Hate Crimes in the Name of Resistance Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Friday, June 6th, 2025.

In celebrating the holiday of Shavuot last week, we went back and reread as the Torah portion, the Ten Commandments, which is that core piece of the Torah first given at Mount Sinai. One of those commandments, probably the best known, is lo tirzach, conventionally translated as “thou shalt not kill,” but more accurately should be rendered as “thou shalt not murder.” The Hebrew is pretty clear. It doesn’t use that more common Hebrew word leharog, meaning to kill. It specifically means some form of a more sinister version of killing.

We want to walk around with the belief that our moral codes insist that all forms of killing are bad, that killing is the moral baseline that shapes our ethical conduct, but embedded here in this language is something we also know to be true, something that’s reinforced in our criminal justice systems and in our biases, that some kinds of killing are better than others, as perverse as that sounds.

So for instance, we rationalize some deaths in war by saying that they weren’t intentional. Those are the people we didn’t mean to kill. Or more accurately, we tend to say things like, well, we’re trying to kill the enemy, but we wound up accidentally killing some others. Moshe Habertal says that one basic act of acknowledging that this is still killing is that instead of using the Orwellian phrase, “collateral damage,” we should at least be willing to say “collateral killing.”

Or as another example, we prosecute premeditated killing more strictly than we do crimes of passion. Because if you plan to kill someone, that’s understood as being worse than just killing them. We have a strange word for acting recklessly in killing, which is called manslaughter. As though slaughtering is apparently preferable to murdering. We prosecute more severely based on how you kill someone. We use it as a way of learning something about your character and maybe your perversions.

But worst of all, it seems, is killing because of hate. Like if you really hate someone, but you don’t really hate them, more like you hate the kind of person they are, their race, their religion, their background. Then we have special statutes that indicate that that kind of killing is particularly heinous. We call these hate crimes. We do this thing, calling certain kinds of killings hate crimes.

I think both to try to ensure that we’re attentive to patterns to prevent copycats for people imitating those types of things and perhaps because, like all of these distinctions, we’re striving to create moral stratifications even among terrible things. Victims don’t really need these distinctions, but we do. It’s been a dangerous few months for Jews and Israel supporters here in America and Canada, part of an escalating wave of the normalization of anti-Semitism and its inevitable translation into violence.

I spoke on this podcast over a year ago about the need that we have as a Jewish community to differentiate between the stuff that makes us uncomfortable and the stuff that actually makes us unsafe. And now we’re deeply in the territory of the latter. This all follows the arson at Governor Shapiro’s home back in April, the murder of the two Israeli embassy staffers outside an American Jewish committee event at the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington a couple of weeks ago, and then this week with the firebombing attack on the peaceful march on behalf of the Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.

All of these attacks, maybe the one thing they hold in common, is that they take as their cause some version of extreme pro-Palestinian activism. They are what is oftentimes called, anti-Semitism of the left. We can challenge and problematize those terms. But don’t worry, just because I’ve talked about those three, there is still violent anti-Semitism coming from the far right. And like that whole question of the stratification of different kinds of killing, it’s not always clear that it matters whether we characterize it as from the right and from the left if it leads to the same violent conclusions.

But meanwhile, the commentariat wonders, apropos all those distinctions I laid out, what about these attacks makes them anti-Semitic? Rabbi Brant Rosen was the founder of an anti-Zionist in Chicago. In my opinion, something of a Jewish enabler for the kinds of uncompromising rhetoric that is part of what creates an environment for a backlash against Zionist Jews, said recently in a JTA article about the Washington murders that they were heinous, but that he was not sure that they should be considered anti-Semitic. He preferred the term “political violence.”

I found this maddening, both because I think that position soft pedals anti-Semitism, but because also the very conversation—is this anti-Semitic or not—actually kind of trivializes the issues. Jews who support Israel, which is the vast majority of us, which we don’t do because we are genocide heirs, but because Israel is a feature of the Jewish story, the home of our loved ones, the place of our past, maybe of our future. Jews who support Israel in ways we consider entirely consonant with American patriotism. We Jews who support Israel are now being targeted by acts of violence. Does it matter whether somebody calls it anti-Semitism or not? How are we meant to respond? And how is America meant to respond to this problem by whatever name we wish to call it?

I’ve been wanting to speak to Amy Spitalnik for some time here on the podcast. Amy is the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the national convener of Jewish coalitions working across communities to build a just and inclusive American democracy. Amy previously served as the executive director of Integrity First for America, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, which won a groundbreaking lawsuit against the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and hate groups responsible for the Charlottesville violence in the Unite the Right rally from several years ago. She’s worked in government, politics, and advocacy and now inhabits a really important role in the American Jewish establishment. And I think we found our cause to have this conversation.

So Amy, thanks for coming here on the podcast today. And I guess where I want to start is that I think you share my sensibility that these are anti-Semitic attacks. I think you even said as much in a Washington Post article by Michelle Boorstein that came out today. I guess I want to hear from you what you think is at stake in making the hate part of these attacks particularly clear, that it’s not just attacks of bad murders against people who have certain opinions, but actually constitutes hate crimes. What is the investment that we as an American Jewish community should have in that classification?

