“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Joe Kent wrote in his resignation letter, which he addressed to President Donald Trump and shared on social media. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

 Kent continued, “Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.” 

 He also accused Israel of having also drawn the United States into the Iraq War in the 2000s and said he had lost his wife, who died in a 2019 suicide bombing in Syria linked to ISIS, “in a war manufactured by Israel.”

 Kent, who has past connections to the far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, is the first senior Trump official to resign over the war. His words reflect a deepening and conspiratorial anti-Israel sentiment on the right, where the two-week old U.S.-Israel war on Iran is fracturing Trump’s MAGA coalition.

 “Joe Kent is an American hero, patriot and veteran,” the far-right personality Candace Owens wrote on X. Buckley Carlson, Tucker Carlson’s son who works for Vice President JD Vance, also tweeted that Kent was an “American hero.” 

 Trump, however, said he was glad Kent had resigned, while a White House spokeswoman said there were “many false claims” in Kent’s letter. 

 And Jewish leaders across the political spectrum condemned the letter, with some saying that even principled opposition to the Iran war could not justify its antisemitic tropes.

 Polls show that most Americans oppose the war, which has sparked a global fuel crisis and appears to threaten the economy more broadly. And some of Kent’s allegations appeared to echo what even some senior Trump administration officials have suggested: that Israeli officials manipulated Trump into believing both that Iran was a present danger to the United States, and that there was a swift path to victory.

 But he went further, saying that the dynamic reflected “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.” And he blamed Israel for a personal tragedy, too.

 A former U.S. Representative from Washington state, Kent was nominated by Trump to be the counterterrorism center’s director last year. Kent was previously a Libertarian and a Democrat before shifting his party to the GOP in 2021 and backing Trump.

 Kent is also a U.S. Army Green Beret and combat veteran who fought in the Iraq War, including in the Battle of Fallujah. He has credited the catalyst for his backing of Trump and belated opposition to the War on Terror to the death of his wife Shannon Smith, a military cryptologist, in a 2019 suicide bombing in the northern Syrian city of Manbij. 

 At the time, the bombing was connected to the first Trump administration’s campaign against ISIS. But in Kent’s telling now, the ISIS fight, too, could be chalked up to Israeli misinformation. 

 “As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives,” Kent wrote in his letter.

 To veteran Middle East policy experts, Kent’s framing of Israel as the secret manipulators of recent global conflicts are a blend of nonsensical and dangerous.

 “It strips away any sense of agency on the part of the United States, all of these charges,” Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former State Department negotiator on Arab-Israeli relations, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And it reposits that agency in the form of a clever, willful Israeli prime minister who somehow manipulates America into going to war.”

 Miller said that Trump was capable of entering a disastrous war on his own, “wanting to make history” by ending America’s decades-long tensions with Iran and assassinating its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Netanyahu may be affecting the timetable of the war, but not the war itself,” he theorized.

 Kent’s allegations about Israel having “manufactured” the Iraq War and the Syrian civil war, Miller said, had no basis in fact.  “As to Iraq, there was a little event called 9/11,” he said. “Syrian civil war, I have no idea what he’s talking about.” The framing, he said, reminded him of decades of hearing from various partners in his line of work that the U.S. Congress was “Israeli-occupied territory.”

 In his letter, Kent does not blame Trump for the war, instead urging the president to rethink his approach.

 “I pray that you will reflect on what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for,” he concludes his letter. “The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.”

 The White House rejected Kent’s claims. “As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.

 Leavitt added that Trump “ultimately made the determination” to strike Iran in “a joint attack with Israel,” and called the charge that Israel manipulated the president “absurd.”

 Asked about Kent directly at the White House, Trump said, “I always thought he was a nice guy but I always thought he was weak on security.”

 He added, “It’s a good thing that he’s out because he said Iran was not a threat. Every country recognized what a threat Iran was.”

 But Kent was celebrated for resigning by figures on both the left and right, with the loudest voices coming from the fringe.

 In addition to Buckley Carlson and Owens, who called the war “Bibi’s Red Heifer War,” other avatars of the far-right praised Kent. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman, called him “a GREAT AMERICAN HERO.”

 Some more liberal and centrist voices were also approving of Kent, without referencing his antisemitism. 

 “I didn’t support Kent’s nomination. Yet I’m glad he is willing to acknowledge the truth – there was NO imminent threat to the United States, and this war was a terrible idea,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X.

