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    Jewish Americans of all stripes reconsider safety protocols – but disagree on roots of recent violence

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    On the first night of Passover, it seemed like a one-off – an arson attack on the mansion of the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro. The arsonist, per police, took issue with Shapiro’s stance on Israel and Palestine.Then, in late May, outside an American Jewish Committee young professionals’ event for young Jews in the DC area to meet young diplomats, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot and killed; the shooter yelled, “Free Palestine.” Roughly a week and a half later, in Boulder, Colorado, a rally in solidarity with hostages held in Gaza was firebombed; the attacker also reportedly yelled, “Free Palestine.”The string of events have deeply unnerved Jewish Americans of all stripes. Despite a wide range of political views, there exists a measure of consensus among Jewish institutions that they need to reconsider their safety protocols. There is less unity on the root causes of the violence, and what policy solutions should address it.“I don’t know anyone who isn’t rethinking their security and the security of the Jewish institutions that they visit,” said Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.Many synagogues have recently heightened security, whether in the form of armed guards, metal detectors, surveillance systems or some combination.Rabbi Joe Black is a senior rabbi of Temple Emanuel, a Reform congregation in Denver, Colorado, a Jewish community he described as “closely linked” to Boulder’s. He said that his synagogue has in recent years upped its spending on security in response to rising antisemitism, putting in place guards, cameras and security systems.View image in fullscreenThe last several weeks have also seen a change of protocols. “I never liked the thought of having armed guards in the synagogue. I do now. And I hate that,” Black said. Meanwhile, Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, recently called for Congress to increase funding for security at Jewish institutions.The American Jewish community is deeply divided over thorny questions around when calls for Palestinian rights cross over into antisemitism. Many view the string of attacks as part of a rising wave of antisemitism fueled by the pro-Palestinian movement. Some on the left, on the other hand, object to conflations of anti-Zionism with antisemitism that are used to suppress protest against Israel’s US-backed war in Gaza. The recent acts of violence all involved targets associated to varying degrees with Jewish life but also with Israel – though it is not entirely clear what the perpetrators knew about them or, in the case of the latter two, precisely how they selected their targets.For some, particularly more conservative voices, the issue is one of speech that has gotten out of hand. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, has singled out the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and university graduation speakers who have spoken out in support of Palestinian rights, whom he accused of spreading “blood libel” against Jews. “We’ve got to stop it once and for all,” he said on Fox News.“We were told over and over again that this was just freedom of speech being exercised. It should not be misunderstood at this point: when someone says ‘Free Palestine,’ what they mean is ‘kill Jews,’” Dr Nolan Lebovitz, senior rabbi at California’s Valley Beth Shalom, one of the largest conservative synagogues in the country, told the Guardian. He pointed as an example to a protest on 8 October 2023 that included some voices that appeared to celebrate the Hamas attacks from the day before, referring to it as a “terror parade”.Others see a different kind of predictability, arguing that if Jewish institutions themselves blur the lines between Judaism and support for Israel – particularly as Israel wages a war in Gaza that has killed by a conservative estimate of more than 50,000 Palestinians since the 7 October attacks – it is inevitable that others will, too.“When you have the main [Jewish] institutions … consistently hammering home that Zionism and Judaism are entirely equivalent, that you can’t have Judaism without Zionism, and that 90% of American Jews are Zionist – how do you expect people outside of the community to not just take that for granted?” asked Rabbi Andrue Kahn, the executive director of the American Council for Judaism, which is devoted to promoting Jewish life “free from Zionist and other nationalist ideologies”.The backdrop to all of this is the Trump administration, which has spent the last several months cracking down on universities and detaining and trying to deport students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, all in the name of fighting antisemitism. In the wake of the attack in Washington DC, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, denounced the term “free Palestine” and vowed to continue a crackdown on foreign nationals. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, in a social media statement following the Boulder firebombing, did not explicitly mention Jews, but did blame his predecessor Joe Biden’s border policies for the attack, suggesting he would use the attack as further justification for his anti-immigrant crackdown.View image in fullscreen“I think one of the things that we’ve been seeing over the past several months is a weaponization of antisemitism by the current administration in order to promote policies that are contrary to my values, contrary to Jewish values,” said Black, the Reform rabbi from Denver. “That doesn’t mean antisemitism is not real. It needs to be addressed in a sane, clear, logical way.”Black believes that the attacks were a consequence of the term “Zionism” being warped in public discourse to become synonymous with oppression. (He calls himself a “proud Zionist” who supports Israel’s right to defend itself but questions the motives of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in prosecuting the war.) Asked what steps he wanted to see taken, he, too, said he wanted more funding for non-profit security – and also for politicians to avoid using the attacks to justify their own political ends.“There’s disagreement about what it will take for the current administration to really take on antisemitism,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. Law enforcement needed to work with and be responsive to Jewish communities, he said, and there needed to be a national conversation about distinguishing between free speech and incitement to violence. “But at the same time, we don’t want to dismantle our democracy and the rule of law and constitutional rights. It’s a delicate balance,” he continued.“We have a wider Jewish community that’s fearful,” he said. “No one is surprised when they get the news flash that there’s been yet another attack on the Jewish community.”There is one point of agreement: the answer is not for Jews to drop out of engaging civically and as Jews. Jacobs insisted: “We will not accept a reality where people are just too afraid to participate in Jewish life.” More

