Following the Hamas October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, in which that group murdered approximately 1,200 people and took 251 more hostage, Israel began a military campaign of “total victory” against the group—a terrorist organization it has previously promoted by facilitating Qatari funding for the group in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and thereby lessen pressure on Israel to allow the creation of a genuine Palestinian state. That campaign has since killed well over 50,000 Gazans, a majority of whom were women or children.
During the course of its attacks, Israel has seen fit to cut off water, electricity, and food supplies to Gaza’s population, destroyed much of its physical infrastructure, and left its residents enduring what the British Red Cross called a “desperate humanitarian crisis.” As if that weren’t enough, in addition to the war on Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces have recently launched multiple attacks in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, with the strong possibility of a much larger attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities later this year.
At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deeply unpopular, scandal- plagued extremist right-wing government—one that features an avowed racist and homophobe and a longtime supporter of Jewish anti-Arab terrorism—is in the process of attempting to destroy the nation’s democracy from within as it prioritizes military attacks over the lives of its remaining hostages in Gaza.
The war has exacerbated a burgeoning conflict between the country that Israel is becoming and the values of the majority of American Jews. To put it in familiar terms, Israel has grown politically bright red while American Jews, alone among ethnicities that code as “white,” remain proudly deep blue. Two-thirds of Israelis questioned told pollsters they preferred Donald Trump over Kamala Harris; the exact opposite held true among American Jews. (“Trump gets nothing but praise here,” the Tel Aviv–based pollster and political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin told me.)
Legacy Jewish organizations are throwing in with a president and political movement that seek to destroy the democratic pillars and educational institutions that have helped to make Jews secure and successful in the United States and are shot through with neo-Nazis.
Despite this, the leaders of the large “legacy” American Jewish organizations, without exception, have chosen to side with Netanyahu, defending Israel against all critics and demonizing as “antisemitic” anyone—especially other Jews—who they believe threatens it. In doing so, however, they face the problem not only of opposing the views of the vast majority of American Jews, but also of throwing in with a U.S. president and political movement that seek to destroy the democratic pillars and educational institutions that have helped to make Jews secure and successful in the United States and are shot through with neo-Nazis and Jew-haters of all sorts.
The net result is that we are in the early stages of a Jewish civil war unmatched since the early battles over Zionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In essence, Trump and the forces arrayed behind him—the legacy organizations, a new and well-financed right-wing Jewish media, and the Christian evangelical world that blindly supports Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu—have offered American Jews a kind of devil’s bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value and that have provided the foundation for all they have been able to accomplish as Americans. Who’s in?
Donald Trump’s “Pro-Israel Antisemitism”
Back in September, Donald Trump appeared at an event about antisemitism together with mega-pro-Israel donor Miriam Adelson and promised the crowd: “I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.” Shocker: This was a lie. Trump’s antisemitism is no secret to anyone who cares to look. We know from his former chief of staff that he believes “Hitler did a lot of good things.” We know that according to his ex-wife Ivana, he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. No less worrisome is the sympathy he has consistently shown toward contemporary neo-Nazis. This was most obvious when he referred to the Charlottesville protesters who chanted “Jews will not replace us” as “very fine people.” Then came the high-profile dinner he had at Mar-a-Lago with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the Hitler-loving rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West).
Trump, moreover, exploits antisemitism as a political weapon. In 2016, for instance, he tweeted an image that featured Hillary Clinton backgrounded by hundred-dollar bills together with a Jewish star. His campaign ran an ad that went after disloyal “globalist” billionaires, illustrated, coincidentally, with the faces of three Jews: Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein. He also embraces the antisemitic canard that the primary loyalty of American Jews lies with Israel rather than their own country. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.… They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves,” he proclaimed.
Equally offensive is Trump’s idiotic claim that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish anymore” and has instead become “a Palestinian.” In assuming the right to decide who is and isn’t legitimately Jewish, Trump is emulating both his hero, Vladimir Putin, who says much the same thing about Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other “ethnic Jews,” as well as the virulently antisemitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, who in the late nineteenth century famously asserted, “I decide who is a Jew”; a claim later picked up by Hermann Göring.
