States and Washington Advance Jewish Protection Measures

California lawmakers sent two Jewish-community protection bills to Gov. Gavin Newsom, while New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pledged additional security for synagogues and Jewish sites before the High Holidays. Separately, the Justice Department appealed the dismissal of its Title VI antisemitism case against Harvard, extending federal scrutiny of campus protections.

• AB 395 would require California public schools and agencies to try to avoid major events on holidays including Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; the Assembly passed it 77-0 with two abstentions.
• AB 1836 would extend California’s nonprofit security-grant program to offsite events; the Assembly passed it 78-0 with one abstention.
• Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the two California bills.
• Hochul offered added funding and State Police support after a hate-crime attack at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue.
• The Justice Department seeks to revive a case involving nearly $1 billion in federal grants over Harvard’s alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students.

Jewish protection policy is moving simultaneously through state legislation, executive security measures and federal civil-rights litigation. The durability of that shift will depend on whether institutional obligations remain enforceable after the immediate political attention recedes.

Amy-Jill Levine’s election as the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America triggered online claims that she was hijacking Catholicism, alongside denunciations of Jews and anti-Zionist comments. The association defended Levine as an exceptional scholar whose decades of work advanced Catholic-Jewish dialogue.

• Amy-Jill Levine is an Orthodox Jewish scholar of Christian scripture and a professor emerita at Vanderbilt University.
• The association said Levine was elected for her scholarship and role in Catholic-Jewish dialogue, not because she is Jewish.
• The backlash mixed historic Christian anti-Jewish accusations with contemporary anti-Zionist rhetoric.

The episode shows how theological antisemitism and anti-Zionist language can reinforce each other even inside institutions built around interfaith scholarship. Institutional defense of the target, rather than procedural silence, is the principal differentiator in this case.

Meta removed 35 accounts tied to a covert Iranian network that posed as Americans and mixed U.S. political content with Israel-Palestinian messaging. Meta and TikTok separately removed an undisclosed AI-generated persona that built an audience with benign content before distributing anti-Israel music and messaging.

• The Iranian network comprised four Facebook and 31 Instagram accounts and concealed its ties to Iran.
• More than 79,000 people followed at least one Instagram account in the Iranian-linked network.
• The AI persona had about 155,000 TikTok followers and 42,000 Instagram followers before removal.

Foreign-state influence and synthetic-persona operations are converging on the same tactic: establish an apparently authentic American identity, accumulate trust and then inject polarizing anti-Israel content. Audience size before disclosure or removal is the measurable indicator of platform vulnerability.