For the last year and a half, Tufts Students for Israel has battled against criticism of Israel on the Boston-area campus. But on Thursday, the group took a stance of a different kind: It published an op-ed in the campus newspaper advocating for the school’s most prominent pro-Palestinian student.
“The detainment of Rümeysa Öztürk is plain wrong,” the group said. “And we stand firmly against it.”
They were referring to the Turkish national and fifth-year doctoral student who was seized by ICE officers last week after leaving her home to attend a Ramadan iftar dinner. The group said it was “horrified” by the video of Öztürk’s arrest, in which several plainclothes officers surround her on the street before bundling her into an unmarked car. The group was also unsettled by the fact that her only apparent offense was having co-authored an op-ed calling on Tufts to divest from Israel and accusing Israel of genocide.
“If any of us do not have the right to speak freely, then none of us have freedom of speech,” Tufts Students for Israel wrote.
The students joined a number of other Jewish voices condemning Öztürk’s arrest. More than 100 rabbis across Massachusetts have signed a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s action, and dozens of members of a local synagogue attended a rally in her name.
American Jews turn on Trump
Their advocacy comes amid an apparent hardening of American Jewish sentiment against the Trump administration’s crackdown on what it says are “Hamas sympathizers” on college campuses. In recent days, the CEOs of Hillel International and the Anti-Defamation League both articulated reservations about deporting non-citizen students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests; for the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, that marked a shift from several weeks ago.
Yet at the same time, the act of rejecting the Trump administration’s ostensible support has not come close to resolving the alienation that many Jews have felt during the Israel-Hamas War. Instead, both students and locals say they were turned off by the anti-Israel tenor of demonstrations on Öztürk’s behalf.
“I think that the vast majority of the Jewish community thinks that it’s really quite bad that this happened,” said Eitan Hersh, a Jewish Tufts professor who has studied Jewish campus life and attitudes after Oct. 7, 2023. Yet, he added, “some of the students who came to my office were disappointed that there was no way for them to express their support for this student.”
Öztürk’s arrest added her to a growing list of pro-Palestinian students targeted by the Trump administration for deportation. The spree began when ICE officers arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest leader, at his home in university housing last month.
As with Khalil, ICE moved Öztürk to Louisiana in an apparent bid to avoid intervention by judges in more liberal jurisdictions. In court Thursday, the government argued that because Öztürk had been moved, a federal judge in Boston no longer had jurisdiction over the case and that it should proceed in immigration court.
The State Department, which revoked Öztürk’s visa at the same time as she was arrested, claimed she had been engaged in activities supporting Hamas. Canary Mission, an anonymous pro-Israel watchdog group that compiles dossiers on pro-Palestinian activists, had published information on her online. The group is making an effort to aid Trump’s roundup of pro-Palestinian “foreign nationals.”
Tufts’ president has advocated for Öztürk’s release. The university “has no information to support the allegations that she was engaged in activities at Tufts that warrant her arrest and detention,” president Sunil Kumar wrote in a court filing on Thursday.
Rubio, meanwhile, has defended Öztürk’s detention by arguing that because she was a part of the broader student protest movement, she was “creating a ruckus” and undeserving of a student visa.
“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses. If we’ve given you a visa and then you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away,” he told reporters.
The crackdown has ignited mixed feelings among Jews who believed the pro-Palestinian protests created an uncomfortable climate for Jewish students. Some have applauded the Trump administration’s crackdown on colleges, saying it is long overdue and needed to protect Jewish students who have felt threatened by anti-Israel activity. Others say they fear the Trump administration is weaponizing concerns about antisemitism to repress speech, undercut universities and pursue an anti-immigrant agenda.
A person who answered the phone at Tufts Hillel said the group had no comment on Öztürk’s case before hanging up.
Shortly after Öztürk’s arrest, Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council issued a statement that said campus antisemitism was “a real and serious problem,” but that “the administration should not exploit those legitimate concerns to undermine civil liberties the rule of law and our constitutional protections.”
The pro-Israel students at Tufts acknowledged that not everyone is concerned about the arrests of students. “While some people may believe that this issue does not affect them because they don’t hold Öztürk’s perceived beliefs or because they are not visa holders, we believe those people are wrong,” they wrote.
The students noted they “strongly oppose the content” of Öztürk’s op-ed. But, they added, “her actions — which, as of now, appear to be limited to speech — are not grounds for detention.”
They went on to argue for the importance of standing up for Öztürk: “History calls upon us to fight injustice whenever and wherever it may appear. No good has ever come from assaults on basic civil rights like freedom of speech, nor has it come from silence in the face of that assault.” The op-ed’s penultimate line was a quote from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
Similarly, the open letter from Massachusetts Jewish leaders — whose signatories include Hebrew College president Sharon Anisfeld and Claudia Kreiman, a Chilean immigrant and senior rabbi at Temple Beth Zion in Brookline — rejected what they described as “the false premise that the Trump administration’s detainments and deportations of university students are being carried out for the purpose of combating antisemitism.”
