Beyond October 7th: Winning the War Against Antisemitism in America

The following is slightly modified from Gregg Roman’s speech delivered to the Texas Pro-Israel community in Plano, Texas.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you what no one else will: You’re being hunted from both sides.

Tucker Carlson recently platformed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and Darryl Cooper, who suggests that Churchill was the chief villain of World War II and questioned Holocaust history. Three-hour conversations that mainstream Holocaust revisionism to millions—the same Tucker Carlson many conservatives read for their daily news.

Meanwhile, on the left, professors like Joseph Massad at Columbia who called October 7th “awesome” still teach. Professors who compare Zionism to Nazism, who frame Jewish self-determination as white supremacy, who teach your children that their identity is inherently oppressive. From segments of the right: “globalist elites control everything.” From segments of the left: “Zionist colonizers oppress everyone.” Different vocabulary, same target.

Columbia has Massad. Cornell has Russell Rickford who felt “exhilarated” by October 7th. Berkeley has Judith Butler arguing Hamas and Hezbollah are progressive movements. These aren’t adjuncts. These are tenured professors shaping curricula and the next generation of American thought leaders.

The Middle East Studies Association passed BDS resolutions. Entire academic departments frame Israel as a settler colonial project. Your children don’t just hear these opinions—they’re graded on accepting these frameworks. Students for Justice in Palestine chapters coordinate nationwide. They don’t just protest. They create environments where Jewish students hide their identity. When wearing a Star of David becomes an act of courage, when supporting Israel becomes academic and social suicide.

Anti-Semitic content explodes across social media. The same blood libels that triggered medieval pogroms are now spread through TikTok. Holocaust denial packaged as historical revision. October 7th denial treated as resistance. Elon Musk’s X reinstated accounts that spread anti-Semitic content. Algorithms amplify hate faster than truth. By the time you debunk one lie, ten more have gone viral. Young people consume more anti-Semitic content daily than previous generations saw in lifetimes. The digital revolution democratized hatred.

It’s not just the platforms where the hate is pernicious. It’s also the sovereign actors like Qatar that have given billions to American universities. Not allegations—documented donations registered with the U.S. Department of Education. Texas A&M, Northwestern, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Harvard. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s public record.

What does this money buy? Chairs, programs, centers, influence—the ability to shape what’s taught about the Middle East, to frame narratives, to define terms, to educate generations.

On the far right: America First, increasingly dual loyalty accusations, conspiracy theories about Jewish influence, the mainstreaming of previously fringe voices. On the far left: anti-Zionism as a litmus test, BDS as a baseline, Israel as the singular evil requiring divestment while actual dictatorships get partnerships. The center holds less each year. The fringes grow louder. And Jews catch hell from both directions.

Jewish students report to the ADL, the AJC, even the JCRC here in Dallas that they must hide their identity—removing mezuzahs from dorm doors, avoiding Hillel, calculating whether wearing Hebrew letters is worth the confrontation. Professors include decolonization readings that frame Israel’s existence as violence. Hebrew is called a colonial language that shouldn’t be taught in linguistics departments at public universities. Teaching assistants downgrade papers that don’t accept anti-Israel premises.

Student governments pass BDS resolutions while Jewish students are forced to sit outside, excluded from debate about their own legitimacy.

Synagogues require security lines worthy of presidential visits and armed guards. Jewish schools need bulletproof glass. Community centers need metal detectors. This is American Jewish life now. The ADL tracks anti-Semitic incidents at historic heights. Not just words, but violence—assaults, vandalism, political assassinations. Your children practice lockdown drills at Hebrew school.

Why does condemning anti-Semitism require political calculation? Why do Jewish students need lawyers to get equal protection on campus? Why does opposing Hamas make you Islamophobic? Why does Jewish self-defense trigger more outrage than Jewish deaths?

Your opponents organize, coordinate, plan years ahead. They have long-term strategies for campus capture, for narrative dominance, for political influence, for generational change. What’s your strategy beyond next year’s gala?

One month ago, Israel achieved what the diplomatic establishment deemed impossible. Seven fronts, simultaneous warfare: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian proxies in Syria, Yemen’s Houthis, Iraqi militias, West Bank terror cells, and Iran itself. Seven enemies converged with one aim—the annihilation of the Jewish state. Israel won. They lost. Not managed, not contained, not negotiated. Won.

And yet here in this sanctuary in the heart of Texas, I bring you an uncomfortable truth: While Israel fought on seven fronts abroad, we have been losing on the eighth front at home—the forgotten front, the American front, your front.