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      Jewish organizers are increasingly confronting Trump: ‘The repression is growing, but so is the resistance’

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      On the morning of Columbia University’s commencement last week, an intergenerational group of Jewish alumni gathered in the rain outside the Manhattan campus’s heavily policed gates, wearing keffiyehs and shirts emblazoned with the words “not in our name”. Two had graduated more than 60 years earlier, and one spoke of having fled the Nazis to the US as a child. Others recalled participating in Columbia protests of the past, including those that led the university to divest from apartheid South Africa.They spoke as alumni and as Jews to condemn the university’s investments in Israel, its repression of pro-Palestinian speech, and its capitulation to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom in the name of fighting antisemitism on campus. They had planned to burn their Columbia diplomas in protest, but the rain got in their way, so many ripped them to pieces instead.“As a Jewish person, I’m really appalled at the idea that they are trying to make it sound as if opposing genocide is somehow antisemitic,” said Josh Dubnau, a professor at Stony Brook University who received a PhD from Columbia in 1995 and led the protest. “There are thousands of us who don’t believe in the right of the Jewish people to ethnically cleanse Palestine. There were Jews thousands of years before Zionism, and there will be Jews when Zionism is in the dustbin of history.”Another alumna, who graduated last year after being suspended over her participation in campus protests, wore a graduation gown and carried the photo of one of nearly 15,000 Palestinian students killed in Gaza during the current war.“We have a particular duty to show up as Jews because we are not being actively targeted in the way that Palestinian students, Muslim students and Arab students are,” said the student, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s our duty to weaponise our privilege as Jewish students.” New York police arrested her along with another protester after they set their Columbia diplomas on fire.View image in fullscreenNineteen months into Israel’s war in Gaza and the US protest movement it prompted, allegations of antisemitism on campuses have become one of the primary pretexts for the Trump administration’s multipronged attack on higher education, including billions in funding cuts, demands universities submit to a string of measures curtailing their academic freedom, and the detention and attempted deportation of international students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.But increasingly, Jewish students, faculty and alumni are pushing back against the exploitation of antisemitism charges to justify repressive policies they say do not represent their Jewish values. They have written letters, led protests, lobbied legislators and denounced what they say is the systematic exclusion of Jewish perspectives that are critical of Israel from the national conversation over antisemitism.Jewish Americans – some identifying as “anti-Zionists”, others with a range of views about Israel – have been at the forefront of the movement against the war in Gaza. Last summer, some 200 people, almost all Jewish, were arrested at a protest on Capitol Hill a day before a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu. Earlier this year, more than 350 rabbis, along with more Jewish creatives and activists, signed a New York Times ad denouncing Donald Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza.But Jewish-led organising has broadened in recent months. As Jewish Americans continue to protest the war, they are also taking on Trump’s onslaught against higher education in the name of Jewish safety, rallying around detained students and condemning what they view as the exploitation of antisemitism in the service of a rightwing political project. In yet another New York Times ad, several former heads of leading Jewish advocacy groups, including conservative ones like Aipac and Hillel International, criticised US Jewish groups that “have been far too silent about the stunning assault on democratic norms and the rule of law” under Trump.“The repression has been growing, but so has the resistance,” said Marianne Hirsch, a retired literature professor at Columbia University, who researches memory and the Holocaust and is outspoken against efforts to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. “I’m seeing a really cross-generational, Jewish faculty, student, and community mobilisation against this narrative.”A need for nuanceJewish Americans’ views on Israel, the war in Gaza, antisemitism on campuses and the Trump administration’s actions are far more complex than mainstream political discourse may suggest.A recent poll by the Jewish Voters Resource Center found that a majority of Jewish Americans are concerned about antisemitism and say they are “emotionally attached” to Israel, although older respondents poll much higher on both questions than younger ones. But the survey also found that 64% disapprove of Trump’s policies to purportedly combat antisemitism, and 61% believe arresting and deporting pro-Palestinian protesters contribute to increased antisemitism. A rightwing Israeli thinktank found last year that one-third of American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.While large numbers of Jewish students point