The Free Press

What would you have thought if, a decade ago, we told you Jews had been pushed out of a country’s public life? What if we told you it happened not in some remote backwater society—but in Canada?

It would have sounded absurd. And yet.

A viral piece by Jesse Brown in The Atlantic this week describes how antisemitism has seeped into nearly every level of what was once considered one of the world’s most progressive societies. It has manifested not only in synagogue attacks and shootings—of which there are many—but in the quiet withdrawal of Jews from Canadian society “without any glass or bones being broken,” simply because the evidence that they are no longer welcome has become overwhelming.

What does that look like? It looks like a Holocaust commemoration ceremony at a Montréal college—held annually for more than 30 years—being canceled this week because of what administrators called a “volatile geopolitical climate.” It looks like 80 percent of Jewish doctors and medical students in Ontario experiencing antisemitism at work since October 7. It looks like the McGill Law Students Association voting this week to boycott Israeli universities following years of escalating campus hostility, including activists telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland,” and graffiti stating “kill all Jews” on bathroom stalls.

Welcome back to the news of the past week. America is at war, but Fort Lauderdale is very much on spring break. Party on, kids. For everyone else, let’s get to the big stuff.

→ We don’t care what the voters say: The big debate between California gubernatorial candidates has been canceled since it didn’t meet Hollywood’s DEI requirements. But really. It’s too white! And so the debate between all these pale nightwalkers was called off. The University of Southern California apparently used discriminatory criteria to decide who got to be on stage, and that criteria was to select the six candidates who were polling the highest and had raised the most, according to CalMatters. Sounds racist to me. The voters are wrong, and their opinions do not count unless they produce a Benetton ad. The donors are also wrong. USC, a school famous for having the hottest, richest student body, will alone decide who is allowed to run for office, and it’s the cast of Euphoria.

The candidates are: Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco and Democrats Tom Steyer, Katie Porter, Eric Swalwell, and Matt Mahan. Okay, reading these names, I kinda see their point. Steve, Tom, and Katie? Is this a Little House on the Prairie remake?

Now, all of those candidates need to sit alone and ask themselves why they are not women of color. Once they decide to drop out and find a woman of color to march in their stead, then we can resume the gubernatorial debate. Or if one of them wants to go trans, that would be acceptable. Steve (Stephanie?) Hilton, do what everyone who applies to USC does: Fake an ethnic ancestry.

John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast, joins School of War to break down how the U.S. and Israel are executing a “neurological” campaign—using precision strikes to target the Iranian regime’s center of gravity. It’s not a new strategy; in fact, it draws on con…

I was captivated this week by my old friend Jay Solomon’s piece investigating the story of Calla Walsh, a privileged young woman from Massachusetts who went down the rabbit hole of radical activism and is now a mouthpiece for the Islamic regime of Iran.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of our Breaking History episode from last year about Ulrike Meinhof—th…

When there is war in the Middle East, not a day passes without Israel dominating the headlines. The Jewish state does not want for attention. Yet one chapter of its history is little-known outside the diaspora: the story of Jews who fled Europe for British Mandatory Palestine, then returned to fight in World War II.

There’s a line of thinking that if Israel had existed during the Holocaust, things might have turned out differently. We’ll never know for sure. But in a sense, there already was an Israel. It had no state and no army—but it did have volunteers from the pre-state Jewish community who enlisted in the British forces. During the war, 32 of them parachuted into Europe to aid Allied forces—and to try to do something their still-theoretical country could not: save the Jews of Europe.

This is the story that the brilliant Matti Friedman takes on in his new book, Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe, which hit shelves this week. The exclusive excerpt below follows one of the volunteers, Haim Hermesh, who would find himself among the first soldiers of a country not yet born. —The Editors

In 1944, when Haim climbs the ladder into the Royal Air Force bomber at Bari, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, he’s 25. He sits on the hard bench with the bulk of his parachute on his back, his body vibrating with the roar of four engines as the bomber lifts off and flies east into the night sky, out of Allied airspace.

His secret documents are in an asbestos pouch strapped to his left calf. The pouch has a fuse that can be pulled to ignite a cylinder of gunpowder that will incinerate the contents if necessary, a letter of introduction from the British officers of MI9, a key to the radio code, and forged documents identifying him as someone other than Haim Hermesh. His orders are the same ones given to the other parachutists who volunteered for the operation back in Palestine: Coordinate the rescue of downed Allied airmen and escaped prisoners of war behind enemy lines, and establish radio contact between resistance forces and British commanders. Like the others, he understands that his return from the mission is to be hoped for but not expected.

In a pocket he has a thin saw, the kind that can cut through prison bars, concealed in a strip of rubber. On his silk scarf is a printed map of Yugoslavia—a country that in 1944 is occupied by the Nazis and their allies, and that in our own times no longer exists.

