exit to a single means of egress. 

At Vassar, to say that people should not reflexively demonize the world’s largest Jewish community and should instead take the time to listen to multiple perspectives is apparently so controversial that a writer making this argument has to shield their identity.

A recent student piece advocates rejecting the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the United States’ largest Jewish defense and civil rights organization, because 30 years ago, an overzealous volunteer spied on people in California. Whether the writer knows it or not, that anecdote has long circulated on neo-Nazi websites like The Occidental Observer. These days, it seems to be a favored yarn in progressive circles where the ADL, long prominent in organizing work on civil rights, immigrant rights, hate crimes legislation and tracking extremism, has become a victim of cancel culture. Perhaps the strangest accusation in the piece is that the ADL is partisan. That would be news to ADL and its harsh MAGA critics, from Elon Musk, who called the ADL a hate group, to FBI Director Kash Patel, who ended the ADL’s long-time provision of hate crimes training to the FBI, complaining that the ADL spied on Turning Point USA. The ADL has a vaunted history of fighting white supremacy.

The piece also advocated jettisoning the world’s most widely-accepted definition of antisemitism because it offends a few anti-Zionists who can almost never be bothered to mention the acts of antisemitism Jews actually face, nor did the piece portray the definition accurately. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition was composed by a committee of scholars and human rights lawyers at the request of European governments looking to address anti-Jewish attacks in their own countries carried out in the name of opposing Israeli policies. Although many Jews believe anti-Zionism is virtually indistinguishable from antisemitism, the IHRA definition does not take that position; it says merely that denying Jewish people their right to self-determination can be antisemitic “in context,” words virtually every critique of the IHRA definition ignores because they undermine the entire case that the definition conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. 

Getting rid of the ADL and the most widely respected definition of antisemitism are bad ideas in an era of rising antisemitism. They are the product of a callous attitude toward Jewish lives that has become common on college campuses and in American society writ large, and a closed-mindedness that should be foreign to higher education in general and Vassar students in particular. And they are ideas I cannot imagine anyone uttering about other minority groups, their constituent organizations, and their conceptions of bigotry. 

As it often is, the rise in antisemitism is less about Jews and Israel and more about the rise of extreme politics in America and elsewhere. Attacks on mainstream groups like the ADL and mainstream definitions of antisemitism like that of the IHRA are symptoms of that disease, not solutions to the problem, which requires a return to saner politics. If bad ideas like eliminating historic civil rights organizations and watering down the definition of antisemitism come to pass, all of us—not just Jews—will be less safe than we are today.