I’m here at Yad Vashem, at the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations. Behind me is the tree planted by Oskar Schindler in 1963 to commemorate not just the 1,200 Jews he saved in the Holocaust, but also their 6,000 descendants—children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—saved by his heroic acts. I get asked all the time, “Is it possible that everyone is wrong? The ICC, the United Nations, Amnesty International—they’re all wrong?” Remember Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party. Everyone in his orbit, everyone in his life, everyone in his community believed that killing Jews was a necessary thing to do, that it was moral, that it was just, that it was righteous and good. But he stood up for what he knew to be true, despite what everyone around him said. I’m honored to be leading the first-ever trip of state supreme court justices to Israel this week, with justices from different states all across the country. And I told them, “One day, there will be a museum to October 7th and its tragic consequences here in Israel, perhaps here in Jerusalem. And in it, there will be a garden. And in that garden, there will be a tree planted for all of the judges, state and federal, who, during this horrible war, have left their wonderful lives behind to come here and, as Oskar Schindler once did, stand for the Jewish people.”

A special thank you to the Merage JCC, ADL of Orange County, Jewish Federation Rose Project, and Karen and Steve Jaffe for hosting a wonderful event for Israel on Trial. I had the honor of signing nearly 300 books!

I was in a bomb shelter in Be'eri with 18 federal judges from America. A young woman who had grown up in that kibbutz in a peaceful border community told me that on October 7th she was at her army base and all the members of her family had gathered in this house in the bomb shelter for safety. She said, "They all died here." She asked us to come inside of the bomb shelter. The entire house was charred black and burned to the ground and the bomb shelter was still standing. We were standing in the rubble of this home around this bomb shelter. She was inside and so a couple of us went in. She said, "No, all of you." So then a couple more went in. She said, "No, all of you." And then all 18 of us federal judges got into this bomb shelter where she had slept as a little girl. It used to have pink and purple walls and unicorn pictures. And we were packed in like sardines. She said, "A terrorist opened the window and threw in a grenade. And all eight members of my family—grandparents, parents, and children huddled together— were blown to pieces." It took weeks for them to take all the physical material off the walls and the ceilings. And they did this house after house after house. Hundreds of houses.

Honored that Israel on Trial is featured at a gathering of top rabbis and pastors in New York City at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Special thank you to Rabbi Goldberg, UF Chabad, and all the many students, faculty, deans, and judges who attended a wonderful evening in Gainesville. jewishgator.com/altman/

My grandfather’s final lesson for me came during the the last conversation I ever had with him. My grandfather, Izu, was dying of cancer. I was a junior or senior in college and my father told me that if I ever wanted to see him again that this was my last chance. So, I came back to Venezuela. If you know Venezuelan history, you know that in 1998, we had a dictator, Hugo Chavez, who came to power. And the Constitution said, you could run for one five-year term. As a self-respecting autocrat, what did he do? He packed the Supreme Court with a bunch of his buddies and they ruled that he could run again as many times as he wanted, which is exactly what happened. The day after that ruling came down, a hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets to protest the dictatorship and that happened to coincide with my last trip to Venezuela to visit my grandfather. He was very ill. He was in a wheelchair. My grandfather said, “Take me out onto the balcony.” And the people were all below us protesting on the street below. And he said, “Your father tells me you want to go to law school.” I said, “I do.” He asked me, “What kind of lawyer do you want to be?” I said, “Well, I don't know. I'm just in college.” And then he lifted his very bony finger, and he pointed it out at the crowd and he said, “Always remember, this is what happens to a country when good people don't serve.” Maybe a week or two later, he was dead. So, for me when I was 34, and the President was going to nominate me to be a federal judge, and all these people came and said, “Oh, you’re way too young, you got your whole life ahead of you to make money,” I remembered my last conversation with my grandfather and all the wonderful blessings that have been provided to us in this country that welcomed us with open arms. It has been the great honor of my life to serve and it was a no brainer from the start.

