There is much talk among progressive Jews right now about pushing back against “government overreach” as the Trump administration ramps up its commitment to ending America’s antisemitism epidemic.
As these folks see it, recent White House actions to hold Jew-haters accountable – such as the withdrawal of billions in academic funding or the arrest and likely deportation of Hamas activist Mahmoud Khalil – are the most worrisome threats against Jewish safety and security facing the United States.
Never mind ongoing anti-Israel campus protests or the suspicious fire bombing Saturday night of the home of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro.
Writing in The New York Times last week, Michael S. Rother, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, warned that current efforts by President Donald Trump to combat antisemitism “pose a bigger threat to Jewish people’s safety than all the campus protests ever could.”
Meanwhile, Emily Tamkin, a contributing columnist at The Forward, wrote in the run-up to Passover on Friday that as she retold “the story of Miriam and Moses” at her Seder, she would also tell “the story of Mahmoud Khalil.” Passover, Tamkin apparently believes, may be a liberation tale, but it’s not just a story of Jewish liberation (apparently regardless Moses and all those Israelites crossing the Red Sea).
Enslaved to the cult of intersectionality as the Hebrews were to Pharaoh, Tamkin declared, in an unoriginal act of virtue signaling, “The suffering of one group is bound up in the suffering of others.”
Take it from someone who could be the poster-child for intersectionality, Tamkin could not be more incorrect. Particularly when it comes to Jews, and particularly right now.
Indeed, no minority group has gone further out of its way to aid other minorities than America’s Jews. Back in the summer of 2020, for instance, during the height of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, more than 600 Jewish groups signed an open letter in The New York Times supporting the pro-Black social justice movement.
Yet few social justice causes have been more historically hostile to Jews, Israel, and Zionism than #blm.
The same goes for organized feminist groups, such as the now-defunct Women’s March, formed in the wake of Trump’s first win in 2016. And for the myriad LGBT organizations, such as media watchdog group GLAAD – whose annual awards dinner last year devolved into an orgy of televised Jew-bashing.
The silence groups toward the Jews
The failure of these groups to support Jews as they were literally being mutilated and murdered in October 2023 not only reveals the folly of the entire #intersectionality movement, but the farcical nature of Jews being now pressured to help “liberate” our own haters in the name of civil liberties.
Where were the civil liberties of Jewish kids being shut out of college campuses or Jewish professionals who found their names on anti-Zionist watchdog lists, unable to earn a living?
But beyond the hypocrisy, at play here is something far more worrisome and dangerous. Once again, Jews are being asked to do the work of securing other folks’ rights and other folks’ liberties.
Once again, unlike any other minority group, Jews are being tasked with sacrificing our own best interests for the sake of others, including those who have advocated for our extermination. And we’re being told to do so by leaders, such as Rother, supposedly for our own good. It’s disgusting.
Jews are under no obligation to advocate on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil
Make no mistake: It’s not our job as Jews, currently the most maligned and imperiled minority group in America, to advocate on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil nor of any terror-aligned jihadi who has run afoul of established Western codes of conduct.
Almost no one asked African-Americans during the height of the #blm protests to account for, say, the sentiments of whites who did not support their agenda.
Oh wait, The New York Times did so when it ran an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton suggesting that the US National Guard be called in to quell the mayhem. The editor of the Times Opinion section was promptly terminated.
Of course, Jews who believe that hardline administration policies threaten US civil liberties can and should make their voices heard; that’s the beauty of America. But to claim that doing so is for the sake of Jews themselves is nothing short of perverse.
It’s also lazy, dishonest, and disingenuous. President Rother of Wesleyan said in the Times that “For Jews, a number of [Administration] agendas... pose a direct threat to the very people they purport to help; Jews who applaud the... crackdown will soon find that they do so at their peril.”
What about the peril posed by the creeping jihadi presence on college campuses or the weaponization of identity politics against Jewish professionals and students?
Or the increasing instances of job applicants with “Jewish-sounding” names unable to find work. At least according to thinkers like Rother or Tomkin, it seems that those are problems Jews cannot solve, nor should they – unlike the fate of Khalil.
Because just like the political pickle the Hamas supporter now finds himself in, these are not problems created by Jews in the first place.
The writer is an editor and columnist at the New York Post and an adjunct fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute.