Trump’s plan to protect Jews follows Heritage Foundation road map

Ellie Cohanim was born in Iran, but her father whisked her family to the United States during the 1979 Islamic revolution. The new Islamic regime had denounced Cohanim’s father, a Jewish businessman for an Israeli company, as a Zionist spy.

Today, Cohanim is a co-chairwoman of the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, a conservative group supported by the Heritage Foundation. She served as a deputy special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism for the State Department during the first Trump administration. After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a wave of student protests rolled across the United States, accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. When she joined the task force that November, Cohanim felt like she was reliving family history.