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      Man Is Charged With Federal Hate Crimes in Assaults on Jewish Protesters

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      Tarek Bazrouk, 20, on three occasions kicked and punched Jewish protesters who were wearing religious attire or carrying Israeli flags at demonstrations in Manhattan, prosecutors said.A New York man has been charged with federal hate crimes in three assaults on Jewish protesters at demonstrations over the war in Gaza, according to an indictment released on Wednesday.The man, Tarek Bazrouk, 20, was arrested at three separate protests in Manhattan over roughly nine months after he kicked and punched Jewish protesters who were wearing religious attire or carrying Israeli flags, federal prosecutors said.“Despite being arrested after each incident, Bazrouk allegedly remained undeterred and quickly returned to using violence to target Jews in New York City,” Jay Clayton, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news release on Wednesday.Mr. Clayton said his office was “dedicated to seeking justice for victims of hate crimes and will aggressively prosecute those who spread bigotry and discrimination through violence.”Mr. Bazrouk was charged with three hate crime counts, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. It was not immediately clear whether he had a lawyer.According to prosecutors, Mr. Bazrouk was arrested in April 2024 at a protest outside the New York Stock Exchange after he “lunged” at a group of pro-Israel demonstrators and then, as he was being taken to a police vehicle, kicked one protester in the stomach.He was arrested again in December at a protest in Upper Manhattan after punching a Jewish student who was draped in an Israeli flag and stealing another flag from the student’s brother, prosecutors said. Mr. Bazrouk was arrested a third time in January, prosecutors said, after he punched a protester wearing an Israeli flag at a demonstration near First Avenue and East 18th Street in Manhattan.In the release, Christopher G. Raia, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York field office, accused Mr. Bazrouk of “demonstrating a pattern of supporting antisemitic terrorist organizations.” A search of his cellphone after his arrest revealed pro-Hamas propaganda and text messages in which he identified himself as a “Jew hater,” prosecutors said. The two-page indictment does not address those allegations.The charges come at a time when the Trump administration has taken an aggressive posture toward pro-Palestinian demonstrations, accusing them of antisemitism and seeking to deport some protesters.Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, who were both active in protests at Columbia University, were detained by immigration authorities earlier this year, as was a Tufts graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who had criticized Israel in an opinion essay for a student newspaper. Mr. Mahdawi was released last week; Mr. Khalil and Ms. Ozturk remain in federal detention in Louisiana.Protests in New York City over the war in Gaza, once a near-daily occurrence, have become less frequent. Dozens of people were taken into police custody on Wednesday evening after pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied part of Columbia’s main library for several hours in an effort to rekindle the movement that swept the campus last spring. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write’

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      Listen and follow ‘The Daily’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube | iHeartRadioWhen Taffy Brodesser-Akner became a writer, Mr. Lindenblatt, the father of one of her oldest friends, began asking to tell his story of survival during the Holocaust in one of the magazines or newspapers she wrote for. He took pride in telling his story, in making sure he fulfilled what he felt was the obligation of all Holocaust survivors, which was to remind the world what had happened to the Jews.His daughter Ilana knew it was a long shot but felt obligated to pass on the request — it was her father, after all. Taffy declined because after a life hearing about the Holocaust, she said, she was “all Holocausted out.”But, years later, when she learned of Mr. Lindenblatt’s imminent passing, Taffy asked herself what would become of stories like his if the generation of hers that was supposed to inherit them had taken the privilege that came with another generation’s survival and decided not to listen?So here it is, an old Jewish story about the Holocaust and a man who somehow survived the pernicious, organized and intentional genocide of the Jews. But right behind it, just two generations later, is another story, one about the children and grandchildren who have been so malformed by the stories that are their lineage that some of them made just as eager work of running from it, only to find themselves, same as anything you run from, having to deal with it anyway.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Frannie Carr Toth, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      America Wants a God

