Commentary Culture Investigations

The once “Shi’ite crescent” is isolated.
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Yale College’s Jewish enrollment is down from 16.4 percent in the 2010s to just 9.5 percent in 2024, a level comparable to the 1940s, when the Ivy League school imposed quotas aimed at excluding “alien” Jews from campus, according to data from the Yale Chaplain’s Office. Yale leaders said they aren’t concerned by the figures and that the school’s diminished Jewish community is “thriving.”
The comments from Yale College dean Pericles Lewis and University Chaplain Maytal Saltiel came in wake of a new report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance titled, “A Narrowing Gate: Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and Its Peers,” that identified the decline in the Jewish population at Yale as particularly troubling, given that Yale has increased the size of its undergraduate classes in recent years and has seen a decline in the number of Jewish undergraduates nonetheless.
While Lewis told the Yale Daily News that the school has a “thriving” Jewish community, he said the numbers would be “very hard to measure”—though that’s exactly what the university Chaplain’s Office does, with data tracing back to the 1940s.
Lewis also said that “So many students—like, I’m half Jewish—a lot of people might consider themselves Jewish but not answer the question in a particular way,” though the Chaplain’s office indicates that it accounts for that. “When students cite multiple religious identities, we count each student once (i.e., if a student identifies as Methodist and Muslim, they would be counted as 1/2 of a person in each category).”
The “Religious Diversity at Yale” survey found that 9.5 percent of undergraduate students identify as Jewish, a 42 percent decrease from the 16.4 percent of students who identified as Jewish in the 2010s and a 52 percent decrease from the 19.9 percent of students who identified as such in the 2000s.

A spokesman for Yale, responding from a nameless university email account, downplayed the school’s own data, telling the Washington Free Beacon that the Chaplain’s office survey is intended “to give an overall view of the religious diversity at Yale, not to report on the exact percentage of a particular community.” A spokesman for Yale University president Maurie McInnis, who took office in 2024, did not respond to a request for comment.
The 9.5 percent mark is the lowest in decades—even below the 9.9 percent of undergraduates who identified as Jewish in the 1940s, according to the survey, a time when the university imposed ruthless quotas on the number of Jews admitted. At that time, Yale intentionally rejected Jewish students in an attempt to address what university leaders described as the “Jewish problem,” according to Dan Oren’s history of anti-Semitism at Yale, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale.
While Yale passed a resolution banning quotas on race or religion in 1946, the Jewish quota continued informally into the late 1950s, according to Oren. It came to an end around 1960 thanks to geopolitical pressures stemming from the Cold War.
“The academic establishment started to ask itself, ‘How has Russia accomplished so much?’ We had been on top of the world militarily in 1945 with the atomic bomb,” Oren said on the Tablet podcast Gatecrashers. “And it became very clear that the American educational establishment, including Yale, was excluding many of its best and brightest, and that was not just having a consequence at Yale, but potentially threatening all of Yale life.”
The informal quota was an outgrowth of Yale’s decision in the 1920s to cap Jewish enrollment around 10 percent under the direction of then-admissions chairman Robert Corwin, who—in response to Yale’s 1921 freshman class, which was 13 percent Jewish—compiled a folder labeled “Jewish Problem,” Oren writes.
Corwin wrote at the time that Jewish students lacked “attributes of refinement and honor,” did not “share the ‘ethical code’ of their peers,” and “take all that is offered or available and give little or nothing in return,” according to a separate 2006 book on the topic, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admissions and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, by University of California, Berkeley, sociology professor Jerome Karabel.
“So the faculty and deans privately worked out a scheme specifically to limit the number of Jews who were the most visible of the unwelcome or the undesirables at that time,” Oren told the Gatecrashers podcast. Admissions officers, he explained, filtered applicants based on in-person interviews and “started asking questions about parental ethnic background.” Then, “at least once a year, the dean of Yale College and the dean of admissions at Yale College would sit down, and they would go through the list of admitted students and make their best guess, and they would compliment themselves when they found that the eventual enrollment came pretty close to 10 percent,” Oren said.
The practice continued into World War II even as it generated financial problems for Yale. While the war meant that fewer young men were applying for college, Jews were an exception because they “apparently finish secondary school at an earlier age than Gentiles” and thus applied for and started college before they were drafted, Yale’s then-chairman of the board of admissions, Edward Noyes, lamented in the Board of Admissions’ 1943-44 Report to the President and Fellows, according to The Chosen.
Noyes’s solution was “to adopt standards of selection from this group more severe than in the past, in order to prevent [the number of Jews] from reaching an undue proportion in the residential colleges,” as he wrote in the report. Yale refers to dormitories as residential colleges, and the policy continued even as the war pushed down enrollment numbers.
The Chaplain’s Office survey is not comprehensive but does track trends over time. Data “is self-reported by incoming students,” and the survey notes it has a 32 percent response rate. It is an “imperfect system that is intended to provide a broad sense of the extent of religious diversity on campus.” But the methodology has been consistent for decades, and the office indicates it has “highlighted notable shifts in the religious affiliations claimed by Yale College students” over the years.
Lewis and Saltiel did not respond to requests for comment. The Yale spokesman, responding on Lewis and Saltiel’s behalf, said the school is “deeply committed to fostering a thriving Jewish community and that is evident in students’ increasing engagement with Yale’s many Jewish student organizations, as well as with the Slifka Center at Yale and Chabad at Yale.”
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Democratic lawmakers have created the high-tax environment that is driving people and capital to flee elsewhere.

