Columbia student and New Yorker, Mahmoud Khalil, who was targeted and detained for constitutionally protected speech, should be home with his 8 months pregnant wife today — not missing in ICE detention, unreachable by his lawyers.
The White House's authoritarian actions are being falsely done in our name as Jews, by a President and politicians who actively use antisemitism and do not speak for Jews.
We’ve been afraid this day would come since campus protests began. Free speech and education are pillars of our democracy, and a healthy democracy is what keeps Jews safest. This is an attack on both.
You’ve heard of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its plan to help Trump disassemble US democracy to replace it with an authoritarian right wing Christian ethnostate. You may not know that this same organization created Project Esther, a strategy on how right wing Christians can use Jewish fear and safety to divide our movements. But this is what Project Esther looks like.
The right knows that our majority and the US Constitution are the biggest things standing in the way of permanent, authoritarian rule by a right wing Christian minority taking away all of our freedoms as Americans. This attack on the US Constitution is part of a right wing plan to shred the liberties of all Americans: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Black, brown and white. Citizen, resident, immigrant. Everybody.
To do it, they’re using a tactic we call Smokescreen Antisemitism. Smokescreen antisemitism uses antisemitism (often of the manufactured type, and sometimes real), to increase fear and division among Jews, while also pointing to the right as saviors of Jews from the antisemitism they themselves fuel.
They do this to shred our Constitutional liberties while breaking the American majority, one which treasures our freedoms.
What about real antisemitism? When protests become popular movements, they bring everyone from everywhere, with all their experiences and talents. They can also bring what harms our society, such as antisemitism, anti-Black racism, sexism, and homophobia. These oppressions are not reflective of the movements themselves, though critics would have you believe that they define them. Many have used accusations of antisemitism, real and perceived, to attempt to discredit these protests.
The right won’t stop here. This same tactic of targeting us, our loved ones and our neighbors to control speech they don’t like, and is being used to facilitate mass deportations, which the vast majority of American Jews oppose.
They do this by employing the Great Replacement Theory, an antisemitic myth, again using Jews to force their agenda. And will continue to target anyone, including US citizens and anyone they disagree with if we don’t stop them.
We implore all institutions, people of all faiths, immigration and citizenship statuses to refuse the right’s attempts to use Jewish people to disassemble democracy and to keep our coalition together to end the machinery of antisemitism, racism and fascism aiming for our freedoms.