to feelings of ostracization on campus in the last year and a half, their views on the campus protests vary widely. A qualitative study of the experiences of Jewish students, published this month, criticizes representations of campus life that “compartmentalize students into either/or categories, diminishing nuances between them”. The authors point to “a need for nuanced discussions about Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish identity that respect generational differences and diverse perspectives”.View image in fullscreenBut tackling complex questions – for instance, about when anti-Zionism veers into antisemitism – has become difficult in an increasingly repressive climate. “It is making it impossible to have discussions in the classroom,” said Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College.Swanson noted that many Jewish Americans are now mobilising against precisely the kind of repression their ancestors came to the US to escape. “The very liberal principles that have enabled Jewish thriving in the United States are being chipped away at systematically, one by one,” he said.Many of those who identify as anti-Zionist have found a home under the umbrella of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian Jewish group whose membership has doubled since the war started – to 32,000 dues-paying members – and whose student chapters were banned from several campuses during last year’s protests. In Baltimore, earlier this month, members of the group’s dozens of chapters gathered for a national convening. Over four days of workshops at the heavily secured event, participants talked about organising from campuses to religious spaces to promote a “Judaism beyond Zionism”, as the conference tagline read, as well as address authoritarianism in the US.Leaning on JewishnessAs US universities have become political battlefields, much Jewish organising is happening on campuses and academic spaces.Responding to what they view as a crisis in their scholarly field precipitated by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Hirsch, the Columbia scholar and others have launched a multidisciplinary Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, a group of mostly Jewish academics invoking their expertise to advocate against universities capitulating to authoritarianism.Jewish faculty and students have also organised in defense of pro-Palestinian students detained by the Trump administration. Following the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been detained for nearly three months with no charges, more than 3,400 Jewish faculty across the country signed a letter to denounce “without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name – and cynical claims of antisemitism – to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities”. Several Jewish students and faculty wrote letters to the court in support of Khalil. And Jewish groups and synagogues filed a court briefing in support of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts University student who was detained over an op-ed critical of Israel and released earlier this month as her case continues.“Jewish people came to America to escape generations of similar predations,” they wrote. “Yet the images of Ozturk’s arrest in twenty-first century Massachusetts evoke the oppressive tactics employed by the authoritarian regimes that many ancestors of [our] members left behind in Odessa, Kishinev, and Warsaw.”View image in fullscreenFaculty and students have also denounced congressional hearings against antisemitism on campuses that they say misrepresent their experiences and exclude their perspectives. As their president prepared to face legislators for a fresh round of antisemitism hearings in Congress this month, Jewish faculty and students at Haverford College issued a statement saying that their voices “have absolutely not been represented in the current public discussion of antisemitism” and questioning the credibility of mostly non-Jewish, Republican legislators leading the battle over antisemitism on campuses.Earlier this month, a group of Jewish students from Columbia University visited Congress to talk to legislators about their participation in campus protests that politicians paint as antisemitic, bringing their views “to lawmakers who are almost never hearing from that specific perspective”, said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace’s action group, who accompanied the group.As the Trump administration has sought to justify its repressive measures in their names, many American Jews have found themselves invoking their Jewishness in a public way for the first time. “We’ve been criticising identity politics and the way everything gets siloed into identities, and suddenly we find ourselves saying ‘as Jewish faculty’ or ‘as the daughter of Holocaust survivors’,” said Hirsch.“I’ve always tried to steer clear of having a public Jewish identity. I never felt like I had to advertise it,” echoed Joshua Moses, an anthropology professor at Haverford College. “But this moment kind of demands it.” More

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      Suspect charged with murder in shooting of Israeli embassy staffers

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      The US justice department on Thursday charged the lone suspect in a brazen attack that killed two young Israeli embassy staff members outside an event at the Jewish museum in downtown Washington DC with two counts of first degree murder.Jeanine Pirro, the interim US attorney for Washington, said at a press conference on Thursday afternoon that authorities were also investigating as a “hate crime and a crime of terrorism” the killings that left the US capital in shock as world leaders condemned the “horrible” and “antisemitic” shootings.Early on Thursday morning, federal agents in tactical gear descended on a Chicago apartment believed to be the alleged gunman’s home. According to a post on X from the FBI’s Washington field office, agents in Chicago were “conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity” that it said was “in relation to yesterday’s tragic shooting in Washington, DC”.The FBI director, Kash Patel, described the slaying as an “act of terror” and “targeted anti-Semitic violence”. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that US authorities believed the suspect acted alone. “We are doing everything we can to protect our entire community, and especially our Jewish community right now,” said Bondi, who was at the crime scene. “It was horrific,” she added.At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Donald Trump was “saddened and outraged” by the deadly act and vowed that the US Department of Justice “will be prosecuting the perpetrator of this to the full extent of the law”. She said Trump spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday.The killings occurred shortly after 9pm on Wednesday evening, outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where, according to officials, a gunman approached a group leaving an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee and opened fire at close range.The victims, identified as Yaron Lischinsky, who grew up in Germany and Israel, and Sarah Milgrim, a US citizen from Kansas, were a young couple about to be engaged, according to Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the US. Leiter told reporters Lischinsky had “purchased a ring this week with the intention of proposing to his girlfriend next week in Jerusalem”.The suspect, identified as Elias Rodriguez, was observed pacing outside the museum before the shooting, the Metropolitan police chief, Pamela Smith, said. After opening fire, he walked into the museum, was detained by event security and began to chant “Free, free Palestine,” she said.Officials have said the suspect was not on any security watchlists and there were no heightened security threats before the shooting. The firearm believed to be used in the killings was retrieved as well, officials said.The FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino, said the suspect was interviewed by authorities within hours of being taken into custody. Officials were aware of “certain writings” possibly authored by the suspect that have been circulated online, he wrote in a post on X, adding: “We hope to have updates as to the authenticity very soon.”The flags at Israeli diplomatic missions around the world were lowered to half mast, and Netanyahu ordered security to be stepped up following what he called “the horrifying antisemitic murder”.The attack comes as Israel expanded its ground offensive in Gaza, and faces growing international pressure, including from the US, to end its nearly three-month long blockade of food, medicine and other supplies that humanitarian groups say has pushed the enclave to the brink of famine.The shooting occurred in an area of the US capital crowded with federal buildings and embassies. The Capital Jewish Museum is located steps from the FBI’s Washington field office.Leaders in the US and Israel have said the attack was part of what Netanyahu called “the terrible price of antisemitism and wild incitement against Israel”.“When antisemitism is normalized, that’s where we start to see the real danger that results in the violence we saw last night,” Ted Deutch, a former Florida congressman and the chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, which had put on the reception for young diplomats on Wednesday night, said in an interview on MSNBC. “Everyone has a role to play in making sure that doesn’t happen.”In a social media post early on Thursday, Trump wrote: “These horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW! Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA.”Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, blamed critics of the Israeli government, including the “leaders and officials of many countries and international organizations, especially from Europe” for inciting violence and hatred against his country since the Israel-Hamas war began on 7 October 2023.France on Thursday denounced Sa’ar’s comments as “unjustified” and “outrageous”. “France has condemned, France condemns and France will continue to condemn, always and unequivocally, any act of antisemitism,” the foreign ministry spokesperson Christophe Lemoine said.International criticism of Israel over the Gaza war has risen in recent weeks. On Tuesday, in an unprecedented, joint statement with Canada and the UK, France condemned “the appalling language” of members of Netanyahu’s government, and the “outrageous actions” and the “intolerable level of suffering” of civilians.The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned the deadly attack as “completely unacceptable” and said that political violence “only undermines the pursuit of justice”.“While millions of Americans feel extreme frustration at the sight of the Israeli government slaughtering Palestinian men, women and children on a daily basis with weapons paid for with our taxpayer dollars, political violence is an unacceptable crime and is not the answer,” the group said in a statement.Tributes poured in for the slain victims of the attack from the US and overseas as those who knew Lischinsky and Milgrim described the couple as “bright” and “talented”.Lischinsky, 30, who worked as a research assistant in the political department of the Israeli embassy in Washington, was born in Nuremberg, according to the Israeli ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor. “He was a Christian, a true lover of Israel, served in the IDF, and chose to dedicate his life to the State of Israel and the Zionist cause,” he wrote on X, sharing that he came to know Lischinsky as his master’s student at Reichman University in Israel.Milgrim, 26, an American from Kansas, organized trips to Israel, according to a spokesperson for the Israeli foreign ministry, officials said. She was also a volunteer with Tech2Peace, an advocacy group training young Palestinians and Israelis and promoting dialogue between them, according to the organization.KU Hillel, a Jewish student organization at her alma mater, the University of Kansas, described Milgrim as a “bright spirit” whose “passion for the Jewish community touched everyone fortunate enough to know her”. Those who knew her best said she was “the definition of the best person”, the statement said.Lischinsky was preparing to propose to Milgrim when they traveled to Jerusalem next week to meet his family, according to officials. Lischinsky had purchased an engagement ring, which Miligram’s family only learned of after the shooting.“The ironic part is that we were worried for our daughter’s safety in Israel,” her father, Robert Milgrim, told the New York Times in an interview. “But she was murdered three days before going.” More

