Standing up to Jewish hate means standing up to all hate

Instead of pulling federal funding from universities, why not pour federal aid into remedies, like promoting dialogue between groups?

(Here is an updated version of a Substack I recently posted, published today by RNS. Thus updated version reflects on the situation at Columbia University and today’s holiday of Purim)

(RNS) — In a Super Bowl ad last month, Hall-of-Fame quarterback Tom Brady and rapper-turned-pitchman Snoop Dogg stood toe-to-toe, pretending to throw shade on each other for their differences — where they are from, how they talk and act. Snoop delivers the takeaway on behalf of the spot’s sponsor, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism: “I hate that things are so bad that we have to do a commercial about it.”

The commercial, and the foundation, founded by Brady’s former boss, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, was plugging its campaign to #StandUpToJewishHate and #StandUpToAllHate. Some have criticized Kraft for the latter hashtag, which lumps antisemitism in with other hatreds — Snoop and Brady don’t specifically mention antisemitism in their set-to. Critics argue that enmity toward Jews is unique, in its virulence, ubiquity and its historic longevity.

All true. But I don’t believe it cheapens Jew-hatred to go long and say that “all hatreds matter.” A Rwandan Tutsi who saw half a million-plus of her people massacred by the Hutu militias isn’t likely to discern Tutsi hatred from Jew hatred.

As an ethical matter, too, standing up to Jewish hate means standing up to all hate.

That’s why President Donald Trump’s January executive order on antisemitism, which focuses on universities and “alien students and staff,” is so dangerous. As dangerous are last week’s decision to deprive Columbia University of $400 million in grants and the detainment of Gaza protester and Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil, ostensibly to protect Jewish students. It’s a poison pill that Jews should not swallow. The president is taking dead aim at academic freedom, not antisemitism.

In the Bible’s Book of Numbers, the Prophet Balaam, sent by King Balak of Moab to curse the Jews, sees them as “a people that dwells alone,” a proclamation that could be seen as both a blessing and a curse. The word “alone” in Hebrew, with the root letters ב-ד-ד (B-D-D), can mean either isolated or distinct, shunned in disgust or admired as a cut above. Are the Jews a pariah people, hated by everyone? Or singularly unequaled for their contributions to civilization?

In the case of the Jews, it means both. But being distinctive doesn’t help much when the enemy has placed a giant target on our back and we have no allies. In the Book of Esther, read this week as Jews celebrate Purim, the anti-Jewish plotter Haman describes the Jews as “a certain people,” a description meant to denigrate them as peculiar and intolerable:

Haman then said to King Ahasuerus, “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws; and it is not in Your Majesty’s interest to tolerate them”

In the very next sentence, Haman states, “If it pleases Your Majesty, let an edict be drawn for their destruction, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to the stewards for deposit in the royal treasury.”

They’re isolated, scattered lawbreakers and troublemakers — and different. So, here’s a big donation, King, and why don’t we just destroy them? They’re all alone, so they’re easy marks.

American Jews are — if nothing else — a people in dizzying transition, simultaneously feeling blessed and cursed, but nearly unanimously, whether on the right or the left, feeling very, very insecure. We’re easy targets right now, not just for those who hate us, but for those who pretend to love us. It’s never been good when the hatred of Jews is addressed in isolation. In this matter, as with so many others, misery loves company.

That’s because hatred always begins with the isolation of the victim. Before deportation to death camps in the Holocaust, Jews were herded into ghettos. That is precisely what haters do, from Jim Crow redlining in America to the mass incarceration of the Uyghurs in China.

The effect of the presidential directive on antisemitism is to isolate and separate student from student, not to make Jewish ones safer. The order “encourages the attorney general” to use a federal law created to target the Ku Klux Klan and directs federal agencies to tell colleges and universities to “monitor” and “report activities” by foreign students, staff and faculty for activities related to terrorism.

As Etan Nechin writes in an op-ed in Ha’aretz, “Trump’s executive order promises to fight post-October 7 campus antisemitism. But what it really does is to establish an authoritarian army of informers targeting Muslims, foreign students and the left under the guise of combating hate.”

The order also demands “the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws,” seeming to foreordain the arrest of the likes of Khalil, who holds a green card, otherwise known as a Permanent Resident Card.

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, best known for her successful lawsuit against the hate groups responsible for the violence after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, responded to the executive order in a statement, expressing concern over “how it intersects with and could undermine civil liberties.” Spitalnick adds, “This administration has thus far taken a number of steps that further embolden antisemitic extremists.”

When our children are being bullied and threatened, how can we not approve of acts designed to marginalize the marginalizers? But kick them out of the country? You don’t have to be a defend-the-Nazis-in-Skokie ACLU’er to see that President Trump’s goal here is not to defend Jewish college students, but to peel their worried parents away from their moral bearings. It’s not to protect but to divide.

Those who attacked Jews on campuses after Oct. 7, 2023, deserve to face consequences, but hauling everyone off to Gitmo is not the answer. The response to concentration camps cannot be bigger concentration camps. Appropriate punishments are needed, but ultimately, the only thing that will make us safer is not more hate directed at others, or even less hate directed toward us — but less hate directed toward everyone. Instead of pulling federal funding from universities, why not pour federal aid into remedies, like promoting dialogue between groups?

The historian Henry Louis Gates said at a panel on which he and Robert Kraft both appeared: “I tell my students at Harvard that under the floorboards of Western culture run two streams. One is anti-black racism, and one is antisemitism. Any time a demagogue wants to stir up people, they just lift up the floorboards and dipper out all that hatred against our people and against our Jewish brothers and sisters.”

Some demagogues do that. And others just lift one floorboard and let the hate from one pour out against the other, in order to sit back and watch the cockfight. This week, when Trump called Chuck Schumer “not Jewish anymore,” the president was clearly trying to divide Jew from Jew, as if he has any right to define who is a “good” Jew and who is not.

No one should be hated, and when hate happens, no one should ever have to confront it in isolation. All hatreds do matter. Standing up to it might begin with fighting the oldest hatred of all: antisemitism, as they did in the story of Purim.

But it can never end there.

(Rabbi Joshua Hammerman is the author of “Mensch-Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi” and “Embracing Auschwitz: Forging a Vibrant, Life-Affirming Judaism That Takes the Holocaust Seriously.” See more of his writing at his Substack page, “In This Moment.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)