Amy: Absolutely, and I do totally share your conviction that we need to be clear about what’s happening here. We need to be clear about anti-Semitism wherever it exists across the political spectrum, removed from the ideological spectrum, because at the end of the day, when Jews are being targeted, that is anti-Semitism. And we parse these terms, we parse these acts. And we don’t do that in many other cases. Because antisemitism operates so uniquely as this conspiracy theory in addition to this basic form of hate, it sometimes leads to these questions of, well, is it political violence? Is it antisemitism? Is it a hate crime? Is it not? And as we’ve seen over the last few weeks, starting with the Josh Shapiro attack, then the Capitol Jewish Museum, and then the Boulder firebombing,

These are Jews being targeted because the perpetrator believes they should be held accountable for the actions of the Israeli government. That is anti-Semitism, period. We need to be clear about that.

You talked about the Jewish community’s relationship with Israel, how the vast majority of us have a deep personal relationship with Israel, which doesn’t mean that we support every action of the Israeli government or what’s happening in Gaza right now, but it is inherent to the identity of the vast majority of American Jews.

And so when we start hearing terms like Zionist or our connections to Israel being used as a pejorative, as it really has become over the last few years in so many spaces that normalizes bigotry and extremism targeting Jews simply because of this core part of our identity. Again, not because we actually support or are responsible for what the Israeli government is doing the same way that the vast majority of us don’t support or are responsible for what the American government is doing. But it takes a piece of our identity and it uses it as an excuse to increasingly violently target the Jewish community in a way that should be unacceptable to everyone.

Yehuda: There’s some things going on in the water here in America in which anti-Semitism seems to be a kind of symptom of something larger. It’s symbolized also in the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, which is not just, I see somebody doing something I think is terrible, causing harm to others, et cetera, and I’m going to carry out this violence against them.

But I’m focused more on the rhetorical world in which that is considered justifiable because of that move towards its political violence, its self-defense violence. And it’s clear that that’s what’s happening with some of these attacks on Jews who support Israel. I really am mad about what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is violent, and therefore anybody who supports it, or in some cases might be seen as enabling it, like an Israeli embassy worker, is then ripe for this kind of violence.

I’m curious what you think has shifted to kind of normalize that kind of rhetoric, which creates these really dangerous discursive conditions that we find ourselves in.

Amy: Yeah, well, look, the deep interconnection between anti-Semitism and anti-democratic extremism has been clear for years. And it exists on both sides of the anti-Semitism conversation. I think it was easier for some of us to understand it on the right. When we hear these conspiracy theories related to Jews will not replace us, replacement, invasion, using Jewish control and power as this excuse or this tool to effectively suggest there’s a replacement of the white race, an attempt to effectively take over our electorate or the government in some way, because as this conspiracy theory, anti-Semitism is really intended to sow distrust in our institutions and our democracy and to pick communities against one another. And so it became clear, I think, to many of us how that was working on the right over the last decade. We’ll talk about Unite the Right, Pittsburgh, Poway, a variety of other incidents that make that clear.

But it’s those same conspiracy theories about Jewish control and power that fuel a lot of the extremism that we’re seeing on the left in terms of left-wing antisemitism. It’s about Jews, whether it’s controlling our government here in the United States to support Israel, whether it’s the dual loyalty tropes, whether it’s this perception that Zionists are sort of this all-powerful entity, you know, the language that we’ve seen become so normalized in certain spaces since October 7th, but frankly before that as well, are rooted in some of these very same tropes.

And what we know is that there is an inextricable link between belief and conspiracy theories, propensity to believe in anti-Semitism, and a willingness to engage in political violence. There’s been fascinating research by the University of Chicago, ADL, and others that connect the dots between these different ideas.

And if you are likely to believe in conspiracy theories, it means you’re much more likely to believe in anti-Semitism. If you harbor core anti-Semitic ideas, you’re much more likely to engage in political violence. Because again, at the core of this is this conspiracy theory around Jewish control and power. And it leads people to believe that the only recourse is to engage in this sort of violent extremism to break this, you know, Jewish control that they believe exists.

And it’s so deeply dangerous, not just because Jews are not responsible for the demographic changes in our country or the actions of the Israeli government or any of the other ills that we’re so often blamed for, but because it fundamentally normalizes this broader extremism, this willingness to engage in violence as a tool that perhaps, you know, 10 years ago felt far less fathomable in our society and in our politics.

Yehuda: So this is very risky terrain for those of us who care about American democracy, and that definitely includes me and you. Both of us have been writing and have been arguing for some time that the core problem that Jews face in America is not particular forms of violence against us, those are the ones we feel most acutely, but the larger erosion of the conditions that have made American Jews safe and protected, which were designed for the safety and protection of all Americans.

And so when we lose the trust in our institutions and so forth, we have much more to be concerned about. And I guess the crux of the issue is, if it is true, based on the research that you’re citing, that the normalizing of extreme ideas and conspiracy theories and beliefs and then the legitimating of those ideas in public discourse leads almost inevitably—I put in the almost—leads almost inevitably to political violence, you can see that the erosion that that’s going to create is going to be around the right to express those viewpoints and civil liberties, and now you’re stuck, because if the system that protects us is rooted in civil liberties, we have this dual challenge of like, well, I want that system of protection, but I also want to tamp down on these ideas and beliefs.

How are you thinking about the dance between those types of kind pressures on the Jewish community right now?

Amy: Yeah, well, we’re in this feedback loop where we see how increasingly normalized anti-Semitism, these conspiracy theories are used as a tool to fundamentally undermine democracy, to sow distrust in our democratic institutions, in our government, in our economy, in the world order. We know this inherently. And to pit communities against one another. So as anti-Semitism is normalized, it increasingly undermines democracy in all of its forms.

