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JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, has a tattoo of a Crusades-inspired Latin slogan that has been embraced by white supremacists and Christian nationalists. Trump appointed Will Scharf, the founder of “Jews Against Soros,” as his staff secretary. And Hebrew Bible scholar Robert Alter warns that Trump’s support for school prayer is “an abhorrent prospect, one that should be resisted legally, politically and morally.”


Plus: My colleague Benyamin Cohen explains why neo-Nazis have been marching around the country.


This week I’m looking at how a piece of major antisemitism legislation became a partisan political football…

MAIL BAG

(Photo Illustration via Getty Images)

Television ads and mailers in New York and several battleground states slammed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this summer for his purported opposition to a bill addressing antisemitism.


“Schumer alone blocks it from coming to a vote,” the narrator intoned as scenes of violence at protests against Israel flashed on the screen. “Faced with blind hatred, Chuck Schumer plays politics.”


The group that spent $2 million on the ads, the Florence Avenue Initiative, described itself as a coalition of “concerned Jewish donors” angry that Schumer was not supporting the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to crack down on anti-Zionism on college campuses. Now, Schumer has announced he will attach the bill to another expected to sail through Congress, and I have found records showing the ads were purchased by a Republican firm that has run other deceptive campaigns, underscoring the degree to which the cause of fighting antisemitism has become a political cudgel since Oct. 7.


Those records, which have not been previously reported, show that the Florence Avenue Initiative is run by Howard Kenyon, Sara Lytle and David Neelley out of a UPS box outside Austin, Texas, and that the group hired Del Cielo Media to purchase its TV ads.


Kenyon, the president of FAI, did not respond to requests for comment.

Del Cielo, Spanish for “from heaven,” has previously bought ads for conservative dark money campaigns. In 2019, it ran spots opposing limits on hospital bills for what it claimed was a coalition of doctors and patients but was in fact at the behest of two private equity-backed medical firms that made money off high hospital bills. And back in 2013, the firm was behind a campaign attacking President Barack Obama’s nominee for defense secretary as “anti-gay” and “anti-Israel” — a campaign that purported to be on behalf of a Democratic gay rights group but news reports said was in fact a Republican project.


This election cycle, the firm was also paid more than $7 million to run attack ads against Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat who has been one of the strongest supporters of the very same antisemitism bill the group attacked Schumer for supposedly opposing. The anti-Casey ads focused mostly on immigration, not antisemitism.


The Antisemitism Awareness Act would require the Department of Education to classify anti-Zionism as antisemitic when investigating discrimination. It has both support and opposition in both parties; at least two Democrats and two Republicans are said to have spent months blocking it from moving forward due to free speech concerns.

I was unable to find much background information about Kenyon, Lytle and Neelley, including what other political activities or Jewish-connected activism they may have been involved with. It’s possible, of course, that they are in fact leading a coalition of concerned Jewish donors whose only goal is passing this legislation, and that they happened to believe that a secretive Republican ad firm was the best partner to work with on that project.


But on Friday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson gave additional reason to think that the campaign to pass the antisemitism bill is at least partly a partisan stunt. Hours after Schumer finally agreed to help it become law, Johnson said he would block it.


“It sounds like they’re just trying to drive a wedge between Democrats,” said Kevin Rachlin, a lobbyist for the Nexus Project, an antisemitism advocacy group that opposes the bill. “They want this alive because it causes hardship for Democrats.”


GO DEEPER:

What could Treasury Secretary Mark Rowan do about antisemitism?

Rowan (Getty Images)

Mark Rowan, a billionaire and private equity tycoon, is on Trump’s shortlist for Treasury Secretary. Rowan helped turn Apollo Global Management into a Wall Street juggernaut, but he’s made more headlines over the past year for his advocacy against campus activism targeting Israel.


He started campaigning against leaders at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1985, after a Palestinian literary festival in September 2023, and ramped up the pressure following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel.


Rowan, who is also chair of the UJA-Federation of New York, won accolades from some Jewish leaders for rallying donors to withhold funds from elite universities that he believed were failing to protect Jewish students, even as some faculty and staff worried about the impact on academic freedom.


Rowan donated $1 million to Trump’s campaign.


The Treasury Department doesn’t ordinarily have much to do with addressing antisemitism, but Congress is poised to pass legislation that I covered last week that would give Treasury officials the ability to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit that they see as supporting terrorism, without going to court or presenting evidence.


This bill is backed by the Anti-Defamation League, and the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther has made going after pro-Palestian nonprofits — it refers to them as the “Hamas Support Network” — a key element of its policy blueprint for how the Trump administration, and possibly Rowan, should address antisemitism.


LEARN MORE:

NEWS & VIEWS

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👾 ‘Zionist’ slur: Twitch, a major online video platform, has banned the use of “Zionist” as a slur, following a similar move by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. (NBC News)


🍻 Last call: The owner of a Salt Lake City bar that generated controversy for refusing service to Zionists said it will close amid a dispute with its landlord, but is looking for a new location. (Salt Lake Tribune)


🇪🇺 European emergency: The European Jewish Association’s director wants the European Union to declare a six-month emergency to address antisemitism. “If our call today won’t be answered, we will start to see an exodus of Jews from Europe and the end of Jewish life on this continent,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin. (JNS)


🏛️ Campus tour: French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy visited American colleges to speak with Jewish students who feel besieged by protests against Israel. “Fatigue. Melancholy,” Lévy writes of how they’re feeling. “But when I see the determination of these brave Jewish students standing tall, there’s hope.” (Wall Street Journal)


🇱🇹 Lithuanian protest: Thousands protested in Vilnius to protest the incoming prime minister’s plan to form a coalition with the leader of a party under investigation for antisemitic posts. (Reuters)


❌❌❌ Antisemitism, racism, xenophobia: Some Amsterdam leaders say the tensions that sparked violence against Israeli soccer fans earlier this month are still festering. “I don’t even think, I’m sorry to say, that we have reached our boiling point,” said Seher Khan, a local politician. (CNN)


🐝 OPINION | A ‘wantee’ reflects: Joy Getnick, the Hillel director at the University of Rochester, writes about being targeted by “wanted” posters on campus falsely accusing her of supporting Israeli settlements. “Real damage has been done here,” she writes. (Campus Times)