 “Have talked a lot of shit about Joe Kent over the years (deserved) and can’t speak to all of his motivations here but I gotta say its pretty refreshing to see that someone in the administration has a red line on something,” Tim Miller, an analyst on the liberal-leaning MS Now network and an editor of the anti-Trump publication The Bulwark, wrote on X.

 Meanwhile, both Trump allies — including far-right Jewish influencer Laura Loomer — and Jewish liberals and conservatives denounced Kent.

 “Good riddance,” tweeted GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska. “Iran has murdered more than a thousand Americans. Their EFP land mines were the deadliest in Iraq. Anti-Semitism is an evil I detest, and we surely don’t want it in our government.” 

 Jewish Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer, of New Jersey, also denounced Kent, writing, “Kent’s reduction of Iran to ‘Israel’s fault’ isn’t leadership, it’s bigoted deflection.”

 “Of course, Kent’s own post announcing his resignation is riddled with antisemitic tropes under the guise of blaming Israel,” Amy Spitalnick, head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, wrote on X. “You can vehemently criticize the Israeli government & oppose the war without engaging in dangerous conspiratorial tropes.”

 “You can resign and ostensibly make it about Iran, but scapegoating Israel and its ‘powerful American lobby’ for Trump’s decision to go to war puts Jews in danger,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, wrote on X. 

 A statement from Brian Romick, head of Democratic Majority for Israel, similarly called Kent’s letter “deeply antisemitic” and added, “It is deeply alarming that a man holding one of the most sensitive national security positions in the United States government harbors these antisemitic views.” Romick also said Trump “made the decision to use military force against Iran.”

 “There is no place in public service for traffickers of antisemitic tropes such as Mr. Kent,” the Combat Antisemitism Movement, which has supported war with Iran, said in a statement. “For generations to come, the world will be a safer place as a direct result of the decisive military actions that have been taken by the U.S. and Israel.”

 Prior to his confirmation as national counterterrorism director, Kent served for a time as acting chief of staff to U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. In that role, he was included in the 2025 “Signalgate” group chats in which highly sensitive planning of bombings in Yemen were mistakenly sent to a journalist. 

 Kent has also had past associations with Fuentes, whom he admitted to calling in 2022 to discuss electoral strategy for his House bid that year — though he disavowed Fuentes. Kent’s wife, Heather Kaiser, has contributed
to The Grayzone, a site founded by anti-Zionist Jewish writer Max Blumenthal.

 Kent has also spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and defended Jan. 6 rioters. While running for congress in 2022, Kent also talked to pro-Israel lobbyists AIPAC for support, according to a policy paper shared by a Jewish Insider reporter. 

 In that paper, Kent states, “The United States and Israel share common enemies in the Middle East, from terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah to the totalitarian government of Iran,” later adding that he would “bolster the coalition that stands in opposition to Iran.” 

 Kent concluded, “Further, I will introduce legislation to strip the most vile antisemites in Congress from their committee assignments.”

 More specifically, Ryan, who was pushed out of the role over the summer amid mounting GOP pressure on the public university, cited the topic as an example of why he was confused about the “DEI ban” imposed earlier this year by the public school’s board. The ban had been drafted by the office of the state’s Republican governor.

 “It’s not clear even today what it means to kill DEI,” Ryan wrote in a letter Friday, Nov. 14 to the UVA faculty senate telling his side of the story. 

 He went on: “For example, did it mean that we could no longer try to recruit qualified first-generation students from rural parts of Virginia, or offer financial aid, or even serve matzah in the dining halls during Passover, because each of those efforts would be advancing diversity, equity, and/or inclusion?”

 The candid look behind the curtain was a reflection of broader struggles on campuses to satisfy conservative demands on both antisemitism and DEI. As the Trump administration has taken up the mantle of campus antisemitism after the Oct. 7 attacks, it has strong-armed universities to make substantial changes to preserve their federal funding — not just to its dealings with Jewish students, but also to other conservative hobbyhorses like DEI initiatives. 

 The first public university to strike a deal with Trump to end an antisemitism investigation, UVA was also quick to fall in behind a “DEI ban.” The school is now becoming a flashpoint as Glenn Youngkin, the outgoing Republican governor who pushed the DEI ban, and Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger, elected as part of a broader “blue wave” opposing Trump, are warring over who gets to appoint Ryan’s replacement. 

