The ‘Rabbi’ and ‘Peace Activist’ Who Cheered the Hamas Oct. 7 Attack

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

When pro-Hamas insurrectionists stormed Capitol Hill, Brant Rosen, described as “one of the demonstrators”, was quoted as falsely accusing Jews of genocide. He was later arrested.

In Chicago, where he claims to have co-founded the “first anti-Zionist temple”, he showed up at a rally urging, “stop the violence, and then, to work toward a true and lasting and just peace.”

‘Rabbi’ Brant Rosen, a co-founder of the pro-terrorist JVP Rabbinical Council (the misleadingly named Jewish Voice for Peace is neither Jewish nor peaceful) is a public face of the political campaign against Israel disguised as calls for “peace” and a “ceasefire”. The media describes him as a “rabbi” and as a “peace activist”. Much like JVP, he’s as much of one as the other.

Rosen actually became a regional director for the American Friends Service Committee, a radical anti-American and anti-Israel Quaker group, after being pushed out of his synagogue for his hatred of the Jewish State and support for Islamic terrorists. In its 5-year tribute to him, AFSC did not use the ‘rabbi’ title. While at the AFSC, he claimed to have opened the “first anti-Zionist temple”. In reality, the “temple” appears to be a PO Box opposite a Little Caesars.

Whether the “temple” exists is unclear, but Brant Rosen’s hatred for Jews is all too real.

“When I heard the initial reports of Hamas’ attacks on Israel this past Saturday, I will be completely honest – my first reaction was ‘good for them,’” Brant Rosen wrote in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7.

When Hamas terrorists burst into homes in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, massacring families and livestreaming the horrors on Facebook, Brant Rosen described it as “not the first time this community had experienced Palestinian armed resistance”.

This is Brant Rosen and the Jewish Voice for Peace’s idea of “Palestinian armed resistance”.

“A father huddles over a mortally injured girl lying in a pool of blood as his wife wails.”

In his column, published at the People’s Voice (formerly the Communist Party’s Daily Worker), he claimed that “this latest violence did not occur in a vacuum. It is but the latest manifestation of an injustice that Israel has been perpetrating against the Palestinian people for decades.” 

Later in October, Brant Rosen argued that, “Hamas’ abduction of hostages – brutal and heinous as it was – occurred in response to a colonial, apartheid regime that (sic) been governing their lives for the past 75 years.”

Brant Rosen gets a great deal of mileage for his activism by claiming to be a “rabbi”. In reality, he was “ordained” by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College: an atheistic movement which believes neither in the Bible nor the G-d of the Bible, or in any actual form of Judaism. He speaks most convincingly about faith when discussing his love of Quaker spiritual teachings.

When he announced that he had founded the “first anti-Zionist temple”, the story popped up everywhere, including at the JTA: always eager to provide a platform for anti-Israel activists.

But the only address for Tzedek Chicago, the tattooed clergyman’s “anti-Zionist temple”, is a Chicago post office box seven miles from Rosen’s house and opposite a Little Caesars pizza place. The weekly “services” are happening in closed Zoom sessions.

The launch meeting for Tzedek Chicago was held in the basement of a Lutheran Church of the kind whose staff all list their pronouns. And he has described himself as “a Jew who also finds a comfortable spiritual home in the Quaker community” who testified that “my spiritual life has greatly benefitted from my encounter with Quaker thought and practice.”

The American Friends Service Committee had developed extensive Communist ties early in the last century and went to work covering up the worst horrors of these regimes. It even defended the Khmer Rogue genocide, claiming that the United States was spreading lies to undermine an “alternative model of development and social organization.”

After the fall of the Communist regimes, the AFSC turned to Islamic terrorism: its people met with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and traveled to Iran. The AFSC defended the Hamas fundraisers of the Holy Land Foundation and ran a piece arguing for “Decriminalizing Hamas” urging that the Islamic terror group be removed from the list of terrorist organizations.