Because I am an American who loves this country with all my heart and who understands that, throughout history, time and again, societies that allow the conspiracy theory of Jew-hatred to metastasize are societies that are sick and dying. Look at the Russia of Kishinev in 1903. It had been around for hundreds of years. Fourteen years later, it was gone. Look at the Germany of Kristallnacht in 1938. The thousand-year Reich. Seven years later, it was dead. Again, not because I’m a Jew, but because I’m an American, I recognize that we have an obligation to root out this nonsense now. Because if we are not careful, it will bring the entire house tumbling down on all of us, not just your Jews. And that’s why I spend all of my free time fighting this fight. People say, “Well, how do you do any judging?” You know, all the extra minutes in your day when you do things that aren’t work? Those are lovely moments, I’m sure. I have none of them. I have given it all up. And I’m happy to do it because I want to see a country for my children and his children and my grandchildren that’s like the one I grew up in—a country that knows what’s right and what’s wrong. A country that knows what’s true and what’s false. A country that knows that the bad guys are the terror army that invades peaceful border communities in our closest regional ally and beheads, burns alive, and mutilates women, children, and the elderly; that rapes—violently rapes—dozens of women and little girls, mothers on the same bed as their daughters; that takes 251 innocent people hostage, stolen from their homes—not soldiers (some soldiers, yes), but mostly septuagenarians, octogenarians, Holocaust survivors, and two dozen infants and toddlers stolen from their cribs—brings them into deep, dark dungeons in Gaza, and holds them there for hundreds of days without food, without medicine, without water.

In March of 1918, King Hussein, the king of all the Arab armies, writes an op-ed in the Al Qibla newspaper. He writes there, "If we, the Arabs, want the Europeans to honor our claims to our ancestral homelands, then we cannot deny the Jews claim to their ancestral homeland." "They," he said, "are the original sons of that land." Nine months later, in December of 1918, his son, Prince Faisal, he would become installed as the first king of Iraq, at banquet in his honor, turns to the Jews in the audience and he says, "To my Jewish friends, I say to you, welcome back home." The truth of the matter is that if we go back 3,200 years ago, there is only one people who still speaks the same language, who still practices the same religion, who still passes to their children and grandchildren the same names, and who still lives and governs in the same land as they did, 3,200 years ago. And those are the Jews who live in Israel.

Thank you to Dean McAlister of UF Law School and Justice Charles Canady, Director of the Hamilton School, for hosting a packed series of events at the Hamilton School and the law school about Israel on Trial. And a special thanks to my dear and steadfast friend, Judge Robert Luck, for moderating the conversation.

In this country, we have to remember who our friends are and who they aren't. Who shares our values and who doesn't. Who the real monsters are and who the good guys are. Remember the 'There's a famine in Gaza' myth? We now know it was all complete bogus—not because Roy Altman said it—UNICEF just wrote a report. UNICEF is not big fans of the Israelis. This was a begrudging report. The children of Gaza today, the report says, are better nutritioned than they were before the war started when they were being governed by their Hamas overlords. The children of Gaza today are better nutritioned than their Muslim Arab compatriots in the two adjoining countries, Egypt and Jordan. Why? Because Israel did something no army in the world has ever done or would ever do again: It brought more food, medicine, and fuel— 3.9 million tons—into Gaza to feed, supply, and keep healthy the enemy's civilian population even though it knew that 251 of its own citizens were actively being held hostage after they were kidnapped on October 7. The hostages were dragged into dungeons. They were not being fed. They were not being clothed. They were not being given medicine. We know that the girls were being sexually abused almost on a daily basis. Men were being tortured and electrocuted. Each hostage lost 30, 50, some of them 70 pounds in captivity. We met one hostage, an American, who told us that despite all the torture, all the horrible things she went through in there, that she could think only of one thing: If there would be enough oxygen deep underground for her next breath. Think about doing that for one hour. Think about doing that for 24 hours. Think about doing that for 400 days.

Special thanks to New College of Florida President Richard Corcoran for hosting and introducing me, Rabbi Altschuler for interviewing me, and the amazing New College community for coming out in force to support America, Israel, and the West.

So honored to be hosted by two legal legends in front of a packed house of students at the University of Florida today: Justice Charles Canady, formerly of the Florida Supreme Court and now Director of UF’s Hamilton Center, and Judge Robert Luck of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Many thanks also to Dean Merritt McAllister of the UF Law School for hosting the standing-room-only event at her school.

