Meet Alex Witkoff, a fellow visionary leading the fight for the Jewish People

The numbers tell a grim story. According to a Tel Aviv University study, 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in over three decades, with 20 Jews killed in antisemitic attacks around the world. That is the highest toll since 1994, the year a Jewish community center was bombed in Buenos Aires. On the first night of Hanukkah, gunmen opened fire on families at Bondi Beach in Sydney, murdering fifteen people as they gathered to light candles. It was the deadliest mass shooting Australia had seen in nearly thirty years. People can hold all kinds of views about events in the Middle East. That is a complicated and painful subject, and reasonable people disagree. But there is nothing complicated about a family being gunned down at a Hanukkah celebration, or worshippers being targeted outside a synagogue. Whatever someone believes about a conflict thousands of miles away, it can never be a license to attack Jewish children, Jewish families, and Jewish communities here at home. That line should be obvious to every decent person, and the fact that it has been blurred is exactly what alarms me. I won’t end in despair, though. I have had the honor of serving on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and if our history teaches us anything, it is that the Jewish people have outlasted every power that ever tried to break us. We will outlast this too. The answer to darkness has never been to dim our own light. It is to shine it brighter.

     Because too many people in positions of influence looked away, or worse, gave hatred a pass. Think back to when the presidents of some of our most elite universities were asked, under oath before Congress, whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct. Their answer was that it “depends on the context.” When the leaders of our greatest institutions cannot give a straight answer to that question, is it any wonder that students felt emboldened to march, to harass, and to intimidate? When a mob can gather outside a synagogue, when Jewish students are targeted simply for being Jewish, when a slogan like “from the river to the sea,” which is a call for the elimination of the Jewish state and its people, gets chanted in the streets and waved through as ordinary political speech, none of that happened by accident. It happened because the guardrails came down one at a time and not enough good people objected. Hatred becomes acceptable the moment it stops carrying a social cost. We allowed the ugliest ideas to be laundered as activism and let intimidation be rebranded as protest. The way to reverse it is the same way it took hold, incrementally and out loud. Decent people of every faith and background have to be willing to say plainly that this is antisemitism, and it has no place here.