The news Nexus tracks is usually grim, and this issue has its share. But it isn’t all dark. Alongside a horrific attack and a candidate running on open antisemitism, this past week also brought a serious bipartisan bill that takes Jewish security seriously without trampling civil liberties, and a wide coalition lining up behind it. Progress and danger often show up in the same stretch of days.
Holding both in view, without letting the good news soften the bad or the bad news bury the good, is part of the work.
The two teenagers who carried out the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego killed three people, including security guard Amin Abdullah, who died protecting children at the school inside. opens with “IT’S THE JEWS” and then moves through anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, anti-trans, and misogynist hatred without pause. The FBI’s special agent in charge put it bluntly: they did not discriminate in who they hated.
The Jewish community has heard versions of that line many times before. In our Bluesky thread on the manifesto, we wrote that the same extremist ecosystems online that spread anti-Muslim conspiracies also fuel antisemitic hatred, racism, misogyny, and political violence. The targets vary. The radicalization pipeline is the same.
Horrific situations like this remind us, allyship across communities is not a soft virtue. It’s how we survive a hate ecosystem that treats every minority as interchangeable prey.
Antisemitism in online comment sections has its own vocabulary: juice box emojis as stand-ins for “Jews,” lightning bolts for SS insignia, “271,000” for Holocaust minimization, “early life check” for Wikipedia-based othering, “every single time” as a confirmation-bias slogan, “spiritually Israeli” as a vessel for genuine antisemitism dressed in anti-Zionist drag. Most readers will scroll past these without knowing what they mean. That’s the point.
Our new field guide walks through the codes, memes, and phrases turning up across Instagram, X, Reddit, and beyond, with examples from the actual comment sections where they appear. See the full guide on Instagram.
The Department of Homeland Security recently posted a bible verse alongside the message “May our nation continue to be guided by the light of our Savior.” The accompanying image of a church included the phrase “One homeland under God.” The same account has been pushing white nationalist references, including “Which Way, Western Man?”, a slogan rooted in antisemitic and eugenicist ideology, and “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” a white nationalist rally song.
These are official federal accounts blurring the line between religious doctrine and state power while promoting the language of organized hate. Minority communities pay the price first when governments speak this way, and Jewish history offers more than enough evidence of why calling it out and pushing back on such exclusionary rhetoric is essential.
Senators Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK) introduced the Jewish American Security Act last week, with hundreds of Jewish advocates in Washington pushing for its passage. The bill proposes a historic $1 billion expansion of the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, creates a Title VI Clearinghouse, and improves hate crimes data collection.
Crucially, it does so without enshrining the contested IHRA definition of antisemitism into federal law. The bill delivers real security infrastructure to Jewish communities while keeping the executive branch from gaining a tool to criminalize political speech about Israel.
JASA is endorsed by a wide coalition including Nexus, JFNA, ADL, JCPA, and the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements. Read our statement welcoming the bill’s introduction here.
Maureen Galindo, who finished first in the March 3 Democratic primary in Texas’s 35th Congressional District, pledged that if elected she would introduce legislation to imprison American Zionists and run a castration center for the “pedophiles” she claims most of them are.
Alyssa Klein’s analysis for Nexus lays out how Galindo swaps “Zionist” in for “Jew” while reaching for classic antisemitic tropes about Jewish control, pedophilia, other conspiracies. After backlash, she clarified she meant only “Zionist Jews,” a familiar move that leaves the underlying fantasy of state violence against Jewish participation in public life fully intact.
The primary runoff took place this week. Galindo was defeated by Johnny C. Garcia.
Nexus’s support for the bill was picked up across the Jewish press, including JTA, the Forward, Jewish Insider, and the Times of Israel.
JTA quoted Kevin Rachlin, Nexus’s VP of Government Relations: “We are pleased to support JASA, which includes serious tools that can tangibly help protect the American Jewish community… Importantly, neither of these two bills seek to push forward an unhelpful, contested definition of antisemitism that would risk criminalizing political speech.”
Read our full statement on the bill here.
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.
The word “antisemitism” is being stretched so thin it’s starting to tear. Actual Jew-hatred is finding its way into congressional primaries and left-wing coalition politics.
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.