Every truth I know about conflict, I first learned on a wrestling mat in first grade in Philadelphia. My father coached the youth wrestling team, and from first grade through college, that sport taught me what Washington’s foreign policy establishment spends decades trying to forget: In actual conflict, there are no narratives. There are no cycles. There is no proportionality. There is a winner and there is a loser.

I was nine years old when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. I found my mother weeping in our living room, transfixed by the television. The comfortable distance between suburban Pennsylvania and the Middle East collapsed in that moment. Jewish fate, I learned, is indivisible.

September 11th, 2001, ended what I call my suburban illusion. That night after watching the towers fall, my father spoke with characteristic directness: “Some men will go to the ends of the earth to ensure that your home does not exist.” The television anchors called them militants. My father called them what they were—terrorists who wanted Jews dead.

At an American university in Washington, I encountered the foreign policy establishment’s grand delusion. My professors spoke of complex dynamics requiring nuanced responses. They analyzed knife fights from luxury boxes, possessing all the footnotes but none of the conclusions. They spoke endlessly of cycles of violence. From wrestling, I knew only one cycle: You fight until someone wins and someone loses.

In 2006, I did what my professors could never understand. I made Aliyah right as the second Lebanon war erupted. My relatives called it terrible timing. I called it clarity. When exactly in Jewish history has timing ever been good?

My education began not at IDC Herzliya, but as a volunteer firefighter in Haifa under Hezbollah bombardment. July 16th, 2006—a day I will never forget. A railway maintenance depot, direct hit, eight workers dead. Arabs and Jews murdered together at their jobs. That was the moment the complexity narrative died for me. Murder is not complicated. Murder is murder.

I joined the IDF, serving in Gaza’s periphery and in Judea and Samaria. Later in COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), I witnessed the theater of international humanitarian aid.

UN officials visiting our base would express grave concern about Gaza’s humanitarian crisis while Hamas diverted concrete meant for schools to build terror tunnels.

I helped formulate Israel’s response to the Goldstone Report, the Gaza Flotilla, the Turkel Commission. In meeting after meeting with representatives of the so-called international community, I presented photographic proof of terror infrastructure built with international aid. Diplomats nodded politely before issuing statements about all parties showing restraint. It’s like identifying an arsonist holding the gas can while officials debate whether both the arsonist and the fire department share responsibility for the flames.

My breaking point came during a confidential meeting with a senior American diplomat in 2010. I showed him evidence that U.S. aid dollars were funding the Palestinian Authority’s Martyr Fund—cash rewards for murdering Jews scaled by body count. He sighed: “We know, but the alternative is worse.” They would rather fund terror than face hard truths. That’s not foreign policy. That’s cowardice.

In 2008, I met a young student in my debate society—Steven Sotloff. He was brilliant, passionate, infectiously curious. We’d go up to the roof of our apartment building, smoke cigars overlooking the Mediterranean, debating regional politics deep into the night.

Steven had a gift for seeing humanity in the midst of inhumanity. He could find the one family in a refugee camp still breaking bread, the one child still playing soccer in rubble, the one story of hope in an ocean of despair. “That’s our job,” he’d tell me, “not just to document the darkness, but to find the light that makes darkness visible.”

He spoke fluent Arabic, better than mine despite my years in Israel. He could quote the Quran and the Talmud with equal facility, seeing in both texts the same yearning for meaning. This wasn’t naive universalism. Steven knew evil when he saw it, but he believed that understanding evil required understanding the humanity it corrupted.

The last time we spoke before he entered Syria, he was electric with purpose. “Someone needs to tell these stories. The world needs to know what’s happening there.” I tried to talk him out of it—too dangerous. He smiled that Sotloff smile, part wisdom, part mischief: “Since when do Jews choose safety over truth?”

In August 2013, ISIS kidnapped him. For a year, his family worked desperately for his release while maintaining absolute secrecy. Then ISIS released the James Foley execution video. Steven, in the background, would be next. His father Arthur called me: “Do whatever you can to help save our son.”

What followed was the most intense operation of my life. If ISIS discovered that Steven was Jewish and Israeli, they would expedite his execution for propaganda value. We assembled a team working 24/7 to scrub the internet of Steven’s Jewish identity. The New York Times removed references within 27 minutes of our call. Israeli journalists deleted stories. Friends purged Facebook tags. A rabbi in Los Angeles deleted an online sermon. One volunteer physically removed Steven’s photo from our university’s wall.

