Trump Doesn't Want to Protect All Jewish Students -- Just Those on His Team

Trump Doesn’t Want to Protect All Jewish Students — Just Those on His Team

April 28, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/opinion/jewish-student-protesters-gaza.html

By Peter Beinart

Mr. Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times. His latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”


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Few have articulated that redefinition more baldly than President Trump. Last month, in an apparent reference to the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s allegedly insufficient support for Israel, Mr. Trump announced, “He’s not Jewish anymore.” Mr. Trump is simply making explicit what Jewish leaders have implied for years. In 2023, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, declared that “Zionism is fundamental to Judaism.” In 2021, the influential former Soviet dissident and Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky co-wrote an essay calling Jews who oppose Zionism “un-Jews.”

This redefinition of Jewishness is occurring alongside one of history’s harshest crackdowns on American Jewish activism. Many American Jews, particularly young Jews, hold critical views about Israel. A 2021 poll by the centrist Jewish Electoral Institute, which monitors Jewish voting engagement, found that 38 percent of American Jewish adults under the age of 40 considered Israel an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who did not. When presented with the accusation that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza in a survey last year, 38 percent of American Jewish adults under the age of 44 agreed.

Given these figures, it’s not surprising that Jews have taken a leading role in the protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Eleven days after Oct. 7, 2023, progressive and anti-Zionist Jewish groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, gathered roughly 400 protesters, many wearing shirts that said “Not in Our Name,” and occupied a congressional building. Later that month, Jewish Voice for Peace and its allies led a takeover of New York’s Grand Central Terminal. At Brown University, the first sit-in demanding divestment from companies affiliated with Israel comprised solely Jewish students.

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Since Oct. 7, at least four universities have temporarily suspended or placed on probation their chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2023 at BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now protests, 20 members were arrested. (The charges were dropped.) At a pro-Israel event at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York on Oct. 12, 2023, a Jewish student who briefly shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine” was reportedly suspended for the rest of the academic year. In May 2024, a Jewish tenured professor in anthropology at Muhlenberg College said she was fired after she reposted an Instagram post that declared, in part: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable.” In September, Michigan’s attorney general brought felony charges for resisting or obstructing a police officer, as well as misdemeanor trespassing charges, against three Jewish activists — as well as four others — for offenses related to a Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. (They all pleaded not guilty).

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There seems something wrong in questioning of the Jewishness of these young dissenters. What hallmarks today’s Jewish student activists from the history of American Jewish leftists is their interest in incorporating Jewishness itself into their protests. In New York alone, at least 10 non-Zionist or anti-Zionist minyanim, or prayer communities, have sprouted in the last several years. They’re overwhelmingly populated by younger adult Jews.