Tikvah Fund Secures $10.4M Grant From Trump, Pushes for Censorship to Advance Zionism

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Tikvah Fund Secures .4M Grant From Trump, Pushes for Censorship to Advance Zionism
Tikvah's Jonathan Silver Rabbi Benjamin Elton (Twitter)

Sentiments among many conservative Jewish groups lean toward demanding restrictions on free speech in order to curb “antisemitism” (i.e. criticism of Israel): “absolutely no doubt that people need to go to jail.”

By Chris Menahan, Reposted from Information Liberation, December 27, 2025

The Jewish-American neoconservative Tikvah Fund, which the Trump administration awarded over $10 million in Sept to counter “the pathology of anti-Semitism” and teach the Talmud, has already gotten to work pushing censorship to advance Zionism.

The NY Times last month told a remarkable story about how the record $10.4 million grant the Tikvah Fund secured from the National Endowment for the Humanities was rammed through.

From The New York Times, “Fired Scholars and Big Grants to Favored Projects: Inside Trump’s N.E.H.”:

One of them — $10.4 million to the conservative Jewish educational group Tikvah, for a project aimed at combating antisemitism — was awarded after the scholarly council voted against it, according to five people with direct knowledge of the discussion, who were granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

The council members said there were questions about the vagueness of the Tikvah application and concern that the project tipped into advocacy, which the agency is supposed to avoid.

[…] A little more than two weeks after the Tikvah announcement, the White House fired all but four members of the endowment’s scholarly council.

In November, Tikvah held their Jewish Leadership Conference with Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss and Dan Senor to discuss how best to advance the interests of Jews and Israel.

Their naked ethnic activism caused quite the stir after being clipped by yours truly.

Tikvah’s Jonathan Silver on Christmas put out an interview with the chief minister of Sydney’s Great Synagogue, Rabbi Benjamin Elton, to discuss how “anti-Israel” and “anti-Semitic” attitudes can best be suppressed.

The interview was recorded on Dec 17th.

As I wrote in my description of the clip on X:

Tikvah’s Jonathan Silver tells Rabbi Benjamin Elton that a “psychic animal spirit” was “let loose” over the past two years giving people “permission” to express “anti-Semitic” ideas.

Suppressing such views was a “very impressive civic achievement” that has now unraveled, he says.

Rabbi Elton, chief minister of Sydney’s Great Synagogue, laments the rise of “anti-Semitism” on the left and right, citing Bob Carr, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens.

“I don’t think it’s at all clear how that genie gets put back in the bottle.”

“We’re not in 1990 anymore — where if you control the media as it then existed, you basically control what people have access to,” Elton said later in the interview.

“I do think there’s an issue and a problem that we face that you could stop every march — which I don’t want to do as that happens — but even if you did, if you confiscated every ‘Globalize the Intifada’ poster, you could still sit in your home and consume endless amounts of the most vitriolic anti-Israel and anti-Semitic material and be radicalized by that and be motivated by that, and short of having a Chinese-style system which you shut down and cut off access to the internet, it’s not at all clear how you deal with access to material,” he continued.

“What do you think meaningful government action would look like now? What would you hope that the government would do now?” Silver asked.

“I think there has to be an attempt to defang the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist movement of its anti-Semitism,” Elton responded.

“People shouldn’t be allowed to say things, or have certain placards, or march in certain areas,” he added.

Joel Burnie, Executive Manager of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), said similar in the wake of the Bondi attack, demanding “No more protests!”

As did Nick Aronson, Chief of Staff to Australia’s Anti-Semitism Czar Jillian Segal:

Aronson told an American Jewish Committee conference call that there’s “absolutely no doubt that people need to go to jail” and get “expelled” from Australia for so-called anti-Semitism.

“We can always arrest more people, make no mistake, but you can never arrest enough, to be honest,” he added.

The Jewish Lobby’s demands were quickly taken up by the government.

As I exclusively reported last week, the “seven largest Jewish communities on earth” hold biweekly Zoom meetings organized by the Anti-Defamation League to “share tips” and “draft legislation that might work in other countries” to advance their people’s agenda.

These censorship bills most likely came out of those very discussions.

Of course, the Lobby has similar plans for America.

AIPAC-funded Sen. Lindsey Graham last week wrote on X, “My New Year’s wish is for Congress to bring social media companies to heel.”

“We’re calling on Senate leadership – Republican and Democrat alike – to allow a week in February 2026 be dedicated to advancing legislation that protects children from online threats and tackling the Section 230 crisis once and for all,” Graham said.

Chris Menahan is a political commentator and a writer for the website Information Liberation. 

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