The U.K.-based tabloid Daily Mail put making quick ad revenue over presenting a complete factual understanding of the ballistic test results of the rifle allegedly used to kill conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Their article, long-windedly titled “Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did NOT match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson, new court filing claims,” intentionally misrepresented what the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were able to recover from Kirk’s body, proving fuel to nutjob conspiracy theorists.

That deceptive headline was copied for the Daily Mail’s now viral X post.

 

Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did NOT match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson, new court filing claims https://t.co/l70QXvGBrb
— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) March 30, 2026
 

“The bullet that killed conservative commentator Charlie Kirk may not match the rifle used by suspected killer Tyler Robinson, a bombshell new court filing states,” wrote U.S. reporter Melissa G Koenig in her first paragraph, essentially making seem as though the ballistic markings left on the bullet did not match the rifle.

Amid bombarding the reader with ads all over the page, the article noted, “the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ‘was unable to identify the bullet recovered at autopsy to the rifle allegedly tied to Mr Robinson [sic].’”

But what did that mean?

The headline, X post, and first sentence of the article were intentionally worded to deceive the reader; to make it sound as though the bullet recovered from Kirk’s body didn’t match a test bullet fired from the recovered bolt-action rifle. Only later in the article did it note the ATF wasn’t able to recover enough intact material from Kirk’s body to identify markings left by the barrel.

When a bullet is fired from a gun, the hard steel of the barrel leaves markings on the softer copper jacket that are fairly consistent bullet-to-bullet, basically becoming a finger print for the gun. Apparently, there was not enough left of the copper jacket to show that fingerprint. However, what Koenig wrote made it seem like a completely different gun was used in the assassination. Of course, she was citing the alleged killer’s defense team.

At worse, the Daily Mail wanted to generate an inflammatory headline so they could get revenue from X engagements and so they could serve up an ungodly amount of ads to those who clicked to read more on their website. Their headline was no better than something the National Enquirer would cook up to get product sold in the checkout line in grocery stores.

At best, it showed an ignorance of how ballistic testing and gun tracing worked.

According to her author page, “Melissa is a senior breaking news reporter who joined Daily Mail in 2021. She covers a variety of topics including politics, business and entertainment. Prior to joining Daily Mail, Melissa worked for the Long Island Herald, where she earned Honorable Mention for Best Front Page and Second-place for In-Depth Reporting at the New York Press Association in 2020.”

The Daily Mail and Koenig’s framing of the ballistic test results were an example of the worst tendencies and instincts of British tabloid journalism.

During Monday’s episode of The Situation Room on CNN, co-host Pamela Brown and CNN religion commentator Father Edward Beck teamed up to attack War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Christian terms throughout his tenure, especially during the recent conflict in Iran. Fr. Beck called Hegseth “unqualified” and pushed Christians, especially Catholics, to rethink their alignment with Trump Administration policies pertaining to defense and immigration.