Perhaps most worrisome of all, however, is Trump’s eagerness to blame the Jews when things don’t go his way. At the same Adelson event mentioned above, he warned, “If I don’t win this election … the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.” He was preparing his followers for an old-fashioned, antisemitic “stab-in-the-back” attack on liberal Jews. This is no idle threat, given the fact that Trump leads a movement whose members are not averse to political violence and that includes actual neo-Nazis.
Such threats should be ringing alarm bells among Jews. After all, the vast majority of violent attacks on Jews in the United States since Trump came on the political scene have come from the right. These include synagogue murders in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, and the planting of an explosive device at George Soros’s house. Like the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, many Trump supporters expound the racist, antisemitic “great replacement” theory that appears to inspire these attacks.
Finally, there is the administration’s embrace of Europe’s and Latin America’s extreme right wing. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who heads the Union for Reform Judaism, told me, “To see the vice president at the Munich conference saying that we should give a break to the AfD [the Alternative for Germany party] and not talk about this Nazi past, it’s just incredible that an administration would think such a thing, much less say it.” One AfD leader has been fined twice for repeatedly using a Nazi slogan that’s banned in his country. (JD Vance’s February speech, not coincidentally, came a day after his visit to Dachau.)
The apparent contradiction between fealty to Israel’s government and hostility to diaspora Jews is evidence of a phenomenon that Georgia State University political scientist Jelena Subotić has named “pro-Israel antisemitism.” It can be seen today in the ruling parties in Russia, Hungary, and Poland, and in the ideologies of Germany’s AfD and France’s National Rally. Their parties make up what is often termed the “Illiberal International” and attract support with antisemitic memes and themes thereby laying the groundwork to blame Jews when things go sour. But they support Israel because they appreciate its model of ethno-nationalist statehood and because they despise Muslims even more than they do Jews.
By the way, all of these concerns can be applied to Trump’s BFF, Elon Musk, and then some. When the world’s wealthiest man bought X (formerly Twitter), he purposely opened it up to what a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found to be a surge in hate speech, including antisemitic and white supremacist content. Much of its antisemitic content was encouraged by Musk himself. For instance, when someone calling himself “Eric” responded to a PSA about antisemitism by saying, “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.”
Back in 2022, when Musk decided to reinstate Trump on the site, the Anti-Defamation League co-led a campaign for an advertising boycott. (ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt was initially a great fan of Musk’s purchase of the site, calling him “an amazing entrepreneur and extraordinary innovator” and “the Henry Ford of our time,” apparently unaware that Ford was one of the most prominent antisemites in American history; he quickly reconsidered after an intense backlash.) Meanwhile, toxic antisemitism continues to flow freely on X.
And of course there was the astonishing sight of Musk, on Inauguration Day, thrusting his arm into the air at Trump’s inauguration in what pretty much every educated, intelligent person in the Western world would have recognized as a Nazi salute. (Musk has vehemently denied the charge.) Almost immediately, Musk was gifted with a get-out-of-jail-free card from the two people who, at least in theory, perhaps should have been the last people on Earth to offer one: the prime minister of Israel and the head of the ADL. Netanyahu rushed to X to proclaim Musk “a great friend of Israel” who was “being falsely smeared” by these Nazi accusations. No less incredibly, the ADL—whose CEO, Greenblatt, is the scourge of every college student who has ever chanted “Free Palestine”—called the salute, which the group’s own website defines as “the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world,” merely an “awkward gesture,” and said the man who made it “should be given the benefit of the doubt.” The Jewish actor Josh Malina was inspired to “report the ADL to the ADL.”
