Rabbi Sharon Brous was growing increasingly alarmed at the Trump administration’s strong-arm tactics, like its attacks on higher-education funding and bullying of law firms, all in the name of protecting Jews.
So early last month, she delivered an impassioned sermon titled “I Am Not Your Pawn” to her Los Angeles congregation. Hours later, the next shoe dropped. Immigration agents began detaining activists and foreign students who had been involved in pro-Palestinian protests.
“This is not going to protect Jews,” Rabbi Brous said in an interview. “We’re being used.”
Across the country, American Jews have watched with alarm or enthusiasm as an effort to address campus unrest over the war in Gaza has transformed into a campaign to deny elite universities billions of dollars in funding, to press major law firms into pro bono work on “antisemitism” and to deport foreign students even tangentially involved in the protests last spring.
“We have to combat antisemitism as vigorously as we can,” said Matt Brooks, the chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, adding that with President Trump in office, there is “a new sheriff in town.”
The divisions mirror those that have long split Jewish communities and have grown deeper since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the broad campus protests that followed Israel’s devastating response in Gaza.
But where most Jews share concerns about antisemitic speech in some of the protests, many within the community have become convinced that things may have gone too far.
A video of plainclothes immigration agents surprising and arresting a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University on the streets of Somerville, Mass., had particularly disturbing resonance for some in the Jewish community. The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, had co-written an opinion essay for a student newspaper demanding the university take a stand against Israel’s war in Gaza.
For many in a community that has suffered more than its share of unjust arrests, disappearances, deportations and deadly violence over the centuries, the video evoked painful memories from Jewish history. That it was done in the name of defending Jews made it worse. Two pro-Israel groups, Canary Mission and Betar, have even been involved in singling out pro-Palestinian protesters to target.
“I stood up. I was sitting down. I stood up involuntarily,” said Orna Guralnik, an Israeli American clinical psychologist and therapist, describing her reaction to watching the video. “It’s outrage and fear.”
Such arrests have “woken people up to the cynical way that the fight against antisemitism is used,” added Ms. Guralnik, who has gained fame with her television show “Couples Therapy.” “It contrasts everything that a liberal person believes in.”
In her practice, she said her American Jewish patients were “confused and really conflicted.”
Though the federal crackdown has so far targeted critics of Israel, some think the Trump administration’s actions uncomfortably echo previous eras of bigoted nationalism that gave way to overt antisemitism.
“Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression,” wrote the journalist Matt Bai in a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday. “You’ll be looking awhile.”
By saying that the harsh actions of the federal government have been in the name of protecting the Jewish community, the Trump administration has, intentionally or not, put a spotlight on Jews that makes many uncomfortable.
“Anytime you put Jews in the middle on an issue, it’s not good for the Jews,” said Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Project, a progressive Jewish group that has been searching for a way to combat antisemitism without suppressing political debate. “That’s a classic antisemitic position that antisemites like to put Jews. So they can be scapegoated.”
At the same time, the Trump administration continues to enjoy the backing of many Jewish groups, including those in the mainstream of social and political life.
The Anti-Defamation League, which for more than a century has worked to combat antisemitism, quickly put out a statement in support of the arrest last month of an activist at Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, saying his detention “serves as a deterrent to others who might consider breaking the law on college campuses or anywhere.” The statement said it assumed Mr. Khalil would be given “due process.”
Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident from Syria with a pregnant American wife, has not been charged with a crime. He has been held for nearly three weeks in a facility in Louisiana, where he was taken after his arrest on March 8 in New York.
The Orthodox Union, an umbrella organization representing religious Jews, has been broadly supportive of the Trump administration’s actions. In a statement, its executive vice president, Rabbi Moshe Hauer, called for the fight against the “anarchy, hate, intimidation, and violence that have infected the campuses” to be carried out “the American way, firmly, resolutely, legally.”
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Brooks, of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said that the answer to antisemitism cannot be doing nothing and called the notion that the federal government’s actions put American Jews in any greater danger “absolutely absurd.”
On the streets of American cities with large and diverse Jewish communities, feelings have been much more ambivalent.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, who leads a socially progressive but religiously conservative Jewish synagogue in Manhattan, said he had been stopped days ago on the sidewalk by a congregant who expressed how distressed she was that “people are being disappeared from street corners in the name of fighting antisemitism.”
“My community is very, very skeptical of the genuineness of the administration’s antisemitism rhetoric,” Rabbi Kalmanofsky said.
“I think that the Jewish people are the worse for the wear if the foundations of a constitutional order and civil rights and civil liberties and higher education are diminished,” he said, referring to attacks on the legal system and universities.
Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a pro-democracy group, said she also doubted the motivation behind the push to combat antisemitism because it has involved the selective application of due process rights based on people’s identities and beliefs.
“It’s about exploiting concerns about antisemitism to undermine democracy,” she said.
But saying so publicly has been an occasionally fraught experience.
Rabbi Kalmanofsky posted on Facebook his objection to the treatment of Mr. Khalil, not because he agreed with the activist’s views on Israel, which he said he finds objectionable, but because his arrest represented a potential threat to everyone.
“If this legal resident can be arrested and deported for exercising First Amendment rights, then anyone can,” he wrote, offering “kudos” to the federal judge in the case who blocked the deportation and is also a member of his synagogue.
The at-times heated discussion over his post surprised the rabbi.
“The correct question is does America benefit from him being here,” one commenter replied, speaking of Mr. Khalil. “If the answer is no, then he should be deported.”
In Los Angeles, Rabbi Brous of IKAR, a nondenominational Jewish congregation, lamented that for many people, Jewish or not, it has become difficult to hold two competing ideas at the same time, and far easier to retreat into defined ideological camps.
She said she wanted to be clear that two things were true: “There is a real antisemitism problem in our time and the universities have become very fertile ground” for its normalization. And, she added, this administration’s attacks “do not emerge from a genuine desire to keep Jews safe.”
“What may feel today like a welcomed embrace is actually putting us at even greater danger,” she said in her sermon on March 8.
One of her congregants, Shifra Bronznick, watched online from New York, and it resonated deeply with her. She said she told dozens of people about it, telling them: “You must listen to this sermon.”
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma. More about J. David Goodman
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