Trump’s arrests of Israel critics sets the stage for a battle for the American Jewish soul

Opposition versus accommodation

The director of the largest Jewish umbrella organization is urging Jewish community officials not to sign on to a statement put forward by ten major Jewish groups that decries the Trump administration’s arrests of foreign students.

It is the beginning of an epic battle over the American Jewish soul. In question: what is the best way for American Jews to engage with a government that undercuts democratic values? Oppose, or accommodate.

The letter Eric Fingerhut, the Jewish Federations of North America CEO, sent last week to Jewish federation CEOs across the country lays down a line in the sand: Objecting to the Trump administration’s plans to deport students for holding anti-Israel views and to defund and penalize universities is outside the Jewish consensus.

“A robust dialogue to develop a letter that truly reflects mainstream opinion would reference the diverse views we hold, which this letter does not,” Fingerhut said in his email, sent April 15 and obtained by me on Friday.

The statement Fingerhut urges Jewish Community Relations Councils to reject was initiated by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and includes as endorsers the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. It was posted the same day, April 15.

“In recent weeks, escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation, as well as to threaten billions in academic research and education funding,” it says. “Students have been arrested at home and on the street with no transparency as to why they are being held or deported, and in certain cases with the implication that they are being punished for their constitutionally-protected speech.”

The Trump administration is endangering Jews, it says. “These actions do not make Jews—or any community—safer. Rather, they only make us less safe.”

The statement and Fingerhut’s memo are the first salvos in what is sure to be a fraught battle over how Jewish communities should deal with the most consequential administration of our lifetimes.

"Jewish Federations of North America work every day to unify our community so we can together serve the Jewish people and the communities in which we live,” a JFNA spokesman told me. “The North American Jewish community holds a wide diversity of views, especially on politically controversial topics, including those referenced in the open letter, which was the point of our email."

Fingerhut in his letter appears to conflate the right to counsel with judicial review.

“While the current immigration cases in the country cover many topics and jurisdictions about which we are not experts, the students who are alleged to have engaged in incitement are receiving due process and are represented by able legal counsel,” he writes.

Lawyers for the students facing deportation say arrest and transport without immediate access to counsel violates due process. (Lawyers have in some cases been brought in after arrest and transfer to a detention facility.) They seek redress in the federal courts, dismissing the immigration courts as lacking independence, effectively agents of government policy.

There are those like Fingerhut who would work with and accommodate President Donald Trump – the JFNA has already hosted a briefing with top Trump officials administering its campus actions.

And there are those who would resist him, echoing the divisions between the “Court Jew” and the “Rebel Jew” throughout Jewish history, in South Africa during the Apartheid era, but also in the parts of Europe under the Soviet yoke.

It’s a clash of titans: Fingerhut’s JFNA was in 2023 worth $279 million and helps set policy for 150 disparate Jewish communities.

Between them, the three denominations signing onto the JCPA-led letter represent the vast majority of synagogue-going Jews. (No Orthodox groups, which represent 10-15 percent of American Jews, signed on.)

The JCPA, the descendant of the National Jewish Community Relations Council, founded in the 1940s, works with JCRCs to shape engagement with non-Jewish communities. The other signatories are HIAS, the Jewish immigration advocacy group, and the National Council of Jewish Women, both founded in the late 19th century.

At heart is what approach best represents the views of the American Jewish community, and whether consensus is reachable.

The “robust dialogue” Fingerhut calls for was available for decades through the offices of a previous iteration of the JCPA, which arrived at national public policy statements through months of correspondence with JCRCs and then through an arduous three day national summit.

It’s a system that collapsed in part because of the JFNA success: In recent decades, JCRCs found it increasingly difficult to fundraise independently and were folded into local federations, which are far more susceptible to donors and their political preferences as opposed to the coalition building that was the JCPA’s specialty.

It was the JFNA’s bid in 2021 to swallow the JCPA whole that led instead to the two organizations distancing in 2022. The JCPA, now wholly independent, continues to consult with JCRCs but the consensus building process is gone.

The division between Fingerhut and the JCPA and the other groups has long simmered: Legacy groups have long held that if the Jewish community wants to maintain influence it cannot alienate the executive branch and/or one of the major parties.

(It will be interesting to see how interested Fingerhut and other ostensible partisans of absolute nonpartisanship are able to sustain this principle as Democrats become increasingly critical of Israel’s Netanyahu government.)

The other view is that Jewish organizations aspiring to represent the entire community should reflect the views of their constituents, however much that might irk the powers that be.

Complicating the tension is the permanent agenda item topping every Jewish community endeavor: How do we keep young Jews in the fold? Jews on campuses suffering massive funding cuts and watching their peers being dragged away for coauthoring utterly unremarkable opinions may not look kindly on an establishment seen as capitulating to authoritarians.

Is opposition to Trump’s draconian policies the consensus Jewish view, as the statement by the JCPA and the non-Orthodox denominations would suggest?

As recently as 2020, the JCPA – under its previous, consensus-building system – rejected the practice of indefinite arrest that appears to undergird some of the Trump administration policies.

I’ve yet to see polling of Jews since Trump II launched its reforms with a vengeance. Still, Jews continue to vote for Democrats in substantial majorities and when they were asked last year to list their highest property heading into the voting booth, it was the preservation of democracy.

Under Fingerhut, the JFNA has sought to distance itself from views identified wholly with Democrats, which has led to tensions at times with JCRCs, especially those in liberal enclaves.

In the current political constellation, the signatories of the statement opposing Trump’s policies mostly lean left – the Rabbinical Assembly, representing the Conservative movement, may be an exception.

That’s partly a function of how American politics have shifted: when, for instance, HIAS expanded its ambit in the 1980s to advocate for refugees generally, and not just for Jewish refugees, it was at the behest of a Republican administration led by President Ronald Reagan. HIAS has not substantially altered its agenda; Republicans have radically altered theirs.

Notably, two other legacy groups, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League have equivocated about the administration’s policies, appearing to endorse some specific actions while calling for restraint more broadly.

The statement calling for opposing Trump’s policies decries what it says is a surge of antisemitism and specifies among other instances, the harassment Jewish students have faced on campuses.

“Jews are being pushed out of certain movements, classrooms, and communities for expressing a connection to their heritage or to the Jewish homeland,” says the statement. “And, horrifically, some voices in the public square are justifying or celebrating the murder of Jews.”

But making Jews safe is a holistic endeavor, it argues: The preservation of democracy, and of due process, is critical to a healthy society:,

“It is both possible and necessary to fight antisemitism—on campus, in our communities, and across the country—without abandoning the democratic values that have allowed Jews, and so many other vulnerable minorities, to thrive,” the statement says.

Observing the current reality, the historian Timothy Snyder this weekend referenced the 12 lessons he cobbled together after Trump’s first election, titled, “On Tyranny.” Snyder said we may soon face “the critical moment when we must prevent ourselves from going along.”

We are in a historical moment: Its curse is that it is an “interesting” time. Its blessing is that such times test our souls.

I spoke last week with Robert Wright, the essayist on faith and politics and philosophy, about the broader issues related to Trump’s treatment of antisemitism. The video is here.

Correction: An earlier version said Fingerhut sent the letter to JCRCs directly. He sent it to local federation CEOs, making his case against their affiliated JCRCs signing on to the statement.