The Legacy Groups and the New Media Landscape
The political world of American Jews is so simultaneously large and chaotic that it can be hard even for its participants to imagine it in full. While Jews number barely more than 2 percent of the U.S. population, there are 54 organizations that make up what’s called the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, as well as numerous groups outside the conference. These groups can be divided into roughly three classifications. First, there are the “legacy” groups, which are the best known and best funded, and inarguably the most influential. It’s fair to say that they see themselves as the contemporary manifestation of the historic shtadlanim (intercessors), those Jews appointed to represent the entire community to whatever ruling powers happened to control the region in which they found themselves. The most famous of these are the ADL; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC; the American Jewish Committee, or AJC; and the office of the CEO of the conference itself. In recent years, all have moved closer to the traditional position of the Orthodox Union, or OU, which represents the faction of Jewish voters who went heavily for Trump and accounts for approximately 10 percent of American Jews today.
A second set of organizations seeks instead to speak for the Jewish majority that consistently votes Democratic and remains committed to defending democracy in both Israel and the United States. Working with far fewer resources than the legacy groups, they walk a political tightrope, balancing their simultaneous commitments to both Zionism and the traditional Jewish liberal agenda and constantly finding themselves fending off attacks from both their right and left—especially when these attacks involve attempts by the right to weaponize antisemitism and by the left to ignore it. These groups include the “pro-peace, pro-Israel” J Street; the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; T’ruah, a group of liberal rabbis and cantors; the Nexus Project, an antisemitism watchdog group; New Jewish Narrative, a product of a merger between Americans for Peace Now and Ameinu; the New Israel Fund, which supports civil society and Arab-Israeli cooperation in Israel; and the recently revitalized Jewish Council for Public Affairs, or JCPA, under the leadership of Amy Spitalnick. Call these the “Next Generation” Jewish organizations.
In the space beyond both groups are those on the far right and left. The far right’s influence has rocketed skyward of late, owing to what former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller calls “the Vulcan mind meld between Trump and Netanyahu on undermining the independence of the courts and fighting the ‘woke left.’” These groups promote Israel’s annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza and thrilled to Trump’s lunatic notion that the United States and Israel could create a second “nakba”—Arabic for the “catastrophe” of the Palestinians’ 1948 expulsion—in the service of turning Gaza into a sort of Middle Eastern Mar-a-Largo (“brilliant and courageous,” as judged by the Zionist Organization of America’s Morton Klein). The anonymously funded Canary Mission, which spies on students and faculty, and Betar, which specializes in violent threats against Jews whom the group doesn’t like, have staked out similar ideological territory. Together with stopantisemitism.com, which exists almost exclusively for this purpose, they take credit for reporting foreign-born students and faculty to ICE in the hopes of getting them deported.
On the opposite side of the spectrum are the youth-dominated, protest-oriented groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, or JVP, IfNotNow, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Popular in college towns and a few cities where young Jews congregate, these groups insist that it is their commitment to Jewish values and religious teachings that underlies their anti-Israel politics. Their membership has grown in recent years to the point where JVP can credibly claim to be the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. The most eloquent expounder of this viewpoint is likely Peter Beinart, an observant Jew and former editor of this magazine in its obsessively Zionist days who now calls himself a “cultural Zionist” and supports the creation of a single binational state in what is today Israel, the occupied West Bank, and Gaza. To the degree they enjoy any influence in Washington, it is exclusively with the “Squad” members who make up the Democratic Party’s left flank.
The legacy groups have two massive advantages over their opponents. The first is that Republican politicians are happy to march in lockstep on behalf of Israeli government demands. According to a recent Gallup poll, 83 percent of registered Republicans say they have a favorable opinion of Israel. And while most Democratic members of Congress remain committed to supporting Israel, the percentage of Democrats surveyed by Gallup with a favorable view of that country has fallen to just 33 percent. Fifty-nine percent expressed greater sympathy for Palestinians, and just 21 percent for Israelis.
Second, and hardly less important given that this is America, is the power of money. The ADL alone enjoys assets of nearly $250 million. (It recently launched what it called the “first ever Jewish advocacy” investment fund. With comically terrible timing, among its top recommendations was Musk’s Tesla, whose stock, at this writing, is down over 40 percent on the year.) The Republican Jewish Coalition, which carries out what political pros term the “Adelson primaries,” worth tens or even hundreds of millions to the right candidate, also plays on this team. (Miriam Adelson alone contributed over $148 million to Trump and the Republicans in 2024.) By contrast, J Street, the best funded of the politically minded Next Generation groups, enjoyed assets of roughly $4.45 million, with another $4.6 million sitting in its “education fund,” according to its most recent filings.
