WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Good morning. Here’s what you need to know to start your day.

• Campus: Columbia may pay $200 million to settle with President Donald Trump’s administration over allegations that that school didn’t do enough to protect Jewish students.

  
  

• Conspiracy: Jeffrey Epstein laughed off claims that he was a spy for Israel, according to his former attorney, Alan Dershowitz.

  
  

• Connection: Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history in a new documentary. “No matter what,” Joel said, “I will always be a Jew.”

ANTISEMITISM DECODED

Influencer Andrew Tate attends a mixed martial arts fight in March in Las Vegas, after the Trump administration helped free him from Romania, where he is face sex trafficking and rape charges. (Ian Maule/Getty Images)

How Elon Musk’s AI Nazi glitch became a perfect symbol of our antisemitic moment

Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot built by a company owned by Elon Musk and deployed on his social media platform X, praised Hitler, targeted users with Jewish-sounding names and even floated the idea of a second Holocaust last week.

The apparent reasons were twofold: a coding error, and the fact that Grok is trained on posts from X — “where open antisemitism has flourished since Musk removed most content moderation in the name of free speech,” my colleague Arno Rosenfeld reports in the latest edition of his Antisemitism Decoded newsletter.

• And yet: There was no public outcry from elected officials. No investigation from government agencies. In fact, just days after the chatbot briefly morphed into a self-described “MechaHitler,” the Department of Defense announced it would award Grok a contract worth up to $200 million.

  
  

• Why the silence? Citing the rise of right-wing influencers and podcasters, Arno argues that “people peddling Grok-style antisemitism-as-brave-truthtelling have the protection of an ascendant political movement that has embraced conspiracy theories while denigrating ‘woke’ politics.”

  
  

• Case in point: In February, senior White House officials worked to free Andrew Tate — the social media influencer jailed in Romania on human trafficking and rape charges. “It’s hard to overstate how many noxious things Tate has said about Jews,” Arno writes. In May, Trump nominated Tate’s personal attorney, Paul Ingrassia, to lead a federal anti-corruption agency. As Arno puts it: “This is just one random example.”

ISRAEL

The site of an Israeli airstrike on Syria's defense ministry headquarters in Damascus on Wednesday. (Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images)

Attack in Syria…

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. is hopeful that a deescalation between Israel and Syria is imminent. (JTA)

Context ► Following December’s ousting of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by Sunni rebels, the Druze, a religious minority, are facing increasing attacks. The situation escalated this week, when hundreds of Druze in Israel broke through the border to Syria in an attempt to reach their embattled coreligionists, and Israel struck key Syrian targets, including military headquarters in the capital of Damascus and sites near the presidential palace, moves that U.S. officials worry could destabilize the new government. (Axios, BBC, Times of Israel)

In other Israel news…

• Trump and his mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, said Wednesday night that ceasefire-for-hostage negotiations are going well and that “good news” is on the horizon. (Haaretz)

  
  

• An Israeli official says a deal is “more likely than not” after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropped demands to maintain a military presence in key areas of Gaza. “I can’t give a timeline," said the official, “but it is within reach.” (Times of Israel)

  
  

• The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said Israel struck Gaza’s only Catholic church on Wednesday, reportedly killing two people and injuring several others; the Israeli military said it is investigating. (AP, Haaretz)

  
  

• World leaders are set to gather in New York this September, ahead of the U.N. General Assembly, for a summit on Palestinian statehood, according to a French official. (Reuters)

  
  

• A French court has ordered the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a Lebanese militant who served nearly 40 years in prison for killing U.S. and Israeli diplomats in the 1980s. (Reuters)

  
  

• Amid a surge in espionage arrests, Israel has launched a public campaign warning its citizens against spying for Iran. (JTA)

  
  

• Unable to get permits for safe rooms, Bedouin residents of unrecognized villages in the Negev Desert are digging makeshift bomb shelters — using buried trucks, steel containers, and scrap — to protect themselves during missile attacks. (AP)

