[Content warning: Antisemitism, misogyny]

The Trump administration has begun arresting political prisoners, and it’s using a supposed crackdown on antisemitism as a pretext to do it. Last week, ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University who is in the United States as a lawful permanent resident. In a post on Truth Social, the president called it the “first arrest of many to come” against college students who engage in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” And, indeed, more arrests and abductions have come. On Wednesday, Politico reported that ICE had also detained Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University on a student visa from India, allegedly because Suri had been “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.” They also relentlessly pursued Ranjani Srinivasan, a Fulbright scholar from India whose only crime was liking and sharing content on social media about Israeli human rights violations and signing an open letter in support of "Palestinian liberation." The government accused her of being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization," and she was forced to “self-deport,” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. 

In Khalil’s case, the Trump administration has made no effort to hide the fact that this persecution is the result of speech in support of Palestinians, not any actual crime. Troy Edgar, the Deputy Homeland Security Secretary, admitted as much when he said that Khalil’s offense was “basically pro-Palestinian activity” in a recent interview. For Trump and his right-wing allies, “antisemitism” is a convenient excuse. They are wielding Judaism and Jewish identity as a justification for blatant political persecution and repression—while, at the same time, being intensely antisemitic themselves. 

Trump administration officials have described Khalil’s arrest as “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.” But they’re playing deceptive word games. For them, “antisemitism” doesn’t actually mean antisemitism in the commonly-understood sense of ethnic or religious prejudice against Jewish people. Instead, it means criticism of Israel and support for Palestinians. The definition of antisemitism that Trump’s executive order cites comes from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and it goes well beyond actual examples of hateful rhetoric about Jewish people (things like Holocaust denial, blood libel, accusing Jews of secretly controlling the world, etc). It also lumps in very reasonable criticisms of Israeli policy (including that the state is racist, which it objectively is, and that its policies resemble those of the Nazis, which multiple Holocaust survivors and other prominent Jewish commentators have argued that they do). In Khalil’s case, we have evidence that he has spoken out against real prejudice, declaring that there was “no place for antisemitism” in the Columbia protest movement during an April 2024 interview with CNN. He is also on record saying that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other.” But the Trump administration doesn’t care. Perhaps most disturbingly, the official White House account has even tweeted out “Shalom, Mahmoud” multiple times in posts celebrating his arrest, as if to imply his abduction was carrying out the will of Jewish people as a group. 

As a person of Jewish heritage who has personally encountered actual antisemitism, I find it deeply distasteful that this administration would claim to speak for me. And I’m not the only one. Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal was similarly horrified: “Shalom, the Hebrew greeting for peace,” he said, “is being used as a declaration of war and repression of dissent at home… Trump is weaponizing Jews to wage war crimes and repression.” Jamie Beran, a columnist for the Israeli paper Haaretz, has used the apt term “smokescreen antisemitism” to describe what Trump is doing: Using a faux concern for Jewish safety as a shield for his administration’s goals of crushing dissenters of all backgrounds.

A lot of American Jewish groups, thankfully, have recognized the danger of this action and were quick to condemn it. Not only groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now, which are openly supportive of the Palestinian cause, but also liberal Zionist groups like J Street and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs have denounced Khalil’s arrest and detention. The same cannot be said, however, for one of America’s largest and most influential Jewish organizations: The Anti-Defamation League. In a post unequivocally praising Khalil’s arrest, the ADL called for “swift and severe consequences for those who provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations, incite violence in support of terrorist activities, or conceal their identities in order to harass and intimidate Jewish individuals and institutions with impunity.” It should be noted that Khalil has not actually been charged with providing “material support” for terrorism, “inciting violence,” or “concealing” his identity to harass people. (What was that about being against defamation?) This would be par for the course for a group like the ADL, which has long sought to conflate any criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism. But they went a step further, praising “the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism” in the same post. 