AIPAC, the traditional 800-pound gorilla of Jewish politics, is influential for many reasons besides money. It recruits congressional candidates and helps to staff their offices if they win. It writes legislation, arranges junkets, and smears the reputations of those with whom it disagrees. Its power and influence created an atmosphere on Capitol Hill where its staffers did not even have to act in order to get what it wanted, since it enjoyed what William Quandt, the Middle East expert and former White House adviser who worked on the Camp David accords, termed “the law of anticipated reaction,” under which certain policy options “are frequently rejected because of the expectation of negative reaction” from AIPAC and its allies.
Lately, AIPAC has also directly entered the money fray, after decades of pretense otherwise, with its own political action committee: one that specializes in raising money from wealthy Republicans and funneling it into Democratic primaries to ensure that the more “pro-Israel” candidate wins the race. In 2022 and 2024, it set all-time records for its primary contributions, though, ironically, its advertising rarely mentioned Israel. AIPAC’s website brags that the group spent a $70 million investment to help defeat 24 candidates whose support for Israel did not meet its exacting standards. As a result, as Matt Duss, formerly the top foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, explained, “AIPAC scares the shit out of members of Congress.” If you vote against or even speak overly critically of Israel in a public forum, Duss explained, “AIPAC will take you down,” and it has “any number of means at its disposal.” While J Street does raise money for more progressive candidates, albeit nowhere near as much as AIPAC, its true value lies in its “pro-peace, pro-Israel” umbrella’s ability to protect those under attack.
In recent times, the ADL’s relentless attacks on Israel’s critics led to the perception among insiders that it had overtaken AIPAC as the most influential member of the presidents’ conference. Once identified with civil rights struggles and the fight to maintain a separation of church and state, it has downgraded virtually all efforts save those involving attacking Israel’s critics wherever they may appear. (“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, full stop,” Greenblatt insists.) In the past, it was AIPAC’s job to root out those unfriendly to Israel anywhere in the presidential bureaucracy. But in March, when Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, felt forced to deny the Israel critic Daniel Davis an important post that would have put him in charge of managing briefings for the president, The New York Times’ account of the internecine fight credited the ADL, which had called the appointment “extremely dangerous.” (Davis had called U.S. support for Israel’s Gaza war a “stain on our character as a nation.”)
As enormous as the imbalance of power is inside the Jewish lobbying groups, it’s even greater within the Jewish media. The right dominates here as well. Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said he found “striking” during his time in the White House the degree to which “the drivers of opinion on foreign policy come almost entirely from the right.” Right-wing Jewish billionaires and multimillionaires have invested heavily in websites, daily email blasts, and thick policy journals. It would take a lot of space to list all of them, but among the most important are Jewish Insider, which acts as a tribal drum for right-wing Jews, often pounding the same targets as Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post but with greater depth and fewer fireworks. Bret Stephens uses his New York Times column to defend whatever Israel does and is also blessed with his very own Jewish policy journal, Sapir, funded by a dark-money foundation called the Maimonides Fund, which refuses to identify its donors. It’s a remarkable state of affairs for a newspaper that seeks to avoid even “the appearance of conflict of interest.” The Free Press, founded by Stephens’s former mentee, Bari Weiss, is obviously all in for Israel. Tablet is another extremely well-funded right-wing outlet that frequently traffics in Trump-style conspiracy theories and personal attacks on those Jews who resist them. Ditto The Algemeiner, a New York newspaper widely read by Hasidic Jews.
