NY event 'rages' against Jew-hatred

(JNS) - Amid a sharp increase in Jew-hatred after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in southern Israel, many elected officials and university presidents stood silent. That's why Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center gathered Jewish groups to "find ways to start fighting back," Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the Israeli nonprofit's president, told JNS. 

Shurat HaDin aimed "to retake the streets, to retake the campuses, to retake the social media, to combat antisemitism in a way that we haven't," Darshan-Leitner said. "We are no longer victims. We are fighting."

The nonprofit organized an Oct. 31 "Rage Against the Hate" conference, which drew about 300 people, at the Yale Club in New York City.

The actor comedian Michael Rapaport, who has emerged as one of the Jewish state's most staunch supporters on social media, was one of the event speakers. He told attendees to "fight with your heart, fight with your prayers, fight with your genius, brilliant Jewish Zionist minds."

"Fight ferociously, and do not take a step back," he said. "We've done the guilty act long enough. There's no more shame. There's no more stuttering. There's no stammering. There's no trying to assimilate. Those days are over. We must stick together and we must stand by Israel."

Rapaport told JNS that "artists who speak up about everything and say nothing about something that's so blatantly horrific and clear-the silence is beyond deafening."

He added that he remains hopeful, despite all the antisemitism he sees. "I know in my heart and in my gut that we're going to be okay," he told JNS.

Douglas Murray, a British journalist and author who has reported extensively in Israel and Gaza and who is also one of the Jewish state's strongest supporters, spoke in a session with Darshan-Leitner. Murray told attendees that however "old-fashioned" the idea is, he still thinks that journalists ought to be devoted to the truth.

"A cynic would say it's a full-time job, but it has always interested me that the bigger the lie that's being spread, the more I think you have a duty to undo the lie," he said.

Murray bemoaned that "very senior" politicians and an American generation have bought into the "delusion that if you were to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, peace would break out, not just in the region but around the world."

It's an "obscenity" that more people don't realize that there would "be another Iranian proxy state nearer to Israel," Murray said.

Murray told attendees that Palestinian leaders don't "really want a state" but are "quite happy with the situation, which is that they are the world's good guys whilst being extremely bad guys."

"Quite a convenient position to be in," he said.

The journalist denounced the international press for failing to report about the 200,000 Israelis, who have had to flee their homes. 

"I know that the Israeli government wants to refer to them as internally displaced people, but these people are also refugees," Murray said.

Like Rapaport, Murray is optimistic. He told attendees to see "a great opportunity for alliance building," particularly with pro-Israel Christians, and he said it is heartening when Israeli solders tell him that his writings give them hope.

"I say, 'You give me hope,'" he said. "It's so important, I think, that we remember not to be downhearted. All the important fights are against considerable odds, but we are winning."

'A really remarkable fight'

The radio host Dennis Prager, attorney and emeritus Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz, student activist Shabbos Kestenbaum and Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, were among the other speakers.

Dershowitz told attendees that "educational malpractice" is pervasive on college campuses, where professors "give disguise" to Jew-hatred through diversity, equity and inclusion policies and through lenses that see oppressors and oppressed.

"I offered $1,000 to anybody who could find me a single protester in any of these protests on university campuses that has ever called for a two-state solution," he said. "Nobody has taken me up on it. No protester wants to see an Israeli state."

"We are in a fight for our lives," he told the audience. He added that "we are in a fight for the future," when students "brought up with this knee jerk anti-Zionism" become political and business leaders.

Darshan-Leitner told attendees that Students for Justice in Palestine is a "propaganda arm of Hamas," which has called "for genocide against Israelis and Jews." SJP's activity is "actually providing material support to a terror organization," thus violating the U.S. anti-terror act, she added.

"Jewish students are fighting a really remarkable fight with limited resources, with limited help and limited funding," Kestenbaum told JNS. (In January, he became lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Harvard University alleging Jew-hatred and testified on the topic before a House committee.)

"It's the Jewish nonprofits, who raise billions of dollars each year, who could be in a position to do a lot more," Kestenbaum told JNS. "I would encourage the Jewish nonprofits not to say, 'What can the students be doing?' but to ask themselves, 'What can I be doing?'" to help students, he added.

Prager, who studied the Middle East and Russia in graduate school at Columbia University, told the audience that he "was basically taught by moral idiots, but they were giants compared to who's teaching in Columbia today, or at Harvard or at Princeton."

He noted that the modern Jewish state and Pakistan were born in the same year.

"There were two Israels in history, but there was no Pakistan in history. When it was created, it was wrenched out of India," he said. "Nobody ever challenges the right of Pakistan to exist."