The Nexus Task Force, also called the Nexus Project, is a Washington-based initiative that advises U.S. institutions on how to define and respond to antisemitism. The task force dates back to November 2019, beginning as an academic working group hosted by USC Annenberg’s Knight Program.
What’s new is Nexus’s advocacy arm. The Nexus Leadership Project was launched in January 2024 to lobby Congress and the executive branch directly. It’s that arm that has spent the last two years becoming the default source of quotes for outlets covering campus antisemitism, federal policy and the war in Gaza, including The New York Times, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Axios, where it’s been called an “antisemitism watchdog.”
The project’s national director, Jonathan Jacoby, is a frequent New York Times source. On the ICE arrest of Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil, for example, he told the paper: “There has never been a safer and more flourishing experience than the American Jewish experience, living as a free people in an open society. Anything that endangers that, or our relationships with other Americans—those are all Jewish concerns.”
In a separate piece in the Times on the Trump administration’s antisemitism crackdown, Jacoby put it more bluntly: “Anytime you put Jews in the middle on an issue, it’s not good for the Jews. ... That’s a classic antisemitic position that antisemites like to put Jews. So they can be scapegoated.”
Nexus’s report on the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” was picked up by Snopes, which quoted the group’s warning that the initiative redefines antisemitism “in ways that blur the line between legitimate protest and hate speech, while simultaneously ignoring and obscuring right-wing antisemitism.”
The project’s Washington director Kevin Rachlin has warned in JTA against federal antisemitism legislation, saying there is “a real concern right now out there on giving the executive branch additional powers.” The Forward has reported on Nexus’s goal of moving officials “left on Israel [and] antisemitism.”
That’s a notable place to sit, given that Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is an Obama White House veteran who has been about as pro-Democrat as it gets. Elon Musk amplified a “#BanTheADL” campaign in 2023, accusing the group of ideological bias. Indeed, the ADL has long been left-wing.
Nexus has no independent nonprofit status; its money runs through the New Israel Fund (NIF), which has stated in writing that it will not exclude support for organizations that lawfully discourage the purchase of goods or use of services from Israeli settlements.
George Soros’s Open Society Foundations has given the Nexus Project three grants since 2022 totaling $175,000. A fourth, far larger commitment followed in May 2026: a $30 million, three-year pledge to organizations fighting antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate, with Nexus named among the recipients alongside the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Bend the Arc Jewish Action.
A U.N. commission investigated a war Hamas started, and Israeli NGOs didn’t even mention what Hamas did.
Jacoby was the founding executive director of the New Israel Fund, serving from 1982 to 1988. In a September 2025 interview with Interfaith Alliance, he said plainly, “We don’t think that any definition of antisemitism should be adopted in any formal way—certainly not incorporated into law. There’s no definition of racism in law; why should there be a definition of antisemitism?”
That position puts Nexus to the left of even the ADL, which has formally endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism that Jacoby says should not exist in any official form.
Kevin Rachlin, Nexus’s Washington director, spent nearly seven years at left-wing lobbying group J Street before joining Nexus in January 2024. In his March 2025 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, Rachlin argued that the IHRA definition “becomes problematic when used as an enforcement mechanism because it conflates legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies with antisemitism.”
Nexus’s board chair Alan Solow is a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and was national co-chair of the 2012 Obama-Biden reelection campaign. In a 2023 op-ed in The Forward, Solow wrote that the Antisemitism Awareness Act’s “claim to helping combat the disturbing surge in anti-Jewish incidents across the United States is, upon closer examination, little more than a symbolic gesture that could actually weaken the fight against this bigotry.”
David N. Myers sits simultaneously as a member of the Nexus Task Force and served as NIF’s board president from 2018 to 2023. He drafted the 2023 “Elephant in the Room” letter, signed by more than 2,100 academics, stating that “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid.” In 2025, he was among more than 2,400 Jewish scholars who signed a letter opposing the arrest and attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil.
The NIF’s role in the Nexus Project should raise eyebrows. HaMoked, the Center for the Defence of the Individual, is one of NIF’s grantees. HaMoked regularly petitions Israel’s High Court of Justice. Its “Court Watch” describes its mission as examining “the measures taken by Israel to control” Judea and Samaria, covering “restrictions on freedom of movement, violations of the right to family life, house demolitions, the settlements, the use of administrative detention, torture and more,” according to NGO Monitor’s profile of the organization.
HaMoked’s executive director Jessica Montell, formerly of the leftist Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, has said on the record that “the word apartheid is useful for mobilizing people because of its emotional power,” adding that “in some cases, the situation in the West Bank is worse than apartheid in South Africa.”
In 2009, after the U.N.’s Goldstone Commission produced its now discredited report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza, Montell said, “Israel has only itself to blame” and accused Israel of “shoot[ing] the messenger.”
HaMoked was one of seven Israeli NGOs, alongside Adalah, Gisha, B’Tselem and others, that submitted a written statement to the Goldstone Commission in June 2009. The statement did not address any war crimes committed by Hamas. It stated instead that it “offers our own distinct perspective [on] human-rights violations for which Israel must be held accountable.” In short, a U.N. commission was investigating a war Hamas started, and the Israeli NGOs testifying before it could not bring themselves to mention what Hamas did.
An organization funded by George Soros and the NIF is selling itself as the voice of American Jewry on the subject of Jewish safety. Sadly, it seems that some progressive Diaspora Jews are among our worst enemies.