More: Miriam and Sheldon Adelson started their own news service explicitly for this purpose, called Jewish News Syndicate, and it is edited by a former Commentary magazine blogger Jonathan S. Tobin. The Jewish Review of Books publishes transparent hatchet jobs on dovish-sounding writers on issues relating to Israel alongside otherwise respectable intellectual inquiry (much like this magazine in the days when Martin Peretz was the owner and editor in chief). It competes in this category with the equally right-wing Mosaic, published by the far-right Tikvah Fund. Commentary, edited by nepo-baby John Podhoretz, has doubled down on its poisonous rancor directed toward anyone and everything that does not hew to the far-right Israeli line in the style of his father, Norman Podhoretz, though with less élan than it had under the old man. For instance, among his barrage of tweets that followed this year’s Oscar victory for the Israeli/Palestinian film No Other Land in the best documentary feature category were these: “Congratulations to HAMAS for its Oscar win. Now let’s see them destroyed,” together with, “Fuck you, anti-Semitic anti-Israel Hollywood filth.”
The Jewish media’s middle ground is occupied primarily by The Forward and the English edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Both lean left editorially but are open to almost all (non-Nazi) viewpoints in their respective opinion sections. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which has ably served as an analogue to the Associated Press ever since 1917, is also dependable journalistically and open to all sides. The Jewish media far left belongs to Jewish Currents, where Beinart frequently publishes. While it can be depended upon for sophisticated, well-documented journalism, its views—like those of other anti-Zionist publications—are considered too extreme to affect mainstream politics. In a shock to this reader at least, its editors could not even bring themselves to condemn the horrific attacks of October 7.
Columbia: Ground Zero of the Backlash
In today’s Jewish political world, there is a single word that will likely dominate almost any conversation: “antisemitism.” Expressions of Jew-hatred are, we can all agree, to be resisted whenever possible and condemned whenever necessary as with all forms of ignorance and prejudice. The problem with antisemitism is that we lack any remotely consensual understanding of how to define it; even less so on how to successfully combat it.
Most of the members of the mainstream media, and therefore many of the people who consume its product, rely on the ADL to tell them what’s going on in this arena, as it is understood to be this legacy stalwart’s bread and butter. But the ADL’s statistics are corrupted by its ideology. For instance, the group defines virtually every single pro-Palestinian demonstration on any campus anywhere, including those in which Jews are significant participants, as antisemitic. Almost every weekday, noted Jodi Rudoren, until recently the editor of The Forward, the ADL blasts what she calls an “exhausting and confusing” Campus Crisis Alert email to roughly 200,000 subscribers (featuring a red siren emoji). These enjoy the highest “open rate,” according to the ADL, of any of its constant stream of email blasts. Campus conflicts have calmed down across the country; emergency ADL email blasts have not.
Whatever antisemitism may or may not be, it obviously is not manifested in every single student demonstration for Palestinian rights. As the venerable Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, who spent four decades as executive director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA, put it to me in conversation: “One is a political issue that has to do with the politics of Israel, and one involves hatred of Jews.”
A considerable number of student protesters are themselves Jewish and insist that it is their religious commitments that lead them to protest Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Last year at Columbia University, for instance, encampment participants held a “solidarity Seder.” Are they antisemites? We can also agree that there are obviously plenty of reasons to object to Israel’s actions in Gaza, its now-multiple military occupations, and its treatment of Palestinians inside and outside its borders without, say, also hating the people on line at the lox counters at Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass. The growing number of anti-Zionist rabbis and especially rabbinical students offers further evidence of the lie of this simple equation.
While Israel’s popularity remains off the charts among conservative Christians, it is rapidly declining among American Jews. It’s as if one group of Americans has fallen in love and another is contemplating divorce. In a survey that shocked many people back in 2021, 34 percent of American Jews questioned agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States” and 38 percent of those under 40 agree that “Israel is an apartheid state.” Those numbers have likely increased in the past four years. In a May 2024 Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs survey, over half of American Jews supported withholding certain weapons from Israel, and fully a third agreed that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza—again, numbers that have likely grown over time.
