After enduring 17 months of antisemitism at levels never seen before in American history, American Jews have arrived at the one most Jewish dilemma of all: what actions should we take towards those seeking our destruction?
From the Book of Esther to Simon Weisenthal’s post-Holocaust work – which many have objected to – the Jewish people have always struggled with the question of how to respond to our oppressors, and American Jewry is now at a similar crossroads.News headlines about ICE arresting non-American antisemitic campus organizers have sparked fierce debate among Jewish academics and communities. If you are a West Wing fan, it is almost like a conversation between Toby Ziegler, Josh Lyman, and Will Bailey. Should Jews support or oppose ICE deporting antisemites or not?
Historically speaking, the long history of Jewish people wandering from country to country, stateless, seeking a place of refuge, has made our community understand and be sympathetic to the plight of those seeking to rebuild their lives away from the tribulations they had left behind.
This is why in the Jewish community, many have spoken out against the arrest of Syria’s Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and Turkey’s Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts University. On the other hand, there is hardly a mention of Jews working with ICE to deport the visas of antisemitic students.
Which side should we take?
Wondering about what side to take in the debate, Jews should take a moment to imagine having this conversation with their grandparents and great-grandparents.
I imagine having this conversation with my grandmother, Hinda Poupko, who was born in the town of Berdychiv, Ukraine, in 1924. Most of her siblings were killed in a local pogrom, and the only reason her father survived was because he was so badly injured, the violent antisemites who ransacked the Jews in his Eastern European town thought he was dead and left him alone.
They came to the United States, where they were welcomed by a world far less antisemitic than they had seen in Eastern Europe. They thrived, built families and communities, and thanked God every day for the gift called America. “Bubby,” I say to her, “a time will come when the US too will see a wave of antisemitism, driven by young students on campus.”
My Bubby (Yiddish for grandma) would then ask: “Is the government not doing anything about it?” I would then go on to inform her that the president has ordered the deportation of antisemitic and terrorism-sympathizing visa holders and that ICE has been carrying out some of these deportations.
However, I cannot imagine telling my grandmother, or any Jew who felt the true horrors of antisemitism and was lucky enough to finally flee to the United States, that when faced with the greatest wave of antisemitism in American history, Jews are too polite to implement consequences for antisemites.
I cannot imagine facing 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, a plumber from Brooklyn who risked his life storming the stage of the infamous Nazi rally in Madison Square Gardens, and telling him we had the opportunity to remove antisemites from the epicenter of American education and failed to do so.
Or Judge Nathan Perlaman, who when faced with the rise of millions of the German American Nazi Bund, took action and with Meyer Lansky, decided to take on the Nazis of New York, and did so with astonishing success; I cannot imagine telling him we chose to let antisemitism thrive. I shudder at the thought of Sydney’s Ahmad Rashad Nadir, an Afghan refugee who became a nurse and was caught saying he has and will kill Israeli patients in the future. When the police raided his home, they found a vial of morphine, which could have been used to kill Israeli patients.
Pretending antisemitism is just an opinion and not something that endangers the very lives of Jewish people is to ignore centuries of the Jewish people’s reality.
In my own community, I have heard people who suffered greatly from antisemitism saying now: “Can you really not renew someone’s visa because of their opinions of what was going on in Gaza?!” This is a reasonable argument. Once again, I am reminded of my Bubby and the pogroms in Eastern Europe.
The majority of those who joined pogroms against the Jewish people were not bloodthirsty killers either. Many just decided to march through the Jewish village; another one broke a window, chanted a chant, or got the crowd riled up.
Imagine telling your grandparents you have decided to check who played what role in a pogrom before deciding something as elementary and non-violent as ensuring that person will not have access to the world’s leading and most privileged educational institutions.
So do Jews need to speak out against arrests like those we have seen of Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts or Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia? Should we remain neutral, or should we actively help ICE deport antisemites? Needless to say, every person must evaluate their own situation individually.
Yet it is hard to imagine history forgiving us as a collective committed to our future. While we experience the greatest wave of antisemitism in American Jewish history and are handed an opportunity to implement real consequences for it, we fail to do so.
Our children and grandchildren will not forgive us for abdicating our responsibility to make sure hate does not find a permanent home in the United States.
Antisemites must face consequences – especially when those consequences are something as simple as denying them the privilege of studying on our tax-dollars-funded campuses.
The writer is an 11th-generation rabbi, teacher, and author. He has written Sacred Days on the Jewish Holidays, Poupko on the Parsha, and hundreds of articles published in five languages. He is a member of the executive committee of the Rabbinical Council of America.
