We Did This. Only We Can Undo This.

American Jews Must Dismantle The Fascist Weapon in Trump's Hand.

We did this:

ICE goons illegally seize Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk

I understand why National Security Advisor Mike Waltz invited The Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the infamous Houthi PC small group Signal chat. Goldberg is a truly magnetic character; he’s just that good.

I met the journalist and former IDF prison guard ten years ago at a private breakfast for Jewish communal professionals, the day after his keynote speech at the annual fundraiser for our local Jewish Community Relations Council. He came off very bright, well-spoken, and thoughtful at this informal chat and Q&A. I was struck by one particular response to a question concerning younger Jews’ rising rates of disengagement from the organized community as a result of Israeli actions.

Goldberg’s advice—which seemed wise at the time—was to sidestep the question of Israel altogether: build a vibrant and robust American communal landscape, welcome young Jews into it, and watch them enjoy a meaningful Jewish life. Goldberg knew it was a fool’s errand to try and convince American Jews of Israel’s moral superiority. He also understood that connection to a faith community meant much more to most people than—let’s be frank—what could at that time still be boiled down to a narrow question of foreign policy.

He’s just that good.

If American Jews’ connection to the State of Israel felt elective, this would have been a sustainable and strategic response to failing rates of religious affiliation among millennials and Gen Z. But we no longer live in that world. Love it or hate it, connection to Israel has become an inescapable thread of contemporary American Jewish life, with the narrative needs of political Zionism infecting its every program. Since October 7, this dynamic has gone into overdrive—but it is by no means new.

In the halcyon Obama-era summer of 2010,

Peter Beinart

sent shockwaves through the Jewish communal landscape, warning in the New York Review of Books of The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment:

“Because [young Jews’] liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake. …Obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.”

Beinart mapped out a future where (historically minority-held) right-wing and orthodox views would come to dominate communal spaces largely abandoned by the rising generations of progressive and liberal minds. His concerns were primarily parochial, but the implication for Jewish communal relations was clear: the expansion of illiberal Zionism would not bode well for American Jewry or Israel, to say nothing of its effects on Palestinians.

Beinart maximized the impact of his essay by wrapping the story of an entire people in a narrative of its youth; he struck a chord because he was talking about all of us. Fifteen years later, this prophetic warning of a community guided by its worst instincts has proven true not just to internal heartbreak—but has in very real measure foretold Zionism’s crucial role in the dismantling of American democracy itself.

Amongst the Trump administration’s blitzkrieg against legal structures and democratic norms one set of actions is perhaps the most chilling of all: the gestapo-style kidnapping of advocates and organizers on behalf of the Jewish people. As these attacks unfold in the name of fighting antisemitism, some American Jewish leaders are starting to wake up and push back.

On April 1, after two Minnesota college students were illegally captured by ICE, the Minnesota Rabbinical Association (MRA) released this statement:

“We are concerned that this approach which targets and detains international students threatens to erode our democracy without making Jewish or Israeli students any safer. It is stirring up fear and stifling free speech…

The recent spate of immigrant arrests and withholding of Federal funding from universities are evidence of a strategy employed by the Trump administration called ‘Project Esther,’ authored by the Heritage Foundation. This strategy uses claims of fighting antisemitism to dismantle values we hold dear as Jews and as Americans, including the right to express dissent and the imperative to protect the stranger.”

The MRA frames its opposition to “this approach” as an objection to apparently novel tactics devised by the Trump administration and the Heritage Foundation. The only problem with this posture is it entirely ignores the Jewish community’s role devising and enabling this approach. In fact, the MRA itself has been instrumental in its rise.

We've got to clean up this mess.

Now let me be clear: It is good and important to see the MRA push back on a lever of Trumpian fascism, as we’re going to need a broad coalition to hold the line for free speech and ultimately reconstitute a healthy democracy. I welcome the MRA to this fight. At the same time, it breaks my brain to see the MRA craft a statement that reckons with authoritarian threats while reinforcing the very propaganda upon which those threats are built:

“On the surface, this approach may seem to offer protection. But this short-term solution is short-sighted….we object to the violation of anyone’s Constitutional rights as a strategy for fighting antisemitism.”

While rejecting the administration’s gestapo tactics, the MRA grants it the good faith presumption of aiming to protect Jews. But this has never been about antisemitism, a broad-brush defamatory label the pro-Israel community has deployed against any and all critics of the Jewish state for decades. Volumes have been written about this perverse strategy, so I will not belabor the point here, but instead highlight a few recent examples of the MRA’s contribution to the weaponization of antisemitism charges now powering Trump’s oppressive actions:

• On January 19, 2024 the MRA issued an open letter to the Minneapolis City Council, urging it to vote against a proposed resolution in Support of Permanent Ceasefire and Preventing Loss of Human Life in the Middle East. “We disagree with the language of the resolution that states that the Israeli Defense Forces are indiscriminately bombing Gaza,” they wrote. “We believe that this resolution is inaccurate and inflammatory. Demonizing Israel contributes to a frightening atmosphere here in Minnesota that leads to increased antisemitism and puts your Jewish constituents at risk.”