The operation revealed the terrifying permanence of digital identity. Steven’s digital footprint stretched across 17 years and four continents. We developed a protocol: Identify, contact, convince, confirm. Every trace had to vanish.

The most surreal moment came when we had to ask Steven’s mother to take down her Facebook photos from her time working at a Jewish preschool. Imagine asking a mother to erase public evidence of her Jewish identity while her son is being held by terrorists who murder Jews for sport. She did it without hesitation, then asked, “What else can I do?” That’s Jewish motherhood under fire—pragmatic heartbreak in service of survival.

In September 2014, one hour after my son Leon was born, a video appeared on YouTube. They murdered Steven. We tried everything, but he died.

Here’s what I learned: Sometimes you do everything right and still lose. The measure isn’t success. The measure is whether you showed up. Steven was murdered partly because he was Jewish. In 2014, in the 21st century, a journalist was murdered for the crime of Jewish blood. That fundamental injustice drives everything I do.

October 7th, 2023. 6:47 AM Eastern Time. The first ping wasn’t a news alert—it was the thin metallic echo of a siren riding through a friend’s phone on a group thread. Then another. Voice notes half-whispered from stairwells. Hebrew curses. Soldiers’ clipped words: “Ani lo yachol ledaber”—“I can’t talk.” This wasn’t rockets. It was something worse. It was moving.

As Hamas terrorists massacred 1,200 people—babies, Holocaust survivors, teenagers at a music festival—as they raped, kidnapped, livestreamed their barbarism, the comfortable consensus that evil could be managed burned to the ground. These men were funded by Iran, educated in UNRWA schools, enabled by billions in Western aid. They committed medieval savagery while broadcasting it on our children’s social media feeds.

But then something just as shocking happened closer to home. Within hours—hours—American university students started celebrating. Columbia professors called the massacre “awesome” and “innovative.” Cornell faculty proclaimed Hamas had a right to murder civilians. At UT Austin, here in Texas, students told Jewish classmates to “go back to Germany.” At UT Dallas, Jade Steinberg, wearing a Star of David, was told: “If Hamas does not kill you, we will.”

Let that sink in. On an American campus, in Texas, in 2023—a death threat for wearing a Jewish symbol.

The catalog of incidents reads like a fever dream of historical repetition. At Yale, Jewish students were trapped in the Slifka Center while a mob pounded on the doors screaming “intifada.” At UCLA, Jewish students were physically blocked from parts of campus unless they denounced Israel—literal checkpoints on American soil. At George Washington University, projectors blazed on walls: “Glory to our martyrs,” while administrators debated whether this violated campus speech codes.

The gaslighting was almost worse than the violence. Jewish students would report death threats only to be told they were misunderstanding “passionate political expression.” A Columbia student showed campus security a video of herself being surrounded and threatened only to be asked, “Have you considered not wearing your Magen David?” A Harvard student reported being spat on and was told, “Consider the pain your Israel advocacy causes to Palestinian students.”

The institutional betrayal cuts deeper than the hatred itself. These universities that once provided refuge for Jewish scholars fleeing European persecution now enable their ideological descendants. The same institutions that pridefully display their Holocaust studies programs actively facilitate the conditions that made the Holocaust possible: dehumanization, isolation, and marking of Jews as legitimate targets.

The Anti-Defamation League documented 9,354 anti-Semitic incidents in 2024—a 344% increase over 2023, the highest since tracking began in 1979. This is not criticism of Israeli policy. This is not political discourse. This is the oldest hatred adapting to new hosts.

Social media has been weaponized into an infrastructure of persecution. Since January 2023, in Texas alone, “From The River To The Sea” increased 2,557% on Texas social media channels. “Holocaust” surged 1,324%. “Jewish supremacy” rose 883%. Jewish students are doxxed—names, photos, addresses posted with targeting instructions. This is not free speech. This is digital terrorism designed to break Jewish souls through isolation and fear.

At Hillcrest High School in Dallas, a Jewish student endured years of being called “dirty Jew,” told to “bathe in Auschwitz,” finding swastikas with “burn the Jews.” Teachers witnessed this. They did nothing.

Dallas City Council member Cara Mendelsohn’s home was vandalized with Hamas death markers. This is not normal political expression. This is preparation for pogrom.

