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      Antisemitic Incidents Reach New High in the U.S., Report Finds

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      The Anti-Defamation League has found that cases of antisemitism have surged in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas against Israel last year.The number of antisemitic episodes in the United States surged to the highest recorded in a one-year period in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel last year, the Anti-Defamation League said on Sunday.The new figures — covering Oct. 7, 2023, to Sept. 24 — were about triple the number of cases reported to the organization during the same period a year before, the A.D.L., a civil rights organization, said in a statement.The group identified more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents, which were split into categories such as verbal or written harassment, vandalism and physical assault. The largest number of cases — 8,015 — fell under verbal or written harassment, according to the figures.Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the A.D.L., said Oct. 7 would be “one year since the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.”“From that day on, Jewish Americans haven’t had a single moment of respite,” he said, adding that instead “we’ve faced a shocking number of antisemitic threats and experienced calls for more violence against Israelis and Jews everywhere.”The organization has been tracking cases of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault in the United States since 1979 and publishes its research in an annual report.The group said it recorded “an unprecedented total number” of 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2022, a 140 percent increase from the previous year.Its latest report is the fourth time in six years that the A.D.L. has said it inventoried a record-high count of antisemitic episodes.The states with the highest number of recorded cases in the most recent report were California (1,266), New York (1,218), New Jersey (830), Florida (463) and Massachusetts (440).The antisemitic incidents have increased since Hamas attacked Israel last year and the war became a heated issue on American college campuses, where numerous protests have taken place.The report noted that at least 922 episodes had taken place on college and university campuses. During the same period a year earlier, the organization had recorded nearly 200 cases on campuses.The A.D.L. also said that the number of bomb threats made to Jewish institutions such as synagogues had soared from its previous report to 1,000, from 81.In addition, the group said, its preliminary research found that more than 3,000 of the antisemitic incidents had occurred during anti-Israel rallies in public spaces, such as parks and streets.The A.D.L., which was founded in 1913, said it used the research to create and improve programs to counter and prevent the spread of antisemitism and bigotry.The organization said that it expected its preliminary figures to increase as it received more reports. Final data for 2024 will be published in the spring of 2025. More

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      College Investigating Report of a Student Scratching a Racial Slur on Another

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      A family says their son, a member of the swim team at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, was victimized when a teammate etched the slur across his chest with a box cutter. School administrators at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania are investigating a report of a student scratching a racial slur onto another student’s chest at an on-campus residence this month.Both the student who wrote the slur and the student who was scratched were on the swim team at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pa. The school and the family of the targeted student said in a joint statement on Sunday that the investigation was almost finished and that the student who scratched the slur was no longer enrolled at the college. It was not immediately clear whether the student was expelled or had decided to leave.The names of the students have not been made public. The family of the targeted student had said in a statement published on Friday in The Gettysburgian, the college newspaper, that their son became “the victim of a hate crime” when a teammate used a box cutter to etch a slur against Black people across their son’s chest at an informal swim team gathering on Sept. 6. They said that their son had been the only person of color at the gathering and that the teammate had been a “trusted” friend. Their son was later interviewed by members of the swim team’s coaching staff and then dismissed from the team, according to their statement. It was unclear on Sunday whether his status had changed. The school and the family are now having conversations about “how most constructively to move forward,” they said on Sunday. “The college and the family both recognize the gravity and seriousness of this situation and hope it can serve as a transformative moment for our community and beyond,” the statement read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters

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      Some of the best advice Democrats have received recently came from Bill Clinton in his speech at the Democratic National Convention.First, he warned against hubris: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.” That’s something that any Clinton understands in his — or her — gut.Second, related and even more important, he cautioned against demeaning voters who don’t share liberal values.“I urge you to meet people where they are,” said Clinton, who knows something about winning votes outside of solid blue states. “I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect — just the way you’d like them to treat you.”That’s critical counsel because too often since 2016, the liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump as a racist and bigot. This has been politically foolish, for it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re disparaging.It has also seemed to me morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Attacks on Harris Invoke Ancient Roman Misogyny