As evidenced by the choice of Mike Huckabee to be U.S. ambassador to Israel, when it comes to Israel and the Trump administration, however, it’s the right-wing Christians who are driving the bus. While the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” has received far less attention than its “Project 2025,” it appears to be no less accurate in presaging the Trump administration’s attack plan. Its almost exclusively conservative Christian authors live in a world where what they call a “Hamas Support Network” is funded by liberal billionaires, especially Jewish ones like Soros. According to a pitch deck that accompanied the report obtained by The Forward, the first necessary step to save mankind from this fate was to locate “foreign [network] members vulnerable to deportation” and deploy law enforcement to “generate uncomfortable conditions” for U.S. citizens similarly engaged. The pitch deck suggested designating certain groups and organizations to be “TSEs,” for “terrorism support entities,” in order to allow ICE agents to arrest and to seek to deport foreign-born pro-Palestine protesters on campus. Trump began putting Project Esther into practice almost immediately when, on January 29, he issued an executive order that promised to deport noncitizens who have joined in “pro-jihadist protests” and to cancel student visas of all sympathizers of Hamas. The order was accompanied by the cheers of most of the legacy groups.
Columbia has the largest contingent of Jews in the Ivy League—nearly 23 percent of its undergraduates—and is located in the city where the 12 percent of citizens who identify as Jewish make it second only to Tel Aviv as the largest Jewish city in the world.
The Trump administration picked Columbia University to begin its attack on America’s institutions of higher learning, and, from a purely political standpoint, this made sense. Columbia has been ground zero for pro-Palestinian protests, encampments, disruption, harassment, building takeovers, destruction of property, and ultimately massive arrests. When called on the carpet by publicity-seeking Republican representatives, wealthy Jewish funders, and legacy Jewish organizations, Minouche Shafik, then the university’s president, attacked her own faculty before Congress and pressured a prominent pro-Palestinian professor to retire before quitting herself (along with the presidents of Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania). What’s more, it’s the school with the largest contingent of Jews in the Ivy League—nearly 23 percent of its undergraduates—and is located in the city where the 12 percent of citizens who identify as Jewish make it second only to Tel Aviv as the largest Jewish city in the world.
In March, ICE made the shocking arrest of the pro-Palestinian protester, graduate student, and green card–holder Mahmoud Khalil (in Columbia housing, in front of his then-pregnant U.S.-citizen wife, who was also threatened). He may be deported. That same month, Trump threatened Columbia with withdrawal of $400 million in federal research funds. ADL’s Greenblatt loudly cheered both the arrest and the attack on the university itself.
There was no shortage of prominent Next Generation voices standing up to the onslaught. Among the most eloquent of these was JCPA’s Spitalnick. “While the Trump administration claims to prioritize the fight against antisemitism, it has, in reality, repeatedly taken steps to gut the very tools we need to protect Jewish students,” she explained. Indeed, the Trump administration shuttered seven of the 12 regional offices of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which actually deals with complaints about antisemitism in our universities. He has, of course, threatened the termination of the entire department. Spitalnick charged the administration with “exploiting our community’s legitimate concerns about antisemitism on campus to undermine due process, civil liberties, and the rule of law” and seeking to “pit the Jewish community against the strong education institutions and inclusive democracy that have been inextricably linked with our community’s advancement, rights, and safety.”
As the Jewish journalist Ron Kampeas recently reported, a confrontation recently erupted between the legacy groups and the Next Generation. It began when Spitalnick and the JCPA initiated a letter that was eventually signed by the leaders of 10 organizations, including the leaders of all three non-Orthodox denominations, stating, “escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation, as well as to threaten billions in academic research and education funding.” The signatories categorically “reject[ed] any policies or actions” designed to exploit Jewish concern about antisemitism “to undermine democratic norms and rights, including the rule of law, the right of due process, and/or the freedoms of speech, press, and peaceful protest.”
Eric Fingerhut, a former congressman who heads the Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella organization boasting assets of nearly $300 million and 146 member groups, urged his members to reject the JCPA letter. He claims, somehow, that ICE’s targets were “receiving due process and are represented by able legal counsel.” (Fingerhut earlier provided Trump administration officials a forum to promote their campus crackdown.)
