Antisemitism is not a political tool; it is an enduring and deadly threat that has plagued Jewish communities for millennia. Yet rabbis on the left—whom, almost to a one, lack traditional Jewish training—have chosen to minimize its severity and distort its reality. This is evidenced in a series of competing epistles by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, HIAS, and a partnership of T’ruah and J Street, each demanding the spotlight for overlapping collections of left-wing movements, rabbis, and cantors proclaiming essentially the same thing: the Trump Administration’s legal efforts to combat antisemitism are “undermin[ing] democratic norms,” engaging in “immoral use of law,” and using Jew-hatred as a “political wedge.”
The rise in antisemitic incitement, from violent attacks across America to open calls for Jewish genocide on campus, represents an existential danger to Jews and American civilization. Yet rather than acknowledging the threat posed by contemporary sources of antisemitism—especially the purported “anti-Israel” voices that demonize Jewish life in the Jewish homeland—the signatories chose to fixate on their opposition to Trump while pretending that support for terrorism is merely a “political view.”
Such pronouncements invert reality. Students are indeed being arrested and detained, but this is due to their threatening conduct, in violation of the conditions under which they received student and residential visas. Study by non-citizens in the United States is a privilege, not a right. To permit terror-supporting activists to remain on campus who foment hatred against their Jewish peers, much less those who engineer takeovers of buildings and walkways to preclude classes from proceeding normally and Jewish students from getting to them, is harmful to students, faculty, and the educational mission of those schools.
When Jewish students are actively being excluded, driven from universities by antisemitic hostility, withholding federal funds is the only moral option. Jews are no less deserving of protection than other minorities, such as the black community on whose behalf the government nixed the tax deduction of Bob Jones University in the 1970s. Harvard may believe that it is more important to oppose the Administration’s cogent demands than to preserve Jewish life on its campus, but that is hardly a Jewish or moral position in any normative sense. As its resident Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi said, “You know when change is gonna happen on this campus? When we don’t have to pack up the menorah” — the Jewish religious symbol that Harvard officials forced him to take down each night of the Chanukah holiday, rather than protecting it from vandals.
One is forced to suspect that had Presidents Obama, Biden or, hypothetically, Harris executed these same actions, the same left-wing bodies and clergy would be praising their actions and touting the president’s support for defending Jews. But because it is President Trump who is actually making the required efforts that his predecessors ignored, their attitude is diametrically different.
By politicizing the fight against antisemitism in this way, the signatories willingly alienate allies who are otherwise anxious to join the fight. Jew-hatred is not confined to one political ideology or party; it is a persistent problem that requires an impartial, nonpartisan focus to combat effectively. Their divisive approach undermines Jewish unity and emboldens those who seek to harm Jewish communities.
Jewish leaders have historically possessed deep knowledge, scholarship, and moral clarity. It is notable that although media sources imply that these letters represent all Jewish denominations, the range of signatories reaches only the very left fringe of Orthodoxy. In other words, although traditional, mainstream Orthodox rabbis comprise the vast majority of American rabbis by any definition, and that by several orders of magnitude, none of them joined any of these letters.
This matters a great deal. The signatories claim to represent moral leadership and rabbinic scholarship, but have failed spectacularly to understand the historical and contemporary nature of antisemitism.
Those trained in traditional Judaism do not, generally speaking, suffer from the ideological fog that characterizes these letters. Demands for civil rights for Jews are not “cynical attacks on higher education” as they claim. Detaining foreign nationals engaged in antisemitic activity is not “undermining of the rights and security of immigrants.” And it is the institutions from which Jews are being driven away that are weakening “free academic inquiry,” not the government that halts taxpayer funding for hate.
The fight against antisemitism must be rooted in truth and unwavering commitment to Jewish safety, not political grandstanding. It is true that the fight against antisemitism is being politicized in an unconscionable way—but the party doing so is not Donald Trump or his administration.
When leftist rabbis and groups dismiss genuine concerns about antisemitism, this only emboldens those who seek to harm the Jewish people. Their betrayal of the fundamental responsibility to protect and defend Jewish lives must be condemned unequivocally by the Jewish community.
Rabbi Yaakov Menken is Executive Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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