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      Anastasia KraynyukThe meddler, the schemer, the veiled power behind the throne, the poisoner, the witch. The image of sinister female power hiding in the dark permeates our cultural consciousness. It is a trope that stretches back to the ancient world, when women were excluded from politics and men sought ways to prove that their participation would be unnatural and dangerous. As ancient texts became part of the Western canon, such suspicion became ingrained into our patterns of thought, surviving long after the conditions that created them.About an hour after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in July, a Trump-aligned super PAC released an attack ad. “Kamala was in on it,” a narrator says. She “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it.” Mr. Trump picked up the theme soon after. Ms. Harris had, he argued, long concealed Mr. Biden’s incapacity, to ensure her own nomination. As focus on the handover itself fades, this idea has come to underpin one of the Trump campaign’s key lines of attack: Ms. Harris has been the power behind the throne all along, and Mr. Biden simply a front. In an early August interview, JD Vance argued that Ms. Harris must have “been the one calling the shots” all along. Mr. Trump has insisted that “Day 1 for Kamala was three and a half years ago.”The accusation that Ms. Harris covered up the state of Mr. Biden’s health is not dependent on her gender. It’s doubtless that Mr. Trump would have deployed the same argument, in one form or another, against a male opponent. But leveled against Ms. Harris, it hits upon the ancient seam of rhetoric that associates women with the clandestine exercise of power, giving it a degree of consequence it would never have carried against a man.The Romans loved a conspiracy theory, and rumors of women-led cover-ups pepper their history. This motif took hold most robustly in the peculiar conditions of the early Roman Empire, as the male aristocrats who’d once ruled the Roman Republic became concerned that women were co-opting power that was rightfully male. It was said that after Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died, his wife, Livia, continued to issue positive news about his health until she had secured the succession of her son Tiberius. A century later, people whispered that Pompeia Plotina, wife of the emperor Trajan, had concealed her husband’s death for some days, signing his letters to the Senate and forcing through the adoption of her favorite, Hadrian, as his successor.When they talk about women in politics, Roman historians paint us a world of plots designed to circumvent the will of the emperor and the Roman people — and the Trump campaign suggests something similar in its vision of Ms. Harris’s “undemocratic” nomination. It is hard to find a woman of the imperial family who is not accused of using poison — the most covert means of assassination — in pursuit of her goals, and women’s intrigues were often set under cover of night. Messalina, for example, supposedly used a series of fake nightmares to dupe her husband, Claudius, into executing one of her enemies.The rhetoric had elements of truth: The public sphere was all but exclusively accessible to men, and the strongest weapon available to women was influence exerted privately on male rulers. But it was exaggerated beyond all historical reality. The women of the imperial family were well-educated veterans of the political game, with huge public profiles. Petitioners frequently addressed missives to empresses, and some women were granted semiofficial titles that, like the vice presidency, carried the potential for (but no guarantee of) great power. Secrecy was stressed not because it reflected the truth, but because it made a point: Female power was destabilizing and the women who held it were not to be trusted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Push for Gender Equality in E.U.’s Top Roles Looks Set to Fall Short

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      Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, asked member countries to nominate both men and women for commission roles.The European Union has presented itself as a champion for promoting gender equality, adopting rules requiring companies to increase the number of women on their boards and pushing employers to address the gender pay gap.So when Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, asked recently for member countries to nominate both male and female candidates for leadership positions within the 27-member bloc’s executive arm, it was seen as an attempt to apply that vision to its own halls. The problem is, few have listened.Only five countries — Sweden, Finland, Spain, Portugal and Croatia — have put forward female candidates ahead of a Friday deadline. Seventeen countries have nominated only men for their commissioner posts. (Three countries have yet to submit names.) Each country gets one leadership slot.It’s possible that some countries could still change their nominees ahead of the deadline. But the current slate of nominees suggests that the European Commission’s leadership team will likely be composed mostly of men for the next five years — and analysts said the public snub of Ms. von der Leyen’s request signals her leadership could be weakened.“It’s not a small thing, asking for gender balance and clearly not getting it,” said a senior European official. “It’s not just one, two countries.” Speaking on condition of anonymity because the process was ongoing, the official said that indicated Ms. von der Leyen’s relations with member states would be more difficult.Ms. von der Leyen, a conservative German politician, secured a second five-year term in a vote last month.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court, for Now, Blocks Protections for Transgender Students in Some States