The jury is still out on the ultimate victor in this battle, but it appears that Team Next Generation has so far carried the day. Even Greenblatt felt forced to backpedal. Following the ADL’s celebratory statement in the wake of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, Greenblatt said his detention “serves as a deterrent to others who might consider breaking the law on college campuses or anywhere.” Later, Greenblatt apparently experienced a civil libertarian revelation: “If we sacrifice our constitutional freedoms in the pursuit of security,” he warned, “we undermine the very foundation of the diverse, pluralistic society we seek to defend.” Not long afterward, the AJC followed suit, belatedly decrying the “profound threat to the survival of America’s leading universities” that Trump’s actions represented, without, however, reconsidering its support for the ICE arrest of Kahlil.
All Roads Lead to … Resistance
During the course of writing and researching this article, I had occasion to speak to dozens of liberal Jewish leaders and noted scholars of American Jewish history. Among them, the only difference I could discern in their views was their degree of concern—a better word in many cases would be “panic”—over what constitutes the greater threat to American Jews: Trump’s attack on universities and his apparently unconstitutional treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the name of combating “antisemitism,” or the threats to the survival of U.S. democracy inherent in these actions.
Both of these, however, are tied up with the problem of the transformation of Israel into a country to which millions of liberal American Jews remain profoundly emotionally committed, but whose government consistently violates their most deeply held values. Taken together, these challenges combine to present American Jews with what J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami described as the fundamental question: “What does it mean to be Jewish in the U.S. in the middle of the twenty-first century?” The conflict he described is “partially related to Trump but also related to Israel and over who gets to define what it means to be Jewish in the U.S.” On the one side is “fealty to domination,” a particularist Jewish vision that is “tribal, nationalist, and territorialist.” On the other are the “liberal universalist values” that have historically defined the politics and culture of (non-Orthodox) American Jewish life.
The Israel problem is complicated enough. As Rabbi Jill Jacobs, an eloquent progressive Zionist who heads up T’ruah (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights), explained: “Judaism is not just a religion, it is also a peoplehood, and it is a connection and responsibility for other Jews. And half the Jews in the world live in the state of Israel. We are not in some café in Vienna.” Ben-Ami predicted that “if Israel moves back toward the center and normalizes relations with the neighboring states while assisting in the emergence of a stable, viable state of Palestine—then I can see a long-term reconnection of the Jewish community with the state of Israel, even for those younger Jews who today feel so distant from it.” Evidence, alas, for even the hint of such a transformation anytime soon would be microscopic, were it to exist at all. Far more likely is Israel’s continued embrace of illiberalism, corruption, and the same general disdain for what Thomas Jefferson called “the good opinion of mankind” that one sees in Donald Trump.
Indeed, it is Trump who is helping to unshackle whatever boundaries Netanyahu and company had until recently respected. As a recent New York Times explainer observed, the result of America’s replacement of Joe Biden with Donald Trump is “a prime minister unleashed, with fewer guardrails to constrain his actions in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.” This is true domestically as well. The Trump-era Netanyahu is all the more likely to succeed in his campaign to destroy Israel’s own fragile democratic institutions. (Others who have been unleashed include lawless West Bank settlers, who, supported by Israel’s military, have increased their campaign of terror designed to force Palestinians out of their homes and pave the way for the ultimate Israeli annexation of the territory.)
According to Beinart, young American Jews outside these established institutions will need to create Jewish ones independent of what he terms “the worship of Israel” or assimilate entirely into secular American life. (Notably, a recent Gallup poll found that fully one-quarter of those Americans raised as Jews no longer identify themselves that way.) Like Beinart, the influential scholar Rabbi Shaul Magid looks forward to younger Jews “creating a new form of diasporism that draws from the proximate past but has its own originality,” one that is “universal in aspiration” rather than dependent on Zionism in the manner that American Jewish identity operated for roughly the half-century that followed the 1967 Six Day War. Magid looks forward to these changes as “Israeli Jewry doesn’t really care that much about the American diaspora unless it supports them. It is a transactional relationship. They are watching American Jews get thrown under the bus by being subjects of weaponizing antisemitism for a conservative agenda, and they say nothing because in effect they support it because that supports their agenda. Young Jews see that and are basically saying ‘fuck you!’”
