It was never about antisemitism

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When Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro gathered family and friends at his residence Saturday evening to celebrate the first night of Passover, he never could have imagined that the religious texts in their hands would end up charred fragments just hours later. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, a man hopped the fence, entered the home, set off a firebomb, and fled undetected. Everyone inside escaped physically unscathed, but had two large doors on the first floor not been closed, the entire building could’ve gone up in flames.

It remains unclear what exactly motivated the arsonist, but the circumstances lent themselves to some pretty clear inferences: A vocally Jewish elected official had his house torched on one of the most important nights of the Hebrew calendar. Luckily the current president has made fighting antisemitism a cornerstone of his reign and would quickly step in to condemn an act that appeared, at least on its face, to be motivated by antisemitism, right? Wrong. 

Trump remained mum all day Sunday into Monday about the attempt on Governor Shapiro’s life until he was finally asked about it during his Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. A day and half of thinking yielded this response: "He was probably just a whack job and certainly a thing like that can not be allowed to happen.”

This complete lack of care for an overtly Jewish situation happens to coincide with the Trump administration going full bore in its faux crusade against antisemitism. They’ve begun withholding millions in funding for universities until they meet some opaque standard, searching the social media accounts of student visa holders to find reasons to revoke their legal stay in the US, and disappearing people in support of Palestinian liberation to immigrant detention facilities.

Meanwhile, Trump has all but admitted that fighting antisemitism is just a ruse to make universities bend to his will. “What if we never pay them?” Trump reportedly said at a lunch on April 1st, according to a witness. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

Donald Trump never gave a shit about fighting antisemitism, which is a fact that’s important to state upfront. By his words and by his actions, nothing the current and former president ever communicated with regard to the Jewish people made us safer—and none of it was supposed to. It’s been an obvious power grab from the start, but one to which a broader audience seems to finally be grasping. 

When former MSNBC host Chris Matthews went on Morning Joe Tuesday morning and said that Trump punishing universities and pro-Palestine students in the name of fighting antisemitism, “is probably not the worst move he’s ever made,” journalist and author Molly Jong-Fast responded with a word.

“This is thought policing 101,” Jong-Fast, an MSNBC contributor, said. “This is not ok. The truth is, and I say this as a Jew, they are using antisemitism as a cloak. If this administration really cared about antisemitism, there’s a lot of stuff they could do. This is not about that. This is about targeting universities. This is about targeting speech. This is right out of an authoritarian playbook.”

It was a nice fairytale for Republicans and staunchly pro-Israel Democrats to tell themselves while Joe Biden was still president that Trump would swoop in and obliterate antisemitism from college campuses: But it took re-electing him for many to discover their personal boundaries on regulating speech. And at this point for many of the victims, it’s too late. Now students are being violently arrested and disappeared in the name of fighting antisemitism—and American Jews are left holding a gun a majority of us never asked for.

The case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student here on a student visa from Turkey, has been particularly disturbing. The video of her being violently grabbed in broad daylight by plain clothes, masked officers of an unidentified agency continues to stick with me. 

A ProPublica piece published this week details the timeline of Ozturk’s abduction, and included this chilling detail: Ozturk believed at first she was being snatched by vigilantes from Canary Mission, the organization that put her in their anti-Israel database for co-writing an op-ed opposing her school’s policies with regard to Israel.

“I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this,” she wrote in a statement filed in federal court on Thursday. “I thought they were people who had doxxed me and I was afraid for my safety.”

From Ozturk’s perspective, this was the behavior of extra-judicial thugs—certainly not the handiwork of the US government. But soon she and the rest of us would learn it came directly from the very top, and that it was being done in the name of keeping Jewish people safe. 

The Boston chapter of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, which is organized around the idea of urging “political leaders to reject any effort to codify into federal law a definition of antisemitism that conflates antisemitism with criticism of the state of Israel,” published an open letter after the March abduction of former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil. The letter starts off “Not in our name,” a reference to a popular rallying cry used by Jews in protest of the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. 

“We hold various views about Israel and Palestine, politics in the Middle East, and student activism on our campuses,” the letter reads. “But we are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name – and cynical claims of antisemitism – to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities. We specifically reject rhetoric that caricatures our students and colleagues as ‘antisemitic terrorists’ because they advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom.”

Earlier this month the Trump administration announced it would freeze $510 million in funding to Brown University. One got the sense the Trump administration expected such a grandiose act of performative solidarity would elicit a chorus of gratitude from Jews on campus. Instead, it landed with a thud.

In a joint statement from Brown’s highest governing body and Jewish community leaders, the signatories affirmed that the campus is already a wonderful place for Jewish students. “Brown University is home to a vibrant Jewish community that continues to flourish with the steadfast support of the administration,” they wrote. “Amidst broader concerns about antisemitism on college campuses, Brown stands out as an inclusive environment where Jewish life is deeply integrated into campus culture.”

Trump is taking a sledgehammer to a Scrabble tile and hurting students far more severely than he claims to be helping. His intentions are so transparently self-serving—in line with everything he does—that we’ve reached a point where people across the spectrum of Israel/Palestine thought can see it’s not about antisemitism. And it never was.

This malevolent quest towards supposed Jewish safety has always been predicated on endangering anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian students—including other Jews. On April 3rd, four Jewish Columbia University students chained themselves to one of the school’s gates to protest the unlawful arrest and detainment of Mahmoud Khalil. “We refuse to accept the ongoing genocide in Gaza, carried out through the investments of our trustees, as normal,” a release from the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition read. “We refuse to accept the kidnapping of our friends as the new normal.” 

Though police and university administrators were called to the scene, no action was taken against them. “We’d be foolish to not acknowledge that if we were Black and brown we would have been arrested by now,” one protester said at the time.

Schools like Harvard and MIT have been more defiant in the face of Trump’s threats.

Harvard President Alan M. Garber wrote on Monday of Trump’s demands that, “It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner. Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”

As promising as Harvard’s opposition may seem, in many ways it’s too little too late. They fell prey to bad actors like Chris Rufo, Rep. Elise Stefanik and billionaire Bill Ackman’s relentless and erroneous attacks on their community in the wake of October 7th. And a report from student newspaper The Harvard Crimson detailed how the school had already partially capitulated in advance.

“In the lead-up to the funding review, Garber had tried to quietly walk a middle road between federal pressure and resistance on campus,” the Crimson wrote. “In March, Harvard ousted personnel at its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, suspended programming focused on Israel and Palestine at the Harvard Divinity School, and terminated its partnership with the oldest university in the West Bank — seemingly a preemptive measure to fend off scrutiny from Washington.”

But Harvard’s preemptive efforts were to no avail, because the truth remains that no capitulation will ever be enough to meet an ever-rising waterline.

“We’re not looking to just file lawsuits — we want to compel a cultural change in how Jewish Americans are treated on college campuses,” Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi said recently of the administration holding its funding ransom. If they were really serious about this goal,  they could stop defunding universities with large Jewish populations; they could quit fraternizing with and hiring known white supremacists; and they could choose not to hand over the full power of the government to a guy who did a Nazi salute on inauguration day. But the whole thing has always been a farce.

As I wrote for Rolling Stone back in 2021, being an American Jew is a mindfuck. And now we’re in more peril than ever because this destruction of this country’s university life and the lives of university students is being done in our name.