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      Today, we’re introducing “Believing,” a yearlong exploration from The Times on how we experience religion and spirituality now.Americans believe.Most people are wary of the government, the future and even each other, but they still believe in astonishing possibilities. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they have a spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world,” as we reported earlier this year.The country seems to be acknowledging this widespread spiritual hunger. America’s secularization is on pause, people have stopped leaving churches, and religion is taking a more prominent role in public life — in the White House, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and even at Harvard. It’s a major, generational shift. But what does this actually look like in people’s lives?I have spent the past year reporting “Believing,” a new project for The Times. This project is personal to me. I was raised a devout Mormon in Arkansas. I’ve left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I understand how wrestling with belief can define a life. I hoped to capture what that journey looked like for others, too — both inside and outside of religion. I interviewed hundreds of people, visited dozens of houses of worship and asked Times readers for their stories. More than 4,000 responded.In my reporting, I found that there are many reasons for this shift in American life. Researchers say the pandemic and the country’s limited social safety nets have inclined people to stick with (or even turn to) religion for support. But there is another reason, too: Many Americans are dissatisfied with the alternatives to religion. They feel an existential malaise, and they’re looking for help. People want stronger communities, more meaningful rituals and spaces to express their spirituality. They’re also longing to have richer, more nuanced conversations about belief.Unsatisfying alternativesIris LegendreOver the past few decades, around 40 million Americans left churches, and the number of people who say they have no religion grew to about 30 percent of the country.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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      How I Survived Heart Surgery

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      A writer explores how a Jewish ritual changed her relationship with mortality.I had a hole in my chest.Three weeks had passed since my open-heart surgery. My body was rejecting some of my stitches, spitting them out like rotten food.“It should heal on its own,” the doctor said as she used tweezers to pack the wound with gauze.She was perched just below my neck with her headlight on full blast. I wanted to turn away, but I needed to know: How deep did this hole actually go?A few weeks earlier, I’d checked into this same building to undergo the surgery I had studiously avoided. There was no definitive sign or test to say “it was time,” but the worsening symptoms made my ailing heart impossible to ignore. A dash to catch a train sent me into a full asthma attack, climbing stairs had become a breathless activity. It was time to accept reality: This wasn’t the version of my heart that could carry me into old age.At 43, there would be no “good time” to take 12 weeks off. There was a demanding small business and my aging parents.“I just didn’t have the room in my schedule,” I told a friend.“Listen to yourself,” she said. “This is not a conference. This is an organ.”I worried about my husband. How would he manage? What about our kids? Would they be traumatized watching me go through this? And there was always the risk of complications and the fact that I might not be better off afterward. Still, like the good girl that I am, I picked a surgery date.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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      Bardella, Leader of France’s Far-Right National Rally, Heads to Israel

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      As Jordan Bardella, its young president, tries to distance the party from its history of antisemitism, it is making common cause with Israel against “Islamist ideology.”Jordan Bardella, the young president of France’s far-right National Rally, plans to visit Israel this month in a powerful symbol of his party’s shift from the home of French antisemitism to the country’s most vociferous friend of the Jews.“Antisemitism is a poison,” Mr. Bardella told Le Journal du Dimanche, a Sunday newspaper, announcing that he plans to attend a Jerusalem conference on that subject in late March and visit areas of Israel attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. “Our engagement in this combat is absolute.”No leader of the far-right party, including its perennial presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, has previously made an official visit to Israel. But the party’s stand against what it calls “Islamist ideology,” has led it to a sweeping embrace of Israel and the country’s fight against Hamas and Hezbollah. At the same time, the National Rally’s vehement anti-immigrant ideology, aimed particularly at Muslims, has earned it the support of some French Jews.No leader of the far-right party, including its perennial presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, has previously made an official visit to Israel.Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty ImagesMany French Jews, however, remain steadfast in their opposition to the party. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent intellectual and author last year of the book “Israel Alone,” an impassioned paean to Israel in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, immediately announced that he had dropped out of the Jerusalem conference because Mr. Bardella is going. He informed President Isaac Herzog of Israel of his decision.Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, which became the National Rally in 2018, famously dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail” of history and called the Nazi occupation of France “not particularly inhumane,” despite the deportation of more than 75,000 Jews to Hitler’s death camps.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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      Archaeologists Unearth Oldest Jewish Ritual Bath Found in Europe