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      Trump administration piles pressure on Harvard with $450m more in cuts

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      Eight federal agencies will terminate a further $450m in grants to Harvard University, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday, escalating its antagonization of the elite institution over what officials frame as inadequate responses to antisemitism on campus.The latest funding cuts come after the administration cancelled $2.2bn in federal funding to the university, bringing the total financial penalty to approximately $2.65bn.“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination,” the Trump administration’s taskforce to combat antisemitism wrote in a statement. “This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement.”The cuts represent a flexing of federal power over the US’s oldest and wealthiest university, first triggered by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza – one that is only expected to expand in the coming days – but encompasses a far broader set of grievances against the institution and others like it perceived as politically liberal.Harvard has so far refused to yield, with the university’s president, Dr Alan Garber, who is Jewish, calling the previous attacks “illegal demands” from the administration “to control whom we hire and what we teach”. The university has refused to comply with the administration’s demands, outlined in a letter last month, which included shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs; cooperating with federal immigration authorities; and banning face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters.The school, which has an endowment of more than $53bn, had launched legal action against the initial $2.2bn funding freeze, arguing the university faced no choice after the Trump administration “threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.The Trump administration’s taskforce to combat antisemitism justified the latest funding reduction by claiming Harvard had “repeatedly failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and antisemitic harassment plaguing its campus”.They referenced a series of alleged incidents, including a fellowship awarded by the Harvard Law Review, which the taskforce characterized as evidence of “just how radical Harvard has become”.Nationwide campus protests appear to be continuing, even as Columbia students were arrested last week. Dozens of students at California State University campuses are staging hunger strikes in solidarity with Gaza, as they simultaneously call on their school to divest from Israel.Harvard recently published its own investigations into allegations of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus, but these self-regulatory efforts appear to have done little to satisfy administration officials.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration’s announcement of the new funding cuts was signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the General Services Administration; Sean R Keveney, acting general counsel at the US Department of Health and Human Services; and Thomas E Wheeler, acting general counsel at the US Department of Education.Harvard did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      We’ve never seen a more error-prone, incompetent presidency | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      As we pass the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s second term, it’s time to take note of a key element of how this administration governs: by mistake. I’m being serious. Have we ever seen a more error-prone, incompetent and fumbling presidency? In their rush to implement a barely concealed authoritarian agenda, this administration is producing a litany of blunders, gaffes and slip-ups. At times, they’ll seek to hide those mistakes by projecting a shield of authoritarianism. At other times, they’ll claim the mistake as a method of walking back an unpopular authoritarian agenda item. Either way, it’s a unique style of rule, one that I call “rule by error”.On 11 April, for example, the White House’s taskforce on antisemitism sent Harvard University a letter detailing a laundry list of actions that Harvard would have to undertake if the university wanted to avoid having over $2bn of multiyear federal grants frozen by the government. But the actions were extreme and would have resulted in the end of Harvard’s intellectual independence. Days later, Harvard wrote back: “Nah, I’m good,” they told Trump’s people. (More precisely, they wrote that the university is “not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration”.)Harvard’s response garnered much popular support against a bullying Trump administration, including a photo caption in the Onion that read: “Nation Can’t Believe It’s On Harvard’s Side.” Then, a few days later, several unnamed officials told the New York Times that the Trump administration’s letter, which had been signed by three officials from the administration and sent on official letterhead from an official email account, had been sent to Harvard by mistake. Oops.Maybe it was sent in error, which frankly still speaks poorly of this administration, but it’s also possible that as the wind began blowing favorably in Harvard’s direction, some in the administration were looking for a way out of the trap they had set for themselves.But that’s hardly the only error this administration has admitted to, nor is it the worst, not by a long shot. Kilmar Ábrego García, an Salvadorian man who lived in Maryland with his wife and five-year-old child, was grabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents on 12 March and deported three days later to El Salvador, despite having a deportation protection order forbidding him from being sent there. In a 7 April court filing, Robert Cerna, the acting Ice field office director, admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”.Did owning up to this error result in the return of Ábrego García? Absolutely not. Trump’s administration continues to this day to defy the courts while doubling down on its own failures. During a recent Oval Office meeting between the US president and Salvadorian president, Nayib Bukele, White House aide Stephen