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For Immediate Release
February, 22 2021, 11:00pm EDT
Contact:
Email:,info(at)fwwatch(dot)org,Seth Gladstone -,sgladstone@fwwatch.org
Vilsack's Confirmation to USDA Is a Warning Sign for Family Farmers and Food, Worker Safety
Statement of Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch
WASHINGTON
Tom Vilsack will be confirmed as Agriculture secretary by the U.S. Senate this afternoon. In anticipation, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter has issued the following statement:
"We can confidently predict what Tom Vilsack's leadership of the Agriculture Department will look like, because he's led it before. And the prediction is grim. In his previous stint at USDA, Vilsack backed mass corporate consolidation of our food system at the expense of struggling family farmers. Similarly, he readily advanced industry-driven initiatives allowing companies to inspect their own poultry processing plants, dismantling federal oversight of food and worker safety.
"This administration needs to drastically shift course from the Trump era by supporting sustainable, independent farming, halting the toxic expansion of polluting factory farms, and ultimately prioritizing consumer health and worker safety. We have little hope that Tom Vilsack cares to undertake this effort, so we will be pressuring him doggedly to see the light."
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
(202) 683-2500LATEST NEWS
At Least 28 Palestinians—Including 17 Children—Killed by Israeli Strikes on Gaza
The strikes follow a massacre by Israeli forces of 13 Palestinians in a refugee camp in southern Lebanon.
Nov 19, 2025
Israel Defense Forces strikes killed at least 28 Palestinians including a woman and 17 children in the Gaza Strip Wednesday in the latest of what local officials say are over 400 Israeli violations of a tenuous ceasefire.
The IDF said it carried out strikes targeting neighborhoods in Gaza City and Khan Younis after "terrorists" opened fire on occupation troops—none of whom were harmed—in what the IDF called "a violation of the ceasefire agreement."
Gaza officials said that more than 100 people were also wounded in Wednesday's attacks, including one which medical personnel said targeted a building housing displaced families in the Zeitoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City.
Hamas—which rules Gaza and led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel—condemned the attacks as “a dangerous escalation” and refuted the IDF’s claim while accusing Israel of attempting to “justify its ongoing crimes and violations.” Hamas also urged the United States to exert “immediate, serious pressure” on Israel to “respect the ceasefire and halt the aggression against our people.”
Israeli forces also continued bombing southern Lebanon on Wednesday, a day after at least 13 people were killed in an IDF airstrike on a Palestinian refugee camp in Ain al-Hilweh near Sidon. Local officials said most of the victims were children playing soccer.
Israel has been accused of repeatedly violating its ceasefire agreements with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
More than 300 Palestinians have been killed and over 750 others wounded in what officials say are nearly 400 Israeli violations of the October ceasefire with Hamas.
Since agreeing to a truce with Hezbollah in November 2024, Israeli forces have also killed at least 121 civilians, including 21 women and 16 children, in Lebanon, according to officials there.
Overall, Israel's 775-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 249,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and millions more forcibly displaced, starved, and sickened.
Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Lebanon killed more than 4,000 people, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. This figure includes at least 790 women and 316 children. More than 16,600 others have been wounded. Upward of 1.2 million Lebanese were also forcibly displaced by Israel’s attacks and invasion.
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Top Dem Speechwriter Says Young Jews' Empathy for Gaza Shows Holocaust Education Has Backfired
"Holocaust education is too successful, it made the kids anti-holocaust while Israel is trying to do one," quipped one prominent critic.
Nov 19, 2025
A speechwriter for prominent Democrats including former President Barack Obama and presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Kerry faced widespread outrage this week after video emerged of her blaming Holocaust education for young Jews' empathy for Palestinians in Gaza and revulsion at Israel's genocidal war there.
Earlier this week, Sarah Hurwitz—who was also a senior speechwriter for former First Lady Michelle Obama and other Democrats—spoke at the opening plenary of this year's Jewish Federations of North America general assembly in Washington, DC. The event featured speakers including Free Press staff writer Olivia Reingold, who implicitly attempted to absolve Israel from blame for the Gaza famine by noting that 12 of the at least 463 Palestinians who starved to death had preexisting health conditions.
"There have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews and Israel, and I think that is especially true of young people," Hurwitz said during the panel discussion, noting the rise of social media as a primary source of news and information.
"Today, we have social media," she added "Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don't really love Jews."
Hurwitz continued:
It's also this increasingly post-literate media. Less and less text, more and more videos, so you have TikTok just smashing our young peoples' brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I wanna give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.
"I think, unfortunately, the very smart... bet we made on Holocaust education to serve as antisemitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit, because Holocaust education is absolutely essential," Hurwitz asserted.
"But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews," she added, "...so when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it's not surprising that they think, 'Oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel, you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.'"
Reaction to Hurwitz' remarks ranged from incredulity to anger.
"I am almost literally speechless," American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee nation legal director Jenin Younes said on X. "She's decrying the fact that kids' takeaway from Holocaust education has been that we must protect helpless people from powerful people killing them. The real lesson from the Holocaust, it seems, is that Israel must be able to commit genocide if it wants to."
