WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION

Good morning. Today: Senate Dems express concern over Trump’s approach to antisemitism • Highland Park shooter sentenced • Holocaust survivors and freed hostages meet at March of the Living.

ON POLITICS

President Donald Trump on April 23. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Opinion | Trump’s heedless approach to an Iran deal could be a big problem for Israel. President Donald Trump’s efforts to seek a new nuclear deal with Iran appeared to move forward this week, with a second meeting between his envoy Steve Witkoff and Iran’s foreign minister. With Trump pushing for a rushed timeline, Israel should be worried about the many ways the endeavor could endanger it, writes Alex Lederman of the Israel Policy Forum: “If Iran opts for a deal to walk back its nuclear efforts in exchange for loosening U.S. sanctions, it may leverage that economic relief to reinvest in its conventional military capabilities and proxies that threaten the U.S. and Israel.”

Taking a key role in talks with Iran: Michael Anton, who has a history with conspiracy theories about George Soros. (Image by Molly Boigon)

More on politics…

The Trump administration said senior State Department official Michael Anton will lead U.S. technical talks with Iran. In 2020, Anton invented a conspiracy theory that Democrats funded by George Soros were seeking to stage a coup. (Politico, Forward)

A Trump-nominated prosecutor, Ed Martin, apologized for praising the Nazi sympathizer Timothy Hale-Cusanelli at an event last year, saying he was previously “unaware of the full scope of his repulsive behavior.” (Forward)

Five Jewish Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer and Jacky Rosen, wrote in a letter to Trump that they are “extremely troubled and disturbed” by his actions toward universities that his administration has accused of fomenting antisemitism; they fear the president is “using what is a real crisis as a pretext to attack people and institutions who do not agree with you,” they wrote. (Senate Dems)

Separately, Trump this week signed an executive order demanding that colleges and universities begin reporting all their foreign funding, a policy long advocated for by pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC. And, Penny Pritzker, the Jewish head of one of Harvard’s two governing boards, pushed back on the government’s moves against the university, saying “Attacking research, attacking who you’re going to hire on campus, attacking lifesaving medical therapies — I don’t see how that’s related to fighting antisemitism.” (JTA, Semafor)

Rep. Jerry Nadler, speaking at a Manhattan protest of an appearance by Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, announced plans to introduce legislation that would codify former President Joe Biden’s sanctions against Israeli and Jewish extremists. (X)

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ON ISRAEL

Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, flashes a peace sign at a crowd of protesters near Yale University’s campus. (Yakov Binyamin)

Opinion | Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to a Jewish society at Yale exposed deep rifts between US Jews. Speaking of Ben-Gvir, our senior columnist Rob Eshman writes that internal discord over his invitation to speak to the Shabtai Society — an eminent Yale-adjacent Jewish group — has become something of a microcosm for broader conflicts in the Jewish community over Israel and campus politics. “It’s hypocritical to express horror while claiming that anti-Israel protesters cross the line to antisemitism,” Rob writes, “when Ben-Gvir’s own actions and rhetoric proudly cross the line to anti-Arab racism.” Read his essay ➤

A Long Island synagogue canceled a planned Saturday talk by Ben-Gvir, whose visit to the United States has been marked by such cancellations amid outrage over his extremist affiliations. (JTA)

Speaking to Shabtai Society members in Manhattan, Ben-Gvir faced tough feedback — including from one questioner who called him a “promoter of racism” — and tried to suggest that some of his stances had softened. “When I was young, I thought we’d have to expel all of the Arabs, and now I think the reality is more complex,” he said. (JTA)

More on Israel…

Released hostages and other survivors of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack joined Holocaust survivors at the March for the Living, an annual event marking the liberation of the concentration camps. Also there: New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who said that “the scale of the evil” demonstrated in Auschwitz and Birkenau is “beyond words.” (JTA, Forward)

While many countries are sending heads of state to Pope Francis’ Saturday funeral, Israel’s only representative will be its ambassador to the Vatican, after relations declined amid the Israel-Hamas war. (Reuters)

ON CULTURE

U.S. troops of the 69th Infantry Division, left, shake hands with Russian troops on the wrecked bridge over the Elbe River. (Allan Jackson/Getty Images)

Hidden in a famous WWII photo, two heroic Jewish stories. “For the German town of Torgau, the 1945 meeting of American and Russian troops at the Elbe River at the end of World War II is a source of local pride,” writes our Olivia Haynie. And in famous photos of that meeting, a Jew appears on each side. “Isn’t this such a powerful sign, that the Jews are being attempted to be wiped from the face of the earth and then here, at this triumphant moment where Germany was cut in two by the Allies, that there were Jews on either side,” said Sara Kirshchenbaum, whose father, Bernard, was there that day as a U.S. soldier.

Even the Holocaust could not silence the music of these composers. “For the last 15 years, New York pianist Jeanne Golan has been recording and performing the works of composers persecuted by the Nazis as part of what has come to be known as the recovered voices movement,” writes Jon Kalish. The work has brought her unexpected revelations: “I’ve learned that you throw a pebble in the pond and it ripples out and you just don’t know what you’re going to encounter,” she said.

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

Judge Victoria A. Rossetti speaks at the sentencing for the man who killed seven people in a 2022 mass shooting in Highland Park, a heavily Jewish Chicago suburb. (Nam Y. Huh-Pool/Getty Images)

⚖️ The perpetrator of a 2022 mass shooting in a predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb was sentenced to seven life sentences, one for each of the people he killed. “I know that my mom knew I loved her, and I would rather have the little time I have with her than all my life with a different mom,” Cassie Goldstein, the daughter of Katherine Goldstein, one of the victims, wrote after the attack. “She didn’t deserve this to happen to her.” (New York Times, Forward)

❗ Court filings revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents did not have an arrest warrant when they arrested protest leader Mahmoud Khalil on March 8. (Columbia Daily Spectator)

⛺ Plans for a new protest encampment to go up at Columbia University yesterday didn’t materialize; the campus remains tentless. (NBC)

👀 Former Rep. George Santos faces sentencing this morning after pleading guilty last year to a variety of charges including wire fraud. Santos, who lied about having Jewish ancestry, faces up to 87 months in prison. (New York Times, JTA)

✡️ A new study from Tel Aviv University suggests rates of antisemitic incidents globally have experienced a striking decline in recent months, although they remain higher than before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. (JTA)

🇳🇱 Amsterdam’s mayor apologized for the city’s role in the Holocaust, saying at an event for Yom HaShoah that the Dutch capital “let its Jewish residents down terribly.” (Associated Press)

🥛 Amid changes at the Food and Drug Administration, kosher-keeping Jews are wondering: Will commercially produced milk still be kosher? (JTA)

Shiva call ➤ Leonard Zeskind, a researcher who tracked right-wing hate groups and said, “For a nice Jewish boy, I’ve gone to more Klan rallies, neo-Nazi events and Posse Comitatus things than anybody should ever have to,” died at 75.

What else we’re reading ➤

“This group keeps a pro-Israel blacklist. Now it’s taking credit for deportations” (Vox)

“A newly reissued book documents the dreams of Germans living under the Nazis” (Atlantic)

“Can Claudia Sheinbaum manage the demands from D.C. — and her own country’s fragile democracy?” (New Yorker)

PHOTO OF THE DAY

(Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

Soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces, holding a Torah, led the March of the Living out of the gates of Auschwitz on Thursday.

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