I returned to Israel this past August after 13 years abroad, having made Aliyah in 2006. What I found was not the triumphant nation of government propaganda, but a country suspended between victory and vigilance, caught in the most dangerous moment in any war—the moment where exhaustion masquerades as peace.

The air itself in government ministries hums with overwhelming paperwork. Businesses shuttered—60,000 small businesses have closed since October 7th. Reservists carrying over 600 days of service on their shoulders like stones. I witnessed this exhaustion firsthand in Herzliya. A tech executive, a good friend from our time at IDC Herzliya (now Reichman University), sat before me, his eyes hollow: “I’ve been in reserve duty for 18 months. My company went public without me. My daughter learned to walk while I was in Gaza. When do I get my life back?” He wasn’t asking me. He was asking the universe. And the universe, as it often does with Jewish questions, remains silent.

This is the invisible tax of survival—not just blood and treasure, but dreams deferred, futures postponed, the ordinary miracles of life that pass while you stand guard. A pianist whose fingers forgot Chopin while holding a rifle. A surgeon whose hands, trained to heal, spent two years preparing for wounds of war. A teacher who found her students had graduated without her.

Three hundred Israelis remain in Hamas captivity. The economy bleeds at a 6.9% government budget deficit. 125,000 Israelis have left the country—a net loss since 2022, a brain drain that threatens our future more than any rocket.

But here’s what terrifies me more than exhaustion: the return of the October 6th mindset. The old delusions are creeping back—the belief that the Israeli government and the IDF can manage the conflict rather than seek defeat of the enemy, that we can contain rather than conquer, that ceasefire equals victory, that quiet equals peace. We are forgetting the central lesson of October 7th: You cannot manage an existential threat.

Victory on our front means breaking the will of the hate movement, ending their narrative dominance, bankrupting their organizations, isolating them politically until their cause collapses. This is not extremism. This is survival. And survival requires strategy.

At The Middle East Forum, we’ve pioneered RICO lawsuits against Students for Justice in Palestine. RICO was created to combat organized crime, and SJP operates as organized crime—coordinated harassment across legal boundaries. Every incident must be documented, every threat recorded, every assault prosecuted. Make attacking Jews ruinously expensive in dollars and decades in prison. When universities violate Title VI by allowing hostile environments, they must lose their federal funding—not eventually, but immediately.

The Jewish community’s economic power remains largely undeployed. When a university tolerates anti-Semitism, redirect every philanthropic dollar. When corporations cave to BDS, organize immediate boycotts. But also reward courage—when institutions stand strong, fund them publicly and substantially. Make protecting Jews profitable. Make abandoning Jews devastating.

The post-October 7th landscape shifted because we finally exercised power. University presidents who equivocated about genocide were forced to resign. Harvard’s president lasted 27 days after her congressional testimony. Penn’s lasted four. These weren’t symbolic victories. They were demonstrations of consequence. Governor Abbott’s orders requiring IHRA adoption and authorizing arrests at illegal encampments sent a message: The rules apply to you too, even to those who claim revolution between their sociology classes.

Create community intelligence systems monitoring threats in real time. Infiltrate their meetings, document their planning, expose their funding, build dossiers that prosecutors can turn into indictments. Information is ammunition. Use it.

Our enemies have rewritten history, transforming Jews from indigenous people into colonizers, the Holocaust from history’s greatest crime into a weapon against its victims. Document everything. Fund the truth. Create curricula teaching actual history. Build museums showing not just past persecution but present threats. Make it impossible to separate anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism by proving their convergence. Truth is a weapon. Wield it.

When existing institutions fail, replace them. Create Jewish excellence programs providing superior education and secure environments. Build media platforms telling truth when mainstream outlets spread lies. Establish security companies when local police won’t protect synagogues. This is not retreat. It’s strategic redeployment.

Too many have been taught to apologize for Jewish strength, to seek acceptance through denouncement of their people. The psychological warfare has created Jews who collaborate in their own erasure. End this now.

Teach your children that Jewish history is triumph, not just persecution. We didn’t just survive—we conquered exile, rebuilt sovereignty, won wars. Send them to Israel not for tours but for transformation. Encourage military service—IDF or American—that forges steel from privilege. Create rites of passage that test rather than celebrate. Make them intellectually formidable and emotionally unbreakable. Give them not just heritage but weaponry, not just memory but mission.