BOOKS

Condé Nast’s Anna Wintour and Si Newhouse at a 1990 book party in New York. (Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images)

How two Jews nurtured the fantasies of millions of readers

A new book shares the story of “two Jewish outsiders with something to prove” — Si Newhouse and Alexander Liberman — who helmed the Condé Nast empire of Vanity Fair, GQ, The New Yorker and other influential magazines. “The duo’s hegemony evokes the clout of the Jewish moguls who founded the Hollywood studios in the early 20th-century,” writes book critic, Julia M. Klein. Read her review ►

Plus: A new book by Jerry Lewis’ son delves into the comedian’s Yiddish-speaking childhood, his decades of work raising money for muscular dystrophy research, and his weekly tradition of ordering nearly the entire menu from Lenny’s Delicatessen. (JTA)

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Jewish community members and allies hold a Shabbat event in June in solidarity with protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles. The event was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. (David McNew/Getty Images)

On campus…

🗳️  Jewish Voice for Peace, a leading force behind pro-Palestinian campus protests and a vocal proponent of divestment from Israel, is restructuring to shift its focus from activism to electoral politics, using a new affiliated nonprofit to support and oppose candidates — something it couldn’t legally do under its previous tax-exempt status. (Jewish Insider)

💰  As part of ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration to restore $400 million in federal funding, Columbia University is adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism, which considers some forms of Israel criticism to be antisemitic. The agreement could require Columbia to pay $200 million, with some allocated to the federal government, and some to impacted students and professors. (JTA, Wall Street Journal)

👮  A Homeland Security agent testified that he was ordered not to inform Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk that her visa had been revoked when she was arrested in March — part of a broader Trump-era effort to deport pro-Palestinian activists that the agent described as highly unusual and politically driven. (CNN, NBC News)

Related: Öztürk wrote an essay, published this morning, about her 45-day experience inside a women’s prison in Louisiana. (Vanity Fair)

And elsewhere…

🕵️  Alan Dershowitz, a former attorney for disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, shot down rumors that the convicted sex offender, who died in 2019, was a spy for Israel. “We discussed it, and the answer was no,” Dershowitz recalled. “He laughed. No intelligence agency would really trust him.” (Telegraph)

🗣️  The doctor accused of threatening to kill Rep. Max Miller, a Jewish Republican from Ohio, called Miller “this racist Jewish” and “that piece of sh*t f***** congressman that’s against Palestine,” newly released video shows. (Forward)

🖼️  An ancient Roman erotic mosaic looted by a Nazi officer during World War II has been returned to Pompeii after more than 80 years, following a diplomatic effort by Italy and Germany. (Reuters)

🥤 Trump said that Coca-Cola has agreed to start using cane sugar in its U.S. sodas, a shift that could make the special kosher-for-Passover version, which swaps out the year-round corn syrup for cane sugar, unnecessary. The company has not yet confirmed the move. (JTA)  

Related: Coke’s Passover recipe sparked an antisemitic conspiracy theory earlier this year. (Forward)

Your pick ► Yesterday’s most-read story was about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral nominee in New York City, saying he will “discourage” the use of the slogan “globalize the intifada.”

Transitions ► Tali Cohen, formerly of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, is the new regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in D.C., Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina … Larry Platt is the new chair of American Jewish University’s board of directors.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

A wide-ranging new documentary about Billy Joel explores, among other topics, antisemitism and Joel’s family’s Holocaust history. His dad, Helmut, who owned a textile factory in Hamburg, fled to escape the Nazis and was forced to sell the business, which became a factory for other items. “They actually started to manufacture the striped pajamas that the prisoners in the concentration camps had to wear,” Joel says in the film. Watch the trailer above; the first of two parts arrives Friday on HBO Max. Learn more about the movie ►

Today’s newsletter made me:

🤓 Confident I understand issues impacting American Jews.

🔗 Connected to the Jewish world.

💡 Curious to learn about something I read.

🤷🏽‍♀️ No different.

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