Some Jewish students, including reporters and editors, viewed post-October 7 coverage by campus newspapers as biased. Their concerns largely went unheard.

Throughout her first three years at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast, nothing mattered more to her than her work on the student newspaper. Already interested in writing, “Rachel” arrived on campus in the COVID fall of 2020, with students largely confined to their dormitories and all classes conducted online. Only after joining the newspaper staff was she able to meet a few other students and feel some connection to her new college community. In her sophomore year, with the campus coming back to life, she saw the newspaper as her “home base,” the place where she established her closest friendships and did her most meaningful work. In her junior year, she was named one of the editors. Two or three nights a week, the group would gather at the paper’s office to discuss and review stories together, share dinner and socialize until midnight or later. “I looked forward to those nights,” she says. “It was my favorite thing. I loved it so much.”

But in the fall of her senior year, the October 7 massacre and the subsequent campus protests shook up her college community, disturbing many Jewish students like herself. Rachel is not her real name, and she doesn’t want her college identified. Even in her previously cozy student newsroom, she felt increasingly out of place, distressed by the deep hostility to Israel evident in some of the news stories and op-eds the other editors were approving for publication and by a willingness to downplay Hamas terrorism.

Even at a distance, the fallout from the carnage in the Holy Land was immediate, quickly overshadowing interfaith efforts that had been years in development. October 7 came, and then the bombing of Gaza. Jews, both in Israel and around the world, were shaken to their core by Hamas terrorists’ slaughter of more than 800 Israeli civilians, with some 200 others taken hostage. The catastrophic bombardment of Gaza that followed, burying civilians each day in rubble, enraged Muslims and others around the world—particularly those with Palestinian connections.

Once a stronghold of Democratic-leaning retirees, South Florida is now home to one of the most religious and politically diverse Jewish communities in America.

The news that President Carter’s United Nations ambassador, Andrew Young, had met in New York with a PLO representative spread furiously among the mostly Jewish residents of the new high-rise condominiums along southern Florida’s Gold Coast. Nowhere in the state was there a more dependable Democratic constituency, but the condominium voters were outraged by what they saw as Carter’s disloyalty to Israel. The ace Democratic operative in the condo communities, a diminutive Jewish woman named Anne “Annie” Ackerman, quickly recognized the danger and called her White House contacts with an urgent message: “You’ve got to get someone down here.”

Ackerman had moved with her husband, Irving, an insurance executive, to the Miami area in 1969 from Chicago. She was 55. Irving was 58. They were among the thousands of Jewish northerners, mostly retirees, attracted to the bright sun, the clear ocean water and the balmy climate. “The area was brand new,” Ackerman later told a reporter. “Everybody was coming from someplace else. I don’t think there were two native Floridians in the whole area.” Unlike many of her fellow Jewish transplants, however, Ackerman was less interested in leisure than in political work. Ackerman’s father, a Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrant, had been a garment worker and union activist. At the age of five, she joined him on a picket line, and politicking soon became her life’s work. She had honed her skills canvassing under the tutelage of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, the legendary big city boss. “She loved to organize,” recalls her son, Allen Ackerman. “She would organize the PTA. She would organize whatever there was to organize. If there was a cause, she would go after it.”

Read the full article by Tom Gjelten in Moment >

Why we don’t know more about the Uyghurs.

As they strolled down M Street after dinner at Clyde’s, a popular Georgetown restaurant, Ekpar told his sister about the people and places he was encountering as part of his three-week program and how it was giving him confidence about China’s own future. “Look at me,” Rayhan recalls him saying. “I am in Washington, representing China as a Uyghur. China wants us to be innovative and creative.” Before he flew back to China, they met again over pizza in Manhattan. Ekpar told his sister he and their parents would come to Cambridge in May to attend her law school graduation.

The family reunion did not happen. Three weeks after returning from the United States, Ekpar was suddenly taken away by Chinese Communist authorities.