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      Discovered outside Rome, the bath, which is thought to be a mikvah, could be more than 1,600 years old. When Luigi Maria Caliò, a classical archaeology professor, first brought students from the University of Catania to excavate an area of Ostia Antica, the ancient commercial port of call outside Rome, he wasn’t sure what he might find.The dig site had not been explored in modern times, despite its central location next to a square that was once the city’s headquarters for shippers and traders and is today renowned for its mosaics.“We thought we’d find some warehouses or a fluvial port,” he said. Instead, the archaeologists — budding and not — last summer uncovered what may be the oldest existing example in the ancient Roman world of a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath. They have tentatively dated the structure to the late fourth or early fifth century.“Such an antique mikvah has never been found” outside Israel, “so it’s a very relevant find,” said Riccardo Di Segni, Rome’s chief rabbi. He added that the discovery contributed to further illuminating the rich history of Jews in Rome and Ostia Antica.Jews first came to Rome in the second century B.C., and inhabited the city and its environs, including Ostia, a half-hour train ride outside the capital city.Rome and Ostia to this day are pockmarked with remnants of Jewish heritage: a menorah on the bas-relief of the first-century Arch of Titus; Jewish catacombs; sundry Roman-era inscriptions, and a synagogue at Ostia Antica.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 Pulled $400 million From Columbia. Other Schools Could Be Next.

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      The administration has circulated a list that includes nine other campuses, accusing them of failure to address antisemitism.The Trump Administration’s abrupt withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University cast a pall over at least nine other campuses worried they could be next.The schools, a mix that includes both public universities and Ivy League institutions, have been placed on an official administration list of schools the Department of Justice said may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty.Faculty leaders at many of the schools have pushed back strongly against claims that their campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism, noting that while some Jewish students complained that they felt unsafe, the vast majority of protesters were peaceful and many of the protest participants were themselves Jewish. The Trump administration has made targeting higher education a priority. This week, the president threatened in a social media post to punish any school that permits “illegal” protests. On Jan. 30, his 10th day in office, he signed an executive order on combating antisemitism, focusing on what he called anti-Jewish racism at “leftists” universities. Then, on Feb. 3, he announced the creation of a multiagency task force to carry out the mandate.The task force appeared to move into action quickly after a pro-Palestinian sit-in and protest at Barnard College, a partner school to Columbia, led to arrests on Feb. 26. Two days later, the administration released its list of 10 schools under scrutiny, including Columbia, the site of large pro-Palestinian encampments last year.It said it would be paying the schools a visit, part of a review process to consider “whether remedial action is warranted.” Then on Friday, it announced it would be canceling millions in grants and contracts with Columbia.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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      I Do Not Want Revenge for My Father’s Death

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      On a warm October night 12 years ago, my father, Yaya Ofer, was murdered by two Palestinian terrorists. They attacked him at home, at night, with axes, landing 41 blows on his body. His killing was planned. My father, who had retired as a colonel in the Israeli Army, had been the central figure in my childhood. As an adult, I loved hiking with him all over this country and meeting people from every background. In one evening all that was gone. The attackers were sentenced to life in prison. Now, as part of the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, one of those men will walk free.I have come to peace with his freedom.Many of the 1,000 prisoners who are being released in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages have the blood of people like my father on their hands, some of it barely dry. Behind every heartwarming video of a hostage embracing family members is a family like mine, being forced to relive our own grief.Knowing that the man who killed my father will walk out of prison stirs complex emotions, but I know it is the right decision to release these prisoners, if that is what it takes to save the hostages who have been held for almost 500 days. I believe nothing could be more sacred than bringing the hostages home — not my grief, which will not end, and not even my father, whose life I cannot restore. Not if we can bring back to life my fellow countrymen who are still held in the tunnels under Gaza.I hope this hostage-prisoner exchange will bring an end to this long and terrible war that has been thrust upon millions of people on both sides who did not choose it. And yet I am terribly worried that when the exchanges are finished, when the troops withdraw, we will discover that Israelis and Palestinians are now farther from peace than at any point in our history.I come from a family of peaceniks. My paternal grandfather, born in Haifa, helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp with the British Army. My maternal grandfather survived the Holocaust in Europe. He emigrated after the war to Israel and pioneered treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome.After my father’s death I, too, wanted peace, not revenge. So I got involved in the peace-building community, including the Parents Circle-Family Forum — a group of bereaved families, Israelis and Palestinians, who have all lost loved ones, brutally, in this endless conflict. In the friendships I formed, I sought out not just Israelis, but also Palestinians, to understand their loss and mine. It was an antidote to spiraling into a state of depression, fear and hatred. Around the time of my father’s murder, I was helping to organize the annual Jerusalem Season of Culture project, which brings together Jews and Arabs for shared cultural projects including music, art and theater.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