Argentinian economist Maia Mindel also took to X, writing that it is "extremely grim that a substantial number of very influential people seem to think that the lesson from the Holocaust isn't 'mass murder of civilians based on their ancestry so your nation can take their land is wrong' but rather, 'Fuck you, got mine.'"
Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart wrote on X that "the level of condescension" in Hurwitz's commentary "is quite remarkable."
Writer Bryce Greene lamented: "We're at the point where Israels supporters are now claiming that the Holocaust was not bad because it was the powerful attacking the weak."
"No, that would be the wrong lesson from the Holocaust," he added. "According to them it was only bad because Jews were the victims. Real sick shit."
Independent journalist Ahmed Eldin said on X that "Zionism is so morally bankrupt it sees empathy as a design flaw."
Eldin wrote Wednesday on his Substack that "Hurwitz didn’t slip up—she said the quiet part out loud and exposed the Zionist project for exactly what it is."
"She even admitted that, amidst the carnage, she sounds 'obscene,'" he noted. "That admission, said almost accidentally, is the closest thing to honesty her worldview will allow: The problem is not the violence of Zionism itself, but the visibility of it. Zionism, as she inadvertently revealed, depends not on morality but on opacity. The ideology requires not less brutality, but simply fewer witnesses."
Moving on to Holocaust education, Eldin wrote:
According to Hurwitz, Holocaust curricula have “backfired” because they taught young people that “you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.” In her telling, this universal ethical principle—this most basic moral intuition—is the problem.
The implication is staggering: the “correct” lesson of the Holocaust, she seems to believe, is not “never again for anyone,” but “never question Israel.” What outrages her is not the suffering of Palestinians but the possibility that young people are recognizing it as suffering.
"A world that is witnessing and seeing Palestinians as human is a world in which Zionism cannot function," Eldin concluded. "A world that sees the violence cannot romanticize the ideology producing it. Once people witness the truth, the mythology cannot be resuscitated and the propaganda cannot be rehabilitated."
"Israel may be able to flatten Gaza’s buildings, but it cannot rebuild the ignorance it once relied upon," he added. "The truth is already out, the narrative collapse well underway, the mask irretrievably gone."
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Trump Deportation Campaign Forcing Immigrants to Avoid Healthcare and Change Daily Routines
“We are grateful for everything this country has given us and our children,” said one man. “But the system has become downright cruel toward immigrants.”
Nov 19, 2025
For people who have immigrated to the United States—regardless of whether they have legal status—life under the second Trump administration has provoked daily anxiety and fear—forcing many to make choices about whether it's safe to go to church services that once provided a sense of community, seek medical care, and send their children to school.
As federal immigration agents continued raiding communities in Charlotte, North Carolina—the latest target of the administration's mass deportation campaign—as well as other cities across the US, the New York Times/KFF poll released Tuesday gave a comprehensive look at how President Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies have impacted both undocumented immigrants and people who have green cards and other legal documentation.
Nearly 80% of undocumented immigrants reported negative health impacts due to worries about being deported, separated from their families, or otherwise harmed due to their immigration status.
Health impacts they reported include problems sleeping or eating, worsening health conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes, and worsening anxiety or stress.
Immigrants with legal documentation also reported these impacts in large numbers, with 47% saying they have experienced health issues stemming from worries about Trump's policies. Nearly a third of naturalized citizens said the same.
A 34-year-old Colombian woman in New York said her family is "scared of going out."
“We’re getting depressed," she said. "We’re scared that they’ll separate us, they’ll mistreat us.”
While experiencing increased negative health impacts, immigrants have become more likely to avoid getting medical care—as viral videos have shown US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents making arrests at medical offices.
Under the Biden administration, ICE and other federal agents were barred from conducting immigration enforcement at sensitive locations like schools and hospitals, but Trump rescinded those limits.
Between 2023-25, the share of adult immigrants who reported skipping or delaying healthcare increased from 22% to 29%. One in five said it was due to immigration-related worries.
Nearly a third of parents also said they had delayed or avoided medical appointments for their children; the share rose to 43% for undocumented immigrant parents.
About half of all adult immigrants and nearly 80% of undocumented immigrants said they were "somewhat" or "very" concerned about healthcare providers sharing information with immigration enforcement officials.
Two years ago, about 26% of immigrants reported fears that they or a family member could be deported or detained, and that number has jumped to 41%.
One-third of noncitizen immigrants said they have begun avoiding aspects of everyday life, and nearly 60% of undocumented immigrants said the same.
"We have been the workforce in construction, restaurants, janitorial,” Ana Luna, an immigrant who has lived in Los Angeles with her family for nearly two decades, told the Times. “Now we have to run, hide, or stay inside. And it’s especially heartbreaking for our children.”
Luna told the Times that her youngest child's school had recently informed her that immigration enforcement was nearby.
“We are grateful for everything this country has given us and our children,” her husband, Gabriel Lorenzo, told the Times. “But the system has become downright cruel toward immigrants.”
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