 Ryan, who remains an emeritus professor at the school, wrote that he felt compelled to revisit his resignation because Youngkin’s assertions about the state of affairs at UVA needed to be corrected.

 “I think it is time to set the record straight, which will hopefully enable UVA to make all necessary changes in order to end this chapter and begin a fresh, new chapter in the history of a remarkable university,” Ryan wrote.

 The DEI ban was only part of UVA’s turmoil this summer. A subsequent Justice Department investigation into the school’s student admissions and hiring practices, Ryan wrote, soon expanded without warning into an antisemitism investigation.

 “We assembled voluminous information related to admissions for one or more of our twelve schools, and a few days before the deadline for submission, we would receive another DOJ inquiry asking about another school,” he wrote. “They also sent a letter asking about antisemitism and one alleged incident of antisemitism in particular. Each time the scope of the DOJ inquiry expanded, our lawyers asked for and received extensions for submission of material.”

 Ryan did not elaborate on the specifics of the “one alleged incident of antisemitism” in his letter but said that investigators’ interest in antisemitism seemed to be “part of a pattern” of the DOJ throwing more and more allegations against the school. He also speculated that the investigators were simply using such allegations as a leverage tactic against the school.

 “It is impossible for me to know, but the timing of the DOJ letters, the ever-expanding scope of their inquiries, and their willingness to give us extension after extension made me wonder more than once if the DOJ was not actually interested in our response,” he wrote. He came to conclude that the government wouldn’t drop its investigations, including on antisemitism, unless he stepped down.

 Ryan did so this June, after which UVA reached a settlement with the government to drop its antisemitism investigation and others. Unlike other university deals with Trump, this one did not require UVA to pay a fine. Instead, the school agreed to abide by Justice Department guidelines on other issues not related to antisemitism, including the school’s existing general ban on DEI.

 As for matzah in the dining hall, no school has yet been criticized as excessively inclusive for offering kosher food. In fact, several universities facing allegations of antisemitism tied to their handling of anti-Israel protests have expanded their kosher dining-hall offerings as part of their overtures to Jewish students.

 Though that wasn’t quite how they tended to phrase it, recalled a colleague. Instead, NPR board members feared that the All Things Considered co-host was “too New York” for Midwest audiences.

 “Besides being a woman, the Jewish element was another aspect,” Jack Mitchell, an early producer on the daily afternoon program, told NPR. “Here is somebody whose name is Stamberg. She had an obvious New York accent. Made no bones about it… And the president of NPR asked that I not put her in there for those — because of the complaints from managers.”

 Stamberg went on the air anyway and quickly became a defining personality for the nonprofit radio network. In subsequent decades, as NPR turned into a cultural juggernaut, Stamberg and her “New York” personality became something of its unofficial mascot. In the elevators of NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, her voice guides visitors from floor to floor.

 Stamberg died Thursday, Oct. 16 at age 87, leaving behind years of her bubbly conversations and an annual, love-it-or-hate-it recipe for her family’s “cranberry relish.” 

 As one of NPR’s “founding mothers” in the 1970s, she helped shape the network’s personality: warm, liberal-leaning, and — along with or laying the groundwork for fellow longtime marquee names like Nina Totenberg, Ira Flatow, Terri Gross, and Robert Siegel — unmistakably, culturally Jewish. In later years, long after her retirement from regular on-air duties, Stamberg would still pop up to read the winners of NPR’s annual “Hanukkah Lights” short-story contest.

 “I am very sociologically Jewish. Very ethnically Jewish, although not in an observant way.  There are a lot of people like me,” Stamberg told the Jewish Women’s Archive in 2011, adding that she willingly participated in Torah study with her son Josh — today an actor — when he was becoming a bar mitzvah at her husband’s request. “I feel deeply Jewish and I deeply identify with my Jewishness, but it doesn’t need a formal affiliation for me.” 

 Born Susan Levitt in Newark in 1938, she was a child of Manhattan’s culturally Jewish scene. Stamberg grew up without regular Jewish observance, though she told the Jewish Women’s Archive she was part of a confirmation class at Temple Rodeph Sholem, the Reform synagogue on the Upper West Side. Her father, a staunch Zionist, raised money for the Weizmann Institute, the research institute founded in 1934 in Rehovot. She earned an English literature degree at Barnard College, the first in her family to go to college.

