On April 29, 2024, Tess Segal, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Florida, joined her fellow activists at a prominent plaza on campus calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and boycott academic institutions in Israel. Some protesters studied or played cards. Later they read obituaries of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip.
Then law enforcement moved in. And although Ms. Segal says she did not resist arrest, she was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was held overnight.
Ms. Segal was charged with resisting arrest without violence. The state later dismissed her case. The University of Florida, however, had already banned her from campus. University officials had warned protesters that they could be punished if they violated tough new restrictions on protest. Administrators also said that officers had instructed the demonstrators to disperse. Ms. Segal said it was too loud to hear that directive.
Ms. Segal told me that she was barred from taking her final exam of the semester and participating in a school-sponsored summer program to which she had been admitted. A university disciplinary committee ruled that she had not acted in a disruptive manner but deemed her responsible for violating university policy, among other things. They proposed a one-year suspension. The university’s newly installed dean of students went further. In a letter shared by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, he declared that Ms. Segal’s conduct “caused major disruption to the normal functions of the university and prevented law enforcement officers from performing their duties promptly” and boosted her suspension to three years. (The university would not officially confirm or comment on events surrounding Ms. Segal’s suspension, pointing out that it’s protected information under privacy laws.)
The University of Florida requires any student absent for more than three semesters to reapply for admission. Ms. Segal said she had been on a full scholarship. She now works in food service and doesn’t know how or when she’ll return to college.
In an era in which students without U.S. citizenship are snatched off the street by federal agents, Ms. Segal’s punishment may seem comparatively mild. But her case contains a special irony. Ms. Segal is Jewish.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, several prominent Jewish organizations and their political allies have repeatedly demanded that universities protect Jewish students by punishing violations of campus conduct and protest, including with suspension or even expulsion. Ms. Segal is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. She’s an alumna of a Jewish summer camp. Why weren’t Jewish organizations concerned about her? Because over the last few years, mainstream American Jewish leaders — in partnership with sympathetic politicians — have done something extraordinary: They have effectively redefined what it means to be a Jew. To silence condemnation of Israel, they have equated support for the state with Jewishness itself.
Few have articulated that redefinition more baldly than President Trump. Last month, in an apparent reference to the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s allegedly insufficient support for Israel, Mr. Trump announced, “He’s not Jewish anymore.” Mr. Trump is simply making explicit what Jewish leaders have implied for years. In 2023, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, declared that “Zionism is fundamental to Judaism.” In 2021, the influential former Soviet dissident and Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky co-wrote an essay calling Jews who oppose Zionism “un-Jews.”
This redefinition of Jewishness is occurring alongside one of history’s harshest crackdowns on American Jewish activism. Many American Jews, particularly young Jews, hold critical views about Israel. A 2021 poll by the centrist Jewish Electoral Institute, which monitors Jewish voting engagement, found that 38 percent of American Jewish adults under the age of 40 considered Israel an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who did not. When presented with the accusation that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza in a survey last year, 38 percent of American Jewish adults under the age of 44 agreed.
Given these figures, it’s not surprising that Jews have taken a leading role in the protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Eleven days after Oct. 7, 2023, progressive and anti-Zionist Jewish groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, gathered roughly 400 protesters, many wearing shirts that said “Not in Our Name,” and occupied a congressional building. Later that month, Jewish Voice for Peace and its allies led a takeover of New York’s Grand Central Terminal. At Brown University, the first sit-in demanding divestment from companies affiliated with Israel comprised solely Jewish students.
Jewish students are not generally as vulnerable as their Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Black and noncitizen counterparts, but it is precisely this assumption of greater safety that may have made them more willing to protest in the first place. And many have paid a price. It’s impossible to know what percentage of the students punished for pro-Palestinian activism have been Jewish, since university disciplinary proceedings are often secret. But anecdotal evidence suggests it is significant. And regardless of one’s views about how universities should treat campus activism, there is something bizarre about repressing it in the name of Jewish safety when a number of the students being repressed are Jews.