It’s not exactly shocking that the ADL would praise an effort to quash pro-Palestine dissent on college campuses since that seems to be the organization’s primary goal these days, at the expense of anything else it once stood for. But for them to endorse the Trump administration asserting the power to summarily disappear and deport anyone they feel like, merely for speech, is jarring. Trump and the Right generally make no secret of their disdain for religious and ethnic minorities. They are much more direct when talking about Muslims, Latinos, or Black people. But you don’t have to look far to find a lot of thinly veiled or totally unveiled attacks on Jews, either.

For starters, there’s Elon Musk, who is now the de facto Republican co-president of the United States. After Musk bought Twitter, the amount of hate speech directed at Jews (along with other groups) on the platform shot up dramatically. Musk reinstated many notorious posters of antisemitic bile—most notably Nick Fuentes, an open admirer of Hitler who has called for “perfidious Jews” to be executed, and Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website and has said his goal is to “ethnically cleanse White nations of non-Whites.” Musk has personally reposted quotes from neo-Nazis, stating his agreement with a tweet claiming that “Jewish communities” were “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities.” He reposted a video of a podcaster suggesting that Hitler committed the Holocaust by accident. He has fervently campaigned for Alternative for Germany (AfD), a political party that is crawling with overt Nazis. (See my article for more on that). And finally, he did what appeared to be multiple Nazi salutes on stage on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Despite all this evidence that there may be more to it, the ADL defended Musk’s salute as merely an “awkward hand gesture.” Abe Foxman, the former leader of the ADL, even went on record criticizing the organization’s soft stance on Trump after his infamous Madison Square Garden rally in 2024, saying “if this happened six months ago, they would be out there condemning racism and antisemitism and hate speech,” and Foxman has condemned Musk’s salute in sharp contrast to his successors at the organization. Days later, Musk would appear at an AfD event and talk about how “there is too much focus on past guilt” over the Holocaust.

If you spend time imbibing right-wing media, you’ll quickly run into somebody casting doubt on the Holocaust or accusing Jews of any number of awful deeds. Darryl Cooper, the guy who implied that the Holocaust was an accident, said that as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show. During the same interview, he also contended that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain of the Second World War,” and Carlson called Cooper “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” (In fact his work is riddled with errors, which suggests the appeal to Carlson is ideological rather than due to scholarly merit.) Earlier in March, Cooper appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he seemed to justify Hitler’s hatred of Jews, saying that “his antisemitism is what allowed him to love the German people.” (Of course, Hitler had no love for the many German Jews, something Cooper ignores. Thus Cooper adopts Hitler’s own antisemitic conception of who the “German people” are.) That same week, Rogan hosted “independent researcher” Ian Carroll, who raved about how Jeffery Epstein “was clearly a Jewish organization [sic] working on behalf of Israel and other groups.” Prior to that, he hosted Jake Shields, a former MMA fighter who now spends his days posting about how “Jews control America” and how you can tell because the seats in the House of Representatives are shaped like a Menorah. 

Candace Owens, another of the biggest stars in right-wing media, has remained Kanye West’s number one defender even as he professed to “love Hitler.” Over the past year, she has descended into old-timey blood libel, liking a post accusing a pro-Israel rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.” (Interestingly, Owens does frequently criticize Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, but has said her “biggest issue” is that they are “supplying the arms to murder Christians in Armenia.”) Owens has also been pushing false claims that a Jewish lynching victim from the 1910s, Leo Frank, was actually guilty of rape, and has been trying very hard to prove that Stalin was secretly Jewish. She even agreed in an interview with Tristan Tate that Stalin was “part of the Jewish cabal.” 

Tristan Tate and his even more notorious brother Andrew Tate also have deep ties to MAGA-world. The “manosphere” influencers were charged by the Romanian government for human trafficking, sex with minors, and money laundering, but their travel restrictions were mysteriously dropped last month, reportedly after pressure from Trump administration officials. Andrew Tate is most famous for his extreme, sociopathic sexism. (He proudly describes himself as a “misogynist,” saying that he enjoys attacking and “beating the shit out of” women until they cry, rather than having sex.) But he has also dabbled in some pretty overt antisemitism. While Elon Musk was denying having given a Nazi salute, Tate embraced it, saying “we should bring the Nazi salute back” and delivering one himself. He encourages his fans to doubt the historical consensus about World War II and the Holocaust, suggesting that there has been an effort to “psyop the populace” into believing that “Bad guy = Nazi.” His misogyny, racism, and antisemitism even occasionally congeal into one disgusting stew, like when he tweeted in response to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who is Jewish, “I don’t listen to women Mexicans or Jews so it’s impossible for me to give a fuck less about what she says.” 