At the same time as democracy erodes, as we see the attacks on core democratic norms, the rule of law, on our democratic institutions, on our fundamental rights, it in turn allows antisemitism to further flourish because people are looking for a scapegoat. And so we’re in this feedback loop in which antisemitism is becoming so normalized, it’s fueling and animating broader anti-democratic extremism and the erosion of our democracy. It’s also being used and exploited, our legitimate fears around antisemitism are being used and exploited to undermine our core democratic norms in a way that has become very clear and acute over the last few months. And I’m sure we’ll talk more about that.

And so too, as the rule of law and the norms and institutions and rights that have been so inherent to Jewish safety for generations erode antisemitism further flourishes inclusivity, and the core norms that have been so important to our community are diminished and we’re made less safe. So we’re stuck in this loop and it’s really hard to see how we get out of it because of the ways in which this is all manifesting. The Trump administration exploiting our very legitimate fears and those legitimate fears being proven real day after day as we see acts of anti-Semitism continue to increase.

Yehuda: Let’s get very specific though. The Washington attacker used the phrase, I think, free Palestine. I think that was the phrase that he used. There are a set of terms and ideas that have emerged as part of the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish political left. Some of them, which seem to me to be explicitly calls for violence, like, globalize the Intifada, which even there too some of the defenders of that rhetoric say no, that’s globalize the struggle. It doesn’t mean actually what the Intifada meant for a long time, which is blow up buses, blow up airplanes, assassinate presidential candidates.

Free Palestine seems much more neutral, right? A person should be able to call for freedom for people that is living under occupation; that should be fair game. But there’s a very quick slippage around that terminology. And I have to admit that there is a piece of me that is, because of what you’re saying, sympathetic to the argument that if these ideas and beliefs are leading in very extreme ways to political violence, we have to be much more cautious about the rhetoric behind them. So that’s the struggle. It’s not a theoretical question as it relates to rhetoric and freedom of speech and freedom to organize and civil liberties and so forth. I guess, what do we do about that? What’s the halakhic strategy to kind of navigate in that messiness right now?

Amy: Well, look, I’ll say I think the personal instinct there is one that I share, right? I’m someone who has spent a good amount of my career committed to core issues of civil rights and civil liberties and the instinct that you’re describing is one that I personally very viscerally feel and I think it’s that much more important to sort of step back and then think about for me two questions.

One, the fact that we’re not even speaking the same language when we talk about these issues, right? Whether it’s terms like Zionism or Intifada or Free Palestine or a variety of the other language that has become so pervasive in this conversation, it means different things to different people and we can unpack that in a second.

And related, you’re not supposed to this, it got, I think, a couple university presidents pushed out, but context actually matters. And so when we’re talking about a term like free Palestine, for example, it’s one thing if there is a college student peacefully standing on the quad with a sign that says Free Palestine, not deliberately targeting any individual, student, or faculty member or something like that. They’re simply, from their perspective, hypothetically protesting for Palestinian human rights and dignity.

If Free Palestine is being spray painted on a synagogue or a Jewish business or screamed at a Jewish student or other person or in these most extreme and horrific cases being shouted as a Jew or Jewish event or Jewish institution as being violently targeted, of course that’s anti-Semitism.

And so we need to be clear about the fact that the context of this language matters and the understanding of this language matters because I hear the term Intifada, for example, very specifically. My formative years and my relationship with Israel were the second Intifada. I watched the images of Sbarro and pizza parlors being blown up and buses being bombed ,and I went to Hebrew University a few years after the cafeteria bombing there and looked at the rebuilt cafeteria and the memorial on a daily basis, and that for me is how I hear the term Intifada. I understand that there are some who, in the Arab American or Muslim American community or others, who might understand it as a term of simple, even peaceful resistance but that’s not how the Jewish community hears it.

The term Zionism, right, it means something very specific to me that is very different than the way in which it’s being used in a lot of the public discourse. For me, it’s simply the belief that Jews are entitled to a homeland in this part of the world where we have deep historical connections. It goes hand in hand with my belief in Palestinian self-determination and humanity and dignity, and I don’t think one can exist without the other long term. But that’s not how the term Zionism is being presented or understood in other contexts.

And so we need to both be clear about the fact that we’re not even speaking the same language to begin with and that the context of some of these terms matters in understanding their intent and their impact. And that in turn allows us to both protect core free speech and civil liberties that we as Jews know are so inherent to our values and our own safety long term, even if we fundamentally disagree with some of that speech, and also be clear-eyed about the threats and the risks that this rhetoric poses as we see it increasingly fueling this sort of violence.

Yehuda: Yeah, and it’s very cyclical. I mean, there was a, I thought a really offensive one of those billboards, the JewBelong billboards, which said, I don’t know if it was actual physical billboard, it was just one of the ones that circulated online, which said, “Let’s be clear: if you said free Palestine, you pulled the trigger.” And I was like, whoa, that is, that then becomes a mechanism for violent response, anticipatory or retaliatory towards that kind of rhetoric. I recognize that is just, to me, beyond belief.