OpenAI’s Sora video generation tool was hailed as a breakthrough when it was introduced in 2024. Journalists called it “jaw-dropping,” especially in its later versions. Disney signed a multiyear deal with OpenAI for Sora to use its characters.

But on Tuesday, OpenAI canceled Sora. One view is that this is evidence of AI getting overhyped, and OpenAI is retreating from an area in which it had failed to find success and fallen behind competitors like Google and ByteDance. It’s being trotted out as an example of how AI is not living up to its promise.

I have a different view.

In June of 2023, Kim Francis did something that 10 years ago would have been unimaginable, but is now as American as apple pie: She shot herself up with Ozempic, praying it would change her life.

“My blood sugar was out of control. My weight was out of control,” she said. And yet, despite her worsening arthritis and type 2 diabetes, she still craved food.

She also craved alcohol, and was beginning to worry that her drinking habits were unhealthy.

And then, just like that: One shot took it all away. Her daily drink turned into one a month, her chronic joint pain vanished, she dropped 25 pounds. Ozempic didn’t just improve her health, it gave her choices—to do “things in life that I wasn’t doing before,” like going to the gym each day. She was finally sleeping through the night.

And yet when we spoke recently, she said she wasn’t sure Ozempic had made her life better. “My mind and my day-to-day is kind of gray,” Francis told me. In the first 48 hours after she injects herself—which is every week—the emotional impact is almost unbearable. “I just feel worthless,” she said.

This is the trade-off of weight loss for her: “You don’t want to be involved in life” for two days of every week.

Last July, as part of a $221 million settlement with the federal government over antisemitism claims, Columbia University pledged to reform its approach to Middle Eastern studies. Among the commitments made was a promise “to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced.”

But as The Free Press’s Maya Sulkin reported last month, that pledge appears not to have been upheld. All four finalists under consideration for the Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature, a prominent position in the Middle East Studies department, had expressed overt animosity toward Israel.

Now, Columbia’s history department has made its choice. In a March 9 message that has not previously been reported, the selection committee “unanimously and enthusiastically” recommended Harvard professor Rosie Bsheer for the position.

Bsheer has a long history of anti-Israel activism. One year ago, she was removed as a leader of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies for “insufficiently balanced” programming on Palestine. While she was associate director, the center hosted speakers who “appeared to justify Hamas’s actions” on October 7, 2023, according to Harvard’s antisemitism report. The Trump administration accused the center of fueling “antisemitic harassment” and reflecting “ideological capture.”

“I didn’t sleep a wink. Why? Because I was with MS-13 gang members.”

That is how businessman Terren Peizer remembers the night he spent in jail after being arrested in 2023. After landing at Los Angeles International Airport with his fiancée, Peizer was swarmed by authorities and cuffed on his hands, feet, and ankles. He had just been charged with insider trading.

Then his situation went from bad to worse. In 2024, a federal jury convicted Peizer of selling his own shares in the healthcare company that counted him as its chairman and CEO. Then, in 2025, a judge sentenced Peizer to 42 months in prison and ordered him to pay $18 million. Federal prosecutors hailed his takedown in a press release and pledged to “combat sophisticated frauds that exploit our securities markets.”

But with the help of President Donald Trump, Peizer is now a free man. While he was appealing the conviction, the president issued Peizer “a full and unconditional pardon,” as the decree put it in January. Since then, the original indictment was dismissed by the Justice Department, which also supported Peizer’s request for reversal of his conviction. A judge approved that request on Wednesday.

“I believed that my case was such obvious lawfare” by the Joe Biden administration “that the merits would prevail,” said Peizer, 66, from his home in Puerto Rico. “I couldn’t get a fair trial in LA because all the jury heard every day was ‘rich white guy.’ ”

Less than 20 years ago, in 2008, voters in deep-blue California passed a proposition outlawing same-sex marriage. California was not an outlier: Only 40 percent of Americans in 2008 believed same-sex marriage should be legal. Just seven years later, in May 2015, 60 percent did. A month later, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states. That’s about as fast as cultural change gets.

Identities and behaviors changed along with attitudes. For a decade, an increasing number of Americans—especially young adults—identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and more reported same-sex behavior. Recently, however, some of those trends have begun to reverse. But the reversal is not as broad as it first appears: It is mostly due to a steep drop among bisexual young women. Patterns of behavior diverge even more: Women report much less same-sex activity in the last two years, while men report slightly more.

So what’s going on?

When I was writing my book Generations a few years ago, I was curious whether there had been any changes in people’s self-reported sexual orientation and in their sexual behavior. Would more people identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB)? And would more people have sex with someone of the same gender?