In 2022, a Jewish couple in Tennessee sued the Holston United Methodist Home for Children for refusing to enroll them in its certification program for parents planning to adopt children—on the grounds that it only offers its services to fellow Christians. The suit aims to challenge a 2020 state law that permits denominational adoption agencies to discriminate on religious grounds. Avi Shafran, an Orthodox rabbi and activist, explains why he believes the law should be upheld:

I want religious adoption agencies to be able to choose to limit their services to those whose lives are in consonance with the agencies’ missions. There are already established religious “ministerial” and “conscience” exceptions to many anti-discrimination statutes. It seems reasonable to me that religious adoption agencies, too, should be able to maintain their religious values.

This freedom is especially compelling for Jewish adoption agencies, because, while Judaism may be a faith, being a Jew is an identity. . . . And so, believing Jews consider it incumbent upon them to do all they can to ensure that all of their relatives, no matter how distant, are aware of their identity as part of the Jewish people. And thus, for us, it is vitally important for a religious Jewish adoption agency to be able to place Jewish children with Jewish families, who will provide an environment conducive to the adoptees’ understanding of their identity.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.