Notably, Brown recently completed a documentary on “The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” which lost most of its attention base due to the Iran conflict. 

The segment was in response to comments from Pope Leo XIV that called for the end of war and said God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.” 

 

CNN religion commentator Fr. Edward Beck was dismayed at Sec. @PeteHegseth’s use of religious language and said “Hegseth is praying for overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy at a Christian worship service.” pic.twitter.com/CiGNJt7NPk
— Nick (@nspin310) March 30, 2026
 

When asked about a compilation of Hegseth’s use of religious phrases, Fr. Beck — who was Chris Cuomo’s favorite priest in his CNN days — showed his dismay and went in at Hegseth:

Well, it’s really significant because Pete Hegseth is praying for overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy at a Christian worship service.

The priest and the host failed to explain that some of Hegseth’s martial language comes directly from King David in the Psalms. There in the Bible is war and God preparing his chosen ones for battle. But this is CNN, so here comes the “Christian Nationalism”:

So, I think one of the positions here is actually rooted in the New Testament. And the other one is Christian Nationalism, which in my opinion is a contradiction in terms. So, I think it’s really very interesting that the two are pitted against each other, and the pope is kind of taking it on, you know, heads on.

Brown, alike to her anti-Christian documentary, invoked the “critics” in another question to Fr. Beck:

And the Pentagon has defended Secretary Hegseth invoking religion and his public statements by saying he is simply embracing his personal faith and the country’s history as a Christian nation. That’s what they say. But some critics argue that his language could divide what is supposed to be a secular military. What do you think, Father Beck?

 

On The Situation Room, CNN contributor Fr. Edward Beck also connected the crucifixion of Jesus to the Iran war.
“…So, this is the worst possible moment for Christian to justify war. This is the week when the church commemorates a state sanctioned execution of an innocent man” pic.twitter.com/TI0wXQdoDO
— Nick (@nspin310) March 30, 2026
 

The military is religiously neutral — allowing religious freedom — that doesn’t mean it’s “secular” in that no one should pray in the military or speak in religious terms. Fr. Beck connected the war back to the crucifixion of Christ, as if the U.S. should let itself be crucified in some sense by Iran? 

Well, I think that this is Holy Week, right? So, this is the worst possible moment for Christian to justify war. This is the week when the church commemorates a state sanctioned execution of an innocent man.

(…)

So, in this very week, when Christians are reacting and reenacting Jesus entering Jerusalem nonviolently, like heading toward crucifixion rather than conquest, you have American political and military leaders invoking his name to justify airstrikes.

 

Fr. Beck also called Hegseth “unqualified” and questioned Catholics and Christians who support Trump Administration policies as people having “issues with trying to allow Christian scriptures to justify their positions.” https://t.co/pJtINCLe71 pic.twitter.com/nuF7FcwVbW
— Nick (@nspin310) March 30, 2026
 

Brown asked about the uniqueness of the first American pope’s involvement in politics. In response, Fr. Beck questioned if Christians and Catholics who support the “unqualified” defense secretary are truly following scripture.

So, this is a real, I think, moment of conscience, not only for all Christians, especially for Catholics, because your pope is on one side of the question and unqualified defense secretary, I mean that’s just not my opinion, that’s the opinion of American generals, is on the other side. 

So, I think Christians have to ask, in particular, Catholics, who do you align yourself with? Where do you stand? Do you accept the pope saying: Jesus is nonviolent? This war is immoral? Or do you look at people who really are having very difficult, I think, issues with trying to allow Christian Scriptures to justify their positions.

It’s not like there is any violence in the Bible or anything.

So we’re supposed to accept this is a totally unbiased priest who gave his unbiased opinion on the unqualified defense secretary. Only on CNN.

The transcript is below. Click “expand”:

CNN’s The Situation Room

March 30, 2026

10:49:47 AM Eastern

PAMELA BROWN: Happening now, Christians around the world are preparing for Easter this Holy Week, Pope Leo’s first at the helm of the Catholic Church. The pope raised eyebrows yesterday during his Palm Sunday Mass when he rejected attempts to co-opt God as justification for war. Many are viewing those remarks from the first U.S. born pontiff as aimed at members of the Trump Administration.

[Cuts to video]

POPE LEO XIV: [Voice Translated to English] Brothers and sisters, this is our God, Jesus, prince of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, even though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.