I think what we’re talking about here is, how do you prevent a kind of lizard brain, right, that instinct towards safety from getting in the way of, like, rationally noticing that obviously there is a different context of where these things take place. And there’s still something under the surface which says in the context of democracies, yes, people being totally different things, and yet all these words have been weaponized in such a way that we are going to have to find some way of, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know how to…

Amy: Yep. No, I think, for example, suggesting that every college student who shows up for Palestinian rights and might chant something like, Free Palestine, in a peaceful way, is somehow inherently anti-Semitic or responsible for violence, not only is wrong from the perspective of how that might in turn lead to retribution, to violence against other communities, as you just described.

But it also actually fundamentally undermines our own cause, which is that if we are going to actually create the ability for people to see Israeli and Jewish humanity alongside Palestinian humanity, which is so important to.

pushing back against the increasingly normalized post-October 7th anti-Semitism that we’re talking about, we need to be able to allow people to have complexity, that they can believe in freeing Palestinians from the occupation, from the human rights abuses, from the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and that they could do so in a way that fundamentally also recognizes the humanity of the Israelis who were murdered on October 7th and who still remain hostage in Gaza, and the Jews here who are being targeted in the name of protesting for Palestinian rights.

And so we need to be able to actually create that space that says not every student, not every person who is showing up for Palestinian rights in this moment, even if they’re using language that we might hear differently, is inherently anti-Semitic, and how we allow for that complexity in the public conversation, particularly on college campuses, but I would argue much more broadly as well, is frankly the only path forward because I’m the last generation of Americans that knew an Israel that was under existential threat, that knew an Israel that wasn’t led by Bibi Netanyahu, that has a fundamentally different perspective of Israel than younger Americans. And there’s not a world in which they’re just going to sort of have blanket sympathy for the Israeli government in this moment.

There’s, there are power dynamics that I think we have to be clear-eyed about, and we can be clear-eyed about, even as we love and protect Israel as the Jewish democratic homeland. And being clear-eyed about that, creating the complexity both with, frankly, not just external to the Jewish community, but within our own community, where so many of these generational debates around Israel are also taking place.

Yehuda: So when it comes to fighting anti-Semitism or, in turn, fighting on behalf of our community, and those are not the same thing, I think it feels reasonable to me that American Jews have at least two strategies. One is a communal strategy, what sits upon our organizations, and one is a demand for a government strategy. It feels very basic. Anti-Semitism is an American problem, it’s created by the Jews, anti-Semitism was never created by the Jews. And if you live somewhere, it is the responsibility of the government to eradicate the hate that is being directed towards some of its citizens.

So let’s start with what we want out of government. What is your position and how do you, from your perch at JCPA, see the responsibility of government here? And I want to sharpen it because to a meaningful number of American Jews, the Trump administration’s public advocacy against anti-Semitism is exactly what they want to hear. They feel frustrated for a long time that government didn’t do what it was supposed to do. They have identified universities and immigration as sources of some of what could constitute some of this anti-Semitism, and they view any response by the President of United States that claims to be motivated by anti-Semitism as doing what government’s supposed to do.

So I’m both curious conceptually where the government should be taking responsibility for eradicating anti-Semitism and specifically, I know what you think about the Trump administration strategy, but I still kind of want you to say it.

Amy: Look, I think two things are true at the same time, right? Jews are feeling incredibly vulnerable. I don’t need to explain that. We’ve been talking about that. And if you are an American Jew right now, there is a visceral feeling of vulnerability and fear that is unlike anything I’ve experienced in my lifetime. And I imagine that’s true for many of us. And that’s important to acknowledge we shouldn’t be gaslit into thinking that our fear and our vulnerability and our concerns aren’t real. And there are absolutely those who are trying to gaslight us into thinking that we’re overreacting or that anti-Semitism isn’t real. So I just want to name that and use it as our starting point.

And part of what that requires is, yes, the use of the bully pulpit by the president and everyone on down to be unequivocally clear that Jews and each and every other community deserve to live safely without fear, without wondering that if you show up at a Jewish event or Jewish institution or walk down the street as a visibly Jewish person, you are going to be targeted. And so we need the use of the bully pulpit.

And we saw it certainly, I think we, I would say frankly, I was in the room with Joe Biden a few days after October 7th and we saw it from him. We can argue about, you know, the year that followed and the campaign and all of the aftermath. But I was in that room and his use of the bully pulpit was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment. And there are absolutely those in the Trump administration who I think do understand the importance of using that bully pulpit to counter anti-Semitism.

The question is, what tools do we actually use to fight back? And what we’ve seen from this administration are two things that I think actually work at odds with the long-term fight against antisemitism. First and foremost, cutting some of the very programs that have been proven to protect Jewish and other faith institutions, prevent hate crimes, protect Jewish and other students. So for example, freezing the nonprofit security grants, then unfroze them, but they are not seeking an increase, despite really strong demand from Jewish and other leaders asking for it given the threats and the violence that we’ve seen.

We’ve seen a decimation of the Office of Civil Rights, which is the Department of Education Office tasked with enforcing Title VI, the very statute that protects Jewish and all students’ civil rights on campus and in K-12 schools. It was already stretched thin under the Biden administration, where each caseworker there had over 50 cases. And the Trump administration has just totally decimated OCR, closing over half of offices. We’ve seen millions and millions and millions of dollars in hate crimes prevention grants being cut at a time when hate crimes are at record levels. We’ve seen a variety of other cuts and policies that actually fundamentally undermine the safety and security of Jewish institutions and communities in a way that should worry us all.

And at the same time, we’ve also seen the advancement of both policies and personnel that don’t actually protect Jewish safety in the long term. On the personnel front, there has been extensive reporting from NPR and otherwise about these avowed neo-Nazi extremists who are being appointed to senior positions in the Trump administration, whether it is the Department of Defense press secretary or others who are now being appointed to deal with monitoring domestic extremism, who they themselves have engaged in some of the worst neo-Nazi, white supremacist, white nationalist, conspiracy theories, and extremism. And we need to be clear that if the administration was truly serious about countering anti-Semitism, they wouldn’t be appointing people like this to senior positions, especially in roles where they would be directly responsible for addressing and countering anti-Semitism.

And of course, we’ve also seen the exploitation of our real fears of anti-Semitism to advance policies that seek to undermine due process, civil liberties, the rule of law, our academic institutions, the academic freedom, the research that has been so inherent to Jewish safety and advancement in this country for generations.

And so we can believe two things are true at the same time, that we are legitimately rightfully vulnerable and concerned about anti-Semitism in this moment and we need a whole of government and whole of society approach and that the tools and the tactics and the personnel that this administration have used ostensibly to counter anti-Semitism actually undermine Jewish safety in both I would say the short and long term.

Yehuda: Okay, so let’s make a list. I wanna try to make a bipartisan list with you because as you’re talking, you’re listing out some of the failings of this administration. And I suspect that a different guest or maybe the two of us could identify the failings under the Biden administration, which had an antisemitism strategy, didn’t particularly pursue it, didn’t pursue it that effectively, can be claimed, and this could be said about democratic administrations for a while, to have harbored personnel in their midst who could have credibly been described as holding to positions that at least 30% of American Jews would have characterized as being anti-Semitic.

So we wind up with this, and both of us share the conviction that to not allow anti-Semitism to become a partisan issue means you have to be able to identify it as part and parcel of the opportunistic political structure of a partisan system on both sides of the aisle.

Okay, so let’s say we might be able to identify, here’s like a list of, based on, you were talking, I took some notes, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine priorities that we might demand would cross partisan lines, right? You said increasing, not decreasing security grants to nonprofits and religious organizations.

You talked about maintaining and growing the Office of Civil Rights to maintain prosecutions and adherence to the law. You talked about commitments overall to due process civil liberties, the rule of law. You talked about hate crime prosecution.

Amy: And prevention grants.

Yehuda: And prevention grants. We talked about personnel, making sure that administration officials, whether they’re Democrats or Republican, are not antisemites. That feels pretty basic. Let me add a few. Title six, enforcement at universities when it comes to antisemitism. Maybe something about consistent administration policy towards Qatar and other countries that harbor dangerous and antisemitic viewpoints. You were a leader in the field of forms of creative forms of litigation to drive out hate groups from what they’re doing. Maybe some version of a consistent approach towards anti-Semitism as a feature of American immigration policy.

Amy: And I would also argue specifically the Department of Justice Office of Civil Rights not gutting that office but instead investing in it so that it can actually effectively hold accountable those who violate Jews and others civil rights through this sort of extremism.

Yehuda: What else would go on that list that represented a failing of the Biden administration that would enable us to say, great, I might think that the Trump people are screwing up seven out of 10, but I’m at least willing to put a couple of other things here on the Biden administration for their inconsistency on this issue.

Amy: Yeah, I think to your point, there was actually a very well received robust anti-Semitism strategy that came out in May of 2023. I was really proud to be a part of helping to shape it. And it didn’t move forward. And we can argue for a variety of reasons why it didn’t move forward. Some of that was the administration’s fault. Some of that was Congress’ and D.C. gridlock’s fault. Some of that was the campaign and some of that was probably the political dynamics around the end of the Biden administration.

But at the end of the day, if you’re gonna commit to something, how do we move this forward in a way that actually gets it done given the urgency of the issue? And so I think that’s true for any administration, but it was heartbreaking in many ways to see such an incredible strategy just sort of languish out there in a way that really could have instead yielded real substantive investment in the sorts of policies that will keep Jews safe and, frankly, all communities safe, because as the strategy recognized and as we’ve been talking about, Jewish safety is inextricably linked with the safety of all communities and our inclusive democracy.

And so there’s an opportunity there that any administration should seize to build on the robust roadmap that was virtually unilaterally in the mainstream Jewish community well received in May of 2023 and think about how we implement this whole of government and whole of society approach. And I’ll say it’s not just on government, right? Government plays the central role, national, federal government, but also state and local governments.

It’s also on civil society and a core part of that strategy and a place where people across the ideological spectrum have failed is to see the fight against anti-Semitism as inherent to how we advance civil society, whether it’s in the arts and culture institutions, in our private academic institutions as we’ve been talking about, in entertainment and so many other ways. And so there are many people in those spaces fighting to counter antisemitism, to make it a priority to help people understand it as deeply connected to the sort of inclusive society that all of us need. But the ways in which we haven’t been able to move that forward or even see the fight against anti-Semitism as inherent to building that sort of inclusive society is a real failure.

Yehuda: Yeah, so if we do have a pretty clear list of here are the priorities and strategies and not only the ones that we think are not working, not being enforced, the negative things that the administrations are doing, there’s also a whole set of activities around cultivating habits and practices and institutions of healthy democracy and civil society.