“When the Palestinians chose Hamas as their ruling party, by and large, they were choosing another alternative,” another AFSC article argued. “In this instance, they were mistaken in thinking that the world would respect their choice.”

Rosen claims that by opposing Israel he’s advocating for Jewish values, the actual values he’s advocating for are those of a Quaker group that partners with Hamas’ backers in Iran.

He established the “Jewish Fast for Gaza” back in 2009 a few years after Hamas took over.

Brant’s purpose in fasting was, among other things, “to call upon Israel, the US, and the international community to engage in negotiations with Hamas.”

By 2012, Brant Rosen had become so extreme that he was actually attacking Hussein Ibish, a leading anti-Israel Arab figure, for writing too harshly about Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.

“It was only the armed resistance of Hamas in Gaza that managed to bring Hilary Clinton to the region and actively engage with the Israelis and Palestinians,” Brant Rosen argued.

“Meshaal’s opening went utterly unregarded by the Obama administration, who refused to deal with Hamas and chose to maintain its support of Israel’s crippling siege of Gaza.”

After the Hamas kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens in 2014, Brant Rosen complained that Israel “knew full well that the teens had been murdered shortly after their abduction” and was “using the pretense of their kidnapping to brutally crack down on Hamas members.”

“If Israel was truly interested in following the course of justice in order to preserve life, it could have dropped its abject refusal to deal with Hamas following the November 2012 cease-fire and pursued further negotiations aimed at ending its crushing siege,” he went on to argue.

That same year, Brant Rosen left the synagogue he used to work at after his “views, work, and words on the Israel/Palestine issue caused deep rifts among the members” and got a job with the Quakers working against Israel and learning from the teachings that had praised Pol Pot.

The “close collaboration” between the American Friends Service Committee and JVP is such that some critics have questioned whether JVP isn’t just a Jewish suit that AFSC wears. Lynn Gottlieb, another member of JVP’s Rabbinical Council, used to head AFSC’s Middle East Program. May Ye, a current member, had ties to AFSC when she was a “musician”.

It’s unclear to what extent Tzedek Chicago exists off Zoom, but as a ‘church’ it doesn’t have to file 990 forms or reveal its financials. And there’s no way to know what the anti-Israel group could be hiding behind its “temple”. But Tzedek Chicago has the advantage of also advancing the “rabbinic” credentials of random anti-Israel activists.

May Ye, a Chinese-American activist from Maine who claimed that she “became a rabbi to be a Jewish voice for Palestinian liberation”, who was quoted in stories about the pro-Hamas assault on New York’s Grand Central Station over the Sabbath, had worked as a “rabbinic intern” at Tzedek Chicago before branching out as a “radical rabbi” with a focus on destroying the Jewish State.

What does it mean to be a “rabbinic intern” in a P.O. Box opposite a Little Caesars?

The media is too busy promoting collaborators like Brant Rosen to ask such basic questions.

And while Brant compares Israel’s Jews to the Nazis, his wife Hallie Esbin Rosen, who worked for the ADL for 15 years and used to work for the Illinois Holocaust Museum, has taken part in Brant’s anti-Israel rallies.

But Brant Rosen, like many other activists, would not exist if the media did not prop him up. And that is especially true of the JTA which has published multiple articles promoting a “rabbi” and his PO Box congregation whose main claim to fame is supporting terrorists and hating Israel.

The JTA ran 9 articles promoting Brant Rosen over the years. It ran two articles alone about his new “temple”. The average synagogue would never get such publicity. Stories about Rosen then popped up in every Jewish local paper in America reprinting the JTA’s publicity for Rosen.

Rosen, JVP, If Not Now, and other hate groups and terrorist collaborators have been blown up into public figures by the JTA and supportive media without revealing what they really believe.

Brant Rosen’s first reaction to Oct 7 was, “when I heard the initial reports of Hamas’ attacks on Israel this past Saturday, I will be completely honest – my first reaction was ‘good for them.”

That is the story about the Quaker Rabbi of the PO Box Anti-Zionist Temple the media won’t tell.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.