WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

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Today: Felony charges for pro-Palestinian Stanford protesters • New York’s mayoral candidates’ Passover plans • The end of a Forward era.

ON CAMPUS

Will cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities threaten our ability to understand one another? (Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Opinion | Trump's administration killed funding for my Holocaust translation project. Sasha Senderovich, a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, is in the final months of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that funded his work to translate writings chronicling Jewish life in the Soviet Union after the Holocaust. That means he’s relatively lucky: While the NEH abruptly canceled the rest of his grant, after cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, he and his co-editor are far enough along that they’ll be able to finish the work. But the episode has left him wondering: Is this really what it looks like to protect Jews — purportedly a major goal of this administration? Read his essay ➤

The latest:

• In its first legal argument for its attempted deportation of recent Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, the State Department suggested that it has the power to deport people based on “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful.” An immigration judge is expected to rule today on whether Khalil can be deported. (AP)

  
  

• The Trump administration intends to pursue an unprecedented legal strategy for establishing further federal oversight of Columbia, after targeting the university with funding freezes based on the assertion that it mishandled campus antisemitism. (Wall Street Journal)

  
  

• Prosecutors filed felony charges against 12 pro-Palestinian protesters over vandalism at Stanford University last June. (LA Times)

  
  

• Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who has been detained by ICE, reported that she has suffered several asthma attacks in detention without receiving adequate medical attention — and that one nurse forcibly removed her hijab. (Bluesky)

  
  

• Close to 650 international students and recent graduates at more than 120 U.S. campuses have experienced changes to their legal status since Trump took office in January. (Inside Higher Ed)

ISRAEL AT WAR

What are the risks when we gatekeep which kinds of Jews are allowed to participate in communal spaces? (Illustration by staff)

Opinion | My Jewish moms group ousted me because I work for J Street. Is this what communal life has come to? For Emily Kaiman, a Facebook group for Jewish moms in Atlanta had long been a source of community — a place to pick up date night ideas and pediatrician recommendations alike. But last week, she was unceremoniously banned from the group after a moderator posted that “anyone affiliated with organizations that undermine Israel’s security and the Jewish people” — including the progressive Zionist organization J Street, where Kaiman works — would be booted. Yes, it was a personal shock, Kaiman writes, but also a profound warning about the dangers of disunity in the Jewish community amid growing rifts over the war in Gaza. Read her essay ➤

More on Israel:

• Representatives of the Trump administration met with Hamas officials in Qatar three times amid an unsuccessful March push to engineer a new hostage release deal. Separately, Trump said Thursday that “we are getting closer” to such a deal. (New York Times, Axios)

  
  

• Israel returned 10 Palestinians to Gaza who had been detained during the war, the first such transfer since the previous ceasefire agreement broke down in March. (Associated Press)

  
  

• Ahead of Passover, Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport on Thursday experienced its single busiest travel day since before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack. (Times of Israel)

ON PASSOVER

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy. (Getty Images)

Opinion | Stephen Miller’s cavalier cruelty misses the whole point of Passover. “Friendly reminder,” Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, posted recently on X: “If you illegally invaded our country the only ‘process’ you are entitled to is deportation.” As we enter Passover, writes our columnist Jay Michaelson, it’s worth contemplating “how many transgressions of both Jewish and American legal principles are contained in this single sentence.” Read his essay ➤

How Coke’s Passover recipe sparked an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Tale as old as the social media age: A rabbi posts an innocent social media video explaining how Coca-Cola gets made kosher for Passover, and far-right influencers seize on it to propagate a new antisemitic conspiracy theory: “That Coca-Cola is making a superior version of its product for Jews only,” writes our Benyamin Cohen, “A chosen beverage of the chosen people.” Read the story ➤

Plus:

• Opinion | Why I’m holding my Seder in one of the oldest Black churches in the country

  
  

• Is it OK to ask your Seder host if you can bring a guest?

  
  

• I miss those secular Jews who led traditional Seders

  
  

• The White House Seder started in a Pennsylvania basement. Its legacy lives on.

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Donald Trump and Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun light a candle during an Oct. 7 remembrance event at the Trump National Doral Golf Club, in Doral, Florida, Oct. 7, 2024. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

✡️  Trump named his special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism: Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, a Miami businessman who campaigned for Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. (JTA)

⚖️  A man who falsely claimed to be a rabbi was sentenced to 135 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of child sexual assault; he abused his adopted sons, while documenting their supposed Jewish lives for TikTok. (JTA)

🍽️  Where will New York’s many mayoral candidates be enjoying Passover Seders? In Park Slope, Carnegie Hill and Connecticut, of course. (Forward)

👀  Newly declassified documents suggest that a decade after the end of World War II, the CIA looked into whether Adolf Hitler was alive in South America. (Daily Beast)

👩‍⚖️  The U.S. extradited to India a suspected plotter of the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people, including several at a Jewish center. (AP)

Shiva call ➤Midcentury modern designer Gerald Luss died at 98.

What else we’re reading ➤

• “Why is ‘The Prince of Egypt’ so important to Jewish kids of the ’90s and 2000s?” (Hey Alma)

• “Why Palestinian Christians feel betrayed by American Christians” (New York Times)

• “How a Jewish family's Nazi-looted art led them to an astonishing discovery – at the Israel Museum” (Haaretz)

• “It’s a typical small-town novel. Except for the Nazis” (New Yorker)

PHOTO OF THE DAY

(Courtesy of Benyamin Cohen)

Farewell to our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren; today is her last day at the Forward, leaving many of us to cry bitter tears over our Passover plates, indeed. We feted Jodi’s half-decade at the helm earlier this week — while noting that, as she is fond of saying, no one ever really leaves the Forward family.

Read Jodi’s farewell column ➤

Today’s newsletter made me:

🤓 Confident I understand issues impacting American Jews.

🔗 Connected to the Jewish world.

💡 Curious to learn about something I read.

😵‍💫 Confused about today’s Jewish news.

🤷🏽‍♀️ No different.

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