What prevents, in your view, the organized Jewish community from being able to speak with any measure of collective coherence about that shared agenda. I mean, we talked last couple weeks ago with Abe Foxman and he was lamenting his kind of read of our many of our leaders community’s inability to parse or many of our leaders inability to parse between, like this thing that an administration is doing, I disagree with that one. And the particular dimensions around the Trump presidency that make people want to kind of curry favor to maintain access. What do you think are the institutional obstacles in the Jewish community around collective mobilization right now?

Amy: Well, it’s funny you ask that because, you know, JCPAs own history is really rooted in this question. Before we were restructured and before I came in as CEO a few years ago, JCPA really was an entity that sought to put forward a consensus policy on behalf of the majority of the mainstream Jewish community. would have these long delegates assemblies and resolutions. You can still read the policy compendium on our website where there was broad consensus among 145 plus mainstream Jewish organizations on key policies, all the issues of the moment.

And I would say if you read that policy compendium now, one of the things that’s fascinating to me is that those positions would now be characterized maybe as progressive or liberal when they are inherently and had been for years really the mainstream position of the Jewish community. So I would say, perhaps some of our institutions have moved from where the Jewish community is if they are perceiving some of these policies as not mainstream, things like protecting immigrants, protecting due process and civil liberties, fighting for voting rights. These core policies and norms that the vast majority of American Jews, based on the poll data we have, still support. So I think we need to be clear-eyed about where the Jewish community is, where we have been, and what has moved in this scenario.

And we, you know, all of the policies that we basically advance at JCPA come out of the policy compendium. Policy that was shaped again by 145 plus Jewish institutions over very rigorous debate and conversation.

I also think, related to that, is this idea that democracy has become a partisan issue and it can’t be. But the term democracy, small-d democracy, because of this normalization of extremism, because of the polarization of our politics, because of the divisiveness that we’ve seen, has really been construed and conveyed in certain corners as inherently partisan. And it can’t be, the same way that fighting anti-Semitism can’t be considered a partisan issue. We need to be calling out anti-Semitism. We need to be calling out attacks on democratic norms, or broader anti-democratic extremism wherever it exists, whether it’s anti-Semitism on the right being normalized in the form of these conspiracy theories or Trump appointees or whatever they may be, whether it’s on the left in the form of what we’re seeing in the Israel conversation leading to these acts of violence, and whether it’s in the form of undermining our democracy on both extremes of the political spectrum.

And so calling those balls and strikes is important and we need both political leaders and Jewish institutions that are willing to call it out no matter where it exists without fear or favor, without concern that there will be retribution from a Trump White House or from any other political entity. And in this moment that feels hard when we know that this is an administration that does engage in retribution, where there is real fear around what it might do, but we have no other choice. We need to be able to name it wherever it exists.

Yehuda: There’s two recent examples of administration actions which seem to be kind of nakedly political strategies to advance partisan political positions that the Trump administration wanted to advance, but to use the lever of anti-Semitism in order to advance them. One was the assault on the universities. There’s such obvious data on this. When you’re cutting $400 million in cancer research from Johns Hopkins University, you can’t then say, yes, the reason we’re doing the same thing to Harvard and Columbia is because of anti-Semitism. It’s just not coherent, right? And yet, like a weird number of American Jewish institutions were like, good, Harvard and Columbia need to get some sort of comeuppance.

And the most recent one is the executive order about reinstating the so-called Muslim ban, an immigration ban on, I think it was 12 countries, in response to Boulder, as a response to Boulder, despite the fact that the guy who perpetrated the boulder attack, I believe, was Egyptian.

Amy: Egypt’s not even on the list.

Yehuda: Egypt’s not on the Saudi Arabia’s not on the list. Qatar’s not on the list. I mean, any of the places that actually have institutional support for the terrorists who have attacked Americans are not on the list. And again, kind of astonishingly, unlike the situation in spring of 2017, Jews are not out at airports. At the time, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL was like, I’ll be first in line to stand in protective. There’s no way that that happens today.

So it just seems like it’s not going to happen at a collective institutional level. So what do we do then? Is it a grassroots strategy among American Jews? Is it, you know, do we continue to litigate what now feel like public fights between, for instance, JCPA and the Federation system about these priorities? What’s the playbook to reacquaint American Jews with some notion of collective action in response to interventions that are actually not about antisemitism at all?

Amy: Yeah, well, I think one being clear, first and foremost, that what we’re seeing, to your point, is simply using anti-Semitism as the pretext to advance policies that this administration wants to advance, whether it is gutting academic freedom and our academic institutions and going after the ability of universities to teach students and engage in the sort of research that we know has been so important, or to advance a draconian immigration policy that targets specific communities and individuals. And so being clear about that first and foremost.

And I think anyone looking at this objectively should be able to see that anti-Semitism is being used as a pretext. And what has been heartening to me is that I spend a lot of time on the road in Jewish communities around the country. And since the first arrest of Columbia in March, where at the time it felt like we were probably pretty lonely as one of the mainstream legacy Jewish organizations out there saying two things are true at the same time, anti-Semitism is real and our legitimate fears are now being exploited to advance a dangerous agenda.

While it might have felt institutionally lonely, the average Jew that we were speaking with at synagogues, not just in liberal communities, but in more conservative suburbs, particularly students on some of the campuses that are on the front lines of these fights, I would say in the last few months, I’ve been at Columbia, I’ve been at the University of Michigan, I was in Providence with Brown students. These are the campuses that have been on the front page of the news as it relates to these issues. And the Jewish student leaders on those campuses all uniformly said, two things are true at the same time. We think our campus administrators failed us in many ways in the aftermath of October 7th, and there needs to be accountability and changes. And we don’t want to see our classmates deported, our universities and its research and our degrees devalued and gutted in our name.

