Why Alyssa Rosenheck is taking a stand against…
Alyssa Rosenheck has always been a fighter.
In seventh grade, a classmate at her Tulsa, Okla., center college misplaced her pockets and, in entrance of the whole biology class, exclaimed “the Jew took it.”
She was pointing at Rosenheck.
Alyssa Rosenheck, creator of “White. Blonde. Jew,” which she wrote after being focused with antisemitic threats and touring to the realm close to Gaza to interview fight heroes, hostages, and households. Nate Griffin for NY Post
“I get up and I knock her down,” the photographer and activist told The Post. “And I immediately received despatched to the principal’s workplace.
“My dad — who’s this big New York Jew — storms in, seems to be at me, seems to be at the principal, and says, ‘Lissy, let’s go’.
“He said, ‘My daughter has the right to deck whomever offends her people and her family’, and so I learned to defend.”
Although she is fast to level out, this was her one and only bodily battle.
Rosenheck, 44, has spent the years since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas assault which killed more than 1,200 Israelis defending her people — and combating against anti-Zionism, arguing it’s grow to be a byword for antisemitism.
“I don’t like bullies,” she said. “And I like justice. I like being able to exist in the world and not have repercussions solely for my immutable characteristics.”
Nashville native Rosenheck says she’s used to combating for her rights. Nate Griffin for NY Post
Rosenheck is a photographer and beforehand launched a profitable inside design e book. Nate Griffin for NY Post
She has written a e book; half exploration of her own roots and personal religion and half treaties on why antisemitism has exploded in the US, called “White. Blonde. Jew.” launched this week.
She put pen to paper after being focused with antisemitic threats and touring to the realm of Israel next to the Gaza strip to interview Israeli fight heroes, hostages and households, including the siblings of Eden Yerushalmi, a 24-year-old Pilates teacher kidnapped and slain by Hamas.
“I look back and I think there are pros and cons to growing up in areas where there’s not large Jewish communities,” said Rosenheck. “You feel a little bit ‘othered’ immediately, but you also, which I think is a gift, learn how to use your voice.”
Rosenheck, who has grown a large social media presence, had to use her voice again when her e book launch at an unbiased bookstore in her hometown of Nashville, deliberate for this past Thursday, was canceled.
Alyssa Rosenheck at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2024. Courtesy Alyssa Rosenheck
Rosenheck interviewing Eden Yerushalmi’s sisters at the Hostage Forum in Tel Aviv in February 2024. Courtesy Alyssa Rosenheck
The event at Bell Bird Books was publicized online but immediately met with hate, prompting store proprietor Mary Ann Weprin to cancel the launch, citing security considerations.
“My concern was whether my small neighborhood bookstore could responsibly host an event that appeared likely to require heightened security,” Weprin said in a assertion, insisting she was “heartbroken” by accusations she was antisemitic.
Rosenheck said she had truly employed personal security before the social media backlash and it was worry and cowardice which stopped Weprin from internet hosting the event.
Weprin allegedly told Rosenheck, “It’s my peers and my customers. They don’t want to be affiliated with a political event, and they’re threatening not to shop with me.”
To which Rosenheck countered “hosting a Jewish author is not a political statement.”
Alyssa Rosenheck and Jamie Geller in December 2025, as she carried out interviews for her e book. Courtesy Alyssa Rosenheck
Bell Bird Books in Nashville where the launch of “White. Blonde. Jew.” was deliberate, before online backlash and the store proprietor pulling out. bbbooksnashville/Instagram
“I’ve been very clear about this sample: the establishments we glance to maintain the road and keep a ethical spine in the end fold and kowtow to strain campaigns designed to intimidate, silence, and exclude Jewish voices.
“Then they reverse-engineer security concerns as a justification for their decision.”
In the e book, Rosenheck explores extraordinarily personal moments of her own.
Her world collapsed when her ex-husband, who was not Jewish, told her, “I don’t want Jewish children.”
The couple have been married for 11 years before splitting in 2023, and she writes, “Everything around me was unraveling, and all I could do was stand there, paralyzed, as the fragments of my life drifted away like autumn leaves, scattering at my feet.”
The cowl of Rosenheck’s e book “White. Blonde. Jew.: A Call to End Extremism, Speak Up, and Reclaim Center.”
