My latest in @JNS_org: 🧵

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025, which would remove a “sunset” date of Dec. 31, 2026, from a 2016 bill of the same name, unanimously on Thursday. “This legislation clarifies and strengthens procedural protections for Holocaust survivors and their heirs by ensuring Nazi looted art claims will be considered on the merits,” stated @JohnCornyn, who led the 2016 bill. “With the rising tide of antisemitism around the world, this bill sends a message that Holocaust survivors and their heirs will not be forgotten, and that justice does not have a time limit.”

According to the bill sponsors, some 100,000 artworks that the Nazis stole have yet to be returned to rightful owners. “Unfortunately, many museums, governments and institutions have contradicted Congress’s intent and obstructed justice by stonewalling legitimate claims, obscuring provenance and employing aggressive legal tactics designed to exhaust and outlast survivors and their families,” the senators said.

“Rather than embracing transparency and reconciliation, too many have chosen to entrench and litigate, effectively preserving possession of stolen works rather than returning them to their rightful owners,” they said. “Moreover, some court cases have interpreted the law narrowly, leaving survivors without recourse.”

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

There is “substantial evidence” that the Oakland Unified School District discriminated against Jews by circulating a map of the Middle East that deleted Israel, the California Department of Education determined on Oct. 20. The seven-page finding obtained by the @jewishsf states that in August 2021, during Arab American Heritage Month, a slideshow presentation in the district featured a map that excluded Israel. The map also appeared in a district guide that the district published in 2023 and in a resource guide that it disseminated in 2024, per the report.

Though the district determined that the map violated board policies, it “did not specifically address the allegation of discrimination in the form of antisemitism,” which the state education department said is “inconsistent with the law.”

“The material findings of fact, supported by substantial evidence, demonstrated a failure to include Israel in a map of the current Middle East, and instead, labeling the entire location as ‘Palestine,’” the department said. “This constituted discrimination toward Jewish persons.”

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

When four anti-Israel, masked protesters with keffiyehs disrupted Claremont Hillel’s Oct. 7 commemoration at Pomona College in southern California on Oct. 15, Jill Stark’s “first instinct was to protect the students,” the director of community relations at the Hillel told JNS.

“That was why I just went and I stood there,” she said. Video footage that circulated on social media showed people forming a barrier to block the anti-Israel protesters from entering the room further. Stark was among those people.

She told JNS that protesters “dressed like Hamas terrorists” shouted statements like “Zionists are not welcome here” and “you’re all complicit in genocide” at the event, which included a survivor of the Oct. 7 attacks who showed photos and footage from that day.

“They were reading from scripts,” she told JNS of the anti-Israel protesters. “They had clearly been trained on what they were supposed to do and say.”

The protesters engaged in “targeted intimidation of Jewish students, marking one of our community’s most painful moments,” Stark said.

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

A month-and-a-half after the deadline that a House panel gave the Wikimedia Foundation to provide documents about how it responds to bias, including Jew-hatred, on Wikipedia, the San Francisco-based nonprofit has yet to send the required materials, Carlie Baker, press assistant to @RepNancyMace, told JNS.

“The Wikimedia Foundation is engaging with the Oversight Committee about its request, but it has not satisfied document production at this time,” Baker said on Tuesday. (JNS sought comment from the foundation.) Mace, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation, and Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, penned a letter to the CEO of the foundation on Aug. 27.

The lawmakers sought “documents and information related to actions by Wikipedia volunteer editors caught violating platform policies,” as well as the CEO’s “efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into sensitive topics.” They gave the foundation until Sept. 10 to provide the documents.

The Republican lawmakers stated in their Aug. 27 letter that a recent report “raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel.”

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

Wikipedia, one of the most viewed sites on the internet, has hosted a page on “Gaza genocide” since July 3, 2024. Since Sept. 22, Wikipedia has linked to the “Gaza genocide” article, which accused Israel of war crimes, in an “in the news” section on its main page, which millions of people view daily. @AJCGlobal told JNS that Wikipedia is “elevating reckless and biased charges of genocide as fact,” and given how many genocide scholars disagree with that statement, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia “showcases how dangerous this can be.”

The nonprofit “previously raised concerns that Wikipedia is an information hub that is controlled by anonymous editors, who have their own biases, in a world in which fact and truth are now too easily distorted,” an AJC spokeswoman, who declined to be named, told JNS.

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

The @ZOA_National filed a complaint against the Massachusetts Teachers Association, alleging that the union has fostered a hostile and discriminatory environment against its Jewish members since Oct. 7. The 26-page complaint, obtained by JNS, was filed with Andrea Joy Campbell, the attorney general of Massachusetts, on Aug. 13. It alleges that the union’s actions violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and state law.

Campbell’s office confirmed to JNS that it has received the complaint. JNS sought comment from the union.

My latest in @JNS_org: 🧵

When the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced that it is investigating manipulation of information on Wikipedia, @lsanger, co-founder of the encyclopedia, welcomed the news.