Despite this, Donald Trump, Jr., Elon Musk, Trump lawyer Alina Habba, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino have all described themselves as fans of Tate, promoted his content, or  publicly supported his release from custody. And according to the Financial Times, Trump administration diplomat Richard Grenell met with the Romanian government specifically to push for the travel ban on Tate to be lifted, which is why he and his brother have now returned to spread their bile on American soil.

And then, of course, there’s Trump himself. While the president often makes loud, vulgar overtures toward the Jewish community, pledging to be “the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House,” he is not exactly a very canny operator in that regard. Trump is friendly to Jews only insofar as Jews are friendly or useful to him. The problem is, most are not. Since 2016, Jewish voters have been one of the most reliably anti-Trump voting blocs in the country. In the last election, when nearly every other demographic swung right, only 17 percent of Jewish voters went for Trump, even fewer than in previous elections, despite furious attempts to use pro-Palestine protests as a wedge against the Left.

For decades, Trump has been recorded engaging in some of the crudest stereotypes of Jews as miserly moneygrubbers. In a 1991 book by former Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino President John R. O’Donnell, Trump was quoted complaining about having Black accountants: “I’ve got black accountants at the Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. No one else.” (Trump would later deny the comments, but at the time he acknowledged that the things O’Donnell wrote about him were “probably true.”) 

But we don’t have to rely on secondhand quotes to see Trump’s attitudes towards Jewish people. They come through very frequently when Jews do not respond to his attempts to pander to them with his pro-Israel policy. On many occasions, he has described American Jews that don’t vote for him as “disloyal” to Israel, a country in which they do not live. At a gathering of Jewish Republicans, he referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister.” This plays into the longstanding antisemitic trope that Jews have “dual loyalties” to their home country and Israel and are therefore untrustworthy. (Ironically, accusing Jews of “dual loyalty” is another example of antisemitism listed in the IHRA’s definition cited by Trump’s executive order. I guess he missed that one!) 

Trump often makes it nakedly clear that his policy towards Israel is a ploy to win over Jewish voters. “You know what really surprised me?” Trump said back in 2021. “I did the Heights”—referring to his recognition of Israeli control over the illegally occupied Golan Heights in Syria. “I did Jerusalem, and I did Iran—the Iran Deal was a disaster, right? And I also did many other things. Jewish people who live in the United States don’t love Israel enough. Does that make sense to you? I’m not talking about Orthodox Jews. I believe we got 25 percent of the Jewish vote, and it doesn’t make sense. It just seems strange to me.”

Trump, who is not Jewish, seems to believe he gets to decide who is and is not Jewish by the standards of how loyal they are to Israel and, by extension, himself. Last year, he said that  “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves.” And as recently as last week, he’s derided Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer as “not Jewish anymore,” saying “Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian.” Leaving aside the grotesquerie of using “Palestinian” as a slur (an example of the casual anti-Palestinian racism that I’ve written about previously), it is deeply chilling for a president, especially a gentile who feels comfortable dining with Kanye and Nick Fuentes, to be opining on who is and isn’t a Jew. And at any rate, to target Schumer of all people on these grounds is absurd, since he has said that “My job… is to keep the left pro-Israel.”

The man in charge of Trump’s antisemitism task force, Leo Terrell (also not Jewish), endorsed Trump’s comments about Schumer in a particularly striking way, sharing a post stating that “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.” The person who originally made that comment about “Jew cards,” Patrick Casey, is ironically a vicious antisemite who led the now-disbanded white nationalist group Identity Evropa—a group founded to bring about, in its words, the “Nazification of America,” and which originated the infamous “Jews will not replace us” chant that was heard at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. 