To be fair, there are many thousands of Israeli Jews who remain committed to finding a peaceful and fair-minded solution to the Palestinian issue. A small number of them are also Orthodox Jews. In March, I was present at an extremely well-attended meeting of American and Israeli religious Jews committed to peace at B’Nai Jeshurun synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But when it comes to elections and the actual making of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, and especially regarding the war in Gaza, they are, alas, all but invisible.
Those Jews like Jill Jacobs—who remain committed to a profound belief in Jewish “peoplehood” and its implied deep connection to Israeli Jews—worry about the impact of the current Israeli political leadership pushing away young Jews from their own religion and history as it simultaneously inspires antisemitism on the part of those who would blame Israel’s actions on Jews more generally. In many respects, this latter phenomenon is exactly the problem that Jewish students have been facing on college campuses, where pro-Palestinian protesters rule the day in popularity and have sometimes verbally abused Jews who they simply assume support Israel. Now, with the harsh, anti-democratic measures being undertaken at so many universities, Jacobs worries that, if this posture becomes widespread, it will lead to a broader perception that “Jewish power” is causing all the trouble. It will start with the accusation that “it is the Jews who are behind defunding the universities” and grow into far worse attacks. Speaking from UCLA, Rabbi Seidler-Feller told me, “I already hear the resentment against Jews based on exactly these claims.”
The more immediate crisis, however, is the one identified earlier by Spitalnick. Trump, with either the support or acquiescence of the legacy groups, and the enthusiastic backing of the new right-wing Jewish media infrastructure, is offering American Jews the following deal: They get a short-term win in shutting down a protest movement focused on Israel that discomfits them, just so long as they are willing to turn a blind eye to purposeful destruction of the educational and democratic institutions that have allowed them to become the safest, most secure, and most economically successful Jewish population to exist anywhere, anytime, ever.
In truth, both crises require exactly the same response. As the head of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest single organized group of Jews in the United States, Rabbi Rick Jacobs insisted that “in protecting Jews from antisemitism, we will find there is no Noah’s Ark that will allow American Jewry to survive the resulting flood of injustice and hate.” The rights and civic institutions that have allowed Jews to prosper in the United States, he said, are “imperiled by the beginning of the slide into authoritarianism we are witnessing in America and in Israel.” Jacobs shares the concern with others that “Trump and the Christian right’s enthusiastic support is supporting Israel on a path that will forever alienate it from the majority of American Jews, particularly those coming of age during the horrors of its war on Gaza.” The Nexus Project recently released a report called “Fighting Antisemitism, Protecting Democracy: A Strategy for the Trump Era.” The group’s founder, Jonathan Jacoby, advises Jewish leaders and rabbis to inform Trump’s supporters, “You cannot exploit our fear for your nefarious purposes. We will not let you destroy our democracy in our name. We will not let you endanger our community, and the communities of disadvantage groups and of other minorities, and ultimately, all Americans, in our name.”
Whatever the future holds for American Jews, David Myers, the esteemed UCLA professor of Jewish history, insisted that whatever one’s beliefs about antisemitism may be, “there is a much larger issue at hand. Jews are being instrumentalized—in the name of anti-antisemitism—as tools in a larger battle with much higher stakes. Trump and his people want to take down the university as a bastion of liberal values that poses an obstacle to their makeover of the American political order. Their larger goal is a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism in which there is no martial law or soldiers at every street corner,” but one that nevertheless strangles the institutions that constitute the lifeblood of any democracy. Myers cited the warnings of the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt about the dangers of the Jews’ vertical alliance with the state and said: “This seems to be another moment at which Jews must seriously weigh the merits of aligning themselves with a regime whose values—anti-rights, anti-due process, anti-rule of law, anti-university—are so antithetical to those that have provided them with the most successful diaspora existence in their history.”
To which all one can say is “Amen.”
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Civil War Over
Donald Trump appeared first on New Republic.