“I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia,” Sanger, who has criticized Wikipedia frequently in recent years, told JNS. Sanger told JNS that he asked U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire entrepreneur @elonmusk, who led the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, in February to enact a policy barring federal workers from editing Wikipedia on the clock and preventing federal dollars from funding edits to the encyclopedia.

“There is clearly massive support for this sort of investigation,” Sanger said.

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

Two non-Jewish teens and their families had to move out of the School District of Philadelphia, which enrolls nearly 200,000 students in 331 schools, after they and two Jewish teens faced backlash for entering a “quiet room,” which the Academy at Palumbo turned out to reserve exclusively for Muslim students to pray, according to a federal lawsuit. The public school violated First Amendment rights in two ways, according to @LoriLMarcus, legal director of @deborah_project. The alleged “Muslim-only prayer room” discriminates against non-Muslim students, and the school used Jewish prayers that the boys recited in the room as “a basis for disciplinary action and justification for claiming harassment of Muslim girls,” she told JNS.

“It’s a stunning, insane story,” Marcus said.

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Adelphi University, a private school in Garden City, N.Y., put the campus Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on “disciplinary probation for a year” after determining that it would be “reasonable to infer” that a Jew who viewed the group’s social media posts “may feel targeted or unsafe.” The @brandeiscenter posted a letter that Adelphi’s community concerns and resolution office sent to the center’s client, Israeli-American math and computer science professor Tuval Foguel, who filed a complaint against the SJP chapter. The university told Foguel that it determined that the student group “created a hostile environment towards the Jewish community.”

The university flagged social media posts of the chapter, including one that stated, “One year since Oct. 7. What have we learned about this historic day since it happened?” Another stated, “long live the intifada,” and another said that “Israel is a terror state, and all its supporters are Zionists terrorists.”

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

The board of the San Francisco Unified School District, which educates more than 50,000 students at 122 public schools, decided to purchase a new ethnic-studies curriculum without fulfilling its legal obligation to provide the public with prior notice, according to Marc Levine, a regional director of the @ADL. “We are concerned that the San Francisco Board of Education approved textbook purchases before adopting or publicly reviewing the related curriculum,” Levine, a former California state representative, told JNS. “This circumvents the transparent process required by law.”

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter after the group was “found in violation of multiple rules” after an April protest. The SJP chapter announced its suspension on social media on Sunday. In its statement, the group wrote that the decision was made in response to the chapter’s protest of a speaking appearance by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in April.

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

Stanford University suspended the student-run Kairos co-op for the upcoming academic year, after receiving reports that Jewish students were targeted, a spokeswoman for the private California school told JNS. Students taking part “in an extracurricular activity were asked to leave the house and told that, among other things, the presence of ‘Zionists’ in the group was making residents of the house uncomfortable,” Dee Mostofi, assistant vice president of external communications at Stanford, told JNS.

Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, executive director of Hillel at Stanford, told JNS that “students had permission from the residents to be in the building to work on a group project,” and “some residents realized some of the visiting students were Jewish and therefore assumed to be Zionists.”

The residents “decided their presence made residents ‘unsafe’ and told the group to leave, which they eventually did,” Kirschner told JNS.

By me in @JNS_org: 🧵

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent more than $25 million to extremist groups with ties to Islamist terror groups between 2013 and 2023, according to a new report from the @meforum. @greggroman, executive director of the think tank, told JNS that the forum pored over publicly accessible government spending data.

“We matched these grants with extremist groups found in our research archives to identify the misuse of taxpayer dollars on a grand scale,” he said.

“Americans should know that their hard-earned money was allocated to build up security around a luxurious mosque compound in Maryland owned by Turkey’s Islamist government and that mosques in Michigan and Texas that serve as outposts for Iran’s regime were also recipients of DHS funds,” he told JNS.

My latest in @JNS_org: 🧵

After Yoav Segev was attacked on Harvard University’s campus in October 2023, shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, the university further victimized him, according to a new lawsuit which the Jewish student filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. “Harvard did everything it could to defend, protect and reward the assailants; to impede the criminal investigation; and to prevent Mr. Segev from obtaining administrative relief from the university,” per the complaint, which National Review obtained.

“After Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitism exploded on Harvard’s campus,” Mark Pinkert, partner at Holtzman Vogel, who is representing Segev, told JNS. “Amidst the chaos and protests, Yoav Segev was violently assaulted by student-employees, simply because he is Jewish.”

Segev is “pursuing justice against Harvard not only for failing to protect him and other Jewish students but for defending and rewarding antisemitism,” the attorney told JNS. “This type of treatment would be unimaginable for other minorities at Harvard, except Jews.”

Thank you to the @AMarkFoundation for linking to some of my @JewishJournal articles on Wikipedia and for the award! The first piece they link to:

https://x.com/bandlersbanter/status/1795913613930037252

My latest in @JNS_org: 🧵

A Jewish Israeli researcher faced “discrimination and insidious, malicious conduct intended to permanently tarnish his reputation and career” at Stanford University, including “tampering with his lab results and manufacturing a bogus complaint against him, merely for being Israeli,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday. The suit, brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the firm Cohen Williams, accuses the private school in Stanford, Calif., of being “complicit in permitting an environment saturated with intimidation and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students to flourish on campus.”