This means revolutionary changes to Jewish education. Stop teaching the Holocaust as the defining story. Yes, we must remember, but memory without power breeds victims, not warriors. Teach instead the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where starving Jews with homemade weapons held off the Wehrmacht longer than Poland itself lasted. Teach the Bielski partisans who saved 1,200 Jews not through negotiation but superior firepower. Teach Israel’s wars not as desperate survivals but as decisive victories.

Create programs that forge Jewish identity through strength, not suffering. Martial arts programs that connect physical training to Jewish warrior traditions. Coding bootcamps that frame cyber expertise as modern Talmud study—the mastery of languages that shape reality. Debate societies that train young Jews to demolish lies in real time, publicly, without apology.

Most critically, teach them to reject the luxury of victimhood. When someone discriminates against them, don’t teach them to file complaints—teach them to acquire power and make their enemies irrelevant. When they face quotas limiting Jewish admission, don’t teach them to beg for fairness—teach them to build better institutions. When they’re excluded from spaces, don’t teach them to demand inclusion—teach them to create superior alternatives that others beg to join.

Texas offers unique advantages in this fight that no other state possesses. You have constitutional carry—Jews here can defend themselves physically, not just legally. You have a political culture that respects strength over sensitivity. You have economic wealth that makes you less susceptible to pressure. You have borders that teach daily lessons about the difference between sovereignty and chaos.

Most importantly, Texas has the spiritual architecture that understands good versus evil without embarrassment. The Texas narrative—settlers defending civilization against savagery—parallels the Jewish story. Texans understand that some conflicts only end when one side wins completely. The Alamo taught what October 7th taught: barbarism must be met with superior force, not superior arguments.

This is why the victory over anti-Semitism in America must begin here. Not in New York, where Jewish establishment politics are ossified. Not in Los Angeles, where entertainment industry Jews fear for their careers. Not in Washington, where Jewish organizations have been captured by diplomatic thinking. Here in Texas, where the frontier mentality still breathes, where independence isn’t a historical memory but a living principle.

When Texas Jews stand up, you don’t stand alone. You stand with millions of Christian Texans who understand that your fight is their fight. You stand with Hispanic Texans who fled socialism and recognize its new disguises. You stand with Asian Texans who know what actual systemic discrimination looks like. This coalition doesn’t exist in other parts of America, but it exists here and must be activated.

You stand where British forces stood at Dunkirk. Behind you, the machinery of hatred advances. Before you, uncertain escape. The choice is not whether to engage, but whether to fight or flee.

Some will counsel moderation, dialogue, understanding. They counsel surrender. When someone threatens to murder you for wearing a Star of David, the response isn’t dialogue. When professors praise the massacre of Jewish babies, the answer isn’t understanding. When your children are told to die in gas chambers, moderation is not a virtue.

What you do here in Texas echoes everywhere. If you break SJP here, you create a template for breaking it nationwide. If you bankrupt their supporters here, you terrify their funders everywhere. If you achieve victory here, you prove victory is possible. You’re not just defending Dallas or Houston or Austin. You are establishing whether American Jews stand or fall.

The comfortable exile you thought you inhabited has ended. You stand on a battlefield whether you’ve chosen it or not. Your enemies have made the choice for you. They’ve marked your synagogues, threatened your children, declared their intentions.

History will record what we do at this moment. Will it record that we held meetings and wrote letters while our children were driven from universities? Will it record that we dialogued with enemies while they chose dominance? Will it record that we confused civility with survival? Or will it record that here in America, we finally said enough? That here you understood that October 7th was not just an attack on Israel but a declaration of war on Jews everywhere?

One month ago, Israel won a war everyone said was unwinnable. Seven fronts, simultaneous assault, existential threat. The result: Victory. Now the eighth front awaits—your front, the American front, the forgotten front.

You didn’t ask for this war, but wars don’t ask permission. They only ask: Will you fight?

I’ve given you strategy, tactics, truth. Now I give you a challenge: Be worthy of your inheritance. Be worthy of those who died for you to live as Jews. Be worthy of Israel’s victory.

Stand up. Stand together. Stand now.

Because if not here, where? If not you, who? If not now, when?

The forgotten front is forgotten no more. We stand at it, shoulder to shoulder, ready to fight and ready to win. From this day forward, we live as warriors.

Am Yisrael Chai—the people of Israel live.

Gregg Roman, Executive Director of the Middle East Forum, delivered this comprehensive address analyzing the surge in antisemitism following October 7th and proposing a seven-pillar strategy for the American pro-Israel community to combat threats from both political extremes at the Israel Now Forum in Plano, Texas.