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      The order maintained halts by lower courts on federal rules prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in schools.The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily continued to block Education Department rules intended to protect transgender students from discrimination based on their gender identity in several Republican states that had mounted challenges.The emergency order allowed rulings by lower courts in Louisiana and Kentucky to remain in effect in about 10 states as litigation moves forward, maintaining a pause on new federal guidelines expanding protections for transgender students that had been enacted in nearly half the country on Aug. 1.The order came in response to a challenge by the Biden administration, which asked the Supreme Court to intervene after a number of Republican-led states sought to overturn the new rules.The decision was unsigned, as is typical in such emergency petitions. But all nine members of the court said that parts of the new rules — including the protections for transgender students — should not go into effect until the legal challenges are resolved.“Importantly,” the unsigned order said, “all members of the court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”The decision handed a victory to the Republican-led states that had challenged the rules. A patchwork of lower court decisions means that the rules are temporarily paused in about 26 states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jewish Man Charged With Attempted Murder in Attacks on Muslim Neighbor

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      Izak Kadosh faces more than 40 charges, many of them hate crimes, including attempted murder and aggravated assault. Prosecutors said the attacks, in Brooklyn, went on for months.A Jewish man in Brooklyn was arrested and charged with attempted murder and hate crimes after repeatedly attacking his Muslim neighbor over several months, ultimately breaking into the neighbor’s apartment and striking him so hard with a mallet that he had internal bleeding, according to a criminal complaint.The man, Izak Kadosh, was arrested on Saturday, two days after he broke into the apartment, according to police officials. Mr. Kadosh faces more than 40 charges, including attempted murder, aggravated harassment, hate-crime assault and intent to damage property.Mr. Kadosh pleaded not guilty to all of the charges in Kings County Criminal Court on Monday. Bail was set at $25,000 cash or a $125,000 partially secured bond. He is being held on Rikers Island and is due to appear in court again on Friday.A lawyer for Mr. Kadosh declined to comment on the case.The neighbor who was attacked, Ahmed Faycal Chebira, said the harassment started soon after he moved into the building, in the Crown Heights neighborhood, in October. Mr. Chebira, who is from Algeria, said Mr. Kadosh would call him “dirty Arab” or “dirty Muslim” and spit on him.“I told him, leave me alone,” Mr. Chebira, 50, said in Arabic on Wednesday. “Everyone has their own religion in America; I don’t have a problem with anyone.”“I feel relieved now that they caught him,” Mr. Chebira continued, adding that he was in the hospital when he learned about the arrest. “I was afraid that I would leave the hospital and he would be outside.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Transfers and Pay Cuts: Pregnant Officers Accuse Border Agency of Discrimination

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      Under a $45 million settlement, Customs and Border Protection agreed to adjust its policy around pregnancy. Some women say the agency has instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation.When Roberta Gabaldon was ready to share news of her pregnancy with her colleagues at Customs and Border Protection in 2015, she brought in pink and blue doughnuts with a sign that read: “Pink and blue. Pink and blue. Somebody’s pregnant, guess who?”But her palpable excitement, particularly after a miscarriage months earlier, quickly dissipated.“My boss came into my office and he’s like: ‘You have to leave. You have to get a note about your pregnancy, and you have to go on light duty,’” Ms. Gabaldon, an agriculture specialist in the El Paso office, recalled, describing how she was told she needed to be reassigned to a post with fewer responsibilities regardless of whether she or her doctor believed it was necessary.Her experience reflects that of hundreds of female employees at the agency who have filed suit against Customs and Border Protection, saying that since at least 2016, they were denied equal treatment once they disclosed they were expecting. No matter the physical demands of their jobs, many were transferred to another post, typically centered on administrative or secretarial work and usually unrelated to what skills they had developed in their existing roles. The policy, they say, hurt their opportunities for advancement, and others add that they weathered pay cuts because light duty meant no more overtime.But under a $45 million settlement reached on Monday, Customs and Border Protection agreed to adjust a practice that some employees say has instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation as women try to hide their pregnancies at work for as long as possible.The agreement, which is not final until the end of September, requires C.B.P. to draft a new policy for pregnant women, and lawyers representing the women will monitor the agency’s compliance for three years. C.B.P. will also be required to train all managers and supervisors about the rights of pregnant employees.C.B.P. declined to answer questions about its policy toward pregnant women as described in the lawsuit and in interviews, citing its practice of not commenting on pending litigation. The terms of the settlement agreement state that the agency does not admit wrongdoing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More