Shay Laps, a postdoctoral researcher, arrived at Stanford roughly six months after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, having been recommended by a Nobel laureate, according to the lawsuit. He aimed to “develop his research of synthetic and ‘smart’ insulin, which would revolutionize treatment for millions of people suffering from diabetes,” the Brandeis Center stated.

He faced extensive discrimination in the lab of Danny Chou, an associate pediatrics professor at Stanford, per the lawsuit, including tampering with his research, a fabricated sexual harassment complaint against him and being locked out of a lab.

My latest on @Wikipedia in @JNS_org: 🧵

The widely used online encyclopedia Wikipedia deems the Anti-Defamation League and NGO Monitor to be “generally unreliable” sources to cite when discussing Israel and the Palestinians, but it maintains that Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor “can be cited as an opinion source” on Israel and the Palestinians. EuroMed has accused Israeli soldiers of harvesting Palestinian organs and their founder and chairman celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is “an advocacy organization on a controversial topic, and should be used with attribution for factual claims,” Wikipedia states on its list of “reliable” and “perennial” sources. The group appears “to gather and responsibly report claims and information gathered directly from primary sources, and is widely used with attribution by reliable news sources,” Wikipedia states.

My first piece on @Wikipedia in @JNS_org: 🧵

‘Hypocrisy, double-standards’ in effort to axe Wikipedia page on Iranian policy to destroy Israel
“The whole thing is totally arbitrary,” an observer who documents anti-Israel hate bias on the platform told JNS. Iranian regime leaders have long said “death to Israel” publicly, and Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, told the United Nations Security Council this week that the Islamic Republic’s avowed goal is to “annihilate the State of Israel.” Iranian terror proxies, including Hamas, call for Israel’s destruction in their charters.

But that isn’t enough for some editors at Wikipedia, the sixth most visited site globally in May, who are attempting to delete an article titled “Destruction of Israel in Iranian policy.”

The article, which was created on June 4 and has garnered about 42,000 views in the past 30 days, states that Iran’s “foreign policy doctrine includes calling for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state” and that “the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy has remained consistent across both hardline and moderate Iranian leaderships.”

Excited to announce that I've been published in @RCInvestigates about @Wikipedia!

Taking Sides: Wikipedia Advances Anti-Israel Narratives 🧵 Wikipedia, the world’s go-to site for information that professes to take a neutral point of view, is coming under fire for alleged anti-Israel bias in the sources it favors and content it delivers to millions of readers.

The criticism is coming from several quarters, including a bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress who, in an April letter, expressed “deep concern regarding antisemitism” found in the online encyclopedia. The entries routinely highlight the work of anti-Zionist scholars and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), according to a review by RealClearInvestigations, while dismissing the views of Israel’s defenders. Amnesty International, which casts Israel as genocidal, is considered a reliable source for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the Anti-Defamation League, which rejects that view, is not.

Clip of me from @boazhepner’s recent Chosen Links episode on Wikipedia’s bias, where I was part of an 11-member panel discussing the matter. Here’s the link to the full episode:

This week's Campus Watch in @JewishJournal: 🧵

Jewish UCLA Student Assaulted on Campus
A Jewish student at UCLA was assaulted on campus April 30 during an unauthorized event promoted by the suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter.

The university said in a May 1 statement that it told SJP “that moving forward with the unauthorized event would violate campus policy and the terms of the suspension” and that “when individuals set up a projection screen and audio equipment and began to project a film going against campus directives, within approximately six minutes, the UCLA Police Department (UCPD) seized the unauthorized sound and video equipment.” The university estimated that around 150 people gathered at the event, during which “a student and a police officer were physically assaulted … The student also had his personal belongings stolen from him.” The student, Eli Tsives, told Fox News host Trace Gallagher that he came to the event with his Israeli flag to show Jewish students to not be afraid of anti-Israel protesters. “One protester grabbed my flag and ran away. I went after them to retrieve my flag, and then around six, seven, eight of them circled around me and started throwing punches,” Tsives said. “One person tried to punch me in a headlock.”

The university’s statement added that university police “arrested three individuals and issued stay-away orders. We are sorry for what this student experienced, and we have already been in touch with him to offer support. This is unacceptable and UCLA will not tolerate it.” Georgetown Students Vote for Anti-Israel Divestment Measure
Georgetown University’s student body voted in favor of an anti-Israel divestment measure, with around 68% in favor and 32% against.

The Georgetown Student Association election commission announced the results on April 29; the referendum only needed a simple majority to pass and 25% of the student body to vote, according to The Georgetown Voice student newspaper. Twenty-nine percent of the student body voted on the referendum.

Interim President Robert Groves sent out an email shortly after the results were announced stating that the university would not be implementing the referendum “based on our institutional values and history and existing university resources and processes that address our investments.” He added that there are “a wide range of opinions on the conflict in the Middle East within our community. We have numerous events to present different perspectives on the conflict. Guided by the University’s Policy on Speech and Expression, we will continue to protect the right of members of our community to freely express their views.”