• On April 28, in response to protests against the University of Minnesota’s and the United States’ complicity in attempted genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the MRA wrote, “When students on campus hear calls such as ‘globalize the intifada,’ ‘al-aqsa flood,’ ‘al-qassam make us proud,’ and ‘death to Zionism’ …those calls of violence create a sense of fear…[these are] direct calls for violence targeting anyone who identifies as Zionist, as so many Jewish students do. These acts must be called out and condemned, and a sense of safety for all students on campus must be restored.”

• On June 20: “We are writing today to offer our input in the ongoing search for the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies…While we deeply respect the principle of academic freedom in faculty decisions…the director of this Center must embody the values and sensitivities of those who are most profoundly impacted by the atrocities it seeks to study and remember…Be mindful about the founding mission and vision of the Center, as conceived and designed by Dr. Feinstein together with donors Myron and Anita Kunin, which included fighting modern-day antisemitism and all forms of bigotry.”

The June 20 letter was part of a pressure campaign urging the University of Minnesota to rescind an offer to Raz Segal to lead the school’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, a field in which the Israeli-American Jewish scholar is a subject matter expert. Segal committed the unforgivable sin of describing Israel’s attacks on Gaza as a genocide, a problem made worse for communal leaders by the scholar’s use of empirical data and indisputable facts. He simply had to go.

In teaming up with the JCRC of Minnesota and the Dakotas and grassroots Zionist activists, the MRA set out to make an example of Segal at the expense of academic freedom and truth itself. In his letter about the affair to The Forward, Segal wrote:

“Genocide is the culmination of a process that turns the world upside down — that frames defenseless people as dangerous enemies; violent states as innocent societies threatened by blind hatred and fanaticism; and lies as truth. Genocide — the destruction of a people, and destruction of their world — finally, is falsified and rationalized as heroic, as righteous. We are now witnessing a terrible spectacle: senior administrators in universities across the U.S. who are, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, engaged in such falsification and rationalization.”

I welcome the MRA to this fight, I really do. But I’m going to need them to go much, much further. And this one’s personal for me. I spent most of my life immersed in the Minnesota Jewish community; I grew up in, gave back to, and benefitted immeasurably from its institutions. The signatories to these MRA statements include my friends, former colleagues, teachers, mentors, former campers, even my own relatives. This is personal.

It is painful and difficult to write in such stark opposition to people I know and love, yet I feel compelled to illustrate the gulf between their intent and their actions, to call them to a higher purpose. Rabbis are supposed to be leaders.

I’m also compelled to push for an evolution here because I used to hold the exact positions I see in these letters, born of the twisted logic that honors ethnosupremacy while striving to protect your people from its destructive reach. It has been a journey. I have occupied nearly every ideological position on the pro-Israel spectrum, arguing and counter-arguing, on my unending path to a deeper understanding. And I have been wrong, so very wrong. Wrong in my assumptions, wrong in my information, wrong in my analysis.

But that’s okay—in fact, it’s absolutely essential. Realizing and acknowledging where I have been wrong on Israel has been critical to reconciling the mistakes of my past and embracing a more advanced, clear-eyed view of the present and the future. Biden couldn’t do it, Kamala couldn’t do it, and that error may well have cost her the election. Now we’re all paying the price.

It is heartening and valuable to have the MRA come out against Trump’s abductions and deportations, but if they’re serious about beating back fascism these community leaders are going to have to do something truly courageous: admit they were wrong.

• They were wrong to look the other way—at best—when Jewish organizations like Canary Mission built lists of pro-Palestinian academics to defame, demonize, dox and blacklist.

• They were wrong to support AIPAC when the pro-Israel lobby platformed Donald Trump and gave millions of campaign dollars to insurrectionist politicians after January 6.

• They were wrong to oppose the cease fire, cease-fire resolutions, pro-peace protests and pro-Palestinian movements.

• They were wrong to embrace and justify the bad-faith antisemitism game.

• They were wrong to preach the fantasy of a two-state solution, a lie that exists to placate Americans so Israel can continue ethnic cleansing unimpeded.

• They were wrong to criminalize participation in the nonviolent Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“IAC For Action’s advocacy has helped 39 states pass anti-BDS laws, creating an economic Iron Dome to protect businesses from antisemitic discrimination.”

Back when those of us in the pro-Israel tent were fighting over the effort to pass state laws against participating in BDS, I tried the most effective argument I could muster. I argued that BDS may be wrong, it may be counterproductive to peace, it may even be antisemitic—but eliminating free speech for those critical of Israel was more damaging than anything the nonviolent movement could achieve. I lost that argument, the free speech exception on Palestine passed into law, and the rest is history.

