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Open Letter from Jewish Faculty, Staff, and Students [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-12
Sign the Statement
March 11, 2025
Not in our name.
We are Jewish professors, staff members, and students from universities across the United States. We hold various views about Israel and Palestine, politics in the Middle East, and student activism on our campuses. But we are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name – and cynical claims of antisemitism – to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities. We specifically reject rhetoric that caricatures our students and colleagues as “antisemitic terrorists” because they advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom. This is the precise talking point President Trump and the architects of Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist agenda now deliberately wield to buttress a campaign designed to concentrate power and exert “ existential terror ” on our institutions and our communities–in part by threatening and slashing federal funding.
On March 8, the Trump administration detained Mahmoud Khalil , a lawful resident and former Columbia University graduate student who helped lead the campus’s Gaza solidarity encampment. This marks a disturbing escalation in the Trump administration’s open assault on our democracy. President Trump then exploited the Hebrew language to taunt Khalil and continues to use Jews as a shield to justify a naked attack on political dissent and university independence. All against the backdrop of Trump pardoning white supremacists and platforming neo-nazis .
As the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University aptly noted : “Universities must recognize that these actions pose an existential threat to academic life itself. They must make clear, through action, that they will not sit on the sidelines as the Trump administration terrorizes students and faculty alike and runs roughshod over individual rights and the rule of law.”
To this end, we call on our university leaders to:
Devote institutional resources to free Mahmoud Khalil and defend any other community member targeted by the Trump administration;
Democratize university governance by enabling faculty, staff and students to shape institutional budgetary, policy and other responses to the Trump administration’s attacks on our communities and institutions;
Cease any voluntary collaboration with federal immigration enforcement;
Reject the dangerous narrative that pro-Palestinian advocacy, in which many Jews have participated, is presumptively anti-Jewish;
Terminate all collaboration with organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, that smear our students and now applaud the lawless targeting of political opponents, and instead engage a variety of Jewish stakeholders to develop policies and programs that can meaningfully address antisemitism alongside all other forms of bigotry;
Affirmatively defend every university member’s lawful right to engage in First Amendment protected activity without fear of internal or external punishment;
Work collectively, across institutions, to resist the Trump administration’s feigned concerns about “Jewish safety” to smear, isolate and defund our universities and our communities.
We write in hopes that our university leaders will embrace the diversity of Jewish voices, denounce the unconscionable targeting of Mahmoud Khalil, and resist any other effort to politicize Jewish identity–our identity–to divide our communities, undermine our institutions, and erode our democracy.
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/12/2309689/-Open-Letter-from-Jewish-Faculty-Staff-and-Students?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
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