As Shane Burley, the author of Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism points out, “One of the key ways that antisemitism operates is it impose[s] what a Jew should be onto Jews who never agreed, thus pulling them as an opportunistic symbol for a largely non-Jewish political attack. Right now, Trump is trying to define Jews as Zionists, and nothing more.”

What Trump is doing—defining “good Jews” and “bad Jews”—is not a new thing. In 1920, Winston Churchill wrote something remarkably similar, in which he described the “National Jew” and the “International Jew” as forces of “good and evil” pitted against each other. The “National Jew” was religious and nationalistic, dutiful to Britain (or restless to settle in what was then the British colony of Palestine, which Britain had recently set aside as a “national home for the Jewish people.”) The “International Jew,” conversely, was liberal and secular—part of a “sinister confederacy” that had “forsaken the faith of their forefathers” and was instead bent on a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization.” No-good radicals, like Karl Marx, Emma Goldman, and Leon Trotsky, naturally belonged to the latter category. (There were also the dreaded “Terrorist Jews,” who were accused of leading the Bolshevik Revolution.)

Such rhetoric persists more than a hundred years later, with Israel usually as the fault line. Ben Shapiro often refers to secular Jews and Jews who criticize Israel as “Jews in Name Only” (or “JINOs”), a label he has applied to Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky, and Sidney Blumenthal. Alan Dershowitz has gone as far as to say that “The worst department in terms of antisemitism and anti-Israel are Jewish studies departments” and even “Holocaust studies departments,” which he says are “populated by the worst anti-Zionists and the worst self-hating Jews.”

I, for one, find the implication that every Jewish person needs to have identical opinions about geopolitics and religion pretty insulting in its own right. There is so much diversity in the history of Jewish thought that one of our most common self-effacing expressions is “Two Jews, Three Opinions.” But on the Right, when discussing the increasingly large number of Jewish Americans who are appalled by Israel’s conduct in Gaza, there is no limit to the amount of overt hatred you can lob their way. And increasingly, there are efforts to “revoke” their “Jew cards” to remove any scruples about deeming them enemies of the state. 

This was on particular display at CPAC, where not long after giving a very obvious Nazi salute to the crowd, Trump advisor Steve Bannon went on a chilling diatribe about left-wing Jews: “The number one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA,” he said. “MAGA and the evangelical Christians and the traditional Catholics in this country have Israel's back. They have the Jews’ back.” 

The Right is content to use Jews as pawns when doing so can help them accrue more power to crack down on the civil rights of their enemies. The abduction of Mahmoud Khalil is an important test case for what they can get away with. If the Trump administration gets its way, he could be branded as “antisemitic” because of his speech criticizing Israel, which would allow for Jewish Americans to not only be used as a fig-leaf justification for a crackdown on civil liberties, but also to take the blame when people start to resent it. But Trump will obviously not stop with Khalil. He will push the bounds further and further until anything is on the table. We are already seeing it. Over this past week, ICE has unleashed a torrent of arrests and deportations that are designed to serve as political spectacle and intimidation, the most chilling of which involved sending over 200 Venezuelan immigrants, many of whom had no actual criminal records, to a slave labor prison in El Salvador without any trial or due process on the accusation of vague “gang” affiliations. The Trump administration deported them in open defiance of a court that ordered them to stop. 

It feels inevitable that this crackdown will come for American citizens next. Trump is already laying the legal groundwork to make citizenship something that he can strip away at will. If that happens, nobody is safe. There’s no doubt that the many Jewish Americans who oppose Trump, and especially the ones who have already been risking their safety and freedom to protest on behalf of Palestinians, will be in extreme danger. In fact, the Heritage Foundation policymakers behind Project 2025 have also created “Project Esther,” which seeks to use terrorism laws to dismantle America’s pro-Palestine protest movement and designates Jewish Voice for Peace as one of its top targets. Anyone who claims to care about the safety of Jewish Americans must not give a single inch to the continued shredding of civil liberties.