 She married Louis Stamberg, who became a longtime USAID staffer, and the duo moved to Washington, D.C. Stamberg recalled that her husband, whose father founded a congregation in Allentown, Pennsylvania, grew up “where being Jewish was really an issue.” Her father-in-law “was insistent that we, too, join a temple in Washington. I said, ‘Well, why?’” she recalled in 2011. “That’s how I came to know that the entire world was not Jewish like the world in which I had grown up.”

 After stints at WAMU, the local public radio station, and for Voice of America in India, Stamberg initially joined NPR, after its founding by an act of Congress in 1971, to cut tape for radio interviews. When All Things Considered launched in 1972, she became its co-host and thus also the first woman to anchor a broadcast news program, in her colleagues’ estimation — overcoming considerable sexism from both the network’s listeners and executives. 

 Stamberg only held the anchor post for a few years, soon pivoting to the cultural correspondent stories she would become known for. She took on other hosting duties, too, including for Weekend Edition, where she introduced the show’s trademark Sunday puzzles and first brought on the guests who would become the mega-popular program Car Talk.

 “I think all of that is very Jewish, the telling of stories, but also the seeking of opinions and also being open to the range of opinions that are out there,” Stamberg would tell the Jewish Women’s Archive about her work. 

 Laughing, she added, “I also feel that sometimes mine’s right. I think that’s very Jewish, too.”

 Stamberg is survived by her son and two grand-daughters.

On Wednesday, May 21, three-armed security officers stood guard as the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington held its annual meeting in the nation’s capital. On the agenda: discussions about the various ways antisemitic rhetoric can lead to violence.

Hours later, JCRC CEO Ron Halber says, he found out about the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy staff at the Capital Jewish Museum. It was a nightmare come to life.

“It’s just godawful. There’s no other way to describe it. It was a horrific, antisemitic, anti-Israel, violent attack,” Halber told Jewish Telegraphic Agency the next day. “For years I’ve said in Washington, we’re lucky we’ve never had anything” of this magnitude attacking the Jewish community. “That record came to an end last night.”

In the attack’s aftermath, Jewish community professionals including Halber are refocusing, again, on how to protect their institutions from threats. The shooting has also raised urgent questions: What went wrong? And what needs to change?

“Why they failed tonight we obviously have to figure out,” Eric Fingerhut, CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, said in an interview with JTA hours after the shooting, regarding security. “The risks have continued to rise as antisemitism has risen and as anti-Israel behavior in America has risen and our security teams have worked so hard to keep up with that. They obviously didn’t succeed tonight but we will not stop until we’ve ensured the security of our community,” says Fingerhut. The timeline of the attack is relatively clear and, to security analysts, troubling. According to reports, the attacker shot his victims, the couple Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, on the street outside the museum as the event, organized by the American Jewish Committee, was winding down.

He then walked inside the museum, where an eyewitness says organizers offered him water and he remained for around 10 minutes until police arrived and he confessed to the shooting. Both elements of the incident — that the attacker was able to reach his victims outside the event and then proceed inside for an extended period of time — indicate missteps, according to security professionals.

“What concerned me as a seasoned law enforcement official is in all the work and the efforts that we put into training civilians, his behavior was almost literally screaming that there’s an issue here,” says Paul Goldenberg, the former head of the Secure Community Network, which coordinates security for Jewish institutions nationwide. Goldenberg says that in a widely circulated video of the suspect entering the building, he appeared nervous and disheveled, with jerky movements.

Goldenberg says in the future, rank- and-file attendees need to be aware of those signs — and act on them by alerting someone.

“The second he walked in after the shooting there should have been a plan,” adds Goldenberg, who is now the chief policy adviser and head of global policing at Rutgers University’s Miller Center “if we know that he just shot an individuals outside, whatever security was in place, he never should have made it inside that building.”

Neither the AJC nor the museum immediately responded to JTA queries about who was responsible for security on that night. But by the next afternoon, five of the leading Jewish groups that focus on security put out a series of security recommendations for future events.

The recommendations focus principally on expanding the security perimeter of events; withholding the details of events and vetting attendees; and coordinating with law enforcement or hiring security guards. The AJC had done at least some of that: The invitation said the location would be “shared upon registration.” “The Jewish community is already among the most hardened targets in the country,” Oren Segal, who oversees the ADL’s Center on Extremism, says. “Bulletproof glass and metal detectors are the norm. And the question is, how broad does the perimeter need to be for the Jews to feel secure?”