At the time, I believed it was possible to separate the cause of Palestinian freedom from the right to stand up and speak up for that cause. It was a principled belief, and somewhere in some alternate timeline I would love to imagine there’s a world out there where the Jewish community came down on the side of the constitution while still holding fast to its deep love of Israel as a Jewish state. But we don’t live in that timeline.

In this world, in our time, the cause of Palestinian freedom and core American values like the right to speech, assembly, and habeas corpus have all now become inextricably entwined. It is no longer possible to fight for the rights of student protestors—as the MRA wishes to do—but not fight for their cause—as the MRA does not wish to do.

The MRA closes its April statement with this clarion call: “We have learned that our safety and freedom as Jews is irrevocably bound up with the safety and freedom of all people…The work before us requires us to build coalitions to protect our community in ways that bind our safety and freedom with others.”

Had they chosen to listen to Raz Segal rather than suppress him, the MRA might have sooner internalized the core warning in his letter to The Forward:

“The Jewish students attacked in the course of protesting the war understand, as I do, that senior administrators at U.S. universities have steered our institutions onto an ominous path. They have for years used the IHRA definition of antisemitism to silence, intimidate and persecute Palestinians and their supporters. This weaponization relies on erasing the distinction between a people and a state, reducing Jewish identity to Zionism…

This is, of course, ahistorical: Many Jews have identified as anti-Zionists since the emergence of Zionism. And there are many ways of identifying as a Jew beyond a Zionist or anti-Zionist framework. What those who insist on an absolute unity between Jewish identity and Zionism fail to understand is that doing so constitutes an attack against anti-Zionist Jews because of the way they express their Jewish identity. It is, in other words, in its own way a form of antisemitism, of attacking Jews because they are Jews.

This, too, is a feature of our world turned upside down, a weaponization of the struggle against antisemitism that includes an antisemitic attack — in support, furthermore, of Israel’s destructive assault on Gaza. The struggle to stop this genocide is thus also a struggle against antisemitism. A struggle to protect a people facing an extremely violent state. A struggle for the significance of truth, both in Israel and Palestine, and in our universities in the U.S. A struggle for our world.”

In Jewish mythology, the golem of Prague was created as a powerful defender of the community during times of persecution. Fashioned from clay and animated through sacred words, it served as a protector against external threats. Yet the legend also warns us: a creation of such power, once unleashed, can slip beyond its maker's control and wreak havoc on the very people it was meant to protect.

We have constructed our own modern golem. We molded it from accusations of antisemitism, inscribed it with the equation that criticism of Israel equals hatred of Jews, and breathed life into it through our institutions. This golem was intended to shield us from the pain of confronting uncomfortable truths, to protect Israel from accountability, and to silence dissent in the name of Jewish safety.

But as with the golem of legend, this creation has grown beyond our control. This collective effort of self-protection has become the instrument of democracy's dismantlement, now wielded by a regime following the authoritarian playbook of history's darkest chapters.

Having participated in this effort, I've shamefully contributed to this transformation firsthand. Trump's administration represents a dire escalation—using the machinery built ostensibly to combat antisemitism to instead target movement leaders, deport students, and dismantle constitutional protections.

Unlike the golem of Prague, whose rampage was halted when the rabbi erased a letter from its forehead, this modern creation cannot be so easily disabled. The dismantling of this golem requires something far more difficult: collective acknowledgment of complicity in its creation and a profound reckoning with the damage it has caused.

The path forward demands that the American Jewish community become not merely tolerant of Palestinian advocacy but actively, vocally, and unequivocally pro-Palestinian. “Safety and freedom as Jews irrevocably bound up with the safety and freedom of all people” can no longer constitute an empty catchphrase. It has to actually mean something. This isn't about abstract principles of justice and human dignity, it's about doing the hard and honest work to recognize and legitimately counter the existential threat that authoritarianism poses to all vulnerable communities, to democracy itself.

Those who helped create this monster are uniquely positioned to dismantle it. Those who breathed life into these dangerous falsehoods must now speak truth with equal fervor. What kind of community stands aside and laments the misuse of a weapon they themselves forged and handed over—while refusing to break it apart?

This work will be painful. It will require admitting to being wrong, that fear was allowed to guide moral compromise, that tribalism was prioritized over a just future. It will mean facing rejection from inside the community and oppression from the outside. But if Jewish values of justice truly matter—if the harrowing lessons of nations are to mean anything—there is no other choice. And the young people might just come crawling back into the tent.

The golem must be dismantled. And those who created it must be the ones to do it, before the monster they unleashed consumes us all. Free Israel. Free America. Free Palestine.

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