The Rays of Light in the Darkness awards Dinner is the nation’s premier event that strengthens leaders who speak the truth about Israel and the Middle East, despite the political cost they face every day.
These leaders share the belief in a strong United States, a self-sufficient Israel. They support the security of the United States and our allies against terrorism, even when it may seem unpopular.
EMET is the first organization of its kind to honor these speakers of truth who stand up in the face of deception and violence, sometimes at great political or physical risk to themselves and their loved ones.
The Rays of Light in the Darkness Dinner begins with a reception where you will get to meet the honorees and other VIP guests, and then hear from them and honor them at the awards dinner.
EMET’s Past Honorees
Videos of past speakers
Registration is now closed.
We all remember Representative Elise Stefanik’s incisive line of questioning on December 5, 2023, during the hearing “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism”, to the Presidents of Harvard, Claudine Gay; The University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill; and M.I.T., Sally Kornbluth; leading to the resignation of the first two. Congresswoman Stefanik has tirelessly advocated against antisemitism on our nation’s college campuses, and her name has become synonymous with unabashedly fighting for the rights of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
She is the first person in her family to go to college and graduated with Honors from Harvard. In 2014, Elise became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress in United States history. In 2021, Representative Stefanik was elected to serve as Chair of House Republican Conference, making her a key part in the party’s present and future leadership. Representative Stefanik is also a senior member on several committees, among them the Armed Services Committee, the Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
These days, Representative Jared Moskowitz is wrapping up his first term in Congress, and what a term it has been! From day one, Moskowitz has been a proven unapologetic supporter of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and has spoken up for it time and time again. We all remember his riveting speech on the floor of Congress, when he said “This is a moment for people in this body to stand together and say, “Israel has a right to exist. I don’t want to hear excuses…As we see antisemitism in the streets at rallies, as we see people holding signs, ‘Gas the Jews. Kill the Jews’ This is a moment to show that Israel has a right to exist…Anyone who doesn’t believe that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, is calling for genocide.”
Rep. Moskowitz believes the United States should remain committed to Israel’s security and regional stability. Moskowitz supports continuing U.S. military assistance to Israel and keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. As a staunch opponent of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, Rep. Moskowitz has continuously worked to combat antisemitism in all its forms and strengthen economic, diplomatic, and military ties with Israel.
Moskowitz’s great-grandparents were killed at Auschwitz, and his grandparents barely escaped Europe before the war. Jared’s grandmother was part of the Kindertransport, an organized rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place during the nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War. His history is our shared history, and it’s his understanding of what’s at stake that guides his work on Capitol Hill each and every day.
Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheik Hassan Yousef, one of the founders of Hamas, whose courage and whose words portray someone whose moral touchstone is that of saving humanity from the decadence of radical Islam, which he knows far better than most of us. Mosab is one of those rare individuals with a riveting intellect who was able to penetrate through the years and years of socialization to demonize the Jewish people and their ties to our tiny strip of land in the Middle East, to hold Israel and the Jewish people up to double standards that no other people in the world could possibly live up to, (particularly when attacked from all sides in a war of extinction), and to deny the Jewish people a right of Jewish self-determination in our own homeland. Mosab spied for the “Shin Bet” where he was, according to his handler Gonen Ben Yitzchak responsible for saving thousands upon thousands of both Jewish and Palestinian lives. Mosab is a true first-class intellect and humanitarian, par excellence.
It was Shabbos Kestenbaum’s riveting testimony on March 4, 2024 that propelled him onto the world’s stage. Since October 7, 2023, when the people of the state of Israel were subjected to the most barbaric and heinous attacks since the Holocaust, Jewish students throughout the nation have been subjected to unprecedented abuse, racial, religious and ethnic discrimination by both students, administrators and professors, and in Shabbos’ own words, in relationship to Harvard, “a stunning lack of moral clarity.” At Harvard, Jewish students have been spate upon, Jewish students, including Shabbos, have been threatened; Jewish students have been assaulted, and Israeli students have been told to leave certain classes. Although under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, religious discrimination is illegal if it is based on a groups “shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics,” Shabbos has consistently made the point that this sort of pervasive and blatant and antisemitism has nothing, whatsoever to do with free speech, (which Harvard hides behind), but has everything to do with, in his own words “unvarnished and naked Jew hatred” that Harvard has “normalized, accepted and celebrated.”
Help us work to ensure that our policymakers and the public receive the EMET- the Truth.
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