Boston mayor Michelle Wu, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell and other local officials showed their support at a downtown rally this week, at which one Jewish attendee told the Boston Globe, “Throwing someone in jail and trying to deport them for a very basic act of free speech is never something I want done in my name.”
But a community rally in Somerville last week, which a few dozen members of a local synagogue had attended in an effort to oppose Öztürk’s detention, was dominated by pro-Palestinian sentiment.
“After some speeches about the Trump administration and ICE taking the students, people at the podium started talking about what Israel was doing in Palestine,” said Mark Niedergang, president of Temple B’nai Brith and a Tufts alum.
Niedergang was not actually present at the rally, but dozens of other congregants including his wife were after the synagogue urged its members to follow their conscience on the Öztürk case. Some of them left in a fury when the tide turned. They later recounted the scene to him: “It kind of segued into an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rally. And many of the people who were there that were outraged by the administration breaking the law and undermining and breaking the Constitution were also outraged by Israel.”
Complicating matters for area Jews, he said, was the fact that the same week Öztürk was arrested, the Somerville city council was presented with an resolution to boycott Israel that had been in the works previously.
But when it emerged, Niedergang and other local Jewish activists diverted their energies to trying to oppose it, as Jewish groups have done in communities across the country since Oct. 7. Boston’s JCRC, a day after its Tufts statement, came out against the boycott resolution, issuing an “action alert” for local Jews to “show up in Somerville!”
Many local Jews, Niedergang said, felt the resolution represented a more immediate threat to their well-being than the Öztürk abduction.
“I think people were concerned about both, but the divestment resolution made people feel more unsafe than the student,” he said. The resolution was rejected from appearing on the ballot by the city council (two members of whom are B’nai Brith congregants), meaning its advocates were now cleared to gather signatures for it in public, which worries local Jews. “I think that is upsetting — that this is going to be happening in our community and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”
What’s more, Niedergang said, he believes advocates for the resolution may use anger at the Öztürk case to drum up communal support for it.
“It’s increasing empathy amongst people for the people who are advocating for this anti-Israel ballot initiative,” he said. “People might be more inclined to sign because of what happened to the student being kidnapped than they would otherwise.”
For Jewish students at Tufts, the situation is both vexing and being seen as a possible reason for optimism after a difficult year and a half.
“It’s been complicated, to say the least,” said Jacob Zlotnitsky, a senior whose father is an Israeli immigrant.
Like all the Jews he knows on campus, Zlotnitsky was “disgusted” by what he described as a kidnapping. A longtime advocate for liberal and progressive causes, he believes “that Trump does not care about Jews and that these deportations are in no way for our sake.” He added that the action was likely to create “a more hostile environment for Jews in this country.”
Yet Zlotnitsky said his circle of friends are not attending protests on campus.
“While it is protesting Rumeysa’s detainment it’s also being co-opted as a pro-Palestine protest,” he said. “It’s a hard situation for all involved, and it’s a moral dilemma for myself at least and I’m sure other Jews on campus as well, because I feel like these students — ones that wrongly vilify Israel, see the world as incredibly black and white, and also vilify the United States for some reason — are so ignorant and foolish, comparing Zionism with Nazism and much more.”
Meirav Solomon, a Tufts senior who is a student leader in the progressive pro-Israel group J Street U and recently appeared before Congress to testify against Trump’s approach to campus antisemitism, was also greatly disturbed by the Öztürk case. While she herself hasn’t felt comfortable enough to attend any protests, she said this was the first time she’d noticed since Oct. 7 that so many Tufts student groups were on the same side of an issue.
“This should be an incredibly uniting issue. I support all efforts that aim to bring Rümeysa back to Tufts,” Solomon said. “At the same time, I can totally empathize with those who feel the protests are maybe not focused enough on her and maybe focused more on the conflict.”
Solomon, who has been accompanying her Muslim and international classmates home from campus for safety, said the case disturbed her as both a woman and the descendant of Jewish immigrants.
“All of us struggle with stories that we’ve been told from our grandparents or our great-grandparents of these types of things happening in Russia or Poland,” she said. “To see it happen on your college campus is really terrifying.”
Solomon said she believes there could be a silver lining — that pro-Israel students and others can find a way to work together on the civil rights issues that Öztürk’s detention raise.
“I don’t think that opportunity’s gone. I think there’s still time to build that coalition,” she said. “I think it’s happening every day. But it’s hard.”