Miller disputed even the existence of an error, despite all the evidence. “The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing that since has been relieved of duty,” Miller said, presumably referring in his tortured English to the fact that the administration fired Erez Reuveni, a career justice department attorney who represented the government in court during the Ábrego García case. The lesson here? You’re better off shooting the messenger than correcting your own mistake.If those errors aren’t enough evidence to constitute a philosophy of error, there’s still plenty more. What about the official notice the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent to some Ukrainian refugees in the United States. More than 240,000 Ukrainians have been settled in the United States under a program titled “U4U” that began under Joe Biden’s presidency. On 3 April, some Ukrainians, it’s unclear how many, received a notice telling them: “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole,” referring to their legal status to stay in the country. “Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate 7 days from the date of this notice,” the email said. Then it warned its recipients: “Do not attempt to remain in the United States–the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”This would unquestionably be a terrifying communication to receive. When CBS News, which first reported the story, asked DHS about the notice, the government replied: “A message was sent in error to some Ukrainians under the U4U program. The U4U parole program has not been terminated.” Sorry!Or how about the time when Nicole Micheroni, a US-born American citizen and immigration lawyer received an email from the Trump administration telling her to self-deport. “It is time for you to leave the United States,” the email read. “If you do not depart the United States immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Oops! They did it again.Or what about using the messaging app Signal to plan a bombing campaign, and then adding a journalist to this top-secret chat? Who hasn’t made this mistake before! And then done it again!How about the widely accepted fact that the calculation the administration has used to determine their outrageous and misguided tariff policy is just plain wrong. The American Enterprise Institute, a center-right thinktank, looked into Trump math and found that it inflates the tariffs that Trump assumes countries are levying on the US by four times. Then again, who cares!Remember when they told us that the US government was sending $50m of condoms to Gaza? The aid was actually sent to a province in Mozambique named Gaza and was earmarked for HIV and tuberculosis prevention. No condoms were part of the aid. Asked about the error, Elon Musk said: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” but then he repeated part of the lie by saying: “I’m not sure we should be sending $50m worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly.”There are plenty more mistakes (tariffs on penguins, anyone?), but you get the point. Trump constantly complains about the existence of some shadowy “deep state”, when in reality he and his entire administration ought to be in a deep state of shame, considering the constant stream of errors and blunders that constitute their rule. No wonder Trump’s job approval rating at the 100-day mark is at a piddly 42%, the second lowest of any president in the last 80 years, according to a new NPR/PBS/Marist News poll. (The lowest? Trump in his first term, by a single point.)People on the right often view Trump as some sort of political genius. Michael Moore, on the other hand, once labeled Trump an “evil genius”. But all I see is a man and an administration who use mistakes to cover up evil practices and use evil practices to excuse mistakes. That’s not genius. It’s dangerous. And if we don’t understand “rule by error” and how to dismantle it, we will all be doomed to live out its mistakes.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More

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      Trump fires Doug Emhoff and others from US Holocaust Memorial Council

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      The Trump administration has fired several members of the US Holocaust Memorial Council appointed by Joe Biden, including Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris.Emhoff described the move as a political decision that turned “one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue”.He said he had been informed on Tuesday of his removal from the board, which oversees the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and other Holocaust commemorations.“Let me be clear: Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized,” Emhoff said in a statement. “To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous – and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”Emhoff, who is Jewish and who led the Biden administration’s efforts to combat antisemitism, said he would continue to “speak out, to educate, and to fight hate in all its forms – because silence is never an option”.“No divisive political decision will ever shake my commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education or to combatting hate and antisemitism,” he added.His statement comes a day before Harris is due to deliver her first major speech since leaving office in January. The former US vice-president, who lost to Donald Trump in the November presidential election, is expected to offer a sharp critique of the Trump administration, in San Francisco.In addition, the Trump administration reportedly dismissed other Biden appointees to the council, including the former White House chief of staff Ron Klain; the former UN ambassador Susan Rice; the former deputy national security adviser Jon Finer; the former labor secretary Tom Perez; the former ambassador to Spain and Andorra Alan Solomont; and Mary Zients, the wife of the former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, according to Jewish Insider.Anthony Bernal, who served as a senior adviser to the former first lady Jill Biden, was also fired from the council, the New York Times reported.Many of those reportedly fired on Tuesday had been appointed in January. Presidential appointments to the council typically serve for a five-year term.Solomont, who was appointed to the council in 2023, told Jewish Insider that he learned of his dismissal through an email from a staff member of the White House presidential personnel office.“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council is terminated, effective immediately,” the email reads. “Thank you for your service.”The email provided no explanation for the dismissal and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A statement from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reads: “At this time of high antisemitism and Holocaust distortion and denial, the Museum is gratified that our visitation is robust and demand for Holocaust education is increasing.“We look forward to continuing to advance our vitally important mission as we work with the Trump Administration,” it added. More

