Photo: Muslim justice League
In the past few weeks, federal agents have targeted nearly a dozen foreign-born students and faculty members, many of whom have criticized Israel or participated in campus protests against its brutal siege on Gaza. Meanwhile, the State Department — using AI to scan social media for evidence of pro-Hamas sentiments — has revoked some 300 visas, relying on a 1952 law originally conceived, in part, to deport “communists.”
At the same time, the White House has threatened to revoke billions in federal grants to universities accused of “fail[ing] to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination” and strong-armed white-shoe law firms to join pro bono litigation to “combat antisemitism,” among other things. After detaining Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who served as an intermediary between activists and administrators during protests last spring, President Trump wrote on Truth Social, “This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students … who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity … We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.” Ten days into his term, he ordered executive agencies to “marshal all Federal resources to combat the explosion of anti-Semitism” and the DoJ to “investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism.” It’s not funny, but it sounds like a joke: Why did fascism come to America in 2025? To protect the Jews.
Khalil, a green-card holder married to a U.S. citizen, has been detained since at least March 11 in a Louisiana facility that has been described by immigration lawyers as a “black hole”; detainees sleep on metal bunk beds 50 to a room. Another target, Columbia undergraduate Yunseo Chung, who has lived in the U.S. since age 7, went into hiding. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, was abducted from a Somerville, Massachusetts, street by plainclothes ICE agents. Her crime: co-authoring an op-ed for the Tufts Daily newspaper calling on the administration to respond to student demands. They are being punished for political speech explicitly. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “not to become a social activist.”
The perversity of this situation is difficult to overstate. The Immigration and Nationality Act, the Cold War–era law under which Khalil and others have been detained and renditioned, was used to impede the immigration of Jewish Holocaust survivors. The irony is not lost on liberal Jews, for whom the video of Ozturk’s arrest, as the New York Times reports, “evoked painful memories from Jewish history.” Many say the administration is manipulating their fears to execute a wider assault, endangering Jews in the process.
But claims of hypocrisy and cynicism conceal a darker truth. When the Immigration and Nationality Act originally passed, the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish political leaders opposed it. Then-ADL national director Benjamin Epstein called it an example “of the worst kind of legislation, discriminatory and abusive of American concepts and ideals.” Times have changed. After Khalil’s detention, the ADL, under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, praised the decision: “We appreciate the Trump administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.” Pro-Israel organizations like Canary Mission and Betar USA have for years been assembling databases of students and scholars who criticize Israel; now Betar boasts the White House is using these blacklists.
The reality is that expanding the definition of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel — and criminalize anti-Zionist protest — has been an express project of mainstream Jewish organizations for decades. (“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” has been Greenblatt’s mantra.) The current crackdown represents the spoils of their success.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations embraced the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which includes “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” and “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” That one can love the Jewish people, as I do, and question the virtue of a Jewish ethnostate, as I also do, is not contemplated by the IHRA. In America, by definition, I am an antisemite.
But at least I am Jewish (and a citizen). I may not want Trump’s “protection,” but I have it. In fact, while the White House attempts to eliminate civil rights for other groups, it is Jews, and Jews alone, who are treated as a minority deserving of defense.
Liberal Jews prefer to think of the White House’s campaign as pretextual: We are being used! It’s not about us. “The purpose of the deportations … has not been to fight antisemitism,” writes The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg on X, “but rather to use antisemitism as a beachhead to eventually do away with foreign students altogether, using Jews as a pretext for a non-Jewish political agenda.” This view unburdens us from complicity. But in what sense can the deportation of anti-Israel activists in defense of Jewish students be considered a “non-Jewish” political agenda? The truth is: We are implicated. Our desire for innocence is of no use to the disappeared.
It’s important to remember how we got here. For half a century, Jewish political and religious leaders insisted that defending Israel is the obligation of every Jewish person. Many leftist Jews, like myself, rejected this as moral blackmail and attempted to craft a Jewish identity separate from Zionism. But others took the lessons of their elders at face value and came to see loving Israel as inherent to their Jewishness. It is understandable that these young people should feel threatened when their campuses erupt in outrage against Israel. Their rabbis, their parents, and their grandparents all told them that protesting Israel is what Jew-haters do — and that when Jew-haters rally, it is the first step on the way to annihilation. Can we blame them for believing it?
Meanwhile, in the past several decades, college administrators embraced the idea that students need to feel seen and vindicated in their identities. Certain political speech became grounds for punishment. The war in Gaza brought this regime to crisis. Activists had every right to express outrage about the atrocities in Gaza; at the same time, it was not unreasonable for Jewish students to expect to be protected from speech that imperiled their senses of self.
If combating antisemitism is a pretext, we helped to create it. Far too many Jewish voices have publicly yearned for someone to rid them of these meddlesome protesters. If they are now appalled that someone heard their wails, let them say so. If Jewish leaders resent their erstwhile concerns about campus safety being used to deport dissidents, they should be the loudest voices denouncing the actions — not sheepish ones, like Greenblatt or Chuck Schumer, whose statement on Khalil’s arrest both stigmatized Khalil and abdicated responsibility.
The plain fact is that our discourse about antisemitism is broken, divorced from reality, at once pedantic and illogical, a vehicle for smallness, moral narcissism, and confusion. Or else, perhaps, it is working exactly as designed. The concept of antisemitism in American political life now exists to demonize critics of Israel; it is what it does. And what it is doing is fueling authoritarianism.
It must be said: The effect of merging Zionism with Jewish identity (the premise of mainstream Jewish political thought since 1967) was to encourage actual antisemitism. American Jewish and Israeli leaders insist that loving Israel is a Jewish obligation. But when Israel behaves badly, the same people require Israel’s critics to carefully distinguish between the Jews and Israel. (Indeed, the IHRA definition of antisemitism includes, among its examples, “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”) It is not surprising that some pro-Palestine activists are exhausted by this gauntlet of blame and exoneration. If Jews don’t want to be held responsible for Israel’s actions, let us be the first to denounce its crimes. If Jews don’t want their safety to be Trump’s excuse for embracing tyranny, let us loudly reject his offer. Saying “Not in our name” is good. But we should also be saying: “Not at all.”
