Antisemitism is not a feeling, and fighting it is not a vibe. It is concrete work. It looks like enforcing a content policy you wrote. It looks like reading a candidate statement before printing it on government letterhead. It looks like firing the aide who calls his colleagues “fat Jewish Zionist f*cks.” It looks like protecting the voting rights coalition American Jews helped build because we understood, in 1965, that our safety was bound up with everyone else’s. This week, the institutions with the power to do that work largely declined to do it.
That vacuum is what Nexus, alongside a growing set of organizations, coalitions, and leaders doing serious work, is built to fill. The stories that follow are why the work matters.
In a new piece in the Times of Israel, Aryeh Tuchman, founding director of the Nexus Center for Antisemitism Research, documented what happens when platform policy and platform enforcement diverge. Within ninety seconds of reading that Meta’s content policy director claimed the company prohibits Holocaust denial, Aryeh found posts on Facebook calling the Holocaust a “fairy tale,” a “hoax,” and using the coded term “6 gorillion.”
Meta’s January 2025 policy change pulled hate speech off the list of categories its automated systems proactively scan for. Holocaust denial is still listed as Tier 1 prohibited content, but nobody is looking for it. A policy that exists only when users manage to flag violations themselves, and that frequently rejects those flags, is not a policy. It is a press release. Meta can and must do more.
In a Forward column this week, Nexus Task Force member Emily Tamkin took on one of the harder questions facing the American Jewish community: what is the actual goal when we write off public figures like Hasan Piker, and is the strategy we’re using likely to achieve it?
Emily is clear about what she finds offensive and antisemitic in Piker’s rhetoric. She is equally clear that comparing him to Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier whose worldview is built on hatred of Jews, collapses a distinction that matters. If the goal is to combat antisemitism, we need to be thoughtful and deliberate about who we write off and what litmus tests help or hurt the cause.
A benefit concert for victims of December’s Hanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach was canceled after members of the Australian Hellenic Choir voted not to perform alongside the Sydney Jewish Choral Society. The piece they were meant to sing was “The Ballad of Mauthausen,” about the bond between Greek and Jewish prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. The two choirs performed it together in 2022.
The choir’s own founder told the Australian press that members “politically objected” to singing with Jews because of Gaza. Refusing to mourn Jewish victims of an antisemitic massacre because of disagreement with a foreign government is how antisemitism creeps into opposition to Israeli policy.
Paul Ingrassia, currently serving as Acting General Counsel at the General Services Administration, was reported this week to have called Republican candidates “fat Jewish Zionist f*cks” in a leaked group chat with other Trump administration officials. This follows earlier reporting that Ingrassia wrote, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.”
Nexus and other Jewish organizations warned against Ingrassia’s appointment when it was first announced. The warnings were dismissed. He is now Acting General Counsel at a federal agency. The administration that built its political identity around fighting antisemitism keeps elevating the people producing it.
The California Secretary of State’s office distributed a voter guide to every household with a registered voter that included a candidate statement claiming Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk, that Israelis perpetrated 9/11, and that the Talmud commands the enslavement of non-Jews. The statement also included links to white supremacist websites.
The statement violated the Secretary of State’s own guidelines. When Jewish groups protested, the guidelines page was quietly removed from the office’s website. You can’t unsend a voter guide and you can’t hide such a grave mistake behind a deleted webpage.. When a state government prints conspiracy theories on official letterhead, the conspiracy gains the legitimacy of the state itself.
The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district, opening the door for Republican-led states to dismantle Voting Rights Act protections against discriminatory redistricting.
The Voting Rights Act was drafted in the boardroom of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism by a civil rights coalition that included the ADL. Rabbi Heschel marched with Dr. King in Selma. American Jewish history and American civil rights history are the same track. The fight against antisemitism cannot be separated from the fight to protect the democratic infrastructure that protects everyone.
In a Forward column on what he calls the Epstein-Iran antisemitism mega-crisis, Rabbi Jay Michaelson called out the silence from major Jewish institutions in the face of an explosion of antisemitic rhetoric, and pointed to Nexus’s Iran War messaging guide as a model for the kind of analytical work the moment requires.
Michaelson argues that validating real critique of the war is what makes it possible to call out the antisemitism that gets smuggled in alongside it. That is exactly the work the guide is built to do.
This is what we do: track real antisemitism, call out when it’s weaponized, and make clear the difference. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate here. We’d love to connect.
We’ll continue offering clear responses, frameworks, and resources as these stories develop.
Six months ago, the FBI cut ties with the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center. This week, the Justice Department indicted the SPLC.
The same week Hungarians voted out a sixteen-year authoritarian, the world’s richest man revived the Soros conspiracy to explain it away. That sequence captures where we are: democratic resistance still works, and the people who fear it reach for the oldest playbook they have, antisemitism.
