|
Over the weekend, ICE agents abducted Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University and green card holder, as he walked in the front door of his apartment complex with his wife, who was eight months pregnant with their first child. It took Khalil’s lawyers over 24 hours to learn that he had been moved to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana owned by the GEO Group, a private prison company that Columbia, ironically enough, had officially divested from in 2015.
The motive for the arrest, however, wasn’t a mystery. Khalil was a lead spokesperson for Columbia’s student protests against Israel’s genocidal war (and Israel advocates from the Heritage Foundation to the Anti-Defamation League have been clamoring for the deportation of non-citizen student activists in the name of fighting antisemitism). “Shalom Mahmoud,” Trump announced in a horrific social media post celebrating the abduction, linking Jewishness with what The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has called “the greatest threat to free speech since the Red Scare.”
This incident provides a chilling example of the weaponization of antisemitism–the advancement of authoritarianism, cynically carried out in the name of protecting Jewish safety.
In conversation with Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart, authors Ben Lorber and Shane Burley discuss insights from their new book Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.
Despite the white-washing of Elon Musk's Nazi salute by mainstream media and the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitism remains baked into the MAGA agenda of White and Christian nationalism, conspiracism, division and fear. Since October 7, accusations of antisemitism have been increasingly used by the authoritarian Right to silence the Palestine solidarity movement and further a neo-McCarthyist crusade. None of this is new, but as the new administration uses real and weaponized antisemitism to advance its repressive agenda, the stakes are higher than ever.
How do we fight antisemitism through a politics of solidarity and collective liberation? How do we forge the coalitions across communities that we need, in order to confront the shared threats we face and build towards a better future? This wide-ranging conversation will help us break the current impasse to understand how antisemitism works, what’s missing in mainstream narratives, and how to build true safety through solidarity, for Jews and all people.
| 