Since Oct. 7, at least four universities have temporarily suspended or placed on probation their chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2023 at BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now protests, 20 members were arrested. (The charges were dropped.) At a pro-Israel event at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York on Oct. 12, 2023, a Jewish student who briefly shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine” was reportedly suspended for the rest of the academic year. In May 2024, a Jewish tenured professor in anthropology at Muhlenberg College said she was fired after she reposted an Instagram post that declared, in part: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable.” In September, Michigan’s attorney general brought felony charges for resisting or obstructing a police officer, as well as misdemeanor trespassing charges, against three Jewish activists — as well as four others — for offenses related to a Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. (They all pleaded not guilty).
Even when protest has taken the form of Jewish religious observance, it often has been shut down. Last fall, when Jewish students opposing the war during the holiday of Sukkot built Gaza solidarity sukkahs, temporary boothlike structures in which Jews eat, learn and sleep during the holiday, at least eight universities forcibly dismantled them, or required the students to do so, or canceled approval for their construction. (The universities said that the groups were not allowed to erect structures on campus.)
Despite this, establishment Jewish pro-Israel organizations have applauded universities that have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protest. When Columbia suspended its branch of Jewish Voice for Peace alongside Students for Justice in Palestine, the A.D.L. congratulated the university for fulfilling its “legal & moral obligations to protect Jewish students.” After New Hampshire police broke up Dartmouth’s Gaza solidarity encampment, the A.D.L. thanked the college’s president for “protecting all students’ right to learn in a safe environment.” But the experience was hardly safe for Annelise Orleck, the former chair of the school’s Jewish studies program, who said she was zip-tied, body-slammed and forcibly dragged by police officers when they moved in. After the state attorney general announced that she would bring charges against demonstrators at the University of Michigan’s encampment who had allegedly violated the law, an official at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor praised her for acting “courageously.” The A.D.L. has since reversed its prior support for the Trump administration’s detention of pro-Palestinian activists. But it still wants universities to impose tough restrictions on campus protest. When I reached out to the organization asking if it had a position on Jewish students getting swept up in campus crackdowns, representatives referred me to Mr. Greenblatt’s recent opinion essays. Each one reiterated the need to fight against what it deems campus antisemitism, but also advocated due process for all those involved.
Nonetheless, Jews keep protesting. In early April, a small group of Jewish students chained themselves to Columbia’s gates to protest the ongoing detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the former graduate student and green card holder who is now being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana over his engagement in campus protest. And just before the holiday of Passover more than 130 Jewish students, faculty members and alumni of Georgetown University signed a letter protesting the detention and arrest of Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow accused of spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism.
There is a deep irony in the American Jewish establishment’s apparent questioning of the Jewishness of these young dissenters. Because what distinguishes today’s Jewish student activists from prior generations of American Jewish leftists is precisely their interest in incorporating Jewish ritual itself into their protests. In New York alone, at least 10 non-Zionist or anti-Zionist minyanim, or prayer communities, have sprouted in the last several years. They’re overwhelmingly populated by Jews not much older than Tess Segal.
BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now erected a Gaza solidarity sukkah last fall. One Jewish undergraduate fearful that the sukkah would be vandalized or dismantled began guarding it at night. She even joined other students who slept in the rickety structure, which symbolizes human frailty and divine protection, as Jews have done for millenniums, despite the administration’s prohibition. She escaped disciplinary proceedings without punishment but soon hatched another plan entwining her Judaism with her support for the Palestinian cause: to belatedly become a bat mitzvah, a woman accepting the obligations of Jewish law. This February, she was called to the Torah for the first time, in a ceremony entirely conducted by members of BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now, now called Brown Jews for Palestinian Liberation.
To Mr. Trump and the leaders of the American Jewish establishment, she may not be a real Jew. But like many in her generation, she is angrily and joyfully proving them wrong.
Peter Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times. He’s also a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism at The City University of New York, an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. His latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”
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