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      Over 100 US university presidents sign letter decrying Trump administration

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      More than 100 presidents of US colleges and universities have signed a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” with higher education – the strongest sign yet that US educational institutions are forming a unified front against the government’s extraordinary attack on their independence.The statement, published early on Tuesday by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, comes weeks into the administration’s mounting campaign against higher education, and hours after Harvard University became the first school to sue the government over threats to its funding. Harvard is one of several institutions hit in recent weeks with huge funding cuts and demands they relinquish significant institutional autonomy.The signatories come from large state schools, small liberal arts colleges and Ivy League institutions, including the presidents of Harvard, Princeton and Brown.In the statement, the university presidents, as well as the leaders of several scholarly societies say they speak with “one voice” and call for “constructive engagement” with the administration.“We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight,” they write. “However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”Harvard’s lawsuit comes after the administration announced it would freeze $2.3bn in federal funds, and Donald Trump threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status, over claims the university failed to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian protests. The suit and the statement, taken together, mark an increasingly muscular response from universities following what initially appeared to be a tepid approach.While some university leaders have in recent weeks criticised the administration and indicated they will not abide by its demands, the statement marks the first time presidents have spoken out collectively on the matter. The joint condemnation followed a convening of more than 100 university leaders called by the AAC&U and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last week to “come together to speak out at this moment of enormity”, said Lynn Pasquarella, the president of the AAC&U.Pasquarella said that there was “widespread agreement” across a variety of academic institutions about the need to take a collective stand.“Much has been written about this flood-the-zone strategy that’s being used in the current attacks on higher education, and it’s a strategy designed to overwhelm campus leaders with a constant barrage of directives, executive orders, and policy announcements that make it impossible to respond to everything all at once,” she said, explaining why it has taken until now for a joint response. “Campus leaders have had a lot to deal with over the past few months, and I think that’s part of the reason, but it’s also the case that they are constrained by boards, by multiple constituencies who are often asking them to do things that are at odds with one another.”The Trump administration has issued a barrage of measures aimed at universities the right has described as “the enemy” – some under the guise of fighting alleged antisemitism on campuses and others in an explicit effort to eradicate diversity and inclusion initiatives. Billions in federal funds are under threat unless universities comply with extreme demands, such as removing academic departments from faculty control, “auditing” the viewpoints of students and faculty, and collaborating with federal authorities as they target international students for detention and deportation. Along with its actions against Harvard, it has threatened and in some cases withheld millions more from Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.Columbia has largely accepted the administration’s requirements to restore funding, including placing an academic department under outside oversight. Its president did not sign the collective statement.The measures against the schools, which are already upending academic research, undermine longstanding partnerships between the federal government and universities, and are contributing to an atmosphere of repression, the statement’s signatories note.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation,” they write.Last week, Harvard University issued the strongest rebuke yet of the administration’s demands, with president Alan Garber setting off a showdown with the White House by saying that the university would not “surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights”.While Harvard’s lawsuit was the first by a university, higher education associations and organisations representing faculty have filed other legal challenges over the cuts.Faculty at some universities are also organising to protect one another, with several members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, a consortium of some of the country’s largest state universities, signing on to a resolution to establish a “mutual defence compact”.At a second convening by the AAC&U on Monday some 120 university leaders also discussed what steps they may take next, including efforts to engage their broader communities and the business world to defend academic freedom.The joint statement, Pasquarella added, was just the beginning, and intended “to signal to the public and to affirm to ourselves what’s at stake here, what’s at risk if this continual infringement on the academy is allowed to continue”. 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      US claims student’s activism could ‘undermine’ Middle East peace