And so if the average Jew can hold that complexity, young Jewish students on campuses who have quite literally been the ones most directly on the front lines of this anti-Semitism over the last year and a half, certainly our institutions can hold that as well. And so I think for me, I’m finding a lot of hope in the fact that the average American Jew can hold that complexity.

The poll data that we have, as limited as it might be, seems to back that up. There was a poll from GBAO Strategies a few weeks ago that both underscored the concern Jews have with anti-Semitism right now and the opposition to the ways in which the Trump administration is addressing it. And so our job as Jewish institutions is to also hold that complexity, to fight tirelessly to counter anti-Semitism using that robust whole of government, whole of society approach, talking about and to make sure that our legitimate fears are not being exploited or used as a pretext to advance policies that we know fundamentally harm Jews and all communities in the very inclusive democracy that has been so inherent to our success and advancement in this country.

Yehuda: So I want to probe further on your comment about civil liberties on campus, that students who are fighting at the Semitism campus don’t want what is kind of like an offensive strategy by some Jewish organizations to go on the offensive, against their fellow students.

And it’s interesting because I thought one of the most impressive parts of the whole Integrity First for America move in Charlottesville following the Unite the Right rally and the killing of Heather Heyer, was precisely that it went on the offensive. It was not a defensive, protective strategy. was, we’re gonna get at the sources of funding and strength and power online and basically bankrupt the Nazis. Like, it’s a fascinating way of going about this.

And at the same time, I notice that when the same types of strategies are argued as strategies against those forces on the left, that are driving things like campus antisemitism, we get very like queasy about it. Don’t dox the students. Canary Mission is a really, you know, it’s problematic for doing exactly this. People start talking about sources of funding on campus for where these ideas come from and folks get queasy. Is that an inconsistency? Is it a partisan inconsistency or is there some legitimate fair play for how you kind of tackle left anti-Semitism by trying to address the same kind of root causes ideologically and financially that are kind of driving that ecosystem.

Amy: Yeah, I think it is multiple things. One, in some cases, there’s a difference. So for example, in the Charlottesville case that we brought, spent a lot of time talking, the defendants in that case would argue that we were attacking their fundamental free speech rights. And this was not a speech case. It was not Skokie, where Jews, as horrified as we were by Nazis marching down the street. Many also fundamentally believed that they had a right to do so. And of course, there’s, the notorious ACLU defense of the Skokie Nazis. And as horrifying as it is years and years later, it was still the right call from my perspective.

What happened in Charlottesville was a deliberate, well-planned violent conspiracy to attack people based on their race, their religion, or their willingness to stand up and defend their neighbors. Down to social media posts about hitting protesters with cars, which is of course precisely what happened. So that was a case in which there was a clear racist, anti-semitic conspiracy theory and our plaintiffs in that suit were holding the core conspirators accountable in court. And that’s not about speech.

And so I think being clear about the tools we do have versus where that line is between speech and violence. And it’s one that is hard to parse. It’s not easy. We’re seeing that right now in the aftermath of the Capital Jewish Museum in Boulder. And so that’s important. I also think in some ways it’s figuring out what the most impactful tools are, right? And we should not be skittish about calling out and holding accountable anti-Semitism on the left, we need to do so in a way that’s actually impactful.

So if you think about the fact that, for example, the Tufts student who was arrested in March and held for weeks and weeks and weeks without due process and ultimately was released, the entire reason she was targeted and held was, I think, because of a Canary Mission post in which she had co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts Daily. This is my alma mater, Tufts. I wrote a bunch of things for the Tufts Daily that I probably would be embarrassed by two decades later, but, like, are not grounds for arrest. And I read that op-ed, as bad as it was. I don’t think it was in any way calling for violence or direct antisemitism. It was just a, it was a really just bad op-ed.

And sing that as the entire grounds to target a student and then to have the government use that as the excuse to undermine due process and civil liberties is dangerous. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other cases where students or others have actually caused harm or broken the law or violated the terms of their visas. And of course they should face accountability. But it means being clear in both directions, right? Whether it’s neo-Nazis in Skokie or someone who says and does something on Israel and Gaza that we find wrong or problematic or even hateful, but doesn’t break the law. We need to be clear and figure out where that line is and hold people accountable under the law, under the terms of their visas, under the tools that we have and apply that across the board rather than selectively applying rights based on someone’s identity or opinion.

Yehuda: Yeah, I agree conceptually. I just, I think we are going to have to find some of those cases that help to demonstrate consistency. Right. What what does the going on the offensive strategy look like that won’t be immediately dismissed as Islamophobic or racist or anti-Palestinian or et cetera or anti civil liberties but reflects the acknowledgement that just as the Capitol Jewish Museum case demonstrates, there can be a bridge between certain forms of online activism and rhetoric and dangerous conspiratorial beliefs and organizing.

I mean, actually, the Boulder case is even stronger because we have a year worth of stuff that led to this. We may need to be able to make that case precisely to be able to acquit ourselves of the charge that we’re going on the offensive in one direction as opposed to being constantly protective of civil liberties when it comes in the other direction.