My grandmother killed a Nazi who tried to rape her when she was 16. She pulled his gun out of its holster and shot him in the side. Then he fell onto his back, and she shot him two or three times in the chest. She dropped the gun, went out the window, and down the fire escape. She had gone to this dance party in Paris and met this young, handsome, dashing young man—not my grandfather—and they danced all through the night. At some point during the party, the Germans come in, the Vichy Police, and everyone went running. My grandmother hid in a dumpster behind the warehouse. She got pulled out by a dog and taken to jail. The Nazis asked all the kids about this young, handsome, dashing man and all of them said, “Look, I don't know who he is, but Janine was dancing with him all night.” So, the Nazis questioned my grandmother and she said, “Look, I don’t even know who he is. He never told me his name.” They didn’t believe her. So, they beat her, kicked her and spat on her. By the end of the night, she had a broken rib and her eyes swollen shut. She thought they were going to kill her. But in the morning, they came in and said, “You’re free to go.” She leaves the jail and quickly notices that one of the Nazis from the jail is following her. She then remembers that a friend’s husband who lives in the area has a gun, so she goes to her friend’s place. When she got to the apartment, the Nazi came in behind her, forced her friend into the bathroom, and took my grandmother into bedroom where he started to rape her. But she was tough and she pulled out his gun from its holster and she shot him in the side. And then he fell onto his back. And she shot him two or three times in the chest. And she dropped the gun and went out the window and down the fire escape. Now, I told this story at a commencement speech I gave a few years ago. She was 96 and she was in the audience in the front row. I said, “Hey, don't mess with the Altmans because my grandmother, she killed a Nazi who tried to rape her when she was 16.” And my grandmother says in front of everybody, “I’m not sure that he died.” I responded, “That’s not how firearms work, abuela.”

I’ll always be a Canes fan, but I’m grateful to have been invited to speak about “Israel on Trial” at three different locations at the University of Florida. Oh, and the sports facilities are a bit nicer than anything we had at Columbia!

I'm extremely optimistic about the future. I know that's hard for people to believe because I go all over the country — and especially in Jewish communities, but not exclusively — people feel like the walls are closing in. There's a great deal of fear and panic. And I always tell people, just wait, today isn't the end of history. Things that seem irreversible now, even just a year or two from now can totally change. Just to give you a couple of examples: Think about where I come from South America. You've got country after country after country — Bolivia, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina — all totally anti-West, mostly socialist, if not communist. And as it pertains to Israel, virulently anti-Israel, many of them closed off consular relations, diplomatic relations, joined the frivolous ICC and the ICJ case against Israel. Then what happened? First Argentina becomes maybe the most pro-Jewish, pro-Israel country in the world. Some might say, "Okay, well, that's 250,000 Jews — a very old, established Jewish community — that can happen there. But it's not going to happen in Bolivia. It's not going to happen in Ecuador. It's not going to happen in Honduras and Nicaragua and Colombia." Look at the last six months, every single one of those countries has had an election in many cases with presidential candidates who were avowedly pro-West, pro-capitalism, pro-Israel. And they win overwhelmingly in country after country after country in South America. And now, the biggest fish of all maybe — Venezuela. You're going to see next year in 2027 if not earlier, full restoration of relations between Venezuela and Israel, something that would have seen inconceivable just one year ago. The world is changing. And if we can change it in the Middle East, if we can change it in Venezuela and Colombia, you're telling me, we can't go out there to our fellow Americans with open hearts and good faith, show them the evidence and persuade them that we are on the right side of this dispute? Absolutely not.

All over the country, I get people who say to me, "You know what I was at a dinner and there were 10 or 12 people. Two of them were Jews. And somebody said, 'oh, it's genocide, it's apartheid,' whatever it is. And the Jews, they stayed silent. So we all just went home and assumed that it was true." It's not nice to say, many of us have been in that situation. That is how they feel whether you like it or not. So I know that it's awkward to say something back to a person at dinner. I know that it's hard to make the dinner difficult. Maybe even lose a friend. But let me tell you, it'll be much more awkward for you 20 or 30 years from now, if not 20% or 30% of people, but 100% of your fellow Americans believe that you and your children and grandchildren are genocidal monsters. It'll be much more awkward then. So, It's time to wake up and nip this thing in the bud. We are the Jewish people. We gave the world not just Jesus and monotheism and the Bible — a system of political democracy. We're the first people to say, you don't need a God to be your King. You don't need to have a Queen who's divine. Every single one of you has a light within yourself to be equal under the law for our God. All political democracy stems from that. Remember who we are, be proud of where you come from. And be optimistic that just as for thousands of years, there have been cataclysmic problems brought on by much bigger and more powerful empires than a few people with purple hair on the Upper West Side, and they are all gone now. But we are still here. Know that. Internalize that. And put that into your conversations.

What a privilege it was to speak to a packed house at Beth Torah in Aventura. Special thanks to Rabbi Rojzman for moderating the conversation.