[Cuts back to live]

BROWN: Joining us now to discuss is CNN religion contributor and Roman Catholic Priest, Father Edward Beck. Nice to have you on, Father Beck. How do you read those comments from the pope?

FR. EDWARD BECK: Well, I think he’s quoting scripture and not playing politics. I mean this is Isaiah chapter one, where the prophet is telling Israel with hands of blood that God turns away from their prayers because of their violence. 

So, the pope is really standing in like a 2700th year old tradition of religious leaders telling the powerful that your piety is hollow if your hands are bloody. So people have, like, accused Pope Leo of meddling in politics. He’s not, he’s simply being steeped in the oldest job description, really, in the Hebrew prophetic tradition.

BROWN: Let’s play some sound from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has discussed religion and war in recent briefings and interviews, to give us some context around these comments from the pope. Let’s watch.

[Cuts to video compilation]

SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans and break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish. 

Blessed be the lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. 

May the lord grant unyielding strength and refuge to our warriors.

The Providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops. And we’re committed to this mission.

[Cuts back to live]

BROWN: So, talk about the significance of that language, especially when discussed in the context of this conflict with Iran.

FR. BECK: Well, it’s really significant because Pete Hegseth is praying for overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy at a Christian worship service. 

I mean, the pope comes back with, what about gethsemane? I mean, Jesus rebukes the disciple who draws the sword. I mean, Jesus of the gospel refused the sword even to save his own life. 

So, I think one of the positions here is actually rooted in the New Testament. And the other one is Christian Nationalism, which in my opinion is a contradiction in terms. So, I think it’s really very interesting that the two are pitted against each other, and the pope is kind of taking it on, you know, heads on.

BROWN: And the Pentagon has defended Secretary Hegseth invoking religion and his public statements by saying he is simply embracing his personal faith and the country’s history as a Christian nation. That’s what they say. But some critics argue that his language could divide what is supposed to be a secular military. What do you think, Father Beck?

FR. BECK: Well, I think that this is holy week, right? So, this is the worst possible moment for Christian to justify war. This is the week when the church commemorates a state sanctioned execution of an innocent man. I mean, the pope said that Christians in the region may not even be able to celebrate Easter. 

As you know, on Palm Sunday, just yesterday, a cardinal was blocked from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Palm Sunday. 

So, in this very week, when Christians are reacting and reenacting Jesus entering Jerusalem nonviolently, like heading toward crucifixion rather than conquest, you have American political and military leaders invoking his name to justify airstrikes. 

And so I just think it’s really interesting that the first American pope is rebuking American power, military power. That’s historic. It’s never happened before.

BROWN: Yeah. And he’s doing it with that. And he’s also been critical of the immigration crackdowns from this administration. Tell us more about just how unusual that is from a pope, let alone an American pope.

FR. BECK: Well, it’s unusual because first of all, this first American pontiff is telling the American government that their conduct is incompatible with the gospel. So, you have a pope who knows American politics. Knows the ethos of the people here. Maybe like roughly 20 percent, right, of the U.S. are American Catholics. 

So, this is a real, I think, moment of conscience, not only for all Christians, especially for Catholics, because your pope is on one side of the question and unqualified defense secretary, I mean that’s just not my opinion, that’s the opinion of American generals, is on the other side. 

So, I think Christians have to ask, in particular, Catholics, who do you align yourself with? Where do you stand? Do you accept the pope saying: Jesus is nonviolent? This war is immoral? Or do you look at people who really are having very difficult, I think, issues with trying to allow Christian scriptures to justify their positions.

BROWN: All right. Father Beck, thank you for coming to offer your perspective. We appreciate it.