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      The Trump administration is justifying its efforts to deport a student at Columbia University by saying that his activities could “potentially undermine” the Middle East peace process.In a memo from the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, reviewed exclusively by the New York Times, the administration asserts that Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, a green-card holder and student who led pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, had undermined the Middle East peace process and threatened the US goal to “peacefully” resolve conflict in Israel and Gaza.Mahdawi was apprehended at an immigration services center in Vermont, where he had arrived to complete the final step in his citizenship process. Instead of taking a citizenship test, as he had expected to do, he was arrested and handcuffed by immigration officers.Rubio’s memo justifying the arrest cites the same authority used to detain Mahdawi’s fellow Columbia protester and green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil. In both cases, Rubio cited a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that he said allows him to deport any person who is not a citizen or national of the US.In Khalil’s case, Rubio argued that Khalil’s activism undermined the US goal of combatting antisemitism; the reasoning is currently being challenged in court. But the memo addressing Mahdawi’s case, the New York Times reports, is more specific, noting that Mahdawi had “engaged in threatening rhetoric and intimidation of pro-Israeli bystanders”, saying his activism had undermined efforts to protect Jewish students from violence, and saying it had undermined the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment.The state department declined to comment, and Mahdawi’s lawyers did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.According to the court filing challenging Mahdawi’s arrest, he was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, where he lived until he moved to the US in 2014. He became a lawful permanent resident of the US in 2015.He was expected to graduate Columbia in May, and had been accepted into a master’s program at the university’s school of international and public affairs, according to the court documents.As a student at Columbia, his lawyers say, Mahdawi was “an outspoken critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and an activist and organizer in student protests on Columbia’s campus until March of 2024, after which he took a step back and has not been involved in organizing”. More

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      Harvard says it will not ‘yield’ to Trump demands over $9bn in funding cuts

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      Harvard University said on Monday that it will not comply with a new list of demands from the Trump administration issued last week that the government says are designed to crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations at elite academic institutions.In a message to the Harvard community, the university president, Alan Garber, vowed that the school would not yield to the government’s pressure campaign. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber said.The Trump administration said it would review $9bn of federal grants and contracts, including Harvard’s research hospitals, as part of its effort to “root out antisemitism”.In a letter last week from the government’s antisemitism taskforce, the university was accused of having “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”.The Trump administration has also demanded that Harvard ban face masks and close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”. The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.The administration further asked Harvard to reform its admissions process for international students to screen for students “supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism” – and to report international students to federal authorities if they break university conduct policies.University faculties are also under the government’s microscope as it has called for “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship”.Harvard’s announced resistance to the administration’s demands comes as Trump’s federal government pits itself against several Ivy League universities over intellectual and political freedoms. The dispute has been playing out in the courts over efforts by the administration to deport several postgraduate students holding provisional citizenship or student visas over pro-Palestinian demonstrations that the government alleges were shows of support for terrorism.On Friday, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian organizer Mahmoud Khalil, 30, can be deported despite having been granted legal permanent residence in the US. The government contended that Khalil’s presence in the US posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences”, satisfying requirements for deportation, according to the judge.After that ruling, Khalil’s immigration attorney Marc Van Der Hout told the court that his client would appeal.The letter from Harvard’s president said the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote in the message.Garber said the government’s demands were a political ploy.“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote. “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”The new approach by the university, which sits on an endowment valued at over $52bn, comes in contrast to Columbia University. Columbia, which holds an endowment of $14bn, largely acceded to the administration demands after it was threatened with $400m in federal funding cuts.But Jewish advocacy groups are divided on the administration’s efforts. Some say they are an innovative and muscular way to combat what they see as campus antisemitism. Others maintain that the government is weaponizing antisemitism to pursue wider intellectual crackdowns.“The gun to the head and shutting down all science seems like a counterproductive way to handle the particular problems of antisemitism,” Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, told the Boston Globe earlier in April. More