Rosenheck said after Oct. 7, a lot modified in her life and she discovered a lot about who her real pals are. Nate Griffin for NY Post
“He wasn’t antisemitic. I knew that for certain,” she notes. “But had the struggling he’d witnessed overwhelmed him? Did the pain he noticed me endure make him draw back?
“Was it fear, not hate, that shaped his words? Fear that our children will be burdened with the weight of a history they didn’t choose but cannot escape? Or had something changed in him, something I had overlooked?”
“You have to burn your life down to rebuild,” Rosenheck told the Post, “And I think that cracking was a wake-up call for me. I could no longer justify everything else I was trying to put back together in that marriage. And there was no turning back from those words.”
She also particulars the loss of pals after Oct. 7 when she grew to become more and more outspoken about Israel and Judaism. “It’s like social Ozempic … You lose a lot of people,” she quipped.
Rosenheck with her fiance John Spencer, who is a retired US Army major, fight veteran and scholar. @spencerguard/X
“It’s the personal betrayals that cut deeper than I ever imagined,’ she writes. “Half of the ladies I welcomed into my home at New Year’s Eve [2019, for a party], those who toasted to friendship and celebrated the future, would no longer sit at my desk—not because of a falling-out.
“Ex-friends unfollowed, blocked, gossiped, and abandoned me at our shared virtual table. With nothing else changing except for me being even more openly Jewish online, it’s not hard for me to imagine that this was the reason.”
Being identified with thyroid cancer aged 32 had prompted Rosenheck to reassess her life, which, up until that second, had been spent in “survival mode”.
From left, Jordyn Tilchen, Alyssa Rosenheck, Rachel Moon, Melinda Strauss, Libby Amber Shayo, Shirin Yadegar, and Ariel Stein are acknowledged as “Heroes Against hostility” at the Anti-Defamation League’s Never Is Now event in NYC. Getty Images for Anti-Defamation League
“There was a very brief moment with a quick scan that we thought it had spread to my lungs,” she told the Post. “It didn’t. But that is when it woke me up … I began to hear to myself actually for the first time and perceive how sad I used to be in the company world.
“And I picked up a camera as just a healing catharsis… It felt like warmth, like home.”
Rosenheck is also now engaged to John Spencer, retired US Army major, fight veteran and scholar who serves at the Modern War Institute at West Point, New York. She said of him, “John is such a beautiful human inside and out and my hero.”
In May, the Anti-Defamation League launched its Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, reporting that 2025 marked one of the most violent durations for American Jews. There have been 6,274 incidents of antisemitic assault, harassment and vandalism, an average of 17 incidents per day.
Rosenheck posted a assertion concerning the cancellation of her Nashville e book launch on Instagram. @AlyssaRosenheck/Instagram
Rosenheck at White’s Mercantile in Franklin, Tennessee, in 2019. Getty Images for HOBO
While this whole represents a 33-percent lower from 2024, it stays significantly larger than the years before Oct. 7 and ranks as the third-highest 12 months for antisemitic incidents (after 2023 and 2024), since ADL started monitoring in 1979.
Among the components contributing to antisemitism, Rosenheck said, is the query of Jews and whiteness.
“We’re living at this interesting time where we’re either not white or really too white.”
In the e book, she cites Dr. Pamela Paresky, who argues that DEI frameworks and Critical Race Theory structurally foster antisemitism by forcing Jews into a inflexible “oppressor-oppressed,” binary that classifies them as privileged, hyper-white oppressors.
“Jews are always the barometer of a society’s consciousness, the health of a society,” she added.
“This anti-Zionist motion is a hate motion. Jews predate ideas of race and even religion, we’re a peoplehood.
“[Antisemitism] is what happens when our conversations around privilege, around whiteness, around this obsession with oppression in the West, around DEI, continues to be weaponized against us and shuts down conversations,” she pressured.
Moving ahead, Jews can and ought to stand up against the hate, she encourages.
“Hitler and the Talmudic scholars agreed on one thing,” she added, “And it wasn’t that we have been a bodily risk, [but] we have been a ethical and bodily risk to tyrants, to authoritative regimes.
“And that gives me hope, because we have so much light within us and we have to lead with it.”
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