A Las Vegas man was arrested on Thursday, October 26, on the count of threatening “to assault, kidnap, or murder” Jewish Senator Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., after leaving a series of disturbing voicemails laden with profanity and antisemitic rhetoric on Rosen’s iphone. 

Rosen, the only Jewish woman serving in the U.S. Senate and the third in American history to do so, has been outspoken in her criticism of antisemitism in light of the October 7 attack by Hamas. Her credentials include being the co-founder and co-chair of the bipartisan task-force for combating antisemitism, serving as the president of Nevada’s largest synagogue before getting elected, and participating in the Abraham Accords caucus in the Senate.

Rosen has recently been attempting to push new legislation through congress that will protect Jewish students from discrimination on college campuses. Mark Ressler, the lead attorney of several lawsuits on this issue, accounts that the deadly October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel “poured a lot of fuel on an already raging fire” which resulted in “an explosion of antisemitism on college campuses around the country”. 

Ressler’s firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, has accused elite American universities like Harvard, Cornell, NYU, MIT and Stanford for violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination by any entity receiving federal funds. While these universities may try to label the conflict as a “free speech” issue, the double standard between the “zero tolerance for racism and sexism” and antisemitism has become “out of control”, Ressler claims. 

In a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Rosen called for the formation of a task force within the department that would issue guidance about the legal consequences of not ensuring Jewish students’ safety to university administrators. “Schools have a legal responsibility to protect their students from discrimination, yet many university presidents and administrators have failed to forcefully condemn antisemitic speech and incidents on campuses in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attack,” Rosen wrote in the letter. Rosen outlined that Congress should also work to provide “non-censorial tools” to institutions of higher education to combat antisemitic discrimination, such as closing the loophole that doesn’t prohibit discrimination based on religion in a certain provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Rosen’s assailant, John Anthony Miller, 43, will appear in a preliminary hearing scheduled for November 13, 2023, before US Magistrate Judge Elayna J. Youchah. Rosen confirmed that she has “full faith in the justice department”, so one can only hope that justice will be served for both Rosen and other victims of discrimination in these trying times.