Leading up to the event, the museum was broadly conscious of threats. The day before the shooting, it had announced a new security grant from the local D.C. government — one that Halber says the JCRC had helped arrange — in connection to a new exhibit on LGBTQ Jews.

The $30,000 grant was meant to help the museum cover the costs of security guards both at the front desk and roaming around the museum “to make sure that everybody is safe and that we are prepared in the event of an emergency,” executive director Beatrice Gurwitz told local news at the time. She added that the grant “also helps our staff prepare.” After the shooting, Gurwitz and the museum’s board said in a statement they were “heartbroken by the murders,” vowing to reopen in the coming days “with all necessary security in place.”

In addition to the museum grant, Halber has also helped arrange state and local Jewish security grants in Maryland and Virginia. He is now urging increased funding of security at Jewish institutions — funding that has already seen massive boosts in recent years following 9/11, the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue and other antisemitic attacks — and pushing the federal government to free up “billions” in more security funding for such centers.

That money, he believes, should not go toward major capital improvements like state-of-the-art monitoring systems; instead, he believes Jewish institutions are most in need of funding everyday operating costs to pay security guards and other basic needs. Halber adds that he did not blame the AJC, whose senior staff he knows personally, for any lapses. He also acknowledged that it’s impossible to fully secure oneself from all threats, while noting that the fact the victims were shot outside the venue suggested one proper course of action could be to “extend the perimeter around our institutions.”

“Resources are finite,” Halber says. “I know they did everything ossible. There’s no blame to AJC on this. But how far can you extend the perimeter? One block, two blocks?” Other Jewish community leaders with security expertise tell JTA that, while physical security measures remain crucial, they should not be expected to stop every attack. We have to know that these things are possible — not probable, but possible,” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, who escaped from a hostage-taker at his former synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, in 2022, says. Cytron- Walker has credited his own security training with saving his life and those of his congregants.

Now the rabbi at Temple Emanuel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Cytron-Walker says Jews should have the expectation that their communal leaders “are doing everything they can to make sure that people can not only feel a sense of safety, but to actually have real security protocols in place that enhance our safety.” Yet, he says, “We also have to acknowledge and understand that in any situation, there’s no way to be 110% secure.”

Cytron-Walker also famously gave his attacker tea when he entered the synagogue — something the rabbi says
he’d do again as an expression of the Jewish value of welcoming guests. Asked about the 10 minutes the D.C. attacker spent in the museum after killing two people, Cytron-Walker says he doesn’t “see a specific parallel” between the two scenarios.

“This individual, it appears, wanted to kill Jews,” he says. “The gunman in my situation wanted to get a convicted terrorist springed. I am grateful in our situation that he didn’t just walk into the synagogue and want to kill Jews. It gave us an opportunity to escape 11 hours later.”

Instead of focusing on physical security, some Jewish leaders say, there should be greater attention paid to what they believe is the real security threat: virulent anti-Israel sentiment, online and in protest networks, that has risen in the months since Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

“I can’t help but think that the persistent demonization of Israelis and Jews, along with the constant glorification of terrorist groups at various events and protests since Oct. 7, created an environment that made this tragedy more likely,” Segal says. “These rhetoric and narratives have consequences.” The ADL conducts extensive threat monitoring, but Segal says they had not been aware of the shooter’s identity prior to the attack. “He was not top-10-to-watch for us,” he says. “We can’t bat a thousand.”

But, he says, the ADL has been tracking groups “this person is associated with,” including the ANSWER Coalition and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. In a statement on X, the latter group says they had “no contact” with the shooter since 2017 and, “We have nothing to do with this shooting and do not support it.”

Goldenberg also acknowledges that “I don’t think anyone in this business has ever seen a hotter environment than what we see right now.” And in that environment, he says, everyone, even regular attendees at an event, needs to stay on alert.

“Every single individual has a place when it comes to their own personal security and the security of people around them,” he says. “I’m not saying these people should be cops or behave like cops or counterterrorism specialists.”

But he adds, “What people cannot do in this environment is hesitate for a second if they see anything that is suspicious.”

With additional reporting by Ben Sales.