It’s often said that protecting basic liberties is most important when it’s hard to do. It’s especially important when it means defending people whose worldview we might find odious or even threatening.
If the ADL thinks Trump’s thuggery is protecting Jews, it’s wrong
You can’t call yourself a civil rights organization and not loudly oppose this unlawful roundup.
April 1, 2025 The Washington Post
When immigration authorities last month detained Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in the student protests at Columbia University, the ADL issued a statement saying it supported Trump’s “bold set of efforts” to clamp down on campus antisemitism. The statement mentioned the need for due process — even though the due process here, it turned out, involved Khalil being shipped out of state before he could even get a hearing.
More detentions followed. At Georgetown University, Badar Khan Suri, an Indian-born postdoctoral fellow, was snatched from his home near midnight by masked agents — presumably because his wife, a U.S. citizen, is the daughter of a Palestinian political figure. (The State Department says Suri spread propaganda for Hamas.)
Last week, masked agents grabbed Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar and doctoral student at Tufts University, off a street in a Boston suburb. Near as anyone can tell, Ozturk’s offense was co-signing an op-ed in the Tufts Daily student newspaper that accused Israel of genocide.
To all this, the ADL has had no official reaction.
The Tufts incident, recorded in a horrifying video, has special resonance for me, as I know it does for Greenblatt. He and I grew up in the same Connecticut town, and in the late 1980s, we overlapped as editors of the weekly newspaper at Tufts.
Greenblatt was an opinion editor, and though we all had spirited arguments about the paper’s editorial views, there was never a doubt that publishing offensive views and facilitating on-campus debate were parts of our job. In my memory, Greenblatt was as devoted to this principle as anyone else.
In 1992, after I had graduated, Greenblatt spoke out against antisemitism in a campus controversy involving the Nation of Islam. In that instance, as the Forward noted last year, he stood firmly for the right of the offending speaker to make his case.
I’m sure Greenblatt remembers the neighborhood where Ozturk was snatched in Somerville, Massachusetts, as clearly as I do. He knows that her piece, written along with several other students, was well within the bounds of normal campus debate. He knows that a lot of op-eds published by Tufts students are incendiary — but they are not supposed to get you stripped of your student visa and thrown into a Louisiana detention center.
Greenblatt knows all this, and yet the ADL so far has taken no stand. It has instead offered cautious approval on behalf of American Jews while the country careens into lawless nativism. When I spoke to him this week, Greenblatt said he was troubled by the rash of student detentions, and he assured me he would soon have more to say about them. “We might not be the first on this,” he told me, “but we will be in the right place on this.”
I understand why the ADL might be reluctant to speak out. For many years now, college administrators have indulged a culture where every identity group on campus enjoyed “safe spaces” and freedom from silly “microaggressions” — every group, that is, except Jews, whose support for Israel has made them de facto oppressors and a target for the worst kind of leftist vitriol. That has certainly been true in recent years at Columbia (where I attended graduate school), and I think it has often been true at Tufts, too.
But the remedy for that double standard isn’t to join the ranks of protected groups that can’t abide being discomfited or having their worldviews challenged, as if the very point of a college campus weren’t to do exactly that. The remedy is to speak up loudly for everyone’s right to free _expression_, hurtful or not, so long as it doesn’t veer into threats of violence.
Speaking out for Jewish students who feel silenced on campus while simultaneously cheering or ignoring the arrests of immigrants for expressing contrary views is not only un-American; it also mocks the core Jewish value of intellectual debate, and it’s painfully ahistorical.
Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression. You’ll be looking awhile.
And this is my main issue with what Greenblatt and the ADL have said, or not said, to this point. You can’t call yourself a civil rights organization in the United States right now — let alone a civil rights organization for a minority that has been brutally evicted all over the world — and not loudly oppose the cruel and unlawful removal of foreigners whose views happen to be out of fashion. Or rather, you can, but no one should take you seriously when you then complain about threats to free speech.
The American idea — and yes, JD Vance, it is an idea and not just a place — faces an existential moment. Our largest law firms are prostrating themselves. Our most storied media companies are paying off the president. We’re running out of bulwarks, and American Jews shouldn’t feel good about that just because the white nationalist arrow hasn’t yet spun in their direction.
As another advocacy group for Jewish Americans, J Street, put it in a statement last week: “The administration seems hell-bent on destroying all that has made this country a secure and welcoming home for Jewish Americans for generations.”
I agree. The ADL should make clear that it does, too.