A new survey shows that a controversial group is both more numerous and more complicated than press reports have suggested
Last month, a 34-year-old woman was arrested in Indianapolis after she backed her car into a building decorated with a Star of David while shouting “Free Palestine!” Ruba Almaghtheh reportedly responded to footage of the war in Gaza by attacking what she thought was an “Israel school,” in support of “her people back in Palestine.” She now faces three felony charges.
Almaghtheh’s botched attack would have been just another in the long list of antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, except for the fact that the target was not a Jewish or Israeli institution at all. It was, in fact, the Indianapolis outpost of the “Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge,” one of the many sects that collectively fall under the umbrella of Black Hebrew Israelism. The house itself features a crudely painted white Star of David under the letters “ISUPK,” as well as a sign reading “1 West 125th Street Harlem New York”—a reference to the One West extremist school of Hebrew Israelism formed in the 1960s.
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Based on a recent MI report.
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