Secretary Kristi Noem and the Department of Homeland Security announced $94 million in federal grants to over 500 Jewish-based organizations across the United States.
I recently sat down with Rabbi Sanford Akselrad from Congregation Ner Tamid, who told me the temple spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on security.
"The fight against hate against the Jews would morph yet again, um, so when someone says that they are, they, they love Jews but they, but they hate Israel and you get a little deeper, what do they mean by that… and usually when they go into the territory not of being critical of Israel which is fair game. But they say Israel has no right to exist at all now… we get into the area of antisemitism," Akselrad said.
More grants are expected in the coming months.
Nation-states are the problem. They’re based on the belief that everyone with some common set of features (language, religion, etc) are somehow a uniform, undifferentiated whole, and anyone who doesn’t fit the template are to be excluded and disempowered. So you end up with an in-group either attemptiong to force-assimilate or exterminate everyone else. For example, the way the Castilians treat the Catalans, Basques, Galicians and others in Spain, or the way the Danes treat the Greenlanders, or the way the Han Chinese treat anyone who isn’t Han, or the way the Turks treated their Greek minority (now ethnically cleansed), their Kurdish minority (culturally suppressed and occasionally attacked), their former Armenian minority (subjected to genocide), etc, etc.
And they’re most damaging in cases where mutiple ethnicities live alongside each others-- for example, the Serbs’ attempts to subjugate minorities under their control.
There are few exceptions to this: one being Scotland, which generally constructs its national identity in an inclusive way.
As for Israel, do your own analysis.