(…)

Karen Attiah, the radical beefcake columnist who lost her job at the Washington Post after “endangering” colleagues with her inflammatory posts about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, has repeatedly denounced mainstream journalism as a racist industry in which black voices are “silenced” and progressive black women are “hunted.”
This summer, Attiah will receive the Distinguished Service Award from the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), a mainstream association dedicated to the promotion of “high standards” and “ethical behavior.” The award was designed to honor journalists whose “work and or actions have made a positive difference on our craft and on society.” The SPJ Dateline Awards dinner will take place in June at the National Press Club, where the SPJ will also induct several journalists into its hall of fame.
(Karen Attiah/Instagram)
The Post fired Attiah in September for “gross misconduct” after the beefcake columnist wrote a series of racially charged posts about Kirk’s assassination and blamed gun violence on “white America.” Attiah responded by hiring a professional photographer to take photos of her posing in front of the Post headquarters wearing a socialist ball gag and holding a flaming newspaper like a torch. She promptly retained a Soros-funded legal advocacy group and sued for unlawful termination.
Taylor Lorenz, the left-wing psychopath and former Post journalist who “quit” her job after accusing Joe Biden of “genocide,” was outraged. “Karen was one of the most brilliant voices still left at the Post and what she posted was completely correct,” wrote Lorenz, who has praised accused murderer Luigi Mangione as a moral icon. “The way these news organizations are culling any journalists who speak truth to power is appalling.”
Others weren’t so sad to see the beefcake columnist go. “Karen Attiah wrote two columns in the last three months, and one was about her body-building regimen. I think the Post will be OK,” one Post staffer, granted anonymity due to personal-safety concerns, told the Washington Free Beacon at the time.
Attiah’s firing for undermining the physical safety of her colleagues with racially charged posts was somewhat poetic given her insistence in 2020 that the New York Times had “put black people and black journalists in danger” by publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) arguing that riots were bad.
Post journalists and others were arguably justified in fearing for their safety given Attiah’s history of violent rhetoric. She expressed support for “Palestinian liberation” in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist massacre by Hamas. In 2020, she argued that white women were collectively deserving of violent “revenge” for enabling racial injustice. Attiah’s social media posts about her obsession with bodybuilding and (more recently) swordplay frequently promote violence. For example, she said her fitness goals involve becoming “more lethal” and building “legs strong enough to crush men’s hopes and dreams.”

Attiah invoked violent imagery in 2024 after Post owner Jeff Bezos blocked the paper from publishing a pointless endorsement of Kamala Harris. “Today has been an absolute stab in the back,” she wrote. “What an insult to those of us who have literally put our careers and lives on the line, to call out threats to human rights and democracy.”
Since leaving the Post, Attiah has posted sporadically on Substack and prolifically on Bluesky, the social media app for deranged liberals who will never be happy. She has also launched an online school for “resistance” liberals that aims to guide students through the “intellectual and emotional labor of building a liberated future.” She recently announced a new course on politics and soccer—the most anti-American sport ever devised—that purports to explain how the World Cup is a “framework for how we move through the world.”
In recent days, Attiah has been defending herself from accusations of being a closet fascist after she suggested on Bluesky that Elon Musk’s X was a better social media platform for following African soccer news.
Congrats to all!
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Pro-abortion writer Jessica Valenti has accused both me and Ramesh of distorting her comments regarding abortion bans and maternal mortality. She states that her comments…

We are grateful for such an incredible response in our ongoing spring webathon.

During a Tuesday press briefing, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth detailed his recent surprise visit to an undisclosed U.S. Central Command base engaged in Operation Epic Fury, recalling the enthusiasm he witnessed from service members.
“We spoke to all ranks, all services—none of whom knew we were coming,” Hegseth said. “It was not rehearsed or scripted. Sometimes we just wandered. What I witnessed was the American warrior unleashed.”
“I met a junior airman,” Hegseth shared, “who when asked what they needed, she simply looked up at me with a sly smile on her face and said, ‘More bombs, sir, and bigger bombs.’ We will happily oblige her.”

A crew chief that the secretary flew with told Hegseth, “It’s been a busy few weeks, sir. Tough stuff, but I’m so honored to be called up. This fight is long overdue. We need to address it for our kids. We cannot pass the buck. Please thank the president from us.”
Hegseth described the resolve and unity of U.S. troops on the ground. “What those Americans said to me—young and old, officer and [non-commissioned officer], male and female, black and white—was, ‘Let’s finish the mission. Get us even more bombs, bigger bombs, more targets. Let us finish this.'”
“These troops, they want to finish this fight for their kids and their grandkids,” he noted. “This is about history. This is about legacy. Success matters, and because of this president and these Americans, we’re closer than ever before to winning.”
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