(RNS) — More than 2,400 Jewish scholars from universities across the United States have signed a letter denouncing Trump administration efforts to harass, expel, arrest or deport students or staff from colleges and universities across the country on the pretext of combating antisemitism.
The letter comes a week after the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University and a permanent U.S. resident whom the administration has sought to deport for promoting literature associated with Hamas terrorists though he has not been charged with any crime.
The academics said in the letter that they will not voluntarily collaborate with federal immigration enforcement or Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, which supported Khalil’s arrest.
The signers declared, “ … we are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name – and cynical claims of antisemitism – to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities. We specifically reject rhetoric that caricatures our students and colleagues as ‘antisemitic terrorists’ because they advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom.”
The letter was written by a loose-knit group of scholars calling themselves Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff-Boston Area, some of whom originally met as participants in conferences sponsored by Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs in past years.
They include leading Jewish intellectuals in fields of religion, history, law, political science, public policy and comparative literature, among them Omer Bartov, Marianne Hirsch, Wendy Brown, Hasia Diner, Daniel Boyarin, Marjorie Feld, Atalia Omer, Deborah Dash Moore, Samuel Moyn and Jason Stanley.
Jonathan Feingold, a law professor at Boston University and a signer of the letter, said: “They don’t all share the same perspective on conflict in the Middle East, but are deeply concerned about the way in which Jewish identity and antisemitism continues to be instrumentalized by bad faith, anti-democratic forces that now are either themselves part of the Trump administration or being platformed by it.”
Feingold said the letter will be sent to the leaders of 60 universities that the Trump administration warned earlier this month could face penalties from pending investigations into antisemitism. On March 7, the administration canceled $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University for what it said was “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
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“We want to remind those university leaders that these investigations are not being made on behalf of Jews, and that their acquiescence to the Trump administration threats makes no one safer, Jews, or anyone else,” said Feingold.
Khalil’s arrest has sparked sharp divisions within the American Jewish community. It was welcomed by some Jewish establishment organizations and denounced by many on the left.
The letter includes several specific action items, calling on university leaders to defend community members targeted by the Trump administration, including Khalil; to democratize university governance in its response to the Trump administration’s attacks; to quit voluntary collaboration with federal immigration enforcement; and to terminate all collaboration with the Anti-Defamation League.
More broadly, the letter rejects the implication that pro-Palestinian advocacy is anti-Jewish.
“I signed this letter because I refuse to accept the supposition of too many that supporting the cause of Palestinian freedom, not to mention the core democratic principle of free expression, is somehow antithetical to Jewish interests or well-being,” said David Myers, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
This is the second letter issued by the group. The first came last year after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which would have codified the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Critics of that definition, known as the IHRA, say it has the effect of silencing criticism of Israel by suggesting, for example, that any statement that Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” is antisemitic. The act was reintroduced in the U.S. Senate last month.
The IHRA definition was adopted by Harvard University in January as part of the settlement of two lawsuits with Jewish groups that claimed the school had not taken appropriate steps to keep its campus from becoming a hostile environment for Jews.
Both letters followed Boston University’s “Conference on the Jewish Left” sponsored by the Pardee School of Global Studies Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs.
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