Amy: Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I also think, that also means holding our institutions accountable, right? The way to hold our academic institutions accountable isn’t to gut 400 million or billions of dollars in Alzheimer’s or cancer research. It’s to use Title VI and the other tools we have to make sure that schools and institutions are protecting their students and their faculty’s fundamental civil rights. And so we need that accountability. We create that accountability by investing in the tools that exist to ensure it.

And so I don’t think we should be shying away from that accountability, whether it’s left-wing extremism and anti-Semitism or the institutions that have failed to protect their stakeholders from it. It’s how we do it and making sure that it’s not being used as a pretext to advance a different agenda that has nothing to do with Jewish safety and everything to do with fundamentally undermining core democratic norms.

And I would say the same thing if it were reversed, if we had a democratic administration that were using this moment to exclusively go after more right-wing academic institutions or organizations. We need to be applying this work across the board, uniformly and fairly no matter what exists. That is true on whether it’s Jewish institutions calling out anti-Semitism, it’s true whether it’s what the government does to hold institutions and perpetrators accountable. And when we start selectively focusing on one piece of the ideological spectrum, it doesn’t work out well for anyone, first and foremost, the Jews.

Yehuda: Right. So let me ask you one last question, and it goes to the kind of the historical heart of what the Community Relations Council did and JCP is the umbrella organization for a long time of that system, which was to kind of be the agency in the Jewish community responsible for allying and partnering and relationships together with other faith and ethnic groups. It felt to me like on the map that was like a very coherent lane that they would hold. This feels like it’s like a mess, this conversation for some in the Jewish community, anecdotally many Jewish leaders, a perception that something shifted around the culture of allyship and solidarity post October 7th.

It seems as though this is a unique problem, this question, and creates a whole bunch of delicate tensions for folks who are coming from the left side of the aisle because of the dependency on the theory that what’s bad for Jews is ultimately bad for everyone and what’s bad for everyone is bad for Jews, as opposed to Jews on the right ,who are much more comfortable talking about anti-Semitism as a unique phenomenon, who don’t want to be bothered by its relationship to, you know, racism, etc.

I wonder if you could give us just a state of the question, as you see it around the, Is the allyship story as bad as some in the American Jewish community feel that it is? And where is, and I guess two part question, there’s that, and also, is there still room among those who care, those of us who care about these multi-faith, multi-ethnic coalitions to still be able to preserve some measure of treating anti-Semitism as a unique case?

And I’ll just tell you why I want to ask that last piece, which is I saw like an ABC News headline about the Boulder attack, which said, Boulder attack takes place amidst rising anti-…

Amy: Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Yehuda: You know this headline!

Amy: I’m in the story.

Yehuda: And I was like, I was like, what is that headline? This is so clearly about anti-Semitism, but for some reason it has to be anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Can’t this case be anti-Semitism? So maybe, yeah.

Amy: Yeah, the irony is I’m in the story talking about why using Zionism as a pejorative has led to this sort of violence. And so yes, I know that story well. And I will say the story itself is actually, I thought, very thoughtful. And I too had a lot of feelings around that headline.

But look, I’ll say a few things. One, I think the story around allyship and coalitions in this moment is messier than the public narrative might suggest. And I think about the days immediately after October 7th when I got a slew of calls from key Black civil rights partners, interfaith partners and others, and so too after the capital Jewish museum and the Boulder attacks, both the solidarity statements and the texts and calls that I got from key partners in the space without needing prompting just simply because of the relationships and the conversations we’ve had in recent years about anti-Semitism and about my vulnerability and fears as a Jewish American in this moment.

It was deeply meaningful, and I will say, we posted on JCPA social media some of these examples just this past week. We worked with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which is the preeminent civil rights coalition that JCPA actually helped co-found in 1950 alongside Black and labor leaders and that we’re still a proud member of. And I sit on the board of, we put out a statement from 60 civil rights groups making very clear that the targeting of Jews because of the actions of the Israeli government because of our real or perceived relationship with Israel is an anti-Semitism, it’s unacceptable, period.

And this is a statement not just from Jewish organizations or you would think like, you know, basic, the usual suspects. This is a statement that includes key Arab-American, Muslim-American, Black, progressive, Latino, other groups.

And that is so important in this moment at a time when extremists on both ends of the political spectrum are trying to tell Jews that we’re alone. And that’s a deliberate tactic to make us feel isolated and alone so that we double down on wanting to advance the policies and the fear and divide the coalitions that we actually need to protect ourselves right now. And so understanding that isolation as a tactic of the extremists on both ends of the spectrum is so important and finding those opportunities for that allyship, leaning into the hard conversations so allies know how to show up.

The conversations I’ve had with folks over the last few months about why targeting Jews because of the actions of the Israeli government is clearly and unequivocally anti-Semitism have hopefully led to some of the solidarity statements we saw in the aftermath of the museum shooting and Boulder and statements like this, this leadership conference one I just read.

So we have to not walk away from the table. We have to actually stay and have those challenging conversations, particularly with those with whom we disagree, because it in turn actually advances the understanding that allows them to show up in moments like this. And showing up matters. It actually does. It sounds cheesy and trite, but that sort of solidarity is how we help prevent antisemitism from becoming even more normalized. And that is so crucial in this moment.

Yehuda: Amy, I really appreciate you being on the show today. And on top of that, I’m very grateful that you’re in the work that you’re doing. We need you.

Amy: Feeling is mutual.