Not in Our Name!

“First they took the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they took the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then it was the trade unionists’ turn, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they took the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came and took me, there was no one left who could have stood up for me.” — Martin Niemöller

Terrifying scenes are playing out at American universities.

On the evening of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and prominent figure in pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations, returned to his apartment building in Morningside Heights to find ICE agents waiting for him in the lobby. Though Khalil, himself Palestinian, is a legal green card holder married to an American citizen, he was arrested and taken to a detention facility in Louisiana as a preliminary step to deportation.

On the evening of March 25, masked ICE agents surrounded Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, in front of her residence in Sommerville, Mass., clapped her into handcuffs and transported her to the same prison in Louisiana where Khalil is being held. Ozturk’s principal offense seems to have been her co-authorship with three other students of an op-ed in the student newspaper criticizing Tufts for its failure to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Yunseo Chung, a Barnard undergraduate originally from South Korea, has gone into hiding after learning that ICE agents were seeking her arrest and deportation. According to Chung’s lawyers, agents searched several Barnard residences in their quest to apprehend her, armed with warrants citing the Harboring Statute, a law that makes it a crime to give shelter to non-citizens present in the US illegally. Yet Chung, who has lived in this country since she was seven, is a legal permanent resident. Her offense was to have been arrested after participating in a pro-Palestinian demonstration that took place in the Barnard Library in early March.

None of these students have been accused of any crime, nor have credible allegations of criminal activity been raised against them — they have been singled out and made examples of for their political activities alone. Such episodes of arbitrary punishment evoke memories of some of the darkest moments of political repression in the 20^th century: late-night knocks at the door, masked police agents, random arrests and threats of summary deportation call to mind the state crimes of which Jews were frequently the victims. Yet this time, Jews are not being targeted. On the contrary, the Trump administration cites a concern for the safety of Jewish students as the reason for its crackdown on protestors. What are we to make of that justification?

The administration’s professed concern over Jewish safety on college campuses is scarcely credible given the president and his inner circle’s record on antisemitism. Trump’s 2016 election campaign featured several ads with clear antisemitic messages. In one, an image of Hillary Clinton appeared next to a Star of David against a background of hundred-dollar bills. In 2017, following a confrontation between participants in the Unite the Right rally and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Trump sprang to the defense of demonstrators who had marched with swastikas and Confederate flags and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” declaring that there were “fine people” on “both sides.”

He has repeatedly praised the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, making no exception for those wearing sweatshirts bearing the slogans CAMP AUSCHWITZ and 6MWE, an acronym for the phrase “Six Million Wasn’t Enough.” In November 2022, he dined with leading Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. And more recently, Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest advisors and surrogates, contributed millions of dollars to Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), an extreme right wing party whose members include a large number of neo-Nazis. Musk’s intervention set the tone for JD Vance’s speech last month at the Munich Security Conference, in which the vice president castigated Germany’s mainstream political parties for refusing, as a matter of principle, to form a coalition government with the AfD. As if to dispel concern over his support for neo-Nazis, Vance later visited the site of the Dachau concentration camp — a breathtakingly cynical instrumentalization of the Holocaust for political purposes.

Some Jewish leaders have nonetheless chosen to ally themselves with the Trump administration, reserving their denunciations of antisemitism for pro-Palestinian demonstrators on college campuses. For them, the president’s unconditional support of Israel — including his proposal to “clean out” Gaza and tacit approval of expelling Palestinians from their villages in the West Bank — would seem to justify turning a blind eye to his recurrent flirtations with antisemitism. This double standard poses serious dangers. When we wield the accusation of antisemitism in a selective and one-sided fashion, it encourages the cynical view that the label is little more than a rhetorical ploy, trivializing the real harm of antisemitism and exposing us to the charge of hypocrisy.

How, then, should we, as Jews, respond to arrest and deportation orders being issued in our name? To address that question, we need to take a step back and reflect on two basic points.

The first is that criticisms of Israel are not ipso facto antisemitic, however much we may disagree with them. I realize that the student protests cause many members of our community significant discomfort, but feeling uncomfortable and being unsafe are not the same. So long as demonstrators’ actions are peaceful, as almost all of them have been, we must accept that they are exercising the right to political speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The second is that the Trump administration is clearly using its supposed concern over Jewish safety as a pretext to attack American higher education, an ideological battle it is waging for reasons that have little if anything to do with antisemitism. Universities are, of course, hardly the only targets of attack. This administration is advancing on multiple fronts, cowing the news media and law firms that have represented the president’s political opponents, rolling back established LGTBQ+ rights and protections and dismantling federal agencies and firing their staffs. The list is long, but universities stand near the top because they have traditionally been bulwarks against ideological control. They are institutions that foster the exchange of ideas and create space for the questioning of dominant perspectives.

One of the most important roles of the humanities — my own corner of academia — and one of the reasons authoritarian regimes find them threatening is that they teach students how to think from the perspective of others. To interpret a historical document, a literary text or a work of art is to switch subject positions, to see things through the eyes of people different from yourself. And while opening ourselves to other perspectives is never easy, it is a crucial defense against authoritarian control. 

Martin Niemöller, the German Protestant pastor persecuted by the Nazis, whose justly famous words I cite in the epigraph, absorbed that lesson the hard way. A German nationalist and early supporter of the Nazis who was certainly not immune to antisemitic prejudice, Niemöller grew increasingly alienated from the Nazi regime during the 1930s and, carried by his deep religious faith, assumed a leading role in the movement of opposition to the so-called “German Christians” inside the official Evangelical Church. Eventually, he was imprisoned on personal orders from Hitler, first at the Sachsenhausen and then at the Dachau concentration camps. His harrowing experiences at the camps led him to repudiate antisemitism and regret his failure to make common cause with other opponents of the regime across the boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and political affiliation.

For Niemöller, the epiphany came too late. But we still have a chance to rescue America as a law-governed constitutional republic. For that, we need to transcend parochialism and recognize how our own freedoms are bound up with those of others. In this spirit, more than 3,000 Jewish university professors from across the U.S. have signed a petition to tell the Trump administration: “Not in our name.” A letter to Hillel International sponsored by the group Jewish Students against Campus Deportations makes a similar appeal, calling on Hillel to denounce the arrest and imprisonment of Khalil and pledge non-cooperation with ICE. For the moral integrity of our community as well as the future of American democracy, I encourage students and faculty to read these statements and consider adding their names.

Jeffrey Freedman is professor and chair of the Beren Department of History. He has taught at YU since the fall of 1992.

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Photo Caption: Students protest on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons